For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

They were trudging towards the clock tower when Renata stopped by the stone of Sylvia Wakefield. Her grave, accompanied by a wreath already beginning to wither, was meagre compared to those littering the churchyard.

Quentin knelt to pick something from the grass. ‘From what I’ve been told,’ he said, ‘it sounds like she deserved a tad more than this. Maybe something more along these lines?’ He nodded to a looming stone angel, then stood. ‘Hey, at least she did better than this guy,’ he said, gesturing to a tiny, nameless stone.

They pressed on, edging carefully around the sleeping graves. Renata could feel the man following silently behind her. The police tape covering the church’s entrance had been replaced with freshly cut two-by-fours. The clock tower stood at the north end of the church, stretching into the mist and looking out towards the slumbering town. The door at its base had also been boarded over, but with planks as weathered as the headstones.

Quentin stood by her side, one hand behind his back. ‘Boarded up,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a crowbar or something.’

He watched Renata disappear around the back of the tower, then followed. He found her standing by a waist-high panel, a tight hole piercing its rotting wood where a handle had long since broken off. She picked a thin branch from the ground and fed it through the hole, pressing the stick at an angle so as to create a lever by which the panel could be prised. It opened, a sharp gust whistling from the darkness and fogging Quentin’s glasses. Renata glanced at his look of apprehension.

‘Too much for you, Quentin?’ she smiled timidly. ‘You’re the horror writer. Maybe you’ll get some inspiration.’

He rubbed his glasses on his corduroys. ‘You’re the romance writer,’ he said, replacing his glasses then pulling from behind his back an improvised bouquet assembled from scraps of lichens, dandelions, and daisies. ‘Maybe you’ll get some inspiration.’

Her eyes dropped. He stepped forward and lifted her hand in his own, then placed in her fingers the bouquet.

‘Right,’ he said, turning to the open hatch, ‘let’s see this room of yours.’

She reached the top first.

In the same way Millbury Peak’s emergence through the mist had reignited forgotten synaptic connections within her, so did each step spiralling up the clock tower. She remembered as a child the mental roadmap leading her safely down the creakiest steps of the house’s staircase. The roadmap leading up the tower tonight, however, was a highway, ascending to the only place in Millbury Peak she’d ever found peace.

She was relieved to find the door at the top, barred vertically in bolted iron strips, not only unsealed but wide open. Decades’ worth of leaves and dust had blown through the tall, narrow opening in the stone that constituted the room’s only window. She ducked under the low doorframe and stepped into her past.

Moonlight poured in. The room was cold, but she was warmed by the glow of nostalgia from the ancient walls. She crossed the unassuming circular space towards the pointed, narrow lancet window, which rose glassless and open from the top of a few steps. Two rotting wooden crates sat overturned at the base of these steps, one significantly larger than the other, red lettering stencilled upside down on each. These crates had once served as the writing desk and chair for a little girl, an aspiring writer of romantic fiction. She placed her bouquet on the larger of the two crates.

She peered into a grimy pile of rubble against the wall and spotted a small, crooked shape poking from the mess, like a miniature version of one of the gravestones in the yard outside. It was a book, mouldy and waterlogged, and she immediately knew which. She shivered, not from the chill, but from a distant memory of the text within those sodden pages.

Pain flashed.

She backed away from the book. Stepping to the narrow window, she looked into the night as she rubbed the sides of her head. The mist beckoned. The ground below called.

It would be so easy.

‘Christ, okay,’ panted Quentin, fumbling for his Marlboros. ‘You beat me.’

She turned as the match in his fingers snapped in two. He struck another but allowed the flame to sit, the unlit cigarette hanging limply from his mouth as he gawked above them at the iron bell dozing in its rusted cage.

‘This was a maintenance room,’ Renata said, looking up at the mechanical dinosaur. ‘If I recall correctly, the bell’s rope wouldn’t have even passed through this space. It fed through a gap in the stonework to a chamber at the base. Would have saved the bell-ringer’s ears.’

Quentin stared at the mechanism. ‘Who rings it now? I’ve heard it every day since I got here.’

She pointed to a dirty-white control box inside the rusted cage. ‘It was automated years ago. The bell’s still real, but it’s put into motion mechanically.’ She looked back out the window again, picking at a fingernail. ‘These people. Some will swear there’s still a monk in here ringing it twice a day.’

‘They seem pretty hung up on the past,’ said Quentin, blowing smoke up into the bell’s chamber. ‘Then again, here you are moping around your old childhood haunt.’ He looked back through the wire mesh at the bell cradled like a hatchling in its dense machinery.

‘I didn’t come here for nostalgia’s sake,’ she said. ‘I have to think things through.’

He took a step towards her and placed a finger under her chin, raising her eyes to meet his own. ‘I can go.’

She felt the blood rushing to her face. A stab of inexplicable guilt shot through her stomach. Two sides battled, one telling her to run and hide and sink into the familiar waters of her mind, the other to hold his gaze.

She looked away.

The finger left her chin. Quentin turned to the