The conductor asked the old man when the keeper would come, but he only held up his bell, whose broken clapper had begun to tap against the rim. Behind us the sound in the shed quickened, and the length of firewood bracing the drawer rolled an inch across the threshold. My double backed the cart toward the door while Victoria kept the board flat on her knees, the red thread drawn taut beneath her finger. The woman offered the old man her arm, and together they went back into the road, leaving his door open to the warmth and yellow light behind it. “He counted them by the knots,” the older child said, watching the shed. “If we take those off, he’ll know something’s missing.” The newcomer looked down at the loose stitches in his sleeve and slipped his hand into the pocket, as though feeling again for whatever had been taken from it.

We brought the drawer out between us, the conductor at one end and I at the other, its damp bottom sagging under the weight of the bells. Minnie’s boy set the empty tray on the cart floor, and the woman began lifting the bells into it without disturbing their bindings, while the old man stood beside her holding the lamp. One bell had a blue bead caught in its thread; another had been wrapped so tightly that the brass showed only through small red diamonds. The newcomer took each one from the woman and laid it down with the knot uppermost, until the tray was full and his fingers had turned red with dust. When she reached the last bell, the tapping stopped, and the quiet was so sudden that we heard water running from the shed roof into a bucket. The old man lowered the lamp into the drawer, revealing a row of scratches along its back, each crossed through except the last.

A hand struck the inside of the shed door before any of us could move. The conductor dropped the drawer, and the newcomer seized the last bell from the woman just as the door bowed outward against the stacked wood. Victoria cried out; the brass tongue had lifted, pulling the thread from under Minnie’s boy’s thumbs, and all the bound bells stirred in their tray. The older child caught the thread and pressed it down with the flat of his hand, but the knocking came again, slower now, as if whoever stood inside had found the latch. The newcomer pushed the last bell into his torn pocket and held the opening shut, and at once the tongue settled beneath the child’s palm. We waited while a thin line of dust sifted from the doorframe, but there was no third blow.

The conductor helped us load the tray and the empty drawer, then pulled the firewood across the shed door again, though he did not look at it while he worked. The old man refused a place in the cart; instead he took three bells from the tray and carried them toward the lit doorway, promising to find the people who had lost them. The woman placed her own bell in his hand for a moment, and he rang it gently, listening before he gave it back. As the horse drew us between the stone walls, the newcomer kept one hand over his pocket, while the older child held the thread against the board and watched the road behind us. I turned the drawer so that the lamplight fell on its scratched back, and saw that the uncrossed mark ended in a small circle, like the one in the candle box. Beneath it, cut more recently into the wood, was a second mark that had not been there when we lifted the drawer: a short line, followed by the beginning of another circle.

The conductor did not answer the woman until we reached the last house, where the boxes ended and the road narrowed between two stone walls. “As many as he could make them give him,” he said, looking at the bell in her palm. She closed her fingers around it and asked whether the voices were still inside, but the older child shook his head before the conductor could speak. “He listened through them,” he said. “When he was finished, he put them away where nobody would think to look.” The newcomer lifted his torn sleeve and showed us a shallow pocket sewn into its lining, its stitches pulled loose around a round impression.

Beyond the walls stood a low shed with a slate roof, and under its eaves hung a row of empty hooks. My double slowed the horse as we passed, and the newcomer tugged at the older child’s coat, pointing to a door nearly concealed by stacked firewood. The conductor moved the logs aside while I held the lamp, and the woman came down from the cart with her bell wrapped in the folded cloth. Inside, shelves climbed the damp walls, crowded with buttons, thimbles, keys and bits of broken harness, each laid in a separate wooden tray. The older child went straight to a drawer beneath the lowest shelf and pulled it open, releasing a dry smell of dust and mouse droppings. In the drawer were dozens of little bells, their clappers bound with red thread.

The woman knelt beside him and loosened the thread from the nearest bell, but when she lifted it, the board in the cart gave a sharp knock. Outside, Victoria called that the brass tongue was rising, and I hurried back to find Minnie’s boy holding the thread against it with both thumbs, his face pinched with the effort. The newcomer climbed down and ran to the shed, returning with an empty tray, which he set beneath the stretched thread before reaching toward the woman’s bell. She hesitated, then placed it in the tray herself, and the newcomer laid the newly uncovered bell beside it. Both began to tremble, though the thread remained still; the woman’s bell gave a faint, uneven note, followed by another so soft that I felt it through the wood rather than heard it. From the shed the older child called that more bells were moving in the drawer, and the conductor pushed it closed with his boot.

The woman picked up her bell again, and this time its note ceased while the other continued, small and patient. She carried the tray to the nearest house and stood at its shuttered window until an old man opened the door, blinking at the lamplight; when she offered him the bell, he took it without a word and pressed it to his cheek. Behind us, the conductor had wedged the drawer shut with a length of firewood, but something tapped against it from within, keeping time with the bells still hanging under the eaves. The old man listened, then looked past us toward the shed. “You mustn’t leave those there,” he said, his hand tightening around the bell. “He comes back for what he’s counted.”

The door opened no wider than the chain would have allowed, though the conductor had left the chain hanging loose. A light shone through the gap at knee height, throwing the warped shadow of the door across the road, and then a small wooden box slid over the threshold. It came to rest in the water with its lid open and a candle burning where the bell should have been. The conductor started toward it, but the newcomer caught his coat and shook his head, pointing instead to the thread stretched across Victoria’s knees. At the far end of the street a lid lifted a finger’s breadth, and a thin note sounded beneath it. Victoria set her palm on the board, and the note held without growing louder.

The older child climbed down before the woman could stop him and stood beside the box, his bare hands tucked into his sleeves. “That’s where he kept it,” he said, looking at the candle rather than the house. “When the keeper wanted to hear someone, he put their bell in there.” The conductor asked whose bell had been taken out, but the child only glanced toward the woman, who had followed him into the road. She knelt and peered into the box, shielding the flame from a wind I could not feel, and drew back with soot on her fingertips. On the inside of the lid, scratched so faintly that I had to bring my lamp close, was a mark like the line on our damp square, ending in a small circle. The woman rubbed the soot between her fingers and said, “My mother had a bell over her bed when she was ill. After she died, I couldn’t remember where I’d put it.”

A knock came from the board, and the candle bent toward the cart as though someone had breathed across it. The newcomer reached for the red thread, but Victoria caught his hand before he could pull it free; the boxes along the street had begun to tremble again, their lids tapping against their frames. The older child picked up the open box and carried it to her, holding it away from his coat as the flame lengthened and smoked. “It needs the bell back,” he said, and the woman searched her pockets with trembling hands, producing only a key, a folded cloth, and a small black button. The conductor took the button and turned it over beneath the lamp; a narrow brass loop remained on its back, with a broken clapper caught inside. When he placed it in the box, the candle went out, and every lid in the street fell shut with a sound like a single door being closed.

The woman lifted the bell from the cold wax and held it to her ear, though none of us heard it ring. Victoria kept the board on her knees, and the newcomer laid the thread carefully back across the tongue, smoothing it with a finger until the last tremor passed from the wood. My double urged the horse forward, while the older child climbed in beside the boy he had brought from the house; this time he let the woman settle the blanket over them both. As we passed the baker’s shop, the conductor opened the empty box there and found a circle scratched inside its lid as well, but no bell hanging from its hook. Farther down the street, each closed box had a dark circle showing through the grain. The woman looked at the little bell in her palm, then toward the rows of shuttered houses, and asked how many voices the keeper had learned to keep.

The first lid struck the side of its box, and the sound travelled down the street ahead of us, each small wooden flap answering the last. My double drew the horse to a halt beside the baker’s shuttered shop, where a bell hung in its open box without moving, though I could hear a thin ringing from somewhere farther on. The conductor went to close the lid, but before his glove reached it a pale curl of wood rose from beneath the bell and dropped onto the pavement. Minnie’s boy caught his trailing thread and wound it round his wrist, watching the curl uncross itself in the damp. “They’re making room,” he said, and the older child pulled the blanket over the newcomer’s torn sleeve. Victoria kept the board level across her knees, but I saw the brass tongue quiver beneath her finger.

The woman climbed down and went from box to box, pressing each lid shut; behind her they opened again, gently at first, then with enough force to rattle their hinges. At the third house a voice came through the wood, so low that she bent to hear it, and she stood there with her hand on the lid until Victoria called her back. “It sounded like my mother,” she said, returning to the cart without looking at us. The newcomer shifted beside the older child and pointed to the damp square in my hand, tracing its line with a dirty finger until he reached the two strokes covered by the tongue. He took the loose end of Minnie’s boy’s thread and laid it across the marks, then pointed toward the open boxes. “They were joined,” the conductor said, and the boy nodded, keeping his finger against the paper as though the line might come apart.

A bell rang sharply behind us, and the horse stumbled against its harness; down the street, a second bell began, then a third. Victoria lifted her finger from the tongue, and at once the board knocked hard enough to make her catch it against her chest. The older child reached for it, but she shook her head and asked him to hold the lamp instead, turning the board until the cut beneath the tongue faced the nearest box. I laid the square beside it and drew the red thread along the wavering line, while Minnie’s boy fed it out from his wrist, wincing as the knot tightened against his skin. When the thread touched the brass, the bells stopped together, leaving only the horse’s breathing and the soft drip from the eaves. Across the street the open lid settled shut, and the woman put out a hand to steady herself against the cart.

For a moment we waited, watching the other lids lower one after another, until the street was still and the cold smell of wet wood began to fade. The newcomer unwound the knot from Minnie’s boy’s wrist with careful fingers, leaving the thread stretched from the square to the tongue, and Victoria thanked him without asking him to speak. My double took up the reins again, but the conductor remained beside the cart, looking back toward the house at the end of the road. Its upstairs window was dark, yet in the glass I could see the reflection of our lamp and, beside it, a second light moving slowly down the stairs. The older child followed my gaze and leaned forward, gripping the edge of the cart. “I didn’t leave that one,” he said, as the light reached the bottom and the house door opened.

The light dwindled to a red point and disappeared, leaving the hand faintly visible against the glass. My double had already taken the reins, but the older child pushed aside the blanket and asked him to stop. “He won’t come down without it,” he said, pointing to the lamp I carried. The woman reached for him, then let her hand rest on the edge of the cart. Victoria held the board across her knees, with one finger pressed over the brass tongue, and asked the child who was upstairs. “The one who knocks,” he said. “He gave me the board, and I promised I’d leave the lamp until he found his way out.”

I took the lamp back to the house, with the conductor following close enough that I could hear the damp soles of his shoes on the road. The chain was still fastened outside, and when he drew out the nail the door opened under its own weight, admitting us to a hall that smelled of wet plaster and extinguished oil. Water lay on the bottom stair, but the steps above it were dry, marked here and there by narrow cuts like those on the wall. At the top I found a small lamp on the floor, its chimney clouded and its wick burned down to a hard black curl. Beside it stood a boy no taller than Minnie’s, wearing a coat with one sleeve torn away; he kept his face turned toward the window until I set my lamp beside the cold one. Then he looked at me, and I saw that the dark line across his cheek continued behind his ear, as though a cord had once been tied too tightly around his head.

He would not take my hand, but he followed when I carried the lamp downstairs, touching each cut in the banister as he passed. At the threshold he stopped, and from the cart came a faint wooden knock; Victoria had lifted the board to see whether the tongue was still in place. The boy put his bare foot into the water and drew it back at once, leaving a red print on the floorboards. The conductor offered him his glove, and after a moment the boy took it, though he held only the loose fingertips while we crossed to the cart. The older child made room beneath the blanket without being asked, and the newcomer climbed in beside him, settling so close that their shoulders touched. Victoria’s boy watched them both, then quietly tucked the blanket around the newcomer’s feet.

The conductor retrieved his glove and asked whether the boy had written the fourth name, but the child only looked at the scored board. Minnie’s boy leaned over the side of the cart, his red thread trailing from his wrist, and said that the writing was not a name at all; he had seen the same marks on the little boxes before the bells were put inside. I unfolded the damp square under the lamp and turned it as he directed, until the wavering letters became a row of cuts joined by a line beneath them. The conductor compared them with the cuts on the board, and his gloved finger stopped at a place where the brass tongue lay across two strokes. As the horse began to pull, a knock came from under Victoria’s hands, followed by another from the house we had left behind. The newly rescued boy caught the older child’s sleeve and pointed down the village street, where one by one the lids of the little wooden boxes were beginning to open.