All Living Stories

A story written in public

The Orchard Underwater

On the morning the reservoir is drained, a girl dives for the voice her drowned brother left behind.

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2 narrated passages in story order.

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The Bell Tower Has Teeth

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Nessa wanted the speaking tube before the mud swallowed her boots.

She waded through the reservoir’s exposed street, past chimney pots standing like broken fingers and a bus half-buried in silt. Above her, the bell tower leaned over the drowned village, its clock stopped at 2:17—the minute Tom vanished.

“Don’t go in,” her mother had said from the dam road.

Nessa had brought the bolt cutters anyway.

At the tower door, something scraped on the other side. Not rats. A slow, careful dragging, followed by three knocks.

She pressed her ear to the swollen wood.

A boy’s voice whispered, “You took long enough.”

Nessa dropped the cutters. The mud closed around them with a soft gulp.

Inside, the tower bell began to ring, though the rope hung slack and the air was perfectly still. Each strike shuddered through her ribs. On the fourth, the door unlocked itself.

Beyond it, wet footprints climbed the spiral stairs—small, bare, and fresh.

The Dry Step

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Nessa went in without the cutters.

The footprints ended halfway up, at a step the water had never reached. Above it lay a folded blanket, a heel of bread, and her mother’s blue flask.

She knew the flask by its dent. Tom had dropped it on the kitchen flags; their mother had made him drink from it anyway.

“Tom?”

No answer. Through a slit in the stone she could see her mother coming down from the dam road, carrying something red.

Nessa climbed.

In the upper room, the brass speaking tube curved out of the wall beside the bell frame. A little recorder was lashed to its mouth with strips of cloth. Tom’s recorder. The battery cover was still held on with her yellow tape.

She pressed play.

First came breathing. Then Tom, close and cross: “Mum, stop calling me. I’m coming.”

A scrape followed. His voice changed.

“But if you’re up there—”

Below Nessa, her mother struck the tower door three times.

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What does Nessa do with Tom’s unfinished sentence when her mother arrives using the same three knocks she heard before the door opened?

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