Chapter 16

The old priest

Father Petar stared at the letter from the eparchy for a long time before opening it. The seal was familiar. The handwriting even more so. He already knew what it meant.

Transfer.

He had spent nearly fifteen years serving in a small but respectable parish near the regional town, where the church was well maintained, the villagers generous, and the roads reliable. The thought of leaving that place for a remote village in the northern plains filled him with quiet resentment. When he finally unfolded the letter and read the name of his new assignment, his jaw tightened.

Knezha.

He had never been there, but he had heard enough stories to form an opinion. A poor farming village. Long winters. Endless mud in spring. People hardened by work and hardship. Not the kind of place a priest chose willingly.

Yet obedience was the spine of priesthood.

And so Father Petar packed his belongings, gathered his books, and left the only parish he had known as home.

His first weeks in Knezha were difficult. The church itself was old and tired. The stone walls were cracked in places, and the wooden beams creaked whenever the wind passed through the valley. The iconostasis had faded from decades of candle smoke, and the bell—small and dull—barely carried its sound beyond the edge of the village. The villagers watched him cautiously.

So did he.

They were quiet people, suspicious of outsiders. Their hands were rough from fieldwork, their faces worn by long winters and harder years. Petar kept his distance at first. He performed the liturgies, visited the sick, baptized the newborns, and buried the dead. But inside he remained detached.

Until slowly, almost without noticing, something began to change.

A woman once left a basket of bread and apples at the church door after he prayed for her sick child. An old man invited him to sit by the fire and drink tea after a funeral. Children began greeting him in the street. The walls between priest and village softened.

By the time his third winter arrived, Father Petar no longer felt like an outsider. He knew the villagers by name. He had blessed their homes. He had listened to their confessions. And when spring returned that year, the idea that had once seemed impossible began to grow in his heart.

The church needed a proper bell.

Not the tired little one that hung there now. A real bell. One that would ring across the fields and call the village to prayer.

The villagers supported the idea immediately. Donations began to arrive, but very slowly—coins placed quietly into the collection box, a handful of lev offered after liturgy, small sacrifices made by people who had very little to spare. But the cost of casting such a bell was enormous. Even after two years of collecting funds, they were still far from the amount needed.

Petar often wondered if the dream would ever become reality.

Then the letters began arriving.

They came from Pleven, from a man who had once lived in the village but had long since disappeared.

Nikolay.

Each letter arrived with money carefully wrapped inside. At first it was a modest amount. Then more. And more. It was obvious that the man was sending nearly everything he ever made.

Petar read the letters in private, seated at the small wooden desk inside the rectory. The words were always the same—apologies, regret, longing. Nikolay wrote that he missed his family more than words could express. That he hoped one day to return and ask forgiveness. That the money was meant for them—for his wife, for his children.

Petar folded the letters carefully and placed them inside his leather notebook. The money he placed in a separate envelope.

At first, he intended to deliver it.

But each time he looked at the growing pile of banknotes, the same thought kept returning.

The bell.

The village needed the bell. Without that money, the dream would take years, maybe decades. Perhaps it would never happen at all.

He told himself the bell would serve everyone. It would bless the entire village.

Surely that mattered more than one struggling family.

And so the money stayed where it was.

More letters came. More money followed.

Until one winter the letters stopped.

Word eventually reached the village that Nikolay had died. Alcohol had taken him slowly.

The final envelope arrived weeks later.

No letter this time. Only money. More than usual this time. Nikolay, knowing the end was near, had arranged in his will for all of his belongings to be sold and the proceeds to be sent to Father Petar. For his family. For Natasha. For Stefan.

Petar used it.

The bell was finally ordered.

The villagers celebrated, and no one knew where most of the funds had come from.

No one except the priest.

The day the bell arrived was one of the happiest days Father Petar had ever known. The entire village gathered in the churchyard. The great bronze bell rested on a wooden platform, its surface gleaming in the sunlight. The carved cross along its side seemed almost alive as the light moved across it.

Petar stood before the people and raised his hands in blessing. His heart was filled with gratitude.

This was God’s work. God’s gift to the village.

And yet somewhere deep inside his chest a quiet voice whispered something else.

You took what was not yours.

He ignored it.

The men tied thick ropes around the bell and began lifting it slowly toward the tower. The villagers watched in silence.

And then the rope snapped. The sound was like a gunshot.

The bell fell.

The impact shook the ground. Two men died instantly, their bodies crushed beneath the bronze weight. The screams that followed echoed across the village.

Petar stood frozen. The bell lay cracked in the dust. And something inside him broke with it.

The visions began weeks later.

At first, they came in dreams—dark shapes moving through the church, whispers beneath the altar, the distant sound of metal ringing somewhere deep underground. Then the dead men appeared, standing beside the bell, watching him in silence. Their faces were broken and twisted exactly as they had looked the day they died.

Petar tried to pray. But the prayers brought no peace. The visions only grew worse.

Soon there was another figure among them. A third man.

Nikolay.

His face pale. His eyes black and empty. He never moved. He only stared. And when he finally spoke, his voice was hollow and distant.

“You promised.”

Petar woke screaming. Night after night. Year after year.

The bell had been moved to the catacombs after the accident, but Petar became convinced that was not enough. The evil remained. It was inside the bell, inside the cracked bronze. If he could only make it disappear, the visions would stop.

Get rid of it. Everything would get better.

One night he made a decision.

He contacted and hired, in secrecy, several men from another village—men who did not ask questions and did not care about the history of the bell. They arrived quietly, and together they moved the bell deeper into the underground tunnels, far beyond the places anyone normally visited. It was done all during one moonless night, so that no one ever knew it had happened. Even the people working in the church.

At the end of a narrow stone passage stood a small storage chamber.

They rolled the bell inside. Petar ordered chains placed around it. Heavy iron chains.

Then wooden beams were nailed across the doors. Finally, the men bricked the entrance shut, stone by stone. When the wall was finished, Petar gave one final command.

The corridor itself must be destroyed.

The men hesitated, but the money removed their doubts. They collapsed the hallway with hammers and iron bars until the ceiling caved in and the passage disappeared beneath piles of broken stone.

The bell was sealed away forever… Or so Petar believed.

But even after that night, he could still hear it. Late in the darkness. A faint ringing. Soft. Distant.

Coming from somewhere beneath the earth.

No one else heard it.

Only him…And it was getting louder.

The sound followed him everywhere—into the church, into his dreams, into his prayers.

Years passed.

His mind slowly unraveled and drove him into madness.

The villagers whispered that the priest had grown strange, but they did not know the reason.

One stormy night, when the river outside the village had swollen from days of rain, Father Petar walked alone along the muddy bank. The wind roared and the water churned violently beneath the bridge.

Somewhere far away, he thought he heard the bell again.

Ringing.

Calling.

Behind him, three figures stood in the darkness.

The two dead men.

And Nikolay.

Watching.

Waiting.

“You promised.”

Petar closed his eyes.

He leaned and stepped forward into the black water.

The river swallowed him as if he had always belonged to it.