Eerie Bells

Those of you who know me well enough to have my friendship across Skype, may have noticed that recently my quote after my name has been "eerie bells". This was actually also my quote from a while ago, and here I'm about to explain it.

My first novel opens with a scene of a creepy run-down garden, and in the distance there is the sound of a clock tower striking twelve. The original idea came from my own experience. Late at night sometimes, when the noises of the day are no longer there, I can hear the clock attached to the church the next village over striking on the hour. I have a tendency to count the strikes, but if the wind is gusting I sometimes don't catch all of them.

In the chapter after that, the main character (currently suffering from insomnia) hears a clock tower in the distance strike one am just before her life is suddenly flung backwards to a life she once knew but had since given up. The whole novel needs rewriting, but the instance of the bells remain the same.

Now if I take you into a computer game that I have played: American McGee's Alice, and inform you that there are bells weaved into the extremely creepy music that plays in the background, you may start to get an idea of what I'm saying, but if you haven't I'll give you the general point: bells are creepy.

When I say this I am throwing the term "creepy" around lightly, they're not always creepy, but with the right circumstances they can be like a scorpion crawling up your bare back. The ones with a sound like a hollow pipe being struck are the worst.

However, if I look at these bells in a different way I can say that they are a call to worship. Google also informs me that the bells in Catholicism are used to symbolise the voice of god and that bells around the world are often used to symbol peace. But those rings in the middle of the night, though somehow comforting can be downright eerie.

I think I see them this way because of the unnatural stillness as the world sleeps. I experience the same feeling when I can hear trains going past in the small hours of the morning. Perhaps this is an abnormal fascination, I mean, even in my most recent novels the bells still appear, one particular instance being a plant that grows bell-shaped fruit and chime when the wind blows through the trees.

Bells play with my imagination, and I sat at my computer one day, quite a while ago, and thought about it. The term "eerie bells" jumped into my head, and without a pen and paper, or an open document, I turned to Skype and entered it into the quote box so that I wouldn't forget it. I don't intend to change it, but perhaps, someday, I'll write a story about those bells.