The village of Saint-Lyon,France lay veiled in fog for most of the year, nestled between hills that whispered of old wars and older curses. At its heart stood a crumbling cathedral, long abandoned—except for the bell tower. Every night, at precisely midnight, its rusted bell rang once, though no one had pulled the rope in over fifty years.
They said it was the widow.
Isabelle Moreau, last seen in 1973, had vanished the night her husband, the bell ringer, fell to his death inside the tower. They found his body twisted and broken at the base of the belfry steps, but Isabelle was never seen again.
Yet her voice remained.
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Alain Dupree was a modern man—a Parisian transplant and architectural historian. When he arrived in Saint-Lyon to catalog the ruins of the cathedral, he scoffed at the villagers' warnings.
"Ghosts don't survive the Enlightenment," he quipped. But on his first night, as the bell rang at midnight, he awoke to the sound of weeping.
A woman's voice, soft and grief-stricken, echoed up from the cathedral below.
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He explored the bell tower by day. Found old journals, love letters, half-burned candles, a single black shoe. The rope that once rang the bell was severed.
Still, every night at midnight, the bell tolled once.
And the weeping came closer.
Alain's dreams turned violent. He saw flashes of a man falling. Of a woman in black climbing the steps again and again. Of blood on a rope.
One morning, he woke with a bruise around his neck—as if he'd been hanged.
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Villagers began avoiding him. They whispered behind closed shutters. The baker refused to serve him.
He asked the mayor about Isabelle.
"She made a pact," the old man whispered. "To bring her love back. The bell must toll for eternity, or the dead forget her."
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Alain didn't believe it.
Until the night he followed the sound to the tower and saw her.
She wore a widow's veil. Her feet hovered inches above the floor. Her face, when she turned, was both young and ancient.
"You rang for me," she said.
"I didn't," he replied.
"But you will."
She reached out—and the rope appeared.
---
Alain never left Saint-Lyon.
Now, at midnight, the bell still tolls once.
The villagers say the widow has a new lover.
And that the man who rang the bell last smiles every time it tolls.