The Sky Above Dubbo

Written in response to a cool
image I saw on Bushboy’s World.
Thanks for letting me use it, Brian!

Father Clement had rung the evening bell every night for eleven years, and every night something rang back.

Not an echo; echoes fade. This came a half-second after his own toll, low and certain, from somewhere inside the tower he had climbed a thousand times and never found another bell.

He’d stopped mentioning it to the diocese. The last priest who’d asked too many questions about St. Andrews had been reassigned to a parish in Wagga Wagga within the month, and Clement suspected reassignment was a kind word for what had actually happened to him.

Tonight the sky above Dubbo was churning white and grey, like something being stirred from underneath, and the spire stood black against it, sharp as a thorn. He climbed the narrow stair with his lamp, counting the same worn stones he always counted, and reached the belfry out of breath, as he always was.

He rang the bell.

The second toll came from below him this time, not above. Below, from the nave, from the three tall windows he could see nothing through from this height, only their dark reflected gleam.

He had never gone down to look. Eleven years, and he had always told himself it was just an old building settling, sound doing strange things in stone. But there was a register to it he couldn’t unhear anymore …. the same weight, the same pitch, as if the church itself had a second throat somewhere in its ribs and had only just learned to use it.

He went down.

The nave was empty, of course. It was always empty at this hour, but tonight the emptiness had a character to it, like a room that had been occupied moments before he entered and was still warm. The three lancet windows held no color without the sun behind them …. just black glass, and in the black glass, very faintly, the reflection of the tower.

Somewhere above him, the bell rang a third time, unprompted, and this time it did not sound like a bell at all. It sounded like something enormous exhaling, the way a thing that has waited a very long time might exhale when it finally senses it’s been heard.

Clement did not run. Instead, he answered it, aloud, in the old tongue the seminary had made him learn and the church went very still. Then, from the registry chest beside the vestry door …. a chest he had dusted a thousand times and never once opened …. came the small, dry sound of an old lock giving way on its own.

Inside, beneath decades of parish scrolls, he found a single ledger page, older than the rest, recording the death of a bellringer named Josiah Coll in 1888, struck by his own bell during a storm not unlike this one, buried, the note specified: beneath the north transept, unmarked, so that he would always be within the sound of the bell he loved.

Clement understood, then, that Josiah had never left. He had been ringing back for over a century, waiting for someone to ring to him with intention instead of habit, to answer instead of merely hear.

The following morning, Clement arranged a small, proper service over the north transept floor, a blessing and a name spoken aloud for the first time in a hundred and thirty-odd years. That evening, he climbed the tower and rang the bell once, as always.

Only once. No echo answered, no second throat opened beneath the stone.

The silence was, he wrote in his final entry on the matter, the loudest and most peaceful sound he had heard in eleven years …. and he closed the register that night knowing that when he rang the bell tomorrow, it would simply be a bell.

NAR© 2026

Nancy’s Notes: I did a fair amount of research on St. Andrews Chapel, but, for whatever reason, I did not go on the official website until after I had written my story. When I did, I was struck by this sentence: “St. Andrews Chapel is a purpose-built space in Dubbo designed specifically for farewells.” I had no idea the service currently offered by St. Andrews is funerals …. a rather eerie fact considering I chose to end my story with a funeral for Josiah Coll.

This is “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica

Silent Sunday – 12 July 2026

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}