Free The Bells by Richard Harvell

today.”
    The abbot clamped my neck with two sharp fingers and pulled me out of the room. I began to cry.
    He dragged me down the stairs, lifting me enough with his pincers that my feet only just skimmed each stair. “If you ever interrupt my Mass again,” he whispered in my ear, “I will cut out your tongue and feed it to—”
    “Stop!”
    We turned. Nicolai stood at the top of the stairs. The potato sack had disappeared. There were tears in his eyes.
    “You cannot do this,” he said.
    “Do you know what you are saying?” asked the abbot.
    “Abbot, I vowed to protect that child.”
    For a moment, the abbot was speechless. I heard the breath catch in his throat. I felt his clamped hand shake with anger, as did his voice when he finally spoke. “You have a single vow, Brother Nicolai, and that is to this abbey. And so, let me make myself clear: You have a choice. You can return to your first and perpetual vow, and I will take this child where I please. Or you may sever that vow, and you and this child can leave the monastery together, immediately. I prefer the second option.”
    Nicolai’s face was red, like when he was drunk. “Father, I beg forgiveness, I choose—”
    His choice was never revealed, because at that moment we heard a fourth person stumbling up the stairs. “Praise God,” this new voice said. “Abbot, you have found him.”

IX.
    “U lrich von Güttigen,” the yellow-skinned man gasped and held out a sweaty hand to me. “I am Regens Chori at the abbey.” I shrank from the hand as though it too meant to pull me down the stairs. I recognized this man from the church. It was he who had stood before the singers I had tried to join.
    “Yes, I have found him,” said the abbot. He pushed me down another step so I stood between the two men. “And now he is off to Rorschach. He will not disturb us again.”
    “No!” the choirmaster said. He grabbed my arm.
    The abbot tightened his fingers on my neck. “What do you mean?” he asked.
    Ulrich looked from the abbot to Nicolai and back to the abbot. I tried to pry away my arm, but the choirmaster’s hold was firm.
    “For the choir, of course.”
    “The choir?”
    “Yes.”
    In the silence that followed, I gave up my squirming and looked closely at this Ulrich von Güttigen. His yellow skin was taut and translucent, like the skin of a chicken plunged briefly in boiling water. His white hair, too, seemed to have been boiled off like feathers, and clung only behind his ears and on the top of his head in wisps.
    Yet his looks did not strike me so much as his sounds. Though he heaved for air, his breath was a mere whisper, like a breeze under a door. His heart beat too quietly for me to hear, and though I strained for more clues by which to know him—rubbing hands or twisting feet or a click in his knees—I heard nothing.
    “We need to hear him sing,” Ulrich said. He pulled me toward him and chewed his lip in eagerness.
    “We have heard him sing. Most disturbingly.”
    “A few notes, Abbot. Merely a glimpse, perhaps, of something extraordinary.”
    “Hear him,” Nicolai interrupted.
    The abbot and Ulrich turned to the large monk, who still stood at the top of the stairs.
    “This does not concern you,” the abbot said. But he turned back to the choirmaster and muttered, “Fine, we will hear the boy.”
    The four of us descended the stairs and wound through a series of unfamiliar corridors. Ulrich did not release my arm until we entered a large room with mirrors along one wall. A small stage ran across the other end of the room. In the room’s center stood a device that appeared to me a coffin with three rows of keys at one end. I was afraid they meant to bury me alive in it. Ulrich placed a stool next to this casket and lifted me up onto it. He saw my frightened eyes staring down at the wooden box and said as kindly as his nervous voice could manage, “But have you never seen a harpsichord before?” He pressed one of the keys, and a