The Verse of the Plague-Bell

I.
Anselm the Illuminator—monk, orphan, survivor of three pestilences—copied manuscripts in the Alpine priory of St. Veyra. In autumn of 1347 a parchment arrived wrapped in wolf-skin, seal black as dried blood. No courier remembered bringing it; the abbot commanded Anselm to decorate the text so the brothers might “laugh at pagan nonsense” before burning it.

II.
The parchment bore a twenty-line poem in vulgar Latin, ink rust-colored, scent of iron and lavender:

  When bell tolls thirteen, the dead lease the night,
  Rats count coins upon the altar stone.
  O reader, breathe on these letters—
  Each exhalation a mortgage on thy soul.
  Plague walks in the bell-rope, not the miasma;
  He who tolls is he who dies, yet knows it not.
  Seal the church-door with wax of thy heart,
  Lest the verse borrow thy pulse for its next line.

III.
Anselm, whose humor had been cauterised by mass graves, thought the metre clumsy but the imagery striking. He painted a marginal grotesque: a skeletal bell-ringer whose rope threaded through his own vertebrae. As he traced the final flourish the parchment absorbed crimson from his brush, though the pigment should have been cinnabar.

IV.
That night the priory bell tolled twelve, then once more—thirteen. Monks stirred from sleep, counted on frost-numb fingers, crossed themselves. Anselm felt the after-vibration travel down the bell-rope, through the cloister stones, into the ink-stains on his fingertips.

V.
Matins. Brother Jean the bell-ringer absent. They found him in the rope-room, mouth distended as if yawning at death itself, tongue black. His palms bore rope-burns reaching elbow-ward, as though he had been pulled upward, not downward. The abbot ordered Psalm 91; Anselm noted the rope still swayed though no wind stirred.

VI.
Next dusk the parchment lengthened. A twenty-first line crawled across the foot, letters wet:

  Jean tolls no more; his heartbeat keeps my meter.

Ink smelled of Jean’s lavender oil. Anselm confessed to the abbot, who slapped him—then commanded the parchment buried in the reliquary crypt beneath the altar. “Holy relics will choke the serpent,” the abbot said. Anselm obeyed, yet when he descended the spiral stairs the parchment fluttered in his sleeve like a trapped sparrow.

VII.
Midnight. Anselm dreamed of the crypt. Lead coffins stood open, their occupants sitting upright, each holding a bell-rope that merged into one great cord ascending through the vault. At the junction stood a cowled figure, face blank as unwritten vellum. It offered Anselm the rope. “Toll, and the poem continues; refuse, and the parchment rewrites thee into margin.”

VIII.
He woke with rope-fibres under his nails, though he had not left his cell. The scriptorium reeked of lavender. The parchment lay on his desk, now forty lines, each chronicling a brother’s death in ballad metre. Brother Bernard found it, read aloud, laughed—died at Compline, eyes inked black.

IX.
Panic. The abbot sealed the crypt, sprinkled relic dust, posted two knights at the stair. Yet the parchment grew. Monks tried burning it; flames turned lavender, smoke spelled the next stanza in mid-air. They drowned it in holy water; letters swam like leeches, reassembled on the rim.

X.
Anselm theorised: the poem fed on being read. He proposed silence. The abbot ordered every monk to vow wordless obedience; parchment still swelled, as though the mountain itself murmured the verses.

XI.
At last only Anselm and the abbot remained. They descended to the crypt, candles guttering. The parchment lay atop the altar, edges now stitched into the stone like veins. The final visible line read:

  Two voices echo; one must loan his throat.

The abbot lifted the abbatial bell-axe to smash the altar. Before steel met stone the axe handle sprouted fibres, twisting into rope. It coiled round the abbot’s neck, hoisted him ceiling-ward. Anselm heard cervical pop, then thirteen tolls—though no bell moved.

XII.
The parchment offered itself, blank at the foot, quill beside it wet with something that pulsed. Anselm understood: the poem needed an author, not a reader. He dipped the quill in the abbot’s still-dripping heart, wrote:

  I end thee here, by ink and by love of Christ.

The letters smoked, but the parchment folded like a flower at dusk, shrinking until it became a small white bell. It rang once—high, innocent—then crumbled into dust that smelled of old parchment and new-baked bread.

XIII.
Anselm emerged at dawn, carried the abbot’s body uphill, and buried it in unconsecrated ground—no prayers, no stone, lest words wake the bell again. He left the priory, wandered Europe recounting the tale to anyone who would listen, always ending with the warning: “Never illuminate a verse that tolls.”

XIV.
Historians record St. Veyra abandoned by 1352, its bell-tower struck by lightning that left the rope unburned but thirteen knots tied mid-way—knots that tighten whenever scholars quote the surviving fragments of the “Plague-Bell Verse.”

XV.
If you visit the alpine ridge today you may hear a bell at dusk, though the tower is rubble. Count the tolls. If they reach thirteen, close your lips, cover your ears, and walk backward—because the poem is still short one voice, and it learns your language faster than you can forget its metre.