Oh boy, I have to admit I was scared. Even Hervey didn’t start joking about it, but just listened. Away, way off somewhere I could hear something like a voice, but it wasn’t that that we heard above us. All of a sudden Hervey said, “I’m not going to hang around here any longer, you can bet. I don’t like this place. I don’t want to spend the night here. Come on, follow your leader, take a chance.”
Before I had a chance to grab him he had reached out across the railing into the open space and got hold of the bell rope. It was beyond his reach so he had to sort of jump for it. I guess it was his jumping and his weight both that made the rope go down, but anyway it went down enough to rock the bell sideways.
It was the creaking that made me look up, and then I saw the bell standing that way. It didn’t ring because there wasn’t any tongue in it but just as plain as could be, I could hear a voice in that bell say, “Help.” It just sent a kind of a shudder through me to hear it. Then the bell swung down again because Hervey’s weight on the rope wasn’t enough to hold it up that way. In a few seconds I could hear Hervey dropping from the end of the rope to the ground down below, and calling, “Follow your leader wherever he goes.”
But just the same none of us moved.
“Coming down?” he called. But we didn’t answer him.
“What is it?” Bert asked in a whisper.
“You heard it,” I said. “You know as much about it as I do. There’s a spook here.”
“The place is haunted,” Pee-wee whispered, all excited.
“Let’s go down,” Garry said. “I’d rather take a chance on that rope than to stay up here. Listen.”
We all listened but the voice above us didn’t call again.
“It’s a spirit in the bell, that’s what it is,” the kid said. “It’s a voice without any body to it—in the bell.”
None of us wanted to stay up there, I guess, but just the same none of us wanted to move. It just seemed as if we couldn’t move.
Pretty soon Warde said, “Wait a minute, let me get hold of that rope.”
He climbed over the old wooden railing and held on with one hand while he reached out with the other one. Then, all of a sudden, he was swinging on the rope and as sure as I live, just in that minute the voice above called, “Help.”
We just s............