TING LING

  KAT SIMONS

  Beware the noise behind the walls…And the dropped Cheetos

  Albert just wants some peace and quiet. Work and silence and no disturbances. Instead, a noise…a ringing noise in his apartment drives him to distraction. The noise even invades his dreams. When he realizes the ringing is coming from inside the walls, Albert really starts to worry. Anything could be behind that wall. Anything could be making that sound.

  Discovering the truth, however, proves more terrifying, and strange, than anything Albert could have expected.

  Author’s Note: This story is also published in the collection HAUNTS AND HOWLS AND JESTERS BELLS.

  TING LING

  Copyright © 2023 by Katrina Tipton

  Cover design: © 2024 T&D Publishing

  Cover Art: © Yevhenii Tryfonov | Dreamstime.com

  Published by: T&D Publishing

  T&D Publishing: https://www.tanddpublishing.com

  Kat Simons Website: https://www.katsimons.com

  Kat Simons Newsletter: https://bit.ly/KatSimonsNewsletter

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Thank You

  Books By Kat Simons

  More Books By Kat

  About the Author

  Newsletter Bonuses

  KatSimonsBooks

  To my fellow animal lovers…even when the animals are a little strange.

  1

  Where the hell was that bell sound coming from? Albert shook his head hard, but that didn’t help. No, the sounds weren’t in his head. They were around here somewhere. But where?

  Albert hunted behind the large, comfortable couch and found only a few hairballs and a stray Cheeto. No bells.

  He looked under the side chairs flanking his coffee table. Both were big heavy Lazy-boy chairs. Nothing under either one except some lint and another couple of Cheetos. Damn Cheetos got everywhere. When had he last eaten Cheetos? A week ago? More? Probably ought to move the furniture around and vacuum underneath more.

  Once he figured out where that fucking bell sound was coming from.

  He checked behind the TV stand, found nothing but dust, the inch of space behind the bookshelves where they didn’t quite sit over the baseboard properly. Nothing again. Not that he expected anything there. But by that stage he’d checked every other nook and cranny in his apartment and…nothing.

  He heard the bells in every room, but stronger in the living room-kitchen area of the one-bedroom apartment. The place was arranged weirdly so there was also a nook off the kitchen he used for an office. The bells weren’t so loud there. No. The sound was definitely louder in the open living room. But he’d checked every possible place they could be coming from.

  Hands on hips in the middle of the living room, he turned in a circle. In the walls maybe?

  Shit. That would be bad. And weird. How the hell was he going to get into the walls without releasing a bunch of mice and cockroaches onto his apartment? This was New York City. Even with the best maintenance and exterminator practices, there were mice and roaches in the walls. It was a fact of life. The only way to keep them out of your apartment was to keep all the possible ways in sealed off. No holes. Anywhere. He’d learned that the hard way when a hole behind the mini-fridge in his office near the baseboard had been letting in a steady stream of mice for about a month before he figured out where the hell they were getting in.

  That month still lived in his memory as a little slice of hell on earth. No more. No more holes.

  But the bells were going to drive him nuts if he couldn’t make them stop. A constant ting-a-ling-a-ling. Ting-a-ling-a-ling. Over and over. A break, randomly. Then more ringing. He’d hunted outside, opening the windows despite the cold to check and see if a bird had built a nest anywhere on the brick walls or over someone’s currently dormant windowsill air conditioner. No birds. No stray nests. No random bells somehow caught on the red bricks.

  Had to be the walls. But he was no way in hell going to punch holes in the walls and let the mice in again.

  He supposed he could always move.

  Albert shook himself hard at the thought. No one would buy this place with a constant bell sound anyway.

  Maybe if he could pinpoint the exact spot, he could get the super up here to help open the wall and then get it closed again before the mice were any the wiser. So long as the hole got sealed up quickly, he should be good.

  He definitely couldn’t sleep another night with those bells. One was enough. And sleep wasn’t exactly how he’d define his night. Noise cancelling headphones were tough to sleep in and didn’t block all the sound anyway.

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling. Ting-a-ling-a-ling.

  For a brief moment, he worried someone or something like a cat had gotten caught in the walls. Or a kid? Shit. That would be horrible. And him not realizing it for a full twenty-four hours!

  But the bells were too consistent. They did stop randomly. But a kid or even a cat would get tired and stop for longer than a minute after all this time. Right?

  Albert walked along the wall in his living room, trying to pinpoint the sound. The hiss of his heaters coming on complicated things. Oh, he could still hear the bells alright, but pinpointing the source over the sounds of hissing and clanking from the heaters proved difficult. He finally had to stop for a few minutes, until the heat was going and the noise of it coming on stopped.

  One thing he’d give his apartment building, they didn’t stint on the heating. At least not by February. God help them if it got cold in October. Saving oil. No heat despite the dip to below the temperature tipping point that was supposed to turn the heat on automatically—Albert thought the building manager made sure that tipping point temperature thing was adjusted lower for October just to save money. But by the middle of winter, the heat was always in full swing. Sometimes too much heat. He had to crack his windows to balance it out. But that was fine. He preferred being hot to being cold anyway.

  Once the heat settled, he went back to trying to pinpoint the exact location of the bell sound. Ting-a-ling-a-ling. Ting-a-ling-a-ling. God that was going to drive him nuts.

  He really hoped it wasn’t coming from someone trapped in the walls. How would they even get in there, though. There wasn’t any work being done on the building at the moment. No way into the walls unless you were dumb enough to open the walls yourself and risk a mice invasion for…reasons.

  Albert couldn’t think of a single reason.

  His cellphone rang from its place charging near the couch. He ignored it. That was his work phone and he was on his lunch break. He didn’t take work calls on his lunch break.

  Damn it. Where were those bells?

  He followed the weird curve in his apartment that led toward the kitchen, past his two windows that actually had a view of a patch of green park and not a view of one of the neighboring buildings. The patch of green was a cemetery, but still. It was a beautiful one with lovely old tombs and lots of grass and trees. Made him feel very Victorian to go for his daily walks there.

  The bells seemed to be coming from an area closer to the corner of the apartment, at the edge of the kitchen. Not a wall shared with a neighbor. He’d already asked both his immediate next-door neighbors if the bells were theirs anyway. And gotten some strange looks from the old woman in 14H and a polite no from the middle-aged man in 14K. He didn’t know his neighbors’ names, just knew them well enough to say hello, talk about the weather if they were riding in the elevator together, maybe bring them their mail if some got into his box on accident. It wasn’t that he wasn’t social. He just…wasn’t that social with his neighbors.

  Albert liked his peace and quiet.

  Which he did not have right now.

  The bells got louder the closer he got to the corner of the room. Ah ha! Finally. He was zeroing in on a location.

  Before getting the super all the way up here, he double checked the entire area around the noise. There were a few storage boxes filled with books stacked against the wall. Things he hadn’t gotten to his storage unit yet. But no furniture or appliances to move and check behind thankfully. Once he’d moved the boxes—and double checked inside to make sure the bells weren’t somehow coming from there—he set his ear to the wall, listening intently.

  Yes! The bells were definitely louder here. He was sure he’d found them. And they were definitely in the wall.

  So weird.

  Okay. Time to call the super and get this fucking noise stopped. He had work to do. It did not involve going slowly insane from the near constant ting-a-ling-a-ling.

  2

  Unfortunately, there was some sort of water emergency on 6, so the super couldn’t get to Albert immediately. Maybe not even that day. Terry said she’d try to get there before it got too late, but they weren’t going to be opening any walls in the apartment until tomorrow at the earliest.

>
  When Albert had raised his concerns that someone’s pet had gotten into the walls, Terry had assured him someone would have reported that by now. Yes, same with a child. No, Albert, especially with a child. There’d be panic. No person or pet was in the wall. Probably just some old toy a kid had dropped through a doorjamb or something and the vibrations of the subway under the building were setting it off.

  It was a very reasonable explanation. And honestly, that reasonable explanation set Albert’s mind at rest. A little. But since he wasn’t going to get any sleep or work done as long as those bells were making noise, he really couldn’t wait until tomorrow. After more nagging, whining and begging, Terry relented and said she’d come up and check as soon as she could.

  Albert tried to go back to work. Failed miserably. Went and tapped on the wall a few times. If something tapped back, he was going to freak out, but maybe then he could get Terry up here quicker.

  Nothing tapped back. Just more ting-a-ling-a-ling.

  Something of a relief. Didn’t help him get any work done.

  When his noise cancelling headphones proved to be just as inadequate to blocking the sound during the day as they’d been at night, he finally took himself from the apartment and went for a walk. He wasn’t getting anything done today. Might as well take in some fresh air.

  He bundled up in his thick wool coat, hat, scarf, gloves, heavy boots, and headed across the street and down a block to the cemetery.

  The elaborate front wrought iron gates were propped open so vehicles could drive in and out. The cemetery was surrounded on three sides by a tall brick wall and a chainlink fence made up the fourth. Thick maple trees rose up over grassy hills covered in elaborate old headstones. At least in this part of the cemetery. There were more modern parts, with less elaborate headstones. But he liked this section best. People used to create art for their dead. He liked the idea of someone creating art for him to honor his life.

  He paused at one headstone made to look like a pile of wood, carved out of gray stone. The details in the stack of wood were so expertly rendered, he’d had to touch the headstone once to make sure it was just rock and not actual trees. Another headstone shot up in a small obelisk made of red marble. Yet another looked an awful lot like a doorway.

  That one sort of freaked Albert out. Why make a doorway for your dead relatives? Did you really want them to use that door?

  Shivering, he moved on, walking a quiet loop around and through the hills, letting the late afternoon sunshine get into his eyes even as the harsh cold stung his cheeks. The fresh air did feel good. Cleared his mind a little. He’d swear he could still hear the ting-a-ling-a-ling echoing in his head, but he knew that was just because of a relentless twenty-four hours of that noise pummeling his brain.

  Though, as he moved deeper into the cemetery, to an even older section with less elaborate headstones with dates that went back to the eighteen hundreds, he’d swear he was hearing that sound again in real life. Not just a painful echo imprinted on his eardrums. Frowning, he left the paved road to walk through the grassy hill, passing rows upon rows of stones set into the ground. These weren’t decorated in elaborate stonework and marble. This was the pauper’s section of the cemetery, where they’d buried the poor souls without enough money or resources to ensure they were buried with ceremony. The headstones were basic. Marked with a name, maybe, and some dates. Not always birth and death. Sometimes just death.

  And there was that one that had the birth but no death written in. That one always wigged him out, same as the doorway stone. Back in the day, if they knew someone’s birthday, and there was a place for them in the cemetery, surely someone at least knew the year that person died. Made him think maybe the person hadn’t actually died and was wandering around the cemetery as a vampire or zombie or something.

  Although, this was New York. If there was a vampire or zombie around here somewhere, they were probably working in Manhattan, not hanging around a Queens cemetery.

  Albert continued to follow the sound, deeper into the cemetery, up and over the hill to the far side near a brick wall. No view of the road beyond, but the occasional car passing temporarily blocked the ringing sound.

  If that ringing was coming from one of those grave bells, Albert was going to run away to the nearest airport, get on a plane, and fly to another country. Especially since none of these graves were recent. The ground hadn’t been disturbed here in a long time and no fresh grave dirt patches showed. The idea of grave bells had always scared him, though. The thought of being buried alive and having to ring a bell, hope the grounds keepers heard it and came to unbury you even as your oxygen was running out? Argh! Very very scary.

  And not anything he’d ever once thought about during these walks in the cemetery. In fact, he couldn’t remember coming across grave bells anywhere here. If he’d thought about it, he’d have assumed anything like that was removed a long time ago because…well, embalming and the time of grave bells was so long ago, they were pointless now. Anyone in those graves was well dead.

  But that ting-a-ling-a-ling was still sounding, driving him on. No people were back here. Not even one of the grounds keepers. The grass was still well tended and short, so this wasn’t a neglected part of the cemetery. But it wasn’t frequently visited by people. In fact, as he looked around, he wasn’t sure he’d ever been back here either. Really was off the beaten track. Wasn’t even one of the walking stone paths through here.

  As he approached the sound, he made note of the fact that there were no obvious grave bells. That was a relief.

  The stone he stopped at wasn’t as reassuring.

  Like the others, it was just a rectangular block of gray stone set into the green grass. No brass plaque with the names and dates. This one had the name and date carved into the stone. The carvings were shallow, on their way to being scrubbed away by weather erosion, but still deep enough to read.

  Albert Scruddy. 1804 to 1843.

  Little spooky the dead man had the same the same first name, but different last name. Not a relative. Not that any of his relatives would be buried here. Most of his family was from the west coast. Their graves were that side of the country.

  He didn’t see a source for the ting-a-ling-a-ling, but the sound was definitely louder here at Albert Scruddy’s grave. He hunted through the grass, close to the wall, the neighboring headstones. Hoping to find someone had tossed a kid’s toy over the brick wall, or maybe brought a grave decoration with bells on that had gotten blown to this side of the cemetery.

  He couldn’t see anything.

  Maybe he really was going crazy. If Terry came up to his apartment and didn’t hear the irritating bells when he did, or worse, the bells stopped until after Terry left, Albert was definitely going to check himself into a hospital. He might be having a stroke and didn’t even realize. Wouldn’t that be just his bad luck to die of stroke at the back of a cemetery? They wouldn’t even have to take him far to bury him.

  He glanced around and shivered as a cold breeze ruffled the maple leaves and made the high branches sway.

  Pausing at Albert Scruddy’s grave one last time, he got down on his knees and searched very carefully through the grass. There had to be a bell around here somewhere. That sound wasn’t in his head. He was sure of it. He’d located the bells in his apartment. He could find them here.

  He pushed aside a patch of grass… Blinked.

  Then fell back on his ass and screeched.

  3

  Albert crab walked backward, over the top of other graves, to get away from the…the…

  He wasn’t even sure what he’d seen. Whatever it was, it wasn’t natural.

  The thing, whatever it was, rose up out of the grass next to Albert Scruddy’s grave. It wasn’t big. Maybe the size of a subway rate, which was large for a rat, but in the grand scheme of things not huge. And it was very white. Not a rat though. It didn’t have fur. Albert was pretty sure that was skin or scales but it was hard to tell because mostly he was scanning his peripheral vision for escape routes.

 

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