Whispers at 3:03 - by Mariam Akorede

Chapter Five: The Bell Tower The next morning, Greybridge felt like a different town—brighter, almost inviting under the cautious spring sun. But to Mara, the sunshine felt like a lie. A bandage on a wound that ran too deep. She needed answers, and only one place in Greybridge kept its secrets in neat, chronological order: the town archives, housed in the basement of the old library. Mara parked on Main Street, eyeing the boarded-up shops and vacant sidewalks. A sign outside the library hung crooked—painted letters barely legible: Greybridge Public Library, Established 1901. Inside, dust motes danced in the weak light that filtered through stained-glass windows. The archivist—a rail-thin man named Curtis with a collection of dust bunnies in his hair—peered at her over his glasses. “Detective Vex,” he said in a voice that sounded older than the town itself. “Looking for something… specific?” She explained the tapes, the 3:03 calls, and the deaths. Curtis listened with an expression that flickered between disbelief and worry. “3:03,” he murmured. “That’s the hour of reckoning. Old folklore. Goes back to when Greybridge was a settlement. Before the bell tower was built.” Mara leaned forward. “Tell me everything.” Curtis shuffled through a battered file box and drew out a cracked leather ledger. He opened it carefully, pages yellowed with age. “Greybridge’s bell tower,” he began, “was built in 1923, but the land it sits on was cursed long before that. The settlers called it ‘The Hollow.’ Said it was where the dead came to talk to the living—at precisely 3:03 a.m.” “Why 3:03?” Mara asked. Curtis shrugged. “Old superstition. They believed that’s when the veil between worlds was thinnest. Some said the fog carried voices from the other side.” He flipped to a page marked 1925. A grainy black-and-white photo showed a line of children standing at the bell tower’s base, their faces blurred by time. Some were smiling. Some were crying. “Every few decades,” Curtis continued, “someone in town disappears. It always starts the same way—strange calls, tapes left behind, the feeling that you’re being watched.” Mara’s mind raced. “Like the town is stuck in a loop,” she muttered, recalling the voice on Eva’s tape. Curtis nodded solemnly. “Exactly. Some think the bell tower is the source—a beacon that calls the dead to speak. But it’s not just the dead that come through, Detective.” He tapped the photograph. “Sometimes it’s the ones we failed to bury properly.” A chill crept up Mara’s spine. She’d faced plenty of killers before, but folklore was harder to shoot. She closed the ledger and thanked Curtis, promising to return it. As she stepped outside, fog rolled in, coiling around her like smoke. The bell tower loomed in the distance—gray and silent. But in the shifting mist, she saw movement. A figure, just visible between the trees, watching her. And for the first time since she’d arrived, Mara felt the town itself staring back.

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