Maren had rung the hollow bells over six hundred graves. Each toll dragged a dead soul up just long enough for one last word. She'd done it so long it bored her. But tonight the bell rang before she touched the rope. One cold iron note rolled across the frozen yard. She opened her casebook to write it down, and the page was already full, in handwriting that was not hers.

Maren read the page by lantern light. It described tonight in perfect detail: the early bell, her shaking hands, even the lantern she held. The last line said, "She will dig up grave 601 before dawn, or the bells stop ringing for good." She had only six hundred graves. There was no 601. Not yet.

Maren took her spade to the far corner where no grave had ever been dug. The frozen ground gave way far too easily, like it had been waiting. Two feet down, her spade struck wood. A coffin lid nobody had buried. Carved into it was a single word: HERS.

Maren refused to touch the coffin. She climbed out and started filling the hole back in, spadeful by spadeful. But the dirt would not stay down. Every clod she threw in floated back up and settled on the yard's edge, until the grave sat open and patient, waiting for her to climb back in.

Maren dropped the spade and stepped away from the patient grave. "I won't climb in, and I won't fill it. So we're stuck." The voice considered this. "Then we wait," it said, "as long as it takes." And so they did, the keeper and the open grave, neither one giving in, while the snow fell and the years turned and the village slowly forgot her name.