The Tolling

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         Bong.

         Bradley Shelton awoke to the sound of a bell reverberating in his ears rather than the annoying wahh, wahh, wahh of his electric alarm clock. He opened his eyes and looked at the green LED numbers that read 4:15. That was forty-five minutes before he usually woke up in the morning.

         “That must have been some dream I had,” he muttered into his pillow. “I don’t have any idea what it was about, but it was disturbing enough to wake me up out of a sound sleep.”

         The previous day’s meeting with his wife’s lawyer no doubt contributed to his fitful slumber. The young gold digger was trying to take him for a bundle, and he deeply regretting not following his own lawyer’s advice and demanded she sign a prenuptial agreement before the wedding.

         “Oh, well, live and learn,” he sighed.

         Rather than stay in bed, Bradley got up, showered, dressed and, after a quick cup of coffee, headed for his office. He was behind his desk by 6:00, just a half hour before his usual time, but three hours before the rest of the office staff arrived. As the largest land developer in Massachusetts—if not all New England—he put in a lot of late-night and early-morning hours. His work weeks were routinely eighty to a hundred hours and sometimes even longer.

         Such dedication to his career left little time for a personal life. Accordingly, he tallied up three failed marriages and a number of sour affairs. None of the relationships yielded any children, so except for a sister and brother-in-law in Puritan Falls, the wealthy Boston land tycoon was alone in the world. His solitary state didn’t bother Bradley in the least. He lived, breathed, ate and drank real estate deals. At the moment there were a number of multimillion dollar projects in progress: two office parks, four large warehouses, a medical facility and, the pièce de résistance, a mega mall that would rival Canada’s West Edmonton Mall in size and grandeur.

         It was the mall that became Bradley’s pet project. He pushed through all the permits, personally greasing the hands of several local and state politicians. Additionally, he was involved in all aspects of the design, right down to the number of benches that would be placed in the courtyards and number of stalls in the restrooms. The mall became a labor of love, a crowning achievement in a career with more than the usual number of major accomplishments.

         Unfortunately, Bradley Shelton was not as young as he used to be, and the long hours and stressful negotiations with zoning boards, contractors, suppliers and inspectors were beginning to take their toll. He was not sleeping as well, he was losing weight, and his handsome face was showing signs of age.

         In the three hours before his staff arrived, Bradley did the work a normal person would do in five. When Elena Fernandez, his administrative assistant, stepped out of the elevator at 8:52, her inbox was overflowing with correspondence, contracts and reports to be typed, photocopied, faxed, mailed or filed.

         “You must have gone through an entire pack of Post-its,” Elena laughed when she saw all the brightly colored squares of paper sticking out of the mountain of paperwork he’d left for her.

         He smiled, but there was no humor or joy in his expression.

         “Are you feeling all right?” Elena asked with concern, for although Bradley drove himself mercilessly, he was more than fair and generous to his employees.

         “Just tired,” he confessed. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. My wife is being unreasonable about the divorce settlement. Of course, the spicy Chinese food I ate last night didn’t help much.”

         “I’ve got some antacid in my desk, if you need it.”

         “I’m fine now,” he said, “but if you have a pill to get rid of my wife, I’ll take that.”

         Then with a low chuckle, he turned toward his computer and back to reading his email.

         Just before noon, as Elena was making progress on moving papers from her inbox to her outbox, Bradley Shelton was interrupted while studying a set of blueprints by the sound of a loud bell tolling.

         “Did you hear that?” he called to his assistant.

         “Hear what?”

         “It sounded like a bell ringing.”

         “I didn’t hear anything. It must have come from outside your window.”

         Bradley rose from his chair and looked out onto the city streets below. Where could the sound have come from? he wondered. When his eyes fell on the towering spire of St. Michael’s Church, he breathed a sigh of relief. Someone must have accidentally ringed one of the bells in the belfry.

         After refilling his coffee cup, he went back to the blueprints on his drafting table.

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         The following day was Saturday, which meant Bradley would only be in his office from 6:00 to 5:30. It was a rare evening in that he had a date, a corporate lawyer who, like the land developer himself, was married to her career. It was the kind of liaison he liked best: a good meal in a five-star restaurant followed by a movie, a concert or a show. Then, after a late night drink, there was an hour or two of sexual dalliance, after which Bradley went home and was usually in bed and asleep by 3:00 a.m.

         Things on this particular Saturday, however, did not go as planned. Not long after the main course was served, Bradley again heard the reverberating bong of a large bell.

         “There’s that noise again,” he declared with annoyance.

         “What noise is that?” his date asked as she eyed her dinner and debated whether she should take some home in a doggie bag.

         “That ringing bell. Didn’t you hear it?”

         “No,” the lawyer replied, dismissing the matter as one of no importance. “It’s probably someone’s cell phone ringtone. I hear all sorts of sound effects at the office: train whistles, police car sirens, thunder, doorbells—you name it.”

         “You might be right,” Bradley concluded.

         The explanation seemed feasible since his own cell phone made the cha-ching sound of a cash register draw opening when he received an incoming call. Nonetheless, the discordant sound ruined his enjoyment of the evening. The meal was not to his liking, and the movie proved to be a bore. Even the sex was less than enjoyable, and he was glad to return to his brownstone at the end of the evening.

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         During the following week, Bradley heard the mysterious tolling five more times. Finally, on Friday afternoon, he went to his doctor’s office for a check-up.

         “You say you’re hearing a ringing sound in your ears,” the doctor said as he quickly read his patient’s chart.

         “It’s not really a ringing. It was more of a bong, a single note of a very large bell. A deep base tone, like a church bell or an orchestra gong.”

         After a thorough examination, the doctor presented his diagnosis.

         “You’re killing yourself, Bradley. Your blood pressure is high, your cholesterol is through the roof and you….”

         Bradley’s eyes suddenly bulged, and he grabbed his chest and fell to the ground. An hour later he found himself in a hospital emergency room.

         “You were lucky this time,” his doctor informed him. “You’re still alive.”

         Bong.

         “There’s that bell again,” Bradley cried.

         “It was nothing but a nurse’s call button.”

         “You heard it too! I was beginning to think I was going crazy.”

         “It’s not your mind you have to worry about. You smoke. You’re living under incredible stress. Your diet is unhealthy. You’re not getting enough exercise. You’re a walking time bomb waiting to go off. Do you have a death wish?”

         “No,” the patient confessed. “Quite frankly, I’ve been given serious thought to slowing down. I’d like to take things easy, to stop and smell the roses.”

         “Then throw away the cigarettes, start eating low-fat foods, watch your cholesterol and join a gym. Because unless you make drastic changes in your lifestyle, you’ll be smelling those roses from six feet below.”

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         After being released from the hospital, Bradley went to spend a few weeks with his sister, Sheila Fallon, in Puritan Falls. Normally, he hated spending time in the quiet New England seaside town, but it was the perfect place in which to recuperate from a heart attack.

         “Here’s your room,” his sister announced as she opened the door to the guestroom.

         Her brother looked at the Queen Anne high boy, the wing chair beside the fireplace and the four poster bed and felt as though he’d stepped into the eighteenth century.

         “I’ll leave you to get settled in,” Sheila said. “Dinner won’t be ready until 6:30, so you have plenty of time to take a nap.”

         Bradley removed his jacket and shoes and lay upon the bed, pulling the quilt up over his legs. Yet even though he was tired, he couldn’t fall asleep. His eyes wandered around the room, examining the light fixtures, the mirror, the framed sepia photographs on the mantel, the hurricane lamps and the drapes. What fascinated him most were the prints hanging on the wall. Most of the subjects looked like English country cottages with lush lawns and beautiful flowers. In all the prints, warm yellow light emanated from the windows.

         Bradley got up from the bed, walked up to the prints and read the signature in the corner: Thomas Kinkade. He stared at the pictures for close to an hour and felt a warm, inviting feeling, the urge to walk inside one of the brightly lit homes and sit beside the warm fire of one of the smoking chimneys.

         As he imaged what the interiors might look like, he heard the loud peal of a bell and suddenly he knew what he wanted his legacy to be: not a mall with hundreds of overpriced stores, trendy restaurants and kid-friendly amusements, but a quiet, peaceful community where one could get off the beaten track and unwind. A utopia. A Brigadoon, untouched by the tribulations of our modern society.

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         Immediately upon returning to work, Bradley shelved all plans to erect a mega mall on his thousand acres in rural western Massachusetts. Instead, he put the architects and contractors to work building quaint cottages, stone footbridges and a white, steepled church. In record time Harmony Village was completed, and Bradley promptly retired and became the first person to move into the Thomas Kinkade-inspired development.

         The night the wealthy land tycoon moved into his ivy-covered stone cottage, he sat in an overstuffed chair beside the fireplace and looked out the bay window at the white church across the meadow. He smiled as the bell began to toll …

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         Sheila Fallon, appropriately dressed in a somber black pants suit, took hold of her husband’s arm as she walked away from the Pine Grove Cemetery in Puritan Falls.

         “Mrs. Fallon?” a voice called.

         The grieving woman turned to see a petite young woman whose face was vaguely familiar.

         “I don’t know if you remember me,” Elena began. “We met about two years ago at your brother’s fiftieth birthday party. I am—er—was your brother’s administrative assistant.”

         “Oh, yes,” Sheila replied. “I remember you. Bradley always spoke so highly of you.”

         “I wanted to offer my condolences. Mr. Shelton was a wonderful man and a good employer. I’m going to miss him.”

         “Thank you. His death was so unexpected, but I can take comfort in the fact that he didn’t suffer.”

         Sheila was still reeling from the shock of her brother’s sudden, massive heart attack, which happened during his meeting with his wife’s divorce lawyers.

         “My husband and I have inherited Bradley’s company,” she told the young assistant, “and we’re going to go ahead with his plans to build the mega mall. I’m only sorry my brother won’t be around to see his dream completed.”

         As Sheila and the Elena expressed their mutual grief over the death of their brother and employer, the bell of the Puritan Falls Church tolled, its echo reaching all the way to heaven where Bradley Shelton sat in his overstuffed chair beside his fireplace in his ivy-covered stone cottage.

Salem, I don't think anyone is going to believe Thomas Kinkade painted that picture of you!