“Madge?” Mimi said, putting her arm around her. She was wide awake now. “You’re shaking like a leaf.”  
“I—know—it but I can’t stop. Every time I close my eyes I hear them——thump—thump. Oh Mimi it’s awful! You don’t know unless you’ve heard them.”
 
“What’s up?” Betsy whispered. She over Jill and her head between theirs. “Am I missing something?”
 
“Sh—sh—” Mimi said to Betsy, but she had her arm around Madge, patting her shoulder. “Madge—er, Madge doesn’t feel well.”
 
“Sumpthin’ she et?” Betsy asked with small boy .
 
“I wouldn’t make fun of you! I’d b-b—be ashamed!”
 
She was in earnest now.
 
“I’m sorry, Madge. I was just joking. If there’s really something the matter I want to help.”
 
“I wish you’d go back to sleep. I was about to tell Mimi something. I won’t tell you, because you’d laugh.”
 
There was a thin crescent moon tonight; the stars were shedding more light than it. The dim light made the figures of the tired girls look like discarded rag dolls that had been thrown helter-skelter on the junk pile. Arms and legs . A of .
 
Mimi took it all in at one glance. The pale moon seemed to be casting a ghostly on Madge. She was pale as the young moon and her eyes were bright. Mimi wondered why Madge had to be so different from those healthy, sound ; why she was so tortured with her strange ? Mimi had never heard of anything like it before. She wouldn’t hear now unless Madge volunteered. She wouldn’t ask or beg her to tell. Death bells? The very name made goose bumps up her .
 
“Please, don’t you all think I’m queer, but it runs in my family. My grandmother always heard them when someone in our family died—I heard them when she died!”
 
Suddenly Madge put her hands to her ears and buried her head in Mimi’s lap.
 
“This doesn’t make sense to me,” Betsy said.
 
“To me either. But maybe it will.”
 
They were whispering over Madge.
 
Mimi felt Madge’s body grow ; heard her voice, and half choked.
 
“Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty——”
 
“If she thinks she hears a bell ringing, she’s goofy,” Betsy whispered. She tapped her forehead as she finished and made a spinning gesture with her hands.
 
Madge sat up as suddenly as she had down. She clutched Mimi’s wrist on one side and Betsy’s on the other.
 
“They’ve stopped!” she announced dramatically, but in the same breath added piteously, “but they’ll come back. They always do. Once they start, I always hear them—until somebody dies.”
 
Betsy was dumbfounded. Mimi was speechless.
 
“What do they sound like?” Betsy asked, moving closer to Madge. She around in front of her and the disturbed look on Madge’s face convinced her that whatever death bells were, Madge believed in them heart and soul.
 
“They don’t ring. I don’t know why they’re called bells at all unless they started calling them that way back when people used to the bell on the tower of the church when someone died. They’re mournful like that but more like a dull thud. When I first used to hear them, before Granny and Mama told me what they were, I thought someone was under the floor with the end of a broomstick or tapping with a hammer which had a piece of cloth tied over the hammer head. They go thump, thump, thump............