- This is a gothic thriller type story with a twist ending.
- It's about Bannadonna, a somewhat sinister architect, and the bell-tower he built.
- The most difficult part of building the tower was the crafting of the giant bell.
- During the melting and forging process, the workmen were scared.
- Bannadonna was worried their fear would cause them to shirk and damage the bell, so he hits the chief on the head with a giant ladle, killing him.
- A bit of the ladle falls into the smelting
- As a result, the bell has a blemish; but Bannadonna covers it over.
- Bad move, Bannadonna.
- Also maybe you shouldn't have murdered a guy. Geez.
- But the townspeople just shrug off the homicide as a sign of artistic temperament.
- Anyway, Bannadonna is secluded in his workshop working on some other thing.
- This is the secret bit setting up the surprise ending, if you couldn't tell.
- The covered over thing is eventually moved to the belfry.
- The chief-magistrate and one of his buddies go up to the belfry to try to figure out what the secret is. But Bannadonna won't tell them.
- They think it's sort of human like. (Cue ominous music.)
- Anyway, he shows them a complicated clock/bell thing, which is to ring the hours the next day.
- Each hour has a female statue by it.
- The magistrates are freaked out because the statues don't all look alike, and one looks like the prophetess Debra from a famous painting by Del Fonca (who appears to be a painter made up by Melville.)
- All of this is supposed to be somewhat ominous, though it's rather confused. Why would it be weird for statues to not look exactly alike?
- This sort of has a B-horror movie feel, where the music and the overacting lets you know that things are supposed to be scary even when the plot doesn't make a lot of sense.
- Anyway, Bannadonna explains at length that you can't necessarily make all statues look alike in an era before industrial standardization.
- They head downstairs, and the magistrate and his buddy think they hear someone moving upstairs in the belfry. Bannadonna assures them it's just the Frankenstein monster and the Terminator doing a rumba.
- No, he doesn't say that. He says nothing's there.
- More ominous music.
- And Bannadonna locks them out. (Most ominous music.)
- The next day people gather to hear the bell ring…but it doesn't.
- So they go upstairs and find some sort of statue/robot thing standing over his bleeding body. (Crescendo on that ominous music.)
- It seems that Bannadonna built a kind of human-looking mechanism to strike the hour, but he got caught in it, and so it bashed him to death as it tried to strike the hour.
- It takes Melville forever to say this, and it's all couched in maybes and superstitious burbling and ominous music, but that's the gist of it.
- So it's basically the Frankenstein story, but the monster never actually comes to life, which makes it all seem kind of pointless.
- At Bannadonna's funeral, the bell is rung, but ends up crashing down because of a weakness at its top (that's the bit Bannadonna tried to hide.)
- They make a new bell, which works for a while, but then on the one-year anniversary of the tower, an earthquake knocks it over.
- Strange event, Shmoopers. Strange, mysterious events. Don't mess with nature, scientists or bell ringers. Vincent Price now wishes you good night.