In the isolated Icelandic village of Skólvellir, nestled between black lava fields and mist-shrouded fjords, stood an aging high school—a crumbling structure of stone and steel, built during the Cold War as a bunker before it became a place of learning. The school had always been a place of relative peace; the students, mostly from farming families and fishermen’s homes, were close-knit, guarded by a shared sense of survivalism rather than competition. Bullying, as it appeared in other parts of the world, was rare—except, as it turned out, for what happened to Luka.

Luka Draganović was not like the others. Born in Serbia and adopted by a quiet couple who had escaped war decades ago, Luka carried something older with him—an ancient sadness, perhaps, or a fire that had burned too long. He had the pallor of a moonlit lake and eyes like cracks in ice. The older students teased him in hushed tones, not with cruelty so much as fear. They’d nudge each other when he passed, whisper “draugur,” the Icelandic word for ghost.

Yrsa Halldórsdóttir, then just fourteen, was the only one who ever spoke to him. She offered him half her sandwich once, when she found him in the music room, softly tapping broken chords on a piano missing half its keys. He looked up, startled, and smiled faintly, accepting the sandwich as though it were a holy gift. They didn’t speak much, but that moment lingered with her. Luka never forgot either.

Two years passed. Yrsa grew older, wiser, and Luka… changed. Something shifted behind his eyes. He became quiet, more withdrawn. Teachers began to notice his strange drawings—dark figures in hooded robes, a bell tower that did not exist, red spirals crawling across the margins of his notebooks. He stopped playing the piano, claiming it was “out of tune with the voices.”

Then came the day the silence broke.

It was in late October, during the first snow. A lockdown drill was called—standard procedure. But this time, it wasn’t a drill. Someone had heard something—heavy breathing over the intercom, followed by a slow, distant clang… like a bell being rung deep beneath the school.

Yrsa and her classmates huddled under desks, lights off, hearts pounding. The intercom buzzed again. And then came a voice.

“They buried it. But it rings still.“

The scream that followed came from the north wing. A teacher found a door ajar in the art room. Inside: red chalk smeared across every surface—walls, tables, windows. At the center, a crude depiction of a bell tower, upside down. At its base, a clown’s face, drawn in vivid detail, the mouth stretched impossibly wide.

A few students swore they saw something moving in the halls—a figure in a clown mask, grinning, holding something heavy that scraped against the floor. Some said it was a prank. Others said it wasn’t human.

Then Luka disappeared.

No one saw him after that day. The authorities searched the surrounding lava fields, the geothermal tunnels beneath the school, even dredged the ice-fringed lake nearby. Nothing. His foster parents left quietly two weeks later.

A year passed. The school tried to move on.

Then, during the anniversary of the lockdown, the bell sounded again.

It was midnight. Yrsa was walking home from choir practice, cutting through the schoolyard. Snow fell in heavy silence. Then, the sound—clang… clang… clang—deep and resonant, like it came from underground. The same tone from that day.

She turned to the school building.

In the highest window of the old bell tower—unused since the school’s days as a military outpost—stood a figure in a clown mask. Watching.

The next day, the janitor, Sigurjón, found a new drawing in the art room—done in charcoal. A perfect likeness of Yrsa’s face, but the eyes were black pits, and her mouth hung open in a silent scream. Beneath it: Luka’s handwriting.

“She fed the ghost. Now it feeds her.”

Students began to whisper of the Hollow Bell, a local legend never before spoken of—of a boy who rang the death bell to call back his drowned brother, and instead summoned something else… something that never stopped ringing once awakened.

Yrsa never stopped hearing the bell after that. Sometimes in her sleep. Sometimes during exams. Sometimes when the town fell quiet and the snow muffled the world. The clown figure appeared in odd places: the corner of her mirror, the reflection in a puddle, the glass of a school bus window.

No one else ever saw it.

Until another lockdown was called the following year.

This time, the voice on the intercom wasn’t a recording.

It was Luka.

“I told you,” he said, almost gently. “They buried it. But it rings still.”

And from every locker, every speaker, every drain in the school came the sound of a bell—tolling for the living, calling something home.

In Skólvellir, they say you can still hear it, on certain nights.

But only if you’ve heard it once before.

Only if you’ve fed the ghost.