The Butler’s Ledger

Angela Harrington’s husband Paul had always collected curiosities.

Old clocks, Victorian dolls, strange silver trinkets.

But the little bell he brought home from a London estate sale was different.

It was heavy.

The skirt was pure silver.

The handle looked like polished bone.

“Feel it,” Angela said to her friend Jeanne one afternoon, sliding the glass door of the cabinet.

“It’s… warm.”

Jeanne turned it in her palm.

“Bone handle?”

“That’s what the dealer said. Eighteenth century. Belonged to some duke’s butler. Supposed to summon perfect service.”

They laughed.

Angela rang it — just once — for fun.

The air shivered.

A tall man in perfect black livery appeared in the corner of the living room, silent, smiling faintly.

Both women froze.

He bowed.

“Madam called?”

From that day the butler was always there when the bell was rung.

He poured wine that never ran out.

He knew secrets before they were spoken.

He brought photographs of Paul in hotel rooms with girls half his age.

He whispered stock tips that made them millionaires overnight.

He arranged “accidents” for people who annoyed Angela.

Every wish came true.

Every desire — granted instantly.

Years flew.

Paul died of a sudden heart attack (the butler served him the last glass of 1945 Château d’Yquem).

Jeanne moved away after “a nervous breakdown”.

Angela grew richer, lonelier, more afraid of the silent man who never aged.

At ninety-two she lay in bed, surrounded by nurses who weren’t nearly as efficient as he was.

She rang the bell one final time — not for medicine, but for company.

The butler appeared.

He looked exactly thirty-three — the age he had been when the bell was forged.

Angela smiled weakly.

“Will you stay with me… until the end?”

He bowed.

“Of course, madam. And after.”

She died peacefully that night.

And opened her eyes in a place of soft white light.

She was thirty-three again.

Young, beautiful, strong.

The butler stood before her holding an enormous parchment scroll that unrolled across the floor and disappeared into the distance.

“What is that?” she asked.

“Your ledger, madam. The bill for every wish.”

She read the first line and felt her knees buckle.

Wish: “Make Paul suffer for his affairs.”

Price: To be reborn as a woman in North Korea, 2000–2026. Famine. Labour camp. Execution for listening to foreign radio.

Wish: “Let Jeanne lose everything she loves.”

Price: Rebirth in rural Uzbekistan, 1980–2040. Married at fourteen. Twelve pregnancies. Buried alive for “dishonour” at thirty-one.

Wish after wish.

Lifetime after lifetime.

Each more brutal than the last.

Angela looked up, tears streaming.

“There must be some mistake… I didn’t know…”

The butler’s smile never reached his eyes.

“You rang, madam. Service is eternal.”

He rang the little silver bell once.

The white light vanished.

Angela opened her eyes in a dark labour camp barracks, 2001, Pyeongyang Province.

She was nineteen.

Her hands already bleeding from barbed wire.

Far away, in a London antique shop, the bell waited on a shelf for its next owner.

The End… or the beginning.

Edited and translated with the assistance of AI Grok. Illustrations generated by Grok.