Through the louvres of the belfry windows.

Whimsey did not want to hear it anymore. He made his way down to the belfry door and climbed the stair to the ringing chamber. The bells were still sounding their frenzied call. He passed the sweating ringers and climbed again – up through the clock-chamber, piled with household goods, and up on to the bell-chamber itself. As his head rose through the floor, the brazen fury of the bells fell about his ears like the blows from a thousand beating hammers. The whole tower was drenched an drunken with noise. It rocked and reeled with the reelings of the bells, and staggered like a drunken man. Stunned and shaken, Wimsey set his foot on the last ladder.

Halfway up he stopped, clinging desperately with his hands. He was pierced through and buffeted by the clamour. Through the brazen crash and clatter there went one high note, shrill and sustained, that was like a sword in the brain. All the blood in his body seemed to rush to his head, swelling it to bursting-point. He released his hold on the ladder and tried to shut out the uproar with his fingers, but such a sick giddiness overcame him that he swayed, ready to fall. It was not noise – it was brute pain, a grinding, bludgeoning, ran-dan, crazy, intolerable moment. He felt himself screaming, but could not hear his own cry. His ear-drums were cracking; his senses swam away. It was infinitely worse than any roar of heavy artillery. That had beaten and deafened, but this unendurable shrill clangour was a raving madness, an assault of devils. He could move neither forward nor backwards through his failing wits urged him, ‘I must get out- I must get out of this.’ The belfry heaved and wheeled about him as the bells dipped and swung with their tongues of bronze, and through it all that shrill, high, sweet, relentless note went stabbing and shivering.

He could not go down, for his head dizzied and stomach retched at the thought of it. With a last, desperate sanity he clutched at the ladder and forced his tottering limbs upward. Foot by foot, rung by rung, he fought his way to the top. Now the trap-door was close above his head. He raised a leaden hand and thrust the blt aside. Staggering, feeling as though his bones were turned to water, and with blood running from his nose and ears, he felt rather than stepped, out upon the windy roof. As he flung the door to behind him, the demoniac clangour sank back into the pit, to rise again, transmuted to harmony, through the louvres of the belfry windows.

An extract from The Nine Tailors

Dorothy L. Sayers, Landsborough Publications 1959