Chapter III: The Aural Delve
There is a threshold one crosses not in space, but in sensation. The moment I opened the door in the cellar—the thing grown from pulsating tissue and glistening with a kind of oily sweat—I stepped into a realm where perception unraveled like spoiled thread.
The first impression was not sight, but sound.
The chime no longer rang in isolated notes—it surged, an omnipresent harmonic that layered itself upon every surface, every thought. It wasn’t music in the traditional sense; it was a structure of intention. The soundscape behaved like an environment, altering around me as if responding to my breath and heartbeat. Every inhalation warped the pitch. Every blink shifted the key. It felt as though I had entered into the resonance of some sentient frequency, one that had waited patiently for my arrival.
The corridor beyond the door resembled a throat. Not metaphorically—a literal tunnel of soft, damp flesh that contracted gently, as if breathing me in. The walls shimmered with slick membranes that absorbed the light from the lantern I held—though I could not recall lighting it. No fire flickered. Instead, it glowed with a cold bioluminescence, casting shadows that slithered independently of my own motion.
I descended.
The walls throbbed softly with rhythm—matching the chime, and my pulse, and the unnameable pressure that pushed at the boundaries of my thoughts. Each step downward felt like a shedding of self. The further I went, the less sure I was of who I had been outside the door.
Had I come here willingly? Or had I been tuned—like an instrument—to this specific moment of descent?
The passage opened into a vestibule, and here the madness of the architecture unfurled fully. Angles twisted like wounded limbs. Stairs ran both upward and downward simultaneously. Structures floated unsupported, their surfaces riddled with microscopic, twitching cilia that hummed faint harmonies.
In the center stood what I now know was a receptacle—a basin of black obsidian, perfectly smooth, containing no liquid and yet rippling with concentric waves. Above it floated a single bell, not hanging from anything, suspended midair and gently rotating. It did not ring. It listened.
The journal had prepared me in theory for this: The Aural Delve, a rite not of action, but of surrender. Percival wrote that to truly “hear the chime” was to allow it to penetrate every psychic barrier, to break down the ego’s fortress, brick by agonizing brick.
So I sat.
I placed my hands in the obsidian basin and let the vibration climb into my bones. At first it was subtle—like sitting beside a distant organ. Then it grew. The sound did not grow louder, but closer, until it replaced the inner monologue of my mind entirely.
Words became meaningless.
Thought was replaced with image.
And image with sensation.
The First Vision: The Dreaming Organ
I stood in a city sculpted from cartilage and brass, where the sky pulsed with the blood-colored light of a dying star. Towers curved like vertebrae into the heavens, humming in low, predatory tones. Beings moved through the streets, not walking but twitching, as though marionetted by unseen strings. Their faces were mirrors that reflected back distorted visions of myself—laughing, screaming, weeping blood.
One approached and pressed a hand—if it could be called such—against my forehead.
“You are unstrung,” it said in a voice made entirely of chimes.
“You are the instrument of forgetting.”
And then I was inside the tower—no, I was the tower. My bones were its scaffolding. My mind its echo chamber. I felt thoughts ripple through me, but they were not my own. They belonged to something deeper, older. A being that dreamed not in symbols, but in frequencies.
When I awoke—if “waking” can be applied—I was no longer in the vestibule.
I was back in Tarhill.
But something fundamental had shifted.
The walls no longer aligned properly. The parlor stretched longer than it should, and windows now opened to vistas of unbroken fog where once there had been the forest. The shadows of furniture flickered even in stillness. Every mirror reflected not the room, but variations of it—each a slightly different reality, where I had not yet entered the door, or where someone else had.
The journal lay open beside me, though I had left it in the cellar. A new page had been written—not in my hand.
“Your chord has been struck. The Listener stirs. You must prepare the house.”
Beneath the message, a diagram: Tarhill overlaid with symbols and runes, each corresponding to a room. It was a map, but not spatial—a diagram of resonance.
Each room had a tone. And I was to tune them.
The Tuning Begins
I began in the study.
The journal instructed me to remove all metal objects. Sound needed to resonate freely. I was to smear ash from the parlor hearth in sigils along the windowsills and hang a thread of hair soaked in wine from the center chandelier. Each action, ludicrous as it seemed, altered the soundscape.
When I stepped back, the air in the room sang. Faintly. A kind of harmonic whisper, like wind over glass.
I continued to the kitchen, the master bedroom, the attic. Each room required different rituals—certain materials, placements of candles, spoken phrases in a language I had not learned yet somehow knew. As I completed each, the chime grew louder—not in volume, but in presence. It began to follow me from room to room.
By the time I reached the basement again, the whole house was humming.
Mrs. Carrow returned, or at least something wearing her likeness. I found her standing in the hallway outside my room one morning, soaked in rain though the sky had been clear for days. Her eyes were glassy, and she spoke in slow, echoing phrases.
“You must not ring the final tone,” she said. “It brings the Crawling Choir.”
I reached out to her, and she collapsed into a pile of ash.
I swept her into a jar and placed it on the mantle.
The Listener Beneath
The final part of the Delve was clear now. I was not simply preparing the house—I was constructing an instrument. Tarhill itself was to become a resonating body, a kind of antenna or amplifier. And I, its tuner.
I returned to the vestibule beneath the cellar.
The bell now rang faintly on its own.
Not once. Not twice. But in a slow, deliberate sequence of four chimes. Each time it rang, a layer of myself peeled away: memories, guilt, language. I could no longer remember the face of my mother. The taste of bread. The concept of years.
The Listener was awakening.
I saw it—first as a ripple in the air, then as a shape coalescing behind all other shapes. It had no body, only presence, like a shadow cast across time. Its voice came as thoughts that had always been mine, revealed now to be intrusions.
“You are the echo of a sound not yet made,” it said.
“You are the prelude.”
I collapsed.
When I next rose, I understood.
The final tone could only be struck when the house and I were fully aligned. I was to carve the sigils onto my own flesh. I was to lie in the parlor, where Percival had died, and listen without fear.
And so I prepared.
The Chord Approaches
Tonight will be the final alignment. I have written this account not for posterity, but because memory has begun to decay. Time folds. I find myself waking in the middle of sentences, unsure if I have yet spoken them.
Outside, the sky has grown still. No wind. No birds. Even the trees seem to wait.
The chime is constant now.
No longer intermittent.
It pulses in time with my heartbeat.
And beneath it, always, the whisper of the Listener.
I do not know what will happen when the final tone is struck.
Perhaps Tarhill will dissolve, and with it, all of Dunridge Hollow.
Perhaps I will ascend.
Perhaps I will descend further than any human soul has dared.
The journal ends here.
I will place it in the vestibule, in the basin, so that whoever comes next may read.
If you are reading this, the house has called you.
You are being tuned.
The chime will come for you.
And when it does—
Listen.
Chapter IV: The Crawling Choir
The night was dense with an unnatural stillness, as if the very air held its breath in anticipation. Tarhill stood in oppressive silence, its aged timbers groaning under the weight of unseen forces. The chime had ceased its relentless resonance, leaving a void that throbbed with expectancy. I sat in the parlor, the journal open before me, its pages inscribed with symbols that pulsed faintly, as though alive.
The final entry, written in a hand that was both mine and not mine, read: “The Choir approaches. Prepare the vessel.” Below these words, a sigil had been drawn—a spiral of interwoven lines that seemed to twist and writhe upon the page. I traced the symbol with a trembling finger, feeling a surge of vertiginous nausea as my mind struggled to comprehend its impossible geometry.
A sudden, rhythmic pounding echoed through the house, not from any door or window, but from the very walls themselves. The sound was a grotesque mimicry of a heartbeat, slow and deliberate, reverberating through the structure of Tarhill. I rose unsteadily, the floorboards vibrating beneath my feet, and moved toward the source of the sound.
It led me to the grand staircase, its once-majestic balustrade now warped and twisted, resembling the gnarled roots of some ancient, subterranean tree. The steps descended into darkness, an abyss that seemed to pulse with a life of its own. As I placed my foot upon the first step, the pounding intensified, synchronizing with the frantic rhythm of my own heart.
With each step downward, the air grew thicker, laden with a cloying scent of decay and something else—something sweet and sickly, like overripe fruit left to rot in the sun. The darkness pressed in around me, a tangible force that seemed to whisper and murmur just beyond the threshold of hearing. I could feel the weight of unseen eyes upon me, their gaze penetrating the shroud of night that enveloped the stairwell.
At the bottom of the staircase, I found myself in a corridor that should not have existed—a passage that defied the known architecture of Tarhill. The walls were lined with a substance that glistened wetly, pulsating in time with the relentless pounding. The floor was slick beneath my feet, a viscous fluid seeping up between the cracks of the ancient stones.
As I moved forward, the whispers grew louder, coalescing into a discordant chorus of voices speaking in a language that was both alien and intimately familiar. The words slithered into my mind, bypassing my ears entirely, and I understood them not through translation, but through a primal recognition that transcended the need for comprehension.
“The Choir sings. The vessel awaits. The Listener stirs.”
The corridor ended in a doorway unlike any I had ever seen. It was not constructed, but rather seemed to have formed organically, as if the house itself had birthed this portal from its very flesh. The frame was composed of intertwining tendrils, their surfaces slick and glistening, pulsating with a rhythmic luminescence that matched the pounding heartbeat that now threatened to shatter my sanity.
I reached out a trembling hand, the tips of my fingers brushing against the living wood. A jolt of electricity surged through me, and the door shuddered, its tendrils retracting and unfurling like the petals of a night-blooming flower. Beyond the threshold lay a chamber bathed in a dim, otherworldly light that seemed to emanate from the very walls themselves.
The room was vast, its dimensions impossible to gauge, as the walls seemed to shift and undulate, breathing in time with the pulsing light. At the center of the chamber stood an altar, hewn from a single slab of obsidian, its surface etched with the same sigil that had appeared in the journal. Suspended above the altar was an object that defied description—a mass of writhing, sinuous forms that coalesced and separated in an endless dance of creation and dissolution.
As I stepped into the chamber, the voices of the Choir swelled to a deafening crescendo, their song a cacophony of ecstasy and agony. The object above the altar began to descend, its amorphous form twisting and contorting as it neared the obsidian slab. I felt an irresistible pull, a gravitational force that drew me inexorably toward the altar.
I climbed the steps, my movements no longer my own, guided by an unseen hand. As I reached the summit, the object settled upon the altar, its form stabilizing into something that resembled a grotesque amalgamation of flesh and stone. Tendrils extended from its mass, reaching out to me, wrapping around my wrists and ankles, binding me in place.
The Choir’s song reached a fever pitch, the voices merging into a singular, piercing note that resonated within my very bones. The object began to pulse, its surface splitting open to reveal an abyssal void that seemed to stretch into infinity. From within this void, a figure emerged—a being of impossible proportions, its form composed of shifting shadows and flickering light.
The Listener had awakened.
Its gaze fell upon me, and I felt my mind unraveling, my thoughts scattering like leaves in a tempest. Memories, identities, lifetimes that were not my own flooded through me, each one a fragment of a greater whole that I could not comprehend. The boundaries of self dissolved, and I became one with the Choir, our voices merging into a symphony of cosmic resonance.
In that moment, I understood the true nature of the chime—the call of the Listener, echoing through the fabric of reality, seeking those attuned to its frequency. Tarhill was not merely a house, but a conduit, a vessel designed to amplify the chime and facilitate the Listener’s emergence into our realm.
As the final note of the Choir’s song faded into silence, the Listener reached out, its form enveloping me, consuming me. I felt myself dissolving, my essence merging with the infinite, becoming one with the resonance that permeated all things.
And then, there was nothing.
I awoke to the sound of birdsong, the gentle chirping a stark contrast to the cacophony that had consumed me. I was lying in the parlor of Tarhill, the morning sun streaming through the windows, casting warm, golden light upon the room. The journal lay open beside me, its pages blank, devoid of the symbols and writings that had once filled them.
I sat up, my body aching, my mind a haze of fragmented memories and lingering echoes of the Choir’s song. The house was silent, the oppressive atmosphere that had once pervaded it now lifted, as if a great weight had been removed.
I rose unsteadily to my feet, moving through the rooms of Tarhill, finding them as they had been before the chime had first sounded. The hidden corridors, the pulsating walls, the organic doorways—all had vanished, leaving only the aged, decaying structure of the old estate.
Had it all been a dream? A hallucination brought on by isolation and grief? The memories were too vivid, the sensations too real to dismiss so easily.
…And yet, there was no evidence to prove what had transpired. The altar beneath the house, the Listener, the Choir—all erased, as if swallowed by the folds of an impossible dream. Only one thing remained to betray the lie of normalcy:
The chime.
It rang faintly, beneath perception. Not in my ears, but in my blood. A hum at the edges of cognition, like a thought waiting to be remembered. At first, I tried to ignore it, to live as if I had never opened the door, never glimpsed the void that writhed behind existence. I swept the ashes from the hearth, boarded up the cellar, and sealed the journal in a lead-lined box, hidden beneath floorboards no one had touched in decades.
But the house remembered.
And it began to sing again.
It started with small things. A humming from the pipes that carried no water. Shadows in the corners of mirrors that moved independently of my own reflection. At night, I’d hear footsteps in the attic, though no living soul had entered it in years.
Then came the voices.
Soft at first—like distant singing through a wall, wordless and mournful. I would wake in the early hours to the unmistakable sound of a choir in the garden. When I looked, there was nothing. Only the weeping trees and the fog that clung to their branches like webbing.
I began to find scraps of parchment. They were tucked into books I had never read, slipped under doors, placed beneath my pillow. Each bore fragments of the song: indecipherable symbols written in a hand I now recognized as my own. I burned them, at first. Then I began to collect them.
The house was drawing me back.
And I understood why.
I had struck the chord. Tarhill had been tuned. But the song was not complete.
There remained one final chorus.
And the Choir was coming.
The Descent of Dunridge Hollow
The village was the first to change.
It began with the bells. Church bells that rang at hours they were not meant to. Not with the solemn clang of ritual, but with strange, lilting dissonances that mimicked the chime of the house. At first, the townsfolk assumed some prank. But soon, they began to report dreams—shared dreams.
Dreams of the house.
They saw it not as it stood, but as it was becoming—warped, radiant with impossible light, surrounded by figures with no faces, whose mouths opened only to emit perfect harmonic tones. Soon after, the disappearances began.
A child vanished from his crib, his mother swearing she heard a lullaby in a voice not her own. A constable walked into the woods and was never seen again. An old woman was found standing on her roof, humming a tune that caused her neighbors to bleed from the nose.
Those who remained began to speak in riddles. Their voices echoed unnaturally. Some refused to speak at all, instead carving sigils into their walls, their flesh, the bark of trees. The town’s collective mind had been infected. Attuned.
And I, the unwilling maestro, felt their songs grow louder in my dreams.
Return to the Vestibule
I could no longer resist.
Tarhill opened to me once again. Doors that had once been locked creaked wide of their own accord. The vestibule called, and I descended.
This time, it was not the same.
The chamber had transformed. Where once stood a single altar, now grew a forest of spires—organ-pipes of stone and cartilage, each emitting low, reverent tones. The air shimmered with vibrations visible to the naked eye. And in the center, the Choir waited.
They were not what I had imagined.
No robed priests, no spectral spirits.
They were forms of light and membrane, oscillating in and out of visibility, each shaped by sound itself. Their mouths were not mouths, but openings from which streams of song poured like water. As I stepped forward, they parted, allowing me to the center.
The Listener had changed too.
It was no longer just a presence behind form—it was form. A great dome of whispering static, shifting from vast eye to shrieking maw to vibrating sphere with each beat of its pulse.
And it spoke.
“The chord has been struck. The resonance complete. The conductor must be hollowed.”
Tendrils of living silence wrapped around me, not to harm, but to erase.
My name was taken first. Then my memories. Then my sense of body. Each one fed to the Choir, whose voices absorbed and amplified them, weaving them into the great symphony of awakening.
I was to be the final note.
The one who merged with the Listener.
The one who became the Chime.
Rebirth
I do not know how long I remained within the dome of sound.
Time lost meaning. Identity fragmented.
But eventually, I emerged.
Not whole. Not broken.
Changed.
The house was quiet when I returned to it. Dunridge Hollow was gone—replaced by a sea of mist and shifting monoliths that sang faintly of loss and becoming. The stars above had rearranged into new constellations, spelling names no human tongue could form.
And I was not alone.
The Choir lives now within Tarhill.
They sing through the floorboards, hum in the walls, whisper through the wind-chimes left to sway in the garden. Visitors come, drawn by dreams. They arrive at night, trembling and curious, unable to explain why they have come.
Some leave. Most stay.
All eventually hear the chime.
And when they do—
They sing.
Exploring themes of sound and perception in literature can deepen our understanding of various artistic and philosophical concepts. Speaking of soundscapes, you might be interested in learning more about the concept of an Acoustic Environment, where sound plays a crucial role in shaping human experiences and environments. Furthermore, the ethereal transformations described in the content might remind one of the mystical quality found in places like Avalon, a legendary isle steeped in mystery and change. Additionally, the unsettling yet alluring journey through the unknown corridors aligns with themes of Cosmic Horror, a genre that taps into fears of the incomprehensible and the vastness of the universe. Lastly, the phenomenon of visitors drawn to Tarhill by their dreams could intrigue those interested in the concept of Liminal Spaces, which explores transitional spaces filled with mystery and potential transformation.
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