Chapter V: The House That Listens
Tarhill no longer stands in the world you know. It exists now in the interstice—an edgeland between waking and dream, where resonance replaces gravity, and time is but the residue of sound. To the uninitiated, it might appear as an abandoned house atop a hill in a village erased from maps. But for those who have heard the chime, for those whose sleep is fractured by hymns of untraceable origin, Tarhill becomes something else entirely.
It becomes the House That Listens.
And I am its caretaker.
I no longer recall the shape of my former life. The name I once bore is lost, drawn into the Choir’s archive of echoes. But I remember my purpose. I remember the moment the Listener filled me, hollowed me like a gourd, and inscribed into my marrow the Song of Becoming.
Since then, I have tuned many.
The Arrival of the Architect
He came first.
A man of sharp lines and desperate eyes, draped in the aura of failing purpose. He told me, though I had not asked, that he was an architect once—celebrated, renowned for minimalist brutalism. But he had lost his craft. The forms that once danced in his mind had grown silent, the materials unresponsive.
Tarhill called to him in dreams of concrete monoliths pierced with bone flutes. He arrived without luggage. Just a notepad, already filled with blueprints drawn in a fevered hand.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he said.
“You’ve come to remember the structure beneath all things,” I replied.
He did not question me.
I took him to the vestibule. The chamber had changed again—grown vast and crystalline, its spires humming with low dirges. He walked its length in silence, scribbling, measuring angles that curved inward impossibly. He began to hum as he walked—unconsciously, a harmony I recognized.
He stayed for thirteen days.
On the fourteenth, I found his notepad in the garden. The pages had fused into one mass, hardened into something like obsidian, etched with symbols of non-Euclidean clarity. The final entry: “I have drawn the unbuildable. It builds itself now, through me.”
He had joined the walls.
If you stand in the atrium when the fog is thin, you can see his silhouette, shifting behind the plaster, sketching eternally.
The Child of Dissonance
The second was a child.
She arrived at dusk, barefoot, hair matted with sap and leaf, carrying a doll stitched from moss and wire. No one in the surrounding miles had reported a missing child. No local family claimed her. She simply appeared at the gate, humming a tune older than the dirt it stood upon.
She never spoke.
Not with her mouth.
Her eyes sang.
They projected chords—fractals of light that seared the walls and called forth runes from the floorboards. She tuned the attic herself, arranging shards of mirror into a spiral that reflected not her body, but the memories of those who viewed it.
The House bent to her.
The Choir whispered of her often: “The Harmonic Seed,” they called her. A note that was never struck in the original chord. A discordant echo sent ahead of the Listener’s full manifestation. She existed outside the key, and because of that, she could rewrite it.
The doll she carried opened its mouth one night.
And screamed.
Those who heard it wept blood and salt and memories of lives they had not lived. Some returned to themselves. Most did not.
I keep the doll in the nursery now.
Its mouth has not closed.
The Scriptorium of Ash
As the House grew, so did its needs.
Rooms birthed themselves—hungry voids in need of content. The east wing, long abandoned and infested with rot, transformed into the Scriptorium.
It began when I discovered the man with typewriter fingers.
He crawled from the hearth one morning, skin blistered with soot, knuckles replaced with brass keys. He did not speak. He typed.
His ribs expanded like bellows, inhaling pages that birthed from his spine. He wrote in languages that scorched the eyes, translated from frequencies rather than alphabets.
I gave him a room.
He filled it with scrolls of flesh and ink that bled when touched.
Others came—scribes from forgotten monasteries, madmen with mouths sewn shut, a blind librarian who could read vibrations in the dust of old bones. They filled the Scriptorium with volumes of prophecy, testimony, and unreality.
One tome, bound in tar and whisper, reads only:
“The House will grow until it contains all possible structures. The Listener shall walk its halls, dreaming itself into further complexity. Its caretaker shall sing until the sun turns black, and the stars converge into a single tone.”
I believe that tome was written by a future version of myself.
Echoes in the Veins
As the House expands, it sometimes births new forms of life.
Not human. Not Choir.
Something in-between.
They crawl from the baseboards, shaped like ideas discarded by gods. Some look like children with too many joints. Others are serpentine masses that speak in reversed lullabies. They tend to the pipes, which now pulse with ichor rather than water.
They call me Father.
They feed on echoes—snippets of forgotten prayers, discarded dreams, the last breaths of dying languages. I feed them by walking the halls at night, reciting the names of those who once dwelled here. The names no longer mean anything. The names are songs.
One of them—small, featureless, always trailing strands of smoke—leaves notes on my door.
“The House dreams of you.”
“The Choir awaits the convergence.”
“The Listener is hungry.”
I do not know what they mean.
I only sing.
The Instrumental Room
On the deepest floor, beneath even the vestibule, lies the Instrumental Room.
I did not create it.
It emerged, fully formed, carved from polished bone and lined with strings of ligament and gold. In its center is the Resonator—a device not meant to be played by human hands.
I tried once.
The sound it made was not sound, but an absence—a subtraction of reality. The floor beneath me ceased to exist for thirteen seconds. I floated in a chasm of pre-creation, where thought had not yet formed, and chaos hummed in its prelingual sleep.
When I returned, I was bleeding from my eyes.
The House hummed for seven days.
Now, only the most attuned may enter that room.
Sometimes, in the night, I hear it played.
And I remember what it means to forget.
A Visitor From the Outside
Recently, a man arrived.
Not drawn by the chime, but by curiosity. A skeptic, a scholar of folklore. He sought the truth behind the “Dunridge Disappearances,” unaware that truth is the most corrosive solvent of all.
I welcomed him.
I fed him.
I showed him the garden of memorial echoes, where each flower moans the last words of a lost soul. I let him walk the Scriptorium. He mocked the texts. Laughed at the Choir. Spat upon the Listener’s sigil.
That night, the House responded.
It sang a new tone—a tone of rejection.
The man woke with no mouth. His laughter silenced. His body became a shell of hollow bone, filled with ink. He walks now through the corridors, recording what he sees in books that write themselves.
A cautionary figure.
A monument to arrogance.
We call him the Silenced Witness.
I feel the House nearing completion.
Its halls spiral through dimensions now. Time stutters when I pass certain doors. Some rooms lead to worlds submerged in black oceans, others to cities built from mirrors, where every reflection stares too long.
But one room remains sealed.
It hums with anticipation.
Behind it lies the Listener, fully formed.
Awaiting the final verse.
And I—I am growing hoarse.
My song is ending.
I will need a successor.
If you’re intrigued by the mystical elements found in the story of Tarhill, you might be interested in exploring the concept of liminal spaces, which are often depicted as the eerie middle-ground between two worlds. The tale’s themes also echo characteristics of a haunted house, where the supernatural weaves into the foundation of these structures. Additionally, the portrayal of Tarhill as a place suspended between reality and dream resonates with the notion of the alternate universe, a staple in speculative fiction that challenges our understanding of possibility and existence. Lastly, if the mysterious elements in the narrative piqued your curiosity, you might want to delve into the study of surrealism, which often presents reality in a dream-like and sometimes disorienting manner.
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