The Dissonant Chime Beneath Tarhill

Chapter I: Inheritance

I first heard the chime the night my uncle hanged himself in the parlor of the old Tarhill estate. The sound—a dissonant, metallic vibration like a bell rung underwater—woke me from a dreamless sleep, echoing faintly from beneath the floorboards. It was not a sound one could place: too sharp to be structural groaning, too fluid for pipes or wind. It rang once, then ceased, leaving in its absence a silence that felt artificially placed, as if layered over the natural hush of the night.

The letter from the executor came two days later. Percival Thorne, my mother’s brother and last living member of the Thorne bloodline apart from myself, had left me everything: the house, the land, and a locked strongbox with no key. I was not close to him. In fact, I had only met him once as a child, during a summer visit too clouded by time to recall clearly. All I remembered was his eyes—piercing and pale, like the moon glimpsed through mist—and a curious phrase he whispered into my ear just before I left: “One day, you’ll hear it too.”

Still, I went. With no job and no direction after a bitter dismissal and a failed engagement, I told myself it was a chance to reset. Tarhill, though described in the town registry as “dilapidated,” stood with a looming grace on the edge of Dunridge Hollow, as if frozen mid-sigh. Its gables sagged like old shoulders, and ivy clawed greedily up its stone flanks. Each window was like a tired, watching eye.

I arrived in a storm.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Carrow, had fled the day of Percival’s death. The villagers said little, save that the Thornes had always been “peculiar folk.” I took possession alone, walking through rooms thick with the musk of centuries, my footsteps swallowed by dust-laden carpet. I found his body still outlined on the parlor floor, where rain had leaked in to stain the oak dark with mold. The air tasted of iron.

In those first days, I attempted to impose a routine—unpack, clean, catalog. But Tarhill resisted such efforts. Objects moved slightly when I turned away. Doors refused to open, only to creak wide at night. I chalked it up to nerves, to the oppressive silence that filled the halls like smoke.

Yet, it was not truly silent.

The chime came again three nights later. I had fallen asleep in the study, Percival’s favorite room. I awoke to that same metallic resonance, reverberating not through the air, but through the bones of the house itself. It vibrated in the marrow of the floorboards, in the glass panes of the windows, and in my own teeth. And when it ended, I was no longer alone in my mind.

Chapter II: The Journal and the Door

I discovered Percival’s journal a week later. It was wrapped in yellowing cloth beneath a floorboard in his study. The leather binding pulsed slightly beneath my touch, as if warmed by blood. Inside were pages of madness: diagrams of geometries that bruised the eye, and entries written in a hand increasingly erratic. Margins overflowed with annotations, glyphs resembling no language I knew, spirals of thought that looped endlessly back upon themselves.

One phrase recurred again and again: “The Hallowed Below.”

He spoke of a chime, a sonic key buried deep within the earth, beneath the house. He wrote of a “door grown, not built,” and rituals involving the tuning of perception—starvation, sleep deprivation, and the ingestion of certain infusions he brewed in a small alembic, still caked with black resin in the cellar. He referenced a figure he called only “The Listener Beneath,” a being or intelligence that resided in the layered echoes of the chime.

Percival described in great detail a ritual he called the Aural Delve, which allowed the practitioner to “step beyond the veil of spatial deception and into the truthful resonance.” He claimed that with each chime, the mind aligned itself further with the rhythm of an ancient sentience slumbering in the substrata of reality.

At first, I laughed. Yet the chime came again that night.

And the next.

Soon, it was not merely a sound. It was an invitation.

I resisted at first. But my dreams turned against me. I began to see the house not as it was, but as it might have once been—and might become again. Hallways elongated into infinity. Doors led into chambers of meat and stone. And always, the chime followed.

On the seventh night, I found the first of the hidden symbols.

Etched faintly into the wallpaper behind the parlor mirror, it resembled a spiral composed of overlapping ears. From within, lines radiated outward, like a diagram of sound waves. As I stared, it seemed to vibrate softly, and I understood that it was not a drawing but a map—a route to somewhere beneath.

The journal’s notes became clearer with each recurrence of the chime. I began to comprehend his mad scrawls. Words he had invented began to make sense. I started to hear them in my own thoughts: Serephage, Chorathid, Nullon pulse. They were not invented at all.

I followed the trail.

In the wine cellar, behind a rack of rotted Bordeauxs and mold-covered shelves, I found the brickwork was false. It crumbled at my touch. Behind it lay a narrow passage slick with damp. The walls were covered in lichen that hummed faintly. It led down.

And at the end, just as he wrote, was the door.

It was not made of wood or iron. It was not made by hands. It grew from the walls, a mass of fibrous tissue and something darker, webbed with veins that pulsed in time with the chime. As I approached, it shuddered slightly, like a thing awakening.

I pressed my ear to it.

The chime rang out—clearer now. Closer. It harmonized with a sound beneath hearing, a subsonic voice that seemed to coil around the shape of my thoughts. I knew, in that moment, that to open the door was to surrender something. To allow something in.

I opened it.

(To be continued in Chapter III…)

If the mystical and eerie elements of “The Dissonant Chime Beneath Tarhill” captured your imagination, you might find these topics intriguing as well. The concept of a dissonant, otherworldly sound in the story might remind you of the notion of infrasound, which is often used to explain paranormal phenomena. Furthermore, the cryptic geometries and inscriptions in Percival’s journal could lead one to explore the mysteries of sacred geometry, which has fascinated scholars and mystics throughout history. Lastly, if you are curious about hidden secrets beneath the earth, consider delving into the idea of subterranean locations, which have been significant in various myths and speculative fiction writings.