As recorded by Dr. Everett Thorne
If ever there were a place born not of earth but out of sorrow, it would be Grimsby Hollow—a village forgotten by time, nestled in a deep Devonshire vale where the mists gather year-round and bells toll without hands to ring them.
We had travelled there in response to a request from Miss Agatha Vey, a schoolteacher recently appointed to the region. Her letter was brief but chilling:
“Mr. Finch, there is something wrong here. Each night at midnight, the bells toll from the old abbey ruins, though the bell tower collapsed decades ago. Since they began, three villagers have died—each found with dirt beneath their fingernails, and their eyes wide in terror. The local constable calls it coincidence. I call it a curse.”
Naturally, Finch could not resist.
We arrived in Grimsby Hollow just before dusk. The villagers watched us with the wary eyes of people who expect nothing good from strangers—or from midnight.
The ruins of the abbey stood on a windswept rise, its bell tower little more than a jagged silhouette. Yet, come midnight, the bells rang—deep, sonorous, and impossible. There was no bell to ring.
“I've no patience for ghostly campfire stories,” Finch muttered, examining the iron supports in the broken tower by lantern-light. “But I do believe in sound, and sound travels.”
We took rooms at the Vicarage, where Miss Vey greeted us with a nervous smile and a locked drawer full of records she had gathered herself—local deaths, tales of monks buried alive for heresy, children gone missing in the 1850s.
One legend stood out: “The Bell Monks.” According to village lore, a sect of monks once rang the bells each night to summon the spirits of the dead. One stormy night, the townsfolk, driven by fear, stormed the abbey and entombed the monks in the crypt below—sealing it with stone and iron.
Ever since, the bells had rung only during times of great sorrow.
“Superstition,” Finch said. “But the deaths are real. What connects them?”
On the third night, we watched from the ridge.
As the clock struck midnight, the bells rang out again.
Finch turned sharply. “There. Hear it? That’s not above—it’s below.”
We rushed toward the crypt entrance—a half-buried arch set in the hillside, choked with vines and brambles. Finch uncovered a vent stone, faintly humming.
“Air movement. Resonant chambers. Someone is playing these villagers like an organ.”
We pried open the vent and followed a narrow passage underground. There, in a hidden chapel deep beneath the ruined abbey, we discovered a man.
Or rather, what remained of one.
Father Elwyn Marke, former priest of the village, missing for ten years. Gaunt, mad-eyed, surviving in the catacombs and striking a buried bell system made of resonant iron rods and tuned clay vessels—his life’s work.
He had believed he was “keeping the dead silent” by ringing each night. And when villagers began questioning the bells, he would poison them with phosphorus-laced water drawn from a hidden well—causing hallucinations, premature burial symptoms… and death.
He whispered as they took him away: “They begged me… not to stop ringing…”
As we left Grimsby Hollow, Miss Vey stood with us at the edge of the village.
“Will the bells stop now?” she asked.
Finch looked back toward the ruined abbey, silhouetted in the fog. “They will. But the silence may prove worse.”
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
No comments:
Post a Comment