Book/Shrieking Hills

Shrieking Hills is an ancient fairy tale about the fall of a mountaintop town. Copies of it may be found all over Clamor.

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''[This book is incredibly old, with slightly brittle and yellowed pages, with a faded, whimsical painting on the front of a mountain, but instead of snow, there was something black on the tip. It seems to be a children's book.]''

Once upon a time, there was a small town on top of a very big mountain. The people there had chosen to make their home way above the harsh cliffs and the deep rivers surrounding them, because they had believed that, by the sweat on their brow and the weight of their packs, they had earned this. And so they built their town, surrounding a small well, on the top of a mountain peak.

The problem with being on this mountain peak, they discovered, is that it was very, very difficult to get water up there.

They could not easily make the journey to and from the rivers surrounding them, as the sheer cliffs meant that it would be far too difficult, and the water might spill anyway. So they had to dig their well very, very deep.

It worked, for a time.

They could water their crops, and clean themselves, and drink. But then the well ran dry, and they needed to dig deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

One day, while digging, they broke through the bottom of the mountain into a huge underground lake.

“Hurrah!” The people thought. “We’re saved! We’ll never run out!”

Everyone in town rushed to the well with their buckets and their ropes to drink freely, something they had not been able to do for a long time.

They boasted, when they traveled down their slopes to visit nearby towns, of how impressive their digging skills were. Other towns did not believe them until they visited themselves, and saw how impossibly far down the well went.

The well was a thing of beauty, for the people of this mountaintop town.

Until one day, Johnny the carpenter swore he heard a strange sound coming from the base of it. He tried to look, but the well was so deep and so dark that he could not see anything.

He shook his head, and turned to walk away, when he swore he heard the sound again, a little louder. It was so faint, so distant, echoing so much, he couldn’t place it, but it definitely sounded as though it came from the well.

Again, he tried to look down, even tying a lantern to a rope to winch it down to try and see, but all that was visible at the bottom was the tiniest dot from his lantern’s light.

Johnny was beginning to get worried, and spoke up, calling the townspeople to ask who among them had heard the sound as well. But none of them had, and they waved him off.

By the time he heard the sound for a third time, it was now clear enough for him to realise what it was. It was close, and it was loud, and it was a deep, terrified shriek.

And then the town was rocked by a horrible earthquake, deepening the rivers as the entire mountain seemed to creak from the strain.

The water burst up from the well in a huge geyser, dowsing the terrified inhabitants, as a strange, living, evil sludge rose with it. It covered the entire town in only minutes, burying and drowning the townspeople before any could run away, and the howling shrieks from the unplumbed depths rang out across the countryside, echoing down the cliffs and far away.

And no one ever heard from the mountaintop town again. The bridge was destroyed, and no one was willing to make the trip to or from the town again.

Sometimes, if you wait nearby, sometimes you can hear the shrieks still echoing down from the top of the mountain from whatever it was that destroyed the mountain.