Starling Heights

Something lived within the rocky hills and bluffs of Starling Heights, but no one knew exactly what...

A/N: I found this image on Pinterest. Not sure where it came from before it wound up there, but I thought the idea of a mind mine was fascinating.

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Something lived within the rocky hills and bluffs of Starling Heights, but no one knew exactly what. The starlings for which the area was named drew the attention of locals and tourists alike by repeating strange phrases to hikers and hunters.

“The feet on my neck hurt me so,” the birds said clear as day. And they would go on saying those kinds of things all throughout the woods.

“The feet on my neck…”

“The feet on my neck…”

“The feet on my neck…”

A billionaire named Jay Lydas—a man with both too much money and too much free time—bought a chunk of Starling Heights and determined that he would get to the bottom of the mystery by digging.

As his workers drilled into the rock and the earth, the starlings continued to disseminate odd messages: “Woe is me, my poor head!”

“Woe is me…”

“My poor head…”

“My head…”

One day, Lydas’s miners made an unexpected discovery. It was a thought, dark and oily. When it slid between the miners’ fingers, they heard the thought inside their own heads. It said, “The world is anger and pain, and I shall give nothing else in return.”

Though the miners only repeated those words in whispers, the starlings still picked it up.

“The world is anger…”

“The world is pain…”

“I shall give nothing else…”

Under Lydas’s orders, they tore apart the bluffs and drilled deeper into the hills. The deeper they went, the more the starlings screamed, “Make it stop!” And the thoughts that the miners extracted became darker and more viscous. They stunk like putrefying plants trapped inside a dying terrarium.

The miners were no longer allowed to touch the thoughts with their bare hands after a worker handled one and then immediately attacked another miner with a mattock.

As winter closed in, the thoughts turned from black to gray. The starlings migrated south. They flew away, yelling random snippets of sentences.

“It hurts…”

“Why is this…”

“I can’t remember…”

And then Starling Heights fell silent.

One by one, the trees began to die, bark peeling and rotten branches breaking. The dry ground cracked and oozed gray thoughts that contaminated the ground water. Everyone in town noticed in a hazy sort of way that their thoughts were foggy and scattered. The miners went to work and became disoriented, wandering away from the dig site. Jay Lydas came to see why operations had stopped, and he too found himself confused and strangely sad. In a daze, Lydas walked off of a bluff and plunged into the river below, never to resurface.

Starling Heights turned into a ghost town.

And next spring, when the starlings returned, they sang and whistled just like all of the other birds. But never again did they repeat odd phrases that they picked up in the woods.