Loud As Bones

Chapter 1

I

Night fell unexpectedly, like a trapdoor giving way beneath the day.

Sylvie came home from work, her car engine coughing once before dying in the driveway, but she didn’t come upstairs to say hello.

She was in the kitchen, rifling through drawers and cabinets for something to eat.

She found nothing. I hadn’t cooked. I hadn’t shopped.

I had done nothing at all. Instead, I remained tethered to my desk, agonizing over commas and em dashes, only to delete more than I’d written.

I was finally drafting the vampire novel—a dream I’d frenzied over since high school but buried because my first girlfriend said vampires were passé, and my work would never amount to anything.

I had always been attracted to the snobby, scholarly type, the kind of people who looked at my aspirations only to criticize them.

Now that I finally had the time to write, the words wouldn’t come.

The back door opened and shut with a click. Sylvie retreated to the backyard for a smoke. There, the white swing on the tree quivered like a dead body next to the off-white gazebo, a sun-bleached ruin slowly collapsing into itself.

I wanted to preserve it. All of it, but mainly the gazebo. We would have to restore it, but I loved it even in its decay. I loved all things abandoned and left to fend for themselves, and this gazebo was exactly that. It spoke to me.

Sylvie, however, was determined to tear it down.

She hated gazebos. When asked why, she would shrug and say they served no sensible purpose other than crowding the yard.

If you wanted shade, you could sit beneath a tree or on the porch, and if it rained, what good was a gazebo anyway?

You would still have to walk through the downpour, soaked to the skin, just to reach the bathroom. To her, it was a pointless structure.

Perhaps she was right. Gazebos were limited in function.

But this one was likely a century old, as old as the house itself.

Real wood, crafted with care and mastery that modern craftsmen wouldn’t waste time on.

It gave the house its gothic charm, that faint sense of something forgotten, delicate, and romantic.

I told Sylvie it would photograph beautifully when restored, that guests at our B&B would post about it and tag us.

She liked that idea, so she let it stay. “For now.”

What I didn’t tell her—what I would never say aloud—was that I hoped she might one day propose to me in that very gazebo. Freshly painted. Draped in ivy. Wrapped in dusk. I would wear the dress she liked, the light blue one that floated when I walked, and I would cry, overwhelmed.

Or, more realistically, I would be in sweatpants and a paint-streaked Nightmare on Elm Street T-shirt, hands rough from sanding and scrubbing, and she would slip a ring onto a finger with chipped nails and flecks of dirt.

But I would be happy all the same.

A proposal would mean the end of the vicious fights that had swallowed our first year in Whitmore House (I loved that it had a name).

It would mean our money troubles had finally loosened their grip, and the house had been given a new lease on life.

Most of all, it would mean our relationship had drifted back to its gentler shape: back to the early days when we’d just moved in, when we couldn't walk past each other without bruising our skin, losing ourselves in that frantic, open-mouthed hunger. It would mean we were speaking, truly speaking, and the first thing she’d do after coming home from work was climb the stairs to kiss me and ask how my writing was going.

I would tell her everything I had written that day: tales of vampires and damsels, concubines and crumbling castles, curses and blood-lit halls, all while she made me pant, forcing the words out of me as I struggled to breathe.

When we decided to leave the city, trading the noise of the busy streets for the silence and the views of the Hudson Valley, we knew we were looking for a fixer-upper. We sifted through dozens of condemned “investor’s dreams” before we finally found the one.

The house had passed through many hands, bearing a palimpsest of change throughout the years, but I had a vision for the property. I believed we could restore it, return it to its former stature until it once again bore its name with pride: Whitmore House.

The property’s final hook was a wine cellar left behind by the previous owners, but the agent couldn't find the key to the heavy iron padlock on the floor hatch. Sylvie and I never saw what lay beneath.

“We’ll crack it when we’re ready to renovate,” she said.

I thought of Bluebeard’s forbidden room, and I prayed the cellar didn't hold a harvest of dead wives.

At the town hall, an unsmiling woman behind the counter—the kind who thrives on giving unsolicited advice—warned us (or possibly cursed us) with her doomed thoughts on homeownership.

We were there to pull the records and check for liens, giddy and loud, telling anyone who would listen that we were the proud owners of a bewitching Victorian.

She listened without interest before hissing, “Just be prepared. Those first five years make or break you. Houses love to fall apart all at once.”

I laughed it off then, but her words proved truer than any prophecy.

Two months after closing, I lost my job. At first, it didn’t feel catastrophic. We had renovation money set aside, and I was certain I would find new work—even more certain my book would sell.

It did not. Nor did any jobs materialize—not for someone with a degree in communications, anyway. We had moved into the middle of nowhere, and career opportunities were as scarce as the winter sun.

Back in the city, I worked as an event coordinator. But once we settled, the firm cut me loose, despite their initial promises of remote work.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Sylvie sighed.

She had changed jobs and had taken a pay cut to move here with me. Now, she still had to commute for over an hour to Kingston, but at least her place in the professional world was secure. Everyone needed accountants. No one needed people who existed in the spaces between things.

Our savings thinned to almost nothing. And as the months passed, the house began revealing problems neither the agent nor the inspector had mentioned, as if it had waited for us to settle in before showing its true nature. The foundation. The mold. The roof. We could simply not keep up.

Sylvie started working from the office more, even though her firm had no strict rules about it. I suspected she preferred the cold fluorescent light of her cubicle and the forced small talk of her colleagues to being entombed in this money pit with me.

And then she finally admitted she had never wanted any of it.

Not the house. Not the land. Not the stillness of the wide, empty fields, nor the star-soaked nights and the quiet that settled like a weighted blanket.

She never wanted to leave the city, never wanted to change jobs, and certainly never wanted to pour her life and savings into restoring a “shitty old house” for people who thought a weekend in the middle of nowhere counted as luxury.

She had done it for me—and realized, too late, it was a mistake.

We hadn’t spoken for days after that fight.

When a thin semblance of communication did return, the air between us was too poisoned.

She began coming home later and later, offering hollow corporate excuses before I could even ask: “year-end close,” “the audit trail.” They sounded like a foreign language in these harrowed halls.

She wouldn’t look at me when she said them.

Then she would retreat downstairs behind a closed door, leaving me in a silence broken only by Whitmore groaning in its slumber.

Sylvie also developed the habit of waiting until Morpheus had claimed me before slipping into our bed.

She’d even tried staying in a separate bedroom—the only other space with a mattress, tucked away on the third floor where we barely went.

We kept it for unexpected guests, though my estranged family didn’t even know where I lived, and Sylvie’s parents were long gone.

I hated the physical distance she was forcing between us. I hated that she no longer wanted to share our bed. Eventually, I tricked her into coming back, claiming I’d had a nightmare where she died and that I couldn't bear another night alone. I even cried until we made up.

But since then, she had been more distant than ever. She refused to discuss the estrangement between us, and I existed in a state of suspension, never knowing what to expect and with no one to turn to for advice.

I took to wandering the vast, empty grounds, desperate to escape the solitude pressing in from every corner of the estate. And worst of all, unlike her, I had nowhere else to go. With Sylvie at work, and us having only one vehicle as we couldn’t afford another, I was trapped.

And before long, I settled into the rot, a comfortable shroud of our life at Whitmore House, preferring the predictable chill of Sylvie's muteness to the terrifying uncertainty of an exit I couldn't bring myself to find.

I became a useless ghost, haunting the corridors, following her from room to room, unnoticed, hoping that one day things might return to the way they once were.