A Haunting of Flesh and Stone

A year ago, Ben and Abby made a home within my walls. I’ve kept their secret ever since. I remember popped champagne, cork denting my ceiling, it aches there still. Fizz crawled across my floorboards, every bubble bursting like laughter caught in wood.

I held them close, kept them safe.

They thought the house was theirs.

But I knew better.

They were mine.

I cradled their mornings, the soft hum of Abby’s song drifting from the kitchen, the scrape of Ben’s chair against my boards as he reached for her hand across the table. I kept their evenings warm by firelight, their whispered secrets like smoke against my plaster, laughter filling my space like perfume. I cherished each sound, each touch, each breath that made me feel alive. Their love seeped into my stone, filling me with a glow I thought unbreakable.

I thought they would stay that way.

Ben had always carried a shadow in his breath, the sting of the bottle clinging to him even in their courtship. I knew this not only from the way his breath soured my rooms, but from the whispers they shared when love was still tender. Abby, blinded by the glow of his gentler hours, chose to look away. She told herself love could drown the bitterness, that devotion might steady what already leaned toward ruin. But vows do not unmake a man’s altar, nor silence the god he serves in secret. Her hope pressed against my stone, soft as breath, fragile in the dream she so desperately clung to.

But laughter is a fickle guest.

It betrayed me, fading into silence that gnawed my bones. Their warmth decayed, leaving me hollow, cold. Ben’s devotion rotted, soured, until the bottle became his altar, his worship, his bride. Every pour, every swallow, I felt it bleeding into me. And the more he drank, the less of him remained. I heard it in the way he spat words like poison into Abby’s face.

I remember her tears at my sink, the salt soaking into my porcelain. Her soft beauty, long black hair carefully curled, even as her spirit withered beneath his weight. She tried. Oh, how she tried.

The night it ended, she had cooked him lamb, his favorite. The aroma filled me, seeped into my beams. She carried the plate with trembling grace.

“What is this shit?!” His voice cracked me open like splintered wood.

Her heart thundered louder still, I felt it.

“It—it’s your favorite, Ben…”

“It’s shit!”

His bulk rose from the couch, broad and towering, the floor shuddering beneath each step as though I could barely hold his weight. He came at her with the swagger of drink, his gut pressing forward, shoulders blotting out the light, eyes glazed bright with scotch. She was not delicate, shorter, rounded, her softness usually radiant, a comfort in the rooms she filled. But before him she seemed to shrink, her curves folding inward, her hands trembling as if to make herself smaller. Her lips quivered. Her hair shook loose in its curls. And still he loomed, the shadow of him swallowing the space between them.

The strike split the room like lightning, and I felt it as if my timber were her bones. She hit my wall, plaster split where her head struck, and I moaned with her pain. The knife followed, cold and merciless, a gleam that caught the light one final time before sinking deep.

Her scream tore through my rafters, rattled my windows, rang along every pipe like a funeral bell. Then silence. Silence and crimson that pressed heavy into me, smothering, endless. Her body grew still upon my boards, her blood pooling warm, seeping, finding every crack, every seam. I drank it unwillingly. I carry it still.

He stood over her, breathing heavy, scotch thick on his tongue. He fetched a spade. He dragged her by her hair, black strands tearing, trailing like ink. My garden wept as he turned its soil. I groaned as each clump fell, dark and damp, covering her inch by inch until the night swallowed her whole. My roots ached.

He tried to clean me after. Scrubbed, scoured, poured bleach into my pores. But memory is stronger than lye. Water only pushes grief deeper.

Yet, he did not flee. No, he spread lies. He said she left him, ran away. He burned her dresses, sold her jewelry. He drank, and he stayed.

And then one night, I felt her.

At first it was only a stirring, light as breath, softer than the shift of curtains in an open window. A pressure in my boards, a ripple through my beams. Her steps. Tentative, uncertain, like someone lost in a dream. They pressed into me, hesitant, then stronger, heavier, until they matched the rhythm of memory. Until they echoed exactly across the very spot where she had fallen.

Abby was home.

She drifted through me, not yet knowing what she was. Her presence chilled my plaster, swelled my shadows, rattled the glass in my panes. She did not know she was dead, but I knew. Oh, I knew. I had carried her silence in my marrow, her blood in my seams, her last scream forever knotted into my walls.

I called to her. Not in words, but in groans and sighs. I whispered through my pipes, my breath rising as steam, as if I could coax her back into flesh. I moaned through my beams, low and mournful, the song of an old wound still bleeding. I showed her what I had kept safe: the dark stain in my floorboards that bleach could not erase, the splintered plaster where her head had struck, the silence that would never heal.

She paused then, trembling, as though at last she remembered.

And I held her. I held her as tightly as wood and stone can hold.

Together, we remembered.

Together, we began.

We haunted him.

At first it was small things, delicate cruelties of spirit and stone. Her phantom steps pressed through my stairs, and I groaned with her rhythm. I sighed a sudden chill through my halls, and she carried it on her breath, enough to snuff his candle, to blind him in the dark. Her perfume unfurled in the bedroom, and I swelled the air with it, soft as a caress, until he bolted upright in bed, gasping her name.

He cursed us. He drank deeper. He tried to tell himself it was nothing. But we grew patient, and patience is a weapon sharper than steel.

The shadows lengthened because I let them. She lingered within their edges. He saw her in the corner of his eye: the tilt of her head, the dark sweep of her hair. He turned, and I devoured the shape, leaving only her imprint in the chair she once curled in, in the mirror’s dark glass where I held her reflection behind his own. When he ate, I soured the food on his tongue, and she spat it from his mouth as poison.

He stopped sleeping. He stopped eating. We gnawed at him together, her voice in the pipes, my moans beneath the floor, her death-cry pouring down the corridors. He clutched his ears, but we were inside him. Her sobs shook the hollow of his bones.

At night he staggered room to room, slurring apologies into the empty air. He swore he hadn’t meant it, swore he loved her still. When he slept, I pressed him with unseen hands at his throat, and she joined me in the weight until he woke choking.

It wasn’t only fear anymore, it was knowing.

He knew she was here.

He knew she would never leave.

And so his mind began to splinter, piece by piece, like plaster cracking in the Cold.

He begged us to stop.

But I am no mercy.

I am memory.

At last, unable to bear us, Ben pressed the barrel of his pistol beneath his chin. He had nothing else, no coin to flee, no kin to turn to. His family had abandoned him long before, weary of the bottle that had claimed him as surely as we had. There was nowhere left to go. The shot rang through me, a final violence. His body fell to my floor, and I drank him in too.

Now his ghost walks my halls, bound to me as Abby is bound. She lingers, and so does he. I keep them both. For a time, their presence warmed me, filled the cracks of my beams, hushed the ache of silence. But silence always returns, biting, hollowing. And so I have learned a new truth: the more I claim, the less alone I am. Their screams are my music, their shadows my marrow. I am no longer content to be hollow. I hunger. I will never be empty again.

I am a reliquary of screams, a cathedral of stains.

I am the house.

Enter me, and you are mine.