The Bones Remember the Song (eBook)

Book one

Tima N. Alwyn (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
101 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
9780001109254 (ISBN)

Infos

Vellicore is a city that pretends to sleep.

Beneath the neon lights and quiet streets, something ancient hums in the dark—an echo that only a few can hear, and one detective can no longer ignore.

When a series of bodies are found arranged in eerie, ritualistic poses, Detective Clara Blackwood is forced to confront a killer who doesn’t just murder—he sculpts the dead into silent art. Every victim is a message. Every bone is a note in the song.

As Clara digs deeper, she begins hearing things no one else can. Whispers. Vibrations. A resonance waking beneath the city’s foundations. The past she buried is clawing its way back, and the killer seems to know every secret she fought to forget.

Vellicore breathes. And what sleeps beneath it… is stirring.

Dark, cinematic, and atmospheric, The Bones Remember the Song blends psychological suspense with forensic mystery, perfect for fans of dark crime thrillers and serial-killer fiction.

Bones don’t die.

They wait to be heard.

Textauszug

Tab 1

CHAPTER ONE – The City That Breathes

Vellicore never truly slept.

By night, the city merely rolled to its other side—trading car horns for the distant groan of cargo ships and the soft, persistent whisper of rain brushing glass. From above, Vellicore looked half-recalled: blocks of concrete stitched by narrow, glistening streets, wrapped in a thin shroud of fog glowing under sodium lamps.

Detective Clara Blackwood watched the city smear past her window as the squad car climbed the hill.

The wipers carved the rain into diagonal streaks; red and blue lights pulsed somewhere near the water—where she should have been already. Instead, she sat two minutes away, listening to the officer at the wheel try to hide how restless he was.

“You ever come up here?” he asked.

“Once,” Clara said, still staring forward. “Noise complaint. A couple arguing over a toaster.”

His awkward laugh died halfway.

The car crested the hill and stopped by the curb. Through the rain, she saw silhouettes of uniforms hovering near crime-scene lamps—standing with the stiff uncertainty of people who never know what to do with their hands.

The radio crackled: “…10-54 confirmed… CSU en route… keep the area contained…”

“Ready, Detective?” he asked.

Clara opened the door without answering.

Cold, salted air struck her first—metal, harbor rot, and damp concrete. She pulled her collar up and walked down the slick street, her boots finding steady purchase by habit alone. The dead didn’t run. There was never a rush.

The alley waited where the buildings leaned into each other, a narrow throat lined with rusted fire escapes and dripping gutters. Yellow tape trembled in the wind. A young officer lifted it for her, relief flickering across his face.

“Detective Blackwood—we secured the scene as best we could. Flooding’s starting.”

“Who found him?” she asked.

“A dock worker. Cutting through on his way home.” The officer pointed toward a man hunched on an overturned crate, blanket around his shoulders, eyes glassy. “He said he heard… something.”

“That’s usually how it begins,” Clara murmured.

Rain pooled at the alley’s lowest point—a shallow mirror fractured by droplets. The body lay at its center.

Male. Thirties. Jacket unbuttoned, shirt torn open. Shoes placed neatly a few feet away, toes pointed with unsettling care. The kind of care that didn’t belong in a place that smelled like rust and old garbage.

The first thing she saw: his eyes.

Half-lidded. Not wide with terror—something stranger, as if he’d been staring through her, past her, into some place only he could see.

The second thing: his chest.

A symbol carved into the skin. No letters. No recognizable mark. A shape—deep, deliberate, ugly.

Clara crouched, rain soaking into her knees. The carved lines were jagged but intentional, darkened with blood and something else… soot? Ash? The wound seemed almost dirtied on purpose.

“Anything moved?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Officer Raines replied. “Found him like this.”

“ID?”

“Jonas Hale. Works Pier Seven.”

Of course he did. Vellicore had a pattern for its dead.

Something pale caught Clara’s eye. She gently pried open Hale’s stiffening fingers.

A piece of bone.

Uneven, shaped, etched with the same symbol carved into his chest. The weight of it felt wrong.

“Great,” she whispered. “Party favors.”

“Is it… human?” Raines asked.

“CSU will tell us.”

But Clara doubted it.

“What did the witness hear?” she asked.

Raines blinked. “Music.”

Clara stilled. “Music? Here?”

“He said it sounded like a lullaby. But warped.”

Clara stepped back, letting the alley breathe around her.

The scuffed wall, the curved water, the tiny smear on a dumpster handle—every detail whispered something.

Vellicore breathed too.

And tonight, it felt like it was holding its breath.

⸻

CHAPTER TWO – The Quiet That Isn’t Empty

Morning crawled into Vellicore instead of arriving—dragging a gray, resentful light up from the horizon as if the sky regretted waking.

Clara managed three hours of sleep. Four, if she counted the fifteen minutes she spent unconscious on her couch with her shoes still on. Coffee helped, but what steadied her more was direction—and today it waited in the building’s concrete belly.

The forensic lab hummed with cold light and colder machinery. Metal tables, glass trays, the faint scent of disinfectant and something faintly burnt. Technicians moved like silent currents, gloves snapping, instruments ringing soft on steel.

Elias Vance didn’t look up when she approached.

“Detective Blackwood,” he said, eyes fixed on a jagged waveform drifting across his screen. “You’re early. That’s either insomnia… or obsession.”

“Both,” she said. “Tell me you have something.”

He tapped the monitor. A hiss of static bled from the speakers—rain, wind, distant echoes. And underneath all that noise…

A rhythm.

Three hollow beats.

A pause.

A long, low tone—barely a note, more like breath pressed through metal.

Clara felt it climb her spine.

“The witness didn’t imagine it,” Elias said. “Strip away the rain and the alley echo, and there’s a pattern. Intentional. Not mechanical.”

“Ventilation system? Pipes? A generator?”

“No.” He switched to a comparison graph. “This sound has appeared six times in the past thirteen years. Different detectives, different victims. The pattern never changed.”

Three beats. Pause. Tone.

Every time.

Clara’s jaw tightened. “So he’s been doing this longer than we thought.”

“Or someone has,” Elias said. “And last night wasn’t random. It was composed.”

He opened a drawer and revealed the bone piece from Hale’s hand. Under the lab lights it looked worse—pale, warped, almost scorched.

“It’s not human,” he said. “And it wasn’t left in that shape. It was forced into it.”

“Why?” Clara asked.

Elias shrugged slightly. “Ritual. Message. Identity. Whoever made this wanted the shape to matter.”

He hesitated.

“There’s more.”

He brought up another waveform—a shaky recording from three blocks away.

“Pedestrian filming the storm. On its own, it’s nothing. But overlay it with your scene—”

The patterns aligned.

“He was moving,” Clara said. “Walking through the city. Broadcasting it.”

“Or projecting it,” Elias said. “If he’s using directional sound tech, he could make it seem like the buildings themselves were singing.”

Clara stared at the ghostly rhythm on the screen.

“What does he want?”

Elias’s voice lowered. “To be heard.”

She left the lab unsettled, the echo of three hollow beats still tapping beneath her ribs.

⸻

CHAPTER THREE – Old Files Don’t Sleep

The records room breathed like a buried vault—damp, cold, smelling of dust and old grief. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead as Clara stepped between rows of metal filing cabinets heavy with the city’s forgotten wounds.

Something in her gut whispered that Jonas Hale wasn’t the first. And Vellicore, for all its noise, never lied.

She opened the 2009 drawer.

Dust rose like ash.

UNRESOLVED.

She pulled out three folders and laid them across a small steel table. The first file stopped her cold.

Victim: Owen Darnell.

Warehouse district.

Cause: exsanguination.

Clara turned to the crime-scene photo.

There it was—a crude, early version of the same carved symbol. Slashed into the skin with an unsteady hand. A beginning.

She opened the next file.

Victim: Linda Bray.

Abandoned school.

Markings on the wall.

Sharper now. Angular. More confident.

A pattern forming.

She opened the third.

Victim: Jarrett Hale.

Clara froze.

Another Hale.

No relation—but another symbol. Another witness reporting “a sound in the walls.”

The city wasn’t random.

It was repeating.

She pulled out her notebook and sketched the evolution:

2009 — rough, clumsy

2013 — angular, deliberate

2017 — almost fluent

Last night — complete

A language taking shape.

Her pulse tightened as she stood. That was when she saw it—faint in the dust on a nearby cabinet.

A handprint.

Long fingers. Slight curve.

Tilted in the exact same angle as the newest symbol.

A cold ripple ran up her spine.

Behind her, the room hummed—the metallic breath of forgotten cases shifting in their drawers.

“Don’t start seeing ghosts,” she whispered.

But Vellicore felt like it was listening.

And waiting.

———

CHAPTER FOUR – Second Body, Second Note

The call came just after noon—another body, another rain-soaked corner of Vellicore. Clara reached the abandoned loading dock fast, the scent of rust and wet concrete rising in a thick breath from the ground. Patrol cars threw amber light across the cracked pavement, stretching long shadows toward the warehouse wall.

Officer Raines met her at the tape, face drawn tight.

“Same setup, Detective.”

Clara ducked under the tape and stepped into the gloom.

The victim lay beneath a rusted metal awning, arranged with the same unsettling care as Jonas Hale: jacket folded beside him, hands placed neatly, palms up, as if expecting something to be returned.

The mark carved into...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.11.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-13: 9780001109254 / 9780001109254