Page 39 of In Her Memory

“Who’s there?” His voice emerged hoarse, rough with sleep.

Silence answered him. Boyd reached for the lamp on the bedside table, fumbling in the darkness until he found the familiar shape. He clicked the switch once, twice. Nothing happened.

A power outage? Boyd thought, his mind searching for rational explanations. Nolan’s final act of sabotage, perhaps.

But no. The digital clock on the dresser should have been dark too, and he could see its dim numbers from the corner of his eye. 2:17 AM. The lamp alone was dead.

“Who’s there?” he demanded again, pushing himself fully upright. The sheets pooled around his waist as he squinted into the darkness.

A small scratching sound cut through the silence, followed by the distinctive hiss of a match being struck. A tiny flame sparked to life across the room, hovering in midair for a moment before touching the wick of a candle. The flame caught, grew stronger, illuminating the hand that held it.

The candlelight pushed back the darkness in a small circle, revealing first the hand, then an arm in an old-fashioned suit jacket, and finally a face that made Boyd’s blood run cold.

He knew that face. It had glared down from an oil portrait that had hung in the mansion’s main hall when Boyd first purchased the property. The portrait now rested in a storage room, too historically significant to discard but too unsettling — with its cold eyes and cruel mouth — to keep on display.

Pete Shannon.

As in the portrait, he was not an old man—perhaps in his thirties, with hair parted in the middle, a thick mustache, and deep-set eyes that seemed to bore into whatever they regarded. In life, those eyes must have regarded Amos Calloway with contempt before cheating him out of his rightful share of the mine. Now, by the wavering candlelight, they regarded Boyd with the same contemptuous recognition.

“This isn’t real,” Boyd whispered, his mouth dry. “You’re not real.”

Shannon’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “As real as the ground beneath this house,” he said, his voice carrying an accent Boyd couldn’t place. “As real as the mine that built it.”

Boyd pressed himself back against the headboard. His hand clutched at his chest, where his heart beat an irregular pattern. “I’m dreaming,” he insisted. “This is stress. A hallucination.”

Shannon took a step closer, the candle flame dancing with the movement. His form seemed solid enough — the floorboards creaked beneath his weight, and the light cast his shadow across the wall.

“You Calloways,” Shannon said, his voice thick with disdain. “Always thinking you’ve been wronged. Always acting the victim.” Another step forward. “Your great-grandfather wasn’t half the businessman I was. He didn’t have the stomach for what needed to be done.”

“What needed to be done?” Boyd repeated, his voice barely a whisper. His chest constricted with pain, tendrils of fire working their way down his left arm.

“To build something that lasts,” Shannon replied, his eyes reflecting the candlelight like two burning coals. “Something that outlives you. Something worth the cost.” He gestured around the room with his free hand. “You think you’ve reclaimed something. You think you’ve won some petty victory over history.” A harsh sound emerged from his throat, something between a laugh and a cough. “You understand nothing.”

Boyd tried to move, to get off the bed, to reach for his phone on the nightstand. But his body felt leaden, uncooperative. The pain had become a vise around his chest, squeezing tighter with each labored breath.

“What do you want?” he managed to gasp.

Shannon loomed still closer, now at the foot of the bed. The candle cast grotesque shadows across his face, deepening the hollows of his eyes and cheeks until he looked more skull than man.

“I’ve come for you, Boyd Calloway,” Shannon said simply.

The words hit Boyd hard. He tried to deny it, to argue, to rationalize, but the crushing pain in his chest stole his voice. This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be happening. Pete Shannon had been dead for over a century. Ghosts weren ‘t real.

And yet the evidence of his senses told a different story.

“Heart’s giving out,” Shannon observed dispassionately. “Weak. Like your ancestor.”

Boyd clutched at his chest, digging into his shirt as if he could physically hold his heart together through sheer will. The pain was unbearable now, radiating through his entire upper body. Black spots danced at the edges of his vision.

“This house remembers, Calloway. The land remembers. I built it from the bones of men who died making me rich.” He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “And now it’s hungry again.”

Boyd wanted to scream, but no sound came. His left arm had gone numb, his vision tunneling. The pain crested like a wave, washing through him with such intensity that for a moment, everything went white.

When his vision cleared, Shannon was still there, watching with clinical interest as Boyd struggled for breath.

“No,” Boyd managed to gasp. “Please...”

But whatever mercy he sought wasn’t forthcoming. Shannon’s expression remained impassive as he observed Boyd’s suffering.