The Amber Glare

The building on Meridian Street was ancient, its bricks stained with a century of soot, its corridors smelling of dust and old wood. My fiancée, Lena, and I moved into unit 4B three months ago, and my mother, Claire, lived two floors down in 2B, as if our family had a gravitational pull to this crumbling structure. I’d done research after our first unsettling week, when the floorboards creaked in patterns and the radiators pinged at odd hours: the site was once a 19th-century manor and, before that, a public garden where a cholera outbreak had claimed over eighty souls. The manor was demolished in the 1920s, and the apartment block rose in its place. Now, history repeated itself because my great-grandmother, Edith, had lived two buildings over, and she’d always told us stories about a shadow man who visited her—a tall figure with a baseball bat, who she claimed was a protective spirit, not a threat. Edith was a spiritual medium, and so was I, though I’d downplayed my gift since childhood. It resurfaced now, like a toothache, when the temperature in our hallway dropped and my skin prickled.

One afternoon, Lena was at work, and my mom came up to visit. She still had that habit from when I was a kid—she’d use the bathroom with the door open whenever we were alone, so she could keep an eye on me. I was four again, playing with a toy truck in the hallway, and our bathroom was at the end of that short corridor. The sun through the frosted window at the far end began to intensify, impossibly bright, as if the god of all light had decided to focus his beam directly on our hallway. My mom and I both looked up from our tasks, squinting, and then the light surged—not a flicker, but a sustained blaze that seemed to swallow shadows and yet create new ones. I saw my mother’s face twist from surprise to recognition, and I felt a chill that had no source. The light lasted maybe three seconds, then it was gone, leaving the hallway dim and our eyes dazzled with green afterimages.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes, and when I could see again, my mom was standing at the bathroom door, hand frozen on the handle, her face pale. ‘Did you see that?’ she whispered. I nodded, and then she added, ‘It’s the same as what your great-grandma described. The light before something appears.’ Something did appear. At the far end of the hallway, where the sun had blazed, a figure now stood—not a shadow man with a bat, but a woman in a torn, soot-stained dress, her hair matted, her face obscured by a dark veil. She held a small, tarnished locket that she raised to her chest as if clutching it. She wasn’t menacing; she was sorrowful. She stood there for a long, stretched moment, and then she raised one hand and pointed directly at me, then at my mother, and then at the floor beneath our feet. She pointed down—persistently, as if drilling a hole into the carpet—and then she vanished, leaving a cold spot where she had stood.

My mother and I exchanged looks. She was the first to speak. ‘She wants us to dig,’ she said. We didn’t dig, not right away, because the thought of demolition in an old building was overwhelming. But the woman appeared again the next night, and the next, always standing in the hallway, always pointing down. Lena saw her on the fourth night and almost fainted. That’s when we decided to contact the building’s super, a taciturn man named Mr. Kowalski, and ask about the history of our unit. He grew quiet, then said, ‘There was a fire in the old manor, right before it was torn down. A servant girl died in it, trapped in a basement storage room. They never found her remains, they said. Her name was maybe Anya, from one of the old records.’

That gave me the shivers. My great-grandmother Edith had spoken of a girl named Anya, a spirit she’d encountered at the old building, but she’d thought it was just a dream. She’d described the same locket. I began to investigate further, pulling old maps and census records from the local library’s digital archive. The manor’s floor plans showed a basement that extended under what is now my apartment. There was a small storage room, no windows. I also found a death certificate for ‘Anastasia Petrovna,’ servant, aged 19, cause of death unknown, dated 1889, and a note in the margin of a diary (which I found in a historical society’s online collection) from the manor’s owner: ‘The girl took the key to her locket to her grave. We never found it, though we searched the basement thoroughly.’ The key, the diary said, was hidden ‘in the floor,’ and it unlocked not the locket, but another reliquary beneath the manor, which we now know is beneath my floorboards.

Armed with this, I rented a floor-saw and, one night after Lena and Mom had gone to sleep, I cut a square of carpet and plywood in the hallway, exactly where the woman had pointed. Beneath, I found a gap in the joists, and nestled in the dust was a small iron key, rusted but intact. I also found a human finger bone, which made me recoil, but I collected the key. As I held it, the temperature plummeted, and the smell of smoke filled the apartment. The woman materialized behind me, so close I could feel her breath on my neck—a cold, dry whisper. ‘Open the locket,’ she said. I didn’t know where the locket was, but I noticed the woman’s hand no longer held it. I turned and saw her holding the locket out to me, its chain dangling. She placed it in my palm, and the chain was icy. I fitted the key into the tiny lock, and it turned with a click. Inside, there was a painted miniature of a young man—a soldier, perhaps—and behind the portrait, a folded piece of paper, yellowed with age.

I unfolded it carefully. It was a letter, written in a shaky hand, dated the day before the fire. It read: ‘Dearest Miša, I have hidden the deeds in the floor, as you bid, but I fear I will not escape. The master knows. If I die, tell the world what lies beneath the house. Forgive me.’ There was also a crude map, drawn in pencil, showing a path from the storage room to a spot outside the manor’s grounds, marked with an X. The X was in the park that predated the manor. I looked at that spot and realized it was now under the parking garage next to our building.

That night, Anya’s spirit did not appear, but I had a dream. In the dream, I was in the basement of the manor during the fire, smoke blinding me, and I saw Anya crouched by the floor, pushing the key through a crack, but she was trapped. I woke up screaming, and Lena held me, and Mom came up, and we talked all night. We decided to end this. We would locate the buried item, if it existed, and put Anya’s spirit to rest by completing her task. The next evening, we sneaked into the parking garage with a borrowed metal detector, and after an hour, the device beeped frantically near a storm drain. We pried up a loose slab, and beneath it, buried in soil, we found a rusted tin box. Inside was a bundle of decaying documents—land deeds, a map of a mineral spring, and a legal complaint against the manor’s owner for fraud. It was explosive: the owner had stolen the land, including the rights to the spring, which was known to have healing properties, and had silenced Anya when she discovered the papers.

We felt a rush of cold air, and when we looked up, Anya stood at the edge of the garage, watching. She nodded once, slowly, and then dissolved into the dust of the ground. Since that day, she hasn’t appeared. The building feels lighter, as if a weight has been lifted. But I still shudder whenever the sun gets unbearably bright in the hallway, and I keep the key and locket in a drawer. I wonder if my great-grandmother’s shadow man with the bat was a protector, guarding her from other spirits, and whether Anya’s task was to ensure the truth was discovered. Now, as a medium myself, I know that some spirits are bound by unfinished business, and that we can be unwitting messengers. I look at my fiancee and my mom, and I smile, but in the back of my mind, I hear the echo of Anya’s whispered voice: ‘Open the locket.’ And I wonder if there are other spirits, other secrets, waiting beneath our building, and whether I’ll be able to resist their pulls.

The sun flares through the frosted window every day, and I catch my mother’s eye across the room. She gives me a knowing nod, and we both understand: our home is a palimpsest, a layer cake of memories and ghosts, and we are just the latest ones to read its pages. But we are not afraid. We have an alliance now, with a spirit who found peace through us. And if another shadow man appears, with a bat or not, we’ll be ready. After all, we’ve got a key to the past, and a locket to hold our own futures close.

I still have nightmares, but they are not of Anya. They are of a sun so bright it blinds, and in that light, I see an empty hallway, and I hear a sound—not a whisper, but a soft, insistent tapping, as if someone is knocking from underneath the floorboards. And I know, deep down, that we haven’t found everything. There is more beneath this building, more history, more unfinished business. And one day, the sun will flare again, and we’ll have to answer the call. But for now, we live, we laugh, and we keep the locket close, as a reminder that the dead may rest, but they never really leave.