Chapter 1: The Ghost in the Mansion

Marcus Bennett sat on the edge of his creaking bed, the chill from the Ohio River fog seeping through the window and crawling up his spine.

Every breath tasted of rust and old regret. Time pressed down on him, heavy as the river mist at dawn. The late autumn air outside slipped through the cracked window, settling into his bones and chilling him deeper than any winter storm ever had.

He thought: Silver Hollow—so this is where my life ends.

The name echoed in his mind with a finality that tasted of regret. He traced the cracks in the old windowpane, listening to the distant whistle of a freight train rolling through Silver Hollow.

Not in Chicago’s teeming streets, not in the rush of a city championship, but here in this backwater town, swallowed by the silence of fallen leaves and distant railroad tracks.

The high school oath in Maple Heights, the dreams of Chicago—how long ago they faded. Doesn’t matter if you hang up your cleats or keep swinging for the fences—sooner or later, the world’ll run you over like a runaway train. Your friends, your ideals, are buried beneath the earth, and you resign yourself to fate:

It was the same everywhere—big cities or dying small towns, the world steamrolled the dreamers. Marcus could almost hear the old football coach’s voice: "This game’ll break you if you let it, son." He'd watched his teammates drift away, some to the graveyard, some to the bottle, and felt that same freight train bearing down.

Who doesn’t die? And yet, what a pity—I’m still unwilling, still unyielding.

The old fire refused to fade. Even now, when most men would have made peace with their ghosts, Marcus clung to the bitterness, the hunger that made him who he was.

Marcus sighed, regret surging endlessly as he prepared to close his eyes for the last time.

He let out a breath, rough as gravel, and stared at the ceiling one last time, the lines on his face mapped by years of hope and disappointment.

But Marcus never expected that, after closing his eyes in Silver Hollow, there would actually be a day he’d awaken again—

6

Savannah, eleventh year, late November. Marcus’s soul wandered for nine hundred years before plunging into the body of President Samuel Goodwin. In that instant, the burning blood of Marcus Bennett consumed Goodwin’s soul, and so Marcus Bennett awoke from his long dream in downtown Savannah.

He blinked, expecting the low ceiling of his Ohio bedroom. Instead, light from a crystal chandelier stabbed his eyes, and the air smelled of wood polish and fresh-cut flowers.

He felt as if he’d gone to sleep in a rusting single-story house and woken up in a palace—a modern American palace, but a palace nonetheless. The room was still, the air strangely sweet, but Marcus’s heart pounded like he was back under Friday night lights.

Goodwin:

He didn’t even notice if he’d fired the right people; Marcus had just awoken and was nearly blinded by what he saw:

Everywhere—crystal chandeliers, ornate mahogany, carved eagles, entwined flags. Before him, on the glass coffee table, dozens of golden bowls brimming with pecan and hickory-scented logs, burning fiercely in the fireplaces. Countless curtains and throws woven from soft down.

It was as if he’d wandered into some Southern governor’s mansion: the kind of place where every room had a portrait of some ancestor in Civil War dress, and the scent of magnolia drifted in from the garden, mixing with the smoke from pecan logs. Every surface gleamed; the kind of place you’d expect to see in a Georgia heritage magazine. The air held a scent of burning wood, undercut by something floral and light, maybe a hint of magnolia or peony.

There were even flowers and potted plants in the hall—cloud-like, radiant, vying in beauty—none of which Marcus recognized.

The arrangement was so extravagant he almost laughed: orchids, African violets, lilies—stuff that wouldn’t survive an Ohio winter for a day. He wondered who they were trying to impress.

Yet a faint fragrance filled the air, pure and refreshing, untainted by any trace of smoke or fire.

It reminded him, oddly, of the old churches in Maple Heights after Christmas service—warm, crowded, and full of hope, but with none of the soot or worry he expected from burning wood.

Marcus looked up. Outside, the western wind was bleak, frost and snow blanketed the earth.

He saw the soft reflection of snow falling past the tall windows, collecting on the stone steps and iron railings—a Savannah winter, rare but biting.

Marcus was bewildered. What kind of place was this? In the depths of winter, with such extravagance—could it be, after death, he had become an angel, entered the pearly gates, ascended to heaven?

He felt a shiver of both awe and dread. The way everything sparkled, too good to be true, made him wonder if he’d finally cashed in his chips.

Then what about John? John should be here as well.

His old friend, lost long ago—if this was the afterlife, maybe John would be there, too. He couldn’t help but hope.

Footsteps sounded. Marcus snapped back to his senses.

A click of polished shoes on hardwood—sharper, more formal than he’d heard since the days of city council meetings. He straightened, instinctively bracing himself.

An aide approached, head lowered, and said, “Mr. President, Secretary Quinn has sent word—the Northern Coalition has entered the city. If your illness is not grave, please move from the East Wing as soon as possible.”

The young man’s voice was all business, laced with the kind of nervousness you hear when someone’s talking to a legend or a loaded gun. He didn’t look Marcus in the eye, clutching a notepad as if it might shield him from trouble.

Marcus:

What in the world is ‘Mr. President’? And what does ‘move’ mean?

The titles, the orders—it all hit Marcus like a fastball to the jaw. He tried to recall what he knew of Savannah, of presidents—was this a dream, or something deeper?

Countless thoughts flashed through his mind, but Marcus Bennett’s face remained impassive. Seasoned as he was, he simply muttered under his breath, “Hell if I know what’s going on…” Then, aloud, “Alright, kid. Go on, I’ll figure this out.”

His voice came out steadier than he felt. He watched the aide depart, back straight as a fence post, and filed the encounter away—already learning the power of a silent stare.

As soon as the aide left, Marcus’s gaze darted about, searching the East Wing for any writing.

He squinted at the edges of furniture, the walls, the table, anything that might explain where he was—old campaign habit, never trusting what he couldn’t read for himself.

The first thing he found was the table before him, covered in briefings from across the country. Many of the place names left Marcus dazed, but they also allowed him to guess his current identity—he was still a leader.

It was all there: maps, spreadsheets, glossy folders stamped with official seals—things he’d seen on mayors’ desks back in the day, but never in such intimidating quantity. He saw his own signature, looping and practiced, on some of the papers.

But when Marcus turned to the briefings on taxes and grain from various states, his eyes nearly popped out:

Heavens! In more than sixty years of his previous life, he had never seen such wealth, not even during wartime.

Whole columns of numbers—millions in revenue, stockpiles of food, cotton shipments that would have made Depression-era farmers weep. It all looked impossibly rich compared to the lean times he remembered.

But the next briefing was about peace negotiations with the Northern Coalition—ceding land, paying tribute: twenty-five million dollars and twenty-five thousand bales of cotton to be sent annually.

The words leapt off the page—"tribute" wasn’t a word he’d seen in a government report before. He felt his hands shake as he pictured the trains loaded with money and cotton heading north, a nation’s pride bundled and shipped.

Marcus froze. He dug through the briefings and finally found the exchange rate for copper to silver in this era—at least two thousand pennies for a dollar.

He did the math on the back of an envelope, old habits refusing to die. The figures made his gut twist.

He remembered the layoffs in ’82, the riots when the mills closed. This—this was a whole country being gutted, and he was supposed to sign off on it?

That’s fifty million coins, plus twenty-five thousand bales of cotton—more than the entire annual tax revenue of his old administration.

The numbers were mind-boggling, almost cartoonish in their size. He wondered if this was the world’s way of mocking him: showing him riches just out of reach, then demanding payment in someone else’s blood.

Marcus took a deep breath. The air was still filled with that pure fragrance. His eyelid twitched. If anyone had been present, they would have seen a flash of fire in Marcus’s eyes.

For a second, he wanted to rip the curtains down, smash the gold bowls, and hurl them through the window. He wanted to grab a Louisville Slugger and smash every fancy vase in the place—show these people what real anger looked like.

The urge was primal, almost comforting—a reminder that, whatever body he now wore, his fighting spirit was still very much alive.

After grasping the general situation, Marcus Bennett surveyed the East Wing once more, and no longer saw it as the pearly gates. Those crystals, mahogany, orchids—in his eyes, all turned blood-red.

It was as if a red haze hung over everything. The glint of chandeliers now looked like glistening wounds, and the richness of the wood screamed of a history soaked in struggle and sacrifice.

In a sky soaked with blood, Marcus seemed to see the music and revelry of late-century Chicago, the extravagance of old mayors and governors.

He could almost hear the jazz leaking from a South Side bar, see the neon flicker over a boarded-up diner, remember the taste of cheap black coffee on freezing election nights.

And behind that—the slaughtered people of Toledo, the ordinary farmers of rural Ohio who toiled all year and could only eat steak twice, the disaster victims with sallow faces and thin bodies, dragging their families across the land.

Faces flashed in his memory—mothers clutching food stamps, kids staring hungrily at grocery windows, men in battered pickup trucks heading to nowhere. He remembered standing in soup kitchens, handing out bowls while the rich dined in splendor just a mile away.

This was no heavenly realm untouched by cold or heat. Every inch here was the fat and blood of the people, the endless suffering of the common folk.

He ran his hand over the polished table, as if feeling for the pulse of a nation. It was as real and raw as any wound.

Marcus exhaled, looking up at the sky. Sixty years of wind and frost from his past life burned in his eyes, and the old chivalrous spirit rekindled in his bones.

A spark kindled somewhere inside him, something bigger than regret—resolve, maybe, or just plain stubbornness. He felt the old coach whisper: "Get back in there, Bennett. One last play."

To die and live again—whether by fate or by the workings of God—since I have come, I will not let this country be ruined by such scum.

He squared his shoulders, as if shaking off the grave itself. Whatever strange hand had dealt him this life, he’d play it out. And he’d play to win.

That day, Marcus, poring over the briefings and draft documents in the East Wing, pieced together the current situation: North and South stand opposed, the Union and the Northern Coalition locked in a blood feud, yet both sides are still negotiating peace.

He mapped the crisis with a general’s eye: supply chains, troop movements, the tension between hope and despair running through every line. It was American politics and civil war, but refracted through a new, darker lens.

More precisely, it was no negotiation, but the Union’s surrender and vassalage.

It was humiliation, plain and simple. The same old story, dressed up with flags and protocol.

Not only did they cede land and pay reparations, but the Northern Coalition also demanded two bizarre conditions: first, that no high officials be replaced; second, that General Ford be executed.

The second demand stabbed at Marcus. He’d seen enough kangaroo courts and political scapegoats to know what this meant. Loyalty punished, treason rewarded.

Marcus’s eyelid twitched. This was clearly crooked politicians colluding with foreign foes for profit and glory, while the brave general who struck terror into the enemy languished in prison.

He felt the old anger sharpen—he’d seen it before in Chicago’s council halls, in shady backroom deals. Now, the stakes were the whole country.

What had the previous president been doing?

How could anyone sleep at night after signing away a nation’s future?

Digging deeper, Marcus found his current name in the official documents:

Samuel Goodwin.

He mouthed it, feeling the unfamiliar name settle on his tongue, wondering who this man had been before he arrived.

Very well, Samuel Goodwin is dead. From now on, this world has only Marcus Goodwin.

It was a declaration, half-joke, half-oath. He felt a strange thrill: the past was dead weight now—his own and Samuel Goodwin’s. What mattered was what came next.

Marcus Goodwin took a deep breath, called for the car, and ordered a return to the main residence.

He spoke with the brisk confidence of a man who knew how to take charge, who’d run campaigns and led men through chaos. The staff scrambled to obey, as if they’d been waiting for this all along.