Christmas came and passed with no odd occurrences. Then, two days after Christmas, I was playing on the third floor, and my father came up to retrieve me.
“Who wants to go on a treasure hunt?” He asked, and I jumped into his arms with gleeful excitement. I wanted to go down to the basement not only to see the many things in the house that had been left behind and stored there, but because I’d heard my parents discussing the rumors of the secret doors and passageways that supposedly led to tunnels underneath. It all fascinated me as a child. My mother wasn’t enthused about my going down there. She didn’t want me getting dirty, or worse, lost. But, my father prevailed.
I now think that my father didn’t want me alone with my mother, as she’d become exceedingly remote and withdrawn from us. I noticed that she just kept staring into that mirror, the one I was not allowed to go near. It began to consume her.
My fascination soared at first sight of the vast, dank labyrinth that stretched for what could have been miles underneath the house. It was a maze beneath the dark kingdom. The walls were built of limestone piled high into a catacomb structure that gave way to cobwebbed rooms with arched entranceways.
I could tell by looking at the hoard of artifacts and antique pieces that they were symbols of a time long before my small existence; but I was more interested in finding the secret tunnels. Although my father had instructed me to stay close to him, I convinced him to play a game of Hide and Seek. I ran through one of the many arched doorways and hid behind an old crate, while my Dad counted aloud to ten in the playful adult voice used only for children.
“Ready or not, here I come!” I heard him yell, and I could see the shadows of his shuffling feet coming closer outside the archway. He’d been stalling, making it appear as though he were stumped in finding me.
For a moment, I turned my head to the left as I kneeled behind the crate. It was just a natural instinct to turn my head and explore with my eyes as I waited. I loosed a blood curdling scream that echoed and bounced from the basement walls; there was something behind me.
It was a body, at least, a vision of one. She was sprawled across the stone floor and naked, bearing a flesh that had turned a soft purple painted by the hand of death. The blackened bruises were strung across her neck like a medallion, and her eyes were open and fixed in a cold, dead stare that gripped me. Then, she blinked.
My screams became a louder hysteria, and I suddenly felt the grasp of my father as he ran in and instantly pulled me up from the floor in a flash. I’d been pointing at the floor as she continued to stare back at me, my breath heaving in fleeting gasps I couldn’t catch.
“There’s nothing there, sweetie, nothing there,” he said, rocking me while rushing to the long set of stairs that we’d descended not twenty minutes before. The excursion had ended not long after it began. I never saw the basement again. Were there secret tunnels? Possibly, but I doubt I’ll ever know.
My father brought me upstairs, and there was my mother, staring into the mirror. She was standing in front of it, lost, enraptured, and enchanted. Later that night, I heard them yelling at each other once again. He was trying to convince her that we should leave the house, but her defenses were fueled by some inexplicable determination, some secret love affair that to my father, was with the house itself. But to me, with my open eyes and instant knowledge, I knew it had everything to do with the mirror.
The shouting continued throughout the night. My father tried desperately to rouse her attention to the fact that something was wrong about the house, that it was affecting me and tearing our family apart, that I was seeing ghosts and that something was taking hold of her. I was certain that night would be the end of it all, that we’d move back to our comfortable townhouse we’d called home.
Then, the worst of it began...
In the middle of the night, windows broke for no reason, along with the glass fixtures of the chandeliers, and the sound of breaking glass had roused us from attempted sleep in the wee hours. We became haunted by voices, many of them random whispers and occasional shouts that would startle us into reckoning with presences unseen. The lights would flicker, and at the oddest times, the house would turn to a frigid ice as the furnace still breathed. I remember the abrupt cold as a sudden spell that sought to steal our senses, overwhelm us with the evil that dwelled inside that house.
It was only my mother who was bewitched by the house’s evil, her mind, and willful responses seemingly gone. The look on my father’s face had displayed the utmost desperation of someone losing the battle for his wife. Something was changing about him; he bore the look of surrender on his face, which nearly frightened the life from me. It was when he began trying to get me back to bed that I noticed he was holding his back with one hand, and the left side of his face with the other. He was hiding something from me.
“Daddy,” I said. “What’s wrong with your face?” He’d realized that it would be impossible to hide from me. He took his hand away, and there was a small stream of blood that continued to trickle from a deep scratch across his cheek that looked more like a gash.
“Nothing, Leah,” he said. “Daddy scratched himself, that’s all.” The sound of his voice was irritated, tough, yet weak from exhaustion. I could tell that he hated lying to me.
He tucked me back into bed, and I asked to him to leave the light on. I wanted to sleep with it on that night. After he kissed my forehead and turned to leave the lighted room, I saw the blood as it soaked through his pajama shirt.
“Daddy, you’ve got blood on your back,” I said. I can still recall the sound of fear in my voice. I think that constantly hearing the sound of fear from his little girl was what helped to weaken my father.
He said nothing and searched with his right hand underneath his shirt. I saw the blood that stained his hand as he pulled it away. He said it was nothing, that everything was okay, and to go back to sleep. Then he turned and left the room. I later learned that my father had awakened to being scratched severely by some unseen presence. The scratches were so deep that whatever it was had literally attacked him.
The next morning, the house became overpowered by a stench so foul that everyone in the house that day, including the workmen, found it impossible to describe. The best description I can conjure is that it smelled like rotten, burning meat. This was not the first occasion on which we smelled it, but that day it was acrid, overwhelming, and everywhere. Soon, the day progressed into a deadly afternoon.
A workman had been standing on the staircase between the second and third floor, observing the view of the accomplished work on the top floor from the staircase. Suddenly, his screams rang out as he tumbled down it, and my father, as well as the rest of the workmen ran to stop his fall. But it was too late. He’d fallen all the way down with a crash that I’d heard from the drawing room, where one of the men had quickly whisked me away.
Fortunately, the man survived, but was paralyzed from the neck down. He’d broken his neck. From his hospital bed, he swore that he’d been pushed, that someone had shoved him from behind. Several witnesses confirmed that no one else had been standing there on the staircase—only him.
Later, I saw my father kneeling in front of my mother as she sat transfixed in a chair. He was gazing into her lost eyes, witnessing the hypnotic spell she lingered in, and trying to find her somewhere inside the vacant shell that she’d become. Little did I know that this moment would be the last I would ever see her, her shoulder-length, red hair hanging to the side as her head was slightly tilted in catatonia, her hazel eyes, though lost, peering outward at nothing. This image would become the last I would have of her.
Soon, night arrived. And again, unknown to me was the fact that it would be my last night in this house and the last night I would ever sleep in this bed again, when my father tucked me in. Tonight, I had decided to sleep with the lights out, except the soft glow of my nightlight. I lay awake awhile, thinking of what would happen tomorrow when Dad got Mom help. I turned my head to the side and tri
ed to fall asleep.
Movement shifted from the corner of my eye.
My first thought was that it was Agnes, so I sat up to see what it was. Something was different about the air in the room; it grew colder, but not icy like before. It was dank and moist, much like the basement. I turned my eyes to the loveseat in my room and tried to focus them against the dim glow of my nightlight. That’s when I felt my heart stop.
I saw the same woman that I’d seen in the basement, only now there was a man clutching her throat, wringing her neck back and forth. There was another man behind her, watching the whole episode as it unfolded. Her naked vulnerability seemed to enthrall him. The two men were draped in long black garments that bore the pentagram, and the three of them were bathed in a flickering, rust-colored aura that seemed part of them, part of their Hell.
The woman’s eyes were pleading with me, her left arm reaching out in hope and beckoning me from beyond. Then, I watched her eyes dim and close. Her chest collapsed as her breath expired, and her naked body fell limp in the first man’s grasp. She was dead, and the monsters that killed her turned their gazes toward me.
The scream I released rivaled my hysteria in the basement. Within seconds, the door of my bedroom flew open, and the lights drenched the darkness in defeat. All had disappeared. My father snatched me from the bed like a rag doll and ran with me in his arms down the staircase. He was moving so fast that I thought we were going to tumble—head over heels—like the workman had. His arm clutched the banister as he quickly balanced himself.
I kept looking around for my mother; she was nowhere to be found. My father opened the door, and out we went. He put me into the car, and I stared back at Cedar Manor, waiting for my mother to run out of it, yet I knew she wouldn’t. It took my father only seconds to hop into the front seat and key the ignition. The engine roared to life and the car was gone. That was the last I would ever see of Cedar Manor.
My father had taken me to my grandmother’s, where I would soon relax and fall asleep in yet another bed that wasn’t mine. But I felt safe at my grandmother’s. My father awoke at around six in the morning, and before I knew it, he’d gone back to the house to get my mother. I was convinced that Dad would walk through the door with Mom at any minute. It wouldn’t take him long; he would grab and rescue her the same way he had with me.
Hours went by and he didn’t return. I began to get nervous. What if Dad became mesmerized by the mirror like she had? What if it had the both of them now? I reached with my mind, searched to see something with the third eye that I knew was part of me, yet it availed me in those moments of despair.
Then, my grandmother got a phone call, during which she began crying, her voice growing louder and louder. I felt the burning feeling of something slipping away from inside me, as though my heart had dropped from its perch and was replaced with the wickedness of finality. When she finished the call, my grandmother began hugging and rocking me.
“Is Daddy dead?” I asked. I felt sure that he was.
“No, Leah,” she said, crying through heaving breaths caught between pain-filled sobs. “But your Mommy’s gone to Heaven. I’m so sorry.”
I didn’t react, even when she pulled me close and held me to her. I wasn’t surprised. The part of me that worried for my mother knew that the house would win in the end. It would claim her, I knew, and it had. My feelings turned to anger, as if some former light had dimmed beneath a jaded veil. Then, my grandmother continued.
“Daddy’s okay, but he won’t be home for awhile.” The strain in her voice told me it was bad, but she composed herself. “He’s sick, right now, because of what happened to Mom, but he’ll get better. He’ll be back soon, sweetie. But you’re going to be safe here, with Grandma. You’re going to be just fine.”
She broke into desperate sobs. It would be another two years before I would see my father, Paul, again. He’d been committed to a mental institution. My mother, Janet, had hung herself from the balcony inside that fortress of evil. Dad had found her, swaying from a noose.
He would never be the same man again.
* * * *
Susan put the memoir down as she finished reading another chapter. Something about the bond between Leah and her mother kept bugging her. She skimmed over the last page and searched for the words that had jumped out at her.
...her shoulder-length, red hair hanging to the side...hazel eyes...
Red hair, hazel eyes, Susan couldn’t get the words out of her mind; she heard them like spoken clues being repeated over and over. Paul Leeds, though now balding, had light-brown hair and blue eyes; Leah is a natural blonde with the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, outside of her own. She pondered the possibility that Janet may not have been Leah’s biological mother. Would it be possible that she were? Certainly, Susan reasoned. Many children favor the looks of one parent over another, but Susan was sure that Leah had inherited those eyes and golden hair, not just from her father, but from a source that was not Janet.
She contemplated for a moment before she picked up the phone and dialed Paul, again. The phone rang several times before he answered. The tone in his voice was tiring of her.
“Hello?”
“Paul, it’s Susan again,” she said, pausing for his response.
“And...?”
“Paul, I know I sound like I’m prying, but since Leah is now my patient, there’s something I need to know before this excursion into the house begins.”
He scoffed and sighed, still intolerant of his daughter’s plans.
“Paul,” Susan said. “I think I just realized that there was something you didn’t tell me during the course of our therapy. Although, I admit, it may not have been pertinent at the time. However, I do find it to be crucial at this particular moment.”
“And that is?”
She wanted to ask the question as gently and tactfully as possible. She kept telling herself that this information was vital to her patient’s well-being.
“Paul, Janet was not Leah’s biological mother, was she?”
The deadness of silence lingered on the other end. He wasn’t answering her. She sat further up in her chair, cradling the phone as closely as possible.
“Paul, Leah may not know, but her subconscious seemed to bring that fact out in her memoir. You still haven’t told her, Paul. Why?”
He sighed once again, his breath like crashing static through the phone.
“What difference does it make, now, Susan? It’s over and done with!”
“It makes every bit of a damn difference, now, Paul! Don’t you understand? Leah mourned the life of this woman, thinking of her as her natural mother. She’s seeing the sight of her hanging, exactly as you described it to me, exactly as it looked in the crime scene photos. She’s seeing that, Paul, and she wasn’t even there!”
Susan heard the slight sound of weeping on the other end. She continued.
“Paul, didn’t you ever notice that the bond Janet had with your daughter was not the strongest? Don’t you think that Leah recognized that at some point in her life? She did Paul; she unconsciously wrote of it. I’m surprised that Leah hasn’t intuitively figured this out by now.
“So, I’ll tell you one thing, Paul. If you plan on showing up in an attempt to stop her, you will tell her the truth, no questions asked. And I will make sure that you do!”
Susan slammed the receiver of the desk phone back in its cradle. How could Paul have never explained this to Leah? Susan understood not telling her in the beginning, when she was five. But now, after all these years, what was the point in remaining quiet?
In the memoir, Leah had subconsciously painted a picture of a woman who was loving to her, but somewhat distant. Leah’s coming to terms with what happened to Janet could have occurred long ago, yet Paul chose to bury this secret with the memories of that house, why?
Unfortunately, for Paul, he’d thought the legend of Cedar Manor was over, that it had died. More unfortunately, for Paul, was that some legends never die.
In Room 208, Dylan and Leah waited for Sidney to return from the library, so that Dylan could address the team’s agenda for the day.
“Leah, you do know that this is short notice about entering the house, especially now, just before Christmas.” Dylan reiterated his skepticism of the whole idea, and when he continued, his voice changed to a whispering tone of understanding.
“Leah, I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to wait until after the holidays to enter that hellhole. You could just wait, relax your mind, and go in with a clear objective once the holiday madness has died down.”
“No, Dylan, you don’t understand,” she persisted. “I can’t relax my mind, not for a second. It won’t let me. The visions, the dreams, they’re constant now. The only way I’m going to get rid of them is by going in there and facing this thing once and for all.”
“I was afraid of this,” he said, grasping at one last hope that whatever was haunting Leah had not progressed to this point, but it had. He could see it on her face, which started to become forlorn, sleepless, while her demeanor became reactive and defensive. Her movements were nervous, fidgety, and agitated.
“Believe me, Dylan. I want this over by Christmas, if possible. I’m starting this New Year without Cedar Manor filling my mind and torturing my soul, and come Hell or high water, I’m going in there, even if it kills me.”
“Hey, don’t talk like that!” The voice whined and dragged out the word ‘that’ for an exaggerated second. Sidney walked through the door of 208 and jumped into the conversation. “C’mon, little sister,” he said, putting his arm around her. “We should all be happy; the world didn’t end yesterday!”
The Third Eye of Leah Leeds Page 11
