Cameron Brogue didn't know if it was the secret that made his family so strange - or whether the secret was the result of some sinister streak that ran through the bloodline. No one of his generation even knew the secret, but it was there and it was undeniably evil.
He learned early on about the secret when family members changed the subject any time his great aunt, Lucinda, was mentioned. She was the younger sister of his great-grandmother, Rose. Lucinda was a beauty by all accounts who, according to the records kept in the old family Bible, died in 1865 when she was barely twenty. The secret lived on in the house, though. The children knew from the time they could walk that the basement was off-limits. No one ever said why. Cameron wasn't sure they even knew. But everyone seemed to know that there was something wicked down there that must stay hidden.
The grand old house outside of Richmond had been in the family since long before the civil war, and it was sometimes whispered that the secret had something to do with a certain Captain Parker of the Union army, with whom Lucinda had been romantically linked. It would have been a scandalous affair during those war years if the accounts were true. Cameron's great aunt Sophie had let it slip about the romance with the northern officer. "'Twas a broken heart that killed her," she'd said. Before that Cameron had thought that Lucinda died of pneumonia. Old Aunt Sophie had been senile, though, and didn't know what she was saying half the time. The story didn't exactly mesh with some of the other rumors Cameron had heard growing up. There were hints now and then that there had been a person living at the house about whom the outside world never knew -- locked up in the basement room.
Whatever the truth was, it was all history now, and best forgotten. In fact, Cameron might have forgotten the stories if there had not been other peculiar members of the family. One of his great uncles, it was said, had been a drunkard who didn't believe in sleeping indoors. He went totally crazy when he was put in jail for threatening the mayor with a knife and died in a prison for the criminally insane. Cameron had a cousin who talked about hearing voices when he was a young man. He was later swallowed by the drug culture in California, and lived there still somewhere on the fringes of society. Another cousin disappeared and hadn't been heard of for nearly thirty years. Then there was his sister Kathy Sue. She called herself Kat now and fancied herself a witch. She mixed potions with roots and rat's innards, read tarot cards, and crafted voodoo dolls for anyone willing to pay. It gave Cameron the creeps to step foot in her house. She'd point at him with a bony finger and say the strangest things. Last time she insisted his name was really Thurman.
At times Cameron worried about the genetic heritage of the Brogue family. He had one child, Cory, a son nearing his twentieth birthday. There had once been such hopes for the intelligent and talented boy, but none of them seemed destined to be realized. He had dropped out of college and had lost one job after another since then. What concerned his father the most was Cory's obsession with macabre themes. Cameron had thought it a "phase" when he started reading comic books around the age of twelve. He should have grown out of such childish fascinations, but morbid interests had a stronger hold on Cory now than when he was a kid. He spent hours reading horror stories and watching them on television. He collected news stories about serial killers and the ghoulish details of unnatural deaths.
Since his father's passing three months ago, Cameron had thought a lot about death, too. He didn't really have time to mourn, though. With his mother and father both gone, it was time to sell the old house where he had grown up. He had gotten married in the house, lived there with his wife, and become a father there, too. But now the house was much too large, and it needed too many expensive repairs to make staying on a practical choice. Besides, Cameron and Cory were the only two living there now since Cory's mother ran off to Idaho to join a cult nine years ago. They heard from her only once since she left. She wrote that she had found "enlightenment and true happiness" in union with the "holy one of God," and that they should forget about her.
Cory pretended not to care, but his father knew it had been hard for him, too. He used to be a happy kid, but Cameron hadn't seen his son smile in years. He might have taken him to a therapist or a shrink if there wasn't such a stigma about being mentally unbalanced. A person has to think about appearances -- and the future. Appointments with a shrink wouldn't look good in a permanent file. Maybe moving to an ordinary house on an ordinary street would help them make a fresh start. The ancient house with its disturbing secrets only fed into Cory's preoccupation with death. It would be better for them both to leave.
The sale of the house, though, would necessitate facing the stories about the old place and Cameron's strange family. He had been to the basement only on three occasions his entire life -- when repairmen needed to work on the furnace or hot water heater. He'd never been in the forbidden room at the far end of the basement or even looked through the doorway. The door was padlocked, and if there was a key to the rusty old lock, Cameron didn't know where it was. He had no desire to go into the room, but the realtors and potential buyer would want to see it. Cameron would have to saw the lock off to get in -- and he would have to do it soon. He couldn't let them go in until he knew what was there.
The night before the realtor was to come to do the paperwork before listing the old three-story house, Cameron took a hacksaw down the basement stairs. He was glad Cory hadn't gone out for the evening, but was instead upstairs reading. Cameron didn't want to be in the house alone on this night of all nights. He hated to admit it even to himself, but he was afraid. He considered asking Cory to come down with him, but in the off chance there was a justifiable reason for the ancient taboo, it would be better if his son was not present.
"It's just a door - it's just a room," he repeated as he walked across the cold cement to the gray door that had been locked his whole life. It was high time that reason and common sense challenged superstition and fables. But he felt like a disobedient twelve-year-old as he took the padlock in his hands and began sawing through the hard steel shackle.
Cameron wondered what his mother would have thought as he drew the blade back and forth across the rusty metal. Would she think it a betrayal? Probably. As strange as the family had been for generations - and perhaps for that reason - maintaining a normal appearance had been paramount. He could see it in his own generation, too. Peculiar members of the family were never discussed openly among family members. Cameron had learned most of what he knew about errant relatives from other sources, and usually by accident. The Brogues simply did not speak of unpleasantness.
His stomach fluttered when the blade finally broke through the shackle of the padlock. It took all of Cameron's strength to twist the rusty lock open enough to slide it off the safety hasp.
The door squeaked as Cameron slowly pushed it open with trembling hands, revealing a colorless bedroom that would have looked at home in a museum. The bed, which was small, was covered with a coarse wool blanket. It was next to a table and chair, which held a candle, a quill writing pen, paper, and an ink well. Crudely constructed shelves lined two walls of the windowless room; and stacked on them were books and piles of papers. An antique toilet seat with removable pot was in one corner, and next to it a small table holding a pitcher sitting in a bowl. Spider webs spanned every corner and everything in the room was covered with dust. Still, Cameron got the sense that when it was last visited, the room had been neat and orderly.
Could the stories about a prisoner in the basement room be true? Someone had lived there -- that was plain enough. It wasn't merely a sleeping room. Whether that someone was a prisoner was unclear, but the room was equipped like a cell, and whoever lived in the room was there long enough to write a great deal. A cold shiver ran down Cameron's spine as he picked up a yellowed piece of paper with writing on it that had been on the desk.
The air in the room was stuffy so Cameron propped the door open with the chair, then sat down in the doorway, blew the dust off the paper, and began reading. It was a letter dated, April 13, 1871
My dearest Reginald,
I doubt that you will ever read these words that I pen to you this night. In truth, my love, it is best that you do not know what has become of me since that day they sent you away. Perhaps as I write these words you will feel something in your heart that tells you that I love you still. I have not forgotten you even though it has been seven years since my lips have tasted yours. But maybe that knowledge is even too much of a burden for you. I want you to be happy, not like me.
We can never be together; my family has made sure of that. But I do not wish for you to live in the hell that has befallen me since our last meeting. I've been unwell, my beloved, and bewitched these long years. I am beset by demons who have found a way into my body and my mind. They scream into my ears until I cannot hear anything else. I am cursed and in misery. The voices say I am evil, that I am a disgrace, that I have brought shame on everyone I love. They are right. I know it must be true, but I cannot bear to hear their accusations all day and night. I have been unable to sleep because of them.
I have tried to kill the demons by starving them, but it is myself who grows thin and the voices grow louder. I've tried to rid myself of them by cutting them out, but have only weakened myself from the loss of blood. I cannot live in this torment. The only way to kill the demons and end my suffering is to end my life. This I will do at the first opportunity.
Good bye my love, Lucinda Lee
Cameron was stunned. It had been Lucinda who lived in the room - hidden away from the prying eyes of neighbors. His grandmother's younger sister hadn't died of pneumonia -- or a broken heart, either. And she didn't die in 1865 as it was recorded in the family Bible, but seven long years after that. Lucinda did something far worse in her family's eyes than have an affair with a Union officer: she'd gone crazy. Insanity was so unthinkable that they had locked her away in shame - adding to her intolerable pain. No wonder she thought that taking her life was the only way out. It was.
He sat motionless for the longest time, holding the letter. Looking around the graceless room, he tried to imagine what it had been like for Lucinda -- her family so ashamed of her that they held her prisoner - so ashamed that they told people she died to explain her absence. Cameron wondered how she took her life and how soon it was after she wrote that letter. He wondered what they did with the body when they had already buried an empty casket seven years before.
The family secret was a wicked one, all right, he thought. But the poor soul that occupied the basement room had not been wicked. She had been the victim -- of an evil that had been more concerned with what others thought than doing what was best for their loved one. Cameron looked up at the basement ceiling in the direction of his son's room.
THE END