Chapter 1
It was never my intention to return
to my father’s house. The old mansion was filled with bad memories and
shattered promises. I lost so many things in there, so many precious
belongings. It was there that I had lost a piece of my heart.
When I left for the last time, or what I
thought would be the last time, I
stormed out those humongous oak doors without ever glancing back, not even for a
second. I was seventeen back then, a mere child, alone and frightened. Now I’m
twenty-five, a man, and I’m still alone, still very frightened, though I knew
there was no reason to be. There was no longer anyone in that house to hurt me,
no one left to fear. My father was dead, and his old house belonged to me.
The cab driver at the train station didn’t
believe it when I first told him. “108 Pleasant Valley Road, please,” I said, slamming
the door shut behind me. The interior of the car was warm but not warm enough.
I rubbed my palms together, trying to ebb the winter cold from my hands. When I
left my Queens apartment, I got that dreadful, suspecting hunch that I had
forgotten something. It’s a normal fear, one that I believe everyone
experiences before departing on a long trip. However this time, my emotions
were speaking the truth. I had forgotten my black leather gloves, a horrible
thing to forget in the middle of January. Luckily, I had a black pea coat and a
gray beanie, both of them woolen, to shield the rest of me.
“108 Pleasant Valley Road?” The
driver turned to look at me, one hand glued to the wheel, the other around his
passenger seat. He was an older man, probably in his late 60s, with coarse
stubble that ran along his jaw, cheeks, and upper lip. There was long, gray
hair protruding from underneath his red beanie, which was pulled down to his
bushy eyebrows. Dark bags sagged below his eyes, and in his breath were faint
traces of rum. The stench should’ve sent me running, but I remained in my seat.
“Is this some sort of joke?” he asked, scowling. There was something in that
deep, gruff voice of his, some unidentifiable factor, that told me he was
uneducated.
“What’s so funny about it?”
“Well…nothing. But you said 108
Pleasant Valley Road.”
“Yes. That’s where I need to go.” ‘Yes,’ my father would always say. Never ‘Yeah.’
The man gave a brief pause. “Why?”
Again, I should’ve exited the cab.
The man was being boorish and intrusive, but instead, I chose to counteract his
rudeness with my patience. “I live there.”
The driver wrinkled his red,
vein-broken nose with confusion. “You live there?
You actually bought that place? Didn’t you hear what happened there?”
His questions were leading me to a
conversation that I didn’t want to have. My identity was something that I had
always sought to stray from. It was an overpowering shadow. It was one of the
reasons I left home. However, in this case, I decided to make an exception. I
needed someone to bring me to my destination, and this was the only taxi at the
train station. “I didn’t buy it,” I explained. “I inherited it. Can we please
just get going?”
“Inherited it?” Suddenly, a mixture
of understanding and intrigue illuminated the driver’s face. “You’re related to
Charles McCormick? Who are you, his son?”
I sighed and reached numb fingers for
the door handle.
The driver lifted his hands into the
air, as if conceding. “OK, OK, I get it.
No more questions. No need to get feisty. I’m just curious, is all. Just sit
back and relax. I’ll bring you to the house.” And so I withdrew my hand and
away we went.
We traveled in silence, though it was
never truly quiet. My head was
buzzing with troubled thoughts and painful memories. From the darkest corners
of my mind, I could hear my father’s voice bellowing at me. I spent the
entirety of the trip staring out my window, but every now and then, my
peripherals would catch the driver glancing at me from his rear view mirror.
I’m sure his head was buzzing noisily as well; buzzing with questions and
curiosity. Thankfully, he never spoke. The next time he did was to tell me that
we had arrived. But I had already known that several minutes prior, after we made
the right onto Reid’s Hill. Whenever I glimpsed that street sign, I always
knew…I was on my way home.
After making that right turn, my stomach
contorted until it felt exactly how Reid’s Hill looked. The cabby followed the
street’s twists and curves, winding this way and that. There were times where I
was certain that the rum would cause him to veer off the path, into the trunk
of a tree. Luckily, he managed to keep us on the street.
The road, which was as narrow as a road
could possibly be, was in the boondocks, in a desolate, wooded area that sat on
the outskirts of town. It was, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere. The
nearest store was a thirty minute drive, though cars were seldom seen here. The
road spanned approximately twenty miles and held only five houses, all of them
humongous. And one of them now belonged to me. Besides that, there was very
little life on Reid’s Hill, save for the abundance of trees that ran along
either side of the street. Back here, there were no neighborhoods, no street
lights or traffic lights, not even a stop sign. The only other road in the area
was the one I was now heading to. There were no cyclists or joggers, no
neighbors on an afternoon stroll, no children playing in the street. Every now
and then, we would pass the opening of a driveway, which eventually led to one
of the five mansions. Other than that, it was a dead, vacant place, especially
during winter. Without the greens of a summer forest, the area appeared dreary
and foreboding. The trees reminded me of black skeletons, their empty boughs
reaching out like gnarled, groping fingers. Living in this area, I always felt
as if I had been shunned from society, like my family and I had been exiled
into the forest for some horrific crime.
Up ahead, on the side of the road, I
spotted the decaying carcass of a male deer. Presumably, most people would turn
away from the sight, too disgusted to look on, but I was infatuated by it. One
of the animal’s legs had snapped clean off, as if it was more no more than a
brittle twig. Its mouth was gaping but not as much as the enormous hole in the
deer’s torso, where it was rotting from the inside out. I absorbed it, engraved
the image into my memory for the entire ten seconds that it took us to reach
the carcass and drive past it. Perhaps I would use the visual for one of my
stories. The next sight to meet my eyes, however, was one much more unsettling.
It was the end of Reid’s Hill. Straight ahead was only a blockade of woods. There
was only one way to go now. Left would lead me to my destination. It was the
road back to the hell that I had escaped several years prior. Pleasant Valley
Road. Home sweet home.
The driver made the left onto the
street, though truthfully, I had never really thought of it as a “street.” This
path took you directly to the front gate, to the only house on the paved trail.
Because of this, I had always perceived Pleasant Valley Road to be a
continuation of my driveway. “Well, we’re here,” the cabby informed me.
And so we were. It was another narrow
path, straight but precipitous. The taxi climbed up the steep hill, up to where
the only thing that awaited me was a dead end. The mansion lingered ominously in
the distance while at the same time looming closer and closer with every
second. Even from the bottom of Pleasant Valley Road, the house was still in scope,
its many towers and spires reaching for the darkening sky above. My body
shuddered, though not from the cold.
The cab slowed to a stop before the main
entrance. For most people, this was the barrier, the spot where Pleasant Valley
Road ended and the driveway to McCormick Manor began. It was a fifteen foot tall,
wrought iron gate, as black as the approaching night. The doors were held
firmly together by a horizontal post. The gate’s bars were twisted
extravagantly into a black sea of iron swirls. On the left door was a large,
golden “C” imbedded into the iron, on the right a golden “M.” It was the
original gate of Charles McCormick I, my great, great grandfather, with a few
technological features that had been added by Charles McCormick III, my late
father. The gate was stuck in between two stone columns, each of which was
topped with a black lamppost and a security camera. The lights wouldn’t flicker
on until 7 PM—that was how my father had set it—but the surveillance cameras
were always on, always watching.
The columns on either side of the gate stretched
out into walls, stretched and stretched until they enclosed the entire estate,
as if being in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a gigantic forest, wasn’t
reclusive enough. In the right wall was a second wrought iron gate, a smaller
one with a keyhole. It was the entrance to the gatehouse. There, the guards
would sit and wait and watch for any approaching visitors. But that was long
before my time here, before the guards’ jobs were made obsolete by the features
on the left column: a key pad and an intercom. Now these were from my time.
When I glanced into the rear view
mirror, I could see the astonishment in the driver’s eyes. “So what now? You
got to enter a code or something?”
“I do. Hold on.” I reached a hand into
my left jeans pocket. My fingers groped a set of approximately three dozen
keys, one for each car in the house. But the most significant one of them all
was the master key.
“I haven’t been this close to this place
in about…” The cabby took a second to reflect on his last visit to McCormick
Manor. “…forty-five years.”
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