The Eye Beneath the Door

It was on the third night that the great-grandmother's voice took on an eerie finality. The boy, his small form shivering in the dark, listened as she cried out, "No! Sebastian, no! Don't touch me! Your hand—it's so cold, so cold! You should not be here! The grave is dark! The grave is dark!"

  In the fetid streets of Lankhmar, where shadows dwell long and fear breeds like rats in the sewers, a pestilence did fall upon the city. A silent, unseen force of ruin—swift and brutal—claimed the breath of a third of the populace within but a single day. The air itself seemed poisoned, thick with despair, as if death's hand hung over the heads of the living, waiting for them to falter and fall. The remaining souls—two-thirds, or perhaps less—found themselves teetering between life and the black abyss. Some, touched lightly, suffered only chills and fevers; others, cursed by a deeper sickness, fell into coughing fits that wracked their bodies, or into maddened delirium where reality bent and crumbled beneath the weight of their own minds.   It was in the Marsh District, where the damp crept into the bones of the dwellers and the air was rank with decay, that a boy of eight winters lived with his mother and his great-grandmother. Their home, small and crumbling, seemed to weep with the plague that gripped the city beyond its doors. The boy had never known a father, nor had his mother spoken much of the past. Only the great-grandmother, a frail relic of time, would murmur of days gone by. Her voice, dry and brittle as old parchment, often whispered tales of her husband, dead now these twenty-one years. She spoke of him rarely, but when she did, it was with a reverence born of a love long past and a sorrow long buried.   The plague had touched her first, laying its cold fingers upon her mind before it ravaged her body. At night, she began to speak with him—her husband, who had gone to the earth long ago. At first, her words were gentle, almost loving, as if she were simply recalling his memory. But soon, her voice grew fervent, as though the veil between life and death had thinned, and she no longer spoke of him, but to him.   "Sebastian… oh, my love," she would say, her eyes wide, staring into the dark corners of the room. "You’ve come back to me… why have you been so long?"   The boy, small and weak from his own fever, would hear these conversations from his cot, though he dared not look. He clung to his blankets, praying that the fever would pass and that the voice of his great-grandmother would cease its ghostly murmurings. Yet the nights passed, and her words grew stranger.   "The grave was cold, Sebastian," she whispered on the second night. "But I see you now, so clear, standing there—how you smile! But… why is your smile so dark? Why do your eyes look like the night sky? Do you see me, too? Yes… yes, you see me…"     Her voice twisted and trembled, a pitch that the boy had never heard before, sending cold tremors through his spine. The air seemed thicker in the room, oppressive, as if something unseen lingered just beyond the flickering light of the hearth. His mother, too weak and stricken with fever, lay in the other corner of the room, coughing weakly into the night, oblivious to the madness creeping ever closer.   It was on the third night that the great-grandmother's voice took on an eerie finality. The boy, his small form shivering in the dark, listened as she cried out, "No! Sebastian, no! Don't touch me! Your hand—it's so cold, so cold! You should not be here! The grave is dark! The grave is dark!"   And then, silence. A silence so thick it seemed to suffocate the boy where he lay. His heart raced in the stillness, each beat like a drum in his tiny chest. Then came a dull thud, a sound of flesh striking the floor. His great-grandmother had fallen.     Terror gripped him, but curiosity—horrid and insidious—compelled him. Slowly, he rose, his fever-dimmed mind pulsing with dread. He did not dare open the door, not yet. Instead, he crouched low, pressing his small face to the crack beneath it. What he saw, he would carry with him to the grave—if only he had lived long enough.   There, staring back at him from mere inches away, was the glazed, bloodshot eye of his great-grandmother. Her milky pupil, wide and unseeing, was locked in a terrible stare, fixed upon his own eye through the thin gap beneath the door. It was as if her very soul had been trapped within that final gaze, a stare that chilled his blood and froze his breath.     And then, in a voice so faint it barely reached his ear, she whispered one word—one terrible word.   "Sebastian."   The boy’s heart seized in his chest, and in that instant, death claimed him. He collapsed beside the door, his eye still wide in terror, staring back into the dead gaze of his great-grandmother.   Morning came, a cold, gray dawn breaking over the plague-ridden city. The boy’s mother, driven mad by grief and fever, found her son and the old woman locked in their ghastly death-stare. A scream tore from her throat, and in her madness, she ran into the kitchen, seizing a carving knife. She turned the blade upon herself, gouging out her eyes with frantic hands. Blood flowed freely as she stumbled through the house, her sightless form fleeing through the streets of Lankhmar, through the Marsh Gate, and into the murky depths of The Great Marsh, never to be seen again. The house remains. Abandoned, haunted by the memories of that terrible night. And it is said, by those who dare whisper of it, that any brave enough to kneel before the door and peer beneath the crack will see the same sight that drove a boy to his grave. Some claim to see the old woman’s bloodshot eye, still searching for her lost Sebastian. Others, the boy’s wide, terrified gaze, frozen in death. And, if the stories are to be believed, a few have even glimpsed the eyeless mother, her hollow sockets bleeding as she wanders forever into the dark.   But none who have looked beneath the door have left with their sanity intact.