What the Left Eye Sees

Mabel Crudup basked in the May sunshine as she worked in her garden. Grinning, she inhaled the fresh scent of soil mixed with last night’s rain. Days like this were made for going outdoors and getting one’s hands dirty.

Mabel stabbed the tip of her trowel into the ground, digging deep and hoping she’d finally get rid of some troublesome weeds. Instead it hit something hard.

She blinked, pulled the trowel out, and tried again. *Clink.* Again. *Clink.*

Puzzled, Mabel wiped sweat from her brow. She then decided to dig with her hands as well as her gardening tool.

She found a few pebbles, a few earthworms, and a medium-sized metal box.

“What on earth?”

Mabel sank her hands down until they gripped the sides of the box, then pulled. It came free with a jerk, like a decayed tooth during a root canal.

The box was locked.

Mabel tipped it every which way and upside-down. Nothing. She shook it. Something shifted and rattled softly inside.

Women like her weren’t supposed to know about picking locks, but Mabel had locked herself out of the house more than once. So she’d watched several YouTube tutorials on how to use a bobby pin, then practiced.

Such practice came in handy when she took the box inside and pried the lock.

It clicked open with surprising ease.

“How…?”

The box was old, rusty, and encrusted with dirt even after Mabel wiped it off. It had to have been buried in her garden for years, if not decades.

The photographs inside looked even older.

Black and white, they were, displaying people in nineteenth and early twentieth-century garb. Mabel gaped as she flipped through them, for three reasons.

First, she’d spent enough time at the courthouse studying genealogical records to recognize each person as a member of her own family, a distant ancestor.

Second, every single one was missing their left eye.

Third, a message at the bottom of each picture issued a command: CAST IT OUT.

Mabel knew she should take the photos and burn them, or put them back inside the box and re-bury it. Far deeper than in the garden, and in a different place. Somewhere she hardly ever went. Next to the fence? She never stood out there.

However, she couldn’t stop quivering and gawking at her long-dead relatives – forebears, aunts, uncles, cousins, all with warm yet vacant smiles, their left eye socket staring into the void.

CAST IT OUT.

“What did you see?” whispered Mabel. “What were you trying not to see?”

None of them answered.

Over the next few days, the box and its dark treasures became her obsession. She went to the county courthouse to compare the sinister pictures with normal ones. Apparently, her ancestors had been photographed before harming themselves. What had happened for each and every one of them to do so?
Time and hunger eventually forced Mabel to venture out of the house and to the supermarket. She thought of taking the box with her but realized that was silly. The dead could wait, but she, the living, had to get some groceries.

At the store she saw her next-door neighbor, Carrie. “Hello, neighbor!”

Carrie smiled. “Good to see you.”

Mabel looked her best friend in the eye. On a whim, she closed her right one.

Carrie’s face was mottled with ugly purplish blotches on her pale cheeks.

Mabel opened her right eye. Carrie’s bruises disappeared.

“Mabe? Are you all right?”

*The question is, are YOU all right?* “Fine as ever. How about yourself?”

“Can’t complain. Hubby’s pretty stressed at work, though. Wish I could help him.”

*You do, dear. Oh, you do.* “Hopefully he’ll cheer up.” *And leave you alone.*

“I hope so. See you soon.” Carrie smiled a wan smile and pushed past Mabel.

As startled and dismayed as she was by the result of her experiment, Mabel was curious too. During the next week, she looked at people with new eyes – or, more accurately, her new eye. What other things could the left one see, but the right could not?

Others’ pain, for one. Injuries. She spotted more bruises and cuts on the bodies of those she scrutinized, and also arthritis and other internal inflammations.

Others’ secrets, for another thing. If she concentrated and stared hard enough, Mabel learned about a hidden truth – an addiction here, a fear there, even a compulsion concealed from the rest of the world.

Third and finally, and with lots of practice, others’ thoughts.

Her left eye saw. So did her mind.

Most people’s mental chatter was dull and innocuous, but Mabel’s heightened sight allowed her to behold blaring exclamations: “I hate my boss. I want to kill him.” “My daughter snorts cocaine.” “That man over there is stalking me.”

Only the bad. No joy or excitement, just never-ending misery.

Mabel’s health faltered. With every detail she uncovered, the worse she felt. Soon, every time she blinked, another person’s physical and mental burdens flashed behind her eyes. She couldn’t stop, no matter what she tried.

In desperation, she returned to the photographs of her relatives. All the same in their mutilation, all broadcasting the same dire sentence.

Someone had lightly buried that box and its contents, but had clearly intended it to be retrieved at a future date. The thing about the photographs was that Mabel was shocked by them, but the person who buried them wanted to keep them secret, or rather semi-secret. If the originator had wanted to destroy evidence of a scandal or family deformity in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, they could have simply shoved the photos on a coal fire.

*Who buried them, and why me?* thought Mabel. *Why was I the one to dig them up?*

*The curse runs in our blood.*

Mabel was stunned by this possibility. She had never believed in curses, but with her sanity in the balance, she was willing to believe and try anything once.

“My ancestors guided me here to this house,” she said to the stale air of her bedroom. “And to my garden. They wanted me to find the photos so I’d know what to do to stop the endless visions. They want me to follow their lead.”

The more she thought about it, the more this made sense to her. What didn’t?

“CASTING OUT my left eye,” Mabel grumbled. “No way in heck.”

Still, as she continued to deteriorate, the thought of doing just that appealed to her. It didn’t have to hurt all that much if it was quick, did it?

*Mabel.*

“What?” she answered herself. “Can’t you leave me be for a few seconds?”

*There’s someone you should talk to: Mary Tillman.*

“My great-grandmother? The last photo? She lost – er, removed her left eye, too.”

*She knew who started it.*

“Started what? The curse?”

*Not only that. The origin of the curse. Put on the cameo necklace you inherited from your grandmother. Touch it, and Mary will contact you.*

“Now I’m really losing my marbles,” said Mabel.

*You lose nothing if the cameo does nothing, but think of what you might gain.*

Mabel found her jewelry box and put on the necklace. Nothing happened at first –either physically or mentally – and then a quiet voice spoke in her mind:

*Hello.*

“H-h-hi.”

*I am Mary Tillman. You are my great-great-granddaughter. You have many questions for me, and I’ll answer the first one now. Yes, I buried the pictures. So many in our family line have fallen prey to the same affliction. We brought it upon ourselves, however. You are only now beginning to see the consequences.”

“Consequences of what?”

“The terms of our agreement. Let me show you.”

Against every fiber of her being, Mabel found herself closing her eyes.

Back and back she traveled, through a tunnel with a blinding light at the end.

Did it lead to heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?

Mabel found herself bound and gagged, on an overcrowded ship’s hull in the middle of the Atlantic. A storm was brewing and making the sailors so nervous that they feared losing control of their bladder and bowels.

Another voice spoke within her consciousness, quite unlike Mary’s. An ancient voice, deep yet with a rasp denoting age and a dark authority.

“The ancestral gods of your people have let you down. You are in the stinking hold of a chattel ship, taking you to a fate of being worked to death on the shores of a distant continent, never to see your family and homeland again. Yes, there is a bit of an eye-gouging downside to entering this contract, but look at how your life is going right now and ask yourself this. What do you have to lose?

“You are the descendant of slaves. I made them healthy, wealthy and free. The Crudup name, imposed upon you by your family’s owners, became well-respected in the communities where they lived. Your community too, Miss Mabel.

“This prosperity comes with a price: the higher you rise, the more you see others who are still struggling. The more you know their grief and pain. Your people have suffered much. That is what the left eye sees. No one can live with only joy and happiness. Sorrow and tribulation must be a part. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Mabel cried, “but I don’t agree.”

“You already have. As you suspected, the curse runs in your blood.”

“Is there no way out besides – ”

“No. Think of your ancestors in the photographs. The ancestors I helped.”

The rub of the cameo necklace against her skin jolted her out of her reverie.

Was it possible to live without seeing other people’s trials, as it was possible to live without one’s left eye?

Mabel Crudup decided to find out.

She found her gardening trowel and used it for its unintended purpose.

Hot blood sprayed out of her eye socket, drenching Mabel and the mirror in front of her. The remains of her left eye, strands of jelly, oozed down her cheek.

No more pain. No more agony over others’ troubles. No more sleepless nights.

Yet, just like her dearly departed in the photographs, she couldn’t stop smiling.

Credit: Tenet