What Lies Beneath The Clearing

15.5

Two days of no sleep, no food, and just enough water to survive had driven Lennox crazy enough that was she ready to die. Maybe that was the riddle, she thought. Maybe all of this was just a way for me to die the same way my mother did. Maybe she went crazy in here.

Lennox sighed as she ran her hand over her face. That's not what happened. It can't be. She rested her chin on her hand, staring in the direction of the stairs. In her exhausted state she couldn't help thinking about what Jay was doing. Probably panicking about where she was. Hopefully not beating Caleb or Skye to get the location of the manor. Hopefully they were at school studying, and as neglectful as it sounded, her father probably didn't even notice she was gone. She was hoping it would stay that way. She's caused him enough problems, the last thing she wanted to do was be a burden before she died too. If she died. There were too many questions that Lennox couldn't answer, not even to save her own life. As she watched the basement door her thought pattern resorted to one revolving around her mother's connection to the house, and how she still didn't know what exactly she was meant to be protecting when her mother passed over the key. Key to what? I never found it anyway.

As her thoughts fractured into different directions, she narrowed her eyes at the basement door. What if it's down there? The thought was daunting. But it was an unwelcome reality she hadn't considered until that moment. What if what I'm looking for isn't up here? It was the one place she hadn't looked because she'd been avoiding it since she'd arrived. Lennox jumped to her feet, grabbing the flashlight out of her bag and walking with determination over to the basement doors. She flung it open, not giving her fears any time to get the better of her as she fled down the stairs. Perhaps it was the lack of food and sleep, but the sound of the basement door echoing shut as she stood in the room seemed to just float over her head as she slowly scanned the room with the flashlight. Lennox spent the next few hours searching high and low, not realising until she'd needed it that she'd left her bag - including her water - upstairs on the ground floor. But when she'd previously tried to go back the door hadn't opened, as though it were jammed shut. Out of frustration, she began destroying whatever she got her hands on. Books, wood, and boxes were all victims of Lennox's anger until she'd drained her energy to the point of almost collapsing onto the floor with a humungous sigh. In her fit of rage, she hadn't noticed the well-preserved photograph that had fallen out of one of the books she had mindlessly launched across the room, but it caught her eye as she went to pick up her flashlight. She picked it up from the floor, blowing the dust off it as she shone her flashlight. "What the hell?" She frowned. The photograph, to Lennox's surprise, was of herself.