The Glass Eye of Mercy House

The winter of 2016 was the year I learned to count the cracks in the ceiling of my room at Mercy House, a halfway shelter for wayward girls. It was a place of grey walls and grey rules, but it was a roof, and after the fire that took my foster family’s home and their lives, I had nothing else. My name is Lydia, and I was nineteen, but I felt ancient.

The house was run by a woman who called herself Sister Miriam, though she wore no habit, only a perpetual grey dress and a thin smile that never touched her eyes. She had a glass eye, the left one, which she said was from a childhood accident. It was a milky white orb that sometimes caught the light like a dead star. I found it unsettling, but I kept my distance, as I did with everyone.

The other girls were a mixture of runaways and drug casualties, all of us with stories we didn’t share. There was a girl named Tessa, who had tracks on her arms and a laugh that was too loud. And there was a quiet one, Maya, who never spoke above a whisper and wore her hair like a curtain. We coexisted in a strained silence, each of us waiting for something to break.

It started with the night sounds. At first, I thought it was the pipes, or the wind. But soon I recognized it as a faint, rhythmic tapping, three taps in a row, coming from inside the walls. It would start at exactly 3 AM, and it would follow me if I moved to the bathroom or the kitchen. I would freeze, listening, and the tapping would pause, as if waiting, then resume once I started moving again. I told Tessa, but she laughed and said I was imagining things. Maya avoided my eyes and bit her nails.

One night, I woke to find my pillow wet, and not from drool. The water was cold and slimy, and it had a faint, coppery smell. I bolted upright, my heart hammering. The room was dark, but I could see a glistening trail of that same dark liquid leading from my bed to the door, which stood ajar. I followed it into the hallway, where the dim light cast long shadows. The trail ended at the door to the basement, which was padlocked from the outside—I knew, because it was always locked. But the lock was gone, and the door hung open, revealing a black void.

I should have gone back. But something urged me forward, a morbid curiosity, or perhaps a need to confront the fear that had been gnawing at my sanity. I descended the wooden stairs, each creak echoing like a gunshot. At the bottom, there was a faint light emanating from a door at the far end, a door I had never seen. It was made of iron, with a small, grimy window. As I approached, I saw a figure on the other side, a woman in grey, her back to me. I recognized the silhouette of Sister Miriam. But her hands were moving, stitching something on a piece of fabric, and she was humming a lullaby I didn’t recognize.

I pressed my face to the glass to see better, and that’s when I saw her turn. She looked directly at me, and her glass eye, that dead star, glinted with a malevolent light. I stumbled back, but my foot caught on something, and I fell. When I looked up, the door was shut, and the light was gone. I scrambled to my feet and ran upstairs, not stopping until I was back in my bed, trembling.

The next day, I was different. I felt a coldness in my chest that wouldn’t go away, and I could see things out of the corner of my eye—shadows that moved when they shouldn’t, faces in the frost that appeared on the windows despite the heat. I tried to tell Tessa, but she just sneered and called me crazy. I tried to talk to Maya, but she just shook her head and whispered, ‘She sees you now. It’s too late.’

Sister Miriam began to pay me special attention. She would leave little gifts on my bed, like a doll made of twigs and dried flowers, or a lock of hair that I was certain was the color of my own. When I asked her about them, she would smile with her thin lips and say, ‘For you, my dear. We don’t want you to feel alone.’ But her glass eye would fix on me with an unblinking stare that made my skin crawl.

Then the dreams started. In my dreams, I was walking through a long corridor lined with doors, and behind each door were the other girls—Tessa, Maya, and others I had seen but never spoken to. They were all dead, their bodies twisted and hanging from hooks, their eyes sewn shut with thick thread. I would wake up screaming, but no one came. The walls were thicker than I thought.

One evening, I decided to confront Sister Miriam. I found her in her office, which was cluttered with old jars containing specimens floating in cloudy fluid—fingers, eyes, something that looked like a heart. She was sitting at her desk, writing in a journal, and when I asked her about the basement, she looked up, and her glass eye seemed to gleam. ‘You saw the door, did you? Good. It’s almost ready.’ I asked what was ready, but she just laughed, a dry, rustling sound like dead leaves.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, counting the cracks, when I heard the tapping again, but this time it wasn’t in the walls. It was on my floor. I turned on my lamp, and there, on the floorboards, was a message written in the same dark, slimy substance: ‘YOU ARE NEXT.’ I screamed, and this time, the door burst open. Sister Miriam stood there, her grey dress stained with that same dark liquid, and in her hands, she held a long, curved needle.

She spoke in a voice that was almost gentle: ‘I was a collector of rare specimens, you see. But my collection was destroyed in the fire. So I had to start anew. You all are my specimens. But you, Lydia, you have a special quality. Your eyes.’ And then I remembered the fire. I had been the only survivor. But I had never told anyone how close I had come to the flames, how I had been saved by a stranger who pulled me out just as the roof collapsed. That stranger had been a woman in grey.

Now, as Sister Miriam advanced, her glass eye rolling to the back of her head, I understood. She wasn’t a human at all. She was a being of glass and shadow, a thing that fed on fear and life. And I had walked into her house, her Mercy House, with my eyes open. The dream of the dead girls behind doors was not a prophecy; it was a promise.

I ran. I ran down the hallway, but the doors were all locked, and the windows were boarded from the outside. The other girls were in their beds, motionless, their eyes open and staring at nothing. I could see the faint glint of needle wounds at their temples. I was alone. The house had become a living thing, its walls breathing, its floors bleeding that dark liquid.

Finally, I reached the basement door, and it was open, waiting. I descended again, but this time, the iron door at the end was ajar, and I saw inside a chamber filled with glass jars, and in each one, a single eye, still wet with life. In the center, on a pedestal, was a glass jar larger than the others, and inside it, floating in a murky solution, was a perfect, unbroken human heart. It was still beating.

I heard her footsteps behind me. I turned to see Sister Miriam at the top of the stairs, her silhouette framed against the dim light. She raised the needle, and her mouth opened in a smile that split her face. ‘You see, my dear? I’ve been saving the best for last.’ And then she plunged the needle into the jar, and the heart stopped.

At that moment, I felt a terrible freezing in my chest, and when I looked down, I saw that my own heart was visible through my ribcage, glowing faintly. She was pulling it out with her mind, and I couldn’t move. The last thing I saw was her glass eye, and in my final moments, I realized that it wasn’t a dead star. It was a doorway, and on the other side, I could see a vast, dark expanse filled with other eyes, all watching me.

Now, I am in the collection. My body hangs in a room like the others, my eyes sewn shut, my heart in a jar on a shelf. But my consciousness still lingers, trapped in the endless dark of Mercy House. I hear the tapping in the walls, and I know it’s the others, trapped like me, trying to reach out to the new girls who come to the house. But they never listen. They never see. And when they sleep, we tap, tap, tap, whispering our warning: ‘Run, before she takes your eyes.’