The Glass Eye of the Lode

The day the mine swallowed the sky, I found my grandfather on the kitchen floor of our company house in Sutter Creek. His mouth was a dark cavern, and his eyes had rolled back to show only the milky undersides. My mother had called the ambulance, but the paramedics worked on his chest for nearly an hour with no luck. They said his heart had likely stopped long before my mother found him—maybe twenty minutes earlier—and that the brain damage from that lack of oxygen meant even if they’d revived him, he wouldn’t have been himself. So they declared him dead, and two men from the county coroner’s office came and took his body away in a black van.

Hours later, after we’d told our relatives—my aunts and uncles who still lived in the old mining town—we returned to the house. The porch light was out, and the front door was slightly ajar. I remember the smell of damp earth and copper that always clung to the place, especially after rain. We pushed the door open, and there, in the middle of the living room, lay a small, rough-hewn stone, about the size of a fist. It was the same gray-green color as the rocks that littered the tailings pile behind the house. But on its surface, inlaid like a real eye, was a perfect glass sphere—cloudy white with a dark pupil. I’d never seen anything like it. My mother, her face still puffy from crying, knelt down and picked it up. ‘It’s a miner’s talisman,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather carved these. He said they kept the mountain’s spirits at bay. This one must have slipped out of his pocket when he fell.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about how the stone had seemed to be looking at me. I got up for a glass of water and passed by the living room. The stone was still on the coffee table, but the glass eye was now facing the hallway, as if it had turned. I told myself it was just my imagination. But then I heard a sound from the basement—a low, rhythmic scraping, like a pick against rock. My grandfather had always kept his tools down there, but he’d been too weak to work for years. I crept to the basement door and pressed my ear to it. The scraping stopped. Then a voice, dry as dust, said, ‘You’ll need a new one. This one’s cracked.’

The next morning, I told my mother what I’d heard. She dismissed it as the wind in the old flue. But she also seemed uneasy, and she wouldn’t touch the stone again. She suggested we bury it in the backyard, under the dead oak. I agreed, and we did. But as we were covering it with dirt, I noticed that the glass eye had rolled so it was looking straight up at the sky, as if accusing it.

Two days later, my mother started talking in her sleep. Not just mumbling—real sentences, in a voice that wasn’t hers. She’d say things like, ‘The vein runs deeper than you think,’ and, ‘You should have sealed the shaft when you had the chance.’ I was terrified, but I couldn’t call anyone. The town’s only doctor had left a decadeago, and the nearest hospital was an hour away. I tried to wake her, but she’d just stare at me with wild eyes and then fall back asleep.

On the third night, I was sitting by her bed, holding her hand, when the house began to shake. Not violently, but a deep, rhythmic tremor, like the pulse of some great beast. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. Then I heard it again—the scraping, but louder now, coming from under the floorboards. And a voice, clearer than before, said, ‘You’ve had your warning. Leave the lode alone.’

I grabbed my mother and dragged her out of the house, into the cold night air. Behind us, the porch fell in with a groan, and the whole front of the house sagged, as if the ground had given way. I looked back and saw that the yard was covered in dozens of those glass eyes, all staring up at me, and in the center, where we had buried the stone, there was a dark hole, leading down into the earth, and from it came a smell of old rot and copper.

We never went back. My mother’s sleep-talking stopped, but she never fully recovered. She would sometimes stare into space and whisper, ‘He’s still down there, counting his stones.’ I still have nightmares about that night. And sometimes, when I’m in my own home, I feel a faint tremor under my feet, and I see a glint of glass in the corner of my eye. I’ve learned to never look too closely. Because I know that somewhere in that abandoned mine, my grandfather’s ghost is carving another talisman, and it’s waiting for me to come home.