The Glass-Eyed Hare

The year I turned six, we moved from our cramped city flat to my grandmother’s house in the rolling hills of Vermont. The house was a two-story colonial, freshly painted white with green shutters, sitting on five acres of overgrown pasture. My father had left us a month prior, and my mother, my two sisters, and I needed a fresh start. My grandparents took us in, and we soon learned the house had a peculiar history: it had been built by a reclusive folk artist named Elias Thorne, who had filled it with his strange wooden carvings and stained glass. The previous family, the Millers, had lived there for forty years, but they left suddenly after the old Mrs. Miller passed away in her sleep. No one in town would speak of the house beyond saying it had ‘a lot of character.’

My grandmother, a practical woman with a sharp tongue and a soft heart, gave us the entire east wing. My mother took the master bedroom, which had a view of the apple orchard, and my sisters and I shared a large room at the end of the hall. The room was painted a sickly yellow, and on the wall hung a single piece of Elias’s work: a wooden hare, about a foot tall, with glass eyes that seemed to follow you. My eldest sister, Clara, immediately claimed the bed closest to the window, while middle sister, Becca, and I fought over the one by the door. I lost and ended up in the middle bed, directly under the hare.

For the first week, nothing unusual happened. We unpacked, explored the house, and tried to adjust to the newness. But then, the house began to settle in its own way. I started waking at exactly 3 a.m., not to any sound, but to a feeling—as if something in the room was holding its breath. On the third night, I looked up at the hare, and I could have sworn its eyes were glowing faintly, a sickly amber. I told Clara, but she laughed and said I was dreaming. Becca, who was only four, began to speak in her sleep, mumbling phrases in a language no one recognized.

The unused living room on our side of the house was off-limits. My grandmother had sealed it with a padlock, saying it was full of my grandfather’s old junk. But curiosity gnawed at me. One afternoon, while everyone else was outside, I picked the lock with a hairpin (a skill I’d learned from a friend back in the city). The room was musty, layered with dust, and filled with Elias’s unfinished sculptures—grotesque faces, twisted animals, and a large, shrouded object in the corner. I lifted the cloth and found a full-length mirror, its frame carved with intricate vines and thorns. The glass was black, not reflective. As I leaned in, I saw a faint image forming: my own face, but older, with hollow cheeks and eyes like burned holes. I stumbled back, knocking over a stack of canvases. They were paintings of the previous Mrs. Miller, each one progressively worse. In the last, her skin was peeling like wallpaper, and her smile was too wide.

I never told anyone about the room. But the house seemed to know I’d discovered its secret. The next night, at 3 a.m., I heard a tapping from inside the wall. It was rhythmic, almost like Morse code. I placed my ear against the cold plaster and heard a voice, muffled and thin, whispering my name. ‘Lena… Lena… come see what I made for you.’ I covered my head with my pillow, but the voice grew sharper. I looked at the hare, and its glass eyes were now fully glowing, casting a warm light across my bed. The tapping stopped, and then came a sound from the unused living room—a heavy drag, as if something was being pulled across the floor.

The next day, I attempted to tell my mother about the mirror and the voice, but she was too busy managing the household, and my grandmother dismissed it as ‘house noises.’ ‘This old place is always groaning,’ she said, but her hands trembled as she poured her tea. That evening, Becca asked a question that froze everyone at the dinner table: ‘Why is there a lady in the mirror staring at me?’ My mother dropped her fork. My grandmother turned pale, and my grandfather, who was usually silent, muttered, ‘The Miller woman never left.’

After dinner, I couldn’t shake the image of the mirror. I stole back into the sealed room, this time with a flashlight. The mirror was uncovered, and in its black glass, I could see a figure standing behind me. I spun around to find no one. But when I turned back, the figure had moved closer. It was an old woman, frail, with a face that was a mask of sorrow. Her lips moved, and though I heard nothing, I felt the words in my mind: ‘He’s still here. He won’t let me rest.’ I understood she meant Elias Thorne, the artist. He had been obsessed with capturing the essence of his wife, and she believed that her death had somehow bound her to the house, to his art.

That night, the hare fell from its hook and shattered into pieces. Each shard held a glimpse of a memory—not mine, but of the Miller family. I saw Mrs. Miller lying in bed, gasping for breath, while a shadowy figure watched from the corner. I saw that figure moving through the halls at night, whispering secrets. And I heard a name: ‘Thorne.’

The next morning, I found my grandmother sitting in the kitchen, staring at the empty wall where another carving used to hang. She told me, ‘Elias was a distant cousin of ours. That’s why we got this house so cheap. He died in the attic, and no one told us. They said he kept his wife’s corpse in his workshop for a week, talking to it, until the smell forced them to take her away. His spirit lingers, and he wants an artist. He wants to trap another soul in his work. That’s what happened to Mrs. Miller. She was an artist, and he used her.’ My blood ran cold. My sisters had always been fond of drawing, and I had been doodling in my notebook. Was that all it took?

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I watched the hare’s shards glimmer in the moonlight, and I saw the glass eyes still intact, now lying on my pillow. They blinked. I heard the floorboards creak outside our room, and then the doorknob began to twist slowly. I screamed for my mother, but my voice came out as a whisper. The door opened, and standing in the shadow was a figure with familiar features—my father. But his skin was stretched tight over his bones, and his eyes were black. He pointed a trembling finger at me and said, ‘You shouldn’t have broken the mirror.’ Then he dissolved into a swarm of moths, which flew out the window, leaving me shaking.

I ran to the sealed room. The mirror was now clear as crystal, and in it, I saw my sisters reflected, but their faces were blank, like mannequins. I realized I had to destroy it. I picked up a heavy candlestick from the mantel and swung. The mirror shattered into a thousand pieces. But as the glass fell, it didn’t clatter to the floor—it hung in the air, each shard reflecting a different room, a different time. And in one shard, I saw the final piece of Elias’s art: a wooden figure of a girl, not yet finished. Her face was mine.

A cold wind swept through the room, extinguishing my flashlight, and I heard Elias’s voice for the first time, booming and enraged: ‘You’ve ruined my masterpiece!’ The shards swirled, forming a whirlwind around me, cutting my skin. I clamped my eyes shut, willing myself to wake up. When I opened them, I was in my bed, the morning sun streaming in. The hare was gone, the mirror was gone, and the door to the unused living room was plastered over, as if it had never existed. But on my nightstand, there was a small wooden figure, exquisitely carved, of a girl in mid-scream. Her face was crowned with a halo of jagged glass shards. And her glass eyes, when I looked closely, were my own. I have never been able to paint or draw since. Somewhere in this house, or perhaps in the final resting place of Elias Thorne, there is a mirror that shows not the reflection of the present, but the echo of the past. And I know, with a certainty that chills me to this day, that I am not the only one who has seen it.