The Glass-Eyed Man

I haven’t touched my journal in over a year. Not since the night I stopped believing in the quiet. I used to think that silence was a comfort, a blanket of nothing that meant safety. Now I know that silence is just a pause, a held breath before the world decides to speak again.

My name is Elias. I’m twenty-two now, and I still live in the same dusty attic room in my family’s ancient house on Foxglove Lane. The house is a decaying Victorian relic, its bones groaning with every shift of the wind. My brothers and sisters have all moved out, chasing lives in the city, leaving me alone with the settlement that stretches for miles around us. It’s not the city, and the only sound is the wind, and the only light is the electric glow from my laptop screen.

I thought the bad times were behind me. For months, nothing had happened. No footsteps in the hall, no cold spots in the bathroom, no whispers from the walls. I had convinced myself that the presence I once feared had finally moved on, like the rest of my family. I even began sleeping with the lights off again.

Last Tuesday, I was woken by a grinding sound. It was a low, rhythmic scrape, like something heavy being dragged across the floor above my ceiling. I live on the top floor, and there’s nothing but an unused, impossible-to-reach crawlspace up there. I lay still, my heart a drum against my ribs. The scraping stopped, and I held my breath. Then it started again, with a slow, deliberate beat, like a beast limping in circles.

I grabbed my flashlight and a kitchen knife, my only weapons against the unseen. I crept into the hallway, my feet cold on the worn oak boards. The sound was coming from the attic access, a square panel in the ceiling that was painted over long ago. I pushed it open with the knife, dust and spiderwebs raining down. The beam of my flashlight revealed only darkness and the rough underside of the roof. Nothing moved. I slammed it shut, my hands shaking, and that scraping followed me back to my room, growing fainter and fainter, until it was just a ghost of a sound.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to tell myself it was the house settling, or a rat. But the next night, the scraping returned, and this time it was accompanied by a new sound: a low, gurgling voice. It seemed to seep through the floorboards and the walls, a wet, awful whisper that called my name—’Elias…’ The word wasn’t clear; it was slurred, as if through broken teeth. I covered my ears, but I could still feel it vibrating in my skull.

I begged the silence to return. I pleaded with the ceiling, with the air, with the unseen thing that haunted my home. I even called my brother, the one who had slept in this room before me, to see if he had ever heard such sounds. He said no, but his voice was strange, distant, as if he were speaking from a long tunnel, and he ended the call quickly.

The next day, I went to the town library to research the history of the house. The old librarian, a woman named Mrs. Whitfield, gave me a ledger. In it, I found a record from 1897. The house had belonged to a glassblower named Jonas Marrow. He was known for his beautiful, terrifying glass eyes that he crafted for himself. The ledger noted that he became obsessed with ‘capturing the gaze of the dead,’ and that his workshop, which was exactly where my room now is, was found burned to the ground one night. No body was ever found, just a single glass eye, melted and fused to the floor.

That night, I sat in my room, staring at the spot where the workshop would have been. The bedside lamp flickered, and the scraping began again, right beneath me, so loud that the floor vibrated. I saw a shape in the corner of my eye, but when I looked, there was nothing. But there was a faint glint on the floor, and when I knelt down, I found a small, perfectly round glass eye, its iris a spiral of deep blue and black. It was warm to the touch.

I picked it up, and the world tilted. I saw the room as it was in 1897. I saw a man with a gaunt face, his right eye socket empty, his good eye gleaming with madness. He was on the floor, bleeding from the mouth, and he was speaking to the dark ceiling: ‘I will give you my sight, if you give me your voice.’ Then he reached into his empty socket and pulled out a single glass eye, which he placed in a brass bowl on the table. I snapped back to reality, the glass eye still warm in my palm.

I know now what that thing wants. It wants a voice. My voice. It has been dragging its broken, glassy shape through the walls, and it’s getting closer. Last night, I woke up to find the glass eye on my pillow, its pupil a tiny, black dot. And when I looked into it, I saw my own face, contorted in a scream, but no sound came out. The gurgling was louder now, right by my door. I grabbed my coat and my keys. I’m leaving this house tonight, but I know it will follow me. It has my sight now, and it will have my voice. There’s a scratch on my throat that wasn’t there before, and when I try to speak, a wet, rattling sound escapes my lips. I’m writing this while I still can, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll have a voice to tell the world about the glass-eyed man.