The Glass-Eyed Mannequin

When I was six, my family moved to a sleepy town called Hollow Creek, where the only exciting thing was the abandoned department store on the edge of Main Street. It had been closed for decades, its windows boarded up, but the faded sign still read ‘Calloway’s Emporium.’ I was a curious kid, always poking around places I shouldn’t, and my best friend, Danny, was just as adventurous. One stifling summer afternoon, we found a loose board at the back of the store and slipped inside.

The air was thick with dust and the smell of decay. Sunlight filtered through cracks in the plywood, casting long, eerie shadows across aisles of rusted shelves. We crept through the store, our footsteps echoing, when we stumbled upon a display in the center of the floor. A mannequin stood there, sculpted like a woman, but unlike any I had ever seen. Its skin was cracked porcelain, and its eyes were not painted on—they were two clear glass marbles, glinting in the dim light. Danny laughed, ‘Look at that creepy thing!’ He poked it, and the mannequin wobbled, but its glass eyes seemed to follow us. We bolted, laughing, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had passed between us.

That night, I woke to a strange sound—a rhythmic tapping, like nails on a window. I looked out, but the yard was empty. The tapping seemed to come from inside my room. It was my closet. I froze as the door slowly creaked open, and there, standing in the shadows, was the mannequin. Its glass eyes were fixed on me, and its mouth, cracked and open, seemed to form a silent word. I wanted to scream, but my voice was trapped. The mannequin stepped forward, its joints creaking, and reached out a hand. I squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them, the closet was closed, and the room was silent.

I told my parents, but they dismissed it as a nightmare. Yet, the next day, Danny came to my house, pale and shaking. He said he had seen the mannequin in his window the night before, and it was holding a pair of scissors from my kitchen. Panic gripped me. We knew we had to go back to the store and destroy that thing. That afternoon, armed with a baseball bat and a can of lighter fluid, we snuck through the same loose board. The mannequin was no longer on the display. It was standing by the store’s main entrance, as if waiting for us. Its head tilted, and a grating voice scraped from its throat, ‘I’ve seen you both.’ We didn’t wait. I swung the bat, shattering its porcelain arm. Danny doused it with fluid and lit it. The flames consumed it, but as it burned, the glass eyes popped, and a sound like a scream hissed out. We ran, thinking it was over.

But it wasn’t. The next morning, my mother found a note on our doorstep: ‘I see you.’ The handwriting was scratchy, like broken glass. Weeks passed, and we tried to forget. But every night, I heard tapping at my window, and sometimes I saw a silhouette with glinting eyes. Danny grew paranoid, refusing to leave his house. Then, one night, he didn’t answer my calls. I biked to his house and found his parents frantic—Danny was missing. In his room, a message was scrawled on the mirror in red lipstick: ‘He came to me.’

I knew then that the mannequin had taken him. I returned to the burnt store, overgrown and forgotten. Beneath the charred remains, I found a trapdoor I’d never noticed. I pried it open and descended into a basement, where flickering gas lamps revealed dozens of mannequins, all with glass eyes, all facing a central figure. There, in the middle, was Danny, his eyes replaced with clear glass spheres, his body stiff as stone. The mannequin I had burned stood beside him, its glass eyes now the same as Danny’s. It spoke in a chorus of whispers, ‘You cannot destroy what is already dead. I see through the eyes of the taken. And now, you will see too.’ I stumbled backward, but the ground gave way, and I fell into darkness.

I woke in a hospital bed, my parents crying with relief. They said I had been found wandering the fields outside town, raving about mannequins and glass eyes. They brought me home, but I knew the truth. That night, as I looked in the mirror, I saw them—Danny and the mannequin—standing behind me. And when I blinked, my own reflection looked back at me with one clear, glass eye.