The Glass-Eyed Saint

The first thing I noticed was that someone had begun to watch me at night. It was at its strongest when I would sleep in the upstairs bedroom of our house, a rambling Victorian that had been in my mother’s family for generations. If I slept on my back, I felt a pressure on my chest, like a cat had settled there, but there was nothing on the bed. If I turned to my right, facing the window, I would see a face pressed against the glass—but the window was three stories up, and the face was not human. It was pale, with a wide, lipless mouth and eyes like black glass that seemed to drink the light. I took to sleeping on my left side, facing the wall, but even then I could feel its gaze boring into the back of my skull, a cold, probing needle of attention.

Our family has a peculiar heritage: my grandmother on my mother’s side was Anishinaabe, and my grandfather was straight off the boat from County Cork. It’s a joke in our family that the women inherit two gifts: the sight from the native side, and the temper from the Irish. But it’s more than that. When a woman in our family turns thirteen, she begins to see things. My mother saw a woman in white in the barn for a year, and my aunt once woke up to find her name scratched in frost on the kitchen window. They both told me it passes, that it’s just a phase, but I knew this was different. The face at the window was not a ghost or a spirit in the usual sense. It was something older, something that had been waiting.

The house itself was a maze of shadow and creaking wood. We lived in the countryside of Ohio, surrounded by cornfields that turned to gold in the autumn and skeletal black in the winter. The house had been built by my great-great-grandfather, a man who dabbled in spiritualism, and the attic was filled with his relics: glass photographic plates, a brass sextant, and a pendulum that we were forbidden to touch. My bedroom was on the third floor, in the turret, and the window faced the old family plot where several generations were buried. I swore I could see shapes moving among the headstones at twilight, but that might have been my imagination.

The face at the window grew more persistent. It would appear as soon as the sun set, and it would stay until the first grey of dawn. It never blinked. In time, I began to notice that its expressions changed—not in the mouth, but in the eyes. Sometimes they were flat and empty, like a doll’s. Other times they burned with a sickly orange light, as if something was behind them, using them to see. And once, I saw a reflection in those eyes: a room I didn’t recognize, with high ceilings and a chandelier made of antlers, and a woman in a long dress standing beside a cradle. I knew she was looking at me, even though she was in the reflection. I knew because she smiled, and the smile was not kind.

My mother dismissed my fears. ‘It’s just your imagination, Willow,’ she said, but her eyes were uneasy. She told me that my great-aunt Maeve had seen something similar in the same room, and that she had taken to sleeping in the parlor for months. ‘It’s a family curse,’ she said, ‘but it passes. They all pass.’ But they hadn’t passed for poor Maeve. She died in her late twenties, under mysterious circumstances, and I had never heard the full story.

One night, I decided I had had enough. I had a dream that I was in that other room, the one from the reflection. I was standing before the cradle, and the woman in the long dress was behind me. I could feel her breath on my neck, and she whispered, ‘He wants a vessel.’ I woke with a start, my heart pounding, and the face at the window was pressed so close that I could see the individual pores in its skin, like the surface of a mushroom. Its lips moved, and I heard a voice, not in my ears, but in my mind: ‘Let me in.’

I screamed, and my mother came running. She found me huddled on the floor, pointing at the window, but there was nothing there. She held me and rocked me, and for a moment, I felt safe. But then I looked at her face, and I saw something in her eyes that I had never seen before: a flicker of that same orange light. She blinked, and it was gone, but I knew I was not mistaken.

The next day, I went to the attic and found my great-great-grandfather’s journal. The pages were brittle and yellowed, but the handwriting was tight and clear. He wrote about a man he had met in the city, a collector of curiosities, who had sold him a mirror that he claimed was from a witch’s cottage in the old country. The mirror was supposed to show the future, but when he looked into it, he saw not his own reflection, but that of a gaunt man with black eyes. He wrote, ‘I have made a bargain, but I do not know with whom.’ The last entry was dated three days before his death, and it simply said: ‘The glass does not lie. It will open.’

I found the mirror in the attic, covered in a velvet cloth. When I uncovered it, I did not see my reflection. Instead, I saw the room from my dream, and the woman in the long dress was standing there, right behind me, but I could only see her in the mirror. She was tall and gaunt, with a face like a skull covered in parchment. She smiled, and her teeth were long and yellowed. She said, ‘I have been waiting for you, child of my blood.’

I almost dropped the mirror, but a strange calm came over me. I realized that this was what my family’s gifts had been building toward. I was not meant to be a vessel for some spirit; I was the one who would break the cycle. I faced the woman in the mirror and said, ‘You have no power here. This house is protected by more than your curse.’

She laughed, a dry sound like rattling leaves. ‘Protected? Your ancestors made deals with me, generation after generation. Your great-great-grandfather gave me his life, but his blood remained. Your great-aunt gave me her sanity, but it was not enough. You, though, you have something they lacked: you have the sight and the temper. You have the fire of the Irish and the wisdom of the Anishinaabe. You can end this, but it will cost you everything.’

I knew she was right. I remembered my mother’s stories about the ‘old one’ in the trees, about the bargain that our family had made to gain the land. And I knew what I had to do. I took the mirror and threw it against the stone floor of the attic. It shattered into a hundred pieces, and each piece reflected a different face—the woman, the man at the window, and then, for just a moment, my own face, but older and weary.

The woman screamed, a sound that seemed to come from all around me. The house shook, and I heard glass breaking in every window in the house. But then, as quickly as it began, it stopped. The silence was deafening.

That night, the face at the window did not appear. I slept soundly for the first time in weeks. But in the morning, when I looked out the window, I saw that the cornfield was dotted with small, reflective objects. They glittered in the sun, and I knew they were the shards of the mirror, scattered across the land. I also knew that I had not destroyed the thing in the mirror; I had only banished it from the house. It was out there now, biding its time, waiting for the next woman in my family to turn thirteen.

I have seen the glass in the cornfield since, and sometimes, in the light of a full moon, I see the face of the gaunt man, looking up at my window. He does not smile, but I feel his gaze, patient and unblinking. I know that one day, the bargain will come due again. But until then, I keep the attic sealed, and I sleep on my left side, and I never look at a mirror without expecting to see someone else looking back.