The Glass Ward

I am 28 now, and I have lived in the coastal town of Port Blossom, Maine, for the past five years. My current home is a converted lighthouse keeper’s cottage, squat and salt-worn, with a single round window that faces the sea. I’ve never felt anything but calm here, even during the nor’easters that rattle the glass and moan through the chimney. But that old house—the one in the inland hills, the one with the glassed-in porch we called the “sunroom”—that was a different story. I don’t live there anymore, but I still dream of it, and I still have the key.

That house was a colonial with wide plank floors and a peculiar addition: a small, octagonal room built off the back, wrapped entirely in old, wavy glass panes. My family called it the “Glass Ward,” and it had been there since the 1800s, originally serving as a kind of conservatory. But as a child, I never liked that room. It was always cold, even in summer, and the glass panes seemed to hold the darkness differently than the rest of the house. The rest of the house was warm, full of the smells of woodsmoke and bread, but the Glass Ward had its own smell—like old newspapers and something faintly metallic.

One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother’s collection of antique hat pins. She had them in a velvet-lined box on the dresser in the Glass Ward, and she used to tell me they were from a time when ladies wore them to pin their hats to their hair. She died when I was eight, and I inherited the box, but I never wore them. They were beautiful—some with glass beads, some with mother-of-pearl, one with a tiny silver bird. But every time I stepped into that room, I felt as if the pins were watching me, as if they had little eyes in the beads. My mother would laugh and say I had an overactive imagination.

When I was about eleven, my father’s cousin, whom I’d never met, sent us a painting he’d done. It was a portrait of a seagull, but not a realistic one—it was done in stark black and white, with the bird’s head turned to the side, so one eye seemed to glare at you from the canvas. He’d painted it during a bout of illness, and he died before we received it. My father hung it in the Glass Ward, because it was the only room with enough natural light to show it off. From that day on, I couldn’t enter that room without feeling that the gull’s eye was following me, no matter where I stood. Even when I’d stand to the side, outside my field of vision, I could feel it there.

One night, I had a friend over, a girl named Rachel. We were eleven, and we dared each other to sleep in the Glass Ward on camping cots. We set up our flashlights and tried to make it fun, but around midnight, Rachel sat up and whispered, “Look at its eye.” I turned on my flashlight, and the gull’s eye—which I’d always thought was just black and white—was now a sickly amber color. And the other eye, the one we couldn’t normally see, was caught in the reflection of a window pane, glowing the same amber. We didn’t sleep there anymore. The next day, I took the painting down and wrapped it in an old sheet and put it in the attic. I didn’t want to look at it again. It’s still there, up to this day, I suppose, under the eaves.

But the worst event happened about a year later, when I was twelve. My parents had gone to a party up the coast, and I was left alone with my dog, a lazy golden retriever named Daisy. The house had the usual creaks and groans, but I was used to them. I decided to read in the living room, which was adjacent to the Glass Ward. The door between them was ajar, and I could see the pale moonlight filtering through the glass panes, casting long, distorted shadows. I don’t know when it happened, but I got the feeling that I wasn’t alone. I put my book down and listened. Daisy was asleep at my feet, but she suddenly lifted her head, her ears perked, and stared at the Glass Ward door.

Then I heard it: a low, chattering sound, like teeth clicking together. It was rhythmic, almost like a code. I called out, “Who’s there?” but the only answer was the chattering growing louder. Daisy began to growl, a low rumble that I’d never heard from her before. I stood up, my heart pounding, and I moved toward the Glass Ward, because I had to know. I pushed the door open fully, and I saw them: all of my grandmother’s hat pins, lined up on the windowsill, their points turned toward me, and they were vibrating, clinking against the glass. The silver bird pin was at the center, and its beak was opening and closing, producing that chattering sound.

The glass panes began to fog up, even though the room was cold, and I could see words forming in the condensation: “HELP ME.” I stumbled backward, grabbed Daisy, and fled to my parents’ bedroom, where I locked the door and hid under the covers until dawn. When my parents came home, I was a shaking mess, but I couldn’t tell them the full truth—they would have thought I was crazy. I only said I had a nightmare. But I never set foot in that room alone again, and I made my father remove the hat pins. I told him I was afraid they’d get lost, and he humored me, putting them in a safe deposit box at the bank.

I moved to Port Blossom after college, and I’ve never gone back to that house. But last week, I got a call from my uncle, who had been staying there while he worked on restoring it. He said he found an old key in the attic, taped to the underside of a rafter, and with it, a letter addressed to me. He mailed it to me, and when I opened the envelope, the key was blackened with age, and the paper was brittle. The letter was written in my grandmother’s handwriting, and it said: “Dear Margaret, if you’re reading this, then I’m gone. You must know the truth about the Glass Ward. It was built on an old well, one that was capped when the house was constructed. There’s something down there. I always felt it, and I think it was trying to speak through those pins—they were mine, but they belonged to her before me. She was a medium, your great-great-grandmother, and she trapped something in that well. But the glass, the glass kept it in. Now the well is open. Be careful. Burn this letter.” I laughed, because my name isn’t Margaret—it’s Alice. Then I looked at the key again, and I noticed it had a small engraving on it: “To the keeper of the Glass Ward.” I don’t know why, but I’ve started having dreams again, dreams of that chattering sound, and I woke up last night to find my own hand writing the words “HELP ME” on the fogged window of my cottage. The key is in my pocket, and I can’t stop rubbing its blackened surface. I think I know what I have to do, but I’m terrified of what I’ll find when I go back.