The Observation of the Glass-Eyed Woman

I have never been a superstitious man, not in the traditional sense. My childhood was steeped in the logic of science and the promise of technology. I devoured books on astronomy, built small circuits, and dreamt of machines that could measure the invisible. Ghost stories were mere entertainment, fodder for campfire giggles and late-night horror films that I watched with a smile. I knew people who claimed to ward off spirits with ridiculous rituals, and I laughed at their folly. But there was one event, when I was only six, that left a fissure in my rational armor, a crack that has never fully sealed.

It was the peak of summer, in the town of Kolhapur, where the air itself seemed to shimmer with heat. Like most families, we slept on the flat terrace of our house to escape the suffocating warmth of our rooms. The night sky was a canvas of stars, and the distant hum of crickets was the only lullaby. Our terrace was a simple concrete expanse, with a low parapet wall, and across the narrow alleyway stood another row of houses, their own terraces mirroring ours. In the house directly opposite lived an elderly woman, a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Kulkarni. She was a quiet, stern figure who always wore a crisp white sari and peered at the world through thick, round spectacles. She had passed away a few weeks before, and the house had been locked since.

On that particular night, I woke from a dreamless sleep. The world was still, save for the occasional dog bark. I lay on my thin mattress, staring at the sky, when a flicker of light caught my eye from the opposite terrace. There, I saw a figure. It was Mrs. Kulkarni, unmistakably her, standing at the edge of her terrace, looking directly at me. She was dressed in the same white sari, but her face was obscured by a strange, glassy sheen, as if her features were blurred behind a pane of frosted glass. In her hand, she held a small brass lamp, the kind used in rituals, but the flame inside was a cold, unnatural blue. She stood motionless, and despite the distance, I felt her gaze—two hollow spots where her eyes should have been, yet somehow they saw me.

My heart hammered. I wanted to shout, to wake my parents, but a strange paralysis held me. Then, the figure raised her free hand and pointed directly at me. Her mouth opened, but no sound came from her—instead, a terrible whispering filled my ears, a sound like dry leaves scraping across concrete, and yet it formed words: ‘We will count the stars together.’ I saw her lips move in a slow, deliberate rhythm, counting: ‘Ek, don, teen…’ Each number felt like a nail being driven into my chest. I shut my eyes tight, counting my own breaths, praying for it to be a nightmare. When I opened them, the terrace was empty, but the blue lamp still flickered on the parapet wall, then vanished like a snuffed candle.

The next morning, I told my mother, who dismissed it as a dream. But I knew what I had seen. Over the following weeks, I noticed something odd. The house opposite remained locked, yet every night at precisely 2:33 AM, I would find myself awake, drawn to the terrace. And she would be there, the glass-eyed woman, her form shimmering in the moonlight, always counting. Her numbers grew louder, more insistent. And one night, she did not just point—she motioned for me to come to her. My feet moved of their own accord, walking toward the edge of the terrace, toward the low wall. I was six stories up. A fall would be fatal. As I reached the edge, her counting stopped, and her voice boomed in my skull: ‘You are my final pupil.’

Just as I began to climb the parapet, a sharp pain jolted my hand. It was my father, who had woken from a nightmare, grabbing my arm. He pulled me back, shaking me. ‘What are you doing?’ he yelled. I sobbed, pointing at the opposite terrace, but there was nothing there. My parents moved our sleeping quarters indoors after that, and for weeks I could not sleep without a light on. The counting continued, though, fading into a whisper that only I could hear, a constant undertone in my life.

Years passed, and I buried the memory in scientific study, telling myself it was a hallucination born of heat and a child’s imagination. But the night before I left for university, I stood on the terrace one last time. The house opposite had been sold and renovated, but as I looked, a faint blue glow flickered in the top window. And in that glow, I saw her again, her glassy face pressed against the glass, her lips moving in a final count: ‘…twenty-nine, thirty. All present. My work is done.’ The light died, and I felt a cold settle in my bones. I never spoke of it again, but to this day, whenever I see a reflection in a window at night, I catch myself counting the beats of my heart, and I wonder if she is still waiting for me to complete her count.