The Room with the Open Eyes

My mother and I had moved to a small coastal town in Oregon, into a house that was once a fishing lodge. It was a three-bedroom place with a musty smell of brine and old wood. Mom suggested I take the largest room, the one facing the ocean. I wasn’t keen on it because the room had two features I despised: a sliding glass door that looked directly onto the bed, and a bathroom with a window that faced the same direction. But I told myself, it’s fine, I’ll get used to it.

On our first night, I brought my dog, a border collie mix named Juno, into the room. Juno was a creature of habit, and she always insisted on sleeping on the bed, usually sprawled across my legs. But that night, she refused to enter. She stood at the threshold, hackles raised, and let out a low growl. I tried to coax her in with treats, but she wouldn’t budge. After five minutes of this, I gave up and just sat on the edge of the bed, trying to ignore the growing unease.

It was then that I felt it—a sensation of being watched. Not just from the window, but from somewhere inside the room. I glanced at the bathroom, and through the open door, I could see the toilet. There was a pile of towels on the floor that I hadn’t unpacked, and it looked like a person lying there. I shook it off, told myself it was my imagination. But the feeling persisted. I got up and closed the bathroom door, but the unease only grew.

Later that night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept staring at the sliding glass door, expecting to see a face pressed against it. But the glass was dark, reflecting only my own pale image. In the reflection, I thought I saw a second pair of eyes behind me. I turned around, but there was nothing. Juno was still in the hallway, whining softly.

I decided to check the other rooms. The house was mostly empty, as we hadn’t moved our furniture yet. In the second bedroom, I found an old armoire with a full-length mirror on its door. I usually avoided mirrors, but something drew me to it. As I stood before it, I noticed that my reflection seemed slightly off—one eye was a fraction higher than the other. I blinked, and it was normal. But then, in the mirror’s glass, I saw the reflection of the room behind me. There was a figure in the doorway—a tall, gaunt man with hollow eyes. I spun around, but again, nothing.

I hurried back to my room and called my mother. She came in, and I told her I couldn’t stay in that room. She laughed, said I was being silly, but she agreed to swap if I wanted. I thanked her and moved my stuff to the smaller room. But as I lay in bed that night, I heard a rhythmic thumping from the direction of the master bedroom. It sounded like someone pounding on the walls from inside.

The next morning, my mother complained of a nightmare about a woman with no face who stood over her bed. I insisted we leave, but she wouldn’t listen. Over the next week, things got worse. My mother would wake up with scratches on her arms, and she started sleepwalking, mumbling about ‘the eyes in the glass.’ I found her one night standing in front of the armoire mirror, staring at her own reflection, which seemed to move independently of her.

On the seventh night, I couldn’t take it anymore. I snuck into the master bedroom and lay down on the bed, determined to face whatever was there. The moment I laid down, the sliding glass door began to slide open by itself. Through it, I saw a figure emerging from the ocean—a woman, drenched, with long black hair covering her face. She walked toward the house, and as she approached, I realized she was the one from my mother’s nightmare. She had no face, just a smooth, skin-colored mask where her features should be. But in the middle of that blank expanse, there were two open eyes, wide and unblinking, fixed on me.

The eyes grew closer until they filled my vision. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream. The eyes were all I could see, and they were not human. They were like the eyes of a doll, glassy and dead, but somehow seeing beyond me. I heard a voice, not from the figure but from inside my head: ‘You see me now. You will always see me.’

When I came to, I was in the bathroom, staring at the toilet, which was now filled with black water. I ran out and called my mother, but she was gone. I searched the house, and finally found her in the second bedroom, sitting in front of the armoire mirror, rocking back and forth. She had drawn eyes on her own eyelids. She said, ‘Now I can see even when I sleep.’ I grabbed her, shook her, and we fled the house that night, leaving everything behind.

We moved to a different town, but I still can’t look at any reflective surface without seeing those eyes staring back at me. And sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see the woman standing at the foot of my bed, waiting for me to open them.