The Lady with the Claret Glass Eye

I was only a boy the first time I heard the singing, coming from the forest behind my family’s little house in Pine Standing.

“Once and twice a time, the end is nearly nigh. I cry upon the evening mist, my loss of love and lies. Never more, never more again I cry.”

I never knew what the words meant, but there it was, every night, like clockwork. Just the same way it had been as long as even Mr. Dunstable, the oldest man in town, could remember. The ghostly lady, singing her tragic tale into our dreams. The Lady with the Claret Glass Eye.

Now I hear her every night, without end. Behind the blackness I live in, it’s the only thing I can still hear anymore. It’s ruled my life from that day to this, and will continue to rule it long after it drives me to my death, just like it has so many others. Just as it will so many more.

It’s never a good sign to hear her song. Margaret Hodges, the mayor’s wife killed in 1764, blood trickling from behind the jagged, jutting piece of glass shoved into her right eye socket, where her husband gouged out her eyes for daring to stray to another man. For daring to see another than him. She cried buckets of blood from those sockets as he went on to slit her throat; they say on the ghost tour of the mansion, our town’s only tourist attraction, that the stains have never left the floorboards even these hundreds of years later.

But she didn’t die. At least, she didn’t die all the way. With her last breath, she stretched her arms out towards her lover, begging him not to leave her as he struggled to climb out the window. His scratches against the wood as her husband dragged him back in are still there to this day. She begged to be spared, if only to see her children just one last time. If only to see at all.

They say her ghost picked up the broken stem of the wine decanter her eyes were gouged with and stuck it in her right socket, hoping that it would help her see clearly again after taking her vision away. When it didn’t, when she could hear her lover screaming and her children crying and could not make out a single shape, she vowed revenge. The very next morning, the mayor was found dead on the floor, his eyes replaced with two shards of glass. He wouldn’t be the only one.

Men and children have disappeared from the town in their hundreds since her murder; they say every family has at least five members gone by her hand. And it’s always her. Officer Richardson might try to tell you about kidnappers and cold cases, but we know better. No one around here’s after a ransom, but lives and senses. All she wants is a new pair of eyes.

They say that if she chooses you, the first thing you’ll hear will be her song, over and over again, for days. Then, once you can’t stop singing it in your sleep, when there’s no one around who might come and stop her, she’ll creep into your house.

She’ll come in through the bedroom window; it’s always through the bedroom window, the very room where she died. Never mind that her home was a mansion and yours is a tract house. She’ll still climb the side of your house, singing her cryptic lullaby of disaster.

“Once and twice a time…” She’ll slither through your window, feeling along the walls with her bruised and broken hands, snapped by her husband when she tried futilely to fight back. She’ll sniff along the room for you, smelling for her baby, for her lover, for the scent of anyone human to drag back with her, her voice as sharp and as brittle as glass. Glass in your eye, piercing and prickling, tearing your retina to shreds with the broken end of a bottle.

“The end is nearly nigh…” You’ll look up from the floor to find yourself face-to-bleeding face with the weeping woman, thin as the mist on the breeze and white as salt except for the blood trickling down to the floor, puddling around your feet, which feel like you stuck them in quick-dry cement, unable to run.

“I cry upon the evening mist…” She takes your head in her hands, her touch as gentle as a butterfly with wings made of ice; the last thing that you see is your own reflection, trembling in a gleaming kaleidoscope of glass, watching her feel all over your face until her longing fingers find what they came for.

“My loss of love and lies…” Her finger goes-squish- right into your eyeball, in and out in seconds flat. Once, twice- and it’s over. Your blood mixes with hers in her embrace; you barely feel the whoosh of her sleeve as her arm flies into her pocket, taking your vision for her own.

“Never more, never more again I cry.” And licking the salty, red drops of your blood from her fingertips, she vanishes into the night, clutching you to her bosom as she takes off into the night sky and into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.

Where, now, where does she go?

“Once and twice a time… the end is nearly nigh…”

***

Amy Strachan is a new author inspired by dark fantasy, fairy tales, and classic literature. She holds a bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in writing from Marist College. When she isn't writing, you'll usually find her singing or crocheting.