The Left Eye Curse

The cold ground bit into Agnes’s knees as she scraped at the earth, her breath forming misty clouds in the crisp autumn air. Her hand brushed something solid, and with a final heave, she uncovered an iron chest, heavier than it had any right to be. It lay in her hands, freezing to the touch, damp with the smell of mildew and decay. Strange carvings covered the surface, markings that twisted and tangled like vines, ending in a crude eye gouged deep into the lid.

She hesitated, but the chest seemed to pulse in her hands, begging her to open it, to feed some long-buried hunger. With trembling fingers, she pried the lid open, and the ancient hinges screamed, splitting the night with their terrible sound.

Inside was a pile of old, brittle photographs. She sifted through them, her breath catching in her throat. Faces stared back at her—faces that looked like her, that held her wide eyes, her sharp nose, her thin mouth. She was staring at her own family, her ancestors, a lineage of strangers.

But each one had a horrifying, impossible similarity. Every single one of them, no matter how young or old, was missing their left eye. The sockets were not faded with age or erosion. No, they were blank, gaping, black pits—too dark, too deep, as if they reached beyond the paper and into something… waiting.

She froze as the shadows around her seemed to move, closing in, swallowing the pale, ghostly light of the moon. She felt a creeping chill slide down her back, icy fingers brushing her skin. The faces in the photographs were too close, watching her, as if they were alive. Her mind reeled, nausea clawing at her stomach. She wanted to throw the chest away, to bury it deeper than she had found it.

But something compelled her to look again, and there, near the bottom, was a photograph that stole her breath entirely.

It was a woman—one who looked just like Agnes, down to the mole above her lip, the same sagging skin, the same stooped posture. The woman in the photograph was sitting on her own porch, the same peeling wood, the same cracked window behind her. She wore Agnes’s favorite old sweater, the one with the embroidered roses along the hem. And like the others, she was missing her left eye, a hollow void where something vital should have been. It was her, and yet, not her.

A sharp, stabbing pain bloomed behind Agnes’s left eye, a hot, needling ache that sent her reeling. Her hands shot to her face, pressing hard, but the pain only deepened, like a thousand needles burrowing into her skull.

A voice hissed through the air, thin and sharp as broken glass.

“You belong to us.”

The pain intensified, unbearable, as if some unseen hand were pulling on her eye from the inside. Her vision blurred, and her left eye felt as though it were slipping out of place, something cold and heavy tearing at her nerves, yanking her toward that endless, hungry void.

Desperate, she stumbled back, clutching at her face. But her fingers brushed only empty, gaping flesh where her eye had been. She choked on a scream, her other eye watering as she looked down. Her left eye dangled by a thin thread of flesh, a glistening, bleeding orb that seemed to pulse in her hand. She felt something cold and alive slither through her veins, tightening around her throat, her lungs, her mind.

A rasping, inhuman voice slid into her head, coiling through her thoughts, dripping into her like venom.

“Thank you, Agnes. I’ve waited so long…”

Her left eye tore itself free from her hand, hitting the ground with a sickening, wet thud. It began to roll slowly, of its own volition, over the damp earth, leaving a slick trail of blood behind it. Agnes staggered, feeling a gaping, hollow darkness where her eye had once been, her vision now blurred and incomplete, the world twisting in her remaining sight.

In horror, she watched as her eye rolled back toward the open chest, leaving a smear of blood on the photographs as it slipped into the shadows. And then, impossibly, her eye stared up at her from the photograph of the woman on the porch—the woman that looked like her. Its pupil swiveled, watching her, the whites yellowed, streaked with red, now part of that cursed image, trapped in a snapshot of terror.

Agnes tried to scream, but her throat closed as the shadows wrapped tighter, pressing into her chest like weights of stone. The photographs seemed to shift, to squirm, as though the people inside them were pushing against the surface, wanting to claw their way out. And then they began to whisper.

Her ancestors’ voices rose, raspy and raw, a choir of torment and rage, filling her head until she thought it would split open.

“We watched… we waited… and now, we see through you.”

She staggered back, clutching at her empty socket, but her hands came away slick with blood. She stumbled, her fingers grasping at nothing, her legs weakening as she sank to the ground. Her mind was slipping, her thoughts scattering like leaves in a storm as she felt herself fading, her identity draining into that hungry void.

The last thing she saw was the chest, snapping shut with a final, hungry hiss. And then it began to sink into the earth, pulling the blood-soaked photographs down with it, dragging her eye into the darkness where it would rest with the others, watching, waiting for the next unlucky soul.

In the quiet morning that followed, there was no sign of Agnes, no trace that she’d ever been there at all—except for a single photograph left behind on the ground, half-buried in dirt.

It was a photo of an old woman, her face frozen in silent agony, her left eye missing. The skin around her mouth was stretched thin, as though she were trying to scream, her terror trapped in the image, forever etched in black and white.