The Hollow Tapestry

Mara had always prided herself on being a light sleeper. The slightest creak of the floorboards in their century-old farmhouse would rouse her, a habit born from years of tending to her younger siblings. But after the birth of their daughter, Ivy, sleep had become a foreign land, a territory she visited in restless, fragmented stretches. It was in that haze, three months into her maternity leave, that the first oddity occurred.

Her husband, Callum, had kissed her goodbye at dawn, his lips brushing hers as he whispered about the cattle needing early attention. She’d murmured something about being tired and rolled over, the warmth of the pillow enveloping her. But then, moments later, she felt it again—a soft, feather-light pressure on her lips. Not Callum’s stubbled, purposeful kiss, but something dry, almost silken. She groggily assumed he’d come back for a proper farewell, but her eyelids were lead, and she couldn’t summon the energy to acknowledge him.

The next thing she knew, she was suspended in a peculiar state of awareness. Her body felt distant, as if she were watching herself from above, yet she was acutely conscious of a weight pressing down on her, a rhythmic, intrusive motion. Her head lolled off the edge of the mattress, hair trailing toward the braided rug on the floor. She tried to call out, to lift her arms, but her limbs were stone, her voice a silent scream. It was like being trapped in a vat of honey, slow and viscous, every muscle refusing to obey. She could hear nothing—no breath, no clothing rustling—only the faint hum of the old refrigerator from the kitchen.

A cold, alien dread seeped into her bones as she realized this was not Callum. This was not anything human. The pressure grew more assertive, a force without body, and she felt a hollow ache in her chest, as if something were being drawn from her. Then, just as suddenly, it ceased. Her limbs unlocked, and she gasped, bolting upright in the dark, heartbeat thundering. She fumbled for the lamp, the yellow light casting long, distorted shadows. Ivy was still in her bassinet, sleeping peacefully, no sign of disturbance. She checked her phone: 3:47 AM. Callum wouldn’t be home for hours.

She told herself it was a night terror, a product of exhaustion and postpartum hormones. But over the following weeks, it returned—not nightly, but at odd intervals, always when she was alone in the house. She began to dread the mornings, waking with strange bruises on her thighs and a weariness that no amount of nap-time recovery could fix. She started locking her bedroom door, but it made no difference. The experiences would happen wherever she was in the house—once on the couch in the living room, once on the kitchen floor, her cheek pressed against the cold linoleum, her mind screaming while her body was a puppet of some unseen puppeteer.

Desperate for answers, she confided in her grandmother, who had always been a repository of old wives’ tales and cryptic warnings. Grandma Edna listened, her face growing ashen, before retrieving a dusty, leather-bound journal from her attic—a diary of their family’s women, passed down for generations. Within its pages, Mara found a pattern: every third generation, a woman was ‘visited’, as they called it. The journal described the exact same sensations—the brush of lips, the paralysis, the overwhelming pressure. One entry, dated 1912, from her great-great-grandmother, described ‘the invisible embrace’ and a ‘hollow man who feeds on vitality.’ The last entry, from her own mother, was cut short—a single, frantic sentence: ‘It comes for the infant. Keep her close.’

Terror solidified into a cold, hard knot in Mara’s stomach. She began sleeping with Ivy right beside her, the crib moved inches from her side of the bed. She kept a small, ornate cross under her pillow and read blessings over the baby each night. But the forces seemed undeterred. One evening, as she was giving Ivy a bath, she felt a cold draft swirl in the tiny room, and a whisper, so faint it could have been her imagination, brushed her ear: ‘Your daughter has my eyes.’ She spun around, the bathroom empty, but the faucet turned on by itself, spitting a stream of rusty water.

Desperation drove her to the local library, where she dug through town archives. She discovered that their farmhouse stood on land that had once been a waystation for a forgotten sect, a group that practiced ritualistic binding of spirits to the land. A map showed a well on the property, long since covered, that the sect used for ‘cleansings’. She found the well one afternoon, buried under a pile of rubble behind the barn. As she cleared the stones, a cold, putrid breath escaped the opening, and she felt a tugging at her gut, as if an invisible rope were connected to her spine. She stumbled back, clutching her belly, and when she looked down, she saw her skin, pale as death, with faint, net-like patterns of veins forming across her arms—like a tapestry, she thought, woven of shadow.

That night, she dreamed of a woman in a white gown, standing over the well, weeping. The woman turned to her, face hollow, eyes like black pits, and said, ‘I am the first. You are the last. The hunger must feed.’ Mara woke with a scream, but this time, she could move. She ran to Ivy’s crib, only to find it empty. Panic seized her as she searched the house, calling the baby’s name, but there was no answer. Finally, she found Ivy in the kitchen, lying on the floor, and above her, a swirling darkness coalesced into a vague, man-shaped silhouette. It turned its head toward Mara, and though it had no face, she felt a wave of pure malevolence.

Summoning courage she didn’t know she had, she grabbed her grandmother’s journal and placed it over Ivy’s heart. The moment the leather touched the baby, the darkness shrieked—a sound that was less a noise and more a sensation of splintering bone—and dissipated. Ivy blinked, unharmed, and smiled. But as Mara lifted her daughter, she caught her reflection in the window pane: behind her, the tapestry of her own veins had darkened, forming the outline of the man. And in the glass, his hollow eyes seemed to look through her, at Ivy, with a possessive hunger that said, ‘For now.’

Mara knows it’s not over. The well is still there, humming a subtle, subsonic frequency that she feels at the base of her skull. She researches night after night, but every ancient rite she finds to banish the entity seems to tie her more tightly to it. She cannot leave—the force seems rooted to the land, to her bloodline. She has moved Ivy’s crib into her bed, has lined the room with salt and iron, but sometimes, when she wakes, she finds strands of her hair—long, silky, not her own—wrapped around her fingers, as if to remind her that she is already part of its design. She has started to wonder if her daughter is the key—if the entity is waiting for her to grow, to become the next vessel. And in her darkest moments, she looks at Ivy’s sleeping face and cannot help but think: those eyes aren’t quite hers.

But she pushes those thoughts away, because she is a mother, and mothers protect their children. She is learning to fight, to guard her mind, to whisper her own incantations. Yet every morning, she wakes exhausted, with strange symbols scratched into the floor on her side of the bed. She hides them from Callum, who thinks she’s just overtired. She knows the truth: she is at war with something that has waited generations for her, and she is not sure she can win. But she will try. For Ivy. Forever.

And sometimes, when the wind howls around the farmhouse and the old well groans in the dark, she could swear she hears a woman’s voice, not her own, crying out, ‘Run. Run while you still can.’ But she cannot run. The roots of the land are in her blood. The Hollow Tapestry has been woven, and she is its newest thread.