The Loom of Unfinished Threads

During my sophomore year at Claymore University, a small Jesuit institution tucked into the rolling hills of western Massachusetts, I lived in Stonebridge Hall, a converted textile mill that had been donated to the school in the 1970s. The building still smelled of musty wool and machine oil, and its interior walls were covered in peeling murals of looms and spindles. The university’s archives claimed the mill had been abandoned after the Great Depression, but local historians whispered that it had served as a processing center for Japanese-American internees during World War II, though no official records supported that claim. I never gave much thought to the building’s past until the summer sessions forced us into its upper floors.

I was rooming with two friends, Dana and Priya, and a quiet, intense girl named Helen who was only there for a summer genetics course. We were on the fourth floor, in what used to be the carding room, where raw cotton was brushed into thin strands. The windows were small and high, and the radiators clanked even in July, as if the building were breathing. Dana and Priya and I had shared rooms in the newer dormitory, Brentwood, for two semesters, but during the summer, we had to squeeze into Stonebridge’s cramped quarters. We made the best of it, hanging tapestries over the grimy windows and stringing fairy lights along the exposed pipes. But there was a section of wall near the door that we couldn’t cover, because it was covered in a faint, greasy stain shaped like a hand, and no matter how many times we scrubbed it, the image remained, as if burned into the plaster.

The first time I noticed something wrong was on the third night. I woke to the sound of rhythmic scratching, like a giant beetle scurrying inside the wall. I turned on my phone light and saw that the hand stain was darker than before, and the fingers seemed longer, reaching toward the light switch. I dismissed it as a trick of the dimness and went back to sleep. The next morning, Priya joked that she’d dreamed of a woman with no face walking through the room, leaving a trail of loose threads. Dana laughed, but Helen looked pale, and she kept checking her phone for messages, as if waiting for someone to confirm a fear. I asked her what was wrong, but she just shook her head and said, ‘It’s nothing. Just the heat.’

Over the following week, the phenomena escalated. The scratching became a low hum that vibrated through the floor, and the hand stain began to weep a dark, viscous resin that smelled faintly of burnt sugar. Dana found a single strand of black hair coiled on her pillow, though none of us had black hair. Priya’s pencil case went missing, only to reappear inside a locked drawer, its contents spilled and arranged in a spiral. I started seeing a figure from the corner of my eye—a slender silhouette in a long, old-fashioned dress, standing at the foot of my bed, but when I turned my head, it vanished. The worst part was the feeling of being watched, not by a person, but by the building itself, as if every girder and beam were an eye trained on our small, temporary lives.

One sweltering afternoon, Helen finally broke her silence. She told us that her grandmother had been an internee at a camp in the Pacific Northwest, and that her great-aunt had died there, in a mill that had been repurposed as a textile workshop for the prisoners. Helen’s grandmother used to tell her stories of a woman who could make the looms sing, who would weave the most beautiful cloth from scraps of discarded uniforms, and who one day disappeared without a trace, leaving behind a half-finished bolt of cloth. Helen said that the woman’s name was Yuki, and that her grandmother had never forgotten her, because Yuki’s loom was said to have a curse: unfinished work would call out until it was completed. Helen had come to Claymore because she’d heard rumors that a piece of cloth from that very workshop had ended up in the university’s archive, and she wanted to see it.

We didn’t know whether to believe her, but that night, the humming grew louder, and the hand stain spread across the wall, its fingers unfurling like a fern. The air turned cold, and the shadows under our beds seemed to breathe. I heard the sound of a shuttle being thrown across a loom, a rhythmic clack-clack-clack, and then the faint sound of a woman humming a lullaby. I crept out of bed and saw that the hand stain had formed a small, dark doorway in the plaster, barely three feet high, and from behind it came a pale, flickering light. Before I could stop her, Helen knelt down and crawled through the opening, disappearing into the darkness. Dana and Priya screamed, but I was seized by a terrible curiosity, and I crawled after her.

The tunnel led to a vast, underground chamber that stretched beyond the limits of the building, its walls lined with rows and rows of looms, each one covered in cobwebs and dust. But at the center was a single loom, its threads glowing with a soft, golden light, and before it sat the figure of an old woman in a kimono, her hands moving with impossible speed, weaving a cloth of shifting colors. Helen stood beside her, entranced. The old woman looked up, and I saw that her face was blank, smooth as an egg, and yet I could feel her gaze on me, patient and sorrowful. She lifted a hand, and in it was a strand of black hair, which she offered to me. A voice, not from her lips but from the loom itself, whispered, ‘Complete the pattern, or remain forever unfinished.’

I reached out to take the strand, but as my fingers brushed it, the chamber began to shake, and the looms collapsed into dust. The old woman’s form crumbled, and the thread in my hand turned to ash. I woke up in my dorm room, gasping, with Helen kneeling by my bed, her hand on my forehead. She looked at me with an expression of relief and sorrow. ‘You came back,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t finish it.’ She showed me her wrist, where a thin red line ran across her skin, like a cut from a shuttle thread. ‘She wanted you to take her place,’ Helen said. ‘But you refused. Now she’s still here, waiting.’

In the weeks that followed, the phenomena didn’t stop. The hand stain reappeared on the ceiling, and at night, I could still hear the hum, sometimes like a lullaby, sometimes like a lament. Helen left at the end of the summer, and I never saw her again, but I received a postcard from her a year later, with no return address. On it was a picture of a loom, and on the back, written in her shaky handwriting: ‘She found the missing thread. It was in you. I’m sorry.’ I never went back to Stonebridge Hall, and I never told anyone except Dana and Priya, who still have nightmares about the woman in the kimono. I still dream of her, sometimes, standing at the foot of my bed, holding out a strand of hair that I will never take, because I know that if I do, my ending will be as unfinished as hers.