The Loom’s Lament

My mother, a woman of quiet nerves, used to tell me of a place we lived before I was born—a crumbling flat in the shadow of a decommissioned steel mill in the town of Ashgrove. The mill’s smokestacks loomed like skeletal fingers over our building, and the air always tasted of rust and regret. My father worked the night shift at the mill, operating the ancient blast furnace that still coughed and wheezed, and my mother would sit alone in our third-floor flat, listening to the building’s groans.

One night, as she sat mending a tear in my father’s work shirt, she heard footsteps in the hallway. They were slow, deliberate, like someone pacing, waiting. The sound stopped at our bedroom door, and then she felt the weight of a presence on the mattress beside her. She tried to turn, but her body locked, as if a cold hand pressed against the back of her neck. She could only stare at the wallpaper, its pattern of faded roses, and listen to a low hum that vibrated through the floorboards. When the sensation lifted, she turned to find nothing. This happened nightly for weeks.

My father dismissed it as the building’s old pipes, but my mother knew better. She said the presence smelled of burnt sugar and motor oil, and that when she closed her eyes, she saw a loom, old and enormous, its shuttles weaving threads of darkness. She never told me more, but that imagery would haunt my own dreams.

I was born in that flat, and we moved when I was three, but the dreams began before I could walk. In the dreams, I was always in a vast, dim hall filled with rows of spinning wheels and looms, each clacking in a grotesque symphony. The air was thick with dust, and the walls were lined with tapestries depicting scenes of people mid-scream, their faces frozen in unheard terror. In the center stood the great loom I had seen in my mother’s eyes, and on its frame was a half-woven tapestry, and in its threads, I saw scenes from my own life—my first steps, my mother’s tears, my father’s stoic silence—all already woven, predetermined.

As I grew older, the dreams became more vivid. I would wake with my hands raw and bleeding, as if I had been gripping threads. I told my parents, but they said it was just night terrors. ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ my father would say, his eyes fixed on the television. But I knew it was something more. The dream always ended the same way: a figure, faceless, draped in grey, would approach the loom and pull a single thread, snapping it, and I would wake with a jolt.

When I was twelve, we moved to a house across town, away from the flat and its ghostly presence. The dreams should have stopped, but they didn’t. They intensified. The loom now took up my entire field of vision, and the tapestries showed scenes not yet my life but the lives of those around me—my schoolmates, my teachers, my parents—all strung and fraying.

One night, I woke to find my hands stained with a dark, oily substance. I went to the bathroom to wash it off, and in the mirror, I saw a face looking back at me, but it wasn’t mine. It was the faceless figure, its face now shifting to reveal a visage that was a composite of everyone I’d ever known—a patchwork of their features stitched together with the same black threads. It smiled, and its mouth opened, and out came the sound of all their voices, distorted and pleading: ‘Weave us, weave us, don’t let us unravel.’

I understand now. That flat, the mill, the loom—it was all part of a fabric that I was meant to inherit. My mother’s encounters were its first threads, and my dreams are its shuttle. It wants me to take up the loom, to continue the weaving, to control the fates of those I love. And I fear that if I refuse, the threads of my own life will snap, and I will be left as nothing but a torn tapestry, forgotten in a dusty hall.

Tonight, as I write this, I hear the footsteps in my hallway, slow and deliberate, stopping outside my bedroom door. The smell of burnt sugar and motor oil wafts through the cracks. The loom in my dream is humming, its shuttles moving faster. I have only one choice: to pick up the shuttle and become the weaver, or to let the threads fly loose and watch everything I know unravel. In the morning, you may not recognize me, or anyone you love, for we will all be re-threaded in the loom’s design. But at least now, the story is known—a warning, perhaps, for those who hear the footsteps of the weaver.