The Moonlit Loom

I was maybe eight when we moved into that old farmhouse on the edge of Barlow, a town nobody’d heard of unless you’d missed the exit and ended up on the rust-belt roads that dead-ended in cornfields. My mom, her boyfriend Carl, my little sister Jess, and me. The house was a two-story Victorian that’d been converted into apartments, but we got the whole thing because nobody else wanted it. The owner, a shriveled man named Mr. Grimshaw, warned us about the stairs creaking, but he didn’t mention the attic.

Our bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of a hallway, with a slanted ceiling and a trapdoor in the corner. Jess and I shared a double bed with a sagging mattress. The trapdoor was right above a built-in dresser, with a rope hanging down from a ring. I hated that rope. It swayed sometimes even when there was no draft, and the door never seemed to sit flush, like it was just waiting to spring open.

For the first week, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined something up there, moving in the dark, listening through the plywood. Jess slept like a rock next to me, and my mom and Carl were down the hall in the master, and I’d hear their muffled TV until late. But I’d lie awake, staring at that trapdoor, counting the cracks in the ceiling until I finally dozed off.

That night, it happened. I woke to a pale light seeping through the curtains. The moon was almost full, casting a silver slash across the floor. I blinked, and my heart jumped: the trapdoor was open, hanging down like a black tongue, and the attic was a void above. The rope swayed gently, as if something had just let go.

I tried to shake Jess. ‘Jess, wake up,’ I whispered, but she was dead weight, her breathing slow and regular, and no matter how I poked her, she didn’t stir. I felt a cold sweat on my forehead. I wanted to call for Mom, but my voice was stuck.

Then I saw it in the corner of my eye, to my left, about four feet from the bed. There was something standing there, next to the dresser, barely visible in the shadow. It was tall, thin, and its head was tilted, as if it was looking at me, but I couldn’t see any eyes. It wore a long, flowing thing that might have been a robe or a sheet, but it moved in a way that fabric shouldn’t—like it was made of moonlight and dust.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I pinched my arm, hard, until it stung. I bit my lip. But when I opened my eyes, it was still there, and it had moved closer, now only a couple feet from the bed. Its form rippled, like heat haze, and I could hear a faint sound, like a loom clacking, rhythmic and patient. The sound seemed to come from the attic, but also from the thing itself.

I felt a warm trickle down my leg—I’d wet the bed. The thing tilted its head the other way, and the clacking stopped. Then it raised a long, pale arm and pointed at the open trapdoor above us. It didn’t have a face, but I knew it wanted me to go up there.

I shook my head, and I whispered, ‘No. Please no.’

But the thing didn’t come closer. Instead, it slowly backed away, toward the trapdoor, and started climbing the rope, hand over hand, its shape folding into the darkness. And as it went, the clacking started again, softer, like it was retreating, but also like it was calling me.

I stayed frozen, in a cold pool of urine, until the moon went behind a cloud and the room went black. I didn’t sleep again that night. I just stared at the dark shape of the trapdoor, which now hung open, but in the morning, it was closed. The rope was still. There was no sign of anything.

I didn’t tell anyone, because they’d think I was crazy. But I found a scratch on the inside of the trapdoor, deep in the wood, like a nail had dragged. And in the weeks after, I always felt watched, especially at night, and I’d hear that clacking, faint and far away, from the attic. But it was never as loud as that first time, and the thing never came down again, as far as I know.

Years later, when I was in my teens, I looked up the history of that house. I found that it had been a tailor’s shop in the 1800s, and the attic was a workroom. The owner, a man named Ephraim, had died in a fire that started in the attic. They said he was a recluse and a weaver who made tapestries out of human hair. They never found his body, but they found his loom, and its shuttle still had a strand of hair on it.

And I remembered that thing, pointing up, and I wondered if it was Ephraim, still weaving, waiting for a new hand to feed the loom. And I wondered if, in that brief moment, it had marked me, and if someday, in another moonlit room, I’d see it again, and the clacking would finally be clear, and I’d follow it up into the dark, unable to refuse.