The Salt Loom

Six years ago, when I was twelve, my father sent me to my room without supper for talking back at the dinner table. Our house sat at the edge of a dying mill town, where the river had turned the color of rust and the mills had long since gone silent. My room was in the attic, a cramped space with sloped ceilings and a single dormer window that faced the dead woods behind the house. I slammed the door, threw myself onto the bed, and stared at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like a weeping face. I was asleep by eight, the summer dusk still clinging to the glass.

I woke to a sound I’d never heard before, a wet, rhythmic sobbing that seemed to come from inside the walls. The room was pitch black, and my alarm clock glowed 12:00. The crying grew louder, then stopped abruptly. I fumbled for the lamp on my nightstand. The moment the light clicked on, something shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, and the bulb exploded in a shower of glass. In the sudden dark, I felt a searing pain across my face, four distinct lines of fire raking from my right temple down to my collarbone. I screamed and fell back, and then I remember nothing.

I woke to my mother’s horrified gasp. She had come to check on me and found me drenched in blood. The bathroom mirror showed four thin, parallel scratches, deep enough to leave raised welts, running from my hairline to my neck. They looked like claw marks, but we had no pets, and the only door to my room had been locked from the inside. The window was painted shut, sealed for years. There was no other way in.

The police came, but they found nothing. They suggested a stray cat might have slipped in through a gap, but my mother knew better. She saw the scratches and her face went white. She didn’t sleep for a week. I tried to move on, but every night, at exactly midnight, I heard the sobbing again. I didn’t turn on the light. I just lay there, heart pounding, until it stopped.

By the third morning, I noticed something strange. The top scratch, the one that began at my temple, was gone. Not faded, gone, as if it had never been there. I traced the skin with my finger, and it was smooth. I said nothing, but my mother noticed too. She examined my face with a trembling hand. ‘It’s healing,’ she whispered, but her eyes were filled with dread.

The next night, the second scratch vanished. Then the third. By the time only one remained, I was having nightmares of a woman with a long, pale face, her mouth open in a silent wail, her fingers like needles reaching for me. I woke each night at midnight to the sobbing, and I began to understand that the scratches were not wounds. They were threads. And someone was pulling them out.

On the fifth night, I waited. When the clock struck twelve, I didn’t reach for the light. I just watched in the dark. The sobbing filled the room, and then I saw it, a faint, shimmering shape by the foot of my bed, like heat rising off a road. It had the outline of a woman, but her eyes were empty sockets, and her mouth was a gaping hole. She was weeping, and as she wept, she reached out with a hand that had only four fingers, and she gently touched the last scratch on my neck. I felt a tug, and then the scratch unraveled like a strand of yarn, and the shape seemed to grow more solid, more real.

I fainted then, and when I woke, the scratches were all gone. My face was smooth, as if nothing had ever happened. But in the weeks that followed, I began to notice things. At night, I would hear the soft sound of a woman crying in the walls. And in the mirror, sometimes, I would catch a glimpse of a pale face staring back at me from the corner of my eye. I would turn, and nothing was there, but the reflection in the mirror would linger a moment too long.

I never told my mother, but I knew. She had taken my scratches, my wounds, and she had used them to anchor herself to our world. Now, every midnight, I hear her sobbing, and I know that she is waiting for something more. I just don’t know what she’ll take next. The scratches are gone, but the salt of my tears is not enough. She wants the loom of my bones, the thread of my soul. And I fear that one night, I’ll wake at midnight, and I’ll find that she has taken my voice, or my sight, or my memory, and I won’t even know it until it’s too late.

Now, I am eighteen, and I am still in that room. The window is painted shut. The door locks from the inside. But every time I close my eyes, I hear her weeping, and I feel her fingers tracing new patterns on my skin, patterns that don’t leave marks but linger just beneath the surface. I don’t know how much longer I can hold on. I don’t know if anyone will read this. But if you hear a sobbing at night, and you see scratches that heal too quickly, do not ignore it. Do not think it’s a cat, or a dream. It is her, and she is always weaving, always waiting, and she will always find a way in.

The last thing I saw before I woke from my final sleep was her face, no longer hollow, but filled with a terrible hunger, and she was smiling, and she was wearing my face as her own.

I look in the mirror now, and I see her. She has my smile. She has my eyes. And she is crying, because she is trapped in this room, in this body, and she knows that the only way out is to pass the curse on to another. The scratches are gone, but the loom is empty. And I am the thread.