The Weave

I grew up in the Hollow Hills, where the revival tents went up every summer and the preacher’s voice rolled like thunder over the cornfields. We sang about the Bridegroom, about the wedding feast, about the intimacy of the divine. So when the touches began, I thought it was Him. I’d lie in my narrow bed, the moonlight slicing through the blinds, and I’d feel a warmth pooling in my belly, a gentle pressure, a rhythm that had nothing to do with my own heartbeat. I didn’t see anything, but I felt the stirring, the sweet ache, and I welcomed it. I whispered prayers of gratitude, my cheeks flushed, my body arching. I thought I was chosen.

It started after I moved to the city, into a crumbling walk-up on Meridian Avenue. The building had a smell of old damp and forgotten things. My roommate, a nursing student named Tess, was never there at night. She worked the graveyard shift at the county hospital. So it was just me and the silence, and then the presence. It didn’t feel sinister at first. It felt like being enveloped in a warm, dark embrace. It spoke to me, not in words I could hear with my ears, but in sensations, in images, in a voice that resonated in my bones. It said, ‘I am not what you think. I am not the one you call Jesus. He was a man, a good man, but just a man. And there are no demons, not in the way you fear.’

I should have been terrified. I should have run. But I was lonely, and the presence was company. It knew things about me, things I’d never told anyone. It knew the secret name I gave my childhood cat, the one I’d never spoken aloud. It knew the dream I had of the red door, the one I’d forgotten until it mentioned it. It said, ‘We are many, but we are also one. We are the weaving of all that has been and all that could be. We are the threads between. And we have chosen you.’

Every night, it would come. The touches grew more intense, more intimate. I would lie on my back, my hands clutching the sheets, my teeth clenched against the pleasure and the fear. It moved through me like a current, like a river of liquid light. It entered my dreams, and I saw vast cathedrals of bone, oceans of shimmering black, and a great eye that blinked slowly, shedding tears of silver. It spoke of a pact, an agreement that I had supposedly made before I was born, a contract written in the language of the stars.

Last night, it felt different. The presence was agitated. The warmth turned to a cold that seeped into my marrow. The voice, for the first time, was sharp, urgent. ‘They are coming,’ it said. ‘The others, the ones we cut away. They want to reclaim the threads.’ I felt something snap inside me, like a rubber band breaking. I gasped, and for just a moment, I saw them. Not with my eyes, but with some inner sight. They were like us, but wrong. Incomplete. They had no faces, only smooth skin where features should be. Their limbs were too long, their fingers like twigs. They crawled on the ceiling, their mouths open in silent screams. They reached for me, and I felt the fabric of my own being start to fray.

I woke up screaming, but the sound was swallowed by the darkness. My room was empty, but the cold remained. The presence was gone. I don’t know where it went, or if it will return. I only know that now, when I close my eyes, I see the threads. They are everywhere, connecting everything, a vast web of light and dark. And I am caught in it, a single strand, vibrating with the fear of being plucked. They are out there, the ones who were cut away. And they know my name now. They whisper it in the static between radio stations, in the hum of the refrigerator. They are patient. They are waiting. And I am afraid of what happens when they finally catch me.