The Weeping Machine

In the summer of 2019, I was fifteen, living in a cramped apartment in the industrial town of Jamshedpur. My mother, a frail woman named Sunita, was dying of a mysterious illness that the doctors had given up on. They said she had weeks, maybe days, left. Our home, a top-floor flat in a building that hummed with the constant drone of nearby factories, felt like a prison. The air was thick with the smell of rust and burnt oil, a smell that clung to everything, even my mother’s bedsheets.

I spent most nights on a thin mattress on the floor beside her bed, listening to her labored breathing. My father, Ravi, worked night shifts at the steel plant, often leaving before dusk and returning after dawn. The nights were the worst. The building was old, and the pipes groaned and clanked, but I had grown used to those sounds. What I wasn’t prepared for was the crying.

It started on a Thursday, around 2:30 in the morning. I was jolted awake from a dreamless sleep by a sound that was both alien and disturbingly human. It was a low, guttural wail, rising and falling like a siren, but thick with despair. It seemed to come from the walls themselves, as if the building were in agony. My mother was already awake, her eyes wide with terror. She reached out and grabbed my hand, her fingers cold and clammy. ‘Don’t move,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t make a sound.’

The crying continued, growing louder and more frantic. It was accompanied by a rhythmic thumping, like something heavy being dragged across the floor above us. But there was no floor above us; we were on the top floor. I squeezed my mother’s hand, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would burst. The sound felt like it was getting closer, pressing in on us from all sides.

Then, it stopped. The silence that followed was even worse. My mother and I lay there, frozen, barely breathing. After what felt like an eternity, a new sound began. It was a soft, mechanical whirring, followed by a metallic clicking, like a machine starting up. It came from the corner of the room, near the old air conditioner we never used. In the dim light filtering through the grimy window, I could see the air conditioner’s vents slowly opening, revealing a dark cavity. From that cavity, a faint, flickering red light pulsed.

I wanted to run, to grab my mother and flee, but she tightened her grip on my hand. ‘It’s the machine,’ she said, her voice a trembling whisper. ‘It’s been here all along. It’s the one that’s been making me sick.’ I didn’t understand. She started coughing, a wet, rattling sound that seemed to echo in the room. The red light from the air conditioner pulsed in time with her coughs.

Over the next few nights, the crying and the whirring became a regular occurrence. My father, when he was home, would hear it too, but he dismissed it as faulty pipes and a dying woman’s imagination. But I knew better. The machine in the air conditioner was alive. It was feeding on my mother’s suffering. I could see it now, a dark, oily shape within the vents, its red light like an unblinking eye.

On the last night, my mother was barely conscious. Her breathing was shallow, and her skin was pale as ash. The crying started earlier that night, at 2:00 AM, more pitiful than ever. I knelt beside her, holding her hand, tears streaming down my face. The air conditioner whirred to life, its red light burning brighter than before. The vent opened wider, and a cold, black tendril emerged, inching toward her bed. I screamed and lashed out, but my hand passed through it as if it were smoke.

The tendril wrapped itself around my mother’s ankle. She let out a weak moan, and the red light pulsed brightly. I watched in horror as her body began to shrivel, as if the machine was draining her life. I tried to pull it off, but it was like trying to grab water. ‘Mom!’ I shouted. Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked at me with a sudden clarity. ‘It’s not crying, beta,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper. ‘It’s singing. It’s a lullaby. It’s been singing to me since I was a child. It wants me to join it.’

With those words, her eyes rolled back, and she went limp. The tendril retracted, and the machine shut off with a final click. The red light faded, and the room was silent and still. I ran out of the room, screaming, waking my father who was sleeping in the hall. He rushed in, but it was too late. My mother was gone.

The doctors said it was heart failure. But I knew the truth. The machine had taken her. And now, every night, I hear it again. But it’s not coming from the air conditioner anymore. It’s coming from inside my own head. That same crying, that same whirring, and that same clicking. And I know, one day, it will call to me too. And I will answer.