The Weight of the Looms

The bus ride from the capital to the village of San Rafael was a descent into another century. Pavement gave way to rutted dirt, and the air thickened with the smell of wet earth and woodsmoke. I was eighteen, starting my first year at the university in San Salvador, but my student housing had fallen through at the last moment. A classmate, Luisa, offered me a spare room in her family’s home, but after a week of her grandmother’s constant praying and the rooster that crowed at three in the morning, I jumped at the chance to rent a tiny room on the edge of the village. It was cheap, absurdly so—twenty-five dollars a month, including water and a bare lightbulb that dangled from a frayed cord. The room was part of an old textile mill that had once been the heart of San Rafael. The mill was now a shell, its rusted machinery stripped and sold, but a row of workers’ quarters remained. My room was at the end of that row, its single window looking out onto a courtyard choked with weeds.

For the first few weeks, the room was fine. I slept deeply, lulled by the rain that drummed on the tin roof. But as the novelty wore off, I started to notice things. It began with the ceiling. The mill’s roof was high, and my room had a false ceiling of cracked plaster tiles. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I would hear something moving up there—a sound like dry reeds rubbing together. It was there during the day too, a faint scratching, as if something was trapped inside the walls. The villagers avoided the mill, I noticed. When I walked to the tienda, the old women would cross themselves. When I asked Luisa about it, she just said, ‘The mill is old, full of dust and rats.’ But rats don’t move like that.

Then the sleep began to go wrong. During the day, I would be exhausted, my eyes heavy, but the moment I lay down, a wave of dread would wash over me. I would jerk awake, my heart racing, certain that something was watching me from the shadows. At night, it was worse. I would hear footsteps in the courtyard, but when I peered through the window, there was nothing. I took to locking the window and the door, and I stuffed a rag into the gap beneath the door to keep out the night air. But the noises didn’t stop. They grew closer. One night, I woke to find the rag pushed halfway across the floor, as if something had tried to squeeze through. The next morning, I found scratches on the door, deep grooves in the wood.

My only friend in the village was an old man named Don Tomás, who had been a weaver in the mill before it closed. He was the only one who would talk about the mill’s history. ‘The mill was cursed from the start,’ he told me one afternoon, his eyes cloudy. ‘The owner, Don Aurelio, was a cruel man. He worked the weavers to death, and when they protested, he locked them in the basement. There was a fire, and many died. The machines were never cleaned. They say the looms still hold their shadows.’ I laughed nervously, but Don Tomás didn’t smile. He just warned me, ‘The room you’re in was Don Aurelio’s office. He used to watch over the floor from there. He never left.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening to the ceiling. The scratching was louder than ever, and there was a new sound: a low, rhythmic thumping, like a giant heart beating in the attic. I tried to ignore it, but the thumping grew faster, more insistent. I covered my ears with my pillow, but the sound seemed to resonate in my bones. Then, around midnight, the scratching stopped, and a voice—a dry, rasping voice—whispered, ‘Let me in.’ I froze. The voice came from the door. I clutched my blanket, my eyes fixed on the door. I saw the rag twitch, then slide aside. The door handle turned, slowly. I had locked it, but the handle continued to turn, the mechanism clicking uselessly. I knew then that the lock meant nothing. I jumped out of bed and pressed my back to the far wall, watching the door. It didn’t open. But the voice came again, from inside the room, right behind me. ‘You’re in my chair.’

I ran. I didn’t care about my things. I burst out of the room, across the courtyard, and didn’t stop until I reached Luisa’s house, pounding on the door until her father, a burly farmer, yanked it open. I was shaking, unable to form coherent words. He let me sleep on their sofa, and in the morning, I went back with a friend to collect my belongings. I told myself it was just anxiety, a bad reaction to the rural silence. But as I packed, I noticed something on the ceiling: a dark stain, roughly the size of a hand, that hadn’t been there before. It was shaped like a hand with long, tapering fingers, pressed against the plaster from the other side. I didn’t wait to find out what it was. I left San Rafael that afternoon, and the bus carried me back to the city, but the memory of that place stayed with me. Even now, in my apartment in the capital, I can’t sleep without a light on. And sometimes, in the quiet of the night, I hear that dry, rasping voice, and I see that hand, and I know that Don Aurelio is still waiting in his office, his looms still spinning out their web of shadow, patient as dust.