The house was suffocating in its silence. Rafe Anders pushed the front door open and stepped into the dim glow of an afternoon that had dragged its weight across the sky. The air inside smelled faintly of dust and old coffee—stale, lived-in, abandoned all at once. Papers and open notebooks formed unruly islands across the hardwood floor, their edges curling upward like they, too, were trying to escape. Zara’s toys—a doll missing its head, plastic building blocks, a crayon-smeared stuffed bear—sat scattered across the room, tiny specters of an interrupted childhood.
“Zara?” Rafe called, his voice gravelly, worn thin by days of speaking to no one but himself.
From the far end of the room came a soft rustling. Rafe followed it, his boots whispering over the scuffed floor, past the sagging couch and the cracked windowpane that had been letting in more shadows than light lately. In the small nook by the window, Zara sat cross-legged on the carpet, surrounded by a halo of crayons—half broken, all heavily used. Her dark curls framed her face like a chaotic cloud, but her expression was steady, focused, as she dragged the crayon across the page.
Rafe stopped short. The sight of her—small, fragile, yet intent—left him caught somewhere between guilt and awe.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, softer this time.
Zara didn’t look up. “Hi, Daddy.”
“What’re you working on?” He dropped his keys onto the kitchen counter with a hollow clatter and crouched beside her.
She didn’t answer immediately, but when she did, it was calm, matter-of-fact. “I’m drawing the thread.”
“The thread?”
She nodded and turned the paper toward him. Rafe froze.
There it was, in her careful crayon strokes: the figure. It was glowing—not literally, but something in the way she shaded the edges gave it life. Its shape was undefined, more impression than detail, but it held a long, looping thread between its hands. The thread coiled outward across the paper like the rings of a tree trunk, or a ripple spreading across water.
Rafe’s throat went dry. He swallowed, forcing his voice to stay steady. “Where...where did you see this?”
Zara blinked up at him, her dark eyes calm as a pond’s surface. “They showed me in my dreams.”
Rafe’s pulse quickened, his heart thudding somewhere between disbelief and dread. “Who’s they?”
She tilted her head, like the question itself was strange. “I don’t know. They don’t say anything. They just show me.”
His mouth opened, then closed again. What was he supposed to say? That the thing in her dreams haunted him too? That he had spent sleepless nights trying to scrape its image out of his mind like a splinter lodged too deep? Zara, unbothered by his silence, went back to her drawing, crayon whispering over paper.
Later that evening, with the house steeped in the heavy blue of twilight, Rafe tucked Zara into bed. She lay curled under a patchwork quilt, her small face turned toward the wall, breathing slow and even. Rafe brushed a stray curl from her forehead, lingering a moment before standing. He turned the lamp off, casting the room into shadow.
“Night, kiddo,” he murmured.
“Good night, Daddy,” Zara whispered, her voice slipping out like a sigh.
He left the door cracked just enough to let in the hallway light. The silence pressed back in as Rafe made his way to the study, the room where he tried to corral the chaos of his life into piles of notebooks, sketches, and fragmented theories. He sank into the creaking chair, letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
It was then, as he turned toward the far wall, that he saw it.
At first, it was faint—a trick of the light, he thought. But as he leaned closer, the pattern resolved itself. Words. Loops and swirls that crossed and tangled over one another, as if someone—or something—had scratched them into the wall with trembling hands.
“Loom.”
The word repeated itself over and over, crowding the surface in a fevered, chaotic scrawl. The handwriting was uneven, desperate, as though it had been carved directly into the plaster. The loops stretched, curling into themselves, a pattern that wasn’t quite random, wasn’t quite sane. Rafe’s pulse pounded in his ears. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, his hand shaking.
He raised the camera, trying to steady it, but the screen flickered as though the phone were fighting him. The wall seemed alive now, the graffiti shifting, slithering. The letters blurred, their sharp edges softening, stretching into symbols he didn’t recognize—an ancient, alien script that burned at the edges of his vision. The phone trembled in his hand, the screen blacking out for half a second, then another. When it finally steadied, the wall was blank.
Rafe blinked. His breath came in short, sharp bursts. He lowered the phone and stared at the wall, where the scrawled word had been.
Gone.
But the memory of it lingered like a taste on his tongue, like the burn of staring at a light too long. Loom. The word filled his mind, crawling into every corner. He turned back to his desk, clutching the phone as though it could ward off whatever had just passed through him. His gaze drifted to Zara’s crayon drawing, now pinned to the corner of the desk. The glowing figure stared back, silent and formless, the thread coiling in its hands.
Rafe slumped back in his chair, his hands falling limply into his lap. The house was quiet again, but he could feel it, buzzing beneath the surface of the walls. Something woven, something waiting.
Something pulling.
Comments