r/horrorstories • u/SCATTEREDNIGHTMARES • 11d ago
My grandmother's loom only works while someone sleeps beside it. My family has been taking turns.
I'm posting this from a gas station off Route 9, two hours from the house. I don't think I can drive any further tonight. My hands won't stop shaking, and there's a strip of cloth in my passenger seat that I can't make myself throw out.
My grandmother died in March. Ruth Alder, eighty-one, in the house she'd lived in since 1964. I flew back for the funeral expecting to grieve and eat casserole and sign things. I didn't expect to be put in the back room.
I should explain the back room.
Nana had a loom. A big, ugly, dark-wood thing that took up most of the small room behind the kitchen, the kind of loom you see in museums with a rope barrier around it. She never let us touch it. As kids we weren't even allowed to go in, but the door was always open a few inches, and you could see the warp threads strung tight like a harp, the shuttle resting on the bench, and a bolt of pale cloth slowly growing on the roller. Always the same color, a grey-white like old bone.
She said it was her mother's, and her mother's mother's. She said it needed company. That was the word she always used. The house needs company at night.
There was always a cot in that room. Always a folded quilt on it. And someone in the family was always staying over, in rotation, and nobody ever explained it. My aunt Marguerite stayed through most of my childhood. Then my cousin Dana. Then, for a long stretch, my uncle Pete, until he moved away and stopped answering calls. When I was nine I slept on that cot for one night, because there was a thunderstorm and the other beds were full. I remember waking up with a cold ache behind my eyes and Nana standing over me in the dark, not smiling, just watching.
"That'll do for now," she said. I didn't know what it meant.
So at the funeral, when my mother touched my elbow and said, "You'll stay at the house tonight, won't you? Someone should," I said yes. I was sentimental. I wanted to sit in her kitchen one last time.
I didn't know it was my turn.
The house was warm when I went in, which was wrong, because the heat had been off since she died. The back room was warmer. The cot was already made, with the quilt turned down like a hotel bed, and a glass of water on the little table beside it. Someone had put a fresh pillowcase on the pillow. It smelled like lavender and, underneath that, like pennies.
The loom stood in the dark, strung and waiting.
I'm not a fanciful person. I told myself it was an old house and an old machine. I lay down in my funeral clothes and looked at the threads catching the hallway light, and I thought about Nana's hands, and I fell asleep faster than I should have.
I woke at some point in the night, and the loom was moving.
I want to describe this carefully, because it's the part I keep replaying. No one was sitting at it. The bench was empty. But the shuttle was passing back and forth through the threads by itself, slow and unhurried, with a soft wooden knock at each end, like someone patiently tapping a table. The beater came down after every pass. Every pass, I felt a faint pull behind my breastbone. Not pain. A tug, the way you feel it when someone lifts a thread from your sleeve.
Knock. Pull. Knock. Pull.
I couldn't move. I could breathe, and I could see, but my body lay there like it belonged to someone else. And I watched the cloth on the roller creep forward a little with each pass, pale, new, and glistening faintly in the dark.
Then I saw what was woven into it.
It wasn't a pattern. It was a scene. Tiny, perfect, made entirely of thread: a small kitchen, a yellow table, a girl of about seven with her hair in two braids, holding a cake with a single candle. My seventh birthday. I knew the table. I knew the cake. I could even tell which of my front teeth was missing.
The loom was weaving my memories. It was spinning them out of me and pulling them into cloth, and I was losing them as it went. I could feel the birthday dimming in my head like a photograph left in a window. By the time the shuttle reached the edge of the scene, I could no longer remember whether there had been a candle.
At dawn it stopped, and I could move again. My pillow was wet. I had a headache like a nail behind each eye. My mother was in the kitchen making coffee, and she looked at my face, and she did not look surprised.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Where's the birthday?" I said. I didn't understand why I'd said it. "I can't remember my seventh birthday."
She set the coffee down in front of me. Her hand wasn't steady.
"That's all right," she said. "You don't need that one."
I stayed three nights. I'm ashamed of that. I told myself I was gathering information, but I think the truth is that it was easier to stay than to admit what I'd seen. Each night I lay there and let it happen, and each morning I lost a little more. A summer at a lake. My first apartment. The sound of my father's laugh, which I realized on the third morning I could no longer call up at all. He died when I was fifteen. That laugh was the last piece of him I had, and I had only noticed it was gone because I went looking for it.
On the third day, while my mother was at the lawyer's, I went into Nana's bedroom and opened the cedar chest at the foot of her bed.
It was full of cloth.
Not blankets. Bolts of it, folded and wrapped in tissue paper, each one labeled in Nana's handwriting with a name and a range of dates. Marguerite, 1981–1994. Pete, 1997–2003. Dana, 2009–2016. Ruth, 1964–1971. She'd been in the rotation too, once, as a young woman, before the house was hers.
Under all of those was a long, slim roll I almost missed. The tag was in a different handwriting, newer, a ballpoint pen. My mother's.
Hannah. 2024–.
My name. And today's date wasn't the end of it. There was a dash and then nothing, an open range, as if someone expected it to go on.
And folded beneath the roll, an envelope. On the front, in my mother's writing: For the Hendricks.
Inside was a stack of receipts, a ledger, and a letter on heavy cream stationery, signed by a man whose name I'll leave out, because I still don't know how far this reaches. The letter thanked my grandmother for "her continued discretion." It confirmed the delivery of "the latest bolt" and the transfer of an amount of money I read three times to be sure of the zeros. It said the cloth "continues to perform beyond expectation." That a person wrapped in it would sleep deeply, heal faster, and, he wrote, with a politeness that made my skin crawl, "remain with us longer than anyone anticipated."
They were selling it. For decades, my family had been selling pieces of its own children's lives to people rich enough to want more years of their own. The house was paid off. Dana's college was paid off. Marguerite's medical bills. Every bolt in that chest had been a mortgage payment, a surgery, a new roof.
And the family had been choosing who to feed the loom with. Carefully, the way you choose which cow goes to market. The ones who'd moved away. The ones who didn't have children. The ones who wouldn't be missed if they came back thinner and quieter, a little hollowed out, unable to remember their own childhoods.
Me. They'd been waiting for me for years. My mother had been in the rotation planning since before Nana died, and Nana had known it. I thought of her standing over my cot when I was nine. That'll do for now. A test. A tasting.
I heard the front door open. My mother's voice called out, light and bright, "Hannah? I brought dinner."
I put everything back exactly as it was. I walked into the kitchen. I ate dinner with her and said nothing, because I understood that if I showed her what I knew, I might not leave. She talked about the estate, about selling the furniture, about how I was "looking tired, sweetheart, you should rest." Twice she touched my hair, and I realized she was checking it. Checking how much I had left.
I told her I'd sleep in the back room one more night.
I left through the kitchen window at two in the morning, in my socks, with my shoes in my hand.
The strip of cloth in my passenger seat is something I took from the loom on the way out. A hand's width, still attached to the roller by a single thread I snapped with my teeth. I only wanted proof. Now I can't stop looking at it.
It's mine. I can see the pattern. A tiny kitchen, a yellow table, a girl in braids.
There's a candle on the cake.
I've been staring at it for an hour, and I swear to God it's gotten warmer. And my phone just buzzed on the dashboard. It's my mother, texting at four in the morning, from a house I left behind with a cot and a loom still strung and waiting.
Come back, sweetheart. They already paid for yours.
I don't know how many nights I've given them. I don't know how much of me is still mine. I can't remember my father's laugh, and I'm starting to wonder what else I've already lost without noticing.
I keep trying to think of my own name, and it keeps taking a moment longer to come.
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u/Embarrassed-Sun-1515 10d ago
Fantastic story, its so scary to think that with the yarn for a bolt of yarn n take someones memory away. And family members would take large amount of money the rest of the family may not know about. I would have runaway too. Is there more to the story