25 Jun Looming

Posted at 16:07h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on June 25, 2025

“Looming”

Written by Micah Edwards
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 12 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 1 vote.

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I don’t know how long the weaver was at its work before I discovered it. It’s possible that I could have changed things if I had found it sooner, if I had paid more attention, if I had done things differently. It’s impossible to say, but equally impossible not to dwell on.

I’m a tailor. I rent a small shop, a little hole in the wall off a pedestrian mall. I think it used to be a laundry before I moved in. It has a surprising number of rooms jumbled into the small space, doors swinging out of odd parts of the walls to reveal tiny spaces more like closets than rooms. It works well for me. I always need more shelving to store my fabric, thread, and notions.

It’s amazing how much stuff piles up in a tailor’s shop. That was the entire problem, really. There’s no way to account for it all, no matter how hard you try. There’s always something lost, something rearranged, something missing. You can’t defeat the clutter. You have to learn to become one with it, or you’ll totally lose your mind.

The mannequins were out of place. That was the first thing I noticed. They’d been out of place for quite a while by the time it finally registered. Not the same out of place, mind you. They were moving.

Obviously, that’s insane. They weren’t moving on their own. I only mean that they were in different places day to day. Sometimes even hour to hour. Any time I wasn’t looking, really. It was subtle a lot of the time, but finally, I marked their foot positions with chalk and proved I was right. They weren’t within the marks when I came back. They had moved.

I didn’t think they were moving on their own. I wasn’t crazy. I assumed it was Olivia, my assistant. It was clearly some kind of joke she was playing. I didn’t get it, but that was fine. I often didn’t get jokes. It would become clear later, or she would explain it to me. Or she wouldn’t, maybe. It didn’t matter much. The point was: the mannequins were being moved, and I wasn’t imagining it.

There was a noise, too. It sounded like a loom, the continuous quiet clacking of the shuttle moving to and fro. It certainly wasn’t my loom. It was more for show than anything else, and neither I nor Olivia had used it in a year or more. Besides, I could see the edge of it a couple of rooms away. It wasn’t the source of the sound.

Now that I thought about it, I’d been hearing it intermittently for the past few weeks. Possibly longer. I’d dismissed it as traffic noise or something from a shop next door. But having recognized the sound, it was unmistakable. I even went over to my loom and threw the shuttle back and forth a couple of times. The sound was identical.

Oddly, after I stepped away from my loom, the sound ceased. It was like my shuttle had taken control of the sound by copying it.

I went back to my main workroom. All of the mannequins had their heads tilted back, their blank faces staring up at something unseen. Even the headless dummies had a pronounced lean to their bodies as if they too were trying to look up.

I knew it was silly to look up, but I did it anyway. There was nothing there, of course.

Olivia walked in as I was scanning the ceiling. “Something up there?”

“Did you move the mannequins?” I asked.

“Sure, I move them all the time when I need them for stuff.” She looked around. “I didn’t turn them so that they were all pointing at the front door, though. Feels like it might make the customers feel judged.”

I slowly lowered my gaze. The blank heads now faced the door of the shop. Those with arms had at least one raised in that direction, sometimes both. They appeared poised to accuse whoever next entered the shop. Olivia was right. It was definitely off-putting.

“Well, help me move them now,” I said. I steeled myself as I reached for the first one. I was ready for its plastic body to be warm, to feel its chest rise and fall with breath, to leap away as those rigid hands tried to grip my arms. None of that happened. It moved with no more difficulty or awkwardness than usual. Olivia, likewise, was able to shift the dummy nearest her with ease.

“Why do you have all of these, anyway?” she asked as we moved the last of them back against the wall. There were an even dozen of them, and although most were adorned in half-completed projects, some were wearing clothes that I was not working on, just for the look of things. Two were completely bare.

I’d picked them up one at a time over the years. It felt like the sort of collection a tailor’s shop should have. They were useful, after all, and they made people feel like work was constantly being done. Which it was, of course, but the dummies helped make it more visible.

I actually thought I’d had more than this. The others were probably just tucked away in the various nooks and crannies of the shop. They were wherever I needed them, surely. Even if they’d been moving like the others, none of them had gone far.

Still, I thought there had been more in the main workroom. Had Olivia moved them? No, she’d said she hadn’t. They had to be where I’d left them. Or possibly I’d just forgotten how many I had. Things did have a way of getting lost in this shop. I always had to be careful with customers’ items. It was unprofessional to let them see my confusion when things were missing.

I could hear the loom again. I walked over to a wall and pressed my ear against it. It was louder, as if it were just on the other side of the wall, but behind that wall was just another of the small rooms of my shop, and not the one with the loom.

I looked inside anyway. Scraps of fabric were piled on the floor. Bolts hung on racks on the walls. The loom was quieter until I pressed my ear against the same wall I’d just been listening to. It again sounded like it was just on the other side, the room I had just come from.

I stood in the doorway and pressed my hands against both sides of the wall. They were only a couple of inches apart. There was no possibility that the wall contained a loom.

“What are you doing?” asked Olivia from just over my shoulder. She moved as silently as the mannequins.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?”

“It sounds like—” I started, but trailed off. It didn’t sound like anything. The noise had ceased again. I listened to both sides of the wall. I heard nothing.

“You seem unsettled,” Olivia said. “You sure you shouldn’t be sitting?”

There was a soft shushing to her esses, a rhythmic pattern to her words. She sounded like the loom. Not wholly, not in any way I could put my finger on. It was just an undercurrent in her voice.

“I’m fine,” I said. I studied her narrowly. “You doing okay? You seem a little different.”

“Just my hair,” said Olivia, tossing her head to make it swirl. “What do you think?”

It looked like yarn. Not in a way I could name, just like the susurrus in her voice. But it had a quality about it.

“It looks nice,” I said.

She smiled. Her teeth reminded me of the matte plastic of the mannequins’ bodies, of the polished wood of the shuttle. I looked away.

The door chimed. Olivia went off to greet the customer. As she left, I saw a thick red string trailing behind her. It was attached to her shoe, and it was long enough that I couldn’t see the other end.

“Olivia,” I said, intending to tell her.

“One sec,” she said, in her voice like the loom. “Let me see to the shop.”

The string dragged along behind her. It didn’t seem to have an end. I wondered if she was unwinding an entire spool somewhere. I picked up the string and began to follow it back, away from Olivia.

It led me along for longer than was reasonable, around corners and through doorways and down dimly-lit corridors. It seemed wrong even for my warren of a shop, but the pieces around me felt right. Here was a wall of fabric-laden shelves. There was a table covered entirely in needles of various sizes. They were the sorts of things that belonged here, even if they didn’t look entirely familiar.

The hole in the wall did not belong here. It was huge, tall enough for me to walk through without ducking if I were so inclined. I was not so inclined. The edges were ragged, but not like broken drywall, wood, and bricks typically are. They were fuzzy like an unraveling shirt. Long threads led away from the edges of the wall, as if the materials that made it up had been converted to string. They all led to a loom.

It wasn’t my loom, although it looked like it. This one stood in an empty, well-lit room that resembled a trendy, open-plan converted attic space. The floors were varnished wood. The walls were bare brick, studded with an unnecessary number of windows.

In between the windows were wall hangings of scenes from my shop. Some showed only the rooms themselves, left in disarray as the projects accumulated. A few depicted Olivia or I helping customers. My mannequins featured in several, and Olivia and I each had one devoted just to depicting us.

Every one of the banners was stitched in loving detail. I wanted to take a better look, but the closer I got to the threads leading away from the hole in the wall, the more they began to resemble a spider’s web. My discomfort surged. I backed away.

Olivia was behind me, her second sudden and silent appearance of the day.

“You saw my string,” she murmured. “You shouldn’t just stop.”

She seized me by the shoulders and began to push me forward into the tattered portal. I screamed and flailed to get free, but her grip was too strong. Inch by inch, I was pushed forward. I could not make her stop.

The red string was still in my hands. A gleaming pair of shears was on a nearby table. I snagged it as I was pushed past, and I snapped the blades together on that string with as much force as I could muster.

I expected resistance, but the string parted as easily as any other. Behind me, Olivia screamed for a split second. The pressure of her hands vanished from my shoulders. I whipped around, ready to push her out of the way and run, but Olivia was gone.

In her place was a mound of clothes, fabric, and sewing supplies roughly the height of a person. A wadded t-shirt was the face. A draped scarf implied the arms. All of it was laced throughout with that thick red thread, but there were no actual stitches or connections. It was falling apart even as I turned, and at my first touch, the pile fell into unrecognizable disarray.

There was a slithering noise behind me. I spun back to see the cut end of the red thread disappearing through the portal. I made a grab for it, but it sped to the safety of the other room. As it did so, the loom started up again, pulling the threads from the edges of the hole as it did so. I leapt back, fearful of it expanding around me, but the hole grew no bigger. It was pulling from somewhere deeper inside the walls. I wondered how far those threads extended into my shop.

The shuttle raced back and forth across the loom. The figure operating it was blocked by the shuddering threads and the edge of the wall. I could see nothing more than white hands darting occasionally into view. Could it be Olivia in there, the real Olivia? Cautiously, I inched to the side to get a better angle.

The thing behind the loom was definitely not Olivia. It was not even human. It was a mishmash of mannequin parts jammed together into a horrific monstrosity. It had at least three arms and more than seven hands. Some were jointed, two at a time to a wrist. Others protruded from the central mass at random angles as if struggling to pull themselves free. All of them moved, their fingers wriggling and writhing, clutching at strings and chalk and blades.

The heads were worse. I could see four of those at first. Like the hands, they followed no discernible pattern for connection. One stuck out from what should have been a knee, affixed upside down with the thigh stabbing upward from its neck and a ring of fingers protruding from the scalp to dig into the shin below. One bobbed at the end of an arm, waving back and forth like the lure of an anglerfish. One was sideways in the middle of everything. A jagged mouth had been carved into its plastic contours, and this chattered open and closed as if trying to bite the loom in front of it.

The final head sat atop the body, such as it was. It turned to me and caught my eyes with its empty stare, and I realized it was not one face but two, crushed together with such force that the plastic had buckled and melted. Holes had been gouged out where the eyes should have been, one on each face and a slightly larger shared hole where the two met. I could see the inside of the mannequins’ skulls through the empty sockets.

Its conjoined face split open into an inhumanly broad mouth. It had glittering silver needles for teeth, and it screamed with a sound like tearing metal. Faster than an eyeblink, it leapt from behind the loom and scuttled toward me, its hands and feet clattering across the wooden floor.

It would have been smart to have shoved a table in front of the hole, or cut the threads coming from it, or anything like that. But it moved too fast for rational thought, and I panicked. I threw the shears at it and I ran.

I fled back through that maze of rooms that now mocked me with their blatant imitations. How had I ever believed I had that many needles lined up? Why had I not seen that the fabric shelves stretched far above where the ceiling could possibly be? How long had this thing been back here, making this lair? How much had I lost?

I hurtled through narrow corridors, bumping off walls and tables and praying that I was on the right path. I shoved fluttering drapes aside to find the path ahead lined with mannequins. I skidded to a halt, momentarily certain that I had circled around to find myself returning to the monster, but these all stood individually, not hurled together in a malign clump. They were mine, the remaining ones from my shop.

Those with arms were pointing to a door up ahead. They were not blocking my path, but guiding it.

Still, my heart pounded as I pushed past their plastic bodies. Was this a trap? I had no choice but to follow. I could hear the scraping pursuit from behind me, the terror racing ever closer. I dove through the door ahead, hoping against hope that it was the way out.

The mannequins had steered me true. I found myself in the front room of my shop, surrounded by mundane clutter instead of the piled mockeries from which I had just run. The door to the outside was just across the room, and I sprinted those final few steps—but as I touched the knob it fell apart in my hand, collapsing into a loose pile of string.

I heard a rasping laugh from behind me, metal on metal. I did not turn to look, but my gaze flickered to a mirror mounted on the front wall. The horror stood there, stopped in the doorway by an unyielding line of mannequins. It struggled to shove them aside, but could not budge their steadfast shield.

Before I could even wonder how long the barricade would hold, the monster reached down and seized a long brown string that was running across the floor. It yanked, and the string in my hand that had been a doorknob burned across my palm. I yelped and lost my grip.

The creature snarled as it whipped the string toward itself, folding it into an intricate cat’s cradle across four of its hands. To my shock, it pulled away not just the knob but the entire door, and where there should have been an exit to the street was only a blank plaster wall. It looked as though there had never been a door there at all.

I looked around the room in a panic. The floor was covered in strings, leading to the desk, lights, windows, and ceiling. They were everywhere, connected to everything. I was standing on them.

I moved to stand on more solid ground, to prevent the horrid weaver from pulling the boards out from under my feet. To my abject shock, one of the strings moved with me. I was not simply standing on it. I was connected to it.

The monster and I dove for that string at the same time. I, unconstrained by the mannequins, seized it a split-second before its many hands could grab hold. We engaged in a brief, desperate tug-of-war. I could not let it have the string. I held on as if my life depended on it. I knew it very well might.

I wrapped the string around my hands. I could feel it cutting into my skin, and then, at a final tug from the monster, it snapped. I felt a brief electric pain throughout my entire body at once. I screamed as I stumbled backward. Would I tumble into scraps as Olivia had?

I collided with the wall behind me, still very much flesh and blood. My relief was short-lived, however. Although my mannequins prevented the monster from passing the doorway, they could not stop its greedy, grabbing hands from seizing string after string. Windows vanished, dimming the room. The lights fell, darkening it entirely. I could hear the rush and rustle of whispering strings all around me as my shop was torn apart into nothingness, gathered up in skeins in the arms of that devouring thing.

The empty dark was all around me. Even the whispers faded away into nothing. I sat in absence forever. Time itself had been unraveled.

And then a touch, a gentle nudge. A plastic hand touched my wrist, guiding it forward. I felt wood, a frame, suspended strings. My loom.

I groped blindly around until my hands touched the shuttle. I did not know what was on the warp. I did not know what I would be making. But I knew I had not found this by accident. I had been brought to this for a reason.

I moved the shuttle timidly at first, afraid to lose it. I kept my hand on it and on the strings, ensuring they were still there. I could not lose them again. I could not be alone in the darkness anymore.

The reassuring hands of the mannequins were still with me. They anchored me in place, reaching past to hold the loom, to guide the shuttle. I began to throw it with more confidence. The mannequins pressed their bodies against mine, huddling tight, protecting me from the dark.

Eventually, a dim light came back, enough for me to begin to see my work. The strings stretched into my loom from all around, coming from the nothingness, pulling from nowhere. The mannequins’ hands worked in concert with my own, smoothing the emerging fabric, throwing the shuttle, weaving the cloth. I could not tell where they ended and I began. We moved as one.

The weaver had tried to steal everything from me. It had almost succeeded. But I was strong. I was capable. I would take it all back.

With many hands I wove, building the tormented corners and cubbies of my shop back as they should have been, stealing back what the monster had tried to rip away.

I smiled, and the mannequins smiled, listening to the quiet sound of the loom.