Into the Tandrid Loom
A horror story in the genre of weird fiction.
This short story comes from my collection No One Came For Me: weird and primal horror stories.
I was twelve when I learned about “rites of passage” from a television show. Some Australian documentary about Aboriginal adolescents who go into the wilderness to survive alone for months, then return to society as adults. A walkabout. I wasn’t aboriginal, or any other way Australian, but the idea of rites of passage as a pan-cultural phenomenon struck a chord with me. There was something about the idea of going into something as a child and coming out of it as an adult that impacted me profoundly.
I immediately desired it. No, more than that – I needed it.
I knew I couldn’t actually go into the wilderness, though. There was no wilderness, to begin with. We lived in a town called Surrender, which was located on a forested island large enough to get lost in the woods for a day or two if you put your mind to it, but too small to survive alone for months. Or rather, too small for survival to be a challenge, and for solitude to be sustained. And regardless, school would start up again after the summer, and of course mom and dad would call the police as soon as I didn’t show up for dinner. So there would be no walkabout in the proper sense. But there could certainly be a one day trek, I thought. Like a symbolical adventure.
I snuck out before the crack of dawn, my wood carving knife tucked in my belt, mostly because I imagined that anyone intent on surviving in the woods would need a knife more than anything. For what, I wasn’t sure.
I made my way to the edge of town in the most beautiful twilight. The air was misty, like the tired clouds had come down from the sky to rest. Maybe that’s what they do when all the people are asleep and aren’t looking, I thought to myself. My long hair and summer clothes got all damp from passing through the moist haze.
The woods seemed holy and somber, shifting with their slow, windy breathing as they watched me, standing now at their entrance with a certain trepidation. I had spent half my waking time in these woods since I was born. Alone and in company, with family and with friends, on foot and by bike, playing games, foraging, camping. My best friend Ellen and I built a treehouse once, it took a whole summer but it was so worth it. Even though as soon as winter came, the whole thing ended up collapsing under the weight of snow and falling down from the tree.
What I mean to say is that I was not a stranger to these woods. But I had never come to them like this before. They had always been just a location in space, a place that I could be. This time the forest seemed to be more than a place, and I more than a person. We were two entities of some sort of common ground, and were about to meet on equal terms for the first time.
I entered the forest thrice, each time thinking to myself that this, this is the woods: first, when the gravel road from town tapered off to become the dirt road that snaked its way beneath the trees, then half a mile later, when I turned off from that road and onto an even more irregular hiking trail, and then, after some time, when I abandoned the trail as well and took to the pure, mossy landscape of the untouched wilderness.
I spent that whole day wandering aimlessly through the forest. I ate some berries and a few tufts of pale, papery-tasting moss. I drank from a stream. I cooled my feet in a stagnant puddle, and then walked barefoot until the moss and earth and cliff had rinsed off the stink of the slimy water. I never met another person or animal, though I heard some birds and saw some droppings. I was satisfied with my big and important self-administered Rite of Passage, having the best day of my life.
At the culmination of my trek I found a beautiful glade where I lay down to rest and look at the sky. Clouds were passing by slowly. I nodded off there, for a time, and…
Later, I woke up again in the glade with a strange sensation murmuring throughout my body. Groggy from sleep, I had a sense that something was off about me, I had become strange. A vague feeling that something of the glade might have rubbed off on me. Looking back, I think something might have really happened to me – or rather happened to my body – while my mind was busy dreaming. It sounds weird to say this, but I think it might have been the dream itself that happened to me. But I only remember disconnected fragments of it. A baby riding on the back of a wolf. A broken body lying naked at the bottom of a cliff. Ravens dropping globules of meat into deep sinkholes and infinite oceans. I don’t know.
Instinctively I wanted to leave something of myself behind when I left the glade, perhaps a primitive urge to restore balance, giving something for something. I gathered a handful of my hair and cut it with the wood carving knife. It took considerably longer than expected. I guess the knife was dull. Then I placed the hair underneath a rock. An offering of myself.
You have to understand, all the things I did in those woods seemed so natural to do at the time. I couldn’t explain to you why. However you judge my actions now, in the moment they were deeply symbolic acts such as come spontaneously to children. I was back home in time for dinner.
That night I fell asleep with a nauseating pain in my belly and a creeping sense that I had done something wrong, more wrong than any human or even natural law dictated. A strange phrase went into my mind from elsewhere, right at the moment of passing between worlds, and it stalked me into the realm of sleep: “into the tandrid loom”.
I woke up in the glade, standing upright in my nightgown. It was the middle of the night and the silver light of the moon wrought sinister shapes from the shadows of the trees surrounding me. I don’t know how I got there or how long I had been standing there, eyes open but asleep unseeing, facing the center of the glade. Behind me was the dark forest and all the horrors that inhabit the forest at night. I turned this way and that, sweating in the cool night air, to make sure nothing was standing right behind me. But wherever I turned, I was constantly turning my back on a new fear. When the glade was behind me I sensed a threatening presence watching me from there; turning around again I was left open to the danger that surely peered at me from beyond the dark trees. Everything was in shades of black and green, like bad bruises on night. I screamed and ran.
My heart raced, I ran crying, trying to push away a song from my mind that kept going on a loop unbidden. The haunting voice of a woman singing, “you must not go to the wood at night”, from a vinyl record my mom used to play, or so I think. The song was frightening to me at the best of times, the wood is full of shining eyes, the wood is full of tiny cries, and there are great puddles of blood on the world. The light thumps of my naked feet against the moss and roots kept the rhythm going and my brain kept echoing that dreadful song as the sharp edges of forest vegetation clawed at my face and arms, the thorny twigs like shriveled hands reaching down from trees that under the moon resembled ribcages, hung upside down from massive wooden poles.
I found my way home through the blackness only eventually, and then only by pure luck or, in the best of worlds, divine intervention. My nightgown was torn, my body covered in scratches from pine needles and twigs. I cried at the foot of my bed until the sun came up.
But when it did, I got dressed and had breakfast, without letting on to mom and dad that anything was the matter.
My episodes of sleepwalking were to continue for some time. Every night I would fall asleep safe in the sheets of my bed, my mind whispering into the tandrid loom to itself, and then I would awaken into the nightmare of standing in the glade.
An arrangement of rocks gradually rose in the center of that empty space. I awoke with my hands covered in sores, with dirt under my fingernails. I awoke with pine needles tangled in my hair. Artifacts from the tandrid loom. The fear faded as I grew accustomed to the glade and the woods and the night. The construction in the center of the glade, which I was apparently working hard to erect during my sleepwalking, was approaching a discernible form, and the surrounding trees seemed to be watching me. I came to see them less as a dark threat and now as a protective force. They were tying together invisible strands of the night sky as I worked. The moon seemed, impossibly, to be present always – its light making the engorged mushroom caps all around glisten in the dark like wet flesh. The cuts I had gotten running home that first night never seemed to heal.
The content of my nightly excursions into the glade slowly began to bleed through from the unconsciousness of my sleepwalking, rising into view like forgotten machinery hoisted up from the bottom of a lake all rusty and eroded, to the click-clacking of a great iron chain. And the more I became aware of what happened during my sleepwalks, the more my waking life started, conversely, exhibiting the attributes of Dream. Things would move from one place to another when I wasn’t looking. Certain objects appeared around the house, and mom and dad acted as though they had always been there. Not everyday objects, to be clear, that might have been explained away as a trick of my mind, such as a rubber spider, or an ornamental egg. No, the items that appeared were such that I would not touch or speak of them; I would only observe that they were there, in plain sight, and that mom and dad did not seem to acknowledge their abnormal presence. Right next to the soap dispenser in the downstairs bathroom, for instance, where we used to put out an extra toothbrush cup for “guests”, there was now a thing which, how can I explain? – don’t try to think of it as having a visual appearance, but unfocus your mind and dwell more on its… nature. The nature of that which appeared in the bathroom was equally that of a cogged mechanism and of a lump of throbbing muscle tissue. I ought to have been terrified both by the objects themselves, by their inexplicable non-appearance, and by mom and dad’s indifference to them, and I can’t say why I was not.
One night I started to bleed.
And in the tandrid loom, I would hike up my nightgown and lower myself onto the ground in the glade, kneeling in front of the towering stone monument, sinking into the moss that gave off a ghostly glow under the moon. And the wet, cold moss pushed up from the ground and cushioned my loins and drank my blood as I sat in the summer dusk with my mouth open, drinking the air in this solitary silence as the glade heaved slowly in the metallic light from above, and the trees whispered about me, and! – too far off for me to hear, I knew the stream I once drank from gurgled all alone in the festering darkness to an audience of no one, like an old man drowning in his bathtub alone. The woods breathed with me and the pale moss was stained black with my blood when I arose to continue my work beneath the stars. There’s a kind of love that is older than the moon.
Later I planted a seed at the spot where my fluid had seeped into the earth, and the organism, let’s call it a bloom, the bloom in the center of the tandrid loom, that bloom that eventually sprouted from that seed was the manifestation of the most essential nature of the glade, as well as the apex of my sanctuary.
I was thrilled to show Ellen what I had done. I can’t say what hour I knocked on her door, because they were all alike now – the hours – but she was awake and dressed and didn’t seem perturbed that I showed up, only that I hadn’t showed up earlier.
“Where have you been? I’ve been calling your house.”
I told her about the trek and the glade, how I had found a beautiful spot and that I’d made it even more beautiful. She didn’t seem that interested in the glade itself, but she was happy to spend time with me again, and so she came along. She said nothing about my cuts.
She kept talking all the time as I led her through the woods. By now I knew the way to the glade like the back of my hand.
“Are you nervous about going back to school? I don’t think it will be the same as in elementary school. But anyway, I’ll still be your best friend.”
The forest was like a gullet, swallowing us. In a way I have always had a forest inside of me, and perhaps at some point the forest on our island became the forest within my body. If I was the forest, then you could say – not literally, of course – that I ate Ellen. We were approaching my sanctum.
“Hey, remember when we built that treehouse?”
I barely noticed she was talking, I was so excited. Imagine the surprise on Ellen’s face when she got to see the glade. She would be so impressed by what I had accomplished all on my own. She would marvel at the wonderful bloom that grew at the foot of my monument. But I probably didn’t have to tell her about the night that I knelt in the moss.
“Is it much further? I don’t like all the bugs out here.”
I had even wreathed two special crowns, unique in the world and unique to myself and Ellen, and I especially looked forward to our crowning once we reached the glade.
“It’s right up ahead!”
I gestured to Ellen to walk in front, and watched in anticipation with glowing eyes as she stepped into the glade. But she did not react the way I expected.
Her jaw fell and her eyes widened as she looked around at the long cords that now webbed the area like the membraneous walls of a giant cocoon. The forest spoke in its peculiar way, information pumping through the fibers like pulsating light, whispering to us, calling us to walk up to the holy rock in the center. Ellen’s mouth opened and closed like a fish, but she couldn’t get a sound out. I beamed at her as I lifted her crown as high as I could and, with an elegant arcing movement, placed it gently around her head.
“What have you done?” she whispered, finally. “Oh God, Ellen, what have you done?”
This threw me.
The most wonderful emotion in the world, I think, is the relief following the realization that a horrifying nightmare was just that, all a dream. It thus follows that the pit of the depth of despair must be this: the thwarted expectation of that feeling. The seconds pass patiently and slow like minutes, but no mercy ever comes. The impossible nightmare is actually happening, happening to you. I am Ellen. Her eyes welled up with tears and she screamed and ran out of the glade, away from me. I stood all alone in the glade watching her disappear into the night. I heard the ripping sound of her nightgown as it caught on a twig and tore, I heard the soft thuds of her bare feet, and to their rhythm I began to sing quietly to myself.
“The wood is full of shining eyes, the wood is full of creeping feet…”
I am Ellen and I am in my special place. I am Ellen and she is running home to her bed to cry all night.
“The wood is full of tiny cries,” I sang.
And the strands that encircled the glade weren’t beautiful anymore, they were horrid. I fell to my knees. I had built a castle of terror, no, I had built a pile of rocks.
I crawled to the center of the glade, to the bloom. There was no such thing. In its place was a small shape, something that looked like it might have been alive once, although I don’t think it ever had. It had appendages, like an animal, and bones that jutted out in places, like little dried-up twigs. It stared into me through its tiny eyeless sockets, crawling with the maggots that had eaten them and would go on to consume everything but the bone.
I grabbed one of the rocks from the pile and smashed it down on the dead creature with a wet crunch. I lifted it and brought it down again. Again. Some of the larvae got stuck to the fluids on the rock and then scattered around me as I swung. When I had thoroughly pulped the thing into the mossy ground, I pushed as many rocks as I could from the pile and over it. Then I walked out, leaving the singing ruins behind me.
I was still wearing my perverse crown when I walked into town, my so-called crown, all dead leaves and needles. No glory, only shame. The sun was coming up. The Other Ellen was sitting down for breakfast, almost but not quite yet ready to leave this town.
I got on the first ferry to the mainland.
I’ve been running ever since. As far away as I could from the town that was no longer home. Haunted by the moment when I caught my own Night Face in the mirror, and the memory of the tandrid loom, nonsense words once so potent but which now seemed like only noise, without meaning. I am unsure of the passage of time, but countless Other Ellens must have completed the cycle in the glade by now, countless times by now, and I know that even at this moment, a new Other Ellen is deep in that forest, still facing her crucial choice. And wherever my calloused feet take me, I’ll never escape the dread that is now my constant companion: the fear that sooner or later, an Other Ellen will come to a different decision. And then, oh God, I will go to sleep one night right here in the shelter, but wake up there. Finally, mercilessly, suffering one more walkabout, into the tandrid loom – to face my creation in the glade.