THE WEEPING VIG

The silence in the room was not empty; it was heavy, a suffocating weight that pressed against Thomas’s chest like a slab of cold granite. He lay frozen under the thin linen sheet, his breath hitching in his throat, eyes wide and stinging in the gloom. It was the third night she had come. In the farthest corner of the bedroom, where the moonlight failed to reach and the shadows pooled like spilled ink, she stood. She was a wretched thing, a silhouette cut from the fabric of the night itself. Her hair, a chaotic cascade of matted obsidian, hung down to her waist, obscuring a face Thomas prayed he would never see. She was weeping. There was no sound to it—no gasp for air, no whimper of distress. Only the violent, rhythmic heaving of her emaciated shoulders suggested the force of her grief. It was a silent scream that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards, a frequency of despair that made Thomas’s teeth ache. "What do you want?" Thomas whispered, the words scraping against his dry throat. She did not answer. The weeping continued, a relentless, silent metronome counting down the seconds of his sanity. Then, with a motion that was too fluid, too unnatural for human joints, she sank down. She did not bend her knees; she simply lowered, collapsing into a crouch as if her bones had turned to water. Now she was a small, dense ball of darkness in the corner, her hair pooling on the floor around her like a black oil slick. Thomas squeezed his eyes shut, reciting a prayer he hadn't believed in since childhood. Go away. Please, just go away. A sound broke the silence. A wet, sticky sound. Slap. Slap. He opened his eyes. She was standing again. But she was no longer in the corner. She had moved three feet closer. She stood rigid, her long, pale arms now visible, hanging lifelessly at her sides. They were too long, the fingers twitching with a nervous energy. The weeping had stopped. Her shoulders were still. Slowly, agonizingly, the curtain of black hair began to part. "Do not look," a voice in Thomas’s mind screamed. "Do not look at what is beneath." But he could not look away. As the hair shifted, revealing the pale, moon-drenched skin of her face, Thomas saw that there were no eyes to weep tears. There were only hollow, black pits, and a mouth that had been stitched shut with thick, coarse twine. The stitches tore open. "Found you," she whispered, her voice the sound of dry leaves skittering on a grave. The darkness in the room surged forward, and the last thing Thomas saw was the shadow reaching out, not to comfort him, but to drag him into the corner with her.