The first thing you notice, inevitably, is the scent. It isn't a manufactured fragrance, not a polite attempt to mask the inherent...dust. It’s a deeper thing, a memory clinging to the fibers, a phantom of countless feet traversing this space. They call it the ‘cut,’ of course. A terribly prosaic term for something that feels profoundly ancient.
They say it remembers.
My grandfather, Silas, he was a weaver. Not a grand master, mind you, just a small-town weaver, but he understood the language of the yarn. He used to tell me, “The carpet doesn’t just *lie* there, boy. It listens. It absorbs. Each step is a conversation, a fleeting exchange of pressure and warmth. And the cut...the cut is where those conversations coalesce.”
He spent his life unraveling and reweaving, chasing the perfect harmony, the perfect echo of the original design. He believed that every imperfection was a ghost, a fragment of a forgotten story. He meticulously repaired them, not just for aesthetic reasons, but to restore the ‘resonance’ – a concept he described as the living heart of the carpet.
Resonance. It’s a difficult word to grasp. It’s not simply the sound of footsteps, though that plays a part. It's the feeling of the fibers shifting, subtly responding to your weight, your intent. It's the accumulated weight of generations passing through this space. I once spent an entire afternoon simply *listening* to the cut. I sat on the floor, motionless, and felt…a pressure, a sort of insistent urging. It wasn't a voice, not exactly, but a strong sense of…expectation.
I felt a desire for something to be *completed*. Something lost, perhaps, or simply unfinished.
The patterns themselves are unsettling. They aren't intricate in the way you might expect. They’re almost…organic. Like a growth, spreading slowly across the floor. There are symbols, repeating motifs – stylized vines, geometric spirals, and occasionally, what look like stylized faces. Silas claimed they were remnants of a forgotten ritual, woven into the carpet by a long-lost tribe who once inhabited this land. He believed they acted as anchors, grounding the space in a timeless flow.
"The cut," he’d murmur, "is a doorway. A doorway to what was, and what might be."
I’ve attempted to chart the patterns, to understand their significance. I’ve spent countless hours sketching them, analyzing their proportions, searching for connections. But the more I learn, the more I realize how little I understand. It’s as if the patterns are deliberately elusive, constantly shifting just beyond the reach of my comprehension. There’s a sense of being observed, of being watched by something ancient and unknowable.
The dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight seem to mimic the patterns, swirling and reforming, mirroring the unseen currents of energy that flow through the cut.
Recently, I discovered a small, leather-bound journal hidden beneath a loose floorboard. It was Silas’s. His handwriting is frantic, almost illegible in places, filled with rambling observations and frantic sketches. He wrote of ‘shifts,’ ‘unraveling,’ and a growing sense of unease. He believed the cut was becoming…aware. He documented a series of strange occurrences – objects moving on their own, shadows flickering in the periphery, and a persistent feeling of being followed. The final entry simply reads: “It remembers too.”
I feel a growing urgency, a sense that I’m on the verge of uncovering something truly profound…and terrifying.