The Invisible Reweaver
Weird Tales – November 1950
(1950)*
Margaret St. Clair

	"SIT DOWN, you fool," he said sharply. "Do you want to be drowned?" 

	I looked at him in astonishment. The boat was almost as motionless as if it had been drawn up on the beach. There was not a ripple, not even a swell, on the flat surface of the sea. It was so calm that standing on your head on the roof of the cabin where Captain Saunders was dealing out cut bait to the anglers would have been perfectly safe. It was a beautiful day.

	My surprise must have appeared in my face. His mouth contracted in a nervous grimace. He said, though not in an apologetic tone, "You never can tell. There are a lot of accidents these days."

	"There always are a lot of accidents," I answered. He didn't look over thirty-five.

	"I suppose so." He turned back to his rod. I noticed the abnormally cautious stance he had adopted for fishing. After a second he said—he seemed to be talking to me out of nervousness, rather than garrulity— "There are a lot of accidents, though. The papers are full of them." He had a rather strident voice.

	"Um."

	"I'll show you what I mean." He reeled in his line quickly; I got the impression that he was glad to abandon fishing even temporarily. "Here."

	He pulled a folded paper from the pocket of his brown corduroy jacket and pointed at a headline: "Forty Killed in Freak Plane Crash."

	I'd seen that headline already. My cousin Max, of whom I had been quite fond, was among those reported dead in the accident. "There are plane wrecks almost every day," I said.

	"But this was a freak accident. It shouldn't have happened. And besides ..." He folded the paper to the third page and pointed to another headline: "Brake Failure Dooms Twenty One on Crack Train."

	"See what the engineer says about it?" he asked. He began to read aloud from the column. " 'I don't know how it happened. The brakes had just been tested. I can't account for it.'

	"And here's another piece." He riffled through the newsprint and read, with what struck me as ghoulish relish, " 'Explosion Kills Mother, Child. Mrs. J. J. Harris and her four month old son were killed today when a bottle of non-explosive cleaning fluid apparently exploded. According to neighbors Mrs. Harris often did home dry cleaning ...'

	"See what I mean? The cleaner was non-explosive. And yet it exploded. It shouldn't have. But it did."

	"Accidents will happen," I answered. I was getting tired of him. I'd come out in Saunders' boat to fish, not to talk.

	"Will they? And there's another item, one on the back page. It's about a man who fell on a piece of glass and severed an artery. He bled to death before the ambulance could get there."

	An angler on the other side of the boat let out a shrill yip. He'd hooked something. It might have been a tuna; the boat began to dip and sway.

	"See what I was driving at?" my interlocutor said with an air of sour triumph. "If you'd been standing up then, leaning over the side—boof! You'd have gone overboard."

	"No, I wouldn't," I contradicted, rather surlily. "I never heard of anybody going overboard for anything like that. It would have been sheer bad luck."

	"That's what I've been trying to tell you. Nowadays, everybody has bad luck.

	"People take chances, little chances. Half the time they aren't even real chances, like the woman who was using the cleaning fluid. But something goes wrong, something that shouldn't have. And then there are more headlines in the newspapers."

	He was, I perceived with resignation, determined to talk. I reeled in my own line, frowning with annoyance, and turned to him. "I suppose you have some sort of theory as to what's causing it," I said.

	"Oh, a theory!" He was silent for so long that I made a tentative movement toward my reel. Then he cleared his throat.

	"Look here, I'll tell you about it. You can judge for yourself whether it's my fault. Even if you don't believe me, you may find it interesting."

	I don't know what I'd been expecting— a wild-eyed outpouring about sunspots, perhaps. But what he actually began talking about was his employment experiences.

-

	HE HADN'T had much training in his specialty—something to do with commercial bookbinding—when he was drafted. After he got out of the army he had trouble finding a job, and when he did get one it only lasted a couple of months. He'd been on the point of applying for more training under the G.I. bill when his girl friend—"I had a girl friend, then," he said nostalgically—burned a hole in her best tweed suit. She took it to one of these invisible reweaving places to get it fixed.

	"The job they did was just beautiful," my vis-a-vis said. "Neither Phyllis nor I could locate where the hole had been. They charged her a nice price for it, too. And I got to thinking, why shouldn't I start myself a little business like this?

	"From what Phyllis said, the man who rewove her suit didn't have a lot of equipment. It wasn't at all like a commercial bookbindery. I'd always wanted to go into business for myself. And the beautiful job the reweaver had done appealed to me.

	"I went through the ads in the papers. There were two or three reweaving schools. I don't know what led me to pick the one I did. They can't all be like it was. The ad was headed, 'Make Yourself An Invisible Reweaver.' I didn't realize then what it meant."

-

	HIS face, now that he was talking, had smoothed out and relaxed, and I saw that he was considerably younger than my previous estimate. He was around twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He was calmer and more self-assured, too, than he'd been before.

	"Anyhow, I went around to the school," he went on. "It was just a place like any other place, with a little office in front and a man sitting at a desk. He was the registrar.

	"He was a perfectly ordinary man. I saw him maybe fifty times, and I don't even remember what color his eyes were. He took my application, and I found out that the school wasn't G.I. approved. That ought to have put me on my guard. But he explained it by saying that the course cost so little that it just wasn't worthwhile to get a loan for it.

	"He showed me samples of the work the school's pupils had done. When he showed you where to look you could see, just barely, that there had been a hole or tear there once. It was mighty fine work.

	"It sounded good to me. The registrar began asking me about my war record. I had a pretty good record. I got three citations for, you know, things.

	"When he heard about the citations, he began smiling. 'We like to help vets,' he said, still smiling. 'And a man with your record deserves all our help. I'll be glad to give you our complete training at half price.'

	"He named the sum, and it was pretty trifling. I was pleased. I said, 'How about equipment?'

	" 'You won't need much,' he answered, still very cordial. 'We'll furnish most of it'

	"He took me in back to where the school was. Two or three other people were mending things on machines. The teacher came up, and he introduced us. Her name was Parks. She was a big fat woman with small hands. She moved quick, for all her size, and I never heard a woman with a prettier voice.

	"I'd been expecting she'd start teaching me on one of the machines, but she didn't. She took me on past the big room to a little one where there was a sort of frame. She said I'd begin by learning to mend individual threads.

	"There were broken threads on the frame, and what I had to do was to rejoin them. She showed me how to do it, with a sort of pull and twist. They were all woolen threads.

	"After a couple of hours practice, I was pretty good at it. She said I was making good progress. Then she touched a switch and the threads began to move past me. They didn't move fast, but they were in motion. It was a lot harder to join them then.

	"I worked at mending the moving threads on the frame for about three days. I got so efficient I never missed a single one. Then the teacher speeded the frame

	"By the time I'd been going to school for four weeks, the threads were just whizzing past. I wouldn't have thought you'd be able to see them, let alone join them, when they went that quick. The teacher kept telling me how good I was, and I guess I thought so too. Anyhow ..."

-

	HE FELL silent "Go on," I prodded him. Two men on my side of the boat were hauling in bonita, and an angler on the other side had landed three. I wanted his story done with, so I could fish.

	"I was just wondering why I didn't ask any questions. Whatever she was teaching me to do on that frame, it didn't seem like ordinary reweaving, even at the time. But you know how it is with a teacher—you sort of think they must know their stuff. And besides, she had such a pretty voice.

	"Along in the fifth week she said I was ready for something different. She paid me a lot of compliments and mentioned my war record, though I didn't see, then, what it had to do with it.

	"She took me down in the elevator to the basement. I never saw such a big basement. We walked and walked. And little by little I saw we weren't in the basement any more, but in a big, shadowy place.

	"That sounds like a cave or something, but it wasn't. There weren't any limits to this space. I don't know where the shadows were coming from. But it was big, bigger than anything anybody could think of. It was like the space between the stars.

	"All the time we'd been walking along Miss Parks had been talking to me. I don't remember what she said, but it was nice to listen to, like your mother singing to you when you're a kid. But now I began to feel a little frightened. I said, 'What's all this? Where are you taking me?'

	"She said, 'Do not be frightened. You have been chosen to help us. It is a great honor. You must try to be worthy of it.'

	"Her answer didn't make me feel any calmer. But I was ashamed to let her see that I was nervous. She'd talked so much about my war record, you see. Besides, I was curious. But I guess the real reason I didn't try to make a break for it was that she had such a pretty voice.

	"We kept on walking. Miss Parks didn't say anything more. And pretty soon I saw two great big shadows up ahead of us.

	"For all their size, they looked familiar, like something I was acquainted with. I stared at them and tried to think. All of a sudden it dawned on me. They were the shapes of two women, as tall as the pyramids, made out of shadow and night."

	He was showing an unexpected talent for the right, the evocative, phrase. And what an imagination! I was almost glad I had abandoned my fishing to listen to him. "Go on," I said urgently.

	He looked at me sideways. His eyes were gray and a little bloodshot. "I was afraid you might think I was ... exaggerating," he said.

-

	IT TOOK him a moment to get back into the mood of his story. He cleared his throat and coughed a couple of times. "When I got up to the shadows, I was just as far away from them as ever. I know that sounds funny, but that's the way it was. I looked around, and Miss Parks wasn't anywhere near me. What had happened to her? My heart began to thump. I felt lost and alone. And then I saw there were three big shadows now.

	"Way up over my head a voice—it sounded like the deep notes of an organ, but I think it was Miss Parks speaking—a voice said, 'Sister, how goes the work?'

	'There was a pause, and then the answer. 'I spin. But there are broken threads.'

	"It's hard to describe how those voices made me feel. It wasn't fear, exactly. It was like what you feel inside a big cathedral, when you look up at the dome and see the buttresses rushing up, and up, and up.

	"A hand came down out of the shadow and lifted me. I could hardly feel where it was touching me, but I went flying through the air. My hair blew back from the motion. And then I was set down beside a loom, the biggest loom. And I knew what Miss Parks had brought me there for. I was supposed to reweave the broken threads

	"A design was being formed on the loom. I could see that, though the design was too big for my eyes to comprehend Now and then one of the threads would run out, and the big hand that had picked me up would join a thread of another color to it. That was the way it was supposed to be, to make the design. But sometimes one of the threads would break, before it had run out. And it was those threads I was supposed to mend.

	"When I realized that, I felt much better. It was not knowing what it was all about that had bothered me before. And I could see that it was a great honor, just as Miss Parks had said, to be chosen for a job like that.

	"One of the threads broke. I hurried toward it, to join it again. It was high up in the work, and when I got there I found I had to stretch out over a—over nothing, to mend it. Do you understand what I mean? There was nothing between me and all that space besides frail-looking threads. I looked over and out, and it seemed to me I could see points of light that were probably stars shining between the threads. Falling—falling has always been my worst fear."

	He halted and pulled absently at his knuckles. I heard them crack as the joints snapped back into place. "What happened then?" I prompted. "Did you mend the thread?"

	"I tried to. I honestly tried to. I knew how important it was, and I stretched out after it. And then I found ... I found I couldn't see my arms or body or hands. I was invisible.

	"Bravery is a funny thing. Sometimes you're so frightened you can't stand it, and your fear makes you do something desperate. It looks like bravery, and I guess maybe it is. I was that way in combat. This wasn't like that at all. This was different.

	"I stood there shaking and trying to make myself reach out and mend that thread for maybe a minute. You understand, I had every intention of doing it. It was just that my body wouldn't let me. All of a sudden—and I didn't want to—all of a sudden I turned and ran.

	"I ran away from the loom and past the big shadows. I don't know what I stepped on or how I kept from falling. I didn't think about that. The way I was feeling, it would have been a relief to me to fall and get it over with.

	"I ran and ran. In the back of my mind I was afraid that one of the big shadows would pick me up and set me down beside the loom again. But nothing happened. There wasn't even a sound from those big shadowy shapes. I guess they thought I wasn't worth bothering about."

	The sky had clouded over a little; the boat was rocking gently. He seemed to think his story was finished. "How did you get out? Get back here?" I asked finally.

	"I don't know. I mean, I don't remember. I ran for a long time, and then I walked. After that the next thing I remember is the janitor, a man in green coveralls, asking me how I'd got into the basement and what I was doing there. He was annoyed and perplexed. I wasn't in the basement of the school, you see—it was in the basement at Bracey's department store.

	"But now you see why there are so many accidents. When one of the threads breaks before its time, there's nobody to rejoin it. And there'll keep on being accidents until Miss Parks trains somebody else to be an invisible reweaver so he can rejoin those threads."

-

	THE three fates, the spinners or weavers whose threads represent the lives of men, appear in the folklore of many nations. The Scandinavian peoples called them the Norns, the Greeks called them the Moirae. The Romans knew them as the Parcae; "Miss Parks" seemed a pretty fair anglicization of this. Still ... "You mean you're responsible for all the accidents?" I demanded.

	"Yes." He tapped on the folded newspaper in his jacket pocket. "All those people killed in the air crash—it's my fault. You could say I murdered them."

	I don't know whether or not I believed him. I'd been fond of my cousin Max, but it was a hard story to accept. But when the man in the brown corduroy jacket tapped the paper and said, "You could say I murdered them," there was a look on his face, a look of self-importance, almost of pride, that made me feel suddenly that I hated him. Involuntarily I made a movement toward him.

	He drew back. He looked more startled than surprised. And then—I don't know how it happened—he went over the side of the boat.

-

	FOR a moment he floundered and sputtered and splashed in the water. His face had gone white. There were shouts of surprise from the others. People ran toward our side of the boat.

	I couldn't reach him; he was too far away. I reversed my rod and held out the butt end for him to grasp. He stretched for it. And then one of the fishing lines near him wrapped itself purposefully around his throat.

	The man whose line it was said afterwards that he must have hooked a tuna just at that moment and that the fish must have swerved in a circle and then headed toward the bottom. Maybe. What it looked like from the boat was that the line had decided of its own volition to murder the man who had failed at reweaving invisibly.

	The brown corduroy jacket receded through the water. The man in it dwindled through layer after layer of green. His mouth looked extremely surprised.

	We weren't equipped to fish for people. The Coast Guard had to come out to help us. When we finally raised him, the invisible reweaver was quite dead. The newspaper was still in the pocket of his brown corduroy coat.

The End