I don’t have much time. I can already feel these hands dissolving. The skin is sloughing from the knuckles as I… what’s the word for it… type? Apologies if that’s wrong. This is all new to me.
I was born in 1786, in a small village in the countryside of England. I was a simple girl with a love for knitting, and it was my passion that led me down a path that I never could have anticipated. It all started in 1802, when my grandmother, a wise old woman who knew more about the world than anyone else I had ever met (and I now realise anybody ever should), gave me a ball of yarn.
It wasn’t just any yarn though. It was yarn that sparkled like it was catching the light from a million distant stars - the same dazzling light that now covers every inch of me. It would be beautiful were it not so damning.
My Grandmother bequeathed this yarn to me on her deathbed, a boon for her youngest grandchild and only granddaughter before she went to meet whatever awaited her in the beyond. She told me that anything made from this yarn would bring good luck, but only if I deliberately left an imperfection in the finished product.
I listened to my grandmother’s advice and created many beautiful pieces over the years, each with a small mistake woven into the fabric. And it was true, wherever I went, good fortune seemed to follow me. I made a shawl for my friend Agatha, and she bore five babes in as many years, all of them surviving their first few winters. For my manfancy Hubert I knitted a cap, and he won the steeplechase for four whole summers.
As for me, well, I never had to worry about Mr. Boxstead the landlord, let’s put it that way. The nice pair of mittens I always wore when he called round for rent always had him leaving with a smile on his face and nothing in his pockets - something that, as anyone who’s ever met a landlord will tell you, is an impossibility under anything short of miraculous circumstances.
Truth be told, I was amazed my good fortune didn’t get noticed sooner. I just never imagined I’d draw the attention of… of someone like Mr. Zarasashael. The man who hid his eyes behind dark lenses, whose mouth never moved when he spoke, who left the sound of wind chimes hanging in your ears like the stench of corpses.
He appeared to me the day it happened, knocking on my door disguised as a wealthy merchant. Mr. Zarasashael, that cursed thing wearing the shape of a man and badly, knew that introducing himself by stating his knowledge of my enchanted yarn was all it took to have my attention. Professing himself as the being who made the yarn ensured he could do what he wanted with it.
Oh, hindsight is a cruel and unforgiving mistress.
Mr. Zarasashael told me that if I made a perfect cardigan, my fortune would be even greater than it was already. He had changed his mind about his rule, he said, and he no longer wanted the (and I quote) “yarn hewn of the same shreds of a dying star as the wedding dress of the Fly King’s bride to be besmirched with nothing but utter perfection.”
I should have known then it was a trick. The cackling he made when he left me after watching me furiously knit for two hours made that obvious, but by then it was too late. Upon hearing his declaration - his lie - greed overtook me, and I ignored my grandmother’s warning. I made the cardigan as perfect as I could, knitting until my fingers bled, and it was the very moment I put the needles down I realised my mistake.
As soon as I finished the cardigan, I felt a strange sensation wash over me. It was as though something was pulling me into the fabric itself. I panicked and tried to scramble away from the cardigan, but it was too late. A perverse, shrill buzzing lanced through my ears, and my vision swam. To my horror, and far too late to scream, I became aware that I wasn’t just being pulled into the fabric, but I was becoming it.
Not physically you understand, either. Something much worse. My body was merely sucked into the garment in a conventional sense, the knitwear sliding itself over my twitching, spasming form. It was my mind, the core of my most God-given being, that underwent the transformation.
Second by agonising second I could feel my awareness being pulled from my soon-to-be empty human anatomy. My thoughts unravelled and rethreaded themselves into abominable inversions of human cogitations. Physical sensations from an unending web of nerves burned and sputtered in my shrieking mind, re-melding themselves into the sensory chaos of uncountable hoops and weaves.
I don’t know why he did it, but Mr. Zarasashael tricked me into displeasing whatever dark entity had created the source of my grandmother’s and later my own, good luck, and now I’d paid the price. My soul was trapped inside the cardigan, and I became one with the yarn.
That was in 1811.
For centuries, I have been trapped inside the cardigan, unable to escape, unable to move or influence my situation unless somebody puts me… no, puts it - IT - on.
The first few years were the worst, sat in the darkness before I was found in around 1823. My house was pretty remote, you see. I could only watch as my body decayed and turned to dust. Initially I’d hoped that once my bones became dust and the house crumbled around them I’d be free. Naïve, I know. Nothing that happened to my former body mattered now. I remained trapped in the cardigan, bound to it when I became an unwitting pawn in whatever foul demonic game Mr. Zarasashael and the thing that made the yarn are playing across centuries - with mere mortals like you, and I once, as the pieces.
I have… no, not I, I’m not… THE CARDIGAN has passed through many hands over the years. The story always ends the same way, with a garment made of yarn that shines like the cosmos soaking in a pile of organic goop. But oh, how I have enjoyed those few dozen hours I’ve had over the centuries. To have those rare chances to bounce a babe on my knee, to make love in a quick heated flurry with some bemused spouse of the current owner, to be cared for when around the shoulders of one only a few years away from death anyway. Such things have been my lifeline, my only tie to the humanity I’ve lost.
Sadly though, I got noticed in the 1950s or 60s. Some woman put me on in front of another woman who had an eye for garments and other antiquities with… impossibly unusual qualities, let’s say. It’s the sparkling that gets them, you see. It’s as hypnotic as Mr. Zarasashael’s oozing windchimes. Still, it was only a matter of time before the legend about the cursed cardigan grew though, and sure enough, a wealthy and eccentric collector in occult dealings was smart enough to have one of her servants try me on as a litmus test.
I was eventually donated to an occult museum. And that’s where I… NO NOT I, IT, REMEMBER YOURSELF… sorry, where it sits today, waiting for someone foolish enough to try it on.
And, at long last, today somebody did - a new cleaner, one who wasn’t smart enough to read the very clear warning sign on the glass.
When the poor dimwitted Matthew, may his soul find more peace than mine, put the cardigan on, I felt a spark of hope. Maybe this would be the person who could help me escape my prison - the first body I’d had since I’d felt that art collectors unfortunate manservant bubbling to mulch within me, my sleeves flattening and collar sagging for the last time in far too long. When I felt Matthew picking me up today there came a sudden rush of determination. I’d get out of here, go to England, track down Mr. Zarasashael, and…
Again, I was being naïve.
I’d almost forgotten the despair and the helplessness of it, you see. It came back soon enough. As soon as I gained full control over Matthew’s body and I felt the final screams of his burning consciousness ebb away, I knew that it was futile. The possession was too strong - it was always too strong . So, instead, I’ve decided to make use of this internet thing - and the knowledge left once Matthew’s soul and memories had been forced out of this brain - to tell my story.
As I type through Matthew’s body thanks to him wearing the cardigan, I’m literally watching his hands begin to dissolve. I will never get used to this, the grotesqueness of it. Nor will I ever be able to truly move past the guilt of what borrowing Matthew’s body meant his final moments were lik, what I know all my once-hosts went through. It was a fate worse than death, and I was the cause of it. I have possessed dozens of people over the years, and every time, it ends in tragedy.
I am a prisoner in my own creation, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be free. I imagine I’ll be put back in the glass case tomorrow. Hopefully the next few decades will go by a little faster now I know someone out there is aware I still exist. I’ve had a chance to tell my story to the world for the first time after being silenced by circumstance since 1811.
It’s been a good day.
(Sorry Matthew).