Arthur tried to scream, but his jaw wouldn't hinge. He looked in the mirror and saw why: the black thread was now zig-zagging across his lips, sewing them shut in real-time.
The entity from the wall didn't want to kill him. It wanted to wear him.
The ghost—a woman who had been crushed in the mill's machinery a century prior—collapsed into a heap of shadows and bone at his feet. She began to unravel herself, her spirit turning into thousands of those needle-thin black hairs. They swarmed up Arthur's legs, burrowing under his skin, stitching themselves into his muscles.
He felt his bones being rearranged, snapped and reset to fit her smaller, broken frame. He was a passenger in his own body, screaming behind a mouth that was now a permanent, silent seam.
An hour later, "Arthur" stood up. He moved with a jerky, hitching gait, his joints popping like firecrackers. He walked to the mirror and looked at the reflection. The eyes were still his, wide and terrified, but the hands—now long and spindly—reached up to touch the glass.
The hum in the room stopped.
"Arthur" picked up the tweezers and began to carefully snip the threads from his lips. He leaned into the glass, his breath fogging the surface, and whispered to the weeping man trapped behind his own pupils:
"Don't worry. I'll take very good care of our skin."