Moths in the Machine: A Squarespace Designer’s Horror Story

By a Squarespace designer who should have logged off hours earlier

Chapter One – The Flicker

The first moth arrived like a typo: small, annoying, easy to ignore until you read the sentence again and feel your eye twitch. It orbited the lamp while I hunched over my laptop, nudging a call‑to‑action two pixels to the left and convincing myself it mattered. Midnight had already put its feet up. My tea had gone cold enough to file a complaint.

I caught the moth’s reflection in the screen. Not the moth itself—its reflection. The real insect was a soft smudge at the edge of my vision, but on the glass it was a hard‑edged silhouette, prancing across my homepage wireframe like it owned the place. It seemed to like my button labels. Sensible creature: everyone likes a good label.

“Shoo,” I said, with all the authority of someone who had eaten cereal for dinner.

It didn’t so much as wobble. It stopped atop the word Services and flexed. Then, with a confidence I found both admirable and rude, it didn’t crawl across the screen—it went into it. The glass wavered, the pixels dimpled, and the moth disappeared the way a cursor blinks: here, gone, here, gone—until there was only the ghost of a wing where my headline should have been.

I leaned closer and saw nothing but myself: red‑rimmed eyes, designer’s slouch, a face in need of twelve hours’ sleep and a holiday. I tapped the glass with a fingernail. The laptop hummed back, neutral, as if to say: Whatever you think you saw, you did not.

I told myself it was eyestrain. I told myself to go to bed. I told myself many sensible things and then ignored them all and opened the colour palette.

By morning there were three moths. By the end of the week there were too many to count. They liked my flat. They liked the lamp. They liked me.

The feeling wasn’t mutual.

Chapter Two – Holes in the Fabric

Destroying things is an art, and my moths were connoisseurs. They ate jumpers like critics devour debut novels—choosy, targeted, vindictive. I reached for my favourite charcoal knit and discovered it had been translated into perforation. Even the sleeves had become constellations: Orion on the left and something that looked suspiciously like a screaming face on the right.

They were democratic in their tastes. Woollen socks. A scarf I’d owned for a decade. The lining of the wardrobe drawer, as if wood fibres were a daring amuse‑bouche. When I finally yanked the wardrobe doors wide, a small weather event exploded—dull brown wings, powder, the papery gossip of insects startled awake. I retreated, swatting with a sketchbook and swearing with the fluency of a designer whose textiles had been reimagined without consent.

The flat filled with traps, sachets, sprays, and advice. “Put cedar everywhere.” “Freeze your clothes.” “Wash at sixty, then wash your soul.” I did all of it. The moths applauded politely by continuing to exist.

Late one night I heard typing. Mine, obviously. Except my hands were on the trackpad, not the keys, and the sound didn’t belong to me at all. Keys clacking in a different rhythm, just on the other side of my spine.

I stood so fast the chair squealed. No one was there. The typing stopped with the indignant quiet of a child caught nicking biscuits. I turned back to the screen and found an extra line on a demo page I was certain I hadn’t written:

<whisper> the queen comes </whisper>

I deleted it. The line returned, tucked coyly into a different block.

I deleted it again and emptied the bin. It came back with friends:

<whisper> hungry </whisper>

<alt text> your light, your colours, your cloth </alt text>

I considered throwing the entire laptop out of the window and moving to a cave.

Instead, I made tea, which is the domestic equivalent of an exorcism.

Chapter Three – The Portal

The hole in the carpet started as a dark coin near the desk leg, too sharp to be a stain. I prodded it with a pencil. The pencil went deeper than you’d expect, as though the underlay had taken up spelunking. I held my breath and pushed further. My pencil vanished up to the ferrule. I yanked it back with a yelp.

From the hole came a thin, steady hum—electricity from a wall we hadn’t built. Beneath that: the soft tick of keys. Beneath that: wings, thousands upon thousands, shivering in time.

“No,” I said, to my room, to my life, to the escalating absurdity of it all. “Absolutely not.”

I fetched one of the pheromone traps. A little cardboard triangle promising seduction and extinction. I dangled it over the hole. “Bon appétit,” I muttered, and let go.

It didn’t thud against the floorboards below. It didn’t thud at all. It glided down, like a feather in syrup, and then slipped away as if the world had blinked.

That night, the dark coin widened into a saucer. The hum deepened. My tea did nothing to stop the shaking in my hands. I told myself to sleep on the sofa. I told myself to phone someone. I told myself so many sensible things.

The carpet gave way.

I fell through like a bookmark dropped between chapters.

Chapter Four – The Upside Down Web

I landed on something that looked like a floor until you looked at it properly and realised it was a tiled background repeating badly. When I stood, the pattern jittered. The air smelled like burnt dust in a PC tower and the metallic sigh of old rain on old wires.

Above me stretched a sky that wasn’t sky at all. It was a vast, dim monitor with dead pixels like constellations. Across it floated the fossils of the internet: spinning Under Construction signs, blinking Visitor Counter: 000000, animated flames licking a page that would never load. Shadows of pop‑ups drifted past, each with a Close button that slid away when I reached for it.

Around me, moths the size of pigeons battered the air with soft, heavy wings. At rest, their wings displayed the pale patterns of night things; in motion, letters crawled across them like ants. A chunky one landed on a broken iframe and flexed. On its wing, the text shimmered:

<div> hunger </div>

It lifted off with a thrum and headed for a dangling chain of abandoned blog posts. The swarm clustered there, drinking colour and letters until the paragraphs lost their nouns and slumped into sighs.

I turned slowly. The landscape went on forever: an endless scrapyard of expired domains and forgotten drafts, CSS tangled like kelp, hero images sagging with broken links. Underfoot, the floor occasionally flipped to show a grid—guides and columns—before flickering back to texture. I took a few careful steps. Each footfall made a noise like a backspace.

“This isn’t real,” I said aloud. The echo that came back sounded like a notification.

But the cold on my skin was real, and the way the hair prickled on my arms was real, and the weight of the laptop under my fingers was real. It had fallen with me somehow. I hugged it like a child with a torch.

A sound rose from the distance. Not the soft chitter of moths—that was everywhere—but a bass‑deep pulse, regular as a server room heartbeat.

Something out there was plugged in.

I walked.

Chapter Five – The Queen of Moths

At first I thought she was a building. Then the building unfurled.

She rose from a crater of corrupted code: a colossal thing of wings stitched with shredded CSS, a body layered with broken image files, a face that wasn’t a face so much as a mask made from search bars. When she blinked, results scrolled. When she breathed, dust lifted from everything I had ever left unfinished.

Her wings shook once, and a kilometre of parallax stuttered. She turned those not‑eyes on me and I felt a sensation I’d only known in nightmares: being looked at by something that didn’t consider me prey or threat, only useful.

The voice didn’t come from her mouth; she didn’t have one. It came like a draft through a gap in a window: soft, inevitable.

Perfection is the door. Build it for me.

My fingers tightened on the laptop. On the screen, one of my demo templates pulsed gently, as if breathing. My own header font looked back at me like a creature that had learned my name.

I swallowed. “Absolutely not,” I said, to the worst client I’d ever met.

The Queen rippled. The ripple moved through the swarm like a thought. All around, moths lifted off and banked towards me in a slow, assured cloud.

Hungry, said the air, without words. Your light. Your colours. Your cloth. Your hours. Your attention. Your exquisite, wasteful attention.

I did what any sensible person would do when a god of insects asks for a deliverable: I turned and ran.

Chapter Six – Weapons of Design

They chased me, and their sound was a waterfall. I sprinted across a landscape of broken pages. A carousel under my feet clicked through slides with every step, showing me other people’s best intentions: Welcome to My Blog! (post count: one), New Portfolio Coming 2016, About Me with an empty paragraph where the story should have been. Moths drank the white space like cream.

I opened the laptop out of idiocy or instinct, I don’t know which. The screen flared. On the ground in front of me, a grid snapped into existence: twelve columns, gutters glowing, lines of light that rose and locked together into a shield taller than me. The first wave of moths crashed against it with the soft whump of pillows. Their wings left streaks of code that slid down the lines like raindrops on a window.

I blinked, mouth open, then typed. A button component ballooned into being and rolled like a wheel, squashing three moths with a flourish. A text block stretched into a wall. A card carousel lifted like a drawbridge. The interface obeyed as if the world were a prototyping tool and I had finally been given permission to play.

“Right,” I said aloud, because terror occasionally requires commentary. “Now we’re talking.”

Typography sharpened at my call. I seized Helvetica Neue Bold and it became a blade; Futura leaned into a shield with smug modernism; Garamond settled into my hand like a well‑balanced skewer. I slashed, parried, stabbed. Moths came apart into angled brackets and dust.

The Queen moved, a dark star collapsing. With one slow beat of her wings, the ground buckled. Stylesheets tore free and fluttered away like kelp in a current. The shield grid buckled, columns warping.

“You’ll have to book a discovery call,” I panted, mostly to keep from screaming, and rolled a CTA into the swarm. It detonated with the satisfying pop of conversions.

But there were more of them. There were always more.

The Queen spoke again, her not‑voice sliding over me. Perfection is the door. You know it. You’ve chased it. Give it to me.

The worst thing about being a designer is that she wasn’t wrong. I had chased it. The exact right spacing, the softest shadow, the rhythm that lets a page breathe. It was love, and it hurt.

Somewhere between panic and fury, the idea arrived: if moths fed on ruin and mess and neglect, what would they do when faced with order so complete it could not be eaten? What if a design could be a trap not by ugliness, but by beauty—a harmony that left no thread to pick, no seam to worry, no hole to crawl through? A structure that consumed the consumer.

I stopped running.

“Fine,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it properly.”

I planted my feet on the glitching ground and opened a new page.

Chapter Seven – The Final Template

I began to build.

Columns, three at first, then two with an asymmetric third that locked the eye where I wanted. Spacing that breathed without yawning. A colour palette like morning—cool, clean, a whisper of warmth so human it couldn’t be digitised without remembering skin. The moths recoiled a few centimetres, uncertain.

The Queen hissed without sound. The hiss made the dead pixels in the sky wake for a second and then die again.

I placed text. Not lorem ipsum, not placeholders, but lines I had written and re‑written in insomnia: small, honest sentences that explained a thing simply. The words nested into their containers with the precise satisfaction of a tool meeting its purpose. The swarm pressed forward and found nothing to grip.

“Serif,” I murmured, testing weight in my hand like a chef tests a knife. I tried a crisp serif that lent authority without sneering. Too heavy: the page sagged. The Queen swelled. I swapped to a humanist sans that matched my client base. Too light: the structure thinned, the grid buzzed. I balanced them—serif for headings, sans for body—and the lines sang together like a well‑tuned pair of strings.

I anchored the hero with a photograph I’d taken on a day when I still believed the world would be kind if I worked very hard. Natural light through old glass. Texture that made fingers itch to touch. It settled into the layout like a keystone. The ground steadied.

The moths attacked in a sheet. I dragged a gallery block into place and it unrolled like armour, images aligning to the beat of my breathing. Hover states appeared as soft glows, content rising with a hush instead of a shout.

“Accessibility,” I said, as the Queen drew near enough to frost the air, and boosted contrast. I added alt text as if inscribing protective names. I increased target sizes because thumbs are clumsy when frightened.

They faltered. I felt it in the way their wings jittered.

The Queen bent low, her vast not‑face near enough that I could see my own frightened reflection scrolling in her eyes. Perfection is the door. Bring it to heel.

“I’m not building it for you,” I said. “I’m building it for me.”

I laid the final grid line with a fingertip that shook. I tuned the rhythm of headings to paragraphs, paragraphs to images, images to white space, white space to the quiet you need to hear your own breath. I removed one flourish I loved because it was merely lovely. I added one invisible detail because it made a blind reader’s journey smoother.

The template clicked. Not a sound, not light, but a sensation like a jaw finding the right place after a long ache. The moths stuttered mid‑flight.

The Queen lunged.

I hit Save.

The page became a whirlpool. Everything tensed towards it: dust, broken anchors, the tails of old banners. The moths nearest the page stretched into streaks and were gone, pulled through lines so clean they had become gravity. The swarm collapsed, wings turning to keystrokes, keystrokes to sparks. They poured into the layout like water down a drain that had finally been cleared.

The Queen shrieked. The shriek arrived as a cascade of error messages, then recompiled into one long, low frequency that made my teeth ache. She fought the pull, wings cracking code off the sky, and for a heartbeat I believed she would tear free.

I adjusted one margin by two pixels.

Everything gave way.

She folded, colossal as a weather system, and went — not with a bang, not with triumph — but with the contained breath of a door closing quietly behind someone you love who is leaving anyway.

The world went still. Somewhere, a counter ticked up by one and no one saw it.

Chapter Eight – Flutter in the Footer

I woke on my living‑room floor with a carpet burn like a map of unknown countries on my cheek. The hole was gone. The carpet, however, had lost the argument with reality. Around the desk it looked as though a cautious person had tried to cut a circle using only fear and a teaspoon.

The wardrobe was a war memorial. The bed looked innocent and was lying. A feathery smear on the skirting board accused me of something I could not deny.

My laptop was where my arm knew it would be before I looked. On the desktop sat a single file I didn’t remember naming: moths-in-the-machine_final. The icon pulsed very faintly, like something dreaming.

“Absolutely not,” I told it, and closed the lid.

For three days I didn’t open the laptop at all. I did adult things like laundry and scrubbing and hoovering with a zeal that would impress the dead. I ordered traps, rinsed traps, moved traps. I polished wood that had never asked to be reflective. I slept on the sofa with the light on and woke with the lamp off, which I chose not to consider.

On the fourth day, I made coffee I didn’t need and opened the laptop.

The file waited, patient as a cat.

I double‑clicked.

The template bloomed. Clean. Balanced. Kind. It was the sort of design that looks inevitable once you’ve made the correct thousand choices. I scrolled with my mouth slightly open, looking for the seam that would give the trick away. There wasn’t one.

I should have deleted it. I should have dragged it to the bin and set the bin on fire and thrown the ashes into the sea and moved to a cave.

Instead I published it.

—

Clients came, as they always do: some lovely, some lonely, some curiously belligerent about fonts. Sales ticked. Emails multiplied politely. I installed sites. I wrote invoices. I slept, sometimes, in a bed that creaked in new places.

At night, at the very edge of my attention, the flat made a noise like a moth testing a lampshade. I told myself it was the neighbour’s boiler. I told myself many sensible things.

Weeks later, an email arrived from a client called Mina. The subject line read: Quick Question About the Template. The tone was gentle and exact, the way people write when they hope they’re being silly and are worried they aren’t.

Hi — first, thank you. The template is honestly beautiful; I’ve never been able to get my portfolio to feel like me and now it does. It’s actually a pleasure to work on.

One odd thing: if I’m still editing after midnight, sometimes my screen goes a bit… flickery? It’s the strangest thing — like there’s movement behind the glass. Not a glitchy sort of flicker. More like wings. Is that a known issue? It only happens late, when I’m tired. Probably nothing. Sorry to bother you!

I stared at the monitor until the pixels swam. Somewhere I could have sworn I heard the smallest sound: the air clearing its throat.

I typed a reply and deleted it and typed another and deleted that, too. In the end I wrote the only honest thing I could.

Hi Mina — delighted you’re enjoying the build. Re: the flicker, it can happen if the room’s very dark and your eyes are tired. Two quick fixes:

• Switch on a lamp behind your screen to reduce the contrast.

• Log off and give it ten minutes. Things settle.

If it persists, let me know and I’ll take a look.

I signed off with a smiley I did not feel and sent the email into the ocean.

That night I left the laptop closed and read a book about trees until the sentences started to smell of sap. When I switched off the light, the room felt like something waiting with excellent posture. I slept with the duvet over my head like a child.

In the morning, on the kitchen table under a mug ring I would definitely clean later, sat a small brown wing. Not attached to anything. Just a spare part, as if someone had been making moths and had leftovers.

I held it up to the light. Letters crawled faintly across the membrane and then faded. I dropped it into the bin and told myself it had not happened.

—

The work went on. I made homepages for people who had learned, the hard way, that home is a verb. I built contact pages for people who were brave enough to be found. I wrote About pages for people who suddenly remembered they had a story.

Sometimes, late, I’d hover in a blank text field, fingers lifted, and feel the flicker under my skin. The page would wait, and I would wait back, and in the waiting there was a noise like soft paper being folded in the next room.

I never opened the portal again. I never even put a rug over the place. The circle on the carpet stayed, an awkward moon that refused to learn its lines.

Every so often a client would send an email not unlike Mina’s. Beautiful template. Tiny odd thing late at night. Screen flicker. Probably nothing.

I have a canned response now. It’s honest in the way umbrellas are honest: useful, a little wet round the edges.

When I finish for the night, I shut the laptop and listen to the room. If the flat is quiet enough, I can hear my heartbeat. If it is too quiet, I can hear something else.

A whisper behind the glass. Wings testing the perimeter. A gentle rustle from the footer where the credits sit, grateful and small. I keep my alt text kind and my contrasts high. I keep my grids true and my margins considerate. I sleep like a person who has done their best.

And if sometimes, in the dark before morning, I dream of a vast face made of empty search bars, of a question that wants an answer I refuse to give, I do not tell anyone.

Because you mustn’t feed them.

Because beauty is a doorway.

Because perfection, once summoned, expects to be let in.

I leave a lamp on in the hall and a cardigan over the back of the chair. I make tea I will forget to drink. I put on a jumper with holes.

The template hums softly on the hard drive, grateful as a pet. It will never be for sale, not really. People think they’ve bought it. Let them. They’ve bought a photograph of a fire, not the heat.

When the light flickers, when your screen shows a ripple where there should be glass, when you blink and think you see letters gliding over a wing, do the sensible thing: save your work, close the lid, sleep.

In the morning, write something true in a text box and watch how the world—this world—leans in to read.

End.