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Last year I finished a four-year residency as part of becoming an emergency medical specialist (aka an ER doctor). Working in a metropolitan hospital, I had seen a lot of crazy things over time—shootings, stabbings, freak accidents and mysterious illnesses, to name a few—but the patient I remember the most was Martha Jennings.
Martha had come in originally after police had been called to her home due to noise complaints from neighbors. When the officers arrived, they had found her frantically moving to and fro between a cellar door and a backed-up truck filled with sheets of metal and wood. According to one cop I spoke to later, she had been wringing with sweat as she yanked an eight-foot sheet of plywood off the truck bed and began dragging it toward the doorway that led underneath the house. She’d barely looked up at the officers’ arrival, but when they offered to help her carry it down, she accepted gratefully.
The cellar was in chaos, with power tools and cords strewn across the floor from one end to the other. It didn’t take long to figure out that Martha was in the process of adding layers to all the walls down there, and not just one layer either. Instead she was attaching sheets of wood and metal in alternating panels, and in places the layers were already five or six sheets deep. When the cop casually asked her what kind of project she was working on down there, she had blinked several times before answering, her voice quiet and wavering in between pants of exertion as she propped the latest board against a wall.
“I’m making the walls thicker. So it’s safe down here when it comes for me.”
They naturally followed up with more questions, which led to her being brought in for examination. She was brought to the ER first due to concerns that her “confusion” might be caused by either dehydration, heatstroke, or some kind of bad reaction to medicine. We pulled blood and I did an initial exam right after she arrived, but I wasn’t noting anything other than her being slightly underweight and looking exhausted. That and her being really pissed off.
“You can’t keep me here. You have no right. I haven’t committed any crime, have I?”
I had smiled at her then, both because I wanted to reassure her and because I thought it was a fair question. I knew they had brought her in because she was being “disorderly”, but I honestly figured they did it more because they were worried about her and the things she was saying. At the time, all I knew was that she had supposedly been “acting crazy” and “talking out of her head”, but looking at her now, fuming but clear-eyed, it was hard to imagine it.
“No, I don’t think you did anything wrong. But…well, I think they were scared something was wrong. That maybe you were sick or weren’t feeling yourself. Do you remember talking to the officers that brought you here?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes. I’m not crazy. Or if I am, I’m not senile at least.”
I laughed. “No one said you were. But do you mind telling me what you talked to them about? It may just be some kind of misunderstanding.”
She sighed. “Look, I was having a bad day, I ran my mouth, and they took me for being serious. It…It was all just a bad joke that got out of hand.” She looked down at the wristcuffs that secured her to the bed. “Can you take these off? They are itchy and I promise, you don’t need them.”
Nodding, I unbuckled them as we talked. “So, it was a bad joke? Tell me about it. What did you tell them?”
Rubbing her freed wrists, she scowled. “I was…I am…renovating the basement of my house. My husband died a few months ago, and I’ve been trying to keep busy ever since. I guess I was making too much noise, and one of my stupid neighbors complained. I was mad because they called the cops, so I made up this silly story just to mess with them. That’s all there is to it.” She glanced around. “So can I get my clothes back? I’m ready to go now.”
I shook my head slightly. “Miss Jennings…”
“Call me Martha please. I’m not that old.”
“Martha, I...I can’t make the call to release you. When someone is brought in by the police, they have to either sign off on the release or they take you back when we’re done treating you. I understand this might have all been just a bad joke like you said, but I’m going to have to talk to them first.”
She started to argue and I raised my hand. “If you will, tell me what you told them, if you remember. It will put me in a better position to help get you released if I know what we’re talking about. Okay?”
Martha closed her eyes and pushed her head back into the pillow, her lips a thin line of resigned defeat as she began.
“I told them that there is some kind of alien or magic needle that is hunting me. That I needed to make the walls of my basement thick enough that it couldn’t get through, even though I didn’t know if it would matter.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So that was your joke? That you thought a magic needle was after you?”
Glaring at me, she nodded. “Yes, it was a bad and stupid joke. Will you please get me released now? I need to be going.”
“As I said, it will be a little while. They’re going to want to see the bloodwork before we release you, and I don’t control what the cops do after that. But I don’t mind talking to them and trying to help, like I said.”
Leaning forward, she stabbed a finger toward me. “I’ll sue. You understand me? I’m being held against my will, and I. Will. Sue.”
I shrugged. “Ma’am, you do what you need to, but I’m telling you, if they arrested you, it’s going to be at least another couple of hours before you get out of here, one way or the other.”
Her eyes widened. “No. I can’t stay here that long. You Goddamn idiots, you don’t…” She started to get up and I raised a hand to stop her.
“Please don’t. They’ll just put the restraints back on you, and it’ll make it harder for me to convince them that you’re okay to go home. Can you try to be patient?”
I was surprised when she laid back, tears in her eyes. “You’re killing me, that’s what you’re doing. You’re all killing me.”
“Miss…Martha, what do you mean? What are you afraid of? The tests? I can assure you they’re all harmless, and no one will do anything…”
“No, you fool. Not the tests.” Her voice was lower but more strident now, the angry hiss of a snake. “The needle. The fucking needle.” Her eyes darted around as she spoke. “I lied before. The needle is real and it’s coming for me. I need to keep moving or be somewhere protected, not stuck here talking to you.”
I felt new unease stirring in my belly. She wasn’t joking now, and I didn’t think she was lying either. Which meant she was crazy after all. I almost went and got help right then, but I wanted to know more. Maybe she could tell me something that could help before they took her away for the 72 hour psych observation, as I could see now that’s the direction this was all heading.
“Martha, will you tell me what you’re talking about? The truth? That’s the only way I can help.”
The woman looked at me for several moments before seeming to make a decision. Scowling, she gave a shrug. “Why not? It won’t make you think I’m any more crazy than you already do. And apparently I have at least a little bit of time to kill. But for the record, this is all a joke, I do not consent to my restraints, and if I’m not released in the next few minutes, you can expect a lawsuit.” These words lacked the same energy and conviction that had crackled off of her just moments before. In fact, as I watched, she seemed to be deflating, her fear and panic being replaced with a dull gray sheen of resignation that was somehow worse. I was going to ask if she was okay, but she had already begun.
My husband wasn’t a bad man. A bit boring and clueless yes, and too in love with his work to be sure, but not a mean bone in his body. He…well, he was passionate about his work. It was all molecular chemistry and metallurgy and…well, it was interesting to him and the paint on the wall. But it paid well enough, especially when he got hired by a hush-hush outfit to work on some secret project.
When he first went to work there, I tried getting some details out of him, but he wouldn’t budge. Too much work integrity, you see. They said don’t tell anything, so he didn’t. That’s how I knew how bad things were when he came home six months ago, pale and shaking.
It wasn’t his constant, nervous glances. He’d been acting more jittery for a few weeks, and I’d assumed it was either work stress or because he knew our marriage was heading toward the edge of something that might interrupt the orderly existence he’d crafted for himself over the last ten years. It wasn’t even the fact that he poured himself a drink as soon as he walked in, despite the fact that he never drank more than once or twice a year.
It was the fact that he was talking to me. Telling me things. Things I knew he wasn’t supposed to be telling. Him breaking one of their precious rules scared the shit out of me.
He said for the last three years he had been part of Project Arcadia, a long-term, multi-disciplinary study of several objects provided to the group he worked for. When I asked if it was the government, he just laughed and shook his head. Said I watched too many movies and was thinking too small. But that it didn’t matter. What mattered was what had happened two weeks earlier. What had happened two hours before he came home to me terrified and shaking.
And it all came down to the thing that his team had been working with for the past year.
They called it the Needle. Two inches long and the width of five human hairs, it was a straight line of metal that defied any kind of explanation. For one thing, the metal seemed indestructible—they couldn’t even scrape it for a sample, and the tests they could run came back with results that made little sense and gave fewer answers. Second, it appeared to be solid and made of one piece, but all attempts at internal imaging had failed, so they couldn’t say for sure. Third, and this is where I started thinking he was crazy, the needle floated. Just floated on its own like a balloon, though it never raised or lowered itself more than about four feet off the ground unless pushed. If you did push it, it would drift away like a floating bar of soap before slowly creeping back to its original spot.
I asked him then, kind of making fun if I’m honest, if it was from an alien ship or something. He hadn’t laughed, but only shook his head slowly. Said he didn’t know. They were only told to learn what they could about how it worked. But, he’d added wearily, one of his partners had said it had come from some kind of “benefactor”. That the guy had worked on other objects before, and they were all different and all strange. One had been some kind of mask, another was a tissue sample from a tree or something.
For a long time he enjoyed working with the Needle. They made very little progress, but the chance to work with something so unique was exciting. He started staying longer and longer hours in the hopes of making some kind of breakthrough. He didn’t say it, but I think he was afraid he’d be kicked off the project if they didn’t get results. Joke was on him, wasn’t it?
Fuck. That’s petty. He didn’t know. I don’t guess any of them did. But…where was I?
Two weeks before my husband told me all this, they were doing a round of what he called “behavioral tests” on the damn thing, because they had figured out it had to have some kind of computer in it or something because of how it acted. It was fine with being moved around to wherever, but it wanted to stay at the same height above the ground. They constructed big vertical mazes and it would navigate them. According to Reese…that was my husband…it was just like watching a smart rat after it had memorized a path. They had this...this fucking thing, and they were just playing with it like it was a shiny toy.
Except one day, when one of his lab buddies, Becker, was pushing the Needle into the maze opening, his hand slipped and the Needle pricked his finger. Reese said it never should have happened. They had protocols for handling the thing, but they had gotten used to it, which made them careless and sloppy. For a few seconds they were just laughing nervously as Becker sucked his bloody finger. Then they heard a terrible screeching sound as the Needle pushed its way out of the maze, shot through a nearby wall and disappeared.
They were locked down for the next twelve hours—questioned again and again while security watched the surveillance videos and tracked the trajectory of the Needle out of the facility. It had shot through dozens of walls before flying off to places unknown. Well, unknown for the time being. As far as Reese and the rest of them went, there was no signs of them doing anything to cause it other than Becker pricking his finger. The rest of them were reassigned while Becker was “asked” to remain at the facility for further testing until the investigation was complete.
Reese heard about the first of the killings a couple of days later.
Becker had a grandmother in Arizona. She suddenly dropped dead in the produce department of her local grocery store, the only visible injury a tiny well of blood on the front and back of her head as though she had been pricked by something. The next day, Becker’s high school girlfriend, who he apparently hadn’t seen for years, died in a single car accident with no apparent cause for the wreck. By that weekend, his brother and the brother’s entire family were found dead in their camper of “indeterminate causes”. Then it was Becker’s college roommate, his parents, his fucking pharmacist.
Because of the way the grandmother died, they suspected from the start it was the Needle. And while they didn’t know why it was doing what it was doing, they began to understand the pattern and the practical effect. It was killing off anyone connected to the man who had pricked his finger on it.
Two hours before he came home, Reese had been talking to one of his old lab partners. They were on different teams now, and this was the first time they’d talked in a few days. Reese said the first thing he’d noticed was that Theresa was spilling her coffee. He went to mention it when he realized she wasn’t spilling it at all. There was a small hole in the side of her mug, and as the cup fell away, he saw blood blooming on her shirt as she fell to the ground. I remember him saying she shouldn’t have died so fast…not unless it had darted around inside her before flitting away again.
Reese was killed two days after telling me about the Needle. His death was a bit more mundane, however, as he was shot to death in a “robbery” while coming back from the ice machine at the motel we had checked into that night. Apparently his employers weren’t very happy with him spilling the beans and trying to run away from the killer needle.
I’d expected to follow him soon after, but no one ever came. No assassins or black cars following me or whatever it is they might normally do. I moved around for a few days, but I realized there was no point. They could find me if they wanted, and I’d started to figure out that they didn’t want to kill me after all. No, they were content to let the Needle do that for them while they gathered the data. Another fucking “behavioral test”.
So I went back home. That’s when I got the call that Rory, the man I’d been sleeping with for the past three years, had died mysteriously in the shower. Rory, a man that Reese had never met, let alone Becker. That’s when I knew that Reese had been telling the truth, and that some time, somewhere, the Needle would be coming for me.
That’s why I have to get out of here.
I tried to keep my expression neutral as Martha finished her story. It was insane, of course, but letting my disbelief and pity show would have only upset her more. So instead, I thanked her and told her I needed to finish my rounds, but I would be back in shortly. She said something else as I walked away, but I pretended I didn’t hear and kept going.
I was on the other side of the ER a few minutes later when I heard Martha begin to scream.
Running over, I pushed through a throng of nurses and PAs to see what was bad enough to cause her to scream so loudly for a few seconds before falling silent. My breath caught as I saw her dead eyes staring up at the ceiling, the right one red from hemorrhage. I staggered back a step, and that’s when I noticed her bare foot hanging halfway off the bed.
On the bottom of her heel was a tiny drop of blood. When I wiped at it, I saw a small puncture wound there. I was moving back toward her upper body to more closely examine the injured eye when something on the wall behind the bed caught my attention.
It was a small hole, about the width of five human hairs. It looked to be lined up perfectly with the top of Martha’s head, and when I checked, I found a matching hole in her scalp.
I went home early that night. I couldn’t get her story out of my head, but worse was the sound of her scream—full of fear and pain as the thing she feared the most found her and pushed its way relentlessly through her body.
I checked later, and there was no autopsy. No record of who claimed the body or where it went. It didn’t matter. I suspected I knew exactly who had taken it.
The next few months were hard for me. I kept waiting for guys in black suits to pay me a visit or to wake up in a dungeon somewhere. I kept my head down, finished my residency, and moved to the other side of the country. When I started my new job, I didn’t take more than a day off for the first six months, and it was only this weekend that I actually got away with a girl I’ve been seeing. It’s the first time in a really long time that I’ve relaxed, and when I got home I realized I had gone more than twenty-four hours without feeling scared for the first time in…well, a long time.
Laying down on my bed, I felt myself getting drowsy as I stared up at my ceiling. Things were going good with Sidney, and work was fine now that…
There was a hole in my ceiling.
I sat up and looked closer. That hadn’t been there before. There hadn’t been a hole right over my bed, right over where I laid my head.
I looked around in a panic. There were no signs of anything else being disturbed, but still…I stood up and examined my bed. That’s when I noticed that there was a similar hole in my pillow, though when I picked it up, it didn’t go through the other side. As though it realized I wasn’t there…or was letting me know that it had been.
Shaking, I grabbed my suitcase again. Headed for the bus station and got on the first one that was going far with infrequent stops. Planned infrequent stops, at least.
Because as I’m writing this on my phone, the bus has pulled over in the middle of nowhere. A flat tire and engine trouble, if you can believe that coincidence. I know I can’t. There’s no service out here, so the driver is walking back to a spot in the road with a gas station that we passed a couple of miles back. I’m not waiting on that though. I’m going to start walking in the opposite direction as soon as this is finished.
Not because I think I’ll outrun it, you understand. But because people get nervous in a crisis, or even just the inconvenience of being stranded for a couple of hours. They want to talk, get to know each other, make connections so they feel more normal and less alone. I’m already terrified about what may happen to Sidney and my Uncle Mike, the people I work with or I’ve treated. I don’t want more lives on my conscience.
So I’ll walk and hope it doesn’t find me. That if it does, it will end with me. And if it’s coming for me, I hope it’s soon. Because I still remember the last thing Martha said to me as I walked away, pretending I didn’t hear.
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