The Fourth Syringe

Mara, a 28-year-old book conservator, had never been more than a routine visitor to St. Aldhelm’s General Hospital, a sprawling Victorian structure in the rain-soaked outskirts of a city that had long ago forgotten its own ghosts. Her niece, Elara, twenty-three and fragile as spun glass, had been admitted on the twenty-sixth of December for a crisis of her chronic hemolytic anemia, a malady that turned her blood into a battlefield. Mara volunteered to stay the nights, not that visitors were allowed after eight, but the nurses, aware of Elara’s fear, bent the rules if she remained silent in the corner chair.

The ICU wing, called the Marrow Ward, was a relic of a bygone era, its corridors lined with green tiles cracked like old porcelain, and its rooms separated by heavy wooden doors with small, dark portholes. Elara’s room, Number 4, was at the end of a narrow hall, where the heating pipes groaned with a sound like a creature clearing its throat. From the very first night, Elara whispered to Mara about a presence—a cold knot of air that hovered near the foot of the bed, a sensation of being watched by unseen eyes that pressed against her skin like cold coins. The bed frame would tremble, not violently, but with a patient, rhythmic pulse, as if something were testing its strength.

Mara dismissed it as the hallucinations of a fevered mind, but by the third night, she could no longer deny the truth. Each morning, she would find the bed rotated, sometimes by fifteen degrees, sometimes by a full quarter turn, so that Elara’s head now faced the door, and the IV stand, the heart monitor, and the oxygen tank were all displaced, their cords stretched like taut nerves. The nurses were baffled; they marked the floor with chalk to prove the shifting, but the chalk lines were smeared by morning, and the equipment always returned to its new, wrong position. Mara began to sleep in the bed beside Elara, holding her hand, but even then, she would wake to the sensation of the mattress tilting slightly, as if something were crawling beneath them.

On the fourth night, just before midnight, Mara saw it. A flicker at the edge of her vision, a figure—tall, impossibly thin, with a head too large for its body—standing at the foot of the bed. It wore no clothes, but its skin was the color of old bandages, and its eyes were like black pearls, absorbing all light. It held a syringe, long and glassy, the plunger already half-pressed. Mara tried to scream, but her throat seized. The figure moved closer, its steps silent, and placed the syringe on the bedside table, then dissolved into the wall. When Mara blinked, the syringe was still there, filled with a dark, oily liquid that seemed to swirl on its own.

The next morning, the doctors found Elara’s hemoglobin counts dangerously improved, as if she had received a transfusion, and her fever had broken. But Mara noticed the bruises on Elara’s arms, small round marks like needle pricks, and the way Elara now spoke in her sleep, saying the name ‘Mordred’ over and over. The hospital records, when Mara finally demanded them, showed no record of any treatment that night. The syringe, when she tried to pick it up, was cold as ice and left a frost mark on her hand.

On the fifth night, Mara stayed awake, determined to confront the presence. At exactly 3:33 AM, the room’s single fluorescent light began to flicker, and the temperature plummeted. The figure reappeared, this time holding two syringes, and it approached Mara, not Elara. Its jaws unhinged, and from its mouth came a voice, dry as dust, whispering, ‘You have seen too much. Now you will take her place.’ Mara tried to run, but her legs were frozen. The figure pressed the syringe against her neck, and she felt a cold liquid enter her bloodstream, not like medicine, but like a thousand tiny needles. Elara screamed from the bed, but her voice was muffled, as if from a great distance.

When the sun rose, the nurses found Mara lying on the floor, her skin pale, her eyes closed. They revived her, but she couldn’t speak. Elara was discharged that day, her condition stable, but she refused to leave without Mara. In the end, they both went home, but Mara never recovered. She would sit by the window, staring at nothing, and when the clock struck 3:33, she would begin to tremble, and a cold sweat would break on her brow. Elara, now well, tried to comfort her aunt, but she couldn’t help but notice that Mara’s eyes had darkened, and when she looked into them, she saw the reflection of a tall, thin figure standing behind her own shoulder, waiting.