The Port and the Pale

The fluorescent lights of St. Jude’s outpatient wing hummed a steady, sterile dirge. My sister Lena and I had been sitting in those hard plastic chairs for what felt like days, though the wall clock insisted only two hours had crawled by. Our mother, Eleanor, had gone in for the procedure to place her port-a-cath, the tiny plastic gateway that would deliver the poison meant to save her. We watched the double doors at the end of the hall, the ones that led to the recovery rooms, with the desperate hope of the condemned.

When Dr. Reyes finally emerged, his face was a careful mask of professional neutrality. ‘Family of Eleanor Vance?’ he called. We all stood—Lena, our father, and I—and rushed over as he delivered the expected news: ‘The surgery went smoothly. She’s resting. You can see her in a few minutes.’ Relief washed over me, but it was thin, brittle. Something in his eyes, a flicker of unease, unsettled me.

When it was my turn to enter the room, I found Mom propped against pillows, her face blotchy and wet. She was crying, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. I rushed to her side. ‘What’s wrong? Are you in pain? Should I get the nurse?’ She shook her head, and with a voice that was barely a whisper, she said, ‘No, it’s not pain. It’s… what I saw.’ I knelt beside her, taking her cold hand. ‘What do you mean? The surgery? Did something go wrong?’ She looked at me with a terror that chilled my blood, a look I had never seen before on her usually stoic face. ‘They put me under, but I wasn’t fully asleep. I could hear everything. I could feel everything. And when they placed the port, I saw… I saw something looking at me. From the other side, out of the light. It had eyes like pits, and it was smiling.’

I tried to soothe her, blaming the anesthesia, the stress. But as I patted her hand, I noticed something odd. The clear tubing that ran from her new port to the IV drip was not filled with the clear saline I expected. It was a pale, milky fluid, swirling lazily. ‘What is this?’ I asked, pointing at the bag. The nurse, who had just entered to check the IV, froze. Her name tag read ‘Brenda.’ She looked at the bag, then at the monitor, her face paling. ‘That’s not the normal solution,’ she stammered. ‘I’ll get the doctor.’ She fled the room, leaving us alone.

Mom began to shake, her teeth chattering. ‘It’s in me,’ she moaned. ‘It’s in me now.’ I tried to calm her, but I felt a cold dread creeping up my own spine. The room seemed to grow darker, the hum of the lights fading to a low buzz. Then, for a split second, I saw it—a shape in the corner of my vision, just behind my mother’s shoulder. It was tall, thin, with skin the color of old bone, and its eyes, if they could be called that, were deep black voids, like the emptiness between stars. It was smiling, a too-wide smile that showed no teeth, just a dark maw.

I blinked, and it was gone. Ignoring my heart hammering in my chest, I squeezed Mom’s hand. ‘You’re just tired. It’s the drugs,’ I whispered. But I didn’t believe it. Later, when Dr. Reyes returned, he dismissed it as a reaction to the sedative, a common hallucination. He ordered the IV bag changed, and the nurse complied, but I noticed that the new bag still had a slight cloudiness to it, and the port site—the little plastic disc under her skin—seemed to pulse with a life of its own.

We took Mom home the next day. The house, a modest ranch we’d lived in for years, suddenly felt wrong. The hallway that led to her bedroom stretched longer than it should, the shadows pooling in corners that had always been bright. That night, as I brought her a cup of tea, I found her staring at the wall, not blinking. ‘Mom?’ I said. She turned to me slowly, an unnatural motion, and said, ‘He told me he’s not from the light. He’s from the dark. And he’s going to live in me now.’ She pointed at the port, visible as a small bump under her pajama top. ‘He’s going to come out when he wants to.’

The next weeks were a nightmare. Mom’s condition deteriorated, but it wasn’t the cancer. It was something else. She spoke in languages no one knew, and her eyes, once warm and brown, took on a yellowish tint with slit-like pupils that seemed to focus on things we couldn’t see. She refused to remove the port, scratching at anyone who came near her skin. The doctors were baffled; they couldn’t find any infection, any cause. But I knew. That port was a door, and something had come through.

One night, I woke to the sound of her singing—a low, guttural lullaby, not in her voice. I crept to her door and peered in. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, facing the window, the moonlight casting a ghostly pallor on her skin. The port site was glowing, a faint blue light pulsing through the fabric of her nightgown. She turned her head and looked directly at me, and her face was not hers. It was thin, elongated, with teeth like needles. ‘He wants you too,’ she said, in a voice that was a chorus of whispers. ‘He wants all the family. That’s why he chose this body. The port was just an invitation.’

I ran, but the hallway seemed to stretch, the doors all leading to the same room. I found myself back at her bedroom, and she was standing, her arms outstretched, the port now open like a mouth, a dark liquid drippling. I screamed, but no sound came out. Then, everything went black.

I woke up in the hospital, restrained, with Lena by my side. She told me I had a breakdown, that I tried to tear out Mom’s port with my bare hands. Mom passed later that week, officially from complications of cancer. But in the morgue, the nurse whispered, the port was found empty—the tube leading to her heart was gone, replaced by a twisted, black root. I still feel it sometimes, a cool sensation near my collarbone, as if a tiny itch awaits a scratch. And at night, I catch the faintest sound, like a humming, coming from my own skin. The port is gone, but the pale that came through has found a new home.