I was eight when my father died.
The heart attack was sudden. No warning. One moment he was carving the Sunday roast, the next he was face-first on the table, gravy pooling around his cheek.
They said it was peaceful. They lied.
He'd been muttering about "the thing in the attic" for weeks before it happened. Said it watched him sleep. That it moved when no one was looking. That it wanted to "go back" to someone, but didn't know who.
We thought it was the pills. Or the grief from losing Mum the year before.
Then he died clutching it.
A ragdoll.
Old. Filthy. Sewn from three different fabrics, none of which matched. One glass eye, one button. A mouth crudely stitched in a crooked line—half a grin, half a grimace. Its stuffing leaked from one armpit like yellowing wool.
Dad called it "Needles."
He said it was his friend from childhood. Said it had saved him from something, once.
After the funeral, they tried to throw it out.
I screamed. I don't remember why—just that it felt wrong. Like getting rid of it would make something worse.
So I kept it.
Years passed. I forgot about it mostly. It lived in a box at the back of my closet. But sometimes, I'd catch it in places I hadn't left it. Sitting at the foot of my bed. Slumped in the hallway. Propped against the window.
I blamed sleepwalking. Or stress. Or maybe I'd moved it and just didn't remember.
But I always put it back in the box.
Always.
By the time I was twenty-seven, the dreams began.
They weren't nightmares at first. Just fragments. A pale room. Flickering lightbulbs. The sound of thread being pulled through flesh.
Then voices.
"Sew him back. Sew him in. Keep the seams tight."
And the whisper that came every night, just as I slipped into unconsciousness:
"I never left you. You let me in."
I started waking up with scratches. Thin, straight lines along my arms, chest, thighs—as if something had measured me.
And the ragdoll...
It never stayed in the box anymore.
One night, I found it on my pillow. Its arms open wide like it was waiting for an embrace. I threw it across the room.
It landed upright.
Staring at me.
Smiling.
I couldn't breathe. I tried to burn it.
The flames went out. Like someone pinched them shut. The lighter flickered, sparked, then died in my hand.
And the doll...
Its stitched mouth had changed.
It was smiling wider.
I called my aunt—Dad's sister. She was the only one who might know the truth.
She hesitated before answering.
"I begged your father to bury it," she said. "We were kids when he found it. In the wall. In that old farmhouse we lived in before you were born."
"Found it?" I asked.
"It was waiting there. Like someone had placed it between the beams. Wrapped in hair. Human hair. We should've left it alone."
"What did it do to him?"
There was a long silence.
"He used to sleepwalk. But when we followed him, we found him whispering to it. Asking it to protect him. Said it promised to make the bad things go away if he 'let it stitch its way in.' And after that..."
She paused.
"...things changed. He stopped crying. Stopped reacting at all. And then other people started getting sick. Animals vanished. The walls bled once."
Then she hung up.
I never reached her again.
The dreams returned worse. Now I saw myself.
But wrong.
My limbs moved like they were on strings. My mouth opened, and Needles spoke through it.
"Skin wears out. But thread remembers."
And then—on the forty-ninth night—I woke up unable to move.
Sleep paralysis, I thought. But my eyes were open. I was fully awake.
I felt the tug first.
A slow, gentle pull near my ankle. Something invisible threading into my heel, inch by inch. I couldn't scream. Couldn't blink.
Needles sat on my chest. Sewing needle clutched in one tiny hand. Black thread unspooling from its other.
It hummed. The same tune my dad used to whistle.
Then it whispered in my voice:
"Almost done. Just need to finish the mouth."
I woke in daylight.
With stitches across my lips.
Crude. Black. Jagged.
I had to cut them free with a knife.
The skin underneath wasn't bleeding. It wasn't even sore. Like it had healed around the thread.
Like it had been there for years.
I tried again to destroy it.
I took it to a church. Left it in the holy water basin. The water turned black. Every crucifix in the building cracked in half within the hour.
The priest told me to leave.
That was last week.
Now it sits beside me as I write this.
It has grown.
It stands two feet tall now. New arms have formed—made of old clothes I no longer remember owning. It mimics my movements. When I turn my head, it turns too. When I speak, it opens its mouth.
Yesterday, I found photographs in my drawer—old, yellowed pictures of my father as a child.
In one of them, he's holding Needles.
But the doll's face is mine.
There's a knock at my door now.
Not on the outside.
From inside the walls.
Needles looks pleased.
It told me last night, in a voice that sounded like my father's:
"We patch the bloodline. One stitch at a time."
If you're reading this, do not keep the doll.
Do not let it touch you.
Do not look into its eyes.
And above all—
Don't love it.
That's how it stays.