The Face in the Window

The scratching came again, three deliberate strokes beneath the casket lid.

Ruth tightened both hands around her gun. “If that thing comes out, I’m shooting it.”

“Where?” Tomás asked. “It doesn’t have a face.”

“Then I’ll shoot the part that’s most inconvenient.”

Iris kept the captured camera against her ribs. Its casing was warm through her blouse. The photograph in her pocket seemed warm too, though that was impossible. Paper did not hold heat. Paper did not show a second Iris standing in a chapel window.

Edwin had backed against the wall. He looked older than he had ten minutes ago, the skin beneath his eyes loose and gray. “Don’t open it.”

Iris turned to him. “You’ve said that about every door in this building.”

“And I’ve been right.”

“Not usefully.”

Another scrape came from within the casket. Something shifted beneath the lid with a slow, dragging weight.

Iris stepped toward it.

Tomás caught her arm. His grip was gentle, but his voice was not. “You don’t have to be the one who looks.”

“That’s the problem.” She glanced at the camera. “It already has a witness. It just doesn’t have a body.”

Edwin’s mouth tightened. “The role needs someone to complete the record.”

“No. The role needs someone who agrees to complete it.”

“You think refusal is enough?”

“I think you’ve spent a year proving that it is.”

His eyes flickered toward the closed casket. “I didn’t refuse. I redirected.”

“You redirected it to me.”

“I kept it from taking me.”

“And called that survival.”

The words landed harder than she intended. Edwin looked away first.

Iris had no room left for his shame. Shame was what people used when they wanted the shape of an apology without the inconvenience of admitting what they had done.

She nodded at Ruth. “Open it.”

Ruth stared at her. “You’re certain?”

“No.”

“That’s not the answer I wanted.”

“It’s the only accurate one.”

Ruth moved to the casket. Tomás took position beside her, one hand holding the broken remains of his camera as if it were still capable of helping. Edwin stayed by the wall, watching the lid.

Ruth lifted the latch.

The scratching stopped.

For a second, the chapel held its breath with them. Then Ruth raised the lid.

The casket was empty.

Not merely free of the witness-form. Empty of its lining, its white pillow, its satin folds. The interior had been stripped down to dark wood. A single Polaroid lay at the bottom.

Ruth swore softly.

Iris leaned over the open casket but did not touch the photograph. It showed the same box from above. In the picture, however, the lid was closed. A pale hand pressed against the inside of it.

On the lower margin, where the date should have been, someone had scratched a word into the emulsion.

IRIS.

Tomás looked toward the chapel windows.

The second figure was gone from the reflection.

Iris pulled the photograph from the casket. The moment her fingers touched it, something struck the back of the paper from within.

Once.

Twice.

The image bulged outward like wet skin.

Iris nearly dropped it. Ruth raised her gun toward the photograph, then stopped, recognizing the absurdity before anyone had to say it aloud.

“Put it down,” Tomás said.

“No.” Iris held the photograph flat between both hands. “It wants me to.”

The bulge moved beneath the image. A fingertip pressed against the paper, distorting the pictured lid. Then another. Five pale impressions appeared in the photograph, spreading outward from the center.

Behind them, the casket lid began to lower by itself.

Edwin made a strangled sound. “It can use the picture as a witness.”

Iris looked at him. “Explain.”

“The witness doesn’t have to be present at the death. It has to establish that the death was seen.”

“The photograph establishes it.”

“The photograph is the record.”

“And the camera?”

His gaze fixed on the machine in her hand. “The camera is what decides which one is true.”

That was the first useful thing he had said all night.

Iris looked down at the SX-70. No film cartridge. No mechanism capable of producing even one picture, let alone the stack of impossible records now scattered through her life. Yet the shutter sat open like a black pupil.

The image in her hands shuddered. The pale fingers pushed farther through the printed casket lid.

Iris understood then why the new photograph had shown her double. The witness-role had lost Edwin’s body. It had made another one from the nearest available shape—not Iris exactly, but Iris as the system understood her: owner of the funeral home, inheritor of the records, person most likely to stand close when someone died.

A replacement witness wearing the victim’s face.

“It’s not showing my death,” she said.

Tomás followed her stare. “The figure?”

“It’s showing who will take the picture.”

The photograph split down the middle.

A white face pushed through the tear.

Ruth fired.

The shot cracked through the chapel. The bullet struck the photograph and blew a black hole through the printed casket. The pale face vanished. Smoke curled from the paper.

For one stunned moment, nothing moved.

Then the casket slammed shut.

The camera in Iris’s hand clicked.

A photograph slid from its front.

She caught it automatically. The fresh image showed Ruth firing into the first photograph. Tomás stood beside her, mouth open in warning. Edwin was not in the frame.

In the lower corner, a date developed in dark gray letters.

OCTOBER 15.

Tomorrow.

Behind the three of them, the chapel doors stood open. The figure wearing Iris’s face waited in the hallway, one hand raised toward the camera.

Iris looked up.

The hallway was empty.

Edwin was gone.

Ruth spun toward the doors. “Where did he—”

A sound came from the funeral home’s preparation room: the rolling squeak of a gurney wheel, followed by Edwin’s voice calling Iris’s name.

Not shouting. Not pleading.

Inviting.

Tomás stepped close to her. “That isn’t him.”

“No,” Iris said.

She slid the new photograph into her pocket beside the first. The two papers touched, and from inside her coat came a faint, synchronized tapping.

One tap from the image of her double.

One tap from tomorrow’s photograph.

The camera’s lens turned toward the preparation room without anyone moving it.

Iris closed her hand around the casing. “It has chosen a new witness.”

Ruth checked the hallway, then the dark chapel, as if procedure might still be waiting somewhere to rescue them. “Who?”

Iris looked at the camera.

“Me.”

She started toward the preparation room. Tomás caught her shoulder, but she shook him off—not because she wanted to go alone, but because this time she needed him behind her, watching the door, watching her, watching anything the camera tried to make true.

At the threshold, Iris stopped.

The preparation table was empty. The overhead lamp swung gently above it. On the observation glass, written from the other side in a greasy black streak, were four words:

TAKE MY PICTURE, IRIS.

Her reflection stood beneath the message.

It smiled before she did.