The Witness in the Dark

The click came again from the chapel.

Iris felt Edwin tense beneath Ruth’s arm. His breath rasped once, sharply, as though the sound had found a handhold inside him.

“Keep him there,” Iris said.

Ruth shifted her weight against his shoulder. “I had no plans to let him wander.”

“Not him.”

The emergency lights failed to come on. Somewhere in the building, a relay ticked and gave up. The funeral home settled around them with its familiar night sounds: pipes contracting, the refrigerator motor stuttering, a loose sign tapping against the front window. Those sounds belonged to the house. The silence between them did not.

Tomás moved close enough that Iris felt his sleeve brush hers. “The chapel is on the other side of the hall.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t go toward it.”

“That’s where it wants us to go.”

“Then we definitely shouldn’t go.”

Another click answered from the chapel, followed by the soft electric whine of a camera ejecting film.

Iris pictured the room without seeing it: the rows of upholstered chairs, the small lectern, the artificial lilies her father had refused to replace because the real ones shed pollen on the carpet. At the rear was the old display alcove, where Calloway & Sons kept its least expensive caskets under warm recessed lights.

The lights were not warm now. They were dead.

She reached for the wall and found the switch by touch. Nothing. Her fingers moved lower, to the cabinet where the funeral home kept candles for power outages and grieving families who wanted a flame beside an urn. Her hand closed around a box of long tapers.

“Ruth,” she said, “can you hold Edwin and use a lighter?”

“I have one.”

“Don’t light it until I tell you.”

Edwin gave a quiet laugh. “You think darkness protects you?”

“No. I think it protects the shape of the room.”

His laugh stopped.

Iris took the candlebox and led them into the hall. Ruth kept Edwin between herself and the wall, one hand twisted into the back of his coat. Tomás came last. His ruined camera hung from his wrist by its strap, the broken lens clicking faintly against the casing as he walked.

At the chapel doors, Iris raised one hand.

A thin strip of light showed beneath them.

Not electric light. A pale square, low to the floor, shifting as if someone inside were holding a photograph there.

Tomás whispered, “It took one.”

Iris opened the right-hand door.

The chapel was empty.

Every chair faced the front. The casket display stood open, its lid raised. A Polaroid photograph lay on the lectern, still silvering at the edges. No one stood near it. No one stood anywhere.

Then the camera clicked from behind Iris.

She turned.

A figure occupied the back row.

It was seated with its hands folded, dressed in Edwin’s black funeral vest. Its face was angled down, obscured by the darkness beneath the brim of an old director’s hat. One hand rested on its knee. The index finger was scarred. On the right hand, the chipped green ring caught the candleless gloom.

Edwin made a sound that was almost a plea.

The figure lifted its head.

There was no face beneath the hat. Only a flat, pale oval, faintly reflective, like undeveloped film.

Ruth raised her gun. “Nobody move.”

The figure did not move. It held the Polaroid camera in its other hand, an old SX-70 with a cracked leather grip.

Iris looked at Edwin. “You said the system had selected me.”

“I said it was expensive to refuse.”

“What is that?”

His eyes remained on the faceless figure. “The part that keeps watching.”

The figure stood.

It did not rise like a person. It unfolded, joint by joint, from the chair, too tall for the suit and too narrow for the shoulders inside it. The hat remained perfectly level. Beneath the coat, the fabric hung empty in places, as though the body had been assembled from the memory of a man rather than his flesh.

Tomás stepped between it and Iris. “Edwin, tell her what it wants.”

“I don’t know.”

“You always knew enough.”

“I knew what it required.” Edwin’s voice hardened. “A decision. A method. A witness. I gave it all three, and it let me walk away.”

“Not walk away,” Iris said. “You substituted someone else.”

The figure raised its camera toward Edwin.

Iris saw the arrangement at once. Edwin against the preparation-room wall. Ruth restraining him. Tomás beside the broken equipment. Herself standing at the chapel doors. The figure behind the lens.

Decision: Edwin’s death.

Method: the camera, perhaps the photograph itself.

Witness: the thing that had inherited his hand.

“No,” Iris said.

The faceless head turned toward her.

She moved to the lectern and snatched up the developing photograph. The image showed the chapel from above. Edwin lay facedown between the chairs. Ruth knelt beside him. Tomás was frozen near the casket display. Iris stood at the rear with blood spreading across the front of her blouse.

In the upper corner, a date had appeared.

OCTOBER 14.

Today.

The future had caught up with them, and the photograph had stopped pretending to be patient.

Iris tore the photograph in half.

The figure’s camera fired.

White light filled the chapel. Ruth shouted. Edwin drove his elbow backward into her ribs and broke free. Tomás lunged for him, but Edwin shoved him into the nearest chair.

Iris did not run. She crossed the room toward the faceless witness.

The camera fired again. The flash left black spots crawling across her vision, but she kept moving. She had spent her life approaching bodies after everyone else had decided there was nothing left to do. This was not a body. It was a task wearing one.

“You aren’t his accomplice,” she said.

The figure tilted its head.

“You’re what remained when he interrupted the record.”

Behind her, Edwin said, “Iris, stop.”

That confirmed it.

She reached the first row of chairs. The figure extended the camera toward her. The lens was not pointed at her face but at the space behind her, where Edwin now stood in the open chapel doorway.

It had chosen its original witness as the subject.

Edwin understood a moment later. His expression changed—not to fear, but to the exhausted recognition of a bill finally presented.

“I was supposed to finish it,” he said.

“Were you?” Iris asked.

“I was supposed to stand there and take the picture.”

“And when you refused?”

“The role continued without me.”

The faceless witness pressed the shutter.

Iris seized the camera before it could fire. Its casing felt warm and faintly wet, like something taken from a living hand. The figure’s scarred fingers closed around her wrist with impossible strength.

Ruth reached them first. She struck the figure’s elbow with the butt of her gun. The grip loosened. Tomás, recovered and furious, caught the camera strap and yanked.

The strap snapped.

The figure stumbled backward into the open casket.

For one instant, its pale face reflected the chapel’s dark windows. Iris saw not emptiness but layers: Edwin as a young man, Edwin with blood at his collar, Edwin behind the cemetery door, Edwin watching her from the observation glass. Every version looked toward the same lens.

Then the figure fell into the casket.

The lid slammed shut by itself.

Silence returned.

Ruth kept her gun trained on the casket. “Is it dead?”

“It was never alive,” Edwin said.

Iris looked down at the camera in her hand. The broken old SX-70 had no film compartment inside. Its shutter remained open, revealing only darkness.

A new photograph slid from its front.

She caught it before it struck the floor.

The picture showed the casket, closed and empty. Beside it stood Iris, holding the camera. Behind her, reflected in the chapel windows, was a second figure wearing her face.

No date had appeared yet.

Tomás stared at the image. “It’s still making records.”

Iris folded the photograph once and put it in her pocket.

“Then we stop giving it the ending it expects.”

Edwin looked at the camera. “You think you can destroy the witness?”

“No,” Iris said. “I think I can make it witness something else.”

Inside the casket, something scratched once against the lid.

Iris turned toward the sound, camera in hand, and ordered Ruth to open it.