I unlocked the Drywell darkroom a little after sunset.
The dehumidifiers were long dead. The doorway breathed out the smell of old fixer and damp cardboard, the kind of vinegar that stings the back of your throat.
The light switch didn’t respond, which was expected. I don’t trust the mains in abandoned wings. I brought my own safelight, red, and set it on the far table, angled away from the trays.
The boxes on the shelves were cataloged by hand in a curling block script. EXPOSURE TESTS – ROOM STUDY was written across three of them. No dates. Inside, a stack of sleeves with thin negatives: furniture outlines, empty walls, a single shaded lamp on a small end table. Someone had documented the way light behaved in a bare room and then filed it where no one would see it again.
The enlarger still worked if you kept pressure on the carriage. The timer clicked, a steady mechanical tick. I cut a sheet, made a quick contact print, and slipped the paper into the developer, rocking the tray back and forth with two fingers.
The lamp appeared first, a pale cone of brightness mid-frame, then the edges of the windows and a strip of bare baseboard. No person. No movement. Just a room measuring itself.
The paper blackened correctly. I rinsed, fixed, and hung the print. Thin darkroom steam fogged the safelight shade. I made three more—same setup, same sequence. When I clipped them up in a row, I saw it.
In the first, the lamp sat near the far wall.
In the second, it stood a foot closer to center.
In the third, closer still, the light cone widening, the grain a fraction sharper.
In the fourth, the lamp had shifted into the near field, its shade filling the top left corner like an eclipse.
I checked the negatives again against the light. The frames were nearly identical—no sign of motion blur, no double exposure, no shadow to suggest anyone had moved the lamp between shots. The notes on the first sleeve read Exposure: 10m22s. The others were blank.
I told myself the developer temperature had drifted. I checked the thermometer. Nineteen degrees, like always. I told myself the enlarger head had drooped a millimeter. It hadn’t. The carriage teeth were tight. The timer ticked evenly. I watched the second hand once around. It stuck for a breath just past the twenty-two. Then continued.
I chose a single negative at random from the second sleeve and printed at a shorter exposure. The lamp appeared. Its cord, invisible before, now fell straight down in a line that didn’t touch the floor. The shadow under the table darkened as if a body had just stepped out of it.
I turned the safelight slightly to keep glare off the trays, and the room reddened, as if I’d drawn blood into the air. I heard a faint click across the darkroom, but the enlarger timer hadn’t moved. The click came again—a small metal sound, like a chain settling, or the pull-switch on a lamp.
I made another print from the same negative, same exposure, same paper. I dropped it in the developer and watched.
The lamp in the image turned on before the emulsion had lifted it out of the gray.
Even in the red light I could see the cone of brightness swell, soft at the edges, like breath on glass.
I turned off the safelight.
The room remained red.
I smacked the switch harder. The shade went dark against my palm, but the red lived on the walls. It wasn’t light. It was memory caught in the paint, in the hangers, in the edges of the drying prints. The lamp in the photograph brightened another degree, and the outline of a shoulder appeared just beyond the tray—mine if I took one more step.
I didn’t. I reached for the print instead. The emulsion surface was slick and cold against my fingertips. The hands within were almost touching the edge where I held it. I thought if I lifted it into the fixer fast enough, the image would stop. It didn’t. It darkened, the whites thickening like cream turning to curd. The lamp’s cord quivered, then went slack, and in the corner of the print the enlarger’s carriage gleamed with a line of water that hadn’t yet dripped in the room.
The timer clicked once, very loud, like a metronome striking a final beat, and the second hand on the wall clock settled just beyond a mark and stayed there.
When I came back in the morning, the bulb in the safelight was cold, the cord unplugged, the clock still waiting just past its mark.
The photograph had darkened another shade overnight.
The lamp in it was almost here.
[End of recovered material]