Chapter 1: The Icepick Memory

Chapter 1: The Icepick Memory

The dust in the attic tasted like forgotten time. It coated Liam Carter’s tongue, clung to the sweat on his brow, and danced like tiny ghosts in the single sunbeam lancing through the grimy porthole window. At forty-eight, this weekend chore felt less like productive homeownership and more like an archaeological dig into a life he barely recognized. His body, once hardened by miles of mountain trails, was now softened by two decades behind a desk, his most strenuous daily activity a battle with a stubborn line of code.

He grunted, shoving a cardboard box labeled ‘College Textbooks’ across the splintery floorboards. He was a man adrift in the calm sea of the suburbs, and today, he was simply reorganizing the flotsam. His wife, Sarah, had called it a “productive purge.” Liam called it confronting the ghosts of ambitions past.

Beneath the textbook box was another, smaller one, its lid warped with age. Tucked beside it, nestled in a shroud of cobwebs, was a shape he knew as well as his own hands. A black, ballistic nylon camera bag.

His breath caught. He hadn't seen it in... God, fifteen years? Maybe more. His fingers, clumsy from years of typing, fumbled with the stiff zipper. It gave way with a sound like tearing canvas, releasing a faint, metallic scent of old electronics and cold weather.

Inside, nestled in custom-fit foam, was his old Canon. The professional one. The one that had cost him two months’ rent back when rent was his single biggest concern. Beside it lay a telephoto lens that looked like a small cannon and, in a side pocket, a clear plastic case. He pulled it out. Within its tiny plastic shell rested a single, black SD card. A SanDisk, 1GB. A laughable capacity by today's standards, a digital fossil.

He didn't know why he'd kept it. He'd sold most of his gear years ago to fund a more practical family car. But this bag, this camera, this one little card... they had survived the purge. A remnant of the man he used to be, the one who chased sunrises instead of project deadlines.

“Find anything good up there?” Sarah’s voice floated up from the bottom of the attic stairs, warm and familiar.

“Just a ghost,” he called back, a smile touching his lips for the first time all day. He zipped the bag shut, leaving the heavy gear behind but clutching the small plastic case in his hand. The ghost could wait.

Down in his office—a converted spare bedroom that smelled faintly of warm plastic and stale coffee—he sat at his desk and slipped on the glasses he now needed for screen work. His laptop hummed, a comfortable counterpoint to the quiet Saturday afternoon. He found an old multi-card reader in a drawer full of tangled cables, blew the dust out of the slot, and slid the SD card home.

The computer chimed. A window popped up. EOS_DIGITAL.

He clicked it open. Folder after folder of images, categorized by date. He leaned back, a genuine warmth spreading through his chest as he began to click through them. There were the White Mountains of New Hampshire, bathed in the impossible orange of an autumn dawn. A macro shot of a dragonfly, its wings a filigree of crystal veins. A portrait of Sarah, twenty years younger, laughing into the wind on a rocky overlook, her hair a wild halo around her face.

He remembered that day. He remembered the chill in the air, the taste of the flask of coffee they’d shared, the easy way her hand fit in his. This was good. This was a past worth remembering.

He navigated to the last folder on the card, dated over a year after the photo of Sarah. The file names weren't sequential. They were a jumbled mess of symbols and corrupted text. The thumbnails were mostly black squares, shot through with glitches of static and green lines. A failed write, probably. The card was old, after all.

Curiosity got the better of him. He clicked on the first readable file, IMG_934.JPG.

The image took a moment to load, resolving line by line from the top down, like a window blind being slowly lowered. It was dark. Forest, at night. The harsh, direct light of an on-camera flash blew out the details in the foreground—the peeling bark of a birch tree, a spray of dead leaves.

In the center of the frame was a deer. Or what was left of one. Its body was crumpled, its neck bent back at a sickening, impossible angle. The fur on its flank was dark and matted, soaked with something that even the grainy, low-resolution photo couldn't hide was blood. An animal attack, he reasoned. A bear, maybe. He’d been in bear country. But he had no memory of taking this picture. None at all.

He felt a faint prickling at the base of his skull. A strange, sour taste, like copper, filled his mouth.

He clicked the next image, IMG_935.JPG.

The same scene, but the camera had panned slightly to the right. The deer was still there, a heap of ruined flesh. But now, stepping from behind another tree, was a figure.

Liam leaned closer to the screen, his nose inches from the display. It was tall. Impossibly so. At least seven feet, rail-thin, with limbs that seemed too long for its torso. Its skin was the colour of bleached bone, pale and slick-looking, utterly hairless. It was humanoid, but wrong in every proportion. It was the background that held the true horror, though. Where a face should be—eyes, a nose, a mouth—there was nothing. Just a smooth, unbroken, nightmarish blankness.

The instant his brain processed the faceless void, the prickling in his skull ignited.

It wasn't a headache. It was a spike of pure agony, an icepick of white-hot light driving through his right temple and out the other side. The world dissolved into a searing, silent whiteness. His breath seized in his lungs. The memory didn't return; it detonated.

The forest floor is cold and wet through the knees of his jeans. The smell of pine needles, damp earth, and blood. So much blood. The deer’s glassy eye stares at nothing. The camera feels heavy, cold in his trembling hands. A twig snaps behind him. He turns. It’s there. The pale thing. Unfolding from the shadows like a nightmare trying to be born. It doesn’t walk. It flows. He raises the camera on pure instinct, a desperate, stupid shield. The flash fires, a tiny sun in the suffocating dark. The creature pauses. Its blank face turns toward him. It doesn't have eyes, but he feels its gaze, a physical pressure, a force that scrapes at the inside of his skull. It feels like violation. It feels like pain. Another flash. The thing recoils, its neck inflating like a bullfrog's, a low, guttural hiss escaping from a mouth he can't see. He scrambles backward, fumbling, his mind screaming a single, primal word: RUN.

The memory ended. The pain in his head subsided to a sledgehammer throb. He was on the floor, tangled in the legs of his office chair, gasping for air. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. Cold sweat drenched his shirt.

“Liam? What was that crash? Are you okay?” Sarah was at the door, her face a mask of concern.

He tried to answer, but his tongue was thick and clumsy in his mouth. He could only point a trembling finger at the laptop screen. “The… the photo,” he croaked, the words tearing at his throat. “The thing… in the woods.”

He pushed himself up, his body shaking uncontrollably. Twenty years. For twenty years, that memory had been gone. Wiped. Excised from his mind with surgical precision, leaving behind nothing but a faint, inexplicable scar of anxiety he’d carried his whole adult life.

He knew, with a certainty that was colder and sharper than the memory itself, that taking its picture had done something to him. And looking at it again had undone it.

He stared at the laptop, at the glowing image of the faceless thing standing over its kill. It wasn’t a photograph of a monster he had once seen. It was a key. And he had just used it to unlock a door that was never, ever meant to be opened again. The Glimmer was back.