Chapter 2: The Empty Frame

Chapter 2: The Empty Frame

The fluorescent lights of the Emergency Room hummed a merciless, buzzing tune. They were the colour of antiseptic and exhaustion, reflecting off the polished linoleum floors and the tired, dismissive face of the on-call doctor.

“All your scans are clear, Mr. Carter,” the young doctor said, flipping through a chart on a tablet. “CT, MRI, bloodwork… everything is textbook normal. Vitals are perfect. Whatever you experienced, it wasn’t a stroke or an aneurysm.” He offered a professional, sterile smile. “It was most likely a severe stress-induced episode. Atypical migraine, perhaps. Have you been under a lot of pressure at work?”

Liam sat on the edge of the gurney, the paper crinkling beneath him. He felt hollowed out, scoured clean by a terror so profound that the doctor’s calm dismissal felt like a form of madness itself. The icepick agony had faded to a dull, pounding throb behind his right eye, a phantom echo of the violation.

“It wasn’t stress,” Liam said, his voice flat. He felt Sarah’s hand on his back, a small, steady pressure meant to soothe him. It only made him feel more isolated. She was trying to comfort a man she thought was breaking down. She hadn’t seen the picture.

“The important thing is, you’re physically fine,” the doctor concluded, already mentally moving on to the next patient. “I’ll have the nurse bring your discharge papers. I’d recommend following up with your primary care physician. Maybe take a few days off.”

The drive home was a cocoon of strained silence. Sarah kept glancing at him, her brow furrowed with a mixture of love and deep, clinical concern. He knew what she was thinking. Her husband, the most pragmatic and grounded man she knew, had crashed to the floor of his office, babbling about a monster in a twenty-year-old photograph. The hospital had found nothing. The logical conclusion was terrifying in its own right.

“Liam, talk to me,” she finally said, her voice gentle as she turned onto their quiet, tree-lined street. “What happened in there? Really.”

“It was a memory, Sarah,” he insisted, his knuckles white on his knees. “It wasn't a migraine. It was like… like something unlocked in my head. Something that was hidden.”

“A memory of what? The picture?” She was trying to understand, trying to connect the dots in a way that didn’t lead to a psychological break. “Maybe it was a false memory? Something your brain created when you saw that poor animal…”

“No!” he snapped, the sound sharp in the confines of the car. He saw her flinch and instantly regretted it. “No,” he repeated, softer this time, his voice choked with desperation. “I’m not crazy. I promise. You have to see it. When you see it, you’ll understand.”

This was his anchor. The proof. The digital file that would drag Sarah over to his side of reality. He needed her to believe him. He couldn’t face this alone.

He practically bolted from the car, leaving Sarah to trail behind as he strode into the house. He went straight to his office. The room was just as they’d left it: his chair still angled awkwardly on the floor, the laptop screen still glowing, casting a cool, blue light into the twilight dimness.

“Okay,” he said, his heart beginning to pound again, a frantic rhythm against his ribs. “Okay, just… look.”

He stood aside to give her a clear view of the doorway. But it was Sarah, with her nurse’s trained eye for things that were out of place, who saw it first.

“Liam… what is that?” she whispered, her gaze fixed on the floor.

He followed her eyes. On the pale beige carpet, just beside the leg of his desk, was a small, dark smudge. It was wet. He knelt, his fingers hesitating just above the stain. He didn't need to touch it. He could smell it now. The same faint, coppery scent that had filled his mouth when the memory first struck. The scent of blood.

His gaze lifted, tracing a path from the first drop. There was another, smaller one a foot away. And another. A neat, horrifying trail of glistening, dark red droplets leading from his laptop, across the carpet, and straight to the window on the far side of the room.

The window was ajar, a black slit open to the cool night air. The lock was undamaged.

A cold dread, far worse than the hospital’s sterile fear, began to creep up Liam’s spine. “No,” he breathed, a prayer and a curse.

He lunged for the laptop, his hands shaking so violently he could barely control the trackpad. Sarah was beside him now, her earlier concern replaced by a tense, frightened watchfulness. She had seen the blood. She had seen the open window. The pieces of a puzzle she didn't understand were forming a picture she didn’t like.

“It’s here,” Liam muttered, his voice trembling. He clicked open the folder. EOS_DIGITAL. The corrupted file names stared back at him. He found the file, the one that held the key to his sanity. IMG_935.JPG.

“Look,” he commanded, his finger hovering over the trackpad. “Look, this is it.”

He clicked.

The image loaded, resolving line by line. The dark forest. The harsh, overexposed foreground. The crumpled, broken body of the deer.

And nothing else.

Where the pale, seven-foot-tall horror had stood, there was only the dark, empty space between two birch trees. The negative space was now just that—empty.

“No… no, no, no!” Liam’s voice rose to a panicked cry. He clicked frantically on the previous image, IMG_934. The dead deer. He clicked back to IMG_935. The dead deer, from a slightly different angle. The frame was empty.

His proof was gone.

His breath hitched. He felt like he was falling, the floor dropping out from under him. He looked at the screen, at the picture of the woods, then at the trail of blood on his carpet, then at the open window swallowing the last of the evening light.

The creature hadn't just been a memory trapped in a digital file. It had been in the photograph. Looking at the image hadn't just unlocked a memory. It had unlocked the cage.

Sarah stared, her face pale in the glow of the monitor. She looked from the blood to the screen, her medical rationalizations crumbling in the face of impossible evidence. She put a hand on Liam’s shoulder, not to soothe him, but to steady herself.

“Liam,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Where did it go?”

He stared at the black rectangle of the open window, at the encroaching darkness of their own backyard. The truth landed on him with the weight of a tombstone.

“It’s not gone,” he said, the words tasting of ash and terror. “It’s out.”