Chapter 5: Developing Nightmares

The clicking sound became a phantom tormentor. It was never loud, never clear enough to be certain. It was a ghost in the static of the refrigerator's hum, a trick of the mind in the patter of rain against his window. Since reading Caroline’s letters, Alex’s apartment had transformed from a sanctuary into a cage where he was the only exhibit, watched by an unseen zookeeper. He’d started sleeping with the lights on, a childish defense that offered no real comfort against the oppressive, bone-deep chill that had taken root in the corners of his home.

He needed proof. Something real. Something beyond a fifty-year-old drawing and the frantic scribblings of a terrified girl. His rational mind, what was left of it, clung to the idea of tangible evidence like a drowning man to a splinter of driftwood. Without it, he was just a paranoid art student inheriting a legacy of delusion, destined to end up like his grandmother or, worse, like Kyle Clifton, staring at a wall and making clicking sounds with his tongue.

It was this desperate need that drove him back to the shoebox. He emptied its contents onto his floor, sifting through the tragic mementos of a summer gone to hell. He ran his fingers over the brittle wildflower, opened the tarnished locket to find two tiny, smiling photos of Brittney and Caroline. And then he saw it, something he’d missed in his initial, panicked search. Tucked into the folded corner of the cardboard at the bottom of the box was a small, gray and black plastic canister. A roll of 35mm film.

Hope, sharp and painful, pierced through the fog of his anxiety. This was it. This was objective reality, captured in silver halide. A camera couldn't have psychosis. A photograph couldn’t lie.

The obstacle, however, was time. In an age of digital everything, finding a place that still developed old film, let alone a roll that had been sitting dormant for half a century, was a challenge. After a dozen calls to drugstores and photo kiosks that offered only digital prints, he finally found a specialty shop downtown. "The Dark Room," it was called, a dusty little place run by a wizened old man with ink-stained fingers named Arthur.

“Fifty years old?” Arthur had squinted at the canister, turning it over in his palm. “No guarantees, son. Emulsion could be completely degraded. Could be a roll of fog, could be nothing. But I’ll give it a go. Come back in two days.”

The next forty-eight hours were the longest of Alex's life. He tried to draw, but his hands shook too much, his charcoal sticks rendering only jagged, meaningless lines and unintentional spirals. He tried to read, but the words swam on the page, rearranging themselves into Caroline’s desperate pleas. The feeling of being watched intensified, a constant pressure at the base of his skull. The clicking sound seemed to grow bolder, a soft, wet metronome counting down the seconds until his appointment with the past.

When he finally walked back into The Dark Room, the little bell above the door jangling like a nerve, Arthur was waiting for him, a thick manila envelope in his hand.

“Well, you got lucky,” the old man said, a hint of professional pride in his voice. “Emulsion held up, mostly. Grainy as all get-out, and the color’s shot, but there are images. Twenty-four exposures. Looks like someone had a fun camping trip.”

Alex paid, his hands clammy, his heart thudding a sick, uneven rhythm. He didn't open the envelope in the shop. He couldn't. He carried it back to his apartment, the weight of it feeling impossibly heavy, like a tombstone.

Back in his cage, he locked the door, drew the blinds, and sat on the floor. He took a deep, shuddering breath and tipped the contents of the envelope onto his coffee table. A stack of 4x6 prints slid out.

The first few were exactly what Arthur had described. Four teenagers, their faces young and unburdened, mugging for the camera in the dappled sunlight of a forest. There was his grandmother, Brittney, laughing. There was Caroline, her arm slung around Brittney’s shoulders. And two boys he recognized from the newspaper article: Robert Mitchell, lanky and grinning, and Kyle Clifton, with a quieter, more intense look in his eyes. They were gathered around a tent, then skipping stones on a lake. Innocent. Normal.

He kept going. The photos transitioned from day to night. The images grew darker, illuminated by the flickering, orange glow of a campfire. The teenagers were huddled closer together. The playful energy was gone, replaced by a focused intensity. In one photo, Robert was holding open a large, old-looking book, his finger tracing a line of text. In another, they were all looking down at something outside the frame, their faces a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

Then the pictures began to fall apart.

The next shot was a blur of motion, as if the photographer had stumbled. A streak of orange campfire against a chaotic backdrop of black. The one after was tilted at a nauseating angle, showing Kyle Clifton’s face, his mouth open in a silent scream, his eyes wide with a terror that wasn't feigned. Another showed Caroline, her hands covering her face, her body language one of pure, abject fear.

Alex’s breath was coming in ragged gasps. He was there with them, in the dark, in the flickering firelight, feeling the night air turn cold. He was at the precipice. He flipped to the second-to-last photo.

It was pitch black, save for two faint, glowing shapes suspended in the darkness. They were ethereal, hazy, like a long-exposure shot of a distant nebula. Two slowly rotating spirals of sickly, pale light.

He knew what the last photo would be before he even looked at it. He felt it with every fiber of his being. His hand shook so violently he could barely pick it up. He turned it over.

The flash had gone off.

For a split second, it had illuminated the clearing, bleaching the scene in a harsh, artificial light. The image was blurry, distorted by panic and a shaky hand, but it was there. Undeniable. Standing just beyond the circle of firelight, partially obscured by the scorched trunk of a pine tree, was a figure.

It was impossibly tall and emaciated, its limbs bent at angles that defied anatomy. Its skin was the color of ash. Frail, membranous wings, like those of a starved bat, sprouted from its lower back. Sharp, mantis-like limbs were poised over its shoulders. It was the creature from Caroline’s drawing, a nightmare given form.

And its face… it was a smooth, featureless canvas of pale flesh. In the center of that horrifying emptiness, where eyes should have been, the flash had caught the two spirals, not as drawings, but as glowing, three-dimensional vortexes of light that seemed to bore right through the photograph and into Alex’s soul.

He dropped the picture. The chemical smell of the print mingled with the phantom scent of ozone in his apartment. This was it. The proof. The absolute, irrefutable evidence that he was not going insane. The horror was real.

His phone, sitting on the table beside the scattered photos, suddenly buzzed, the vibration unnaturally loud in the dead-silent room. It lit up.

UNKNOWN NUMBER

Alex stared at it, his blood turning to sludge in his veins. He had never received a call from an unknown number on his cell phone before. His finger hovered over the screen, a primal instinct screaming at him not to answer. But he had to know. He had to.

He slowly swiped to accept the call and raised the phone to his ear.

“Hello?” he whispered, his voice a dry crackle.

There was no answer. No voice. No static. Just a chilling, open line. And then, he heard it. Not through the phone's speaker, but seemingly from everywhere at once—from the phone, from the corner of the room, from directly inside his own head.

A series of soft, wet, articulate clicks.

Click. Ch-click-click. Chk.

It was the sound of a patient insect, of chitinous mandibles tasting the air. It was the sound Caroline had described in her final, terrified letter. It was the sound of something ancient and hungry, and it was telling him, without words, a single, terrifying message:

I see you. I know you know. And now, it’s your turn.