The Darkroom ✔️

3

After that night, the spot quickly became The Spot.  Every night Dane would check on it, stare at it, daring it to grow, but each night it looked the same.

Then, in January of 2010, Dane left for two weeks.  A 7.0 earthquake had hit Haiti and projections were that when the calculations were complete this one would ring in as the deadliest quake on record since the Indian Ocean quake and tsunami of '04.  He had been immediately ushered by his editor onto a plane and sent off to cover the catastrophe.

The projections had been right, and the photographs he took over those two weeks were some of the most horrific that he had taken in his life; yet, it was his return to his New York loft that left him speechless.  After that return, his obsession became an outright, deep down panic.

When he came back, The Spot was bigger.  There was no denying it.  Now it was a massive stain on his forearm, with thin tendrils spreading up to his bicep and down to his wrist.

In a fit of rage, he slammed the picture down, shattering the glass of the frame.  He knew it was a brash move, one that he would regret, but sometimes Dane couldn't help himself.  Pictures were supposed to be immortal!

He inhaled one long deep breath, calming his nerves, then turned on his heels and headed straight for his darkroom.  It was a cramped space, converted from what once was the master bath.  The sink had been enlarged, while the tub, shower and toilets had been removed.  The drains were left in place and were now situated below a long metal basin in which rested an assortment of processing trays.  A strong smell of chemicals dominated the space.

Dane flicked on a vent, then bent down, sorting through numerous binders of negatives.  His back spasmed and he bit down on his lip to stifle the pain.  He would not get back up; not until he found what he needed.  His back throbbed and his bad elbow screamed for attention, but still he searched, finally pulling out a small binder labeled Baghdad, 2006.

He stood, popping his back, and quickly flipped through the plastic sleeves of processed negatives, until he found it – the shot of Ellen Veers.  He flipped off the main light and turned on the red safelight, then hurried to his enlarger and got to work.  Within a few minutes, a fresh print was washing in the chemical baths, carefully timed until at last, the image began to appear.  There she was, Ellen, with that look of adulation and love, her hair and blouse eternally caught in a timeless breeze.  Beside her, his arm draped over her shoulder, was Dane... and there was no spot on his arm.

All just a blemish, Dane thought.  Nothing to be so panicked about.  And he had been panicked... over a stain, a tiny, dark stain.  He laughed at himself as he clipped the image to the clothesline stretched above the basin.  He had stared at this photo for months, and all he had needed was to make one lousy print.  He laughed again, and turned to leave.

Only, once more that feeling of something forgotten teased him.  Some detail from that photograph called for his attention; begged him to turn around.  His ankles locked in place.  He didn't want to turn around.  He knew what he would see.  The blemish would be back.  Dane stood there, motionless, for what must have been only a few minutes, yet it felt like he'd been frozen there for hours.  He knew he was being stupid, and yet as long as he did not look at that photo, then everything was fine.  The Spot was nothing more than a spot.

At last, Dane turned.  The first thing he noticed was that The Spot was not there.  This should have come as some relief, yet it did not.  Something had changed.  Ellen was no longer staring up at him, not the picture him.  She was looking at him, the real him, and she was not smiling.  She was accusing.  Dane could see it in her eyes.  There was anger there.

Dane shut his own eyes tight, unwilling to accept that what he had seen was real.  This had to be a delusion cooked up by the smell of the chemicals and, what, beer, stress, his pain, that deep excruciating pain running up his back and arm, a mixture of all the above?

As he opened his eyes, he noticed the accusatory stare was gone; the picture was back to normal.  This lasted a few heartbeats, then it washed away, the image burn dripping into the basin below, leaving the processed print blank.  'How is that possible?' he thought.  But of course, none of it was possible: not The Spot, nor the accusatory stare of his ex, not even the washed away print.  This whole chain of events was beyond reason, and yet it was.  This was no delusion.

Even so, Dane had to be sure.  He repeated the development process three more times that night, but the look from Ellen never returned, and, each time, the print washed away.  At last, he accepted that the print could not be duplicated.

He returned to his guilty pleasures shelf, picked up the frame and dusted off the broken glass.  A small shard caught on the print itself, and as he tried to brush it away, the print fell from the frame revealing a small vanilla envelope behind the picture.

Dane wanted to look in that envelope.  He knew what was there, but now did not seem the time.  The image of Ellen staring out from within that fluid print haunted him.  He hurriedly placed the print back in the frame, ripping the shard of glass from where it had embedded within the photo.  As he did, Dane felt a tiny prick in his cheek.  He swatted at it and his hand came back with a smear of blood.

***

Dane kept Ellen's photo well protected in the years to come.  He had placed a new plate of glass over the picture, and bolted it to the wall in his bedroom, just near the panoramic of the acid-scarred face.  He had been especially careful not to rip it any further during the process as, though he couldn't explain or even understand it, the first tear had left a tiny scar on his cheek in perfect match to the torn photo.

And The Spot had continued to grow.  Now his photograph's entire arm was black from hand to shoulder, and other tendrils of black spread out from his shoulder reaching up towards his neck and down beneath his shirt.  Although beneath that shirt he could not see for certain where those tendrils stretched, he knew they were headed for his heart.

Two months after Dane had broken the glass on the picture, he had come to realize the truth of that spot.  That was when the diagnosis had come.  The doctors had removed the primary tumor from his left arm, but it had been too late; the cancer had metastasized.  Soon after, the treatments began.  Dane had become a hospital regular, undergoing chemotherapy, hormone therapy and multiple surgeries – most in an effort to re-remove the primary tumor, which refused to stay gone.

At one point there had been talk of amputation.  There was a chance the cancer could have been contained.  Dane, however, knew that this wouldn't work and he had refused the surgery.  That would have been to admit defeat, something he could not do – plus the cancer would have just cropped up elsewhere.  This wasn't a matter of speculation.  Dane knew it in the same way that every man knows that one day they will die.  This cancer had become an inevitable and irrepressible fact of his existence.

Nearly two years after he had torn the photo, the pain in his back had been replaced with an all over pain.  Dane was 45 now, hairless from head to toe, and insufferably thin.  Sometimes he spent weeks in the hospital.  This night, however, Dane had reached a conclusion.  He was done with hospitals.  His third round of chemotherapy had finished and the news, as always, was not good.

Dane knew why.  The answer to his dilemma, the undeniable truth, was that Ellen Veers wanted him dead.