The Yellowed Photograph

The first time I saw him, I thought he was just a trick of the light. I was nine, spending the summer with my grandmother in the hill town of San Cristóbal, where the fog rolled in every evening like a slow tide. My grandmother’s house was old, with thick adobe walls and a courtyard full of lemon trees. In the back room, which we never used, there was a trunk full of things she said belonged to my great-uncle, who died before I was born.

My cousin Elena and I were bored one afternoon, and we decided to sneak into that room. The trunk was locked, but Elena, who was twelve and had a knack for picking simple locks, managed to open it with a hairpin. Inside, we found old clothes, a pair of spectacles, a tarnished watch, and a yellowed photograph. The photograph showed a man in a dark suit, standing in front of the same house, but the windows were dark, and the sky was a strange gray. What made us gasp was his face: it was blurred, as if he had moved during the exposure, but his eyes were sharp, focused on the camera, and they seemed to follow us.

That night, I woke up to a sound like someone shuffling in the hallway. My bedroom door was ajar, and I saw a silhouette standing there, tall and thin. I froze, my heart pounding. The silhouette stepped forward, and the moonlight caught a glint of glass – spectacles. I wanted to scream, but my voice was gone. It moved closer, and I saw the blurred face from the photograph, but now the eyes were hollow, like empty sockets. It reached out a hand, and I shut my eyes, feeling a cold breeze wash over me. When I opened them, it was gone.

I tried to tell my grandmother the next morning, but she dismissed it, saying I had a nightmare. But Elena believed me, because she had seen something too. She said she saw the man in the courtyard, standing under the lemon tree, staring up at her window. We decided to investigate. We went back to the trunk and found a diary tucked beneath the linens. The handwriting was my great-uncle’s, but the entries were strange: he wrote about a ‘visitor’ who came to him in dreams, offering him a way to see beyond the veil. He wrote that he had agreed, but then regretted it, because the visitor took his face and left him with a blur. The last entry said, ‘He comes for the young ones now. I cannot stop him. He wears my face. He will wear yours.’

The days grew darker. The fog thickened, and the house felt colder. My grandmother grew worried and told us we should leave, but we couldn’t; the road was washed out from a sudden storm. On the third night, Elena and I stayed up, huddled together in my room. We had taken the photograph and the diary, thinking we could destroy them. But as we lit a match to burn the photograph, the man appeared in the doorway. This time, his face was not blurred – it was shifting, like a reflection in rippling water, and I saw my own face staring back at me for a moment. He spoke, but his voice was like many voices layered, ‘You called me. I am here.’

Elena screamed and threw the diary at him, but it passed through his form, and the man lunged. I held up the photograph, and as the match touched it, the man let out a shriek like tearing metal, and the room filled with a blinding light. When we could see again, the man was gone, and the photograph turned to ash. But on the wall, where the mirror hung, there was a new reflection. It was not ours. It was the man, standing behind us, but his face was now clear – and it was my face, with the same hollow eyes.

We ran out of the house and into the fog, not stopping until we reached a neighbor’s shack. We never went back. The house was later demolished, and the trunk was burned. But sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see the man. And I know that he is waiting, wearing my face, for the day I bring someone else to that house. I have the yellowed photograph now, kept in a locked box, but the eyes have faded to white, and I feel him watching me from inside it always.