The door opened into darkness and the mineral smell of old smoke. Mara lifted the camera. The flash showed a room too large to fit inside the hotel. Wallpaper curled in black strips. At its center stood a dining table set for four, every plate heaped with gray ash. A woman sat with her back to Mara. Across from her, two children held hands. At the head of the table, a tall man in a white coat looked up.

“You took too long,” he said.

The children began to cough. The woman turned, and where her face should have been there was only a scorched oval reflecting the camera’s red focus light. Mara stumbled backward, but the corridor had vanished. Behind her stood the elevator, its doors open, its indicator fixed on seven.

She entered and struck the lobby button. The tall man placed one pale hand between the closing doors. “One picture,” he said. “So they remember we were here.”

Mara raised the camera. Through the narrowing gap she framed the family at the table. The little girl smiled. The flash fired, and the elevator dropped so violently that Mara’s knees struck the floor.

In the lobby, the doors opened upon music, glasses, and living voices. The manager found her sitting inside the elevator, clutching a camera hot enough to blister her palms. Its memory card contained only one image: Mara standing alone in a burned room, her face turned toward an empty chair.

She never published the photograph. She sealed the camera in a drawer and moved to the coast, where fog replaced dust and no building stood higher than three floors. Yet every year, on the night the photograph was taken, a small handprint appears on the inside of her bedroom mirror.