The Handprint on Seven

The Padre Hotel · Bakersfield, California

By the time Mara Velez reached the seventh floor, the elevator had forgotten the number seven. Its brass indicator slipped from six to eight, hesitated, and then returned to six with a tired little bell. The doors opened anyway. Beyond them lay a corridor as red and narrow as a throat. She had been hired to photograph the renovated hotel for a winter travel issue. All afternoon she had worked below, arranging empty glasses beneath amber lights and waiting for the desert sun to soften the windows. The manager had given her one rule with a smile that made it sound like a joke: if she heard a child laughing upstairs, she was not to follow it. Mara followed it. The laugh came from the far end of the hall, one bright note, then another, while every door remained shut. Heat breathed through the carpet although November pressed cold against the windows. Her camera woke by itself. On its screen appeared a photograph she had not taken: a little girl facing a mirror, her hair tied with a white ribbon, one palm raised to the glass.At room 712, the giggling stopped. A wet handprint bloomed on the polished door at the height of Mara’s knee. Five perfect fingers. She wiped it away with her sleeve. Another appeared above it. Then another, climbing toward the latch.

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.

It begins at the bottom.

By morning, it has climbed to the latch.