The Storage Unit Chair
The storage facility sat a half mile south of the river, flanked by a truck depot and a shuttered auto shop. Single-story construction, roll-up metal doors, gravel drive. Nothing unusual in the Archive’s surface check: no criminal incidents, no structural failures, no disputes.
What triggered the request was a pattern of energy readings traced to Unit 184. The owner reported an unexplained draw on the facility’s electrical grid, isolated to that one unit. No lights were installed inside. No outlets. The draw persisted even when the site’s master breaker was cut.
I arrived at 16:12. Sky low and gray. Air temperature barely above freezing.
The manager met me at the gate, handed me the key, and refused to accompany me down the row.
“It’s colder in there,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I walked alone.
The gravel muted under my boots. The thin metal walls creaked softly in the wind.
Unit 184’s door was closed. A small frost rim traced the bottom seam where no frost should have been.
At 16:18, I unlocked the padlock and pulled the door up.
The cold hit my face like a breath expelled from a long-sealed room.
The interior was spare: concrete floor, corrugated walls, a single overhead fixture without a bulb. The air was still.
At the center of the unit sat a metal folding chair.
A spotlight—one not connected to any power source I could see—shined directly down onto it from the rafters. Its cord ran upward into the dark, disappearing into nothing.
Around the chair, covering most of the floor, lay dozens upon dozens of Polaroid photographs.
Most were curled at the edges from cold. Some were face-down. Others were arranged in rough concentric rings radiating outward from the chair’s legs.
The images varied:
overexposed bursts of light
blurry corners of a room
partial limbs caught mid-motion
the edge of the metal chair
what looked like an empty unit, but slightly smaller in dimension
A few showed the open doorway from different times of day, sunlight shifting across the threshold.
The photos gave the impression of someone trying repeatedly—hundreds of times—to capture something.
Or someone.
The cold intensified as I stepped inside.
Condensation formed on the metal chair in tiny beads. The temperature in the unit was at least fifteen degrees lower than outside, yet no refrigeration unit or vent existed.
“Unit 184 interior,” I recorded. “Temperature anomaly confirmed. Photographic debris present. Unknown light source overhead.”
I crouched beside the nearest ring of Polaroids.
One photograph depicted the chair empty.
Another showed the chair occupied by a shape—a blur, a darker smudge against the gray.
A third captured only the faint impression of motion inside the chair’s outline, as though the camera had tried to expose a subject that wasn’t fully solid.
I picked up a photo from closer to the center.
It showed the back corner of the unit, where a small metal shelf sat.
On the shelf, in the photo, another Polaroid camera rested.
When I looked up, the shelf was indeed there, but the camera was missing.
Except—
Something shifted on the shelf.
I moved closer.
A Polaroid camera sat exactly where the photo had shown it, body intact, film door open. The hinge was corroded; the interior compartment empty. Dust gathered along the grip.
But it hadn’t been there a moment earlier.
At 16:24, I examined the concrete floor around the chair.
The Polaroids closer to the center varied subtly in size.
Older types. Newer types. Different borders. Different emulsions.
This hadn’t been one person shooting film on one day. This was accumulated over time. Years, maybe.
Some photos were dated in pencil on their backs. The earliest was nearly a decade old.
The most recent—dated in pen on the border—was timestamped 10:22 AM, the morning of my arrival.
The handwriting did not match the manager’s.
The ink had not fully dried.
I checked my watch.
It was 16:25.
The photograph had existed six hours before I arrived, yet the scene in the photo was nearly identical to the room now—minus the coat I had hung over my arm on entry.
The Polaroid showed the chair. The spotlight. And the doorway behind it.
From the perspective of someone standing exactly where I was now.
I lifted the photo.
The temperature dropped sharply around me. My breath condensed in a thin cloud.
A faint click echoed from the shelf.
The Polaroid camera’s lens had rotated, a millimeter at most.
I moved toward it. The camera, inert and without batteries, clicked again. The lens extended another fraction. The shutter door twitched as if something inside tested the mechanism.
The film well remained empty.
I stepped back, heart rate elevated.
On the floor near the shelf lay a single undeveloped instant film sheet—half-exposed, black.
As I reached for it, I felt warmth on my back.
A beam from the overhead spotlight had shifted.
The light was now centered not on the chair, but on me.
At 16:29, the Polaroids closest to my boots changed.
Not all at once, but a few at a time.
Images that had been static now showed movement—a blur appearing near the edges, a slight shift in the shadows behind the chair, the spotlight’s halo stretching toward the doorway.
I picked up one of the newly shifted photographs.
It showed me.
Standing in the exact position I now occupied.
And behind me—faint, overexposed, indistinct—a shape leaned forward as though peering over my shoulder.
I turned sharply.
Nothing.
The empty unit hummed faintly, the cold flattening everything into stillness.
But when I looked down, the Polaroid in my hand had changed again.
The shape behind me was closer.
At 16:31, I returned to the center of the room.
The spotlight tracked me, its pool of light sliding across the concrete like an eye’s gaze following a subject.
The Polaroids nearest the chair began to curl inward, edges contracting as if reacting to heat—but the room was only getting colder.
Another click sounded from the shelf.
The Polaroid camera turned fully toward me.
The shutter whirred twice, an old motor grinding through a function it should not have been able to execute.
A third whir followed.
I stepped back.
A moment later, a square of undeveloped film ejected from the empty camera slot, landing on the ground with a soft plasticky slap.
I did not pick it up.
At 16:34, the spotlight dimmed.
The Polaroids on the floor reacted.
Across the room, several photos flickered slightly—not the prints themselves, but the images embedded in them.
In one, the chair was no longer empty.
A figure slumped in it—head bowed, arms slack.
The shape was human, but the proportions were subtly wrong. Length of arm. Angle of shoulder.
In another, the same figure was rising.
In a third, the figure stood partially outside the frame, as if stepping toward the photographer.
The last photo in the sequence—its border darker than the others—showed the doorway.
And someone was standing there.
I checked my watch.
16:35.
The timestamp on the photo?
16:35, written lightly in graphite.
Same minute. Different moment.
It showed the doorway as it would look seconds from now.
Someone already there.
At 16:36, the cold became absolute.
My breath crystallized instantly; my eyelashes stiffened. The spotlight flickered once, then steadied.
The open doorway behind me—my only exit—felt impossibly far.
A sharp click from the shelf announced the camera’s final movement.
I looked down.
The newly ejected undeveloped film was developing fast—too fast. The white fog that usually precedes an image had already begun to recede.
A silhouette emerged.
Tall. Upright.
Standing where the camera pointed.
Standing where I stood.
I backed toward the door.
The light from the spotlight stretched with me—like it didn’t want to let me go.
Another Polaroid developed itself at my feet. Then another.
All showing me retreating.
All showing something behind me, out of frame.
At 16:37, I reached the threshold.
The cold pulled at my clothes like gravity.
The spotlight dimmed, then snapped off entirely, leaving the unit in near dark.
Only the Polaroids glowed faintly in the ambient gray.
I stepped backward into the gravel and pulled the door down hard.
Just before it sealed shut, one last Polaroid slid across the floor inside, propelled by no wind I could feel.
It came to a stop just inside the threshold.
In the dim light, I could make out its image:
The empty chair.
The spotlight.
The doorway.
And a shadow seated in the chair that matched my height, my outline… except for the tilt of the head.
It wasn’t looking at the door.
It was looking straight up at the camera.
[End of recovered material]