The Photograph

"Absence doesn’t make a house empty—it makes every object scream with what’s missing."

The lock resisted, stiff in its frame, then gave with a reluctant click. I slipped inside quickly and eased the door shut behind me, the seal of it pressing the silence closer rather than keeping it out. For a moment I stood perfectly still in the narrow entryway, holding myself as though the house might notice me—an intruder caught in its lungs, waiting for the exhale that would push me back out.

The smell found me first. Not rot, not the heavy theatre of decay—nothing so overt. Just the flat, sour tang of absence. The scent of a house unbreathed in, its air left to stagnate and sour in curtains that had been drawn too long, in windows sealed too tightly. A silence soaked into plaster and carpet alike. The absence of people lingered here not as emptiness but as residue, clinging to corners the way dust does.

I didn’t move at once. I let my eyes adjust to the dim, waiting as the shadows slowly surrendered their outlines. Shapes surfaced from the gloom: the narrow hallway stretching ahead, its walls grazed with faint scuffs that spoke of years lived against them. Everything bore the impression of recent use, but only just—like fingerprints fading from glass.

Near the door, shoes lay scattered in untidy testimony. Kids’ runners, their laces pulled into impatient, knotted tangles. A pair of Claire’s dance flats—split-soled, canvas, worn soft at the toes—kicked off mid-step, skewed at careless angles, the gesture of someone expecting to slide back into them within the hour. They hadn’t been tidied, hadn’t been gathered. They’d simply been left—abandoned not by intent, but by haste.

But the life itself was gone. The shoes, the scuffs, the faint traces of routine—they were debris now, fragments of a rhythm cut short. The hallway held itself like a stage abandoned between acts, props in place, lights waiting, but the dancers vanished, their lines unsaid. The pause before something resumed—except this time, it wouldn’t.

I moved further into the hallway, my shoes sinking into the runner that had lost its splendour years ago, fibres flattened and threadbare with use. Each step sounded swallowed, muted, like the house itself was unwilling to let noise travel too far. On either side the bedrooms stood open, doorways yawning like dark mouths in the stillness, their silence more eloquent than words.

The first was unmistakably a boy’s room. A bedspread patterned with cartoon dinosaurs—bright tyrannosaurs and stegosauruses, their colours slightly faded from too many washes—lay tangled in a heap, as though its owner had wrestled with dreams as much as sleep. The pillow was half shoved off the mattress, the hollow beneath it still shaped faintly by a head that hadn’t returned.

On the carpet, Lego bricks lay in wait like tiny landmines, perfectly positioned for bare feet, a trap laid unintentionally but no less cruel. The desk bore the chaotic scrawl of childhood living: pencils scattered across its surface like fallen pick-up sticks, a school reader left open and face down as though it had been dropped mid-sentence, a drawing in blue crayon half finished, its lines drifting away from whatever idea had been abandoned.

Mack’s room, no doubt—his absence louder, heavier, than the clutter he’d left behind.

Next door was Rose’s, softer in palette but no less vacant. The walls were speckled with stickers—stars, ponies, cartoon hearts—their edges curling where little fingers had tugged at them in idle curiosity. A doll slumped against her pillow in an awkward lean, its frozen smile catching the dim light, unsettling now that it had been abandoned mid-game.

On the back of a small chair hung a cardigan, sleeves twisted together as though tugged off in haste, dropped and never reclaimed. The wardrobe yawned half-open, empty hangers swaying faintly in a draught, rocking like pendulums that had forgotten their rhythm. On the carpet by the skirting sat a single pink shoe, its partner missing—one small casualty of the rush, left behind as mute testimony.

Paul and Claire’s room lay further down, heavier in atmosphere even before I stepped in. The bed was unmade, sheets crumpled, one side still indented by a body that hadn’t been there for days. Cold now, but carrying the ghost of weight. The wardrobe doors stood flung open, gaps between hangers yawning where clothes had been swept up in armfuls rather than chosen with care.

On the dressing table, a hairbrush rested abandoned, strands of blonde still caught in its bristles like relics of someone’s morning ritual. The mirror above it was dulled by a thin haze of dust, the kind that settles quickly when no one is here to wipe it away. Everything spoke of haste—not the neat folding of a planned journey, but the wild disruption of flight. Claire hadn’t measured her departure; she had torn herself from this place. The tilt of objects, the skew of furniture, the unnatural angles—they all carried the velocity of her exit, like gravity still tugged on her absence.

Luke had once dismissed her in passing with a careless, almost amused, “crazy person.” At the time, I hadn’t known enough to argue. Looking around now, the word I’d have chosen was “rushed.” Not madness. Not instability. Just speed—urgent, uneven, desperate speed. The kind of speed that leaves echoes behind, sharp enough to cut.

I moved into the bathroom, the air there carrying a faint humidity that didn’t belong, as though the room still remembered the warmth of bodies that had once passed through it. A towel lay crumpled on the tiles, its fabric creased and heavy, faint dampness still clinging stubbornly to the folds. It hadn’t dried completely—caught, like everything else, in a state of pause.

The sink bore streaks of toothpaste hardened into chalky lines, the evidence of a rushed hand abandoning the tube mid-squeeze. On the counter, a plastic cup stood to attention, still holding three brushes—two small, bristled in the bright colours of children, and one adult-sized. They leaned against one another in their silent vigil, as though waiting for their owners to return and complete the ritual. Above them, the mirror wore a smear where a hand had swiped across its surface, the drag of fingers through condensation leaving a ghostly arc across the glass. A shape too human to ignore, too fleeting to outlast the moment.

It felt like walking through a moment interrupted—a scene mid-breath, suspended. A family in the middle of their morning, then suddenly gone, the actors pulled offstage before they could collect their cues.

The silence pressed in, dense and unmoving, until even my own breathing felt intrusive. From outside came the half-hearted call of a bird, a sound clipped short and quickly devoured by the stillness before it could take root. The house absorbed it as if it, too, were an intruder.

I moved back into the hallway, the air heavier with every step, the weight of the house sitting squarely in my chest. This wasn’t the soft quiet of an early morning, nor the ordinary hush of a home between routines. This was a silence with edges, sharpened by absence. It didn’t simply mean empty—it meant vacated. The difference rang in the walls, echoed down every open doorway, clung to every object left behind. A hollow that remembered.

The hallway gave out into the living room, the shift in space immediate, almost theatrical. The curtains were drawn only partway, leaving a narrow seam of morning light that sliced across the floorboards. Dust motes floated lazily in the beam, drifting in slow spirals, unhurried, as if even time itself had stalled here, too indifferent to bother keeping pace.

The furniture carried its history without apology. A sofa sagged predictably in the places most often claimed, its cushions misshapen, the fabric dulled by years of use. Draped over one arm was a crocheted blanket, carefully folded—habit rather than tidiness, a rhythm of hands that had repeated the gesture too many times to forget. The coffee table bore faint ghost-rings of mugs, stains pressed into the grain like tattoos, reminders of mornings and evenings that had come and gone unnoticed.

Against the television cabinet, a stack of DVDs leaned precariously, a tilt suggesting they had been rifled through too often to stand straight. Children’s films, mostly, their spines softened by countless tugs of small, impatient hands, shoved back in the wrong cases, sometimes upside down. The kind of disorder that spoke of living, not staging. Wear you couldn’t fake.

And then, on the sideboard, the thing that stopped me. A photograph, framed in cheap wood polished to a dull shine, the kind you’d find in any Big W store, unremarkable in itself. Inside: Paul, Claire, Mack, and Rose perched on the front steps of this very house, the sun bleaching the paintwork behind them until it glared bright. Paul’s arm rested around Claire’s shoulders, his body turned in protectively. The children pressed close between them, squinting against the sun, their laughter caught in the instant before it spilled loose.

Not the image of a woman unravelling. Not the portrait of a man suffocating under some secret double-life. Just a family. Untidy. Ordinary. Real.

I stood longer than I meant to, caught by their stillness, the silence filling the gulf between their frozen smiles until it felt like it might fracture the glass itself. The photograph radiated a presence stronger than the rooms I’d walked through, as though it had caught the essence of what the house now lacked and preserved it stubbornly, defiantly.

Gertrude’s voice floated back into my mind, sly and sharp-edged: Claire had that wild look about her. Gossip weaponised into certainty. Yet here, in this frame, Claire looked anything but wild. Anchored, yes. Weary, certainly. But rooted, steady. A woman pulling her children close, holding the centre of a life she hadn’t meant to abandon. If anything, the wildness lived in the gap between this image and the silence now clinging to the house. A silence she hadn’t chosen.

I felt a twist of something unhelpfully close to guilt. It lodged low, sharp and persistent, as though the house itself were pressing the point. Guilt for breaking in, for breathing the stale air that wasn’t mine to disturb. For standing here, weighing and judging their absence with a key I had no right to hold. Worse still, guilt for even considering taking what belonged to them and smuggling it across worlds like contraband tucked under a coat.

And yet the alternative—Paul stranded without them, his family split across realities, torn apart with no path back—that was worse. The kind of worse that crawled under your skin and stayed there.

The photograph seemed to fix me in its gaze, pinning me to the floorboards with silent demand. A choice. A direction. Help them. Get him back to them. At least give him the chance. The message radiated louder than the stale air, louder than Gertrude’s chatter lingering in my head.

I set the frame down carefully, almost ceremonially, the glass giving a faint, decisive click as it touched the sideboard. A small sound, but in the hush it carried like a gavel strike. From here on, every step I took would be exactly that: intrusion.

Still, I couldn’t shake the image of Paul’s children—Mack and Rose pressed close to their parents, faces open and unguarded, caught mid-laughter. Ordinary, fleeting, real. It clung, insistent, even as the room pushed against me.

Whatever Gertrude thought she knew, whatever story she had polished and rehearsed for the neighbourhood, whatever the police had already decided Charlie’s fate should be—there was more here. Layers I couldn’t see, truths still curled tight. And I was already too deep to pretend I could turn back now.

I lingered in the living room, the photograph still ghosting behind my eyes, while the silence pressed in again. It had weight, that silence, pressing against my ribs in that peculiar way empty houses do—resentful, as though the very air wanted to expel me.

What was I supposed to do here?

Take Charlie. That had been the plan. Clean, simple. Paul had asked, and I had agreed. But Charlie wasn’t here. And if Gertrude was right—and my gut told me she was—then the Kelpie was already locked up in some cold, confined police cage, confusion in her eyes. Neighbours exaggerate, yes, but they don’t conjure uniforms and badge numbers out of thin air.

So what then? March into the station and demand her back? Pretend I was family? Pretend I was Sophie again, all false warmth and forged entitlement? The image rose unbidden: “Sophie,” standing at a chipped counter, arguing with some small-town sergeant over the fate of a black Kelpie. The absurdity almost made me laugh—except I knew the sound would curdle in this stale, watchful air.

And if Charlie was gone… what then? What exactly did Paul expect me to bring him? What did he actually need?

I turned in a slow circle, letting my eyes sweep the room as though seeing it for the first time. Everything here was freighted with meaning, but none of it was mine to understand. I didn’t know the grammar of this house, the syntax of its silences. What counted as essential? A blanket folded too neatly to be random? A child’s toy abandoned mid-play, waiting for hands that wouldn’t return? The leaning stack of mismatched DVDs, covers frayed and bent from small fingers tugging at them without care? Each possibility felt absurd, like trying to smuggle sentiment through customs, declaring one memory, slightly used at the border.

Would Claire really have abandoned Charlie? Walked away with the leash left hanging and no thought of return? Had she fled in panic, leaving the dog behind in the mad rush of escape? Or had she gone in haste but not finality—believing Paul would walk back through the door the very next day, collect his Kelpie, put the kettle on, and pick up the rhythm as though none of this had happened?

I folded my arms tight across my chest, a makeshift shield against questions that refused to answer themselves. I stood rooted, paralysed, as though moving might disturb the fragile balance of the room.

Where had she gone? Brisbane, if you believed the whispers Gertrude so gleefully curated. Or maybe a sister’s house. But whispers weren’t facts. And facts—facts had a way of snapping shut into traps, catching you by the ankle the second you trusted them.

I lowered myself into Paul’s armchair, that broad, lived-in thing, worn into the contours of his frame. It swallowed me up immediately, the fabric sagging in ways that matched someone else’s weight. I felt instantly out of place, as though I’d sat down inside his skin, my own edges blurred by his. The thought was wrong enough, intimate enough, to make me spring back up almost at once.

My hands hovered uselessly at my sides, empty, suspended between action and inaction. I didn’t belong here—not in this house, not in these choices. And yet somehow, absurdly, impossibly, I was the only one left to make them.

The stillness pressed down heavier, turning questions into weights that dragged against my ribs. My mind kept circling the same loop, repeating sharper each time, like a blade being honed:

— If Charlie was with the police, was she safe?
— If Claire had run, had she left breadcrumbs Paul could follow?
— If I took things from this house, was I helping… or hurting?

For once, no dry remark rose to steady me, no sardonic quip to sand the edge. Just the hollow awareness that I had stepped straight into a family’s absence and now stood paralysed, unable to move forward.

I drifted back towards the front door, each step pulled from me rather than chosen, as though the house itself were quietly herding me out. The photograph still burned bright in my mind, vivid as an afterimage, but so did Gertrude’s chatter, and the silence that gnawed at the walls, and the sour smell lingering faintly in the air like a bin left too long. Each one tugged at me differently—gossip, memory, emptiness, decay—pulling in opposite directions until I thought I might split in two if I tried to follow any one of them.

The door loomed ahead, ordinary and final. I set my hand on the knob, ready to step back out into the street—then stopped.

Of course. I didn’t have to go back out there.

The Portal Key was already warm in my palm, as though it had been waiting, patient, for me to remember. I didn’t need alleys or chip shops, didn’t need the performance of strolling through town like I belonged. Paul’s house could be my way in. My way out. A base.

I turned again, and my eyes snagged on the photograph resting on the sideboard. The four of them on the steps, sun in their eyes, laughter caught mid-breath, held there forever. Before I could talk myself down, I crossed the room, lifted the frame, and slid it into my jacket. Impulsive, yes—but it didn’t feel like theft. It felt like ballast. An anchor. A reminder of what Paul stood to lose, and what I might still have a chance of handing back.

I returned to the door and activated the Portal Key against the wood. The air gave its subtle shiver, the faint hum rising around me like a breath stretched too long. Then the shimmer unfolded—colour bleeding into existence, unnatural and luminous against the tidy geometry of the doorway. And there it was: Clivilius, waiting.

A small win in a sea of stalemates.

Trust me to break into a missing man’s house, rifle through the silence, and walk away with nothing but a new shortcut. Still, in my new line of work, that counted as progress.

I stepped through, the frame pressed hard against my ribs, leaving stale air and unanswered questions in my wake. The Portal sealed with its usual finality—neat, merciless—and Paul’s house was gone. Gone, though not gone forever. I could return whenever I needed. Whenever I found the nerve to face what I hadn’t finished.