by Darcy Coates
Richard sucked air in through his nose. His voice wavered as he stumbled over his words. “The first person came to me two days before his death. We destroyed the camera, and I thought that would be enough to stop it, but he still died. Official diagnosis was a heart attack. The police found him hiding in the cupboards under his sink.”
“Bull,” Bree repeated, seemingly unable to stay still. Jenine’s hands felt empty without the cat, so she picked up a cushion instead.
“When the second victim came to me, I tried everything within my power to free her. And I mean everything.” Richard’s face was drawn. Beads of sweat had developed on his forehead and cheeks. “Bathing in holy water, exorcisms, expulsions. Blessings by Romanian white witches. We burnt sage everywhere. We tried to hide inside churches, in rural areas, anywhere. We did experiments on the camera and tried to communicate with the ghosts, and I called every expert I thought might be able to help. Only three were aware of ghost cameras, and none knew of any cure. She died as well.”
“So, so, so…” Bree’s panic was visible on her face and her voice was tight and high. She stopped pacing. “What do we do?”
Richard finally met her eyes. His were sad and resigned. “Depending on how many photos you’ve taken, you may still have a few days or a few weeks. Maybe as much as a month, if you only took one picture. You’ll know it’s near the end when you feel them touch you.”
Jenine’s fingers fluttered to the part of her neck crusted with dried blood.
Richard continued, “At that point, I would suggest taking a few sleeping pills.”
Bree looked from Jenine to Richard. She had her arms folded, fists balled under her armpits, and her eyes were huge. “Will that help?”
“No, but you won’t be awake for the end.”
Both Jenine and Richard jumped as Bree’s anger exploded out of her like water rushing through a broken dam. “You’re lying!” Bree threw herself at Richard and grasped the front of his cardigan in her fists.
“No!” Jenine yelled.
Bree shook him hard, as though he might change his story with enough coercion. Jenine grasped Bree around the waist and tried to haul her back. For a second she thought Bree might really hurt the man, but then she relaxed, released her hold, and let Jenine draw her back.
Bree’s face was as white as a sheet and her cheeks were wet. She stared at Jenine for a second then looked back at the professor. “Oh… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—I’m so sorry.”
Richard adjusted his cardigan and smoothed back his grey hair, which had come loose from its careful comb-over. His lips were tight and pale, but his voice was even when he answered. “It’s alright. I understand. It’s difficult news to receive, and I certainly don’t like giving it.”
“There’s got to be something you can do,” Jenine said. She sat next to Bree and wrapped an arm around her friend’s shoulders. She could feel them trembling—she wasn’t sure if fear or anger was the cause—but Bree remained mute.
“I wish there was. I truly, truly do. But I didn’t lie when I said I tried everything. I had an entire week with the last case, and when we weren’t trying new methods of breaking the curse, I was researching. Ghost cameras aren’t a new phenomenon; I found evidence of them as far back as the early 1900s. They’ve become rarer with the invention of digital cameras -for whatever reason, ghost cameras are only analog - but they still pop up every now and then. Every single case of a person using the camera to take a photo has resulted in death. The more photos they took, the sooner and more violent their deaths were.”
Bree shuddered and leaned forward to rest her head in Jenine’s lap. She grasped Jenine’s hands in hers and squeezed them tightly, rubbing the palms with her fingers. Jenine squeezed back.
Richard looked at them, and his mouth tightened. He looked as though he were on the verge of crying, but he maintained a steady voice when he spoke. “You took a large number of pictures. I’d strongly recommend the sleeping pills when they start to touch you. You don’t want to see what happens after that.” He stood and turned towards the door.
Bree raised her head and glared at him with red-rimmed eyes. “That’s it? You’re just going to leave us to it?”
He hesitated in the doorway, shoulders hunched and eyes on the floor. “I wish I could help,” he repeated.
“No. There’s got to be a way to beat this!”
He turned back to them, emotions struggling over his face. “Look. I’m sorry. I really, really am sorry. You seem like nice people. I wish to hell this hadn’t happened to you. But I can’t help you any more than I could help someone with an incurable disease. Goodbye.”
The door slammed as he left and Jenine’s legs gave out. She flopped onto the carpet and hugged her knees to her chest. Bree sat down next to her and placed her arm around Jenine’s shoulders.
“I don’t want to die,” Jenine said stupidly.
“Oh, babe.”
Neither of them seemed to have anything else to say, so they huddled and shivered together as thunder crackled in the distance. A single raindrop tapped the roof, then a second and a third, and soon the sound of single drops blended together into the steady drum of rain.
Chapter Five
Jenine very rarely saw her best friend vulnerable, frightened, or without answers. Bree was a perpetual achiever: obstacles only existed for her to knock over. Seeing Bree look so helpless and alone was a new experience for Jenine, but there it was; proof that Bree Abernackle was human.
As she sat on the floor with her arms around Bree, Jenine tried to come to terms with her new knowledge. She was going to die. Not in fifty years, when she was old and had lived a full life, but in the immediate future.
She tried to take stock of her emotions, and found they were missing. She felt numb, as if she were watching herself act in a movie. The professor-looking man had strolled into her life, told her she was a dead woman walking, then strolled out, leaving her to shrug at the camera. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t possibly be real.
Bree seemed to be dealing with the news in a very different way. She rocked on the floor, gripping Jenine’s arm, her eyes dull as she stared at the floor. She looked sick.
“Bree…”
She shook her head and pulled herself out of Jenine’s arms. She stood, stumbled, then walked to her bag in the corner of the room and pulled out her mobile. Jenine stood up, uncertain what she should say or do.
Bree disappeared into the bedroom. When she came out two minutes later, her face was all hard angles and covered in a sheen of sweat. She dropped the phone into her bag and leaned her hands on the kitchen counter, breathing deeply through her nose.
Jenine approached Bree from behind and placed a hand on her shoulder. Bree turned, offered a watery smile, and said, “He didn’t answer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Jenine wanted to smack herself as soon as the words left her mouth. Of all the things she could have said to someone who’d just found out she was about to die, “I’m sorry” had to be the most useless and insipid choice.
Bree scrunched up her face and pulled Jenine into a hug. “Don’t be. Not your fault. Anyway,”—she pulled back—“we’re not done yet. Holt doesn’t want to help us, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do.”
Just like that, Active Bree was back.
“Here’s the plan,” she said, turning on the kettle and picking up the laptop in one deft sweep. “We’re going to get a cup of tea. We’re going to do five minutes of meditation. Then we’re going to find a solution to this. So what if we don’t have help from the ‘expert’? There’s got to be a way to beat this, and we’ll figure out what it is. I promise.”
Jenine nodded, mostly just relieved to let Bree take over.
Jenine and Bree sat down next to each other at the coffee table. Bree was researching the cameras. Jenine guessed it wasn’t going so well, based on the quiet grumbles and hisses of frustration.
Bree had given Jenine the job of exami
ning the photographs and noting down anything significant or unusual. Bree reasoned that Jenine had a better eye for detail, but Jenine suspected her friend’s motives were more self-centered. Bree always floundered when she felt out of control, and, right then, control for Bree meant being in charge of the research.
Jenine didn’t mind. She wouldn’t know where to look if it had been left up to her. The photos, though unsettling, were at least familiar. She’d gathered every picture she could find—they had taken nine—and laid them out in front of her in chronological order, starting with the picture of the wedding reception. She counted twenty-eight ghosts in total.
She rubbed her hand across her face and suddenly realised she was missing one of the pictures. “Hey, Bree, where’s the photo you took earlier today?”
“There.” Without looking up from the computer, Bree pointed to the Polaroid on the kitchen counter.
Jenine fetched it and took a long look. Her own face took up a lot of the picture: pale, frightened, wide-eyed. A ghostly hand grasped at her shoulder. The hand belonged to an impossibly tall man, so horribly bony that he reminded Jenine of a prisoner of war who had been starved. His mouth was open, and every visible tooth had been sharpened to a fine point.
She grimaced and placed it in the correct spot at the end of the list.
You’ve got this, she told herself. Think of it as a law school assignment. Find the evidence. That’s what your professors are always saying: evidence is everywhere; it’s just got to be found.
The first thing she thought might be significant was the ghost’s attention. In the first picture, none of the ghosts were looking at the camera. In the second picture, the one taken in the floristry, the single ghost was staring at the back of Jenine’s head, not at the camera. Out of the pictures taken in her home, the ghosts only seemed to start paying attention to her partway through the series. The turning point was the set of photos taken in her bedroom. At first, the ghosts hadn’t acknowledged her presence, but in the second photo, all three of them were watching her intently.
After that, every single ghost was either looking at or trying to approach her or the camera. That matched what Richard Holt had said: the more photos she took, the easier the ghosts could find her.
Then she noticed the recurring ghosts. In the photo she’d taken from inside the car, the ghost—the woman who had left finger smudges on the window—looked remarkably similar to one of the women in the wedding photograph. This raised several interesting questions: how did ghosts travel? Did they just walk, or did they teleport? Maybe if I keep running, keep moving, they won’t catch me?
For a second, she thought she felt a cold breath drift across the back of her neck. She swiped her hand over the area but couldn’t feel anything. Bree glanced at her, a silent question creasing her eyes, and Jenine smiled reassuringly.
She turned back to the pictures. She found a second instance of a duplicate ghost quickly—a man at the wedding appeared later at the park. The second ghost in the park photograph was also familiar. A child stood behind the tree, his empty, white eyes wide and his hair tossed about his head.
Jenine picked up the wedding photo to compare and was vindicated to see it was the same boy who had crouched behind the tree at the park. At first she didn’t see any other duplicates, but then she came across a third instance of the boy, in the photo taken in the floristry, half of his face was visible outside the window. Intrigued, she searched for him in the other pictures, and her skin began to crawl.
The boy appeared in eight of the ten photos. Never featured prominently, he was almost always hiding or peeking around a large object or through a window. He was unmistakable, though. Wide, hollow eyes beneath thin hair being blown by non-existent wind watched the camera in every single photo.
Jenine was simultaneously repulsed and heartbroken. Why is he following me? And why does he hide?
Jenine picked up the wedding photo again. She’d wondered if he might be the owner of the camera, hoping to reclaim something he’d lost.
“Jackpot,” Bree whispered. Jenine put aside the photos and scooted close enough to look over her friend’s shoulder. “Check this out. Among the droves of fiction, Photoshopped pictures, hoaxes, games and irrelevant crap, there’s a forum thread that matches our camera perfectly.”
Bree had found a paranormal forum. Jenine skimmed the first post, which was from 2008. The author described a situation similar to Jenine’s. He’d found a camera abandoned in the attic of a house he’d inherited, and had taken some pictures. He’d attached them to the post, and Jenine suppressed a shudder.
They were eerily similar to the pictures she’d taken. Pale figures stared at the camera with empty eyes, some reaching out. One appeared to have a rope around her neck.
The replies varied from curious to downright incredulous. Jenine supposed that was to be expected. The fifth post took it more seriously, though:
“An old colleague of mine used to talk about photos like this,” it read. “He called them ‘death pictures.’ He collected them as a hobby.”
Jenine scanned the rest of the post, but it focussed on analysing the pictures and coming up with theories about the ghosts’ former lives. A few others continued the conversation for about a week, but the original poster never replied.
The thread picked up four years later, with a post by a girl who called herself Becca:
“Hello, sorry to revive an old thread, but it’s very relevant to my situation. I bought a lovely vintage camera from a garage sale (previous owner is deceased), and it shows ghosts in both of the pictures I developed. It’s freaking me out! Is there anyone I should be contacting about this? One of the pictures was taken inside my home, and there are these white, ghostly people everywhere. Would a medium help?”
A reply had been left the next day:
“Hi. Full disclosure here, I know nothing about the paranormal. A friend sent me the link to your post, thinking I might be able to help. I’m a professional photographer with thirty years of experience. I’ve heard plenty of wild tales in my time, and that includes stories about ‘ghost cameras’ (or ‘death cameras’, as some call them). They’re not only meant to show ghosts, but supposedly the user always dies shortly after taking them. Personally, I think it’s an entertaining story, but ultimately just that—fiction. If such a thing really existed, it would be all over the news.”
The post after said:
“Unless there’s an industry-wide cover-up. The conspiracy theorist in me is going wild, LOL.”
Becca replied soon after:
“Thanks for the industry advice. It’s pretty hard to discard it as fiction when I’m staring at pictures of dead people, though. Should I not take any more pictures? Is there anyone I can get in touch with about this? I’ve been searching the internet and I’m desperate for help.”
Shortly after, there was a new post from a user called RHParanormal:
“Hi Becca. I may be able to help. I’ve extensively studied the area of possessed items, and I have had contact with one person previously who had used a ghost camera. Where do you live? Don’t use the camera again, but call me, and I can talk you through what to do next.” His phone number followed the post.
“Hey, is it just me, or is that number familiar?” Jenine asked.
“Bloody hell,” Bree muttered. “RHParanormal. Richard Holt. I suppose that’s the second person he claims he tried to help.”
There were no more posts in the thread. Jenine rubbed at the goose bumps on her arms. “What do we do now?” she asked.
“Keep looking.” Bree was already back on Google, searching for “ghost camera” and “death camera”.
Jenine glanced back at the pictures laid out on the table and felt queasy. The people in the forum had only taken a couple of shots. She’d taken eight. She stood up and stretched her shoulders, trying to look nonchalant. “Actually, it’s past dinner. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think with an empty stomach. How about I get some food while you ke
ep on there?”
Bree shot her a smile. “Sounds good.”
“Anything you want?”
“Whatever you have, babe. I’m not fussy.”
Jenine started rifling through her cupboards. She grabbed a tin of tuna, intending to make tuna sandwiches, then hesitated. What if this is my last meal? Do I really want it to be tuna on toast?
She tossed the fish back onto the shelf and picked out a packet of nachos and a tub of salsa. She dumped them both in a bowl, poured the remains of a packet of shredded cheese on top, and put it in the microwave.
Bree was muttering to herself again, which meant she’d found something good. Jenine peered at the computer screen, but it was too far away to read. She turned back to her task and grabbed a tub of sour cream out of the fridge. She was peeling away the seal when an invisible hand grabbed her arm. The touch burnt like a thousand ice-cold needles being pressed into her skin, constricting the flesh and muscles, and sending jolts down into her elbow and up into her shoulder.
Jenine screamed and dropped the sour cream, which splattered over the tiled floor and her jeans, but she hardly noticed. The hand hadn’t let go, and every second it held on, the pain increased. She jerked back and smacked her free hand at where the invisible wrist should be, but she touched only air. The grip tightened, and the ice spread through her body, rushing up her arm and into her chest.
She threw herself back, trying to find relief. Eyes squeezed shut, she screamed. Then, as abruptly as it had grabbed her, the invisible hand let go.
She found herself on her back, lying in the spilled sour cream. Bree was yelling her name and shaking her shoulders. Jenine felt sick, but she doubted she had enough in her stomach to bring up, so pulled herself to her knees. A headache, the kind she got when she tried to eat ice, gnawed at her head.
“Jenny?” Bree’s voice was unsteady. “Talk to me, Jenny. What happened? What can I do?”
‘I… I…” Jenine rubbed her hand over the aching skin. A bruise was forming, shaped like a palm and fingers.
