By the time he made it to the top end of the field, Kyle’s legs were burning; the incline was steeper than expected and the mud was only getting deeper. He reached a large gate and leaned against it to take a breath. He was out of shape. Bertie bounded over, looking pleased with himself. The big lab was nine years old but still acted like a pup. Kyle opened the gate, let the dog through first, and followed.
He emerged onto a much wider, somewhat waterlogged track. In front of him was the wall of a massive barn, so Kyle assumed that he must be standing in a tractor lane, although he doubted it was still in use. There were two ways to go: down the hill, presumably back towards the village; or uphill, where the track vanished around the far side of the barn. The way back to the village was tempting. He was wet and hungry. He hadn’t seen a single subject worth photographing. Kyle’s right foot was ice-cold. He thought maybe his wellie was leaking and muddy water was seeping into his sock. Bertie looked up at him, panting expectantly.
“In for a penny, in for a pound. Come on, boy.” Kyle turned right and headed up the slope alongside the barn. It could well be a dead end, in which case he’d head back.
The guy on ViewFindr – what was his handle? BokehBuddy? Something like that – had said the tracks were all interconnected, so it was impossible to get lost. The only thing Kyle had to worry about was trudging too far in the cold and wet with a leaky boot. Still, he had a log-burner and a bath back home, which would seem all the sweeter after his trek.
Kyle marched up the hill, now facing the rain, the wind catching under his hood until all he could hear was it whistling around in his ears. When he rounded the corner of the barn, he stopped dead. This was promising.
Beside the barn was another structure, hidden from view until now. It only had two walls, and a large pitched tin roof supported by tall girders. The floor was concrete, and covered in rubble, lengths of old cable, rubbish, and ripped tarpaulin weighted down with bricks. Kyle wasn’t sure what he was looking at – hay storage maybe? It was certainly disused, like the rest of this land. His photographer’s eye took in the more unusual details. Graffiti was painted large on the interior walls: LISA + JONO in yellow letters, four feet tall, the usual stuff. All except one piece. A black figure, abstract and blocky, with spiked hair, large round, white eyes. A noose around its neck, the painted rope stretching all the way up the wall until it disappeared into the shadows under the eaves. Nearly twenty feet high? How was it painted? He didn’t want to think the words “voodoo doll”, but they prised their way into his mind regardless.
And beside that black figure, which Kyle increasingly disliked, was a smaller structure, tucked into the corner. It was a cube, with crumbling walls, covered in scrawled graffiti. The walls were maybe eight feet high, and it seemed to have a flat roof. There was a large door in the centre of the wall facing outwards, ajar, around eight inches thick. The handle was hanging half-off. There were thick electrical cables trailing between the nearby barn and the top of this structure, and they hung down loosely, vanishing into the roof of the cube before him. It looked like a big walk-in freezer, like you’d find in an abattoir – Kyle shuddered as he remembered that day spent photographing in the slaughterhouse.
Kyle noticed for the first time that he couldn’t hear anything but his own breath, which frosted in front of his face. He couldn’t even hear the rain pattering on the tin roof. He specialised in the macabre, and yet he hadn’t seen much that unnerved him like this weird little farm building did. He couldn’t take his eyes off the crack in the door, and the darkness behind it.
Kyle forced some rational thoughts into his brain. This was probably a tractor port, and if that little room was powered, it had likely been a workshop. Maybe the farmer had mothballed this place when the phone mast went up, and simply rented the space out to the telecoms company. He was just on edge because the outbuilding had obviously been used by the local colour, and maybe recently. There were cigarette butts and crushed cola cans on the ground; for all he knew there could be druggies or lager louts here every night, and that in itself made him feel a little unsafe. Yes, that was it.
But as it was daylight and he hadn’t seen another soul, he’d probably be okay. He stepped over the threshold, onto the concrete. As soon as he set foot on the hard ground, the wind seemed to get under his jacket, and he shivered as though someone had dropped an ice cube down his back. He paused for just a moment, cursed at his own silliness, and stepped closer. Kyle took out his phone – still 4G, excellent. He opened ViewFindr. The in-app camera was better than the one on his phone sometimes. If this place unsettled him, it’d make for some great interactions. He took a snap of the cube-shaped structure.
Uploading.
He went closer and took another.
Uploading.
He heard a low rumble behind him. He turned round and realised it was Bertie. Head bowed, hackles up, growling.
“Christ, Bertie, don’t do that,” Kyle said. But the sound of his own voice spooked him, because what if there was someone behind that door? Some wino, or some glue-sniffing kid with a knife?
“Stupid,” Kyle muttered, now finding it reassuring to say it out loud. “It’s not the big city, mate.”
His phone buzzed in his hand, making him jump.
One new follower.
“That was quick.” He clicked on it, welcoming the distraction. No username. Avatar just a black circle. “Weird.” Kyle frowned. He didn’t think it was possible to have a blank username.
He turned back to the structure, trying his hardest to ignore Bertie. The old boy wasn’t always the sharpest tool in the box, although he wasn’t easily spooked. Unlike his master, apparently.
Kyle took a breath, marched up to the door, and swung it open.
The door creaked with the rust of ages, the grinding metal making far too much noise for Kyle’s liking. Foul air rushed out of the room, blowing around Kyle’s hood like a rasping breath. His stomach lurched, like he expected to see something horrible behind the door. But no one leapt out at him. Not a creature stirred within. It was just a dark, square room that smelled of damp and piss. The walls were covered in large tiles, probably asbestos, which bloomed with black mould. The ceiling was intersected by steel joists, from which a broken lamp hung by a chain. The room was no more than ten feet across. Light from the broken roof filtered in weakly, but was reluctant to illuminate the far corners, which remained stubbornly shrouded in darkness.
He took three shots, uncharacteristically imprecise, really not wanting to linger more than necessary. To get the best composition, he took another couple with the flash on, and found himself looking away when the flash went off, like he was scared of what he might see.
“Pity’s sake,” he hissed to himself. “Man up, Kyle.”
With that, he swung the door to, as he’d found it, flinching again when the closing door revealed the voodoo graffiti. From where he stood, it was like it was looking at him.
Bertie barked.
“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me twice,” Kyle said, as the dog took two steps backwards. Kyle tramped away from the barn, back onto the grass and mud, pressing “Upload All” as he went.
It took Kyle another hour to complete the network of paths and tracks, and although the weather brightened a little, his heart wasn’t really in it. Everything seemed more still and quiet than before. Kyle couldn’t hear any birdsong, or scurrying animals – all those sounds that he’d taken for granted before passing by that barn. Bertie no longer rooted about in the bushes, instead plodding along at Kyle’s side. The old boy must be tired.
Although the rain hadn’t stopped, Kyle felt compelled to pull his hood back, acutely aware of his lack of peripheral vision, and he had a growing sense that there was someone following him. Or, at least, watching.
Definitely watching, like eyes burning a hole in the back of his head. But of course, every time he stopped and looked around, there was no one.
Not a living soul.
* * *
Kyle realised he felt very alone in the quiet old cottage, even with Bertie curled up by his feet. He turned the TV on to inject a bit of life into the room. Even when his phone pinged to tell him his photos had received a new Like, he didn’t open the app. He took a few sips of whiskey, tried and failed to concentrate on the game show on TV, and before he knew it he felt his eyelids droop, his breathing grow heavier.
Must be all the fresh air, he thought. A little nap won’t hurt.
* * *
Kyle felt something cold and wet on his skin. He tried to open his eyes, but they were gummy with sleep, his eyelashes sticking together, sight blurring. It was dark. He was moving.
Half-asleep, panic gripped him, rising in a wave. He felt ice-cold wind on his legs, his arms, his back, all over. His feet slid through damp grass, the blades tickling his shins, toes digging into sucking mud. Something was closed tight around his wrists: bony fingers. Several pairs of hands. He was being dragged.
He fought to open his eyes, tried to move his sluggish limbs, eventually managing to dig his feet just a little deeper into the soft earth. This resistance was met by tightening grips and painful yanks that threatened to tear Kyle’s arms out of their sockets. His head felt heavy. He tried to raise it, but it lolled about on his neck like a dead fish. He saw mud-caked shoes poking from under black skirts. Or robes. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t cry out.
A sudden pain at his ankles jarred him to lucidity. His feet bashed against something hard and then scraped along rough ground. There was concrete beneath him, strewn with rubbish. The footsteps of his captors rang out on the hard surface.
Kyle tried again to look up, catching sight of a thick, metalled door set into a crumbling wall. His head flopped down again. Rusty hinges groaned. And then he was yanked hard forwards, into pitch darkness. His feet slipped on slime. His nostrils filled with decay, and something fouler. He managed to babble at last, “Wh… what are you doing? Who are you?”
There was no reply but for the rustle of robes in this dreadful place of stillness and quiet and dark.
Something was slipped around his neck, tightening painfully. He knew it was a noose even before it began to drag him upwards, raising his body from the hard floor. He opened his eyes now, but it was so dark it did him no good. There was a shaft of moonlight beyond the heavy door, but it couldn’t find its way inside. Not in here.
Kyle started to choke. All he could do was claw at the rope around his neck. Bile rose in his throat but had nowhere to go. His thoughts were a jumble; he wanted to think of a way out, but all he could do was wish he could scream as his feet left the ground and he was hoisted up, up, into black.
* * *
The barking dog jolted Kyle awake. Whiskey sloshed from the glass in his hand onto his trouser leg.
Kyle’s heart pounded in his chest. His thoughts were fogged. The room was dark. But as his breathing slowed, he realised he was in his cottage, in his chair. The fire was out. Bertie barked once more, then whined. The dog was looking at the floor, where Kyle’s phone blinked and vibrated.
“What a nightmare…”
The lounge was cast in a cold, greyish light that streamed in around the edges of the blinds.
“Shit!” Kyle clicked on a lamp, set his tumbler down, and retrieved the phone that must have fallen off the chair arm as he’d slept. The phone’s lock screen displayed 6:57 AM. He’d slept for over twelve hours. “Impossible…”
He swiped open the phone.
ViewFindr: 127 notifications. Alright, that was unusual.
It was with some trepidation that Kyle opened the app, and the first thing he saw was the message board.
Is this for real?
FFS, sicko.
Nice Photoshop, but not really suitable for ViewFindr.
This isn’t a horror site!
Blocked and reported.
“What the hell?” Kyle tried to type a reply, but was met only by a message:
This function is temporarily suspended while we investigate a breach of our terms and conditions. Thank you for your patience.
Kyle scrolled up to his gallery, and his blood ran cold.
His last three shots in the series were motion-blurred, hastily composed, and entirely unexpected. Each showed, in varying levels of detail, a dead woman, hanged from a steel joist. She was naked, her body bruised and filthy. Her eyes bulged. Her lips were cracked and blue.
Kyle shook uncontrollably. Bile rose in his throat. He held his head in his hands. He couldn’t work out what was happening. Had he been hacked?
He stood up, his legs like jelly.
A bang on the front door: three loud raps. Kyle almost screamed.
He threw the phone into the armchair and staggered over to the window, opened the blind slowly, no longer certain of anything. When he saw a police uniform he didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more afraid. A second man, with two-day stubble and a cheap suit, held up an ID card to Kyle’s window. His expression was not reassuring.
* * *
The door of the gloomy interview room opened, and DI Stein entered, carrying a stack of folders and evidence bags. He took his seat on the other side of the table.
“Look,” Kyle said, wearily. “I’ve been here all day, and there’s still no charge. You must know I haven’t done anything. How many times do we—”
Stein held up a hand, and Kyle shut up at once. Without saying a word, he opened a polythene bag, removed Kyle’s phone, and slid it across the table.
“It’s your lucky day, Mr Watson,” the detective said, his voice almost a growl. “Digital forensics back up your story. The original images on your phone do not match the indecent images uploaded to the app.”
“Told you!” Kyle said, with a mixture of relief and anger. He looked uncertainly to his court-appointed solicitor, who said nothing. “So… I can go?”
“Not so fast. We still need to finish examining your computer, to make sure the photo-editing wasn’t done by you.”
“Of course it wasn’t! I uploaded those shots from my phone, I told you a thousand times.”
“Yes, and then went to sleep, and woke up this morning to find you’d been hacked. Convenient. Tell me, Mr Watson, what made you visit Dewberry Farm yesterday?”
“I didn’t even know it was called Dewberry Farm. Someone online told me about the walk. Thought it’d be good to take the dog, maybe get a few photos. I’m a professional photographer; that’s what I do.”
“And you maintain that you don’t know the history of the place?”
“I haven’t lived in the village very long. I don’t really know much about anywhere around there yet. All I know is it’s a nice, quiet walk.”
“Do you know why it’s so quiet, Mr Watson? It’s because, less than ten years ago, a woman was found hanged in that tractor shed you found. More specifically, in the workshop you photographed. This woman.” Stein opened a folio, and passed three photographs over.
Kyle could barely focus on them. He saw bulging eyes, pallid, naked flesh, dark lips, lank hair. He turned away, queasy.
“That was Amanda Bartlett, aged twenty-eight, resident of Dewberry Farm, just four miles from where you live. Left her home in the middle of the night, later found hanged in the workshop. Official verdict was recorded as suicide, despite various strange circumstances. Her brother, Mr Thomas Bartlett, maintains that she was coerced into killing herself by a weird cult that she joined on the internet
. Nothing substantiated. I like to think of it as unsolved. But that’s not the strangest part, Mr Watson.”
Kyle looked at Stein uncertainly. The detective was impassive.
“Those are coroner’s photographs from the scene,” Stein went on. “They’re the only images in existence of Amanda Bartlett’s body, or so we thought. The pictures uploaded to your account on the ViewFindr app are a definite match for the victim. But they aren’t the same photographs. They’re different, as though someone else took photos before the coroner got there, and saved them, just for this.”
“I… I hadn’t even heard of this village ten years ago,” Kyle said. “I was living down South. I can prove it.”
“The other strange thing,” Stein said, ignoring Kyle entirely, “is that your photographs—”
“They’re not mine!”
“—Your photographs aren’t scans. They’re original, digital photographs, probably taken with a mobile phone camera at the scene. Now, the backgrounds match your originals, so the figure of Miss Bartlett must be superimposed. But the positioning is congruous with the angle of the shots in every photo. Forensics say it’s the best fake they’ve ever seen. Almost like the pictures were carefully staged. By a professional.”
“Check the metadata. That’ll prove it.”
“It’s been stripped.” Stein gave Kyle that stony look again.
Kyle twitched a little. “Well… it’s easy enough to erase metadata. There’s an app for it.”
“Interesting that you know all about these things, Mr Watson.”
“Look… Like I said, I wasn’t here ten years ago. I’d just graduated from uni. I was working for a local paper… Maybe they can verify where I was.”
“I’ll be sure to check.”
“My client has a point,” the solicitor said, making a rare contribution. “It seems more likely that someone with local knowledge used my client’s photographs to play a joke, in rather poor taste. Perhaps you should be looking into the users of this photography app.”
Phantoms Page 21
