by Rob Smales
“Well?” Frank jerked his chin toward the picture in Billy’s hand. Billy looked down at the image slowly manifesting within the white frame, and his stomach gave that little “oopsy” feeling that he got from roller coasters and some fast elevators, like some part of him was trying to throw up but the rest of him hadn’t caught on yet.
“What’s the matter?”
Wordlessly, Billy held out the picture.
Frank’s eyes widened. “Holy shit.” His head snapped around as he looked at the playground behind him, then swung about as he scanned the surrounding park and street beyond. Finally, his gaze returned to Billy.
“Uh . . . some kind of double exposure thing, you think?”
His voice was higher than ever and sounded tight, like he was forcing the words out. Billy knew what Frank was doing; he was doing it himself. Frank was putting everything he had into sounding cool, while inside he was anything but.
“No double exposure,” Billy said. “The film’s old, but it wasn’t opened.”
“Well then, what’s going on?”
Billy looked at the photo in his hand, the image darkening as it developed. Clearer than ever, the man in the photo was closer, past the Three Little Pigs and halfway to the merry-go-round. Angry eyes bored out of a blurred face, and the sense of purpose in his posture was easy to see: his strong stride billowing his long dark coat, chest thrust forward, head slightly lowered, hands balled into fists.
He appeared to be marching straight toward them.
“I dunno,” said Billy as he tucked the newest photo into the bag and looked out at the empty playground. “But I say we get the hell out of here.”
“Fine by me.”
Frank pushed his bike into motion and leapt into the seat all in one smooth maneuver, pumping his legs and gaining speed almost before his feet hit the pedals. Billy gave the park one more look before he pushed off on his own bike, standing on the pedals as he worked to catch up.
The skin on the back of his neck crawled the whole time, and he had the feeling that someone was watching him.
“Dinner’s at six, Billy. You lose track of time?”
“Sorry, Dad.” Billy had been at the foot of the stairs and moving fast when his father popped out from the door to the living room.
“Frank’s not having dinner with us? I don’t think he’s eaten dinner at home all summer.”
Billy smiled, trying to appear normal, though the truth was that Frank had turned toward his own house without a word, pedaling for all he was worth.
“Sorry, Dad. I’ll tell him you missed him, though. I’ll be right down. I just need to wash for dinner.” He turned to run the rest of the way up the stairs, hoping to get to his room before his father noticed—
“What’s that you have there?”
Slumping, Billy turned and took a few steps back down, swinging the camera bag around so it was in full view.
“It’s just this old camera I got secondhand. Me and Frank were playing around with it, that’s all.”
“May I?”
His father held out a hand. Billy unzipped the bag and pulled out the camera, handing it over. His father held it up, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
“A One-Step Express,” he murmured. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. You know, twenty years ago everybody had these. The tech guys were even using them at crime scenes, before everything went digital.” That last bit would have sounded odd if Billy’s father hadn’t been a cop.
He looked up at Billy. “So, where’d you find one of these you could afford?”
The words at a flea market popped into Billy’s head, but his father always knew when he was lying. Years of being a police detective, or maybe just being a father—Billy didn’t know which. He sighed.
“Eccles’s Pawnshop.”
His father’s nostalgic smile faded. “Billy, I’ve told you to stay out of there. Eccles deals in stolen goods. Not everything in there, but enough. We’re looking at him all the time, and if we could ever prove he knew where his stuff was coming from, we’d be all over him. Word is he does other stuff to make ends meet, too. Serious stuff, for some serious people.”
Billy’s father sighed. “Look, I just don’t want to take a chance on you getting involved in something. I mean, what if this camera was stolen and became part of an investigation? How would that look for me, for my son to have bought stolen goods?”
“I wouldn’t have known it was stolen,” objected Billy. “Besides, it was way at the back of the shop, like it had been there for a long time. I mean, it was dusty, Dad.”
His father digested that for a moment.
“Fine, keep the camera. But I don’t want you going in there any more, okay? I know there’s a lot of neat stuff in there, but please, no more. We can go to the flea market sometime, if you start feeling the need to browse.”
He held the camera out to Billy, who tucked it back in the bag.
“Can I see the pictures sometime?”
“The film’s old and doesn’t work right,” said Billy. “There were two packs, though. Maybe the other one’ll work better.”
Billy’s father nodded.
“Okay, go wash up. Mom’s waited for dinner long enough. Maybe this weekend we can see about getting you some real film for that.”
After dinner, Billy retired to his room with his father’s magnifying glass; he just had to remember to put it back before his father found out it had been borrowed.
Six photos formed a line across the top of Billy’s desk, but he tried not to look at them. They creeped him out just being there; when he looked right at them, they scared the shit out of him. He had six of the nine pictures he and Frank had taken laid out in chronological order, numbers four through nine. The photo under the magnifying glass was number three, the first one they had taken at the house under construction.
Billy leaned over the picture, slowly scanning the temporary fence at the back of the site forming the scene’s horizon. In photo number four, he’d found the figure on the far side of the fence with his naked eye. Now he scanned from right to left, from the front corner of the fence back toward where it disappeared beyond the house.
“Shit,” he whispered. There he was. Farther back than in number four, as if he were walking up the street on the far side of the house. He was hard to make out at first—just the silhouette of half a man showing above the plastic fencing—but he was there. Billy slid the picture into line with the others and pulled over the picture Frank had taken in front of the pharmacy, when Billy had loaded the film. He ignored the image of himself smiling theatrically, focusing instead on the background. Using the magnifying glass to follow the sidewalk, he found the man almost at once. On the distant street corner was a tiny black figure. The distortion gave him a slightly rippled look, like he was being seen through heat coming off a street baking in the summer sun.
Billy licked dry lips with a dry tongue. He had that feeling at the back of his neck again, and he couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder at his empty room, relieved to see that it was indeed empty.
Come on, he told himself. You’re fourteen—act like it! This is creepy, but you haven’t believed in the boogeyman in years, and you don’t believe in him now.
Billy slid the picture to the head of the line on his desk, then pulled the last one, actually the first one, into place before him. He stared for a moment at the large round magnifying glass clutched in his hand. He took a breath.
Sure you don’t.
It took some time, but he found it, wishing all the while he wouldn’t. The figure was so small, and at such a distance, that Billy would never have seen it with his naked eye. Even then, Billy wouldn’t have spotted the figure if it weren’t for a strange clear spot in the old film. Sepia toned but with crystal clarity, the photo caught the man just as he was rounding the corner at the far end of the street, most of him still hidden from view.
Though Billy had eaten well at dinner, his stomach felt hollowed ou
t and slightly nauseated. The finger that coaxed that first photo into its spot at the head of the line trembled. As he sat and scanned the line of Polaroids from left to right, oldest to newest, he felt sweat breaking out at the nape of his neck, though he was almost shivering with the chill in his skin.
No matter where he and Frank had gone that afternoon, the man had been there with them. In the pictures. Billy stared at the last image, the stranger striding across the playground toward the camera, dark eyes burning in their sockets with frightening intensity. He had not been there. Both boys had looked right into the playground when Billy took that picture, and there had been nothing to see but the other side of the park. But there was the man: in the picture, large as life.
Billy examined the stranger’s features as best he could through the distortion. Jaw set, his forward lean imparting urgency to his motion, he seemed to stare directly into the camera, through the camera, at the photographer on the other side.
At Billy.
This is crazy, Billy thought. There has to be some sort of explanation, right?
Maybe double exposure, like Frank had said at the park. Maybe he was freaking out over nothing. Yet there was something else odd, something Billy couldn’t quite put his finger on. He started to examine the photos again, but he only got to the second shot in the series when he stopped.
Now, that’s not possible.
In the first picture, the man was coming around the corner down the street behind Frank. In the second, the boys had traded the camera without swapping places, but there he was on the corner behind Billy. This meant the guy had appeared in two pictures, taken a minute apart, on two different corners at opposite ends of the street!
See that? He’s a double exposure or something, thought Billy. No matter where we pointed the camera, he was in the picture, just sort of inserted into the scene. We could have taken a picture of the sky and he’d have been in it, right?
There was another thought scrabbling about at the edges of Billy’s consciousness, and he was desperately trying not to have it. Realizing he was trying to fight it, though, gave it a little opening, and it slithered into his mind like a snake, coiling on top of his brain.
It can’t be a ghost. Ghosts haunt places, right? All the ghost stories I’ve ever heard, the spook was in a haunted hotel, or a haunted room, or a haunted house. Even a haunted stretch of highway. But we went to all different places today, all across town, and he’s in all the pictures. That means he can’t be a ghost.
Billy’s eyes strayed across the line of photos, each bringing the stranger closer and closer to the lens. His gaze lingered on that last shot, the eyes of the man seeming to stare right at Billy, and that serpent of thought rattled its tail, letting Billy see just how dangerous a thought it was.
Unless he’s haunting the camera . . .
He looked at the camera. There had been ten shots in the film pack he’d loaded that afternoon, and there were nine pictures lined up on his desk.
One shot left. He looked about his room. One shot left, and all the others have this guy walking toward us. But they were all outside, where there was room. If I take the last picture in here and there’s still a guy walking at me in the distance, then it has to be a double exposure or something. He won’t fit into the scene.
Billy steeled himself, then raised the camera and popped off a picture without even looking through the viewfinder. The print came out, and Billy laid it on the edge of his desk to develop. Then he got up and hustled down the hall toward the bathroom.
In the stillness of his room, alone but for that thought coiling in his head, he’d almost wet his pants when the shutter snapped.
He left the door open when he returned, taking up the picture as he sat. He felt as if he were five years old again and had to go into the basement for a toy, and knew there was something down there that was going to eat him up.
But, just like when he was five, there was nothing there. It was a picture of his empty room, absent of any dark figure striding toward him. Tight shoulders relaxed, and he released his held breath in a relieved sigh. There. Nothing to see but his closet door, bureau, bedroom door and the window with half his bookcase showing beneath, all in shades of brown and black. It was—
Wait . . . in the photo, the dark of night had turned the glass of the window into a mirror for the flash, reflecting the bright room back on itself. But the lower window was half open to catch the night breeze, and there, where there was nothing but the screen to shut out the backyard, was a shape. Not a hand, exactly, but the flattened out bits one sees when pressing their hand to a pane of glass, giving the rough shape of the fingers and palm. Beyond it, just barely visible to Billy’s naked eye, was a shadowed face.
The face he might have imagined; it was nothing but shapes put together, darker spots in the darkness outside the window, like seeing a puppy or a fire truck in a cloud on a summer day. Not so with the palm. The hand pressed to the screen reflected the camera’s flash well, creating a light spot against the darkness. Once spotted, Billy’s eye was immediately drawn to it, until it seemed not so much a photo of an empty room with a palm at the window, as a photo of the palm itself.
Billy’s heart thudded in his ears, but was quickly drowned out by a rushing sound, loud and terrible, the ocean heard in a seashell bigger than the world.
The palm and the face, there at his window.
His second story window.
Suddenly his father was kneeling beside him, a hand gently shaking Billy’s shoulder. The rushing sound cut off like someone had flipped a switch, and he heard his own voice calling out, shrill and odd, even to his own ears.
“Daddy!”
“Billy, are you all right? What’s wrong?”
“Daddy!”
He flung his arms around his father’s neck. He hadn’t called his father “Daddy” in years, but right now he was less fourteen-year-old Billy than some much younger self who still lived inside him.
“He’s at the window, Daddy, at the window!”
Billy was babbling but couldn’t seem to stop. He realized he’d been sitting there calling for his father since seeing the hand and face in the picture, afraid to move, afraid to stay, knowing that somewhere nearby was the boogeyman, but unable to get away. Strong fingers gently pried Billy’s arms loose, leaving him in the chair as his father crossed the room.
“Who’s at the window?”
“I dunno. A guy, the guy who’s everywhere!”
His father peered out into the dark.
“Billy, there’s no one out there. We’re twenty feet up. Who could be out there?”
“The guy who’s everywhere!”
Billy’s father wore a look of concern as he knelt by the chair again, looking his son in the eye. “It’s okay, Billy. Deep breaths, all right? I need you to calm down for me so you can tell me what you’re talking about.”
Billy sat and breathed, and tried to shove his younger self back into his memories. His father’s presence helped. The next time he spoke, he was more himself again, though he could feel his younger self prodding at the edges of his mind, propelled by fear and refusing to be put away entirely.
He told his father the whole story: buying the camera, taking the pictures, the strange discovery of the man. His father looked at each photograph, using the magnifying glass when necessary. He tapped the line of them, one by one, lingering on the last one: Billy’s room and the face.
“You know there has to be some sort of explanation, right?”
From the tone of his voice, Billy thought his father was trying not so much to reassure his son as convince himself.
“It’s a ghost, Dad. He’s in every picture, no matter where you take it.” He pointed to the camera, sitting on his desk where he’d left it. “That thing’s haunted.”
“You know I don’t believe in that sort of thing. It’s got to be . . .” Billy’s father trailed off thoughtfully as he picked up the camera, popping it open into picture-taking mode and turning
it over in his hands as he had before dinner.
“I see ten pictures here,” Billy’s father said, “and there are ten shots in a pack of film, if I remember correctly. Did you try the second pack?”
“No.”
Billy’s father fished the second expired pack out of the camera bag. He quickly replaced the film, and the top of the pack came rolling through the slot.
He held the camera out to Billy.
“Take a picture of your old man?”
Billy crossed his arms, stuffing his hands into his armpits. “No way.”
“Come on. One picture. If it’s as old as the other stuff, then chances are it won’t come out anyway.” He leaned forward slightly, forcing Billy to take the camera or have it dropped in his lap. “I’m right here,” he said, quietly. “I won’t let anything happen. Okay?”
Billy stared at the camera in his hands and muttered a short “fine.” His father stepped back, struck a heroic pose with fists on hips, gave an exaggerated smile and said “Cheese!” The pose did make Billy smile. The camera flashed, the motor whirred, and the white square stuck out of the little machine like a tongue. Billy tugged it free and set it on the desk to develop. He handed the Polaroid off and went to sit on the bed. His father folded the camera closed and held it in one hand.
“You said this looked like it had been on the shelf for a while?”
“I had to blow dust off it. Honestly, Dad, it looked like Stinky put it there years ago, then never touched it again.”
Billy’s father quirked an eyebrow. “Stinky?”
Billy felt himself blush as he smiled. “That’s what Frank and me were calling the guy after we left the shop. He was a big guy, and he smelled really bad.”
“That sounds like Eccles,” Billy’s father said as he moved toward the desk. “The joke around the department is that Eccles was born past his expiration da—” He stopped dead, staring down at the developing photo, and spoke in a rough whisper. “What the hell?”
“What is it?”
Billy stood to look, but his father sidestepped into his path, scooped up the picture and held it close to his chest. Billy could see how stiff his father’s posture was.
