Echoes of Darkness (15 page)

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.

“Dad?”

“Wait. Just . . . wait. Okay?”

Time passed, during which Billy fought with himself. Most of him wanted nothing to do with whatever was in that picture, but part of him
had
to know.

“Dad?”

His father just shook his head.

“I’ve already seen all the others, and, I guess, technically it
is
my camera. What is it?”

His father’s voice sounded far away, like he was preoccupied, but he held the photo out to his side, hanging it in Billy’s view.

“I can’t explain it. I mean, it’s not a double exposure, not some kind of superimposition, but where . . . ?”

Billy looked at the picture, the breath catching in his throat. There stood his father in his heroic pose. The color was a little washed out, but there were no overt sepia tones like in the other pictures. It was a fairly normal-looking picture of his father—with a tall man standing beside him, staring him straight in the face.

Dad’s elbows were thrust out to the sides, exaggerating his stance, but the stranger was tall enough that he could lean in over one of those elbows and get within a foot of Dad’s face. The man’s mouth was a tight line, the one eye visible in profile staring intensely at Billy’s unseeing father. Through the space between his father’s elbow and body, Billy could make out the man’s arm, thrust behind his dad as if about to pat him on the back. The man’s other arm obscured part of his father’s shoulder and chest as the apparition pointed directly at the camera.

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah,” said Billy’s father, a little rasp in his voice. “I don’t believe in ghosts and spooks, but I really can’t think of a good explanation for this.” His father finally took two steps backward and didn’t so much sit on the bed as allow his legs to give out. Billy joined him, and they sat side by side, staring at the new image.

“What do you think he wants?” Billy finally asked.

His father thought for a while.

“Well, he spent all that time getting closer to the camera, according to the pictures, then the first thing he does is try to point the camera out to anyone he can. I could be just thinking like a cop, but maybe he wants someone to look into that camera.”

He cleared his throat and raised his voice slightly, directing his words upward into the empty air.

“First thing tomorrow morning, you and I are going down to Eccles’s Pawnshop so I can ask him what’s going on with this thing. Maybe it’s some kind of joke, but if it is, I don’t appreciate him playing it on my son.”

He took a breath and stood. He went to the desk, scooped up the pictures and dumped them into the camera bag. The camera followed.

“I’ll put this down in the kitchen, all right? Try not to worry about it. Watch some TV, read a book, try to take your mind off it, but don’t be up too late, okay?”

“Okay. And Dad?”

His father paused in the doorway.

“Thanks.”

Billy’s father nodded with a tight smile and walked from the room.