Echoes of Darkness (14 page)

In the photos before that, Billy failed to find the figure, but his skin was already crawling. He flipped through them, pointing the figure out to Frank.

“Weird,” Frank muttered, flipping through them again. “You think this guy’s been following us?” He sounded nervous, and Billy didn’t blame him.

“How did we miss him in these?” Frank held up the most recent pair, then scanned the playground again, looking behind them as well.

“I don’t know,” said Billy. Rather than looking all around the playground, he stared at where the photos said the stranger had been. He had a suspicion, but it was crazy.

Before he could think too much, he popped the camera open and took another picture, aiming across the empty park like he was taking another shot of the merry-go-round.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking something.”

Billy pulled the picture loose as it whirred out of the camera. He handed it to Frank, and tucked the camera away in the bag with the already developed pictures as he led the way toward the bikes. Levering his Schwinn up from the grass, he swung a leg over the seat. Standing astride it, he took the developing photo back. Frank picked up his own bike, standing next to it, hands on the handlebars.

“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 out 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?