Keep It To Yourselfie

 

‘Can’t wait much longer buddy,’ the young man said, his brittle smile beginning to turn down at the corners. I studied the face through the screen, watching the little yellow squares confirm the focus was just right. The girl giggled again and I hesitated, watching as her square flickered uncertainly. The thought crossed my mind that she might come out blurred, and I fought a brief, insane urge to laugh hysterically.

The man’s strained smile had almost faded completely, replaced by a guarded expression that I considered entirely appropriate given that I’d been following them for an hour. Watching them. I was fairly sure that he’d become aware of me only moments ago, but something was unsettling him. Perhaps my pallor which I admit was less than healthy. My clothes, not at all suited for a day out on the pier under the beautiful sunshine amidst the laughter of children and mechanical fairground music. Perhaps it was an ominous sense of foreboding, a prescient inkling; in the circumstances that too would have been entirely appropriate.

I pushed the button, wondering for a fleeting moment why a device without a shutter should bother to make a shutter-like sound. That half-formed thought was drowned in a rush of elation, of relief and guilt, as I handed the phone back after a cursory glance at the screen. I turned and walked away, fast, losing myself in the crowd revellers. I imagined them looking in puzzlement at the picture I’d just taken, at the fuzzy outline marring the otherwise perfect image. I suspected they’d delete it without another thought, perhaps regretting that they’d even bothered to ask me to take their picture. I hoped not. I’m not heartless. If they kept it, they might understand.

Just as I had come to understand.

Satisfied that I had left them behind, I ducked into a novelty photo booth, knowing and not caring that my breathing was too rapid, my face sweaty, my fingers shaking as I shoved coins into the slot with frantic desperation. I hadn’t bothered to draw the curtain, and was well aware of the looks I was getting from passers-by. I let them look. The irritatingly cheery machine started talking at me in an infuriatingly jovial tone, accompanied by the tinny chime of badly recorded music. I hit the button over and over as though it might spare me the anguish of waiting, but to no avail. Finally, once the sadistic device had enjoyed itself sufficiently, it took my picture. An electronic image appeared in the display, of my face. Drawn, haunted, pale. But mine. Alone. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of the booth.

I was still there when the security guard woke me. I can’t have been asleep long, because the tuneless metallic music of the machine was still playing, the sun was still out, and the image of my face still stared emptily from the screen. I left the pier.

The man who’d come to see me at work had been frantic, upset. He’d implored me to help him. His phone wasn’t working properly, he said, as though that justified the level of wide-eyed, twitchy torment he was displaying. Something to do with the photo function. This he said without looking at me, staring intently at the phone. A sidelong glance and a pause.

Incidentally, I work in a phone shop. I sell phones. My mother is very proud.

Also incidentally, I’m not an utter moron.

I knew there was something else going on. But in my defence, I have had a lot of crazies to deal with in my line of work. A lot of perfectly nice but socially sub-optimal people find me after failing to find anyone on the internet able to help them with their phone’s particular quirks. This is, I think, largely due to the fact that people watch, download or otherwise access certain things on their phones that perhaps they shouldn’t, and on balance decide speaking to an understanding human is better than leaving guilty digital fingerprints everywhere as they try to deal with the consequences themselves.

So I asked Mr Twitchy to demonstrate the problem with the phone. I asked if I could try it, to take a photo of him. He refused.

‘No, no,’ he said, almost flinching away from me, ‘that won’t work.’

‘Okay,’ I replied, in a tone normally used by hostage negotiators dealing with particularly volatile kidnappers. I made no effort to suggest alternatives, after all I was the one trying to get on with my day and he was the one making it unnecessarily awkward.

He just hovered there, clutching his phone, glancing around. Twitching. The moment stretched for longer than was comfortable until I suggested he take the photo instead. In case it was some kind of boundary issue with this guy.

‘Take one of me then,’ I said.

The effect was instantaneous. The man broke into a wide, slightly unhinged smile, and aimed his phone at me. It made that unnecessary shutter-click sound, and he laughed in what appeared to be an overwhelming feeling of joy. He practically danced out of the shop.

It wasn’t until I’d tracked him down that I learned why he’d been so edgy. But by that point, I was pretty edgy myself. Just as those two on the pier today will be, eventually. As soon as they realise something is wrong.

I myself didn’t realise anything was wrong for most of the first day. It was only by chance that I decided to test my own phone’s picture-taking abilities, after talking to a colleague about the twitchy guy and his short-lived yet apparently successful visit to the shop.

The photo I took was fine, except that there was a faint grey outline hovering just behind my shoulder. I figured it was a motion blur, though that seemed unlikely, and deleted it without another thought. I took another, and the blur appeared again. This time I assumed it was the light, so I moved across the shop and aimed it at the passers-by. No blur appeared in that picture.

Because I’m not a complete psychopath I didn’t instantly assume demonic possession as a reason for the blur, so I was satisfied that the mysterious smudge had cleared. That is, until I tried taking another selfie a little later on. Yes I take selfies; I’m not perfect.

The blur reappeared, only darker. It did not appear in any photo that did not feature me.

I began to worry. Stuff like that is not meant to happen, but any passably intelligent person notices a pattern that obvious.

In my defence though, I didn’t begin to outright panic until the following day. I woke up as usual at 7.15, and immediately reached for my phone. This would have been maybe ten hours since I’d taken the last photo. The shadow behind me was much thicker, and now I could make out a shape inside it.

Imagine wisps of smoke, rising from a fire. Imagine them gathered into a roiling, churning outline of something vaguely humanoid, as though a deeper shadow lurks within it, obscured by a veil of rippling darkness. The more I stared at it the more I was able to make out the figure within. Elongated limbs, an unnaturally lengthened jawline. Two darker patches that hinted at a pair of pitiless, inhuman eyes…

I tore my gaze from the photo, and stared determinedly at the wall. I sat, breathing heavily, hands shaking, on the edge of my bed for maybe ten minutes. I’d like to say my mind was racing with possibilities. It was not. It was blank with dread. Frozen cold with primitive, helpless fear. Then I looked back at the picture. I couldn’t make it out quite as well, but the shape was unmistakably a leering, looming thing, standing at my shoulder. Hidden by a veil of smoky shadow, but darker and more defined, as though the barrier between us was wearing thin. I hit delete and flung the device away.

I think perhaps I thought that would be the end of it. Until I remembered that the first photo (I had made the connection with Mr Twitch some time before this) had been taken with Twitch’s phone, not mine. And only after I’d asked him to take it.

That realisation stole over me as soon as I arrived at work. Memory is a strange thing, connections and associations unconsciously linked in the most infuriatingly idiosyncratic manner. Especially when you want to remember something fast and find you can’t, or wish you’d remembered something sooner.

I quickly learned that time was running out. Each successive photo, regardless of the device it was taken on, contained a slightly darker figure. A slightly thinner obscuring veil. Essentially, the thing stalking me became more and more real. The eyes became darker and darker, like deepening pits sinking slowly into some Stygian underworld. I figured I didn’t have long until I was staring at a fully realised…thing, insane eyes boring into my soul, oddly-jointed fingers reaching through that gossamer-thin veil...

Well. That wasn’t going to happen.

If Twitch had passed this to me – which I figured he must have, since it was the only thing that explained his euphoria when I had asked him to take my picture – I figured I could give it back.

Thankfully my workplace has lots of records of its customers. Data is the new gold, apparently, according to a mind-numbing webinar we were made to watch. So Twitch, and his home address, was not hard to find.

I’m pretty sure I was fired shortly thereafter, for leaving work without notice or accessing private details or whatever.

Like it matters.

In any case, I turned up at Twitch’s house. He was not surprised to see me. He stared at me grimly for a moment or two, then moved away from his front door into a gloomy living room. I followed, perching on a hideous couch that had seen better days. Possibly in about 1920. BC.

Anyway. He told me a tale of horror. He’d been on the pier, he said, with his girlfriend. A lovely sunny day, a young couple. You know the scene. They ask a passer-by to take their photo, and suddenly – what’s that blur behind the girl? Nothing. Never mind. Move on.

And move on they did. For two days, they gave it no thought. On the second night she came home in a terrible fluster, raving about the smoke-like after-image stalking her through photos. He’d taken her photo, and sure enough the demon-thing was there, looming over her, insanely elongated jaws open as though ready to swallow her head. They freaked out. Didn’t think. Didn’t make the connection with the creepy guy on the pier.

The next morning she suffered a massive heart attack. Died hours later in hospital. Cardiac arrest, in response to unknown external stimulus, according to the coroner. She’d died of fright, essentially.

Twitch had flown into a mad rage. Throwing himself around the hospital like a maniac. He’d blindly stumbled into the reception desk, with guard scrabbling to grab him, and caught sight of the CCTV feed on the screen behind the desk. There he was, surrounded by guards, being manhandled away.

With a cloudy image trailing after him.

It hadn’t taken him long to figure it out after that. They’d both asked the creepy man to take their photo, and 48 hours later she had died. They’d asked him to pass it to them.

So he’d come to me. And I’d asked him to take my photo. Like a total chump.

I’m a rational guy. I knew better than to waste time with ‘demons don’t exist’. I’d had 24 hours already.

So I went down to the pier, and followed the first loved-up selfie-taking couple I saw. It didn’t take them long to ask.

‘Can’t wait much longer buddy,’ the young man said.

And wherever he is, he’s right.

Copyright (c) Steven D Jackson 2023