Inspired by true events.

"I'll love you forever," Ellie had said. Her final words burned in Jeffrey's ears as he lay in his bed, staring at the expanse of ceiling and counting the long hours till morning. Forever ....

It had been a perfect day. They started early with a walk in the woods, her in the hiking boots he had given her as a birthday gift, him lugging the backpack she had bought him the previous Christmas. Jeffrey had his camera with him, and they snapped pictures of each other all day.

In the afternoon they showered, changed, and went for another walk — this one on Shell Beach. He took a photo of their footprints as the waves swept them away. He wrote Jeffrey loves Ellie in the sand and they snapped a picture of that, too.

As the sun began to sink in the afternoon sky, they climbed Engagement Rock — so named because of the number of marriage proposals that had taken place there. Had she known? He thought maybe she had. They had spoken lately of the future, of the children they'd have, of the house they'd buy, the red one with black shutters.

When Jeffrey dropped to one knee atop the rock, it took her breath away. Tears spilled down her cheeks as he took her hands in his.

"Eloise Anne Smith," he said, retrieving a velvet box from his pocket. "You would make me the happiest man in the world if you would do me the honor of becoming my wife."

Jeffrey opened the box, revealing a two-carat diamond ring. "Ellie," he whispered. "Will you marry me?"

She replied without hesitation, trembling as he slipped the ring on her finger.

Beneath them, the ocean boiled and churned. A wave rolled in; there was a hissing sound as it receded.

"I'll love you forever," she said — and then it happened.

A freak wave — to Jeffrey it looked like a tsunami, a wall of blue-green chaos, the avenging fist of God or the Devil — exploded over them, filling the air with stinging, salty liquid. Jeffrey felt himself lifted, felt Ellie's hands torn from his. The world turned upside-down as frigid water assaulted his lungs. Then his skull slammed against stone, and everything vanished.

The days that followed were a kind of slow nightmare. Waking in the hospital ... the terrible, shattering realization that Ellie was gone ... the pallid faces of her parents, who should have been the grandparents of the children that would never be born ... Ellie's memorial service, nothing but a framed portrait on the altar, no coffin, no urn.

At first, he couldn't bring himself to look at the photographs they'd taken that day. Wracked with grief, he put everything in the closet: the pictures, the mementos. He spent his nights in a haze of whiskey.

But now, with the hours until sunrise stretching to infinity, he threw off the blankets. Suddenly, he needed to see her face again, a reminder of happier times.

He sat at the computer in his pajamas and inserted the memory card. Seawater had saturated the camera bag, but he had recovered the card and it looked unscathed.

He frowned as the thumbnails appeared on screen. The memory card had been ruined after all; the pictures were nothing but noise, all pixels and snow, the files corrupted. Maybe it was better. Perhaps seeing her on her final day, happy and vibrant, unaware of the terrible fate to come, would be too much to bear.

He was about to shut down the computer when he noticed a single, undamaged thumbnail image near the bottom of the screen, the final picture in the set. He clicked on it, and the photograph filled his monitor ... and filled his mind.

Ellie was wearing the same white shirt she had worn on the beach. But what was that in the background? He hadn't taken this picture. She appeared to be standing in a train station or airport; behind her, frozen in time, blurry travelers bustled to and fro, on their way to unknown destinations.

Ellie was looking at the camera, her blue eyes strong and reassuring. Jeffrey had known and loved her for years; in her facial expression, he read the message as clearly as if she were whispering in his ear. The scene had an ethereal quality about it, and Jeffrey was afraid to look away for fear that the picture would blink out of existence, a figment of his overtaxed imagination. He wept, placing his hand on the screen, grateful for the opportunity to say goodbye.

Don't worry about me, the expression on her face said, her eyes glittering like the two-carat diamond clearly visible on her left hand. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm not afraid. Stay strong, Jeffrey. Whatever my destination, I know you'll join me there.

I'll love you forever.

He crossed his arms tight, and shivered inside his ragged overcoat, slipping icy fingers into gashes in the sleeves to pull the whole contraption tighter about his body as he strode purposefully along the pier.

The sky was gray, shot through with dark iron plumes, where a sickly bladder of snow waited to burst completely over the dismal cityscape, burying the thick grime with deathly white purity. The flurries whorled in a frenzy, making a mad dash to the concrete below, as if stirred to chaos like the granules within a snow globe.

The man muttered nothings to himself as he marched against the bitter winds. Flecks of shaved ice formed on the curled ringlets of his matted beard. His wheezing, unhealthy breaths exited his body in ragged bursts, lingering thick in the air like dewdrops in a spider's web. His hip ached, his foot was numb, but the call of ritual kept him upright, and pounding the paved walk to his final destination, which even now, loomed in the distance of his memory, like the figments of skyscrapers in the expanses behind him.

The streets and all who would find shelter upon them are abandoned to their fate in times such as these. He had the entire world to himself in this instant. A lone gray smudge, walking through a blustery tundra. He couldn't remember the place he had come from, nor could he think of where it is he was supposed to go, though something told him he had made this walk before, perhaps many times. These days, he couldn't remember much of anything. The back of his head itched as he tried to think. The place where his hair wouldn't grow, where an ugly gashed scar hid under a filthy cap, where a million memories were obliterated by some terrible calamity, where new ones went to die a quick death.

He shook his head loose of snow, his pace slowing as he neared a dining area with benches and tables. Rotting from the inside out and strewn across with garbage, the little stand used to operate at a tidy profit, now it died the slow death of the uncared for, like so many things in the big city. Things, and people, as it were.

Pulling his hands from his coat, he touched his fingers to a sign that declared, "HOT CHOCOLATE, 35 CENTS", in faded brown writing. He turned slowly in a circle, taking in the area around him, until his eyes fell on a novelty old-fashioned lamppost near the rail that guarded the rushing river. A strange spark blossomed in his addled mind, the sound of long dead pathways filled with clamoring electrons, banging to and fro, starting a fire of recognition.

He made strange, urgent noises as he patted down his coat, jacket, pants, shirt. He stuffed his hands into pocket after pocket, there are dozens to check. Finally, in the breast pocket of his innermost shirt, he touched upon what he sought, a jolt of lightning going through him. He gingerly pulled the paper out and unfolded it. Holding it up to his face.

The photograph was creased severely, almost tattered to ruins. In it, a tall man with a well-trimmed beard leaned against that same lamppost before him, smiling broadly. His left arm was wrapped tight around a beautiful woman, who leaned her head back against his shoulder to stare up at him lovingly. His right hand rested atop a child's head, playfully tousling his hair, the boy staring fixedly at a cup spilling over with hot steam.

He recognized none of those people, but from somewhere deep within, a sickly rocket fired off from his guts that annihilated his heart into a violent storm of broken flurries. The edges of his vision grew black, as a sense of loss descended, so profound that it threatened to strike him dead. Silent tears froze upon his cheeks, as the emotions died with each hitching breath, each spark in his mind drifting speedily away into the gray miasma.

Unthinking once more, he folded the photograph up and tucked it safely away inside the same pocket from whence it came. He stared at the lamppost some more, curious about the lingering hooks it probed in his mind, until even those were jarred loose and floating away, until it was unspecial, until it meant nothing once more, until, like everything in his world, it was another irrelevant object in a world the size of a snow globe.

He turned on his heel and set off, beyond the stand and the post, back toward the city, back toward the chilly, dark alleys that zigged and zagged along the backs of the indifferent buildings. A lone gray smudge, trudging through a bitter, gray reality.

I wanted to be photographer. I wanted to go somewhere, get out of this miserable town but the course didn’t work out; sure, my grades were reasonable, but I wasn’t anything special so they kicked me out in the summer of ‘93. I go back home feeling like a failure, and a year later I’m processing family photos in the kiosk down the back of the local Kmart for peanuts.

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She was tiny: ‘bout 12, scrunch socks over leggings and a floppy hat with the front pushed up. Brings in her little disposable camera, wants the photos developed. No problem, I tell her, should get them done by the end of the day. Off she goes with a big smile back to her Mum, the happy bounce in her step making me hate my life even more.

Two hours later I’m drying the prints and I spot something odd. Amongst all the laughing, loathsome tweenies in long floral skirts, next to all the shots filled with underexposed, blurry ice cream cake at the local Pizza Hut the night before, there was grass, daylight, something grey in the foreground. Grabbing the print out and waving it around to dry off, I take a closer look and what I see nearly makes me scream. I call Jeanie over and she does scream.

“Sure you didn’t get it mixed up?” Jeanie asks, but we check everything and there is no way I’d made a mistake. “Dude, this has got to be some kind of sick joke,” Jeanie mutters, not taking her eyes from the print. “You think we should call the police?”

“Dunno. I mean, shouldn’t we call the kid’s mum first?” I reply, “I mean, there could be an explanation for it . . . ?”

“Like what?” Jeanie snorts, and I can’t find one so we ring the girl’s mum up and in an hour she’s at the booth, looking all worried when I tell her something’s up.

“I hope you haven’t ruined them. Sam is ever so looking forward to showing her friends!” she snaps.

“No, Mrs. Jefferies, the prints are fine, there’s just an . . . anomaly,” I say but she still screams when I show her. She doesn’t get any better when I show her the negatives either and we have to get security to carry her out. She doesn’t come back, we close up for the day and Jeanie and I have a few beers afterwards to try to get the image out of our heads.

What we don’t realise is – we can’t.

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That night, I go to sleep with the TV on static, droning out anything in my brain. When I’m fast asleep, I dream and I’m there . . .

The sky is overcast and cold, and the long grass a dull grey-green. Something smells. I see a grey shape in the hillside and I walk towards it. The smell gets worse and I can hear the buzzing of flies. I want to run, but I’m being pushed forwards until I'm face to face with the corpse in the grass. I can’t move, I can’t breath; it sits up and a rotting hand whips out and grabs my wrist. I scream until I wake up, panting and clammy.

When I’m putting my eyeliner on in the morning I see the bruise, a slash of blue across the back of my wrist.

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I get to work and Jeanie looks terrible. She’s got a bruise on her forearm, just below her elbow, but she tells me to shut up when I ask if she had a bad dream. “No, dude, I know you did,” I say, “’cause I had it too.”

“’bout the photo?”

“Yeah.” I show her my wrist.

The Jeffries never come back and Jeanie locks it away. But the dreams keep happening, getting worse. Jeanie turns up to work with a black eye and I’ve got back pain from when the thing grabbed my ankle and dragged me to the ground. I’m drinking so much Jolt I’m permanently shaking but I can’t stay awake forever.

Then Jeanie and I hear Mr. Jeffries has been arrested, his wife dead after being beaten and strangled, but he’s denying it. Said he called 000 but she died, screaming, in bed and asleep. But we know what caused it. She was the only other person to see that photo.

“Oh, man . . . “ Jeanie mutters, “we gotta do something . . .” We unlock the drawer, exhume its deadly contents and burn it in the staff toilets, flushing the ashes away and hoping the fire alarm doesn’t ring . . .

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That night, I sleep a dark, peaceful sleep. The next day, Jeanie looks good too, the bruises are gone. Weeks pass and we try not to think about it, at least not until we’re developing the holiday snaps for some kid: in the middle of sunny beaches, the same, overcast field, this time, in bloody scrawl across the scene: YOU CAN'T STOP ME . . .

“Work’s been crazy,” Lily screamed down the hall as she unburdened herself of two camera bags and her briefcase.

She’d been tracing down a story for the last two weeks on the history of the local Civil War relics and battlefields. This week had been truly taxing; 19 interviews, battling each time to get the families to pose for pictures with their precious family heirlooms and artifacts, and 5 trips out to various battlefields trying to get a shot that didn’t involve a superstore or power grid. She was finally ready to get down to business and compile all the notebooks full of quotes and gigabytes of photos into a four page spread for next month’s issue.

“Babe, you here?” she called down the hall. Her boyfriend, Alastair, had been out of town for a month on business.

No answer. He should have been home three hours ago.

She dragged her camera bags over to the table in the hall where they had the answering machine. She smiled as she stared down at the lonely little answering machine sitting on the table, no phone to keep it company, just there to mess with people and act as a glorified note pad. One new message…

"Hey, honey, it’s mom, just calling to tell you that I told your Aunt Sally that you wouldn’t mind taking some pictures of the kids for Christmas cards this weekend. Hope that’s OK. Call me soon."

Lovely. She loathed it when her mother volunteered her for little projects like this. She was always signing her up for photography and decorating assignments without ever asking her if she was busy or interested.

Her brow furrowed further when she realized that hers was the only message on the machine. Where was he?

Not being the worrying kind, she decided to go ahead and get started wading through the photos devouring space on her CF cards.

“OK, folks,” Lily said to her camera as she pulled the card from the bay on the side, “let’s see just how awful you look in 2D.”

After a few seconds, her iMac screen was filled with tiny thumbnails of awkwardly smiling folks holding 150-year-old rifles and swords, uniforms and flags all belonging to their dead relatives, and the sweeping landscapes where they were killed.

She excitedly looked for the one with the fog that looked like the very smoke of the canons that had been fired in the epic battles of the area.

“There you are,” she declared as she located it among the myriad.

As she double clicked it, she noticed something strange about the thumbnail beside it. As quickly as it opened the fog photo, she closed it to get a better look at this mysterious photo following it.

It opened slowly, more slowly than it should have. As it gradually came into focus, Lily leaned farther and farther back from her screen. She hadn’t taken this picture…

On the screen before her disbelieving eyes was a photograph of six soldiers on the battlefield where she’d shot the fog. Her jaw dropped as her eyes studied each face peeking out from under the bills of their grey hats. She knew these people. She recognized them, but how, how are they here in this photo – her dead father, David, her friend from high school, the two firefighters who died the night she’d gotten her first job, the homeless guy she used to give muffins to, and on the end, Alastair.

He looked a little younger, maybe it was the hat, or the uniform, but it was definitely Alastair. She stared, agape, wondering how this photo got onto her camera. She looked at the info box at the bottom of the screen...

"Date 6/23/1864"

A gasp escaped her lungs as she began think of all the possibilities. What was this? A vision of the past, a cruel Photoshop joke? She jumped back from the desk, swinging around wildly, knocking over her chair to make her way stumbling to the hall where she’d left her briefcase.

“Cell phone, cell phone,” she muttered to herself rifling through the bag trying not to panic. “667-7700…”

"The number you are trying to reach is not in service. If you feel you have received this message in error, please try the number again."

She sat back against the wall and dialed again…

"The number you are trying to reach…"

She crawled back to the desk and enlarged the image now burning a hole in her brain. She looked at the face, every line, perfect; piercing eyes and that kissable mouth. She looked closer at the uniform, down his chest to the belt holding a brass-handled sword and then she noticed something small hidden in his hand, just barely visible – the tiny Atlanta Braves logo that graced his silver-clad cell phone.

t was an effort for the woman to carry her many packages. The elevator stopped at the top floor and once she had found her keys, she finally entered the smart upscale apartment. It was Christmas Eve and she was weary from fighting the throngs of holiday shoppers. Laying the packages down on the side table, she walked toward the kitchen.

The large wall mirror caught the reflection of the well-dressed and attractive thirty-year-old. Pausing, she absently smoothed the single auburn strand of hair back in place and touched the barely visible smile lines around her dark brown eyes.
Where has time gone? She thought, continuing to the kitchen to make dinner.

Judith Gregory had spent her life in the pursuit of success. She had methodically planned every move with burning ambition. She would never again experience the cruel snubs of the in crowd because she was poor, or have to struggle as her parents had done. She had worked her way through college, networking her way into the best circles and eventually buying a small cosmetics company. Within five years, it had excelled into a thriving corporation.

The price she had paid was from choice, never allowing her self to love anyone or anything, and now she wondered if it had been worth it? Her parents had died a few years earlier, the victims of a drunk driver in an auto accident; she had no siblings or close friends. She was always amid a sea of people, but tonight Judith sat on her plush sofa very much alone.

She remembered the prints she had picked up from the Photo Mart that afternoon and retrieved them from the side table where she had laid them.The company Christmas party had been held a few days earlier and as usual she had been the one to take pictures. It was her way of not having to involve herself with idle chitchat and distance herself from getting too close to her peers and employees.

Settling back on the sofa, she opened the envelope and laughed at the first print. Good natured Jim Hedge her chemist, was looking back at her with red eyes. He obviously had too much to drink, wearing a paper ship hat on his head and a cock-eyed grin spread across his mouth. Judith knew all of these people by sight and she wondered what kind of life they lived away from the job.

Her eyes brimmed with tears. She missed her parents desperately, remembering that no matter how poor they were, Christmas had always been a happy time for the three of them. While growing up, her father, a carpenter, made wonderful toys from wood and her mother always given her a pretty dress that she had sewn. They strung popcorn and made paper ornaments and they always let her place the foil star on the top of the small tree. She glanced over at her own tree. She had paid a decorator to design a one of a kind tree at great expense. It seemed cold and detached and a reflection of her own life.

For the first time since she could remember, Judith wanted to share her life, to have children and someone to love her. She found herself praying and it occurred to her that it had been years since she had prayed or wished so desperately for anything.

Putting her thoughts aside, she looked at the next picture. It was of a man that she had never seen before. She had personally transferred the digital pictures to the CD, looking at every picture before taking it to the developer. This man was not at the party.

Judith studied the picture. Whoever he is, he is very good looking she thought. Blond hair framed the rugged features. The wide shoulders enhanced the obviously tailored suit. His kind but intense blue eyes looked out at her and she felt a warm discomfort in the strength that seemed to penetrate deep into her soul.

Christmas passed and it was a relief to go back to work. At lunch time she started for her favorite restaurant. She hailed a taxi and while rushing to get in, she ran right into someone. “Excuse me” she apologized then looking up, she found herself looking straight into those blue eyes. It was the man in the picture.

“Where are you going?” He asked. Almost tongue tied, she finally told him. He suggested they share the taxi since he was going the same direction. They talked easily while in route and he asked her out for dinner. Judith would never mention the picture and decided this had to be unexplained fate. She only knew that this man was some how meant to be in her life for a long time.

I woke up one Christmas Day to see at least a foot of snow gleaming perfectly and enticingly outside my window. Well, first I saw the joyful grimaces of my three children as, screaming, they plunged under the down comforter of the bed I shared with my wife to tickle me with their icy fingers. Yelping, I shot out of bed and was chased to the living room to see the mound of presents under the large Christmas tree. Some of the presents I didn’t recognize, but that didn’t worry me; my wife, Cheryl, had probably added a few extras before going to bed.
“Daddy! Can we open ‘em?” My oldest, Amalia, tugged on my tattered nightshirt.
“No, honey. After breakfast, maybe.” This resulted in vocal complaints from all three: Amalia, seven, Oscar, five, and Beverly, four. I ignored them like a good father and pointed out the fact that the cookies and milk they had left out were all gone! I felt a flicker of confusion, because I had left half, and Cheryl hadn’t eaten any. She was up by now and making pancakes.
I pushed all other thoughts out of my mind and went to find my camera. I knew exactly where I’d left it the night before: on the mantle above the stockings. But my camera wasn’t where I had put it. I looked high and low, but it was not to be found. I questioned the children and my wife about it, but no one knew what had happened to it. I shrugged it off.
After having a delicious breakfast, Cheryl and I joined the kids on the carpet next to the tree, where they had been sitting since they had finished shoveling food into their mouths. “Dave,” Cheryl insisted, “put on the Santa hat.” So I donned the hated red hat and passed out gifts, saying “Ho, ho, ho” and “Merry Christmas.” Among the presents, I found my camera. Odd, I thought, but I handed it to Cheryl so that she could document these precious memories.
That was how the morning passed. We went outside to build snow people and make forts and have an epic snow battle, and then we hauled out the sleds and walked to Heather Hills Park. After an hour or two of sledding and playing with the neighbors’ kids and their dog, we walked to our favorite local diner for a hot lunch.
On the way home, we passed Mrs. Hamilton’s house. Mrs. Hamilton was elderly, an absolute doll, and she always gave the kids cookies on Christmas. This year, however, she didn’t appear; the kids craned their necks to try to catch a glimpse of her. She was not to be found. So we continued on and came home, where the kids immediately began having a heyday with their brand-new toys.
After a dinner of ham, the kids went back to playing with their toys; Amalia played us a few Christmas carols on the piano and we gathered around and sang, off-key, the few words we remembered. Oscar got a kick out of singing the words “I don’t know the words to this song” even if he did know them.
The kids went to bed, despite claims that “I’m not tired.” While Cheryl took a shower, I loaded the pictures from that day onto my laptop. I went through the pictures and picked out my favorites, starting at the end and going backwards. I had finished with the Christmas photos when I decided to go through the non-Christmas photos. What I saw next was horrifying.
They were pictures of some Santa lookalike wearing crazed, devious expressions. There was Mrs. Hamilton’s bloody face, her eyes rolled back into her head and her mouth stuck in an “o” of sheer terror. I saw her being run over by a reindeer, who wore the demented grimace of a wild animal. It was trampling her, prancing over her body in a most satisfied way. In one, Santa was taking a picture of himself drooling while cracking his whip evilly.
The pictures were appalling and gruesome. Santa biting his lip whiles stomping on Mrs. Hamilton’s face; Santa holding a knife to Mrs. Hamilton’s neck and beaming a fake, toothy smile. It was ghastly. This Santa character was in my house, come in through the chimney! He had eaten the kids’ cookies and drank their milk and given them presents like a good Saint Nicholas, but he had tortured and murdered our elderly neighbor.
“Cheryl?” I called weakly. No answer. I heard nothing but the water running in the bathroom. I gulped. I did not know why this creep had documented his sick “accomplishment” on my camera, other than this: if anyone didn’t put out cookies on Christmas Eve, they too would suffer this fate.