A girl walks home when she suddenly finds some twenty KODAK photos tied with a rubber band. In the first photo, she sees a spectral man standing on a black background, quite far from the camera lens, without being able to distinguish his face or clothes. In the second picture, everything is the same but the man is closer; however, in the eighth photograph, the ghostly man...
She is walking back home. The sun hits hard, insistently. A while ago, as if by chance, she just thought of those cases that make fun of Criminology and seduce Parapsychology. Cases of people who disappear as if by magic, leaving no trace. Extraterrestrials? Dimensional portals? Or, why not, simply criminals with great skill. It must be the last thing, she thought and kept walking when suddenly she found a stack of instant KODAK photos.
The photos were about twenty and were in perfect condition, tied, together by a rubber band. She noticed them because it was strange that they were right in the center of one of those benches where people sit down to rest. It was difficult to think that someone left the photos carelessly. The most likely thing was that the person wanted to show others his photographs but without being present...
Unable to contain her natural curiosity, she checked that other person didn't see her, took the stack of photos and began to see them in order.
The first photo showed a man with a ghostly appearance on a black background, so far from the camera that she could barely see his silhouette and the fact that he was facing her... intrigued her even more. She looked this photo for a while, intrigued, and then put it at the bottom of the stack and went to the next one, in which the same man appeared, standing in front of the camera and with the black background. The only difference between the first and the second photo is that in the second, the man was a little closer to the camera, but she still couldn’t distinguish his features, he was still far from the lens. The third photo also showed the same, but the man was a little closer, she still couldn’t see him clearly. So, she supposed that the other photos would follow the same pattern, but anyway she continued seeing the following photos in order, hoping to see clearly the face of the ghostly man.
Already in the fourteenth photo, she could finally see the face of the ghostly man: it was the most frightening face she had ever seen. The man in the picture was screaming, his eyes were completely blank, and his expression reflected a horror different from any form of horror she had seen painted on any face. It was as if he were being tormented intensely and around him, there were things so frightening that no one in the world could imagine them…
Finally, in the seventh photo, there were only two blank words on a black background: I'm close… Yes, the photo really scared her, but now it seemed to her that the one who left the photographs had failed his terrifying joke right… in the last image. For her, at that moment, the only thing that was close was her own house, and she kept walking...
A few meters from the girl, in the house where she was going, her brother was waiting for her calmly, but all that calm was shattered when he heard her a short distance from the door uttering a loud scream of terror.
Anguished, the girl's brother ran to open the door, although he didn’t find his sister. All that was about two meters from the door was a stack of KODAK photos. They were about twenty, tied by a rubber band. He was still too worried about his sister, but he couldn’t resist the curiosity and took the package of photos to look at them in order. The first thing he saw was a black background, in which a girl with a ghostly appearance was seen, standing in front of him, quite far from the camera. The features of the girl and the clothes she wore weren’t distinguishable. Although, in the little that he could distinguish, he had the impression that the girl looked like his sister... In the next photo, everything was the same, except that the girl was a little closer… He still unable to distinguish her. Restless, he saw to the following photo, and so on…
THE END