The Man in the Photo

“Oh, and this right here!”

Kevin peeled back the plastic sheet covering the page of photos and draped it over the edge of the photo album, letting it hang towards the floor. His fingers worked carefully at the edge of the picture in an effort to pull it free from the adhesive holding it in place.

“It’s okay,” his fiancée laughed. “I can see it fine from here.” She put a kind hand on his shoulder.

“But you don’t understand,” he continued, unable to contain his excitement. “That summer.”

His voice trailed off as he stopped fighting the corners of the picture and stared at the image of himself and a group of his neighborhood friends – Johnny had been thirteen at the time while he and the twins, Josh and Joyce, were twelve if he remembered correctly. They posed in front of the public pool, glistening in the radiance of the late-summer sun. They were a scrappy little group, all skin and bones, complete with wicked, rebellious grins and swim trunks that barely fit over their narrow bodies. Even Joyce’s one-piece looked a size too big for her little body.

“Oh, that summer,” Kevin sighed. “We stayed gone that summer. We spent the days hiding in the vacant homes that were being built right up the road from where we all lived. Or we would hang out in the old shopping center. Johnny had this boombox that he’d carry everywhere with him. He had it rigged up to fit on his bike, so he could even listen to it while he was riding around.” Kevin didn’t take his eyes from the photo while he talked. He could have been in the room alone. He could have been standing there with his friends again.

He remembered the way the screeching heavy metal guitars echoed off the concrete floors and metal walls inside the old the shopping center, the way the music played underneath everything while drowning out anything from the outside world at the same time. It created a safe place for them to be kids, to throw rocks or pieces of crumbled cinder blocks. Glass shattered. The occasional girl who tagged along with one or the other of them laughed – oh, and when the girls laughed, it filled the spaces the music couldn’t touch.

The sun hadn’t seemed as hot that summer. Drenched in sweat and pool water, bellies full of lemonade and Vienna sausages – or whatever they could sneak from the store – they ran from sun-up to sun-down. The world was theirs, full of endless possibilities, full of futures no one had to consider. It would come when it came.

“Is everything okay?” The gentle touch moved from his shoulder to his back, drifting from side to side now.

Kevin realized his smile had faded. A lonely tear ran down his cheek. He wiped it off with the back of his hand, realizing that at some point he’d managed to pull the picture off the page and held it now right before his face.

“Hey.” Reagan’s voice came more insistently, her touch growing firmer to pull his attention away from the picture in his hands. “You keep in touch with any of them?”

“Nah, I haven’t spoken to any of them in ages.” He sniffled and put the photo down, pressing it back onto the page and covering it again with the clear sheet. “That was the last summer we all spent together,” he added, turning the page.

Putting the picture away and covering it quickly, he couldn’t help but feel like he’d put them away. Their eyes reached for him as the next page hid their image. They pleaded with him – Come back. Just for a moment. Let’s relive that last summer, that last good time. He cleared his throat, pushing back tears and silencing the voices. He couldn’t answer the tempting pull of the past. It couldn’t be relived.

“You don’t know how to get in touch with any of them?”

“We were just kids, Reagan.” He shook his head and closed the album. “We were just kids,” he repeated as he slid it over into her lap and got up, but that wasn’t it, was it? That wasn’t it at all. Being kids had nothing to do with why he couldn’t get in touch with anyone today. He knew that, but she didn’t.

He walked over to the window and looked out. A lifetime and hundreds of miles away now, he stared at another neighborhood, one similar to the developing subdivision they’d played in as kids. He looked out over back yards separated by a grid of wooden privacy fences. Summer had faded long ago, leaving bare trees and dead colorless grass under heavy gray skies. Not a single soul stirred in the chill, but he could still hear the girls laughing in the old shopping center.

Joyce. He could hear Joyce. The first and the last. He smiled to himself – she might as well have been the only one. Her laughter had eventually changed to tears years later, struggling to get through the line to him, in the deepest darkness of night, alone, just the two of them, separated only by a few miles across town but still too far to change anything.

“Babe,” Reagan called from behind him, and before she said anything else, a chill clawed its way up his spine. He could hear it in her voice. She’d seen him.

“Close it,” he shouted, turning around and taking the first step towards the bed, not surprised to see that she’d picked the album back up from the floor and opened it in her lap.

“Who’s the guy?”

“Don’t look at him.” His hand shot out to knock the open photo album from her lap. Why was she looking through it by herself anyway?

“What?” She held her hands out as the binder of photos fell to the floor at her feet, remaining open to the same page. “Kevin, who is he?”

“No one.” He rushed the words out as he closed the photo album, looking around the room, making sure they were alone.

“Kevin!”

“He’s no one, baby.” No one you want to meet, he added in his head.

Kevin wasn’t lying. The tall thin man standing in the background of several pictures – even the one by the pool, where it all started – didn’t officially exist. He had no identity, yet there he was. He wore a dark suit with a wide-brimmed hat. He looked like some kind of traveling preacher, going house to house to spread the Word. In his case, though, it wasn’t the word of god. He brought something else to anyone who noticed him, something much, much darker.

“Then why are you acting like this?” She furrowed her brow and stared up into his face.

Kevin realized she’d seen him. She’d seen the man in the photos. She’d taken notice of him, and now there was no escaping him. Just like he’d hunted down each of them, he would soon be coming for her. Kevin sank to his knees and took his fiancée’s hands in his own.

“Listen, that man you saw in the pictures doesn’t exist.”

“Sure he does. I saw him, Kevin,” she insisted, missing the point. “He was right there.”

“I know you did. We all did, and that’s why I’m the last one.” He looked down at the hands he held, rubbing his thumb across her fingers.

“Who was he?”

“Did you see his face?” Kevin stared at their hands, the ring on her finger symbolizing the future they’d planned together, a future he should have known better than to assume he still had.

“Yeah, I looked right at him. What are you talking about? What do you mean you’re the last one? What’s going on, Kev?”

He looked into her face then. The words hesitated. The answer wouldn’t come, reluctant to make it real again, but she saw something in his eyes, saw the words he couldn’t speak.

“No.” Reagan pulled away. “No, you’re just making that up. Stop trying to mess with me. Who was he, Kevin?”

“Death,” he said, finally admitting it out loud, finally acknowledging the old man’s identity, the only identity he could have had.

“You’re not kidding.”

“No. He arrived that summer. If you look closely at that picture, you’d see him in the background, watching us. Josh drowned in that same pool that winter. It wasn’t even full. It had rained, and somehow he wound up tangled in the cover, in just enough water to keep him from breathing. No one knew why he was there, but we knew. He did it.”

“Oh God, Kevin.” She brought her hands up to her face, covering her mouth in shock, her eyes staring wide.

“He was the first. Joyce, his sister, was the last.” He cleared his throat again. “We were in our twenties by then.”

I’m sorry, he remembered her sobbing. He could have driven to her apartment in only a few minutes, but she sounded so distant over the phone, he knew he would never reach her. I’m going to take a bath and turn in for the night. I’ll see ya later, Kev.

Joyce, you know that’s him talking, he’d tried to tell her. Don’t hang up the phone.

“That’s why you can’t keep in touch with them,” Reagan observed.

“Yeah, that’s why.”

Johnny had been found with speaker wire wrapped around his throat, hanging from a beam in the attic of one of the houses in the new subdivision. This was years after the picture at the pool, when only a few of the houses remained unsold. Kevin and Joyce had gone off to college. Johnny had dropped out back in high school. He flew under the radar for a few years, and while they were away at school, he succumbed to the will of the man in the photos.

Kevin’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the number. He patted Reagan’s knee and stood up.

“I gotta take this.”

“Who is it?”

“Nobody.” He shook his head. “Just do me a favor and get rid of that photo album, okay? Make sure no one else ever sees those pictures.”

“Wait, where are you going?” She reached for him as he turned to walk away, but even as she got up, she couldn’t touch him. He stayed just beyond reach.

“Hello?” he answered cautiously. He hadn’t taken a call from the number on his Caller ID since before he even had a cellphone. There was no guarantee who would be on the other end of the call.

“He’s there,” Joyce warned, her voice clear and firm and alive.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. You’ve got to get out of that house. Where even are you?”

“It’s a long story.” He’d moved as far away as he could after his childhood love had been found carved up in her bathtub. Authorities ruled it a suicide because there were no signs of forced entry, and the only plausible suspect had been on the phone with her up until she did it. There wouldn’t have been enough time, they ruled, for him to get across town in order to slash her up after hanging up with her. So, as soon as his name was cleared, he hit the road.

“Listen.” Her voice turned somber. “You’re both in danger.”

“I know,” Kevin said, his heart breaking at the disappointment in her voice. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s been a long time.”

“It has.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m…” Kevin started to answer, but when he looked around and realized where he was, he dropped his phone.

Laughter came up from the little speaker – deep, dark, and sinister, not the laughter of his first girlfriend. It rose behind him, becoming present, real. A hand touched his shoulder, thin and firm. He didn’t have to turn around to see the man standing behind him in his black suit, his final grin creeping out from underneath the brim of his hat.

It wasn’t lost on him that things had come full circle. With no clue how he’d managed to do it, Kevin found himself standing in another back yard, next to a pool covered for winter, the cover sagging with a puddle gathered from the previous days of rain. He could only think that it was a fitting end to this whole thing.

“Remember that summer,” the creep behind him croaked. “Remember, and go swimming.”

He pushed Kevin as dark tendrils wafted through the air from his breath. Kevin took his last few steps, and those wisps of night wrapped around his legs, his arms, pulling him down into the shallow water in the strangers’ back yard. He didn’t struggle, didn’t even feel any pain.

He heard laughter. Laughter and music.