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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MrBlackBook on 2024-09-16 13:37:35+00:00.

It was the early 2010s when I found my father’s camera. A relic from another era; one of his countless forgotten things confined to the attic after his passing.

In life, he had this… obsession with it. Not like someone obsessed with photography, but something deeper, stranger. It was like the camera had consumed him, his hands bound to it as if it were one with his flesh, and in most of my memories of him, his face is hidden behind it. He existed only beyond its lens like the world didn’t matter unless he was seeing it through that damned viewfinder.

Rediscovering the camera felt like a chance to reconnect with him after all of these years. I was seventeen at the time, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little excited to find it. It was an old QuickTake 100, clunky and covered in dust. The thing looked ancient, by tech standards, and holding it, it felt… heavy. Not just in weight, but in something else. Almost like I could feel my dad’s attachment to it, his love for it tangible in plastic and metal. And for a moment, I thought maybe I could see what he saw. Maybe I could understand why it seemed to matter more than we did.

This was his totem - his artistic lifeline - and perhaps knowing this I should’ve left it undisturbed.

I should’ve left it there, buried beneath old furniture and junk.

But I didn’t.

The first incident - it all happened so fast. I had just wiped the dust off the lens, standing by my bedroom window. My best friend, Charlie, he lived across the street, and I remember seeing him in his room, just a blur of motion through the glass. The sun was setting, casting long shadows across the neighbourhood, and it seemed like a good time to test the camera, to see if it even worked after all these years. And so, I lifted the viewfinder to my eye, lining up the shot, and pressed the button on its side.

The flash went off, bright and glaring.

And then - chaos.

A deafening boom rocked the air, shaking my house as if we were caught in an earthquake. I stumbled back to my bed, hands covering my face as a burst of radiant life seared through my window. My heart raced as I tried to make sense of what had just happened. I smelled smoke - it assaulted my nostrils almost instantly - and the scent of burning wood; it was strong. So I pushed myself off my bed, staggering over to the window, and that’s when I saw it.

Charlie’s house… was gone.

Where his house once stood was nothing but a hellish crater, flames licking up into the sky. The remains of his home were scattered in all directions, as if something had reached down from the heavens and ripped it apart. The noise, the smoke, the screams… they were everywhere. My mom rushed outside - I heard the door hit the wall as she tore it open - pulling my sister with her, both of them in hysterics.

But I couldn’t move.

I just stood there, staring at the chaos, paralysed by the shock of what I’d just witnessed. I remained frozen until the fire engines arrived, beginning their futile attempt to quell the inferno, but God, how it burned. 

It burned and it burned and it burned, the flames raging on into the night, glowing like a second sun in the darkness. Charlie and his family… incinerated in an instant. Gone, just like that; wiped off the face of the earth. They never stood a chance.

A few weeks later, the official report blamed it on a gas leak. And I believed it at first - I had to. What else could explain something so sudden, so violent?

But I was naive. I had no idea at the time - it was just a freak accident. I had just happened to capture it.

A year or so later, I found the camera again. It was like it reappeared in my bedroom. Hidden in plain sight amongst the clutter, I rediscovered it whilst packing up for university - I was moving far from home - and I plugged it into the family computer, hoping to find some of my father’s old photos. These cameras, apparently they can only hold about 8 photographs at a time, so I was curious to see if he’d left a few on there before his passing. But he hadn’t; I discovered that quickly. The curious smile on my face fell into a frown.

But there was one photo on there; a singular file in its memory.

Just one horrifying photograph that made my heart stop. I opened it up, the image exploding onto my screen, and tears rolled over my cheeks.

In the image, the house had been caught mid-explosion, walls buckling, windows shattering, fire erupting from the ground. I’d captured the exact moment the house was obliterated. And something about it… felt wrong. Like it wasn’t just a coincidence. Like I had caused it, somehow, with the flick of my finger, the button akin to the trigger of a gun.

Terrified, I deleted the photo. I didn’t think, I just wanted it gone; away from my tear-filled eyes. But even after it was wiped, that feeling stayed. This nagging sense that the camera was more than just a piece of equipment. That it held onto things… dark things. My father had been obsessed with it for a reason.

So I didn’t touch the camera again for a while.

But, like a cursed object from an old horror movie, I couldn’t shake its presence. When I left home one year for my final term of university, I brought it with me; I don’t even know why. It just… ended up in my bag, like it wanted to come along, and for months, it sat on a shelf in my dorm room, collecting dust. It stared at me from its spot, its lens like an unblinking eye, and sometimes I felt like my father was watching me through it. I swear I could see his eye in the lens from time to time, but I knew I was just being paranoid; perhaps I’d had one too many coffees during a late-night study. So I left it alone. I let it - him - watch over me undisturbed.

Until one day, I couldn’t.

It was late and I was stressed out from a final project; it was going to be making up most of my grade. I needed a distraction, so I grabbed the camera, telling myself it was harmless. I stood in front of my mirror, holding it up to my face, and for a second, I considered taking a picture of myself. My finger hovered over the button, a smile blooming on my face, but something stopped me. I felt… dread. A cold wave of fear washed over me, and I remembered the explosion. The fire. Charlie.

I put the camera down. I relived the explosion all over again, and for a while, I was frozen to the spot.

But then the next day, I took it with me to campus.

I can’t tell you why, but I just felt like I needed to. My friend Sarah and I were hanging out by a smoking shelter with a few other students. They were fascinated by the old camera, calling it a piece of history. They begged me to take a photo of them, Sarah and these three other girls I didn’t know, but I was hesitant; I was shaking at just the thought of it. Every instinct screamed at me to stop, but they kept urging me on.

So I agreed to it, against my better judgment.

I stood up, and they moved into place behind a row of bollards, posing and pouting; it was by no means a serious photograph. Lifting the viewfinder to my eye, I struggled to still the shot, my hands still shaking with anxiety, but I calmed myself, slowing my breathing; I thought I was simply scaring myself. What happened to Charlie, that was a freak accident. There was no way this camera had any part in its doing.

And so I pressed the button; I pulled the trigger. And what happened next, it was all on me.

The flash went off. The world transformed into white light and my eyes burned as if I had stared into the sun.

But screaming followed.

I heard bodies hitting metal, then the sound of flesh pounding the ground, bones breaking upon impact. The gargled sound of blood pooling in someone’s throat. The continuous, monotonous beep of a car horn.

It came out of nowhere, swerving wildly down the road. I’d heard it coming, but I never foresaw this happening. The driver, a drunk student, had lost control of the wheel. The girls were thrown into the air like ragdolls, killed the moment their skin touched the bumper, but I had witnessed none of it. I’d held my eyes shut after the flash as if I knew what was coming, and instantly I regretted not trusting my gut. I knew this was going to happen. I just knew something would happen; I could feel it.

But now they were dead. All three of them. Dead. And so too was the driver, his car wrapped around a concrete pillar, his skull crushed against the horn, the sound wailing like a scream.

And I was numb. It felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. The deaths. The destruction. The two times I used this camera, death had followed. And it wasn’t a coincidence; I was certain of that. It wasn’t just bad luck.

This camera was the cause; the murderer, the executioner. It killed. I don’t know how else to put it, and I know it sounds ridiculous, but if you held it in your hands, you would feel it too.

It was more than plastic and metal, this camera. It was satanic. It was hellish. It was under the influence of evil; possessed or hexed. And I should’ve destroyed it before it took another life, but for some reason - perhaps it was its power - I simply couldn’t.

That summer, I left the camera on my desk, untouched, as if ignoring it could somehow undo the damage. But it was still there, watching me. Waiting. Waiting for the day I’d pick it up again, once I convinced myself that everything was just a coincidence.

That day came when winter rolled around. Enough time had passed for the fear to dull, for …

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