It Cost Me Only Five Dollars
I wasn’t looking for anything special.
Just killing time at a weekend flea market.
Old books.
Vintage tools.
Boxes filled with random junk.
Then I saw the camera.
It looked ancient.
Heavy.
Scratched.
Forgotten.
The seller smiled.
“Five dollars.”
I bought it without thinking.
That decision changed everything.
The Roll of Film Nobody Developed
When I got home, I noticed something unusual.
There was still film inside.
I almost threw it away.
But curiosity got the better of me.
The next day, I took it to a photo lab.
Three days later, the employee called.
His voice sounded strange.
“You should come pick these up.”
The First Photo
The first few pictures were normal.
A family picnic.
A dog.
A parked car.
Then I reached photo number seven.
And nearly dropped the stack.
The picture showed my house.
My actual house.
The house I live in today.
That Was Impossible
The photo looked old.
Very old.
The timestamp printed on the corner showed 1998.
I wasn’t living there in 1998.
Nobody in my family was.
In fact, I had purchased the property only three years ago.
So why was my house on someone else’s film roll?
A Face I Recognized
I kept flipping through the photos.
Then I saw something even stranger.
A man standing in my backyard.
Looking directly at the camera.
The moment I saw him, my stomach tightened.
Because I knew that face.
I had seen him before.
The Man Across The Street
For months, I had noticed an older man living across from me.
Quiet.
Always alone.
Always watching.
Never speaking.
The man in the photograph was him.
Except the photo was over twenty-five years old.
And he looked exactly the same.
Not older.
Not younger.
Exactly the same.
The Address Written On The Back
The final photo had something written behind it.
A single sentence.
“If you live here now, do not open the basement wall.”
I stared at those words for several minutes.
Because there was only one problem.
My house didn’t have a basement.
At least…
That’s what I thought.
END OF PART 1…