The Camera Read online

on the film. Her face was almost hidden and she too looked down, just like Derleth. But she was alive, and so was I. Yes, I needed to calm down from the disquieting revelations I never planned to make that day. I took a deep breath and tried to recall how beautiful the day had been, before I had locked myself away in the dark. The clear blue sky, the bright sun, the green leaves, the smell of coffee, they all contrasted the oppressive and inscrutable events. Comfortingly they were buried by the decades and what ever had happened, was long over now. Realizing that the life and death of Milosh Derleth did not affect me in the least bit, made my uneasiness retreat almost entirely. The first deep blue hint of the dawn revealed the horizon outside my kitchen window and I decided to call it a night and go to bed. A last time I scanned my first exposure with my new old camera half-heartedly through the loupe. But in an instant I was sober and wide awake, my hair stood on end as I caught sight of them: A dozen black dots on the tray on the counter with my macchiato, four more around the girl’s ring. A dozen and four perfect black dots, each with a fine corona, shaped exactly like those in the other exposures.

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Thank you for your interest!

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Phil Strahl

  Phil Strahl is the author of a number of short stories mainly situated in the gloomy field of weird fiction, with fragments of science fiction scattered towards the horizon. He publishes those few stories he deems worthy enough to share with prudent and open-minded readers and is grateful for each review or line of feedback.

  Among his admired influences are the usual suspects, H. P. Lovecraft and E. A. Poe, but also the philosophic Soviet sci-fi parables by the Strugatsky Brothers.

  Being a native Austrian he lives and writes in Salzburg where he enjoys to visit the preppy city and trips to the surrounding dark forests alike.

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