Peripheral Visions: The Devil and the Details

"Peripheral Visions: You sense them from the corner of your eye or in the soft blur of darkest shadows. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late."

The Devil and the Details

Gary leaned forward, delighted. The new suite of photo editing tools was everything he might have hoped for – which was more than he had dared to hope, considering he had purchased the software from the Dark Web.

The package had been touted as a cutting-edge product, pirated from Kromadaim, which was known among photographers as the best company for photo imaging and enhancement software. It was the sort of software Gary would have expected to spend hundreds of dollars on each year in subscription fees, but the best part was that this software came without a need to subscribe: Once purchased and installed, it was his to use forever. At least, that was what the product description had said.

Samantha had told him that he was letting himself in for disappointment. "Dark web? She had scoffed. " 'Kromadaim?' And what did you say the price was?"

"One hundred and eleven dollars," Gary had told her, excitedly.

"Oh, brother," Samantha had said – her favorite expression for times when, in her view, he was making a grave mistake and it was her duty, as his older sister, to reign him in and set him straight.

Not that her attempts at intervention ever did any good. He'd ignored her advice when he started dating Callum, whose charming façade she had seen through in an instant.

And not that Samantha had any right to chide Gary for anything he did. She had made plenty of mistakes of her own, and when Gary had seen her heading for trouble he'd tried her own recipe on her – disdainful eye-roll, exasperated bullet point rundown of all the ways in which what she was doing made no sense and were bound to go wrong, and even his own spin on her trademark phrase ("Oh, sister!" – but she, like Gary, was hard-headed and forever convinced that she was right. She would do whatever she was going to do, just like Gary would, and more than once one sibling had spent a long night consoling the other one, though with plenty of gentle "I told you so"s added into the mix.

The thing was, Gary often knew that Samantha's objections were rooted in common sense or in objective facts, but he felt a need to go through with whatever scheme he'd hit upon anyway. This was how things had always been, from the time he tested a makeshift parachute, fashioned out of a bedsheet, by jumping into the deep end of an empty pool (and spraining his ankle) to the occasion, just last week, when he added cayenne pepper to a homemade pumpkin pie, thinking that the guy he'd invited to dinner would like it.

"He's Cajun," he had explained to Samantha, who tried, without success, to convince him that nobody would like a spicy pumpkin pie.

Still, there was always a contrarian impulse in Gary: A sense of optimism and a determination that if he simply tried again, and with enough faith, things would work out well. As he loved telling Samantha, every toss of the coin had an equal chance of going right, no matter how many times things had gone awry before.

And this time Samantha, and even his own nagging doubts, had been vanquished by the force of his hope. The software worked perfectly, and it did things no other editing package had ever done. Gary had used high-end editing tools that sweetened colors and adjusted shadows and allowed a skilled user to remove unsightly blemishes on an otherwise impeccably composed image: Power lines cutting across a landscape, or trash floating on a placid blue lake, or a jogger suddenly leaping into the frame just as Gary was taking a snap of a fountain or some other urban feature. It was easier to simply erase passersby who intruded onto is urban architecture photos than to wait minute after minute for the frame to be free of people, hoping all the while to capture the light of a sunset just after a rainfall or the shadowless perfection of a summer solstice at high noon.

The editing tools offered the holy grail: The ability to correct blurring or fuzziness. Gary had lost count of the number of times his camera's autofocus had let him down, keying in on the wrong thing: A nearby boulder instead of the surfer in the distance, or a dominating shrub in the background rather than a frail foreground flower. At least he had time to correct for those situations, though it could be exasperating; worse were the moments when an unexpected sight presented itself out of the blue, in passing, during a transient moment. The time Gary and his ex, Drew, had been speeding along an LA freeway and come upon a white piano, inexplicably sitting in the breakdown lane and wreathed in flames... it was such an LA moment, but Gary had only split seconds to train his camera on the piano and get the shot. Between the speed of the car and Drew's erratic steering, the half-dozen images Gary had captured were all marred. The piano's white edges were soft, not crisp; the flames were flat in the clearer pictures, and more fulsome in the blurrier ones.

And that, Gary decided, would be the perfect challenge for his next test of the new software.

Gary went into his photo file and located the half-dozen shots. Using the software's various features, he combined images in order to blend the sharpest photos with the ones that showed the flames at their most spiky orange fullness. The images merged and the program automatically corrected for the slightly difference in angle – another artifact that resulted from taking he photos from a speeding car.

Gary worked intently. The program had cleaned up the streaking caused y the camera lens being less than perfectly still, but there was still a fuzziness to the piano. Its details were obliterated nd its edges blurred. The Refocus setting cleaned that up and yielded a crisp, hard edge. In fact, the entire image seemed to be in better focus.

Gary surveyed the various control icons stacked in the control box on the right side of the screen.. Most were familiar: Lighting, shadow, balance... But there was one symbol he didn't recognize. It looked like a circle superimposed onto a crescent, It might have been a astrological symbol, Gary though, examining it. It looked like a crude cartoon o fa bull's head, only tipped on its side.

Gary pulled he cursor over to the symbol and clicked. Something changed, but at first he wasn't able to make sense of the difference. There was now a set of soft blue streaks to the side of the burning piano.

Gary frowned, wondering what aspect of the image he'd just affected. Was this tool some kind of reverse "haze removal" function? Did it add haze, or maybe emphasize faint traces of color? If so, maybe the blue streaks were exhaust – the result of one of the other cars on the freeway not having a catalytic convertor that was up to code. Or maybe it was exhaust from a motorcycle. Gary tried to remember if he'd noticed any motorcycles on the road. He couldn't recall. He had been so thrilled by the strange sight and so intent on getting a photo that he'd simply ignored everything else. There could have been a phalanx of Hell's Angels roaring along and he wouldn't even have noticed.

Gary decided to hit the strange control icon a second time, and that was when the faint blue streaks took on enough substance that he could see they weren't exhaust fumes. But what he saw, while identifiable, still made no sense.

It was a man. He was incomplete, as though a ghost or a phantom, but he was unmistakable. He was in the middle of some sort of movement – he was facing he piano, his body a muscular flex of effort. He seemed to be carrying something...

No, Gary thought, as he examined the image. The man wasn't carrying anything, he was in the middle of throwing something. Looking at the positions of the man's arms, taking note of the angles at which he held them from his body, Gary perceived that one hand was braced on the body of whatever the object was, while the other hand gripped its edge. Was the man throwing a suitcase?

No, Gary realized, suddenly seeing another faint blue trace. The man was holding a gas can. He wasn't swinging it; he was splashing. There was a vague, barely visible trail leading from the can's nozzle to the piano.

This was strange, since there had been no person nearby – just the piano sitting in the breakdown lane, unattended, on fire.

But someone must have put it there and they must have set it ablaze before driving away, Gary thought. It made sense that whoever had burned the piano would have used gasoline or some other liquid accelerant.

But the action of splashing the gas on the piano had to happened before the flame was lit, didn't it? Even if now, it had to have happened before Gary and Drew can driving by, or else the man, and not the burning piano, would have been the focus of Gary's attention and his photos.

No, he'd definitely not seen this man, or any man, near the burning piano. But the man must have been there not long before.

Gary was hesitant to allow the thought to form, but finally he had no choice: Somehow, the image of the man's actions a short time before the photo was taken had lingered in the air, in the light, implicit and invisible. The camera had picked it up.

And the new editing tool had pulled the image into visibility, maybe in the same way it pulled out hidden details or colors not apparent to the naked eye.

Gary sat back and mused. Did this make sense? Did any of this make sense?

Maybe this was why this particular editing software was on the dark web, and nowhere else. Gary had assumed this was a beta test for some yet unrelease product, but now he had a different theory: The company had intended to bury tis software, but some employee with access had decided to make it available on the dark web and pocket the proceeds. Gary wondered if whoever had leaked the editing tools had realized what he was putting out into the public realm; it was too strange, too sinister.

Garry saved the changes to the photo and thought about how to explain it to Samantha... or to anybody. He could try to tell people about the editing tools but that would just lead to him being accused of adding the ghostly image of the man into the photo himself. It would also mean having to explain that he had bought the software on the dark web, and even if Kromadaim – or whoever – took no action against him, the software had still been pirated. Gary knew the editing software was stolen IP, and it was felony to have purchased, downloaded, and used it.

His best course of action, Gary decided, was to keep quiet. See who else might go public – g to the cops, make a YouShoot video, whatever. The web was full of people wanting o be influencers, looking o share the odd or the inexplicable or the scandalous, without regard for the possible consequences. He'd see what someone else had to say, and what happened to them. Meantime, he'd keep the discovery of this strange new image processing tool quiet.

And he'd have some fun with it.

Gary went back into his photo files and found a picture to himself. The photo was from the previous weekend; he and Samantha and Callum had gone hiking. Gary had held his phone up and taken a selfie; behind him Callum stood with is back half-turned, looking toward Samantha; his sister, in turn, was just looking up, giving the lens a half-smile, and In the photo. Gary was in the foreground, of course, wearing a red flannel shirt. He was smiling. Gary processed the image using the new software and chose the unfamiliar tool, wondering what it would disclose. He'd woken up that morning with a guy he'd met on Spurtr still in his bed. The guy had given him a good morning blowjob. That, Gary thought, looking at his own broad smile and winkling eyes, was the reason he looked so chipper in the picture. Would the image processing software somehow show that morning's fun?

No blue streaks or soft blue traces appeared on the image. What was a shame Gary thought; the Spurtr date had been fun. But then he noticed a reddish-orange discoloration had appeared around Samantha. Indistinct blobs on either side of her smiling face, and a thin line between the blobs that cut straight across her neck.

Gary zoomed in on Samantha, frowning. The orange blobs almost looked like...

No, they were disembodied hands. They hovered on either side of her neck, seeming to clutch the ends of the thin orange line, which Gary now realized was a cord of some sort. I was an image of strangulation... an image of murder.

What the hell, Gary thought.

He studied the hands more carefully. All he could see were tichly pressed fingers, knuckles... fists, that's what they were. It was an image of violence... an image of strangulation. An image of murder.

But it hadn't happened.

Gary called up the enhanced image of the burning piano and looked at the soft blue haze that continued the figure of the man with the gas can. Then he looked back at the orange fists and the garotte they held taut across his sister's throat. The fists weren't gauzy or indistinct; they were all to clear, save that they seemed to have coalesced from a light leak that had spilled across the picture.

Gary tried to make sense of the two images. One showed a lingering moment in time – something that had happened and had led directly to the moment captured in the photograph. The other had obviously never happened... at least, not yet. Was the orange effect an indication of a future event?

Was someone going to try to kill Samantha?

***

"Now look at this one," Gary said to Samantha. It was the following afternoon, Obsessed, Gary had scanned dozens of photos into the new software and used the strange enhancement tool to see what would come to light.

"Here," he said.

"That's grandma," Samantha said.

"And this blue patch right here..."

Samantha squinted. Then she saw it. "Is that... is that grandpa? My god," she said, looking more closely. "That's his face, that's exactly what he looked like before he died."

"Well, not exactly," Gary said. "He wasn't blue and translucent. But yes, I think that's Grandpa."

"His ghost?"

"Maybe, or maybe just a moment from the past that was still attached to her somehow. Like, maybe a moment that she thought back to – him in that moment, I mean, a memory she defaulted to whenever she thought of him."

"That's too weird," Samantha said.

"You think that's weird? Look at this..." Gary pulled up another old photo.

"That's. like, from six years ago," Samantha said. "That's cousin Danny."

"The Christmas before he killed himself," Gary nodded. "Though I guess he was already planning it, or at least thinking about it."

Samantha looked at the photo in silent shock. The three of them stood in front of the house of Danny's parents. It was a snowy winter evening. The house was bedecked with strings of lights. Everyone wore happy smiles. It was a festive holiday photograph, except for the reddish-orange phantom arm that grew from Danny's shoulder. At the end of the arm was a hand that clutched a gun, and the gun was seemingly pressed to Danny's temple.

"And six weeks later..." Gary said.

Samantha nodded. Danny had blown his brains out in the middle of February following that Christmas. The evening that photo had been taken had been the last time they had seen Cousin Danny alive.

"Then there's this..." Gary pulled up a new picture. This one was at Stacey's birthday party. Stacey had been a good friend of both Gary and Samantha's; she'd been dating a man named Cole at the time. Cole was there in the photo, his arm wrapped around Stacey. But a reddish blur occupied the space next to him... a blur with faintly discernible features.

"Is that Kristy?" Samantha asked, shocked.

Kristy was the woman Cold had left Samantha for, three years after their wedding.

"Looks like it to me," Gary said. "Even though this was before Cole met her."

"Well, maybe before he said he met her," Samantha said.

In all, Gary had shown Samantha eight or nine of the most surprising images the new editing software had generated. One was a photo of their mother as she was when they were children; it was a familiar photo, one they had seen for years. Only now, a blank spot on the wall behind her had filled in with the image a ghostly blue crucifix, an ornament that their father had torn down from the wall in drunken fury after 9/11 and smashed to pieces, declaring that God did not exist if religious madmen could commit acts of mass murder in His name. Their mother had wept for the loss of that crucifix. It had belonged to her mother, and to her grandmother.

Another photo was of their parents as a young, newlywed couple. The bouquet in their mother's arms was now superimposed with the reddish image of a swaddled baby while, standing on the other side of their father, was the hazy blue form of a woman that was clearly not their mother. It was, in fact, their mother's sister, Aunt Ida. Gary had offered the opinion that a juicy family stary surely lay behind that image.

"So the blue images are of things or people from the past," Samantha said.

"Yes, past moments that are somehow associated with the subject of the photograph," Gary said.

"And the orange images are... the future?"

"Or maybe just intentions for the future," Gary said. "At least, I hope so."

"Why?" Samantha had caught on to the anxiety in his voice.

Gary hesitated. Before Samantha could press him further, there was knock at Gary's door.

"That will be Callum," Samantha said. "We were supposed to go to Fabienne's gallery and see the new opening. When you called and wanted me to come over, I told him just to meet me here"

Gary crossed the apartment to the door. He opened it, and Callum stepped in.

"Hey, Gare... Sam!" Callum called. "You ready to go?"

Samantha didn't move from Gary's desk. "Callum, come over here, check this out," she added.

Callum crossed the apartment. "You working on some new stuff?" he asked Gary. Then he stopped and stared at the image on Gary's computer screen. "What's this?" he asked.

"That," Gary said, "is a picture of our parents with our mother's sister."

"What's wrong with it? Is ist a light leak or something?"

"No," Samantha said. "It's crazy, but Aunt Ida wasn't in the photo originally. But Gary got this new editing software. And, well..." She gestured at the computer screen.

"You added this in with the new editor program?" Callum asked.

"No," Gary said. "Somehow, the editing program pulls latent details out of the images. Or, maybe it would be better to say that it pulls details out of the moment in time when the image was made. At least, that's what I think is going on."

"So, was your Aunt Ida like, dead or something?" Callum asked, confused. "Is this a picture of her ghost?"

"No," Gary sighed. "We think this image means she and our dad had a fling."

"What, after your mom and dad got married?"

"Before," Samantha said. "When these images show up in blue, they seem to be from the past... the past from the moment the photo was taken, I mean. But if they refer to the future..."

Samantha leaned over the keyboard and switched to the photo of Cousin Danny and the orange blur of his extra arm and the spectral pistol.

"What, he killed himself?" Callum asked.

"Yeah, six weeks after this photo was taken," Gary said.

"And you only now saw this?"

"Yes, using the new editing software," Gary said.

Callum frowned down at the screen. "Dude, that is fucked up. That's, like, devil shit."

Gary rolled his eyes. Samantha gave him a warning look. Callum was a Baptist; he and Gary sometimes argued about religion, with Calum pointing to the Bible as cause for telling Gary that he was a sinner for being gay. Gary's view was that it didn't matter, since God was a fiction for the gullible and the clueless.

"No, I mean it," Callum said. "This is evil, You need to get rid of it."

"And we," Samantha said, tugging at Callum's sleeve, eager to avoid another theological argument between her boyfriend and her brother, "need to go. The opening starts in less than an hour.,"

"Yeah," Calum said. "Okay." He looked at Gary once more, his expressions concerned. "I mean it, bro. The devil is behind those pictures. You need to get rid of that software and never use it again."

"But what if it's real?" Gary said.

"Man, the devil is all about lies."

Samantha tugged harder, and Callum took a step toward the door. Then he turned back. "Even if what you're seeing there is true... well, the devil also uses the truth to tell his lies. Be careful, man."

Samantha dragged on is sleeve again.

"Okay, I'm coming," Callum said, and the two of them left, shutting the door behind them.

Gary sat at his desk and started scrolling through the newly-edited images once more. HE bit his lip, frowning, and called up an image he hadn't shown Samantha: A selfie he had taken a week earlier when he had gone to concert with Samantha and Callum. The photo showed Gary, smiling at the lens; behind him and to the left was the entrance into the small live music venue, and a posted advertising that night's performer; in the background, to the right, were Samantha and Callum; Samantha looking at the camera and Callum, his arm around her, looking away.

There was a reddish-orange smear across Samantha's neck and two indistinct blobs of orange light on either side of her face. As Gary zoomed on her, the details emerged: A cord of some kind cut across her throat. Knuckles became visible in the blurs on either said of her face: Fists that clutched the cord.

Fists that were strangling his sister.

Gary shuddered and got up from his desk.

Callum thought that this was the devil's work, but what if it wasn't? Gary had never believed in God or any higher power, but now he found himself doubting his own atheism. Why if God... or some other benevolent force... was trying to warn him, trying to help him avoid tragedy?

Gary had intended to go on one of the hookup apps on his phone to find some diversion for the evening. But now all he wanted to do was lie down, close his eyes, and figure this out.

***

Gary hardly left his apartment for the next few days. Fascinated and frightened, he scrutinized each of the photos he'd already processed, and then applied the new software to different photos. Many showed no spectral additions; of those that did, many offered only trivial additions, such as a new piece of furniture or a tree glimpsed outside window.

What Gary was avoiding was taking anew selfie and putting it through the software. He didn't want it to show him some sort of hideous death awaiting him in the near, or even distant, future.

On the other hand... maybe if he took a selfie and it showed him something dangerous, he could treat it as a warning, the way he was thinking the photo showing Samantha being strangled was a warning. He and Samantha had speculated that the reddish-orange specters in the photographs were intimations of things that were intended, not necessarily the future in some hard and fast sense.

If that was true, then maybe there were multiple possible futures. Gary meditated on that thought, then decided to test it by taking one of the photos he'd already processed and processing it anew.

Selecting the original photo file of his selfie from the concert, Gary entered the image into the software and clicked the strange icon.

Let's see what we can see, he thought, as the image processed.

It was himself, smiling at the lens with the posted behind his shoulder. And in the background, Samantha and Callum, as before. Gary's eyes locked onto Samantha, who was still flanked by the reddish-orange blobs on either side of her face, with the thin orange line of the cord stretching across her throat.

But there was something else, too: Ghostly hands, ruddy in hue, that reached into the frame, seemingly from behind the camera lens. Hands that wrapped around his own throat.

Gary leaned toward the screen, staring intently.

Unlike the fists that were choking Samantha with the cord, the backs of these hands were visible. There was a mark on one of them. A circle? Maybe a circle with a bar through it?

It was hard to make out, but the hand, as seen from this angel, had some sort of tattoo.

"Okay," Gary muttered to himself. "Okay, okay." He enlarged the background and saw the same clenched fists as before, with nothing but knuckles and fingers visible. "So, are these the same hands?" It seemed likely. If the photos were showing the future... or someone's plans for the future... than that someone seemed to have it in mind to kill Gary as well as Samantha.

Gary's phone vibrated. He looked down and saw a text message from Samantha. She had sent him at least a dozen texts over the past few days, and even tried calling a few times. He'd send back a handful of short, noncommittal replies, which clearly had not reassured her.

She was worried that he was obsessing over the editing software.

Well, she was right.

What more had he found? – she wondered.

Nothing very interesting, he had written her back.

Was he okay? – she had asked, in one way or another, in may of the texts.

He was fine, he'd told her repeatedly.

Except that he wasn't fine, and obviously she knew it.

Gary sighed. He didn't want to tell Samantha about the alarming images he'd found – not yet, anyway. Not until he figured out what to do about them.

The phone vibrated again. Gary shut his eyes and put his hands over them. The warmth of his palms felt good on his face. His eyelids alone didn't' shut out the disturbing images he'd been seeing; the blank, bright red field of his closed eyelids was too much like the red-orange horror he'd been scrutinizing in minute detail. By placing his hands over his eyes he turned the red void into blackness – restful, peaceful.

He really didn't want to deal with this anymore.

Gary opened his eyes and looked at the newest message from Samantha.

I'M COMING OVER

"Shit," he muttered.

***

Twenty-four minutes later there was a knock at his door. It wasn't like Samantha's knock. Maybe a neighbor? Or... Gary's heart quickened. Certainly not the police, with terrible news. Not now, not yet.

Jesus, why hadn't he warned her?

Gary opened the door. It was Callum.

"Hey," Callum said, a slightly pinched and worried look on his face. "Sam was gonna come over but she's really upset. She thinks you must have seen something terrible in those photos."

Gary started at Callum, who stared back.

"Did you?" Callum asked.

Gary sighed, and opened the door to let Callum step inside. Callum made a beeline for the desk, where the monitor glowed with visions of chaos and murder.

Gary shut the door and turned to follow Callum into the main room. He saw Callum was wearing a new sweatshirt with an anchor design on the back.

"Cool shirt," he said.

"Huh? Oh – right. I got this at the church fair the other day."

"What church fair?"

"Sunday. The day after the gallery opening," Callum said.

"I didn't hear about it," Gary said. "Did Samantha go with you?"

"Yeah, she did. She got this for me. It's a new Christian press. Faith is the Anchor or something." Callum was speaking distractedly, looking at the images in the monitor. "Is that...?

"Yeah," Gary mumbled.

"So this is why you've gone quiet?"

"I haven't gone quiet. I've been busy."

"Busy with this Satanic divination," Callum said.

"Don't start that again," Gary said in a sharp, exasperated tone.

Callum was frowning at the screen. He sat in Gary's chair and leaned closer. "Is that...?" He fell into a puzzled silence. "Are those hands?"

"Yeah. Choking Samantha, in close up here... and in the background in this one."

"And more hands choking you. And hey!" Callum raised his own hand. "I have one of those, too."

"You have what"

Callum showed him the back of his right hand. "A temporary tattoo."

Gary's eyes widened with recognition; it was the same circular shape, crossed with... "Is that a bird's wing?"

"Dovewing."

Gay and Callum looked at each other.

"Dove wing?"

"One word, Dovewing. It's a Christian punk band."

Gary's mind was spinning. Too much coffee. Too little sleep... a sense of vertigo swept over him.

"You okay? You better sit down." Callum got out of the chair.

Gary sat, then looked at the image of the ghostly red hands grasping his throat in the photo. "Goddamn," he said suddenly, and began pointing and clicking with his mouse.

"Hey," Callum said, disapproving of the curse.

Gary called up the original image of the selfie. Then he paused and looked up. "You know what I could really use? There's a bottle of bourbon in the kitchen. In the first cabinet on the right."

"I thought you were doing the twelve-step thing," Callum said.

"Yeah, and I thought Christians didn't drink, but here we both are, and I think this is the perfect occasion."

"I think it's exactly the wrong occasion," Callum said.

"Callum! Please!" Gary snapped.

"Okay, all right, don't flip your top." Callum retreated to the kitchen, still talking, as Gary went back to work.

Callum was talking about God and Stan and the Great war between Good and Evil. "The Father of Lies," he was saying, was the stopped made a hollow sound coming out of the bottle and glasses clinked.

"And ice!" Gary called, working faster.

The image was processing.

"How much?"

Gary started at the image that came up.

"Two cubes? Three?" Callum called over the sound of the freezer door opening. Then: "I'm sorry, looks like you don't have any ice in the freezer."

"What?" Gary stared at the monitor, eyes burning, fear pricking him.

"I mean, you have ice trays bit they're empty... the ice must have evaporated." Callum was approaching from the kitchen, two glasses in his hands. Gary glanced up at him, and then shuffled some papers aside on his desk.

A large kitchen knife came into view. Sick with fear, insomniac and paranoid, Gary had hidden it on his desk two nights ago. It had waited there ever since, a comfort and touchstone.

"What's with the knife?" Callum asked, just before Gary stood up and drove the blade into his abdomen.

Callum grunted, staggered back, dropped the glasses of bourbon. The smell of the alcohol was suddenly in the air. So was another, less familiar smell...

The smell of blood, Gary realized.

Gary pulled back, the knife red and blood gushing from Callum's wound. Callum was holding his belly with one hand, the other hand gripping the corner of the desk. He looked up at Gary with an expression of confusion.

Gary drove the knife into his throat.

This time Callum didn't even grunt; he just went down. A spray of blood gushed from his punctured throat and then subsided.

Gary started down at him, then sat at the desk and looked at the monitor.

The newly processed image was of the selfie, again, but this time Samantha and Callum couldn't be seen clearly in the background. A ruddy range nebula blotted them out: An image of Gary, or a spectral version of Gary, twisting out of his own body, and obscured by the bulk of a man whose back was turned to the camera.

A man whose back was emblazoned with an anchor design identical to the one on Callum's sweatshirt.

The spectral version of Gary was clearly punching the man in the stomach... punching or stabbing.

Gary looked down at Callum, dead on the floor, the carpet stained the blood darkening, starting to clot.

Then, blood-wet fingers leaving scarlet smudges on the mouse and keyboard, Gary called up the earlier images he'd processed.

Samantha, smiling... without the chocking cord and gripping orange fists. They had disappeared.

Gary, smiling at the camera, no nebulous hands grabbing his throat – they, too, had vanished.

Gary scrolled through all the photos, then, over a hundred of them, looking for fuzzy blobs of red or blue, additions the editing software had discerned or invented. Gone: All of them, gone.

One by one, Gary deleted the photos until he came back to the selfie that had showed him stabbing Callum.

Those spectral images, too, had disappeared.

Seized by a sudden compulsion, Gary called up the computer's suite of applications, intending to delete the editing software, but he didn't have to. It was gone. Had it crashed? Had it self-deleted? Had it never really been there in the first place?

Gary sat at the desk, laughing, crying, knowing that the law would never consider his story about magical editing software to be a foundation for a plea of self-defense, knowing Samantha – even though she had seen some of the strange images herself – would doubt him when he told her about the cord and the clenching fists and the prediction of strangulation. She would never believe Callum intended to murder her. Or that Callum would have killed Gary to avoid being found out.

Samantha would say he had been acting crazy.

He'd gone back to drinking, she would say, and the evidence of it – the bottle, the spilled bourbon – was right there, together with the bloodstains and the body.

But Gary hadn't had any other choice...

Had he?

The Father of Lies, Callum had warned him.

Gary stared at the computer screen helplessly, hopelessly, buoyed by triumph one moment and sunk into despair the next. God's instrument... or a tool of the devil. He no longer knew, had never known...

Gary stared, his eyes wild and wet, looking at each image over and over again, feverishly minutely, searching for any lingering scrap of proof, looking for salvation... or the devil... in the details.

Next week's focal point is a man named Joseph who finds himself taking an unexpected trip to an impossible destination... his own long-ago high school days. Is this a taste of Hell, or merely a glimpse of "Purgatory?"