On the screen, Campbell Bradford blinked slowly and took a hissed breath.

Are you going to talk to me tonight?

This was where he’d responded, right? Eric had dropped his eye to the viewfinder after asking that question, and Bradford had spoken for the first time.

But now as he watched, nothing happened. Bradford stayed silent. Okay, maybe Eric had the wrong spot. Maybe he’d talked for a while before the old man embarked on his game.

His own voice continued:

Great. Where would you like to start? What would you like to tell me?

Oh, shit. He was responding to Bradford now, wasn’t he? Had to be. On the screen, though, the old man hadn’t said a word, hadn’t lifted his head or moved his lips.

Can I ask you something off topic?

Pause. No response from Bradford.

Are you going to talk to me only when I’m looking through the camera?

In his memory, clear as anything, Eric recalled the old man smiling here. On the screen, his mouth didn’t so much as twitch.

That is one wicked sense of humor.

“No, no, no,” Eric said. “He was talking. He was talking.”

But he wasn’t talking. Hadn’t said a word, hadn’t moved a muscle. And there in the background was Eric, gibbering along, carrying on a conversation with no one, sounding like… a crazy person.

“I’m not crazy,” he said. “I’m not. You were talking, old man, you were talking and I’m sure of it, and I don’t know why this piece-of-shit camera won’t show it!”

He was half shouting now but through clenched teeth, and he got to his feet with the camera in his hands, his eyes still locked on the display. He could see himself on the screen now, the green bottle in his hand. This was when Campbell had gotten upset. When he’d moved, grabbed Eric’s arm, and started to talk about the river.

What?

Well, I thought it was plenty cold. When I touched-

Eric’s voice cut off on the audio then, and he remembered Campbell had interrupted him, but it didn’t play that way. Instead, it sounded like he’d just cut himself off in midsentence. The man in the hospital bed had not moved or spoken.

What, then? What are you talking about?

“He talked about the river,” Eric said. “The cold river.”

But talk he did not. Only Eric spoke. Responding, according to the camera, to utter silence.

What river are you talking about?

What river? I don’t understand what you’re talking about, sir.

Mr. Bradford? I’m sorry I brought the bottle.

Mr. Bradford, I was hoping to talk to you about your life. If you don’t want to talk about West Baden or your childhood, that’s fine with me. Let’s talk about your career, then. Your kids.

All Eric’s voice. Not a single whispered word from Campbell Bradford. The video went blank then, the recording over, and Eric was left standing there in the hotel room with the camera in his hands, staring at a blue screen.

Crazy, a voice whispered in Eric’s mind, you’re going insane. Truly, literally, out of your mind. Seeing things that aren’t there is one thing, but you had a conversation that wasn’t there, buddy. That’s the sort of thing that only happens to-

“I didn’t imagine shit,” Eric said. “Didn’t imagine a single damn thing. It was all real, and I don’t know why this thing won’t show it.”

He rewound, played part of it again, saw the same thing he’d seen before, and now his heart was thundering.

“Bullshit,” he said. “It happened, and the camera was on. So why didn’t you record it, you piece of shit? Why didn’t you record it!”

The video played on, no voice but Eric’s audible.

“Fuck you,” he told the camera, his voice shaking. “It’s you. It’s your fault.”

That had to be it-the camera. The thing was… not broken, but what? Evil, that was it. This camera was evil. Because Eric knew he’d had a conversation with Campbell Bradford, knew it as surely as he knew his own name, and he knew he’d seen the train and spinning leaves last night, and yet those things had not been recorded and that left no other option but that this shitty camera was corrupt, malevolent, evil…

He lifted it above his head and smashed it on the edge of the desk. A crack appeared on the casing but the rest of the camera stayed intact. Well-built, sturdy. Thanks, Paul. He lifted it and smashed it again. And again.

By now he was shouting, not words so much as guttural oaths as he lifted and smashed, lifted and smashed, lifted and smashed.

He didn’t stop until the casing was shattered and the carpet was littered with plastic shards. Then he dropped it to the floor, breathing hard, and kicked it, sent the camera rolling across the floor, leaving a trail of broken pieces in its wake.

“There you go,” he said softly, and then he fell back onto the bed, dropping his head to his hands as his chest rose and fell in deep, fear-fueled breaths.

THERE’D BEEN ELEVEN CANS of Keystone Ice in the fridge when Josiah got home Friday night, and he drank nine of them before falling asleep sometime in those silent hours before dawn. He fell asleep out on the porch, could remember that the wind had been starting to stir right toward the end and he’d had a notion that it was time to go inside, but alcohol-induced sleep crept on and held him down with heavy hands.

Dreams came for him then.

In the first one he was in a city, on some street of towering buildings unfamiliar to him. Everything was a dusty gray, like an old photograph, and the wind howled around the concrete corners and swirled dust into his eyes. The dust was painful, made him wince and turn away, and when he did, he saw that the cars lining the street were old-fashioned, every last one of them, roadsters with headlights the size of dinner plates and long, wide running boards.

There was no one on the sidewalks, no one in sight, but despite that, he had the sense that the place was bustling, busy. A powerful, impatient humming noise contributed to that impression, and then he heard a steam whistle ring out loud above it and he knew that a train was near. He turned back again, into the wind and the dust, and now he could see the train coming right down the sidewalk toward him. He stepped back as the locomotive roared up and went by in a blur that lifted more dust into his eyes and flapped his clothes against his body. The huge metal wheels were going right over the sidewalk, no rails beneath them, grinding off a fine layer of concrete, and Josiah knew then where all the dust was coming from.

He had his hands up, shielding his face, when he heard the locomotive slow, and the cars that had been flying by began to take shape, corrugated doors and iron ladders and couplers like clasped fists of steel. All a dirty gray; nothing in this world had color. Then he turned to his left, looked down at the long snake of train cars yet to come, and saw a splash of red on white. The red was in the shape of a devil, with pointed tail and pitchfork in hand, the word Pluto written above it, all this on the side of a clean white boxcar. As this car approached, he could see there was a man leaning from it, hanging out of the open door of the boxcar with just one hand to support him and waving with the other. Waving at Josiah. The man wasn’t familiar but Josiah knew him all the same, knew him well.

The train was at a crawl now, and Josiah stepped closer to it as the Pluto boxcar approached. The man hanging from it wore a rumpled brown suit with frayed cuffs above scuffed shoes, a bowler hat tilted up on his head, thick dark hair showing underneath. He smiled at Josiah as the steam whistle cut loose with another shriek and the train shuddered to a halt.

“Time to be getting on,” the man said. He was hanging out of the boxcar right above Josiah now, almost close enough to touch.