Charlotte struggled against the crowd, trying desperately to keep the figure in sight. “Hey!”, she yelled, the sound being lost in the background. Nonetheless, she continued chasing the mysterious figure, who looked to be in his twenties and had long, shaggy, black hair covering his ears, going down enough to brush against the collar of his black aviator jacket. She didn’t know what he looked like from the front, after all, who would want to see tragedy?

 

She kept pushing against the crowd, but soon enough, she didn’t need to. The mob was thinning out; none of them wanted to get close to the figure for some reason. The pedestrians that had been practically suffocating her were basically non-existent by now. Charlotte sprinted through the empty sidewalks, her camera bouncing upon her chest. Boom. Boom. The noise seemed perfectly aligned with her heartbeat, which was ironic since the camera had caused so many other heartbeats to fade. Charlotte was pulled back into her memories.

 

She remembered her cousin’s jolly picture hanging on the kitchen wall. She remembered his dead body lying in the next room. A strangled sob found its way to her throat. The haunted memory of her friend echoed back to her; the funeral, along with the cursed picture. She had begged her parents to get rid of it, destroy it, but her parents didn’t understand; they didn’t listen. The tears were coming in earnest now. They were clouding her vision, nearly making her collide with obstacles, but she still went on. He won’t get away, she thought, not this time. She remembered with growing dread, the one thing the pictures had in common. Him. He had faded into each of the pictures only a few minutes before the dreaded incidents happened. His position was always the same… his back to the camera, and his sinister front facing his victim.

 

He was standing at the crosswalk by now, his long jet-black hair being thrown in every direction by the wind. The signal flashed white, and he started walking across the road at a leisurely pace, as if he was completely unaware of the furious human chasing after him. Charlotte had reached the start of crosswalk, but a truck suddenly came out of nowhere, nearly flattening her into a grease spot. She instinctively jumped back, but when the truck had passed, the figure was… gone. She looked about desperately, hoping to find even the tiniest of glimpses of him; but all she found was nothing.

 

She collapsed on the sidewalk, great big sobs heaving out of her lungs. She had thoughts of sorrow, of misery, and of despair; for she had just experienced an encounter with Death.