This time, I hadn’t noticed the problem onscreen. I’d printed the picture, expecting nothing unusual. But holding the print, I could see that someone had again walked right by as I took the shot. He’d passed no more than a couple yards in front of me, leaving the frame just as I opened the shutter. His foot, ankle, and a little bit of calf were plainly visible, flexed like he was pushing off for his next step.

There had been no one besides me in the cemetery, certainly not that close to me.

I went and stood right under the bright naked light bulb suspended from the ceiling near the washer and dryer.

The foot was huge and bare. Its pale blue skin was patterned with gray, donut-shaped blotches. It had jagged, horny toenails.

It was a monster foot. Strike that. It was a cliché of a monster foot. If someone had asked me to imagine a monster’s foot, that’s what it would’ve looked like.

It had to be some kind of joke. But how? I couldn’t think of any way someone could’ve gotten the foot into the picture.

I looked again at the print. I could see the tendons and muscles of the lower leg flexing. It wasn’t just some rubber Halloween-costume foot someone had dangled from a tree.

The basement walls started pressing in on me, and my breathing sped up. I backed up to the wall and sat down on the floor. I gave the rubber band on my wrist a hard snap and started focusing on breathing more methodically. In, out, pause. In, out, pause. Slowly, the room stabilized.

I groped for an explanation. There had to be one.

Someone had tampered with my camera. A joke, maybe. April Fools’ Day had been, what, a week ago?

But how? No one could’ve known I’d be taking pictures at the cemetery today. Besides, even if someone else had put the monster-foot image on my camera’s card, the one I took of the gravestone would be on there too.

Some kind of hacking thing, maybe? But I didn’t have internet service.

I looked down at my computer, which was Ben’s latest castoff. Someone could have connected it to the net wirelessly without my knowledge. Maybe someone was controlling it remotely at that very moment, grabbing my images and altering them as soon as I uploaded them.

I pushed my chair back from the desk, then immediately felt silly. What did I think they were going to do? Reach through the monitor and grab me?