Day 355

Any time you took a photo your camera would show you what used to be there.
People called you a conceptual genius among other less pleasant names.
You thought of yourself as a historian, uncovering the world's forgotten places
Lately it hadn't been working right, the damn thing just kept showing you snapshots of people.
Two people specifically, a couple you reckoned and it didn't seem to matter where you were.
It looked like they lived in a mansion up in a mountain, it was a little run down but still huge.

The couple in question didn't fit in with their surroundings, you wondered if they were squatters.
It didn't matter to you, you could still make some kind of series on this maybe.
From the looks of things they spent most of their time looking around the house or arguing.
You figured out by chance that if you zoomed in with the camera you could read the papers that
they left lying all over the place which pertained to a missing person named Arles Le Veere.
Researching him revealed that he'd been missing for almost a hundred years!

He was a wealthy eccentric man in his mid fifties who had lived in the Le Veere mansion all his life.
Despite amassing an enormous fortune through ownership of multiple companies he was rarely seen.
He had a habit of sending letters to his closest relative (a cousin or aunt, sources are conflicted) as
a way of both maintaining contact with the outside world and letting them know he was alive.
The letters stopped coming around 1912 and he was declared missing five years later.

Though you couldn't hear what the couple were saying, you knew they were looking for his fortune.
For weeks you followed them around the mansion, making notes on the corresponding locations.
They eventually focused their search around the family mausoleum which bore the Le Veere crest.
Every inch of it was poked, it didn't look to have a door so there must have been a mechanism.
You took to travelling further than ever, trying to see inside the crypt somehow.
After weeks of fruitless searching you returned to the spot where you last saw the couple.

They weren't there and after returning to all of the corresponding places you knew of, scouring the
old mansion through your lens, you couldn't find them anywhere but their belongings remained.
Eventually your camera focused on other places and refused to focus on the Le Veere mansion.
You asked around, showing your photos of the couple to as many contacts as possible, you even
put the clearest images of them online in case someone knew who they were but nobody did.
You returned to the room where they slept one last time and saw two skeletal figures embracing.

They looked like they'd been dead for centuries rather then the few months you hadn't seen them for.
The room itself (formerly a parlour of some sort) was covered in a thin sheen of ice.
You couldn't see any open windows but the fireplace looked strangely deep, far deeper than normal.
Crouching and moving you managed to peer into it and used the flash to get a clear image.
Inside was another corpse -  a man who was black, leather skinned and twisted.
His head snapped up and he leapt at you.

He keeps following you somehow, every image shows him travelling.
He is in your country, heading towards you.
You have to admit, he's persistent and no amount of moving deters him.
While you aren't sure exactly where he is you swear you can see his footprints.
Last week they lead to the back of your house, black and damp like tar they retreated to the road.
Last night they stopped beside your bed, one single track... he hasn't left and neither have you.