The photograph 3/9

The pond was there all right, but it was nothing at all like the picture his eyes were seeing. The water surface was easily twice the size that he could see in front of him. Also the water was perfectly clean and when he switched to the second of the three pictures he’d taken, he got the shock of his life.

On the far side of the pond, immediately opposite the raised bank where he taken the pictures, was quite a long quay faced with vertically placed logs. There was even a small sailing boat moored alongside at one end. The last picture that he’d taken of the little stream trickling into the woods, showed a small river, more than wide enough to allow the boat to leave the pond.

He sat there thinking for a few minutes. The thought had come into his mind that Eve may well have been right about the Bell family. Although he still couldn’t believe that magic was involved as she claimed, something here was not natural; it was almost as if the place was hypnotising him into believing that it wasn’t really there.

In fact the more he thought about it, the more he began to wonder if Jane Bell’s magic show hadn’t been covered in the same way, silly though it sounded. He kept looking at his pictures and then at the pond that he could see.

It all looked perfectly natural, he didn’t feel dizzy and yet something must be wrong with him. The camera cannot lie, so whatever was causing him to see things that weren’t there, certainly wasn’t affecting his pictures. It suddenly struck him that he’d heard none of the pictures that any of the parents had tried to take at the school conjuring show had come out.

‘I wonder if all those cameras used ordinary film? It would be interesting to find out, then next year I could take this camera with me. I bet the pictures would show something very strange going on!’

He was just about to get up from his seat, when something very peculiar occurred. The rock he was sitting on suddenly started buzzing! He snatched his hand away and stood up in rather a hurry, but nothing else seemed to happen, indeed now that he was standing he couldn’t hear any noise at all. He put his hand back on the rock; sure enough he could feel a very slight vibration.

He knelt down carefully and put his ear as close to the stone as he dared. It sounded as if the thing was hollow and had machinery working inside. That didn’t seem to fit in with the idea that everything here was some sort of illusion. Then he looked again at the pond water. Apparently coming from the bank just by his feet, he could see a slight swirl in the water. It was as if a pump had started and was replacing the water in the pool.

On impulse he dipped a finger in the water and tasted it very carefully. Another surprise in a morning full of surprises, just as if the pond was at the seaside, the water was salt!

He went home in a very thoughtful mood indeed. It didn’t take him too long to work out what his next move would be. With a bit of help he should be able to get to the bottom of this mystery; or else his name wasn’t Adam Gardener!