THE LENS A James Herbert Fan Fiction — London Chapter One: Background Inspired by Creed (1990) by James Herbert. Published at: https://www.james-herbert.co.uk/fiction/the-lens-chapter-one.html --- The thing about being a freelance photographer in London was that you saw everything and were seen by nothing. That was how Mick Farrow thought about it. He had been doing this for nine years — events, premieres, the occasional funeral if the deceased was famous enough to command a market, celebrity doorsteps when the agency had a tip and needed someone on the ground by six. He had the knack that separated the useful photographers from the useless ones: he was invisible. He could stand in a crowd of forty people with a camera the size of a small dog and somehow not register in anyone's peripheral vision. People looked through him. He had always found this more useful than troubling. He found the first anomaly on a Tuesday in March, reviewing the previous night's shots from a charity auction in Mayfair. The event had been straightforward — eighty people in a hotel ballroom, the usual mix of the genuinely wealthy and the ambitiously adjacent, a celebrity auctioneer working the room, everything lit the way these things were lit. He'd got the shots the agency wanted and a few he'd kept for himself because they were interesting, and then he'd gone home and edited and filed and gone to bed. He was reviewing the gallery the next afternoon, deleting the ones that didn't work, when he noticed the figure. It was in the background of shot 34 of 187. A corner of the ballroom, near the fire exit, not the focus of the image at all — he'd been shooting the auctioneer, the figure was perhaps six metres behind and slightly left of frame. Tall. Dark clothing. Facing the camera, which was unusual — most people in the background of event photos were in profile or turned away. This figure was facing directly at the lens. Mick zoomed in. The resolution dropped, but not enough to obscure what he was looking at. He couldn't explain the face. Or rather, he couldn't explain the absence of a face — there was a face, in that a head was present and features were present, but when he looked directly at it he found his attention sliding away, finding somewhere else to rest, the way you couldn't look at a floater in your eye directly because it always moved to the edge of your vision. He tried several times and got the same result each time. He put it down to the resolution and moved on. Shot 67. Different part of the room, forty minutes later into the evening. He'd been shooting a table of people who'd just bid successfully on something, caught a good expression, good light. In the background, near the service entrance: The same figure. Same dark clothing. Same height. Facing the camera. Mick felt something that he catalogued, professionally, as unease, and which he immediately set about explaining. Someone who had attended the event, who was tall and dressed in dark colours and who happened to be facing his direction twice during the evening. That was it. That was the explanation. These things looked strange out of context. Everything looked strange out of context. He searched the rest of the gallery. He found the figure in eleven shots, spanning the full three hours of the event, in different locations across the ballroom. In every shot, it was facing the camera. In every shot, the face would not resolve. --- He told himself he wasn't going to check the archives. He checked the archives. He went back three months — the limit of how far his organised filing extended before it became a chaos of dated folders he'd been meaning to sort out since 2021. He searched by eye, scanning galleries that he'd already edited and filed and mostly forgotten. He found the figure in a gallery from a product launch in Shoreditch in January. He found it in a gallery from a private members' club opening in Soho in December. He found it at a book launch, a film premiere, a fashion event at a gallery in Bermondsey. Different venues, different events, different client briefs, different months. The same figure. Facing the camera. Face unresolvable at any zoom level. Never in the foreground. Always in the background, never quite where you'd expect a person to stand, always slightly wrong in the way that would take you a moment to identify and which you'd be likely to dismiss if you were editing under deadline. Mick was not under deadline. He lined up twelve screenshots on his second monitor and looked at them. The figure was in the background of his professional life, he now understood, in the same way that background noise was in audio: present beneath everything, detectable only when you were specifically listening for it. He had no idea how long it had been there. He had no idea if it was there in galleries older than three months. He sat for a long time looking at the twelve screenshots. Then he picked up his camera — the body he used for everything, that he'd owned for four years, that he knew the way you know an instrument when you've used it until it becomes an extension of the hand — and he reviewed the shots currently on the card. He'd been in the park yesterday. Just walking. No brief, no client, a few hours off. Forty-three personal shots. Trees, a dog, a woman reading on a bench, the light on the water looking interesting at a certain angle. The figure was in eight of them. One of them — shot taken in an empty section of the park, no other people visible, just a path and bare February trees — Just the figure. Facing the camera. Mick put the camera down carefully on the desk. He had been a photographer for nine years. He had a rule that he considered fundamental: he trusted what the lens saw. The lens was not imaginative. The lens did not project or misremember or construct. The lens recorded what was in front of it and nothing else. He looked at the shot of the empty path and the bare trees and the figure that had been standing there yesterday while he'd been walking alone. He thought about the rule. He picked up his phone and called his editor at the agency, and when she answered he said: "I need to ask you something and I need you to take it seriously." "Okay," she said. "Has anyone ever come to you about my shots? Anyone who seemed like they were looking for something specific?" A pause. "What kind of something specific?" "In the background of the shots. Anyone in the background of my shots." Another pause. Longer this time. "Mick," she said, slowly. "Why are you asking me that?" He looked at the shot of the empty path. "Because I think someone's been watching me work," he said. "And I don't think they're using their eyes." --- To be continued. --- THE LENS is an unofficial fan fiction inspired by Creed (1990) by James Herbert. Published free of charge. Not affiliated with the James Herbert estate or Pan Macmillan. All original characters are the author's own.