Woes of a photographer

*camera noises*

"What the hell?" 

The words had not fully left the man's lips before he let the eyepiece of his camera drop down, coming with a series of genuinely bewildered blinks. Henry Townshend fought against the urge to look back down at his camera, instead letting his gaze wander out to the intended subject of his photographs at that moment. Nothing was amiss, and he knew that this was going to be the case before he even looked. The lake was as serene and empty as it had been moments before, little wisps of mist rolling pleasantly across the surface in the comfortable afternoon air, a single waterfowl he couldn't identify at the distance it was from him swimming happily across the water. The man tapped his fingers nervously against the case of his camera, taking just a moment to commit the scene to memory once again. 
He brought the camera back up again and his jaw clenched involuntarily.
Floating on Toluca Lake was an outdated steamboat, several figures aboard waving excitedly as if to a gathered crowd, despite Henry being the only person on the shore, and the boat wasn't alone. There were shapes in the water, not all easy to identify even when he, with some sort of morbid curiosity pushing him onwards, zoomed in a little. If he was not mistaken, he could have sworn there was a car beneath the water but he did not give himself the time to be completely certain as he pulled the camera away with a force that would make it seem as if he had been injured. 

Once more, and as it always was, the lake was still. 

The photographer took a step back, an action that he needed to overcompensate a little bit for as he was still not the most steady on one of them. He swallowed back the touch of nervousness that tried to bubble up at this, not wanting to brush the sheer strangeness of this off as something unimportant.
But, if he was going to be perfectly honest, he was not going to be able to deal with the task of trying to understand what was happening. Far too much had happened, and, to be frank, he wasn't sure he could handle something new. He had gone out there to try and steady his mind a little and forget his woes in a place where he had, in the past, done work he was happy with. It had felt like visiting the outskirts of Silent Hill would be a safe place to bring out his camera for the first time since his life had become so entirely mad, but it seemed all this managed to do was introduce him to a new sort of madness. Or perhaps he had just finally gone outright insane after everything. Either way, he already had enough and would just have to try again at a later date.
That said, and despite everything that seemed to be going against him, he did take a single photo of the lake, only willing to look at the scene through the camera lens for as long as it took him to ensure it was in focus.

His return home, a bus trip that he had managed more on a sort autopilot than by any conscious decisions went by in a blur. Henry checked the single photo he took several times over the course of his brief trip, and no matter how much he had hoped something would change between instances he gazed upon it, nothing did. The boat - the Little Baroness, it was called - was still very much in the centre of the frame. He wondered briefly if there was a fault to the device, that it had been damaged and was overlapping an older image onto the display, but even after taking the time to look through each and every image he had taken, there was no such image. If that was the case, how would the people on the boat have been waving like they were anyway? 
So absorbed in trying to find a logical explanation to this, he almost missed his stop, and so had to scurry apologetically off. 

For better or for worse - and it always did seem to be worse for him - he let the slightest touch of curiosity that was playing in his mind win out. He took a deep breath, pointed the camera to the road then, after a moment which he spent wondering if this was wise, he looked through the camera.
Well, it didn't show him a boat.
Seated where there was nobody if he wasn't looking through the eyepiece was a young man sitting on the curb, his head in his hands. On reflex, he snapped a photo. It only took a moment or so for the photo to save, but in this time, the man had turned to him. The reason he had his head in his hands like it was was made all too obvious now that he was facing the photographer front on. This was the only way he could keep his head upright, for his neck had clearly been snapped in the same accident that had crushed the previously hidden side of his skull. For a moment, he knew who the figure was, a news story from a few months ago about a hit and run accident in the area had included an image of the victim before the accident, and now the man was staring directly at him. Before the spectre had managed to get any closer to him, Henry turned and broke into a run, ignoring the dull ache of not old enough injuries that protested this, the distance between the perceived safety of his home - a safety that wasn't just due to his more reclusive tendencies - growing with each flying footfall. He almost fell once or twice, his body failing him in a way he had thought he was more used to than he was. The only reason he stopped his flighty escape was that he met the stop of a descending flight of stairs and what little self preservation skills he had kicked in at the last second.