It was a lark, the sort of things teenage boys and internet forum users do, and I was both.

Feeling smarter than the whole world and with my atheist head held high, I sought to deflate the notion of the supernatural as a product of rumors run amok. So I took it upon myself to “seed” the internet with a hoax. With a nod toward E. E. “Doc” Smith, I wrote of a group of terrifyingly unpredictable and inscrutable beings called the Lensmen who were all but invisible to the naked eye but could be captured with a camera lens (though only, of course, near the periphery and very out of focus). They would, I wrote, randomly choose victims to bedevil, with a living blood sacrifice supposedly the only way to end the torment. Particularly worthy victims who offered a magnificent sacrifice would be offered the opportunity to become Lensmen themselves.

As evidence, I doctored some photos, wrote some testimonials using aliases and sockpuppets, and buried within each of them a hidden email address and a directive to contact me. Anyone who was a clever internet user or a skeptic should have been able to uncover the hoax and contact me.

No one did.

Instead, my posts began to spread around the internet creep and scare culture. First dozens and then hundreds of people reported seen the Lensmen singly or in groups. I laughed this off as mass hysteria and paranoid superstition at first. After a few years, more photos appeared that I thought must have been doctored in the same way, and again I could only shrug my shoulders at how naive people were.

That was before the photographs of the blood sacrifices began surfacing.

At first it was pets and vermin, the sort of thing that–I told myself–psychopaths would have been doing anyway, “Lensmen” or no. Then came the case of the young boy who murdered his sister, secure in his belief that it was a necessary blood sacrifice to end his torment by unseen hands and assure him an immortal existence among the Lensmen.

I came clean after that, publishing a full confession after a night of retching over my toilet in nauseous horror. But no one listened. The rumor had taken on a life of its own, it seemed, and I was powerless to stop it.

Resigned to having that hanging over my conscience, I withdrew into my amateur photography studies. It was there in my darkroom, a few years later, that I first noticed strange dark figures on the periphery of my distance shots.

And now I find myself cowering in my basement, where the sobbing seldom stops.

We make them. We make them all.

But they don’t go away.

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