by Carrie King
Harry chewed thoughtfully. “Nothing like that. We had a few more visitors than normal which was nice. Even though none of them actually bought anything. Anything on your end?”
“Nothing. Just what I told you over the phone. Your ghost theory is starting to sound like the only reasonable explanation of everything that’s been happening,” Gavin said. The words looked like they were causing him physical pain.
‘Well, maybe tonight, we can catch them on the cameras,” said Harry. “But I don’t think I can do this again tomorrow night, so you’ll be on your own.”
“Why not?” asked Gavin.
Harry thought about not telling him, but to be honest, he was kind of dying to tell someone. Saying something like this out loud might make it feel real to him and reduce the chances that he’d ruin it.
“I might have a date,” he said.
“A date?”
‘Yeah. There was a girl in here earlier who was looking at one of the paintings that my grandfather did. She asked me for some information. We’re going to go out for a drink tomorrow once I look through my granddad’s old papers and things.”
Gavin raised both eyebrows and grinned at Harry. “Well, congratulations. At least these paintings are doing some useful work by getting you a date.”
Harry pointed at Gavin with a slice of pizza. “Listen, just because it has been a little slow lately, doesn’t mean this place isn’t paying for itself.”
Gavin shook his head. “You’re forgetting, I’ve seen the records and accounts,” he said. “A dates about the most valuable thing you’ve got from it in the last year.”
“There’s no reason for you to be quite so accurate, you know,” replied Harry.
The two men laughed. Just then, the lights flickered. Harry looked at the monitor. He could have sworn that he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He stared at it without blinking.
‘What’s up,” asked Gavin.
“I’m not sure. I thought I saw something. It’s fine,” said Harry.
He spoke too soon. Footsteps started to echo against the marble floors of the gallery, louder and louder, like they were coming closer to the office. Gavin shot up from his chair and withdrew the pepper spray from his belt.
Harry was still staring at the monitor. There was nothing outside the door. No one who could be making the footsteps. “Gavin, there’s no one out there,” he said. His voice was barely above a whisper.
“I can hear them coming,” Gavin said. “There’s are footsteps.”
“Gavin, there isn’t anyone on the monitor. No one is making those footsteps!” Harry said urgently.
“That isn’t possible.” The footsteps were slowly approaching, the loudness steadily increasing even as the frequency of the steps didn’t. Gavin shook his head. “I’m going out there,” he decided. “Whoever it is, they’re just trying to scare us.” He started for the door. Harry stood up, too. He couldn’t let Gavin go out there alone, as scared as he was.
They slowly opened the door, and carefully stepped into the main room of the gallery. There was nothing there, but the air had changed somehow. There was something almost electrically charged about it. Harry made sure to stick close to Gavin as they went. The only lights on the gallery floor were those illuminating the art, but instead of highlighting the beauty of the pieces, instead they distorted the pictures, turning them into grotesque caricatures of their daytime selves.
The footsteps were quieter, but Harry could still hear them clearly. They were coming from the section that housed Granddad’s collection. He tapped Gavin on the shoulder and pointed to the section. The lights flickered again, causing the shadows to almost come alive. They walked to Granddad’s section. The lights above the paintings had gone out, leaving them shrouded in shadow. The paintings were already dark, and that made them almost black, like little voids on the wall.
Gavin whispered, “Do you see anything?”
“No. But it’s really dark. “
“Is there a circuit panel somewhere?”
Before Harry could answer, there was a scraping sound, like someone dragging their nails across a chalkboard. Harry didn’t know if it was because of the dark, or if it was because it was actually happening, but the painting right in front of them, the one that Laura had been admiring this morning started moving. Harry stared wide-eyed at the wall. It started bulging outwards, like there was something on the other side of the canvas straining to get out. He could hear Gavin gasp beside him.
“Are you seeing the same thing that I’m seeing?” Harry whispered.
“I think I am,” said Gavin.
The painting strained and bulged, the scraping sound a nonstop background noise to the unholy scene unfolding in front of them. Without warning, a ripping sound hurtled through the air, and the stretched canvas gave way. Harry tried to look closer. There was nothing behind the canvas. Literally, nothing. It looked like the wall itself was gone. Gavin grabbed Harry’s elbow and pulled him backwards, just in time, as it happened, because at that moment, something appeared in the void. Something that looked like a hand.
Chapter 78
The hand was dark. The skin wrinkled and blackened in places. It reminded Harry of a corpse.
Slowly, it stretched up and over the edge of the void and bent like it was trying to pull itself up. It was as if time had slowed down for Harry. He could hear his blood whooshing in his ears. He felt like ice was slowly creeping over his body.
There was something climbing out of the void behind the painting. It levered its body out of the hole and over the wooden frame of the painting. Gavin yanked Harry backwards hard and pulled him back to the office. Harry could barely make himself move. The creature that had pulled itself out from behind the painting was hideous, less than human. But something about it had caught his attention, to the point where he felt he couldn’t move.
Gavin all but threw him into the office and slammed the door shut behind them.
“What the hell was that?!” he yelled. His voice was hoarse, and he was breathing hard.
“Did that just happen?” asked Harry. “We just stood there and watched something climb out from behind my grandfather’s painting. What just happened?!”
“I think your theory about ghosts and supernatural things might not be the silliest theory, now,” said Gavin. He collapsed onto the sofa and dropped his head into his hands. Harry sat at the desk and pulled up the security footage.
“That thing is still out there,” he said. “We should know where exactly it is.” He rewound the footage to the last few minutes and started looking thought the video from all of the cameras in the gallery. One of them had to have caught the thing, whatever it was, as it left Granddad’s section. It was in a strange part of the gallery. Because of the way the walls were laid out, it had been hard to get a security camera in position to get direct pictures. Harry hadn’t thought to get a dedicated security camera for that section since it was so small, but now, he cursed his lack of foresight. In the future, he thought, cameras everywhere.
“Wait a minute,” said Gavin. “What if it’s dangerous? It can’t get out, can it?”
Harry shook his head. “The doors are incredibly secure. We’ve had some really valuable pieces come through here, so I made sure that nothing short of an earthquake could open those doors. And even then, it’s a fifty-fifty chance.”
Gavin nodded. “Did you find anything on the cameras?”
Harry suddenly noticed that the gallery had fallen silent. The footsteps, the scraping, all of it had stopped, leaving the gallery in complete silence. He turned his attention back to the monitors, but they were being absolutely no help. He switched from camera to camera, searching for anything to show where the creature had gone. He kept going, looking for anything, but it was as if the creature had never existed.
Gavin nodded sagely. “So, you’re saying that there is something out there. We don’t know what it is, but maybe it had something to do with ghosts. We don’t know
what it wants, or if it’s dangerous, and now we don’t know where it is. That about it?”
“Yes,” said Harry distractedly. He was closely watching the live feed from the cameras, but there was nothing to confirm what he and Gavin had seen. He kept watching until his head started to ache.
Gavin was sitting bolt upright on the sofa and staring at the door. “Is there anything?” he asked.
Harry tipped his head back and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Nothing at all.”
“All right,” said Gavin. “We’re trapped in here until morning, or until that thing decides to make an appearance, I suppose.”
Harry nodded. “Looks that way.” He found the business card Laura had given him lying on the desk and slipped it into the drawer. He didn’t want to lose it.
The prospect of spending another night cooped up in the office was terrible, but he didn’t want to take his chances with the creature outside either.
“Hopefully, you can still make it to your date in the morning,” Gavin said.
“I still have to go through my Granddad’s things. I might not even find the information that she wants tomorrow. Either because the man never threw anything out, or because whatever just came out of that painting has killed and eaten the two of us. I think I have some time to get ready.”
Gavin smiled. “Sound like a solid plan of action.” He sighed. “If we’re going to stay in here with that thing out there, we should at least try to sleep. You get a couple of hours first and I’ll watch the monitors.”
A grateful Harry switched places with Gavin and let his eyes slide shut. Exhaustion was like a heavy blanket and yet he knew he would never get any rest. How could he sleep not knowing where that thing was?
The night passed somehow. Gavin and Harry traded off sleep shifts, even though from the look of both of them now, there was no way of telling that they had slept at all. Once Harry woke up from his last sleep shift, he went straight to the computer. There was no change from last night. The gallery was as still as a tomb.
He sat back to think about their next step. They had to leave the office at some point, but since there was no way of seeing if that thing was still lurking in Granddad’s section. Harry tapped Gavin on the shoulder, and Gavin jerked awake.
“I think one of us should go out there and see what’s happening,” he said. Gavin looked blearily up at him. “And I should be that person because…?”
“Because you’re a trained police officer,” said Harry, putting what he hoped was a persuasive smile on his face.
Gavin rolled his eyes, but he got up, anyway.
Harry closed the door firmly behind the detective when he stepped outside. There were some things that only trained personnel should handle, and he was perfectly fine letting Gavin take the lead on this one. It only took him a few minutes to do a sweep of the gallery. Luckily there weren’t a lot of hidden alcoves and isolated spaces at the Madison. In fact, the only place that could be called hidden by any stretch was the section with Granddad’s paintings. That and the bathrooms.
Gavin pounded on the door when he finished his sweep. Harry opened the door to see him on the other side, looking more relaxed than he had when he left.
“There’s nothing here,” he said. “I even checked up in the rafters. And there’s something else that I think you’ll want to see.” He waved Harry forward with a flourish, and he stepped out, still hesitant.
Even though Gavin had checked the gallery, Harry’s animal brain was screaming at him to get out of there are fast as his legs could carry him.
He followed Gavin to the place where they’d seen the creature emerge, and Harry’s breath caught in his throat. The painting was completely intact. There was no sign of the fact that some otherworldly creature had clawed its way out of it just last night.
“What the hell is happening in my gallery?” he whispered to himself.
Gavin caught the words and put a comforting arm on his shoulder. “Look at it this way. At least now, you have positive proof that there is something out there that could qualify as a ghost.”
They made their way back to the office where Gavin collected his things. Harry rubbed his hand over his stubble covered face and stifled a yawn. He had a lot of work to get through before the next nightshift. He was going to go through the boxes in his grandparents’ shed. It might yield some interesting things for him and Laura to talk about.
“I’ll call you later,” Gavin said on his way out. “Good luck with the rest of the day.” And with that, he left, his jacket slung over his shoulder.
Harry felt a pang of jealousy. There was no way he could look that effortlessly cool no matter how he tried.
Harry waited for the dayshift staff to come into the gallery and assigned the least witless of them to watch the place until he could go home, shower and change. It wasn’t the most ideal plan of course, but at least the art was all alarmed and they weren’t allowed to process any sales without him, so there was really a limit to the amount of damage they could do.
The shower made him feel halfway human at least, and once he put on a fresh set of clothes, Harry headed to his grandparents’ house. The place had been around for at least a century, but in his childhood, it had been more exciting than boring.
His grandmother was a bit of a stereotype, with fluffy white hair that formed a halo around her head, and she was always ready with a biscuit, a cup of tea and a friendly word. She and Granddad had been married for almost fifty years. Harry still had memories of her bringing them tea and sandwiches in Granddad’s studio in the shed as they worked away on their own personal projects. Harry’s parents both worked. They didn’t have much time to spend with him on a day to day basis, so he spent most of his time learning to paint or bake with his grandparents.
Harry pulled into the driveway in front of the house. His grandmother wasn’t at home. Instead, she’d left him a key to the shed under the doormat so he could let himself in. Just slotting the key into the lock brought back memories of coming home after school. He pushed the door open, careful not to knock over the pile of boxes stacked in there. Harry carefully picked a path through the stored items and found a place to sit down.
He pulled the first box toward him. It was stuffed nearly to bursting with journals, notebooks, pencils and brushes. He started sorting through them all, piling up the things that could be thrown away and the things he wanted to keep. He didn’t let himself think about the memories he had of seeing Granddad scribble in these old books, or with a paintbrush between his teeth as he worked. It would pull him in like quicksand, he knew that already. The week before the funeral had been like that. He could barely see his way through the fog that seemed to surround him. He wasn’t going to let himself get in that place again.
He methodically worked through box after box, sorting the rubbish from the mementos, and choosing what he wanted to keep or give to his grandmother. Luckily, Granddad put dates on all his notes. For each of his paintings, he had pages of sketches, ideas for what pigments to use, and sometimes shopping lists jotted in the margins.
Harry made his way through the pile until he came to the notebooks from the last year of his grandfather’s life. These ones weren’t as meticulous as the other ones. But Granddad had been one of the lucky ones, getting relatively more clear episodes than other patients. In those times, he took a good look at his paintings and made the same notes, either in his own shaking hand, or dictated to the aides at the care home.
Harry swallowed the increasingly large lump in his throat as he leafed through page after lined page. Finally, in a small notebook that was buried under a pile of other objects, he found what he was looking for. This notebook looked different than the others. It was much smaller than the others, covered with a rich brown leather.
Harry opened it. The handwriting was that of a younger, stronger Granddad, especially at the beginning, but Harry could mark almost the exact page that separated the healthy man from the one that was struggling with remembering his
family in a care home.
That wasn’t what made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. On the first page of the notebook was a sketch of the painting hanging in the gallery, the one that the creature had clawed its way out of. On the facing page were squiggles that Harry couldn’t read. They looked like the runes he’d read about in his history books at school.
It was the page afterwards that made Harry feel sick. It was a list of the colors that granddad wanted to use. And at the end of the list was an item that said “Burgundy #3561. Blood mixer.”
Blood mixer? What did that mean? It might have been the dementia talking, Harry thought. His Granddad wouldn’t have anything to do with any kind of blood. Even bandaging up scraped knees was solely Gran’s purview.
The next page didn’t’ make Harry feel any better. The heading on the page was “Steps”, written in neat even handwriting. This was before the care home. Underneath was a numbered list that looked like Granddad was taking notes from something he read:
1) Immortality requires sacrifice. Be certain you want to do this.
2) The blood of the subject must be mixed with the carrier in sufficient quantities to prevent degradation or flaking. Ratio of 3:1?
3) Upon return, one of the subject’s bloodline must be present to become a vessel.
4) Blood ritual is powerful. Only fire can destroy.
The next few pages held more of the squiggles that he’d already seen. As Harry flipped through the notebook, he started to feel overwhelmingly uneasy. He didn’t know the symbols, and he didn’t understand what Granddad was doing, but it didn’t seem to be good. He flipped through to the last page of the notebook. There, Granddad’s handwriting was big and clumsy. After he’d gone to the home, then. At the top of the page was the heading “Bloody Boy”. Underneath was a list of the final pigments Granddad had used. The listing for the same burgundy as before was followed this time by a single word. Carrier.
Underneath that, Granddad had written, “Bound to painting. With luck will be able to come back. Harry vessel? Others maybe? God forgive me. So scared.”
