CANVAS OF DECEIT

CHAPTER 1: Inheritance

Lena didn’t expect much from the envelope. The last few months had trained her to brace for disappointment—rejection letters from galleries, bills she couldn’t pay, silence where there should’ve been inspiration. But this envelope was thicker, yellowed, and hand-addressed in delicate cursive. It didn’t belong with the rest of the week’s noise.

She opened it with paint-stained fingers and read the contents twice.

You’ve inherited a property.

Her hands trembled. The words didn’t make sense. A great-aunt Cecelia? She had no memory of ever hearing the name. Her mother rarely spoke of family, and when she did, it was only with sighs and half-finished sentences. But here it was: a legal document declaring Lena the sole heir of Black Hollow Manor, a sprawling estate on the outskirts of a town she’d never heard of.

There was a condition, of course.

To claim the inheritance, she had to reside in the mansion for thirty consecutive days, and create.

She let out a dry laugh. “Create what?”

A second page answered: The home once belonged to a patron of the arts. Your great-aunt believed creativity to be sacred. To inherit her estate, you must honor that belief. Create art. Let the house inspire you.

Lena sat back, the letter trembling in her hands. She hadn’t completed a painting in six months. The grief that followed her mother’s death had wrapped around her like fog—cold, dense, and directionless. She barely left her studio apartment. She barely ate. Her canvases were blank, her brushes stiff with neglect.

But now… an escape?

Maybe it was a joke. Maybe she was being scammed. Still, the documents looked official. A lawyer’s signature. A town seal. A return address.

The next morning, Lena packed her brushes, easel, and a few blank canvases. She booked the earliest bus to Black Hollow.

The town was even smaller than she’d imagined. A post office, a diner, a church with a rusted bell tower. Locals stared when she arrived, some curious, others… wary. The cab she called from the lone payphone didn’t need an address.

“You’re the one going to the manor?” the driver asked, his voice gravelly.

She nodded.

He didn’t speak again.

Black Hollow Manor appeared like a dream carved into stone—or maybe a nightmare. Perched on a wooded hill, it stood tall with ivy-strangled walls and shuttered windows. Iron gates creaked open as they approached, and the cab slowed, tires crunching the gravel path.

Lena stepped out, her breath catching. It was massive—at least three stories, with towers that brushed the sky and a grand entrance flanked by marble statues. She reached out to touch one: a woman cloaked in vines, her face worn smooth by time.

The front door opened before she knocked.

A man stood on the threshold.

He was tall, dressed in black, with dark hair and storm-gray eyes. Handsome in a way that didn’t comfort—sharp cheekbones, a mouth that held secrets.

“I’m Julian,” he said. “The caretaker. I’ve been expecting you.”

The house smelled of dust, old wood, and something floral she couldn’t place. Julian showed her to a bedroom on the second floor—ornate, cold, but beautiful. A fireplace. A window overlooking the east garden. An empty canvas already resting on an easel.

“Great-Aunt Cecelia was thorough,” she said, half-joking.

“She always planned ahead,” Julian replied.

He left without another word.

That night, Lena unpacked slowly. The silence of the house wasn’t peaceful—it was heavy, as though every creak of the floorboards was being judged. Still, she told herself it was just age. Just her nerves. Just a new place after too much time in the same four walls.

She didn’t sleep well.

The wind moaned through the eaves, and once, she thought she heard something else—a faint scratching, like a pen on paper.

In the morning, she set up her paints. She stared at the canvas for an hour. Then two. Her fingers itched to move, but the ideas wouldn’t come.

Outside, the manor seemed to hum, as though waiting.

CHAPTER 2: The Caretaker

The third morning in Black Hollow was colder than the ones before. A sharp wind cut through the air like it had been waiting for her to step outside. Lena wrapped herself tighter in her oversized cardigan, her boots crunching the gravel as she wandered the path behind the mansion, sketchbook tucked beneath her arm.

She told herself she was just exploring. Finding inspiration. But the truth was she couldn’t sleep. Every night since her arrival had been punctuated by the same dream: a shadow standing at the edge of her bed, watching. Not moving. Not breathing. Just… watching.

She chalked it up to stress and a creaky house. Still, she avoided the master bedroom and took to sleeping in a guest room downstairs, one with windows that actually opened.

That morning, while rounding a corner in the garden, she met him.

He was crouched beside a withered rosebush, gloved hands deep in the soil. He looked up at her without alarm, as if he’d been expecting her. His face was long and angular, his skin pale against the early light, and his eyes—storm-gray and unreadable—seemed carved from some forgotten myth.

“You’re early,” he said, brushing dirt from his gloves.

She blinked. “I didn’t know anyone else was on the grounds.”

“I’m the caretaker. Name’s Julian.”

“Julian,” she repeated, tasting the name. It suited him—old, elegant, slightly dangerous.

He stood, towering slightly over her, but not in a way that felt threatening. There was something refined in the way he moved, like he didn’t quite belong to the modern world.

“I didn’t know anyone had been hired,” she said.

“I wasn’t hired,” he replied smoothly. “I’ve always been here.”

The words sent a shiver down her spine. She smiled awkwardly, unsure whether he was joking.

He gestured toward the trellised walkway ahead. “Come. There’s more to see than just dying roses.”

Against her better judgment—or maybe because of it—she followed.

They walked in silence for a while, Julian pointing out parts of the garden that had long fallen into disrepair: a pond choked with algae, fountains cracked down the middle, flower beds overrun by ivy. He spoke of them as if they were old friends.

Lena stole glances at him. He was hard to place. His features were sharp, almost too symmetrical. His voice was calm, but carried weight. When he spoke, she listened—even if she wasn’t sure why.

“How do you know so much about this place?” she asked finally.

“I grew up nearby,” he said, though his voice wavered for the first time. “Spent most of my time in these gardens.”

She frowned. “Nearby? Black Hollow is practically abandoned.”

“There are still some of us who never left,” he said with a faint smile.

The way he said “us” made her skin crawl. Still, she kept walking.

When they reached a small marble gazebo hidden beneath a veil of overgrown wisteria, Julian paused.

“She used to sit here,” he said.

“Who?”

“Cecelia.”

Lena stiffened. “You knew her?”

Julian’s eyes settled on hers. “Everyone knew Cecelia. But no one really knew her.”

He sat on the bench, brushing leaves aside. “She believed the house was alive, you know. Said it breathed through its paintings. That it remembered.”

Lena’s throat tightened.

“She also believed some guests were meant to come. And others were meant to stay.”

Silence stretched between them, taut and heavy.

“You say that like I’m not going to leave,” she said softly.

Julian didn’t answer.

Back inside, Lena found herself staring at her canvas. She hadn’t painted since arriving. The house didn’t inspire her—it unsettled her. The walls felt too tight, the silence too loud. But now, she could still feel Julian’s presence in her bones, like a song she couldn’t forget.

And so she painted.

At first, it was just colors—grays, greens, and rusted reds. Then outlines. A face began to emerge. Angular. Sad. Familiar.

She realized, with a start, she was painting Julian.

When the face was nearly complete, she stepped back, wiping sweat from her brow. The eyes on the canvas were too alive. Too watching.

Her breath caught.

She turned—and gasped.

Julian stood in the doorway.

“You paint with grief,” he said quietly, not even glancing at the painting.

She swallowed. “Excuse me?”

“You bleed on the canvas. It’s rare.”

“You sound like someone who’s been watching me.”

“I have.”

His answer chilled her, but not in the way she expected. There was no malice in his voice—just fact. Like he’d said, she had dirt on her shoe.

“And you speak like someone who’s lost more than you’re saying,” she said before she could stop herself.

Julian smiled—but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“Everyone here has lost something,” he said. “Some just haven’t found it yet.”

That night, Lena couldn’t sleep. Her window was open, and she thought she saw movement in the garden below. A figure in the dark, walking the same trellised path they’d taken earlier.

Julian? Maybe.

Or maybe the house wasn’t as empty as she believed.

She closed the curtain, heart pounding.

In the quiet, she heard her paintbrushes clatter to the floor in her studio.

She didn’t get up to check.

Not that night.

Chapter Three: The Paint Moves

The painting was not hers.

Lena stood in the studio, brush still wet in her hand, staring at the canvas like it had betrayed her. She had fallen asleep the night before—she remembered that clearly. The half-finished outline of a landscape had blurred before her eyes, her body surrendering to exhaustion right there on the floor.

But this… this wasn’t what she’d been working on.

The canvas now held a face. Hers. But distorted—half of it pristine, painted in delicate hues of lilac and rose, and the other half fractured, like cracked porcelain. A black streak ran from one eye, as though the painting itself had cried ink.

She backed away from it.

“No,” she whispered. “I didn’t do this.”

Yet her brush had clearly been used. Her palette was smudged with colors that matched the piece exactly. The jar of turpentine was half full—the exact amount she would’ve used.

Julian was already in the garden when she stepped outside, still wearing the flannel shirt she’d painted in, speckled with gray and crimson.

He didn’t look surprised to see her, not even when she appeared visibly shaken.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said calmly, trimming a dead vine that had wrapped itself too tightly around a gatepost.

“I didn’t paint it,” she replied. “The face. My face. In the studio.”

Julian paused.

“Maybe you painted in your sleep.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

Lena studied him. His tone was sincere, but that only made her skin crawl more. Something about the way he said it—too matter-of-fact, too practiced—like he had rehearsed for this moment.

“You’ve been here longer than I,” she said. “Has anything like that ever happened to you?”

Julian clipped another vine. “The house remembers.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

He looked up, storm-gray eyes steady. “Some homes carry memory. And some memories carry warnings.”

Lena waited for more, but he returned to his pruning.

Back in the house, she covered the painting with an old bedsheet.

She tried to work on something new—started sketching the garden from the eastern window—but her fingers felt foreign, her grip uncertain. The image of her own painted, damaged face kept returning.

That night, she didn’t sleep.

She wandered through the mansion’s endless halls instead, barefoot on creaking floorboards, candle in hand like a character in one of the gothic novels her mother once adored.

The paintings in the house watched her.

Or maybe she imagined that.

In one hallway, she found a portrait she hadn’t noticed before. It was old—maybe a century or more. A woman stood at an easel, her expression focused, almost feverish. The brush in her hand looked like it was trembling. Lena leaned closer.

The woman looked like her.

Not exactly, but close enough to startle her—a similarity in the angle of the jaw, the set of the mouth. The eyes, wide and burdened.

A nameplate rested at the bottom of the frame: Cecelia Hollow, 1892.

Her great-aunt?

She stepped back.

The silence in the hallway pressed down like a hand on her throat.

When Lena finally returned to her bedroom, dawn was breaking open the sky. She sat on the edge of the mattress, her thoughts spiraling. There was something wrong with this place. Not just strange, but layered. Haunted, maybe. Or hungry.

By the following afternoon, she gave in and painted again. Not because she wanted to—but because the urge was unbearable. Her hands itched. Her mind buzzed with images that didn’t belong to her.

This time, she didn’t even sketch. She started directly with color. Heavy strokes. A palette more violent than anything she’d used before—crimsons, charcoals, deep bruised violets. What emerged was not a landscape or a portrait.

It was a door.

Old, decayed, framed by vines with thorns as thick as her wrist. The handle was broken. The wood was cracked down the middle.

And at the bottom, written in tiny, tight letters:

Don’t open it.

She dropped the brush.

The sun had set without her noticing. The studio was cast in a grayish blue that made everything look colder, harder.

She backed out of the room.

In the hallway, Julian stood by the staircase.

“You painted again,” he said softly.

She didn’t reply.

“Do you know what it means?”

“No.”

Julian didn’t push. Instead, he handed her something—an envelope.

It was yellowed, sealed with an old stamp she didn’t recognize. Her name was written in ornate script on the front.

Lena stared at it.

“Where did you get this?”

Julian’s voice was careful. “It was under the floorboards. In the old nursery.”

She hesitated, then broke the seal.

Inside, a single sheet of paper.

“Creation is never without cost. You may think the house inspires you, but the house consumes. Be careful what you feed it.”

No signature.

Lena looked up. “Why are you helping me?”

Julian’s face didn’t change, but something flickered in his eyes.

“Because you’re not the first.”

Chapter Four: Secrets in the Attic

The key didn’t belong to any door Lena had tried.

It had been tucked inside an old book—“The Hollow Genealogy”—a dusty leather-bound tome she found shoved behind other volumes in the second-floor library. She wasn’t even looking for it. The key fell out when she opened to a random page.

Heavy. Iron. Cold even in her warm palm.

She knew where it went.

The attic.

She had passed the hatch on her first day, barely registering it above the spiral staircase. There’d been no ladder, just a panel in the ceiling with no indication of how to reach it. But that night, the key burned in her pocket, and the pull toward the attic felt unmistakable.

Julian wasn’t around. For once, she was glad.

The creak of an old step stool beneath her weight was the only sound as she reached up and turned the key. With a groan, the panel released. A ladder unfurled on its own, like it had been waiting.

Lena climbed into the dark.

The attic smelled like dust and oil paint. The air was thick with the scent of aged wood and old memories. Moonlight streamed in from a small round window, catching cobwebs that draped over canvas-covered shapes and wooden trunks.

She turned on the antique lamp in the far corner, bathing the attic in flickering yellow light.

There were easels—five or six of them—each bearing paintings draped in linen. Stacks of sketchbooks. Piles of letters tied with faded ribbon. An old phonograph. A rocking chair.

And portraits.

Dozens of them.

Lena moved toward the far wall. Someone had pinned paintings there, like an obsessive artist tracking their descent into madness. The faces stared back at her—some twisted with grief, others calm and vacant. One looked exactly like Julian. Another looked eerily like… herself. But younger.

She ripped the sheet off an easel in the corner.

A painting of a woman, mid-scream, mouth open as if she’d been caught mid-confession.

She stumbled back.

The woman had Lena’s eyes.

On the floor nearby, she noticed a small, cracked jewelry box. Inside, a faded photograph—black-and-white, edges curled with time. A baby in someone’s arms. The woman’s face was out of frame, but on the back, in smudged ink:

Julian – 6 months.

Lena sat down hard, her knees buckling.

What the hell?

She stared at the photo until the lines blurred.

Julian. As a baby.

But he looked barely older than her now. How was that possible? The photo had to be decades old. And if this was her family’s attic… what else did it mean?

More letters. More clues. She tore open a wooden chest nearby. Inside, bundles of journals bound in red leather. The first page of the top one read:

“Cecelia Hollow. Summer, 1964.”

She flipped through. Handwritten entries, elegant and looping. One caught her eye:

“The boy is progressing. He sees what others can’t. Paints what hasn’t happened yet. Just like she did. Just like Lena will.”

Lena slammed the book shut.

It couldn’t be about her. Cecelia didn’t know her. She had only just inherited this place. Right?

She heard a creak behind her.

Julian.

“I told you not to dig,” he said quietly.

Lena spun around. He stood just inside the attic, his silhouette framed by the hatch’s faint light.

“You lied to me,” she said. “You told me nothing about this. About that photo. About her journals. About us.”

Julian’s face was unreadable. “Because I didn’t know how much you could handle. Not yet.”

“What are you to me?” Her voice trembled.

He stepped forward, slow and careful. “You already know.”

“No.” She backed away. “Say it.”

Julian’s jaw clenched. “We share blood. That’s all that matters.”

“Are you—are you my brother?”

A pause. Then a nod.

“I was raised here. Groomed. Cecelia said I was the first draft. The test. You’re the final.”

Lena shook her head. “Final what?”

Julian looked around the attic, his expression softening, almost bitter.

“She thought the Hollow line was gifted. That our blood could unlock something pure in art. That pain made masterpieces. She wanted to raise someone in isolation, in inspiration, surrounded only by ghosts and oil and grief. That’s what this place is.”

“A gallery of trauma?” Lena whispered.

Julian nodded again.

“She raised you here?”

“And she left it for you.”

“But why?”

“Because Cecelia was never finished with her work. And now it’s your turn to complete it.”

Lena’s hands balled into fists. “No. I’m not continuing her madness.”

“Then why are you still painting?” he asked, voice sharp. “You felt it. The pull. The need.”

“I can stop.”

“Can you?”

Silence.

“I want answers,” Lena said, her throat dry.

“Then keep reading,” he said, and disappeared down the ladder.

She was left alone in the attic of ghosts, heart racing, surrounded by the artwork of a family that had hidden every truth behind brushstrokes.

Chapter Five: The Unraveling

Lena hadn’t picked up a brush in three days.

But her hands ached for it. Her fingers twitched at night like they were chasing something invisible. Even when she locked away the paints, hid the canvases in the linen closet, she still found herself sketching absentmindedly—on napkins, the wall, even her skin.

The mansion no longer felt like a place. It felt like a presence. Watching. Breathing. Breeding inspiration with cruelty.

Julian had kept his distance since the attic.

He no longer brought her tea or walked her through the overgrown gardens. When they passed in the hall, his eyes barely met hers. But she could feel him watching—like he always did.

One morning, Lena woke to find her bedroom walls covered in charcoal sketches. Faces. All hers. Screaming, crying, fading. Her hands were black with soot, her fingernails chipped and raw.

She had no memory of drawing them.

The mirror above her desk was cracked straight through the middle.

She stared at her reflection, split in half, and whispered, “This place is eating me alive.”

The paintings, the ones she had finished, had changed. Somehow. Their colors are darker. The shapes are more twisted. One that had once shown a quiet lake now bubbled with storm and shadow. Her brushstrokes looked frantic, manic.

Worse—some canvases she knew she hadn’t touched were wet again. Smudged. Different.

She wasn’t just losing track of time.

She was losing track of herself.

That night, she followed Julian.

She waited until midnight, barefoot on the cold wood floors, her breath shallow with anticipation and dread. His footsteps echoed faintly down the east wing—a part of the house she hadn’t explored. When he slipped through a narrow hall, she crept behind him, keeping to the dark.

He moved like he belonged to the house, like it shaped itself around his every step.

Then he vanished.

Lena pressed her ear to the wall where she last saw him. Silence. Then—a creak.

She ran her fingers along the bookcase. One of the books was fake. She tugged it. The shelf clicked and slid open, revealing a narrow stone staircase spiraling downward.

Cold air rose up to meet her, thick with mildew and… paint thinner?

She descended slowly, heart pounding with every step.

The basement opened into a massive chamber. Lanterns flickered along the walls. The space wasn’t empty.

It was a studio.

Julian’s studio.

Massive canvases leaned against every wall. All of her. In poses she’d never struck. In places she’d never stood. Some were warped—her face twisted into agony, her limbs elongated like some grotesque version of herself. One painting showed her sleeping. She recognized the nightgown.

She remembered that night. He had painted her without her knowledge.

In the far corner was an easel.

A canvas.

Blank.

But not for long.

A brush sat waiting on the stand. Fresh paint. A single lamp illuminated the space, casting her shadow long and bent behind her.

She was still staring, trying to make sense of the horror and betrayal crawling up her throat, when Julian stepped into the light.

“You weren’t supposed to come here,” he said, not angry—almost… resigned.

“How long have you been painting me?”

“Since before you arrived.”

Her voice cracked. “How?”

“I knew you would come. Cecelia told me. She said you were the key. That the house would respond to you in ways it never did with me.”

Lena shook her head. “This—this is madness. You’ve been using me. Watching me.”

“No,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you. For us to finish it together.”

“Finish what?”

He gestured to the blank canvas. “The final portrait.”

“Of what?”

Julian stepped closer. His voice lowered to a reverent whisper. “Of truth. Of blood. Of legacy. It has to be us—merged. The house chose you. Just like it once chose me.”

Lena stumbled back. “You’re sick. Cecelia was sick.”

Julian’s expression darkened, just for a moment. “No, Lena. She was brilliant. She understood what most people run from: that pain creates art. That memory lives in pigment. That the only immortality we have is what we leave on canvas.”

“I never agreed to this.”

“You didn’t have to,” he said gently. “It was always inside you.”

“I’m leaving.”

He blocked her path. “No one leaves until the portrait is complete.”

Lena’s breath hitched. “You’re not going to stop me.”

“I don’t want to,” he said. “But the house might.”

That night, she packed her bags.

She didn’t sleep. She couldn’t. The walls whispered. The floors moaned. She could feel the eyes of every painting she’d ever touched watching her from the shadows.

When dawn came, she ran.

But the front doors wouldn’t open.

No matter how hard she turned the knob, kicked, screamed—the locks held. The windows were the same. Sealed tight, as if they’d never been real to begin with. The car in the garage had no engine. Her phone? Dead.

The house had decided.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

Chapter Six: A Family Fractured

She tried every door in the house.

Even the servants’ entrances, the cellar doors, the rusted side gate that hung crooked on its hinges. Nothing opened. It was as if the mansion had drawn in a final breath—and refused to let it out.

Lena collapsed in the front hall, fists raw from pounding against wood, lungs burning with exhaustion and rage.

Julian was nowhere to be found.

But she felt him.

Or maybe it was the house.

Time twisted after that. Day and night folded into each other like warped brushstrokes. The clocks stopped ticking. The mirrors fogged without cause. And her art—

Her art had changed.

The paintings painted themselves.

She’d wake to find new ones leaning against the wall: unfinished figures, blurred faces, colors bleeding off the edges. Once, she found a canvas still wet—of her standing over Julian’s body, her eyes black pits, her mouth twisted in a scream she hadn’t yet made.

She tore that one apart.

But it reappeared the next day.

That was when she stopped sleeping.

That was when the walls started whispering in Cecelia’s voice.

“Finish it, child.”

Lena spent hours in the attic after that.

The journals she’d discovered—the ones she’d only skimmed—were not just memories. They were instructions. Pages filled with ritualistic notes, odd symbols, color studies, and notes on blood-to-pigment ratios. Obsession etched in faded ink.

Cecelia hadn’t been painting portraits.

She’d been crafting vessels.

Binding memories. Trapping truths. Turning pain into permanence.

She flipped through the brittle pages until she found one with two names written in ornate script: Julian and Elena.

Not Lena.

Elena.

A family tree followed—half-finished and deliberately obscured, but enough to piece together the truth.

Julian wasn’t just the caretaker.

He wasn’t even her cousin.

He was her brother.

Half-brother, she realized. Cecelia had taken him in. Raised him within these walls after their mother died. He hid him from the world—and from Lena.

They were both orphans. Both artists. Both haunted.

But Julian had been raised inside the madness. Lena had only been summoned to complete it.

She confronted him that night.

She found him in the library, painting with charcoal directly on the wall. Her face again—hollow, sunken, dissolving into shadow.

“You knew,” she said, voice low and shaking. “You knew we were blood.”

He didn’t turn. “Cecelia said it was better that way. She said I had to let you find your own way to the truth.”

“You let me think you were just—” She stopped herself, unable to say it aloud.

His silence confirmed what she feared.

“You watched me,” she said. “You manipulated me. All for what? Some grand painting? Some vision Cecelia left behind?”

Julian finally turned.

He looked older now. Worn. His eyes didn’t shimmer with mystery anymore. They looked tired.

“She believed in legacy,” he said. “She believed we weren’t just artists—we were vessels. That blood and brush could create something eternal. That our pain—our fracture—would give birth to the final masterpiece.”

“We’re not a project,” Lena snapped. “We’re people. We’re—”

She stopped herself again. The word lodged in her throat.

“Then leave,” he whispered.

“I tried,” she spat.

He looked down. “Then you know it’s not up to us anymore.”

She took a step forward. “Why? Why trap me here?”

“Because the house wants both of us. Because our blood woke it up.”

Lena’s skin crawled.

“This place isn’t haunted,” Julian continued. “It’s hungry. And it only listens to artists. To grief. To people like us.”

“I’m not like you.”

He smiled sadly. “You are. That’s why it chose you.”

Lena’s chest tightened. “Then maybe I should burn it all. Every painting. Every canvas. Every page in Cecelia’s journals.”

Julian didn’t flinch.

“Try.”

The challenge hung between them like smoke.

The next morning, Lena gathered every painting in the east wing.

Her own. Julian’s. Even Cecelia’s.

She dragged them outside. Into the dead garden.

Poured kerosene over them.

Lit a match.

The fire roared to life. For a moment, it felt like freedom.

Then the wind shifted and blew the flames backward.

Onto the grass. Toward the house.

It didn’t catch. The fire refused to spread.

The paintings burned—but only the edges. The center of each canvas remained untouched, defiant, still bearing its twisted images. And then the wind died, and the smoke spiraled upward like a silent scream.

Lena fell to her knees.

It won’t let me destroy them.

That night, she dreamt of the final portrait.

It stood in the hall, taller than a man. Her face merged with Julian’s. Their eyes black and weeping. Their mouths stitched shut.

At the bottom of the frame, in blood-red paint, was Cecelia’s voice:

“One must bleed. The other must remember.”

She woke up screaming.

And when she stumbled to the mirror above her vanity, she saw the reflection flicker—once—just long enough to show Julian’s face in place of hers.

Chapter Seven: The Final Portrait

Lena didn’t remember walking to the attic.

Her body moved as if pulled by invisible threads, her hand gripping a paintbrush she didn’t remember picking up. The air was thick with dust and dried flowers. Motes of light streamed through the cracked skylight above the easel, the canvas already stretched and waiting, blank, beckoning.

Julian stood in the corner, silent, his face lost in shadow. He didn’t look up.

“I dreamed of this,” she said.

“I know.”

Lena approached the easel like an altar. Everything had led here. The visions. The whispers. The unraveling of Cecelia’s journals. Even Julian—her brother, her captor, her reflection—was part of it.

“This is the painting she wanted,” Lena whispered.

“No,” Julian said, finally meeting her eyes. “This is the one you were meant to create.”

The distinction chilled her.

She squeezed the brush. Her fingers ached, stained in dried pigment from days of sleepless work.

“Why me?” she asked. “Why not you? You were already here. Already painting her visions.”

Julian stepped forward, his expression haunted.

“Because I was born from her madness. But you were born outside it. You had hope. You had light.” His voice cracked. “Cecelia believed only someone who had known the world—and then lost it—could finish her work. Someone with grief and love and clarity.”

Lena’s breath caught.

“She believed art is a curse,” he continued. “And the cure.”

Lena turned back to the canvas.

She dipped the brush in paint. Black. Red. Crimson. Shades she had never mixed before, yet somehow knew intimately. They moved like liquid memory.

The first stroke landed like thunder.

She didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Her arm moved in rhythms older than her, guided by instinct and something deeper. Every brushstroke pulled something from her body—her pain, her doubt, her longing.

The image formed slowly.

Two figures.

Julian.

Herself.

Not as they were now, but as children. Twins, almost. Sitting under a twisted tree. One with a closed mouth. One with hollow eyes.

The house loomed behind them like a deity.

In the sky—Cecelia’s silhouette, a mass of shadows and eyes, her hands like wings.

Lena’s heart thundered in her chest.

She painted until her fingers bled.

Painted until her tears mixed with the pigment.

Painted until the brush snapped in half.

Then she stepped back.

Julian stared at the canvas. His lips moved, but no sound came. Finally, he whispered, “It’s done.”

But the house didn’t react.

There was no earthquake. No scream. No burst of light or collapse.

Just silence.

Then the painting moved.

Not in the way her other paintings had—where shadows shifted, or eyes blinked.

No.

This one breathed.

The tree rustled. The figures turned. Cecelia’s outline pulsed. And slowly, painfully, the painted Lena stood up—her body rising from the canvas like a woman waking from a grave.

Lena backed away, horror flooding her veins.

The painting’s version of Julian turned too, his mouth sewn shut, his hands dripping black ink.

They stepped toward the edge of the canvas.

“Julian,” Lena rasped. “What is this?”

He looked at her. And this time, she saw it—his face flickering, breaking like cracked glass.

He wasn’t Julian anymore.

He was the echo Cecelia had raised.

The Julian in the painting opened his mouth and screamed without sound.

The attic shook.

Lena ran.

Down the stairs. Through the halls. Every mirror screamed her reflection back at her. Every painting whispered her name.

She reached the front door—still locked.

Behind her, the sound of footsteps.

Not Julian’s.

Not Cecelia’s.

Hers.

The painted version.

Coming to take her place.

She turned just as the thing stepped into view—identical in face but not in soul. The eyes were too still. The smile was too wide. It didn’t breathe. I only watched.

Julian appeared behind it, half-shadow, half-boy.

“You have to choose,” he said.

Lena clenched her fists. “Choose what?”

“One must bleed,” he whispered. “The other must remember.”

The attic. The journals. The voices.

It all made sense.

Cecelia hadn’t wanted a masterpiece.

She wanted a prison.

One of them would be the vessel. The eternal memory. The cursed canvas.

The other would walk free, burdened with remembering.

Lena looked at the painted version of herself.

Then at Julian.

“I won’t be your ghost,” she said.

The painted Lena tilted her head.

Julian stepped forward, sadness etched into every line of his face. “Then you know what has to happen.”

Lena’s hand closed around a shard of broken glass on the floor.

She didn’t hesitate.

She drove it into the painting’s chest.

The canvas screamed—she screamed—blood and paint spilling in one violent bloom. The portrait writhed, black veins spreading through the frame, until it cracked in half, bursting into flames that didn’t touch anything else.

Julian staggered, clutching his chest.

Lena caught him before he hit the floor.

“She’s gone,” she whispered.

“She always was,” he breathed.

And then, like ash, he dissolved.

Epilogue: The Last Gallery

Lena left Black Hollow at dawn.

The gates opened on their own. The road was waiting. The mansion behind her didn’t burn, didn’t crumble. It simply stood, as it always had, quietly watching her go.

She never looked back.

Years later, her name began appearing in obscure galleries.

Then mainstream ones.

Her paintings captivated people—not because of beauty, but because of something else. Something unsettling.

Viewers claimed the images changed over time.

That if you looked long enough, the figures blinked.

That the eyes followed you home.

But Lena never painted again.

Not truly.

She stopped holding brushes. Refused canvases. When asked, she simply smiled and said:

“All my masterpieces were left behind.”

And in the quietest moments—when the world was still, and the moonlight fell just right—she sometimes swore she could hear whispers in her sleep.

Calling her home.

THE END.