Chapter 005

Chapter 5: Irene in the Painting

Since the frog scooped out his heart, Yu Sheng felt like his heart had grown a lot harder to shake.

Like now. He woke from a dream that was wrong in every way, opened an eerie locked room, and found a talking painting. There was clearly something uncanny hiding in it. Even so, he stayed calm.

He even stepped up, took the painting off the wall, and examined it closely.

The frame had weight to it, the kind that felt expensive in the hand. Looking closer, he saw the black-painted surface was covered with intricate, elegant patterns. The lines felt like a stream of written symbols that flowed and twisted into vine-like shapes, merging perfectly into the decoration along the picture’s edge.

He knew nothing about painting or art, but he was sure this thing was worth a lot.

The thing hiding deep in the painting still refused to show itself. The corner bit of skirt drew back a little.

Yu Sheng tried angling his gaze to peer inside the picture, but saw nothing.

“I know you’re in there,” he said as he gave the heavy frame a little shake. He spoke to the painting without emotion: “Hiding now is only fooling yourself.”

There was a faint rustle in the corner of the image, but no reply.

He set the frame on the floor and crouched. As he did, he took out a lighter from his pocket.

He sparked a small flame and held it near the frame, his face blank: “I’ll count to three. If you don’t come out, I’ll burn this thing.”

Two or three seconds later, a small, soft voice answered from inside the painting: “A petty mortal flame is nothing. That does not harm an uncanny entity.”

Yu Sheng was sure he heard guilt behind the words.

So he touched the flame to one corner of the frame and said calmly: “Then I’ll try lighting it.”

The scream came almost at the same time: “Stop! You actually lit it!”

He snapped the lighter shut. Right then a figure jumped in a hurry from the thorny vine-like border of the picture.

It was a girl in a complex, gorgeous black gothic dress. A hairband edged with white lace sat on her head. Her hair was long and black, her skin white as snow, her face pretty, yet her eyes were a strange crimson. Those eyes were wide as she stared at Yu Sheng, checking if the human outside the frame would really burn her home.

He admitted he jumped when the girl popped into the center of the picture.

Looked at closely, the girl in the painting was not scary, even quite cute. But with the background so dim and gloomy and the sudden way she appeared, anything that sprang out of the image would make you jump. And she had eyes the color of fresh blood. She pressed her face right up to the canvas, and those red eyes seemed to fill the whole painting, which was even more unnerving.

“Don’t set it on fire,” the girl in the painting said as if pleading: “This is the only place I have to live.”

“Step back a little first,” Yu Sheng said as he kept a bit of distance from the painting. For some reason, her red eyes felt deeply wrong to him. The color seemed to seep into his memory and thoughts the longer he looked, hard to wipe away. To keep the upper hand in the talk, he forced himself not to look away. He added calmly: “I won’t light it.”

“Oh.” The girl in the picture was easy to talk to. She did not seem to notice his brief odd moment. She nodded and retreated to the center of the image. She sat down on the chair covered in thick red velvet, bent to pick up a plush teddy bear she had dropped, and hugged it to her chest. Then she sat very straight and kept watching Yu Sheng.

A gothic girl on a red velvet chair hugging a teddy bear. For a second, Yu Sheng felt like this was the original, normal scene of the painting.

He frowned slightly and noticed something off.

He saw her wrist where it showed bare. It was clearly a ball shape.

A human joint did not look like that.

A doll’s did.

Maybe his stare was too obvious. The girl in the picture shifted in her seat, a bit uneasy, and frowned at him: “Why are you staring at me?”

Yu Sheng opened his mouth. He almost asked about the wrist joint, but held the question back. He knew too little about this world. Asking about the supernatural domain might give himself away. He changed the question at the last second: “Who are you, and why are you here?”

The girl hesitated, then answered him.

“My name is Irene,” she said, adjusting her posture as if to look a bit more formal: “I come from Alice’s Little House. I am one of Alice’s Dolls… but that was a long time ago.”

Doll.

Yu Sheng caught that word at once. He glanced again at Irene’s ball-jointed wrist, so unlike a human’s. Then his attention locked on the two names she had said so naturally.

Alice’s Little House. Alice’s Dolls.

[What does that mean? I get what a doll is, and I can accept a talking doll or a doll jumping around inside a painting. But that ‘Alice’… what is that?] The Little House sounded like a place. It could also be an organization named after a place. And “Alice’s Dolls” sounded like the name of a group.

Was this girl in the painting a member of a larger group that called itself Alice’s Dolls?

Once his thoughts started, they ran wild.

[If there are more like her, how many? Do they all hang in people’s homes? In a city with high housing prices, they take up a whole room, lock the door, laugh at the owner for not having a key, and in truth a little lighter can scare them…] The idea of that organization’s main purpose felt very mysterious.

His silence went on a bit too long. Irene finally could not help speaking, her voice tiny: “Why did you stop talking… you are not still thinking of burning it, right?”

“Let me ask you something,” Yu Sheng said as he suddenly looked up, so serious that the girl in the painting flinched.

“Uh… go ahead,” she said.

He asked with a straight face: “Is that Alice’s Little House a group people hire to push down housing prices?”

“…Huh?” Irene said, stunned.

“I mean someone pays you, and you hang yourselves in other people’s homes, taking up a room and a piece of the floor, laughing at night and locking the door in the day, just to drag down the prices in the neighborhood. It’s like hanging at the property office door to help stabilize prices.”

Irene’s crimson eyes stared. It took her almost half a minute to catch up to his crazy line of thinking and understand what this man with a lighter meant. Angry now, she snapped: “You can insult me if you want, but you cannot insult the Progenitor of Dolls and my sisters. We… we are part of something very powerful…”

“Then why are you hanging in my house?” Yu Sheng cut her off with a glare: “And why is the door locked? Oh, and that dream I had, was that your doing too? And that annoying laugh…”

He threw out the questions in a row, riding his burst of anger. Right after, he felt a bit guilty. He remembered the frog on that rainy night and felt sure this painting, which was just as uncanny, was probably just as dangerous. The portrait doll who called herself Irene seemed easy to talk to now, but she might change in a second and attack, then lift that teddy bear and slam it into his face.

But he shook off the guilt fast. After all, the frog’s little operation had not caused any huge trouble. He had only died once. A portrait doll scared by a lighter was not going to eat him, right?

His heart was broad now. The world was already this strange, and he had died once. He did not want to worry so much. He wanted to figure out what all these uncanny things were. He would start with this painting.

Irene was even easier to talk to than he expected.

She did not attack. She did not raise the teddy bear to smash his face. Faced with his fierce questions, she only shrank in the chair and looked honestly a little… ashamed.

“This is an accident. I was not like this at first,” she said, uneasy, hugging the plush bear so hard it bent out of shape: “A long time ago I had an accident. I was sealed inside this painting and lost contact with the other dolls.”

She lifted her head and looked at the room outside the painting.

“As for why I’m in your home, I don’t know. I’m trapped in a picture and cannot choose where I’m hung. Are you sure you did not buy me at some art show one day and hang me on your wall?”

Yu Sheng said nothing. He could only stare.