Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Irene in the Painting

Yu Sheng felt that ever since that frog tore out his heart, he’d become a lot more laid-back.

For example, right now, he’d woken from a weird dream that felt wrong no matter how he looked at it, opened a creepy locked room, and found a talking painting. Even though there was clearly something wicked hiding inside it, he stayed calm.

He even stepped forward, took the painting off the wall, and held it close to study it.

The frame had real weight, and the feel in his hands screamed expensive. Up close, he saw that the pitch-black surface was covered in complex, exquisite patterns. The lines looked like a kind of continuous script, yet they linked together in a clever way, twisting into vine-like shapes that flowed perfectly into the border around the image.

Yu Sheng didn’t know art, but he was pretty sure this thing was worth a fortune.

And the thing hiding deep in the painting still refused to show itself. Only the corner of a skirt in the image drew back a little more.

Yu Sheng tried peering into the scene from an angle, but he couldn’t see anything.

“I know you’re in there,” he said, giving the heavy frame a shake. “Hiding like this is just lying to yourself.”

There was a faint rustle in the corner of the painting, but no answer.

Yu Sheng set the frame on the floor, squatted, and dug a lighter out of his pocket.

He flicked it on, held the flame near the frame, and said without expression, “I’ll count to three. If you don’t come out, I’m setting this thing on fire.”

Two or three seconds later, a thin, childish voice came from the painting. “…That’s just an ordinary flame. That won’t work on a creepy entity.”

But Yu Sheng was sure he heard guilt in that voice.

So he singed a corner of the frame.

A scream exploded at almost the exact same moment. “Don’t! You’re seriously lighting it?!”

Yu Sheng snapped the lighter shut. Then a figure hurried out from the edge of the scene, where thorny vines and tangled flowers seemed to grow into the darkness.

It was a young girl in an ornate black gothic dress. A hair clip trimmed with white lace rested in her hair. Her hair was Rapunzel-long and jet-black, her skin snow-white, her face cute—yet her eyes were a strange, unsettling scarlet.

Those eyes were wide as she stared straight at Yu Sheng, like she was checking whether the human outside the frame would really burn her home.

Yu Sheng admitted he’d jumped when she suddenly appeared.

Up close, the girl wasn’t actually terrifying. She was even pretty. But the dim, gloomy background and the way she’d popped out of nowhere would’ve startled anyone. And those blood-red eyes didn’t help. A second later, she leaned forward, pressed her face against the canvas, and her eyes nearly filled the entire painting.

It was deeply unsettling.

“Don’t light it,” the girl said. “This is the only place I have to live.”

“Back up a little,” Yu Sheng said, instinctively keeping some distance from the painting. He didn’t know why, but those scarlet eyes felt wicked—like that red could seep into his thoughts, leaving stains that got harder and harder to scrub out the longer he looked. Still, he forced himself not to look away. “I won’t burn it.”

“Oh.” The girl seemed easy to handle. She nodded and retreated to the center of the scene, sat on a chair covered in thick red velvet, then bent down to pick up a plush teddy bear she’d dropped earlier. Hugging it to her chest, she kept staring at Yu Sheng, tracking every move he made.

A gothic girl hugging a teddy bear on a red velvet chair. For a moment, Yu Sheng almost saw what this painting might have looked like when it was “normal.”

Then he noticed something off.

Her exposed wrist. The joint was clearly… spherical.

A human joint didn’t look like that.

That was how a doll’s joint looked.

Maybe his stare was too obvious. The girl shifted awkwardly, frowned at him, and asked, “Why are you staring at me?”

Yu Sheng opened his mouth. At first he wanted to ask about her wrist, but he swallowed it. He knew too little about this world. Asking the wrong thing might expose how clueless he was, and he wasn’t sure that was safe.

So he changed his question at the last second. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

The girl hesitated, but after a moment, she answered.

“My name is Irene,” she said, straightening as if to look more formal. “I’m from Alice Little House. I’m one of Alice’s dolls… but that was a very long time ago.”

A doll?

Yu Sheng’s eyes flicked again to the ball-jointed wrist, then locked onto the two phrases she’d said so casually: Alice Little House, and Alice’s dolls.

He understood what dolls were. With enough imagination—and enough nerves—he could even accept a doll that talked, or a doll that moved inside a painting.

But Alice?

That sounded like a place, or maybe an organization. And “Alice’s dolls” sounded like a collective title—like there were more of them.

Yu Sheng’s imagination took off at full speed.

So there wasn’t just one?

There was a whole group?

Were they all hanging in people’s homes like this, taking up entire rooms? Doors locked, keys missing, laughing in the dark—yet a lighter was enough to scare them into behaving?

…Somehow, the purpose of this “organization” felt weirdly mysterious.

Maybe he’d gone quiet too long. Irene finally couldn’t hold it in. “Why did you suddenly stop talking… You’re not still thinking about lighting it, are you?!”

“Let me ask you something.” Yu Sheng looked up. The seriousness on his face clearly startled her.

“Uh… go ahead.”

Yu Sheng kept a straight face. “That Alice Little House you mentioned—does it take jobs specifically to crush housing prices?”

Irene blinked. “…Huh?”

“Like, someone pays you, and you hang yourselves in other people’s homes, taking up a room and lying around. You laugh at night, lock the door in the daytime, and the goal is to drive down the neighborhood’s property values. Basically, you haunt the local property management office to help ‘stabilize’ housing prices…”

Irene stared at him with those scarlet eyes. It took her nearly half a minute to catch up with his train of thought. Then her face went red with anger.

“You… you can insult me, but you can’t insult the doll progenitor or my sisters! We… we’re very powerful…”

“Then why are you hanging in my house?!” Yu Sheng snapped. “And you locked a door! And what about that dream I had earlier—was that you? And that laugh that made me want to punch something?”

He fired off questions one after another, using anger to try to look intimidating. But the moment he finished, he felt a little shaky inside.

He remembered that rainy night—the frog, the freezing water, the way his heart had been ripped out—and he couldn’t help thinking this painting might be just as dangerous. Irene seemed easy to talk to now, but what if she changed in the next second? What if she snapped and dragged him into the canvas?

He forced down the jitters.

After the frog had “cheered him up,” nothing truly catastrophic had happened… aside from dying once. Compared to that, could a portrait doll who could be bluffed with a lighter really eat him alive?

Yu Sheng’s heart had gotten “wide” lately. The world was already twisted beyond sense, and he’d already tasted a kind of happiness that literally killed him. He didn’t want to live in constant fear. He just wanted answers—starting with this painting.

And Irene was even easier to deal with than he expected.

She didn’t explode into violence. She didn’t swing the teddy bear at his face. Faced with his barrage of questions, she only shrank back on the chair, and—of all things—looked guilty.

“I… I’m an accident case. I wasn’t like this before,” she said, twisting uneasily and squeezing the teddy bear until it bent out of shape. “A long time ago, I had an accident. I was sealed inside this painting, and I lost contact with the other dolls…”

She lifted her head and looked out at the room beyond the frame.

“As for why I’m in your house… I don’t know either. I’m trapped in a painting. I can’t decide where I get hung. Are you sure you didn’t buy me at some art exhibit one day and hang me on your wall? Then you just… forgot?”

Yu Sheng said nothing.