Chapter 12.3

 

Roisin moved to the edge of the nearest painting. From this angle she could see across the surface of the artwork, where the coruscating prisms were visible whenever they shifted to catch the reflections of light. When she moved back to a front view, she couldn’t see them at all. How on earth was this effect achieved? Was it a physical effect? An optical one? A product added to the paint?

She ran her fingers lightly over the frame. There was nothing unusual there. No electronics. No mirrors. No projectors. “Do you know who brought them?”

The assistant hesitated. “No. They were just… here. One morning. Leaning against the door.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“I know,” the assistant said. “But there’s something else.”

Roisin turned to her. “What?”

The assistant swallowed. “There were more of them.”

Roisin’s breath caught. “More?”

“Yeah,” the assistant said. “Five or six. But when we opened the gallery the next day, half of them were gone.”

“Gone?”

“Just… gone. No one took them. No one bought them. They just weren’t here anymore.”

Roisin stared at her. “And you didn’t report it?”

“Who would I report it to?” the assistant shrugged, and momentarily Roisin could see her clavicles, devoid of the skin covering them, naked as the day they’d be exhumed. At any other time she would have derived a thrill of pleasure from the thought, but for now she brushed it away.

“It’s not like we have CCTV or anything,” the assistant continued. “And nothing else was touched. No break‑in. No damage. Just… missing.” She sighed, shaking her head, a few grey hairs glinting in the gallery lights. “Please forget I said we don’t have cameras.”

“But that doesn’t make sense.” Roisin narrowed her eyes, trying to imagine how the paintings might vanish from the gallery. “They can’t just appear and disappear.”

“I know,” the assistant said, rubbing her arms as though the room had grown colder. “Toni, that’s the owner, said the same thing. She thought maybe the artist came back for them. But why leave some and take others? And why not say anything? And how did they get in?”

“And if they can get in, why leave them outside the day before?” Roisin looked back at the paintings. The nearest canvas seemed to pulse faintly, as though the colours were shifting under the surface. She felt the same pressure behind her ribs—the sense of being watched or recognised. She looked at how they were fixed to the gallery wall. “Have you checked behind them?”

“Behind them how?” The assistant held up her hands. “They’re fixed to the wall.”

“But the frames are quite thick.” Roisin used her finger to measure the depth of the nearest frame. It was the full length of her index finger, right down to the wedding to her third finger. She held it up like da Vinci’s Madonna. “A hundred millimetres at least, and the paintings are less than half that”

“Why would you think of that?

“I read a locked-room mystery story about a theft from a gallery, once, and the way the thief stole the painting was to store it behind one that was already there, then work for a moving company when the collection was sent to the next gallery. All they had to do was wait until they were alone and strip the stolen one from behind the one being moved.”       

“Clever.” The assistant nodded. “I wouldn’t have thought of that. That’s way cleverer than how my great-grandparent’s artwork was stolen.”

“How did they lose theirs?”

“They were born Jewish in Germany in the 1930s.”                                                    

“Ah.” Roisin had no words to say that wouldn’t sound like hollow soundbites of the ‘thoughts and prayers’ variety, though she hadn’t prayed for anything other than a winning lottery ticket since she was eight years old. “What did the missing ones look like?”

The assistant hesitated. “Honestly? I don’t remember them clearly. They were like these, but… different. I only saw them for a few minutes before we opened. When I came back the next day, they were gone.”

Roisin swallowed. “And no one else saw them?”

“Other than Antonia, no. And whoever painted them, obvs.”

The gallery felt smaller now, the air thicker. Roisin stepped closer to the nearest painting, her breath shallow. The shapes were unmistakable—an arm dissolving into colour, a face half‑formed, half‑erased. She felt a strange certainty settle over her, as though the painting were revealing itself to her alone.

The assistant watched her, uneasy. “You okay?”

Roisin didn’t answer immediately. She lifted a hand, stopping just short of the canvas. The air between her fingers and the paint felt charged, like static before a storm.

“They’re changing,” she whispered.

The assistant blinked. “What?”

“These paintings,” Roisin said, her voice thin. “They’re not the same as yesterday.”

The assistant looked again, squinting. “I really don’t see it.”

Roisin lowered her hand. “Maybe you’re not meant to.”

The assistant frowned. “What does that mean?”

Roisin didn’t know how to explain it. She didn’t know how to say that the paintings felt like echoes of the woman on the steps, like glimpses of a transformation she wasn’t supposed to witness. She didn’t know how to say that the colours felt alive, that the shapes felt unfinished, that the canvases felt like thresholds.

Instead, she said softly, “I think the artist knew what they were painting.”

The assistant gave a nervous laugh. “Well, I’d hope so.”

“No,” Roisin said, turning to her. “I mean—they aren’t abstracts. They’re portraits of real people.”

The assistant’s smile faltered. “Why do you think that?” She joined Roisin at the surface and stared hard. “They don’t look like any portrait I’ve ever seen.”

Roisin looked back at the paintings. The face in the nearest one seemed clearer now, the hollow of the cheekbone more defined. She felt a chill crawl up her spine. “That’s because the people they depict aren’t alive anymore.”

The assistant took a small step back.