What compels visitors to stare at that abstract painting for hours? Why does the temperature drop precisely during auction lot 37? How did those bizarre shadows appear in every photograph of the east wing? What causes the strange acoustics that make whispers sound like chanting, and why do the displayed faces seem to age overnight?
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How funny things are! You go to those museums and galleries and think what a damned bore they are and then, when you least expect it, you find that something you’ve seen comes in useful. It shows art and all that isn’t really waste of time.
― W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre
The Meridian Gallery had always prided itself on acquiring the most… unique pieces. When Marcus inherited the establishment from his eccentric uncle, he discovered a basement collection that hadn’t seen daylight in decades.
The paintings were exquisite, almost impossibly lifelike. Portraits of men and women from various eras, their eyes holding depths that seemed to shift in the flickering gaslight. Marcus felt drawn to display them, despite finding no record of their provenance in his uncle’s meticulous files.
The first patron went missing on opening night. Security footage showed her walking toward the new exhibition, but never leaving. The police found nothing—no signs of struggle, no exits unaccounted for. Just her purse, dropped before a portrait of a Victorian woman whose smile seemed somehow wider than it had been that morning.
More disappearances followed. Always the same pattern: visitors would enter the gallery alone, drawn inexorably to the basement collection. The portraits grew more vibrant with each incident, the painted figures more animated, more aware.
Marcus began spending nights in the gallery, watching. He saw them moving within their frames after midnight—subtle shifts, breathing motions, lips that seemed to whisper soundlessly. The Victorian woman’s eyes would track his movements across the room.
On the seventh night, he understood. The paintings weren’t just portraits—they were windows. Or perhaps prisons. The missing patrons hadn’t vanished; they’d been absorbed, their essence captured and bound within the canvas, joining the collection of souls his uncle had been gathering for decades.
As dawn approached, Marcus felt the familiar pull. His feet moved without his command toward an empty frame hanging at the collection’s center. The canvas was blank, waiting. Behind him, forty-three pairs of painted eyes watched with hungry anticipation as he realized this had always been his inheritance—not the gallery, but a permanent place within its walls.
The morning custodian found only an empty gallery and one new portrait: a man in modern dress, his mouth open in an eternal, silent scream.
