PAINTED IN BLOOD

Chapter 4: Midnight in the Gallery

Cora was asleep when I got back to the room.

Or she was pretending to be, which with Cora I was beginning to understand were two very different things. She lay perfectly still on her side, facing the wall, her breathing slow and even in the way that people's breathing is slow and even when they are concentrating on making it slow and even.

I didn't say anything. I set my bag down, changed quietly, and got into bed.

I stared at the ceiling for a long time.

There are things in this building that you are not equipped to understand yet.

I turned the sentence over in my mind the way you turn a stone over to see what lives underneath it. He had said yet. Not ever. Not at all. Yet — which implied a timeline. A point at which understanding became possible.

Which implied he was already thinking about that point.

I told myself that was not a comforting thought.

It was, inexplicably, a little bit comforting.

I found the entrance to the restricted gallery by accident.

Three days after the library. A Thursday afternoon, late, when the light through the studio windows had gone the particular deep gold that meant the sun was almost gone and I had been painting for four hours without stopping and my back ached and my hands were stained to the wrist in prussian blue and burnt sienna.

I was looking for the bathroom.

The west corridor on the third floor was exactly where the woman at reception had said it was — and exactly as restricted, in the sense that the door at the end was fitted with a lock that looked significantly more serious than anything else in the building. Old iron. Heavy. The kind of lock that suggested whoever installed it was not interested in keeping out curious students so much as keeping in whatever was on the other side.

I should have turned around.

The door was open.

Not wide open — just slightly, a few inches, enough to let out a thin line of warm light that fell across the corridor floor like something spilled. I stood in the hallway and looked at it for a moment.

Then I pushed it open and went inside.

The gallery was not what I expected.

I had imagined storage — the word the receptionist had used — boxes and covered furniture and the accumulated debris of a century and a half of institutional existence. Dust sheets and forgotten things.

What I found instead was a room the size of a small ballroom, lit by a series of old iron chandeliers that held actual candles — not electric imitations, actual candles, burning low and steady in the still air. The walls were hung floor to ceiling with paintings. Dozens of them. Maybe more.

I walked in slowly.

The paintings were portraits, mostly. Different sizes, different styles spanning what looked like decades — centuries, possibly. Some were formal, the subjects posed and composed in the manner of official portraiture. Others were more intimate. A woman reading by a window. A young man with paint on his hands looking somewhere off-canvas with an expression that suggested he hadn't known he was being observed.

They were extraordinary. Every one of them. The kind of work that made you feel the inadequacy of your own ability in your chest rather than your head.

I moved along the wall, reading the small cards fixed below each frame.

Names. Dates. A year of study.

Miriam Cross. 1994.

Thomas Hall. 1990.

Anisa Reeves. 1987.

I stopped.

I knew these names.

I pulled Cora's list from my jacket pocket — I had been carrying it since she showed it to me, folded small, a habit I hadn't examined — and unfolded it with hands that were not entirely steady.

Miriam Cross. 1994. Left suddenly. No explanation given.

Thomas Hall. 1990. Withdrew citing medical reasons. Never contacted the academy again.

Anisa Reeves. 1987. Missing. Case remains open.

I looked at the portrait of Anisa Reeves for a long time.

She had been painted in three-quarter profile, looking slightly upward, dark hair loose around her shoulders. She looked young — younger than nineteen, somehow, in the way that some people look younger when they are painted than they do in photographs. There was something in her expression that I couldn't name. Not fear. Not happiness. Something in between — something that looked like a person standing at the edge of a decision they hadn't made yet.

I understood, looking at her, that she had not left voluntarily.

I understood it the way you understand certain things — not because of evidence, but because of the particular quality of the silence around a thing that is true.

"You shouldn't be in here."

I didn't jump this time. I had been half-expecting his voice — had felt, in the way I was beginning to feel his presence before I registered it consciously, that the air in the room had changed.

Professor Voss stood in the doorway.

He was not in his usual jacket. He wore a dark shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows — the first time I had seen his arms, I realised, and noted with the detached clarity of someone filing information away that his forearms were marked with faint silver lines. Old scars. Dozens of them, thin as threads, running in patterns that didn't look accidental.

He looked at my hands. At Cora's list. At the portrait of Anisa Reeves.

He said nothing.

"You know who she is," I said.

It wasn't a question. He looked at the portrait the way you look at something you have looked at many times before — with the specific exhaustion of familiarity.

"Yes," he said.

"What happened to her?"

A long silence. He moved into the room — not toward me, but along the opposite wall, his hands clasped behind his back, looking at the paintings the way a person looks at graves.

"She was taken," he said finally. "By someone who wanted what she had."

"What did she have?"

He stopped walking. Turned to look at me across the room.

"The same thing you have," he said quietly.

The candles shifted in some movement of air I couldn't feel, and the light moved across his face, and for just a moment his eyes caught it in a way that made them look — not red, exactly. Deeper than red. The colour of something very old and very dark that had learned, over a long time, to stay very still.

"Sit down, Miss Blackwell," he said.

"I'm fine standing."

"I know." Something moved at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile. "Sit down anyway."

There was a wooden bench along the centre of the room, the kind put in galleries for people to sit and look at art. I sat on one end of it. He stood at the other end, not sitting, not moving closer. A careful distance.

"What I am about to tell you," he said, "cannot leave this room."

"I'm not going to agree to that before I know what it is."

He looked at me for a moment. "No," he said. "I don't suppose you are." A pause. "Ask me one question. I will answer it truthfully. After that, you leave this corridor and you don't come back alone."

One question.

I looked at the portraits on the wall. At Anisa Reeves looking toward something off-canvas. At the list in my hands with thirty-two names on it, and all the silence around every single one.