Chapter 5 – Eileen in the Painting

Yu Sheng felt that ever since that frog had ripped his heart wide open, he’d somehow become a lot more broad-minded.

For example, right now — he had just woken from a bizarre dream that looked wrong no matter how you looked at it, opened a strangely locked room, found a talking oil painting, and could clearly tell that the painting was hiding something sinister inside — and he was still perfectly calm.

He even stepped forward, lifted the oil painting off the wall, and held it up before his eyes to examine it carefully.

The frame was quite heavy; its texture in his hands conveyed that it was worth a considerable sum. After closer inspection, he discovered that the surface of the jet-black frame was covered with intricate and exquisite patterns — the lines looked almost like some kind of continuously written text, yet they cleverly interlocked and twisted into vine-like structures, ultimately merging seamlessly with the decorative patterns along the edge of the canvas.

Yu Sheng didn’t understand paintings or art, but he felt certain that this thing was worth a fortune.

The figure hiding deep within the painting still refused to show itself; only the corner of a skirt hem at the edge of the canvas had retreated ever so slightly.

Yu Sheng tried to look at the interior of the painting from an angle, but saw nothing.

“I know you’re in there,” he said, shaking the heavy frame and addressing the painting. “Hiding like this is only fooling yourself.”

A faint rustling sound came from the corner of the canvas, but there was no reply.

Yu Sheng set the frame down on the floor and crouched, fishing a lighter out of his pocket at the same time.

He flicked it open and brought the flame close to the frame, his expression blank. “I’ll count to three. If you don’t come out, I’ll set this thing on fire.”

Two or three seconds later, a soft, delicate, childlike voice came from inside the painting: “…Ordinary mortal flames. That sort of thing doesn’t work on anomalous entities.”

But Yu Sheng was certain he could detect a note of guilt in that voice.

So he moved the flame directly to a corner of the frame: “Oh? Then let me try lighting it—”

A shriek rang out almost simultaneously with his action: “Don’t! You’re actually doing it!!”

Yu Sheng instantly extinguished the lighter, and immediately after, he saw a figure leap hurriedly out from what looked like the thorn-covered vine border of the painting.

It was a young girl dressed in an elaborate and ornate gothic black dress, wearing a headband adorned with white lace on her head. Her long hair was jet black, her skin as white as snow, and her features were adorable — yet she had a pair of distinctly inhuman crimson eyes. Those eyes were wide open at this moment, staring fixedly at Yu Sheng, as though confirming whether the human outside the frame would truly burn the painting.

Yu Sheng admitted that he had been startled when the girl suddenly leaped to the center of the canvas.

Although the girl in the painting wasn’t actually frightening upon closer inspection — she was even quite beautiful — with that gloomy, dim backdrop and that sudden manner of appearance, anything jumping out of a canvas like that would startle a person. Not to mention that the girl had a pair of eyes that looked soaked in blood — she then leaned closer to the surface of the painting, pressing her face completely against the canvas, so that her eyes nearly filled the entire oil painting, making her look even more uncanny.

“Don’t set it on fire,” the girl’s voice came from inside the painting. “This is my only home.”

“Step back a bit first,” Yu Sheng instinctively kept a small distance from the painting. For some reason, he always felt that the girl’s crimson eyes were unnervingly sinister — that shade of red, whenever it stared in his direction, seemed to gradually seep into his memories and thoughts, growing harder and harder to erase from his mind the longer he looked. But to maintain the upper hand in their conversation, he forced himself not to look away. “I can hold off on the fire.”

“Oh.” The girl in the painting was surprisingly easy to negotiate with. She seemed not to have noticed Yu Sheng’s momentary unease, gave a nod, and retreated to the center of the canvas, sitting down on a chair draped in thick red velvet. She then bent down to pick up a plush stuffed bear she’d apparently dropped on the floor, hugged it to her chest, and continued to stare straight at Yu Sheng’s movements.

A gothic girl hugging a stuffed bear while seated in a red velvet chair — for a fleeting moment, Yu Sheng felt like he was seeing the original, “normal” image of this “painting.”

But then his brow furrowed slightly as he noticed something off about the image.

He noticed the girl’s exposed wrists — they had an obvious… spherical structure.

Human joints could never be shaped like that.

A doll’s joints would be!

Perhaps his gaze from outside the painting was too obvious. The girl in the canvas shifted uncomfortably and frowned at Yu Sheng: “Why are you staring at me?”

Yu Sheng opened his mouth, intending at first to ask about her wrist joints, but stopped himself short just before speaking — he knew too little about this “world,” and rashly asking about matters in the supernatural realm might expose his weaknesses. So the question that had reached his lips was replaced with a different one: “…Who are you? Why are you here?”

The girl in the painting hesitated visibly for a moment, but after a brief pause, she answered Yu Sheng’s question.

“My name is Eileen,” she said, adjusting her posture slightly as if trying to appear more composed. “I come from ‘Alice’s Cottage’ and am one of Alice’s Dolls… but that was a very long time ago.”

A doll?

Yu Sheng keenly noticed that word, and instinctively glanced again at the clearly non-human spherical joint structure on “Eileen’s” wrist. Immediately after, his attention settled on the two phrases she had mentioned so naturally:

“Alice’s Cottage” and “Alice’s Dolls.”

What did that mean? He understood what a doll was. He could even use his imagination and his broad-mindedness to accept talking dolls and dolls cavorting inside oil paintings — but that “Alice”… what was that?

The cottage sounded like a place name, or possibly an organization named after a place. And “Alice’s Dolls”… sounded like a collective term for some kind of group?

The girl in the painting right in front of him was a member of a group who called themselves “Alice’s Dolls”?

Once Yu Sheng’s train of thought started going, it quickly became impossible to stop, and his associative mind began racing at full speed —

There were more like her? A whole group? Were they all hanging in people’s homes like she was? With housing prices this high, they were still occupying someone’s room, locking the door so no one could enter and mocking the homeowner for not having a key — yet in reality, a single lighter was all it took to intimidate one of them…?

…Somehow, the main purpose of this organization seemed awfully mysterious…

Perhaps Yu Sheng had been silent for a bit too long. Eileen finally couldn’t hold back and spoke up: “Why did you suddenly go quiet… You’re not still thinking about setting it on fire, are you?!”

“Let me ask you something.” Yu Sheng abruptly raised his head, and the seriousness in his expression startled even the girl in the painting.

“Ah… go ahead.”

Yu Sheng’s face was perfectly earnest: “Is that ‘Alice’s Cottage’ you mentioned a service specifically for driving down property values?”

Eileen: “…Huh?”

“You know — someone pays you, and you hang yourselves in strangers’ homes, occupying the room, lounging around, giggling to yourselves in the middle of the night while keeping the door locked during the day. The whole point is to drag down neighborhood property prices — sort of like hanging yourself at the property management office as your contribution to stabilizing housing costs…”

Eileen stared with her crimson eyes. It took nearly half a minute before she finally caught up with Yu Sheng’s deranged line of reasoning and understood what this lighter-wielding man was actually saying, at which point she immediately showed an indignant expression: “You… you can insult me, but you can’t insult the Ancestral Doll and my sisters! We… we are a very formidable…”

“Then why are you hanging in MY home!” Yu Sheng cut her off with a glare. “And with a locked door! Oh right, and that dream I had earlier — was that your doing too? And that infuriating laugh…”

He fired off a barrage of questions, riding the wave of his irritation to appear aggressive, but once he finished, he felt a little uneasy inside. He recalled the frog in that rainy night, and had a strong feeling that this equally sinister-looking painting before him was probably just as dangerous. This self-proclaimed doll named Eileen seemed easy to deal with right now, but for all he knew, she might change expressions at any second, suddenly turn hostile, and smash him with the stuffed bear…

But soon enough he shook off that unease, because he remembered that after the frog had “delighted” him, nothing particularly terrible had happened — he’d only died once, after all. Could the painting-dwelling doll whom he’d frightened with a lighter really swallow him whole?

Yu Sheng was broad-minded these days. This world was already so bizarre, and he had already died once in a burst of joy. He didn’t want to hold back so much anymore — he just wanted to understand all the bizarre things around him and what they were actually about… starting with this painting.

And “Eileen” was even easier to deal with than he had imagined.

The doll in the painting didn’t suddenly turn hostile or swing the stuffed bear at Yu Sheng’s face. Faced with his aggressive barrage of questions, she merely curled up a little in her chair, and her expression showed something that genuinely looked like… guilt.

“I… this was an accident on my part, I wasn’t always like this,” she said, fidgeting uneasily and squeezing the stuffed bear in her arms out of shape. “A long time ago I ran into an accident, and I was sealed inside this painting and lost contact with the other dolls…”

She then lifted her head and glanced around the room outside the oil painting.

“As for why I’m in your home — I… I don’t know either. I’m trapped inside a painting; I have no say in where I end up being hung. Are you sure you didn’t buy me yourself at some painting exhibition one day and hang me on your wall?”

Yu Sheng: “…”

Thanks to Mr. O of the Aurora Society for the Silver Sprout~

(End of Chapter)