Violet Mortis's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Violet set her charcoal down and turned from the wall. The brother was gone. The room was hers now, and the sketches watched her from every side, the sister's face repeated until it blurred. She wiped her hands on her coat and noticed a draft along the baseboard. Cold air pulled from a seam in the plaster. She pressed her palm flat. The wall gave. She pushed harder. A panel swung inward on a hidden hinge. Behind it sat a narrow room, no wider than her arms could reach. A tall cabinet filled the far wall, its glass doors fogged with dust. Inside stood rows of small painted faces, stacked on every shelf. Violet stepped closer and rubbed the glass clean. Each portrait had been crossed out. Heavy charcoal Xs cut through every face. Underneath the strikes, Violet could still see the work — careful eyes, soft mouths, real people. Someone had painted them, then erased them, then drawn the sister's face over and over on top. The missing woman had not started here. She had buried someone else's work first. Violet opened the cabinet. On the lowest shelf lay a small whiteboard. A man with blonde hair and blue eyes smiled out from its surface, his face the only one not struck through. She lifted it. The paint was old, the edges chipped. She did not know him. She had never known him. But the sister had kept him clean while crossing out all the rest. Violet sat on the floor with the board across her knees. She pulled a worn journal from a stack beside the cabinet. The cover read Sister's Sketch. Inside, page after page held early studies of the same blonde man, drawn from life, drawn slowly, drawn right. The sister had learned him by looking. Not by remembering. Violet pressed her thumb to a sketch and felt the ridges of pencil under her skin. She stood. She tucked the journal under her arm and carried the whiteboard out into the upper room. She set it against the wall beside her finished sketch of the sister. Two faces now. One she had stolen, one she had found. She would learn the blonde man the way the sister had learned him — by looking, not by remembering. The cabinet behind her stayed open, its crossed-out portraits waiting. She would come back for them. But not yet.