Out of Sight

“Why do I do these things?” I murmured to the dark stretch of dank hallway before me.

I had been submerged in this half-light for…an hour? Maybe? Let me tell you: when behind you is shadows, and ahead of you is shadows, and beside you is mossy, faded brick, you’ll start talking to the darkness, too.

At least I wasn’t expecting an answer from the stones yet.

When the ancient portrait of my ancient, long-deceased great aunt had tumbled from the ancient wall at my childish slamming of the bedroom door, I had expected a full-on beating from my uncle, following the spat we’d just had as he, once again, blundered my name for that of his missing daughter. His grandmother had been his favourite person in the world, and, once she had passed on and he had inherited this mansion, he had taken copious action to ensure that every room remained a perfect memorialization of who she had been while alive. That certainly didn't include her renowned regality scoffing at the floorboards.

But, as old portraits always seem to do, the staring eyes had beckoned me closer and closer until I was staring right back, head tilted sideways to match her new viewpoint.

And as old portraits always do, as I tilted my head side to side, her gaze had tilted with me, divulging the barest whisper of torn wallpaper from where she had hung. And as I had peeled back the wallpaper, my expectation of a beating slipped away into my expectation of the grandest adventure of my dreams.

And as I had stepped wordlessly into the now-revealed 4x2-foot cut-out in the stone wall, I already knew not to expect light or guidance or even a proper exit down the path I was about to take.

So why did I do these things?

I glanced behind me again. The strip of light from where I had entered had vanished about 14 turns ago. This hidden tunnel seemed to have been designed to spiral into the depths of…what, exactly? The mansion was big – huge, really. But I knew there was no way it had suddenly gained the square footage required for me to have gone this far without doubling back yet.

And if I had doubled back, then surely the turns would have gotten steadily wider again. But I still spiralled tighter.

And now the floor was slanting down just enough to be uncomfortable in the dark. And there was the dull “skoosh” of rats scurrying somewhere that was mysteriously not in the immediate tunnel with me. And the floor at the last turn had been littered with discarded murals and sketched silhouettes of family members long-forgotten. And the turn twice before that had had a smell so rank that I couldn’t not examine the smeared, molding artworks and wonder if one of them had been buried down here.

I had given up trusting the narrow slats of light that burned through the tunnel walls in peculiar places; their impression of being another secret doorway just a cruel trick that led, somehow, into even darker, more ominous chasms. And while some of them had the tell-tale breeze that promised a way out, the whisper hidden beneath that promise was a blood-curdling sound. And while the paintings’ eyes may have had the ability to move separate of their bodies, mine had no such competence, and often found themselves blank with panic while my feet stumbled for the safety of the monotonous outer tunnel.

At least two hours now. And what I would have given for the slimy, eroded brick to begin to answer my questions.

I was used to getting answers. I was good at asking the right questions, questions that people wanted to answer.

My cousins, in particular, had never left me unsatisfied. How could they? Growing up in a place like this, with a life like this, being peppered with questions by someone like me, who had grown up in a townhouse on a middle-class block of a middle-class city with a middle-class future expected before me.

I always had questions they couldn’t wait to answer, and while I knew some of them had to be stretches of their imagination, I had been free to ask, and they had always obliged.

But these walls weren’t my cousins, though they shared the similarity of being buried out of sight and threatening to take me with them…

How far gone – mentally – now was I that I took comfort in the curiosity of where their portraits were? Wasn’t that how places like this worked: the faces of the deceased displayed prominently and passionately for all to see?

But the acrylic-and-canvas-strewn floor a while ago had disclosed otherwise. And none of them had been the resplendent hubristics of my bygone counterparts.

Another tilt in the floor’s decline.

A stumble. A grumble.

“A bumbling tumble,” I finished the unspoken rhyme aloud, hand pressed against the wall for support.

My fingertips dug into the mortar for reassurance, but withdrew abruptly at the notice that the brick was dry. Chalky. Crumbling. Old tapestries and derelict tableaus hanging haphazardly from loosened screws and snapped twine.

Where was my insistent slime?

“You’ve been with me all this time.”

I examined the surly faces. Couldn’t not do it.

“And yet where are The Partners in – ?”

Choked off by the sudden burst of dust and silt that assaulted my face, I stumbled back from the massive portrait of the Dahlmer Triplets, crafted what must have been mere days before their unsolved murder, as it crashed to the sedimented floor.

From the shattered porcelain frame, her eyes stared up at me, always bulbous in real life, and expertly rendered in smears of coloured oils. Her brothers, whose sassy smirks had never failed to arouse both suspicion and intrigue, whose prominently painted eyes held me with rapture in the perfect duplication to their former selves. The three of them together. Their image so alive that I could be mistaken for the dead one in my breathlessness.

Buried out of sight…

With an insufficient swallow at the lump in my throat, I reached my hand forward, watching with astonishment as the space between fingers and faces lessened, and the colours that had taken longer to dry than their correlative cadavers settled further to the granular ground, and I reached more earnestly to keep the delicate folds from the desolate floor.

And, too late, did I notice that the canvas wasn’t falling, but reaching. Wasn’t tumbling, but fissuring. Was breathing clearer than I was, and craning its neck down the passageway beside me as I peered in pure petrifaction at the dainty confirmation of my cousin, the ruined creation now swung about her shoulders like a cape.

Her bulbous blues spanned back to me, touched with humour at my stricken stance, and her agile hands, never even warm in life, gripped my shoulders. She leaned in, nose brushing my cheek in our old mimicry of a greeting, and she leaned back, and her arms dropped to her sides, and a smirk to put her brothers to shame creased the dimples of her shadow-veiled features, and her hand reached for mine, and she pulled me in close.

And the voice that I had never expected to hear again took one last stolen glance down the abandoned tunnel, and then breathed across my ear in the murky darkness, “Can you keep a secret?”