Chapter 5: Irene in the Painting

Chapter 5: Irene in the Painting

Yu Sheng felt that ever since that frog had ripped open his chest and dug out his heart, he had become much more broad-minded.

For example, right now, he had woken from a bizarre dream that was obviously wrong no matter how one looked at it, opened a creepy locked room, found a talking oil painting, and there was clearly some kind of sinister thing hiding inside that painting. Yet he still remained remarkably calm.

He even stepped forward, took the painting down from the wall, and carefully examined it right before his eyes.

The frame had considerable weight to it, and the feel of it in his hands suggested it was extremely valuable. After closer inspection, he discovered that the black frame was covered in intricate and exquisite patterns. The lines resembled some sort of continuously written script, yet they were cleverly connected and twisted into vine-like structures, eventually merging seamlessly with the decorative patterns along the edge of the painting itself.

Yu Sheng knew nothing about paintings and nothing about art, but he felt certain this thing was worth a fortune.

The figure hiding deep within the oil painting still refused to show itself. Only the hem of the skirt in the corner of the picture retreated slightly farther back.

Yu Sheng tried looking into the painting from the corner of his vision, but saw nothing.

“I know you’re in there,” he said, shaking the heavy frame. “Hiding now is just lying to yourself.”

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

Yu Sheng set the frame on the floor, crouched down, and pulled a lighter from his pocket.

He lit it and brought the flame close to the frame, expressionless.

“I’m counting to three. If you don’t come out, I’ll set this thing on fire.”

Two or three seconds later, a delicate childish voice came from inside the painting.

“...It’s only an ordinary mortal flame. That thing is useless against strange entities.”

But Yu Sheng was certain he could hear guilt in that voice.

So he directly held the flame against one corner of the frame.

“Oh? Then let’s see if it burns.”

The scream rang out almost simultaneously with his action.

“Don’t! You’re actually lighting it?!”

Yu Sheng immediately extinguished the lighter.

Then he saw a figure hurriedly jump out from the edge of the painting, which resembled thorny flower vines.

It was a young girl wearing an elaborate and luxurious black Gothic dress. A hair clip trimmed with white lace adorned her head. Her long hair was jet black, her skin pale as snow, and her appearance adorable. Yet she possessed a pair of abnormal crimson eyes.

Those eyes were wide open at the moment, staring fixedly at Yu Sheng, as if trying to determine whether the human outside the frame would really burn the painting.

Yu Sheng admitted that he had been startled when the girl suddenly jumped into the centre of the painting.

Although the girl in the painting was not actually frightening upon closer inspection, and was even quite beautiful, the gloomy and dark background combined with such a sudden entrance would have startled anyone. Moreover, the girl possessed eyes that looked as though they were soaked in blood.

Then she moved right up to the front of the picture, pressing her entire face against the canvas. Those eyes nearly filled the entire oil painting, making the scene look even more bizarre.

“Don’t set it on fire,” the girl’s voice came from within the painting. “This is the only place I have to live.”

“Take a few steps back first.”

Yu Sheng instinctively kept some distance from the painting. For some reason, he felt those crimson eyes were exceptionally sinister. Whenever they stared at him, the red seemed to seep gradually into his memories and thoughts. The longer he looked, the harder it became to erase them from his mind.

But in order to maintain the upper hand in the conversation, he forced himself not to look away.

“I won’t burn it.”

“Oh.”

The girl in the painting proved surprisingly cooperative. She seemed not to have noticed Yu Sheng’s momentary abnormal reaction. Nodding, she retreated to the centre of the picture and sat down on the chair covered with thick red velvet.

Then she bent over, picked up a plush teddy bear she had previously thrown onto the floor, hugged it in her arms, and continued staring at Yu Sheng from her seat.

A Gothic girl sitting in a red velvet chair while clutching a teddy bear.

For a moment, Yu Sheng felt as though he had glimpsed the painting’s original, “normal” image.

Then he frowned slightly as he noticed something unusual.

He saw the girl’s exposed wrist.

It was clearly a spherical structure.

Human joints could not look like that.

Only dolls had joints like that.

Perhaps because the gaze from outside the painting was too obvious, the girl shifted uncomfortably and frowned at Yu Sheng.

“Why are you staring at me?”

Yu Sheng opened his mouth. At first he had intended to ask about her wrist joints, but he forcibly stopped himself before speaking.

He still knew very little about this world. Carelessly asking questions related to the supernatural might expose his ignorance.

So at the last moment he changed the question.

“...Who are you? Why are you here?”

The girl in the painting clearly hesitated.

But after a moment, she answered.

“My name is Irene.” She adjusted her sitting posture slightly, as though trying to appear more formal. “I’m from Alice’s Cottage, and I’m one of Alice’s Dolls. But that was a very long time ago.”

A doll?

Yu Sheng immediately noticed the word. At the same time, he glanced again at the clearly non-human spherical joints on Irene’s wrists.

Then his attention shifted to the two terms she had mentioned so naturally.

Alice’s Cottage.

Alice’s Dolls.

What did those mean?

He understood dolls. As for talking dolls and dolls bouncing around inside oil paintings, he could accept those through imagination and broad-mindedness.

But this Alice...

What exactly was that?

The cottage sounded like a place name, or perhaps an organisation named after a location. And Alice’s Dolls sounded like the collective name of some group.

The girl before him, the one inside the painting, was merely one member of a large group calling themselves Alice’s Dolls?

Once Yu Sheng’s train of thought started moving, it instantly became impossible to stop. His imagination began racing wildly.

There was more than one like her?

A whole group of them?

Could they all be hanging inside people’s homes like her?

Housing prices were already high enough, and they still occupied an entire room in someone else’s house. They locked the door and refused to let it be opened, mocked the homeowner for lacking a key, yet could be intimidated by a simple lighter...

...For some reason, the primary purpose of this organisation felt rather mysterious.

Perhaps because Yu Sheng had remained silent for too long, Irene finally could not hold back.

“Why did you suddenly stop talking...? You’re not still thinking about setting it on fire, are you?!”

“Let me ask you something.”

Yu Sheng suddenly raised his head.

The seriousness in his expression startled even the girl in the painting.

“Ah... go ahead.”

Yu Sheng spoke with complete sincerity.

“Is that Alice’s Cottage of yours specifically hired to drive down housing prices?”

Irene: “...Huh?”

“I mean, people pay you, and then you hang yourselves inside other people’s homes, occupy rooms, lounge around all day, secretly laugh in the middle of the night, keep doors locked during the day, all for the purpose of lowering property values in the neighbourhood. It’s basically the same as hanging yourselves in front of the property management office to contribute to stabilising housing prices...”

Irene stared with her crimson eyes.

It took nearly half a minute before she finally managed to follow Yu Sheng’s lunatic train of thought and understand what the lighter-wielding man before her was talking about.

She immediately looked furious.

“You... you can insult me, but you can’t insult the Ancestor of Dolls or my sisters! I... we’re a very powerful...”

“Then why are you hanging in my house?!”

Yu Sheng immediately glared and interrupted her.

“And locking a door while you’re at it! Oh right, and that dream I had earlier, was that your doing too? And that annoying laugh...”

He fired off a whole string of questions.

His anger gave him a fierce and imposing manner, but once he finished, he felt slightly uncertain again.

He remembered the frog from that rainy night.

The painting before him seemed just as sinister.

The doll calling herself Irene appeared easy to talk to right now, but perhaps in the next second her expression would change and she would suddenly attack, bringing down the teddy bear in her hand and killing him before the painting.

But he quickly shook off that uncertainty.

He remembered that after the frog had “opened up his heart,” nothing particularly terrible had happened.

He had only died once.

Surely this doll in the painting, one that could be intimidated by a lighter, was not going to eat him.

Yu Sheng was very broad-minded now.

This world was already bizarre enough as it was.

And after experiencing happiness intense enough to kill him, he no longer wanted to worry about so many things.

He just wanted to understand what all the strange things around him actually were.

Starting with this painting.

And Irene proved even easier to talk to than he had expected.

The doll in the painting neither launched an attack nor swung her teddy bear into Yu Sheng’s face.

Faced with his aggressive string of accusations, she merely shrank back slightly in her chair.

There was even a trace of guilt on her face.

“I... I’m an unusual case. I wasn’t originally like this.”

She shifted uneasily, squeezing the teddy bear in her arms until it became misshapen.

“A long time ago, I encountered an accident. I was sealed inside this painting and lost contact with the other dolls...”

She looked up again and glanced around the room outside the painting.

“As for why I’m in your house, I... don’t know either. I’m trapped inside a painting. It’s not as if I can decide where I’m hung. Are you sure you didn’t buy me at an art exhibition one day and hang me on your wall yourself?”

Yu Sheng: “...”