The Vanishment by Jonathan Aycliffe Read Free Book Online Page A

years. I had come close to destroying our life together, I know, and Sarah had taken a long time to forgive me. Nonetheless, I loved her, and her absence distressed me terribly. I could not bear the thought of separation, of real, lasting separation, of never seeing her again. And that other, darker thought, the possibility that something unpleasant had happened to her, that filled me with dread.
    Around midnight, depressed by my fruitless vigil, I trudged upstairs. I was in no mood for sleep, yet the thought of spending the rest of the night downstairs was loathsome. At the entrance to our bedroom, I hesitated. The thought had caught me unawares, that I should look at the paintings Sarah had completed, the ones she had stored on the top floor. She had been working that day, the day she had disappeared; irrationally, I thought I might find some sort of clue in the painting she had last completed.
    In spite of my newfound curiosity, I was strangely reluctant to go farther up the stairs. My dream had affected me. There was a melancholy feel to the entire upper story of the house, and I still felt a little spooked by the bedroom I had been in, the one in which I had sensed that atmosphere of subdued yet growing menace. I went up all the same. I knew that if I let my fears get the better of me, I would soon end up like Sarah, frightened out of my wits and forced to leave. I had no intentions of leaving, not until my two months were up.
    The room in which the finished paintings had been left was at the end of a short corridor, just beyond the bedroom, now locked and silent. I switched on the light and looked around. No furniture, just a large rectangle covered in a white sheet, propped against one wall.
    There was a portfolio under the sheet. I laid it flat on the bare floor and untied the ribbons one by one. Carefully, I opened it. Inside was a stack of heavy papers, each sheet laid neatly on the one below.
    I had expected paintings of the house and gardens, or of the coastal views visible from the cliff top. But the painting on top was not a landscape at all. It was a portrait of a woman sitting in a room. With a shudder, I thought I recognized the room—it was the one farther down the corridor, the one that Sarah had considered the heart of whatever ailed this house.
    The woman in the painting sat tensely on a high-backed chair, her body upright, I would almost have said stiff. She wore a long black dress with buttons that went from a high neck to her ankles, and her hair was lifted and arranged in a tight bun on top. Her age I guessed to be somewhere between eighty and ninety. Sarah had painted her face well, and in considerable detail. One side of the face was completely in shadow. On it was a look I could not quite interpret. Unease, perhaps, or the memory of something unpleasant. Or the first stirrings of dread.
    I lifted the painting and set it to one side. Beneath it was a second, almost identical. The same room, the same time of day, the same woman on the chair. What on earth had been going through Sarah's mind all the time she had been out there in the garden, painting? I drew the second picture aside as well. The one beneath was the same.
    No, not quite. It was at the third painting that I noticed a tiny but marked difference between the three pictures I had seen so far. On the wall behind the sitter was the damp patch I had noticed in the room. In each of the pictures, the shape of the patch changed slightly, and it seemed to be growing in several directions.
    Quickly, I leafed through the remaining pictures. There were nine in all. They all showed the same scene. In the last, the damp patch had grown until it covered most of the wall. And I could see, when I looked more closely, that the wallpaper was about to give in one place. I bent down and brought the light right up to the picture. As I did so I shuddered. In the painting, against the wallpaper, pressing hard as though about to burst through, was the