Chapter 288: Posthumous Work (7)
The situation was not looking good.
Five minutes earlier, Everly had watched with her own eyes as the large and small monsters were blown to pieces. Their scattered flesh was ignited by the gasoline, charring into black ash. Even the ruins surrounding the two monsters were caught in the blast, triggering a second collapse.
Yet five minutes later, as the smoke gradually cleared, the bricks, shattered stones, chunks of flesh, and black ash on the ground suddenly began moving on their own, as though they had grown legs.
The broken bricks reassembled themselves. Displaced stones slid back to their original positions. The scattered pieces of flesh crawled toward one another and fused together. The burnt black ash gathered into heaps, transforming back into fresh, living flesh…
The entire process was silent and astonishingly swift. Every blink brought a dramatic change to the scene before her eyes. In less than half a minute, the ruins that had collapsed a second time reverted to the state of the first collapse, while the large and small monsters that had been blown apart pieced themselves back together like jigsaw puzzles. Flesh wriggled in from every direction, reconstructing them into the human figures from Scars.
What was even more bizarre was that this restoration occurred only within the area enclosed by the painting’s frame—that is, the portion of the painting visible to people in the real world.
Outside that boundary, everything remained exactly as it had been. The black scorch marks left by Everly’s explosion, as well as the shards of broken glass scattered across the ground, stayed untouched. It was as though the mysterious force that restored everything simply ignored anything that people outside the painting couldn’t see.
Everly couldn’t explain the mechanism behind it. The only thing she was certain of was this:
The “door” had not appeared.
Just moments ago, she had genuinely managed to kill both monsters—if only briefly. But after the explosion, amid the devastation, she had seen nothing resembling a “door” or a “key.” If something like a “key” really existed, surely it couldn’t have been blown to bits in the explosion. No movie would ever handle it that way!
A faint sense of foreboding crept over her.
Her original hypothesis… was probably wrong.
Perhaps the way to leave the world inside the painting wasn’t hidden within those two monsters after all. She would have to search elsewhere for an escape.
Of course, that decision carried its own risks. But Everly was willing to take the gamble, because what had just happened had already proven one thing: simply killing the large and small monsters accomplished nothing.
She had killed them once, and no “door” had appeared. There was no reason to believe killing them a second time would produce a different result. On the other hand, if she didn’t kill them, a single poke from either monster was enough to trigger mutation, making it impossible for her to search their bodies directly.
Staying here any longer would only waste time.
She needed to change her approach—find a new lead, or at the very least discover a way to stop the monsters from reviving.
As soon as she made up her mind, she acted.
Turning around, Everly retraced the route she had taken earlier.
Something came back to her.
While searching the surrounding area for useful items before, one of the nearby buildings had struck her as strangely familiar.
She was certain she had seen it somewhere before, but the impression had been too faint for her to recall where. Besides, at the time her priority had been gathering supplies and dealing with the monsters, so she had pushed the thought aside.
Now that she thought about it, however, that building might be the breakthrough she was looking for.
She decided to take another look around it. If it managed to jog her memory, whatever she remembered might help her find a way out of this place.
She followed the road for a while.
Before reaching her destination, Everly suddenly stopped and looked around in confusion.
Something felt… off.
On closer inspection, it was indeed the same road she had walked before. The dilapidated buildings lining the street looked exactly as they had earlier, with no obvious changes.
And yet, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was different.
What was it…?
Standing where she was, she carefully surveyed her surroundings. She even took out her compact mirror and used it to inspect the blind spots behind her.
Her brow slowly furrowed.
She couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong, yet her mind kept insisting that something had changed.
As a result, the next stretch of her journey became agonizing.
If her footsteps grew even slightly louder, she’d have the unsettling illusion that someone was following close behind her.
If the wind stirred a curtain in a nearby window, her heart would race, convinced that someone was hiding behind it, secretly watching her.
Suspicious of everything she saw, she pressed on. By the time she finally returned, following her memory, to the dilapidated building, Everly was drenched in cold sweat.
It was a shop located on a street corner.
The storefront had been heavily damaged. Its entrance and signboard had both been destroyed, lying crookedly on the ground. At the doorway remained a large pool of blood mixed with mangled pieces of flesh.
Walking up to the shop, Everly used a wooden stick to lift the fallen signboard, which was smeared with a layer of translucent gelatinous slime.
The first thing she saw was a line of garbled characters painted in bright red.
In the upper-right corner of the sign was the image of a smiling red-haired, freckled girl holding up a taco.
The moment she saw the girl, Everly instantly remembered why the building had seemed so familiar.
It was the logo of Wendy’s, a local street-food brand in Gilosha that had been around for more than fifty years.
According to the story, the logo was modeled after the founder’s youngest daughter, Wendy. Her identity as a family member, together with the innocent, cheerful smile on her face, continuously conveyed the brand’s image of serving homestyle tacos, making customers naturally associate it with quality ingredients and clean, hygienic food.
Gilosha was the city where Everly and Misha had changed planes on their way to university.
Since their layovers there were usually quite long, the two of them would take the opportunity to explore the city and have some fun.
And Wendy’s slow-braised pork tacos and spicy shredded chicken tacos were famous local specialties, so naturally neither of them had missed the chance to try them.
No wonder the place had seemed so familiar to Everly—Misha had brought her here once to eat tacos!
But…
Wasn’t there something wrong with Wendy’s sign?
The surge of excitement lasted only an instant before Everly noticed something strange.
She lowered her head and examined the logo inch by inch.
The cartoon girl held a taco in one hand, wearing a red-and-white checkered dress. Her eyes curved into crescent moons with delight, while the corners of her mouth stretched almost to her ears, forming a smile that looked bright and cheerful at first glance—but the longer one looked at it, the stiffer and more unsettling it became.
The worst part was that staring at the smile for too long created the uncomfortable feeling that she was being watched with malicious intent.
A storefront sign like this could never make customers think of the warmth of home.
Everly’s heart suddenly skipped a beat.
At last, she realized where the strange feeling that had haunted her all this time had come from.
Faces.
Along the way, every human image she had seen—store signs, display posters, street graffiti, mannequin figures…
…every single one of them was smiling.
And not an ordinary smile, either.
They all wore eerie, uncanny smiles, the kind that looked almost human but somehow not quite.
The first time she had passed through this street, all those faces had looked perfectly normal.
So why had they changed when she came back?
Were they really just ordinary pictures?
Or were they living monsters in disguise?
Everly forced herself to steady her ragged breathing and looked at the sign once more.
Perhaps it was only her imagination, but the girl’s smile seemed even wider than before.
Her eyes, drawn with simple black lines, stared fixedly at Everly. They seemed filled with resentment and malice, like a venomous snake lurking in the shadows, waiting for the perfect chance to sink its fangs into her.
Crack!
Without hesitation, Everly raised the wooden stick and smashed the sign bearing the girl’s image to pieces before striding away from the shop.
Although she had witnessed something deeply disturbing, she couldn’t deny that this trip had yielded an important discovery.
Wendy’s was a local brand exclusive to Gilosha, with no branches anywhere else.
That gave Everly an important clue:
The painting Scars had most likely been created with Gilosha as its setting.
At the exhibition of Shelly’s final works, the paintings had been arranged in chronological order according to the creation dates written on the backs of the canvases. Since Scars was displayed first, it meant it was the very first painting Shelly had completed after shutting himself away in his studio.
There was another piece of information as well.
The lawyer, Charlie, had once told her that at the end of August last year, Shelly had returned from a research trip and immediately secluded himself in his studio to begin painting.
Late August of last year.
Gilosha.
A city reduced to ruins.
The weeping mother transformed from a human into a tentacled monster.
And the Dagon Order totem depicted in Self-Portrait…
Putting all the clues together, Everly arrived at a bold hypothesis:
Shelly’s research trip had taken him to Gilosha.
After all, July through August of last year was exactly when Gilosha experienced the outbreak of radiation sickness and the mass human mutations. The devastated city and the mother’s grotesque transformation both matched the events of that disaster perfectly.
As for why the streets in the painting were completely deserted, there were two possible explanations.
The first was that, to heighten the painting’s tragic atmosphere, Shelly had deliberately omitted both the mutated monsters and the fleeing survivors from the background.
The second was that by the time he gathered his reference material, the mutation incident was already nearing its end. The mutated humans had been drawn to the ancient relic statue aboard the ship, flocking to the shoreline before throwing themselves into the sea, leaving the city’s streets eerily empty.
Verifying the theory wouldn’t be difficult.
Although every written word in the city had turned into incomprehensible squiggles, non-textual images remained unchanged.
All Everly had to do was find a newsstand, locate a local tourist map, and compare the city’s layout with that of Gilosha.
As luck would have it, there was a newsstand on a street corner only a few hundred meters away from the taco shop.
Everly quickened her pace and headed straight for it.
Once she noticed the unsettling changes in the city’s human images, the entire place became every bit as terrifying as a haunted house.
Standing outside the newsstand and peering through its window, Everly saw that whether it was the posters hanging on the walls or the newspapers and magazines spread across the counter, every single human face printed on them was staring directly at her through the paper.
Without exception.
They all wore enormous, unnatural smiles, their mouths stretched impossibly wide, the corners pulling all the way back to their ears.
It even seemed as though those smiles were gradually growing wider with the passage of time.
Everly had no idea what would happen if they continued to change.
But judging by the logic of horror movies, things would only get worse, never better.
So she ignored the creepy images—which, for the moment at least, were unable to attack her—and hurriedly searched through the pile of newspapers until she found a local map.
First, she confirmed her suspicion that this place really was Gilosha.
Then, following the illustrations on the map, she headed straight for the harbor on the city’s western side.
The reason she was going to the harbor was simple.
She had previously investigated the Gilosha incident and knew that the city’s mutation had originated from two separate sources:
the ancient relic statue aboard the ship, and the ritual array painted across the harbor district by the cultists.
The Weeping Mother and her infant had also been transformed under the influence of those two things.
That realization inspired a new hypothesis.
Perhaps, if she could eliminate the source of the city’s corruption, she would be able to escape from the painting.
After all, the world inside the painting was merely the effect of the mutation.
Without the cause, the effect should cease to exist.
Wouldn’t that amount to destroying the painting from within, albeit indirectly?
The theory was at least plausible.
And if it was plausible, then it was worth trying.
