Chapter 284: Posthumous Works (3)
The posthumous exhibition would run for a total of half a month.
Since all of the guests invited on the first day were prominent figures, the exhibition would not be open to the public in order to avoid causing a commotion. Only invited guests were allowed to attend on opening day, while the general public would be admitted starting on the second day.
Even so, the area around the gallery was packed with cars on the first day of the exhibition. Crowds of curious onlookers had gathered, along with reporters carrying cameras and long telephoto lenses.
When Everly arrived at the entrance, a swarm of unscrupulous reporters had surrounded a mother and son dressed in black, noisily bombarding them with pointed, provocative questions.
Everly recognized the exhausted-looking woman at a glance—she was Sophia, Shelly’s second wife. That meant the blond, blue-eyed little boy beside her was, in all likelihood, Everly’s half-brother, Thomas.
Out of curiosity, she took a second look.
Sure enough, Thomas’s facial features bore quite a resemblance to Shelly’s. As long as he didn’t grow up awkwardly, he would probably become quite a handsome young man.
Looking at it that way, fate hadn’t treated Shelly too poorly after all.
Sophia and Thomas had often accompanied Shelly to public events, making them highly recognizable. By comparison, Everly—the daughter from his first marriage—was practically a mystery to the public.
As a result, when Everly took the invitation letter her lawyer had given her and walked confidently toward the gallery entrance in full view of the crowd, the reporters merely glanced at her in puzzlement. Unable to recognize her face, they quickly lost interest and returned to pestering Sophia and Thomas.
Everly entered the gallery without any trouble.
Her lawyer, Charlie, and his assistant were already waiting in the entrance hall. The moment he saw Everly, he stepped forward to greet her warmly and introduced his assistant.
“Mr. Shelly’s will stipulates that the heir must view every single work in this exhibition. During your visit, my assistant will record the entire process on video and keep it on file. I hope you won’t mind.”
Everly nodded in understanding.
Compared to the tens of millions she was about to inherit, being recorded on video was hardly a big deal.
The lawyer still needed to wait at the entrance for Sophia and Thomas. After a brief exchange, he stepped aside and gestured politely toward the gallery.
“Please.”
Everly nodded in return and, accompanied by the assistant, passed through the entrance foyer, officially beginning her tour of the exhibition.
The collection consisted entirely of paintings Shelly had produced during his period of seclusion.
These works marked a dramatic departure from his previous style. No longer confined to traditional Western myths and legends, he had ventured into subjects he had never explored before.
The very first painting, Scars, was set in what appeared to be a modern city.
Something catastrophic had happened there. Traffic had ground to a halt, the city lay in ruins, buildings were battered and crumbling, and blood was splattered across the streets and walls alongside patches of translucent, gelatinous-looking matter.
At the center of the painting, a mother knelt alone in the deserted street, clutching a swaddled infant in her arms as she wept in silent anguish. Although the artist had deliberately chosen a low-angle perspective, avoiding a close-up of the baby, the sheer agony on the woman’s face and the bloodstains covering the blanket made it painfully obvious that something terrible had happened to her child.
The painting possessed extraordinary emotional power.
After standing before it for only a short while, Everly felt a tightness in her chest. Despair and suffocating oppression washed over her from the canvas.
She took a deep breath and moved on to the second painting, Encounter.
This one was an entirely different style.
Judging from its title, one might easily assume that Encounter told a romantic story of a man and woman meeting for the first time.
In reality, however, its protagonist was a sailing ship caught in a violent storm.
The sky was shrouded in dark clouds, streaked with lightning and filled with thunder. Amid the raging tempest, a frail wooden vessel pitched helplessly on the towering waves, listing precariously as though the next swell would overturn it.
More terrifying still, the storm was not the ship’s greatest danger.
A closer look revealed that enormous tentacles were coiled tightly around the vessel’s hull.
These tentacles emerged from the deep sea, painted in eerie shades of dark green. Their surfaces were covered with wart-like protrusions and countless suckers, giving them a grotesque, terrifying appearance.
The ship’s lanterns were still lit, yet not a single living soul could be seen aboard. The artist had smeared chaotic streaks of crimson across the deck and the cabin walls, the ominous splashes of red subtly hinting at the crew’s fate.
The painting itself was executed with bold, unrestrained brushstrokes and dominated by cool colors. Compositionally, the sailing ship had been deliberately reduced to a tiny presence within the frame, while the crashing waves and octopus-like tentacles were rendered on a massively exaggerated scale. The stark contrast instinctively impressed upon the viewer just how insignificant humanity was, reinforcing the painting’s pervasive atmosphere of dampness, coldness, and danger.
Its mood was so distinctive that, after staring at it for a while, Everly could almost detect the faint scent of the sea lingering in the air.
The painting was clearly one of the exhibition’s favorites, with a large crowd gathered before it. One man in a loud floral shirt was even crying openly.
The fellow—who looked every bit the artist—pressed both hands to his chest like a stage actor and proclaimed dramatically before the painting that it had struck him with overwhelming force, that his heart had been utterly pierced by this magnificent masterpiece.
Oddly enough, no one around him seemed to think he was exaggerating. Instead, they nodded in wholehearted agreement. Some even found themselves tearing up as they continued to gaze at the canvas, just like the flamboyantly dressed man.
“…”
Were artists always this eccentric?
Or was there actually something unusual about this painting?
Following Horror Movie Survival Rule #1—Pay attention to the hints—Everly cautiously gripped the Eye of Horus amulet beneath her clothing, the most reliable protective charm she owned, and studied the painting once more.
The amulet gave no reaction whatsoever, and she herself couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary about the artwork.
Was I just imagining it…?
Perhaps she simply lacked any artistic sensibility and couldn’t resonate with the painting the way everyone else seemed to.
After thinking it over, Everly concluded that the chances of stumbling into another horror scenario here were extremely low.
After all, strictly speaking, both she and Shelly were people who shouldn’t even exist.
Remember? When she was still an infant, she and her father had been caught up in the “Foul Stench” incident at the Mayflower Apartments. If Everly hadn’t used the cross her grandfather had given her to burn Shelly awake, prompting him to grab her and flee the building, both of them would have died there.
In other words, on the original timeline—the one in which Everly had never transmigrated—their predetermined fate had been to die as expendable cannon fodder in the Mayflower Apartments disaster.
Once the two of them were dead, no subsequent horror scenarios could possibly revolve around them anymore. By “couldn’t revolve around them,” she meant that no new horror story could feature either of them as a main or significant character. After all, dead people couldn’t exactly climb back out of their coffins.
Of course, that was different from someone like the perpetually unlucky Everly, who might simply be walking down the street one moment, accidentally stumble into a horror scenario the next, get swept into the ensuing chaos, and find herself forced to shoulder the burden of fighting against it.
Based on that reasoning, Everly believed the odds of encountering a horror scenario at this exhibition were fairly low.
After all, the organizer of this exhibition was Shelly—a man who, by all rights, should have died more than twenty years ago. On the original timeline, it should have been impossible for any new horror story to branch off from him.
Naturally, all of this was still just speculation. It had never been proven, and likely never could be. Even so, Everly remained cautious about everything that happened today.
After lingering in front of Encounter for a while, she moved on to the next painting.
The works that followed were equally devoid of anything remotely beautiful or comforting.
One depicted an abandoned fishing village beneath the cover of night. A crimson moon, like a bleeding eye, hung coldly in the sky, staring down at a beach covered in strange, unnatural patterns. In the moonlit sea floated more than a dozen bizarre creatures that were half human and half fish.
Their appearance immediately reminded Everly of the merfolk she had encountered during the Golden Anchor incident. However, in early Western mythology, merfolk had often been portrayed as ugly, horrifying, and grotesque beings rather than beautiful sirens. As a result, she couldn’t be certain whether the two were actually connected.
She saw a bloody and macabre witches’ gathering. More than a dozen scantily clad witches with twisted, grotesque faces danced wildly around a bonfire deep within a forest. Suspended above the flames was a large cauldron, and inside it, the dismembered remains of a human corpse stared blankly outward with wide-open eyes, its hollow gaze fixed on whoever stood before the painting.
She saw a vast, magnificent cosmos that was as awe-inspiring as it was terrifying. Upon the surface of an unknown planet covered in concentric ring-shaped craters, white, toad-like creatures lay prostrate in reverence, worshipping a colossal, egg-shaped being covered with countless breasts and fish-like fins…
Every painting bore a bizarre title that had seemingly nothing to do with its subject matter. And the farther she progressed through the exhibition, the stranger the works became. By the final few paintings, Shelly’s use of color had become so audacious that it seemed to transcend human comprehension. The lines he painted appeared almost alive, writhing wildly across the canvas in chaotic motion, making the viewer’s eyes ache just from looking at them.
Everly felt that Shelly’s artistic expression was a little too avant-garde. Despite being a university student, she stared at the paintings for ages without the slightest idea what he was depicting or what message he was trying to convey.
Surely he hadn’t just suffered a mental breakdown from too much stress and started splashing paint around at random…?
Feeling a little guilty for the thought, she glanced at the crowd gathered around the paintings.
Unlike Everly, the renowned critics and artists in attendance lavished the bizarre, almost incomprehensible works on the walls with the highest praise. A few particularly sensitive viewers became so overwhelmed that they had to brace themselves against the wall as they vomited. They cried uncontrollably while retching, making it impossible to tell whether they were moved to tears by the art itself or simply overcome with physical nausea.
Oh no…
Just seeing someone else’s vomit was starting to make Everly’s own stomach churn.
She took a deep breath and encouraged herself to hang in there a little longer.
There was only one painting left.
Once she finished viewing it, she would have fulfilled the final prerequisite for inheriting the estate—and from then on, she’d be on the fast track to a life of wealth.
Compared to that kind of money, a little physical discomfort and emotional trauma were completely worth it!
With that in mind, she made her way to the very back of the exhibition hall.
There, a small viewing room had been partitioned off by low walls. Mounted on the tall wall at its center hung a painting completely concealed behind a heavy blackout curtain.
This was Shelly’s final work before his suicide:
Self-Portrait.
According to reports, when everyone forced their way into his studio, Shelly had already drawn the curtain over the painting. His s**cide note had been found lying beside the frame.
In the note, he wrote that this was the finest work of his entire life, surpassing every painting he had ever created. He specifically requested that it be unveiled publicly at the exhibition, in front of all the invited guests.
As a result, no one yet knew what the painting actually looked like.
The small viewing room had been furnished with a waiting area containing several rows of chairs. Quite a few visitors who had already finished touring the exhibition were seated there, patiently waiting for the unveiling of the final masterpiece.
The paintings in the previous galleries had raised everyone’s expectations for Self-Portrait to extraordinary heights.
Had Shelly made such a claim in the past—that he had created a work surpassing The Sea Demon Under the Moon—the critics would probably have greeted it with skepticism. But after seeing the astonishing and revolutionary new works he had produced during his final period of seclusion, they now believed his words might well be true.
In the final moments of his life, that man had achieved the one breakthrough that had eluded him his entire career.
And they, the recipients of his invitations, had the privilege of witnessing that historic moment.
Because of this, everyone eagerly anticipated the unveiling of the last painting. Even though they had to wait, no one complained; they waited with remarkable patience.
Everyone except Everly.
She genuinely didn’t think the earlier paintings were enjoyable at all. If anything, she found them revolting—like the kind of thing that left you mentally contaminated. The longer she looked at them, the more uncomfortable she felt physically as well.
…Then again, maybe she was simply exhausted from yesterday’s long journey.
Either way, she just wanted this exhibition to end as soon as possible so they could hurry up and move on to the inheritance proceedings.
Feeling less than enthusiastic, Everly walked into the waiting area and casually took an empty seat.
After another half hour of waiting, everyone in the exhibition had finally finished viewing the earlier paintings and gathered in the small viewing room. Among them were Everly’s bargain-bin stepmother and her half-brother.
“Now that everyone has arrived, I will proceed, in accordance with Mr. Shelly’s final wishes as stated in his will, to unveil this painting before you all.”
Lawyer Charlie took on the role of master of ceremonies.
Walking up to the tall wall, he raised a pair of scissors and carefully cut the cord securing the curtain. Then he grasped the edges of the heavy fabric and gently pulled them apart.
With a soft shhh as the silk curtain slid aside, a massive portrait was revealed before the assembled guests.
