Chapter 299: Paint Me – Smearing Yourself into a Painting
“In fact, it’s not just the paintings we mentioned earlier. We believe that every Posthumous Work Shelly exhibited in his posthumous exhibition depicted something he witnessed during his visions—events that either have already happened or are yet to happen. SAI has already formed preliminary hypotheses about the real-world events corresponding to several of those paintings, and they are currently awaiting further verification.”
As for why Shelly painted these scenes, SAI believes there were two reasons. On one hand, he was an artist by nature, driven by a powerful urge to record and share what he had seen. On the other, he intended to use these paintings—each touching upon forbidden, hidden truths—to subtly contaminate the minds of those who viewed them.
Once the viewers’ mental worlds had been corroded into something like a honeycomb, riddled with countless tiny holes, it would be time for his Self-Portrait to make its appearance and reap the final harvest.
“We held multiple rounds of internal discussions regarding the ‘revelation’ Shelly mentioned in his diary. Our final conclusion was that, during one of his visions, he most likely caught an accidental glimpse of an Old One—perhaps merely one of Its projections, or perhaps a single strand of Its psychic tendril. During that brief contact, Shelly’s mind was contaminated and assimilated, transforming him into a fanatical worshipper.”
This Old One was the “Great Master” spoken of in the doctrines of the Dagon Secret Order—the entity said to slumber on the ocean floor. The cult’s ultimate objective is to free this Great Master, allowing chaos, disorder, and madness to once again engulf the world.
Remia and Gregory were extremely reluctant to discuss this deity. As a result, Everly still did not know Its true name. From the scattered hints she had gathered, she only knew that this Old One had been sealed away, for reasons unknown, within an underwater city somewhere deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. Only when the stars return to their proper alignment—when the constellations once again coincide with their ancient celestial paths—would It awaken.
Prompted by those words, Everly recalled the ravings Shelly had uttered on the White Plains.
“Shelly once told me, ‘The stars will soon return to their proper places. The prison walls will inevitably crumble. The time of the Old Ones’ awakening is at hand.’ …Could it be that their god is about to awaken?”
The two investigators exchanged a glance. Remia shrugged.
“The earliest traceable records of the Dagon Secret Order date back to the fifteenth century. Even back then, its followers were proclaiming that the day when the stars would return to their proper alignment was near and that the Old Ones were about to awaken. Hundreds of years have passed, and they’re still chanting the same slogan.”
Gregory added,
“The movement of the stars is a cyclical cosmic phenomenon beyond human influence. We can’t tell you exactly when the stars will return to their proper alignment, but we can say this much: that day will not come within either your lifetime or mine. However, for some reason, the followers of those Old Ones firmly believe they can accelerate the process through prayers, rituals, and sacrifices.”
According to the two investigators, everything the cultists were currently doing was ultimately futile. Even if they somehow managed to briefly awaken one of those gods through their efforts, It would soon fall back into slumber once the celestial alignments shifted out of place again.
Of course, beings that ancient and terrifying did not need long to bring catastrophe. Even a momentary appearance in the world would unleash consequences no government could possibly tolerate. That was why SAI had devoted itself to suppressing the Dagon Secret Order and numerous other dangerous cults.
The Posthumous Works Exhibition had been Shelly’s carefully orchestrated attempt to free that deity.
Through his visions, he had glimpsed fragments of truths hidden from the world. In doing so, he became a fanatical devotee of that god, coming to regard Its liberation as the sole purpose of his life.
According to the conclusions reached after SAI’s extensive investigation, Shelly appeared to believe that if he could create a passage connecting the underwater city to the real world and then open the gateway at its end, the Great Master he worshipped would be able to break free from Its seal and regain Its freedom.
The plan consisted of two steps:
1. Construct the passage.
2. Create—and fully open—the gate.
The passage Shelly intended to build was, of course, not a physical one. It was a metaphysical corridor existing within consciousness-space.
Consciousness-space was another realm, separate from the material world. When a clairvoyant entered a visionary state, what they perceived was this realm of consciousness. It was described as a boundless world of mist, filled everywhere with chaotic currents of consciousness.
Building a road through consciousness-space essentially meant using human mental power—or, more precisely, sheer force of will—to push aside the drifting fragments of consciousness and disperse the surrounding fog.
Constructing a passage vast enough for a god-like entity to travel through was far beyond the ability of one or two individuals. It required the combined will of a great many people who shared the same goal and the same collective conviction.
That was precisely why Shelly had broadly invited people from the art world to participate in his exhibition.
People engaged in artistic professions generally possessed delicate, highly sensitive minds, allowing them to perceive the emotions and feelings embedded within works of art far more keenly than ordinary people. This unique gift gave them a natural advantage in artistic pursuits, but it also left them virtually defenseless against the psychological corruption contained within Shelly’s forbidden paintings.
As the invited guests moved through the exhibition, Shelly’s corruption of their minds intensified layer by layer. By the time they had viewed every Posthumous Work and finally stood before his Self-Portrait, the painting’s overwhelming concentration of mental contamination would instantly assimilate them, transforming them into contributors to the collective belief required to sustain the passage.
As for Shelly himself, he became the Gate at the end of that passage.
When Everly fell out of the Self-Portrait, the painting was damaged as well. SAI later examined the ruined artwork and arrived at a startling conclusion.
The canvas was made of human skin. In addition to powdered stone from the ruin statue, the paint contained human blood, fat, flesh, bone, and other biological materials. Laboratory analysis confirmed that every one of those human components came from Shelly himself.
In other words, Shelly had used his own flesh and blood as the materials to create the final Self-Portrait.
Everly’s first reaction was disbelief.
“That can’t be right. The Self-Portrait is enormous. Shelly would have had to skin practically his entire body just to get enough material for a canvas that size. A person has an extremely high chance of dying after losing more than half of their skin. Without any skin, how could he possibly have painted something this intricate?”
Besides, Charlie the lawyer had once told her that after completing the Self-Portrait, Shelly had taken his own life with a gunshot. His death had been swift and peaceful. The police had examined the scene, and the medical examiner had inspected the body. No one had noticed anything unusual.
If SAI’s findings were correct, then considering the size of the Self-Portrait, his body should have been missing quite a few… parts.
Gregory fully understood Everly’s shock. Even for someone like him, who had lived through countless supernatural incidents both great and small, the truth had seemed almost unbelievable when he first heard it.
“Shelly’s body was prepared for burial but hasn’t been interred yet. We opened his coffin and found that all that remained inside were his clothes and a layer of paint covering the bottom. Shelly’s body had disappeared at some point… Or perhaps the body that people laid to rest was never real to begin with—perhaps it was a dummy painted out of pigment.”
As for how Shelly had somehow painted himself into a work of art, or how he had transformed paint into what appeared to be a human corpse, no one knew.
Gregory advised Everly not to dwell on the mystery. Her sanity was already precarious enough, and probing too deeply into it would only expose her to unnecessary mental contamination.
“Using that ruin statue and his own body as painting materials, Shelly painted a door onto the canvas. That door was the key to freeing the deity. No matter how far that Old One had traveled through consciousness-space, as long as the door was not fully opened, It could not pass through it and descend into the real world…”
Now that the door existed, the next problem was how to open it.
That was no simple task.
In the real world, opening a closed door required nothing more than reaching out and giving it a gentle push. But Shelly’s door existed in the gap between reality and consciousness-space. Through it, an ancient god imprisoned beyond the veil would cross over, briefly break free from Its seal, and awaken in the human world.
Shelly had exhausted both his body and his soul in creating the Door. The strength he had left was no longer enough to open it.
That was precisely why he had left behind that strange will, insisting that Everly and Thomas attend his Posthumous Works Exhibition.
He intended to use his own children as sacrifices, opening the door with their lives.
“But there were only two of us—Thomas and me. Could the lives of just two people really possess that much power?” Everly asked, puzzled.
Just to construct a passage large enough for an evil god to travel through, Shelly had invited over a hundred people from the art world. So why, when it came to opening the door, would sacrificing only two lives be enough? Even if being his biological children gave them some special significance, she and Thomas shouldn’t have been that valuable.
Gregory nodded.
“We’ve been discussing that very question internally. From beginning to end, the whole thing is riddled with inconsistencies. First of all, based on our understanding, that Door shouldn’t have been possible in the first place. Even if Shelly used one of the ruin statues in its construction, it was still a gateway capable of ignoring the barriers of space and time and releasing a sealed deity. To create something on that scale, the statue alone would never have been sufficient—it should have required the sacrifice of at least a hundred lives. Yet Shelly accomplished it using only his own.”
The same contradiction applied to opening the Door.
Logically, sacrificing only Everly and Thomas should have been nowhere near enough to open it. Yet Shelly remained convinced that the lives of his two children alone would suffice.
SAI debated the issue intensely for quite some time. In the end, it was Gregory who found the answer after something Everly had said during her testimony gave him an idea.
“Which part of my testimony?”
“You told us that Shelly once said when you were only a few months old, both you and he were destined to die. According to him, he defied that cruel fate and twisted the very fabric of space-time, changing the course that had already been set. Because of that, he believed that both your life and Thomas’s existed solely through his grace.”
The moment Everly heard those words, her heart skipped a beat. A vague premonition welled up inside her.
She had wondered about this before.
How had Shelly—a mere expendable character in a certain horror film—managed to break through the fourth wall and know that he had originally been destined to die in the Mayflower Apartment Incident? And why had he so shamelessly described himself as someone who had “defied cruel fate and twisted the fabric of space-time”?
Later, after learning from SAI that Shelly possessed an extraordinary gift for clairvoyance, capable of seeing both the past and the future, the mystery had finally made sense.
Shelly had most likely used his visionary abilities to witness the original timeline—the version of events that existed before Everly’s intervention.
During the Mayflower Apartment Incident, father and daughter had survived because Shelly had been burned by the cross and carried the infant Everly out of the apartment. It was probably because of that that Shelly claimed all the credit for their survival.
It could be said that from that very day onward, the course of both Shelly’s and Everly’s destinies had diverged.
Could it be that…?