Archive of Our Own ^beta

At around noon today, I was hired by Casey Williams to investigate the whereabouts of an art history major named Garry Bryant. What I assumed would be a standard person search soon revealed itself to be something much more. The facts are these: On October 2nd of last year, Garry sent a text message to a friend asking to postpone a dinner date, as it was the last day of an art exhibition he wanted to see. The friend was the last who ever heard from Garry, save for the museum attendant who sold him his ticket. He disappeared that day. When his friends and family grew worried and tried to engage the police, it came to light that Garry wasn't the only one who had disappeared from the museum. Also reported missing was a nine-year-old girl by the curious name of Ib (pronounced with a long e sound, such as in Eve). The police decided that Garry had abducted the poor girl. A warrant for his arrest was put out and a search was conducted, but neither Garry nor Ib were ever found.

Williams, a close (and fortuitously rich) family friend of the Bryants, assured me that Garry would never hurt anyone, let alone abduct them. Williams believes that Garry can be found and, when found, can provide evidence enough to exonerate his good name.

My contact with the police sent me their files on the subject, files which are marked less with investigation and more with rushing things along for the sake of closing the case. Looking through the witness accounts and interviews, there seems to be no basis to the conclusion that Garry abducted Eve, even if they did disappear from the museum on the same day. Ib, it might be worth noting, was at the museum with her parents. Apparently she was allowed to wander off and look at exhibits by herself. When they looked for her later, she was gone. There are a few witnesses who recalled seeing her, but never in the company of anyone else. Garry himself was conspicuous enough that they would remember him; by Williams' account, Garry was a young man with effeminate mannerisms and wavy, purple hair. He was slim and tall and, at the time of his disappearance, fond of wearing a trench coat trimmed in feathers around its collar.

A noteworthy detail seems to be the surveillance cameras. The exhibit was held in a relatively small, privately owned museum. The owners lack the money that larger museums, especially ones subsidized by the government, have access to. Their only cameras are stationed at entrance and exit points. According to the reports, video from the day in question show Garry and Ib coming into the museum. They don't show them coming out.

The police have a copy of the footage from that day, contained on a USB drive, but it has been lost, most likely due to incompetency.

An effort to retrieve the footage from the museum was met with a dead end. They only keep footage for a few months before recording over it, and after giving a copy to the police, they didn't think it would be needed anymore. The curator, however, was kind enough to give me a tour of the museum, a tour that confirmed that there are no other known exits from the museum. There are are few windows, frosted and tinted to keep light from getting in and ruining the artwork, but there's no mechanism to open them. The curator assures me that none of them were broken the day of the disappearance.

The actual museum is two floors, each with a circular, roomless layout that facilitates traffic. There is also a basement that is closed off to the public, although to call it a basement seems inaccurate. It's so big it must extend underneath the neighboring buildings as well; 'archive' might be a more apt word. It's a cavernous and dusty place, lights barely enough to illuminate the things within it, filled with paintings and sculptures that aren't being displayed. I gave myself a scare when I looked into one corner to see a human figure, ominous and looming, and was relieved to see on second glance that it was only some kind of mannequin. A headless one, like you might find in a boutique, and what distinguished it as 'art' I do not know.

I walked along the walls of the various rooms, looking for any possible exits, and tried to ignore the various portraits that watched me as I did so. They were only paintings, I know, but in that dark space and with their large, black eyes, it almost seemed as though they were staring right at me.

There are no exits in the basement that I could find.

Another notable facet of this case is the lack of media attention paid to it. Usually, little, white girls who go missing are prime subjects for national attention. They seize the public consciousness more easily than other victims or topics. Parents usually take full advantage of media attention, using the coverage to implore people to come forward with any information they might have. But despite the fact that I keep abreast of news both broadcast and written, I didn't personally recall the disappearance when Williams came to talk to me about it. A search on the internet brings up little in the way of articles or discussion.

Was there a reason that Ib's family wanted to keep coverage of the case minimal? It's not as if the parents are above suspicion; most of the time, it's the people closest to the victim that you have to pay the most attention to. Nothing seemed amiss about them in the police reports and interview transcripts, but I thought it might be useful to talk to Ib's parents. Unfortunately, they seem to have moved from the address on record and have left no forwarding address with the post office.

Williams called for an update in the case, and I wonder if this is going to be a problem. Some clients have a tendency to be anxious and don't realize that these things take time. Williams actually seems to want to help, which might be even worse, since 'help' can often mean 'getting in the way.' Williams also has the kind of personality that's hard for me to deal with. Wealthy and relatively young (I would guess that Williams is only a few years older than me), there is a vaguely entitled, stubborn streak there that I don't usually enjoy working with. Probably the product of being raised with both money and good looks. I'll make a note to discuss my boundaries as a private investigator if it becomes a problem.

A standard search reveals that Ib's parents have moved to Bethesda, Maryland, thanks to a federal job that her father procured. A day trip down there is more time than I can spare right now. I made a phone call and ended up speaking to the mother. Detached but polite, she said she just wanted to put this whole thing behind her. I'm now weighing whether a trip south would even be worth it.

I spoke to the museum attendant who took Garry's admittance fee for the museum. She remembers him due to his unique appearance, but their contact was short. She only remembers that he was polite and seemed mild-mannered despite his attention-grabbing appearance.

I also spoke to the friend he was supposed to meet for dinner the night of his disappearance. Like Williams, she insists that Garry would never have done something like kidnap a child. She showed me the last text message he sent her, which I reproduce verbatim here:

I just realized that today is the last day of the Weiss Guertena exhibit! Would you mind if we grab dinner tomorrow instead?

She promised me that she would do anything she could to help.

His parents, when called, pledged similar support. They seem disillusioned with the lack of support they received from the police and by the fact that the police have deemed their son a criminal. They are also very grateful to Williams for hiring my services, something they wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise. My conversation with them yielded no information relevant to Garry's disappearance.

There was a discrepancy with the date of the disappearance. All but one of the sources list October 2nd. The initial police report, filed when Ib's parents reported her missing, lists October 12th. I am sure this is a typographical error or similar mistake but wanted confirmation just in case. I called the museum to ask when was the last day of the Guertena exhibit held in October of last year. Their answer was surprising: there was no such exhibit. In fact, the curator insists that there is no artist known as Weiss Guertena at all.

An internet search seems to prove her correct.

If Garry and Ib never left the museum, what happened to them?

Why would Garry, an art history major, be so excited to see the work of an artist who doesn't even exist?

Is there a connection between these two questions?

Without seeing the footage, I can't be sure for myself that Garry and Ib never left the museum. The police might have missed it. They also neglected to check the footage on subsequent days; it could be possible that the perpetrator kept his victim(s) hidden inside the museum. to be herded out at some later date.

Still, it seems rather obvious where the perpetrator could hide two people, whether or not they ever left: the basement.

I wasn't looking forward to going back to that museum basement. Despite all its space, it had felt claustrophobic to me. And while I was in there, I couldn't help but feel a sense of unease, goosebumps on my skin despite the moderate temperature. It didn't help that when I got to the museum I found Williams chatting with the curator. 'I thought two sets of eyes was better than one' was the excuse given, and I refrained from rolling my eyes as we walked toward the basement.

I gave an overview of what we were looking for, although I wasn't counting on Williams to find anything. Any sign that people were ever hidden here, probably against their will. Spaces where the body of a small child, or dismembered body parts, could be hidden. Williams looked a little sick but nodded.

Once we were in that dark, quiet basement, the hustle of the museum seemed so far away. I was sure that I could have dropped a pin and heard when it fell onto the ground. For a moment I actually wanted to ask Williams to stay by my side, but then realized how silly I was being. It was just a basement like any other, and I would be more effective at searching without someone in my way. I decided we should start in different rooms.

The room I started in was full of large paintings. Most of them, thankfully, were landscapes, depictions of remote countryside homes in somber sepia tones. Not my cup of tea, but nothing insidious either. It's not as though there were little people inside those painted houses, staring out at me through the darkened windows. There were a only few portraits. I couldn't help but feel uneasy as I moved them around, as though they were watching me do it and didn't approve. One painting in particular, a woman in a red dress with dark, handsome features, had me unsettled. As I moved her, I couldn't help but feel like her arm was going to come right out of the painting and grab my wrist. I was careful to place her so that she was facing the wall.

I made it through about half the rooms without finding anything concrete. There were plenty of hiding spaces, but no evidence that they had ever been used to hide people. It was still just theory on my part, at the moment. As I worked, though, I felt something strange come over me. It become harder from me to focus on things visually. It was like when you're looking through the air above a fire, and the heat distorts things so that everything behind it is blurry. I had no idea what it was, but for some reason I found it harder and harder to see things, and everything seemed more and more hazy. I also started to feel lightheaded, to the point where I was walking through the hallway when I actually fainted. I had never fainted before in my life.

When I came to, I was laying on the futon couch in one of the administrative offices found in the basement. I assumed that Williams had found me and placed me there. From the dust gathered on everything, I doubted the room was being used all that much. There were file cabinets and a desk and all sorts of artistic clutter, which I couldn't clearly see. It was dark in the room; the only light came through a sliver where the door was open, and even that was dim.

At any rate, I felt much more like myself. I could see things clearly again, and I wondered what had been wrong with me. Maybe I hadn't eaten enough today. With a sense of relief, I stretched and then let my arm drop off the side of the futon. As my hand dangled in the cool air, right next to the empty space below the futon, I wondered when Williams was coming back.

That's when I felt it.

Something cold and clammy was touching my hand. I went completely still. I couldn't move. All I knew was that something cold and clammy was touching my hand. Something was underneath the futon, and what felt like fingertips were pressing the base of my fingers. And they were moving upward, slowly, along my palm. If I looked just a little bit to the side, a little bit down, I might be able to see it. . . but something inside of me told me that I didn't want to see what was touching me. A childlike part of me was saying that if I ignored it, if I stayed completely still and didn't look at it, then it didn't exist.

But then it wrapped its ice cold fingers around my wrist.

I screamed. I opened my mouth and, after a moment where no sound came out at all, I heard a blood-curdling scream that I didn't think I was capable of producing.

The door slammed open and the lights in the room turned on. Whatever was holding onto me let go. I jumped off the futon and away, looking under it to see that nothing was there. My heart was racing like crazy, and I couldn't seem to keep my breathing regular.

"What's wrong?" Williams asked. "What happened?"

As my heartbeat and breathing returned to normal, I realized how silly I was being. The space underneath the futon was clearly empty. I had been half-asleep. It must have been the remnant of some nightmare or my imagination playing tricks on me. Now that the light was on, my earlier fear, as real as it had felt, seemed so ridiculous.

"I'm fine," I said, shaking my head. "Just a dream."

Still, there was that tiny little doubt at the back of my head: what if it wasn't just my imagination?

At any rate, we went back to searching through the basement, and nothing notable happened after that. Unfortunately, that means that we didn't find anything, either. I'll have to think of some other lead to follow.

Somehow, I can't stop thinking about Weiss Guertena. There must be something to it. An art history major wouldn't make such a mistake regarding an artist he was excited to see. I've looked for variations of the name in case Garry misspelled it or made some other little mistake, but as far as I can tell no artist exists with a similar name. I don't know why, but I feel like this is a key factor, somehow.

I've been looking into any source I can. After the internet failed, I talked to people in the art world, contacts at galleries and museums. I spent hours in different libraries, looking through all the indexes of all the art books I could find.

Weiss Guertena. Weiss Guertena. Weiss Guertena. Who the hell is Weiss Guertana?

Williams left a message in my voice mail. Something about paying me to find Garry, not research artists who don't exist. But my instinct still tells me that this is something I need to look into.

Williams showed up at my office today, apparently in a conspiracy with my secretary, who feels that I've been spending too much time looking through art books. Apparently, they decided that Williams and I would be driving down to Maryland to meet with Ib's parents. I really don't think I should go, as I was planning on going to The Strand and some other used bookstores to see if they have any artbooks I haven't looked through. Unfortunately, Williams is stubborn and unused to taking no for an answer. They herded me into a rented car and, five minutes into the drive, I fell asleep.

I hadn't even realized that I had been tired. How much sleep had I gotten since I started researching Guertena? Not a lot, I realized; perhaps just a few hours a night. I slept for more than four hours in that car. When I awoke, we had arrived at a small, one-story home in an affluent suburb directly outside of Washington, DC. Williams assured me that the small plot of land was worth a good million dollars for its location alone.

The appointment with Ib's parents was scheduled by my secretary. They were polite and nice enough, inviting us in for tea as we all discussed the event. I've transcribed a part of the conversation that I found strange and off-putting below.

Mother: It was an awful thing to go through, but we just wanted to put it past us and move on with our lives.

Ito: Did you work with the police to find Ib?

Mother: Of course. We did everything they asked us to do.

Ito: Did you try any other avenues of finding her?

Mother: . . . I'm not sure I know what you me-

Ito: Hiring private investigators or talking to news channels and newspapers.

Mother: Oh, no, nothing like that.

Father: Like we said, we just wanted to put all this behind us.

Williams: Really? You didn't even want the newspaper to run an article about it, just in case?

[Here I poked Williams with my pen. The last thing I needed was an amateur trying to take part in the investigation.]

Mother: We didn't want to be a bother.

Williams: Really? This was your-

[This interruption was an even harder poke.]

Ito: I assume the police have talked to you about Garry Bryant.

Mother: Yes, they've told us about him.

Ito: What's your opinion on him?

Mother: We don't have one, really. If the police think he's responsible, then maybe he is.

Father: Innocent until proven guilty, though.

The overriding sense that I picked up from them was indifference. I didn't understand it. All around their household were signs that they loved their daughter (lots of photographs on the walls, toys in her room, etc), and yet they didn't seem to care when she went missing. I felt like I had stepped into some kind of twilight zone, although I didn't think for a second that they were responsible for their daughter's death; if they had been, they would be putting on a better act than this. So what exactly was wrong with them? There's also the matter of the exhibit itself. When asked about Guertana, they don't recall the artist or his work. They remember going to the art gallery but can't remember anything about it, including what any of the art on display looked like. It seems strange to me. Are people likely to forget details about such a significant day in their lives? Their only child disappeared on that day, after all; it wasn't simply another visit to another art gallery.

After that we checked into a hotel for the night. Williams has a meeting in D.C. tomorrow and offered to pay for my train ticket back, but I think I'd like to stay and visit the Library of Congress. If I can't find anything on Guertena there, I'll probably have to give up hope. We ended up eating room service in my room, and I decided that Williams wasn't so bad after all. Still stubborn, insisting that Guertana has nothing to do with the case, and still infuriating, but a good person. Apparently Williams grew up in the Lower East Side at a time before it was gentrified, when the McDonalds and Dunkin' Donuts on Delancey were just boarded up buildings and there were more drug dealers than hipsters. Garry's parents were friends with Williams' parents, and even though there was an age gap Williams always tried to look out for Garry. So Williams wasn't just someone who had gotten by on family money and attractiveness like I had thought.

But I digress. I'm going to go through the recorded conversation with Ib's parents now before I go to sleep, but experience tells me I probably won't find anything.

I found it. I found it, a slim, leather-bound book entitled Handbook of Wayward Artists, whatever that's supposed to mean. All I saw was Weiss Guertana's name on the first page, up front and center, and I made a beeline to the circulation desk. When I went to check it out, the librarian couldn't find it in the system. She wanted to take the book to look into it, a process that could take weeks, but luckily someone came to distract her. I was able to sneak it out while she was occupied. It's not my proudest moment, and I'll make a note to mail the book back when I'm done with it, but this is the breakthrough I've been looking for for so long.

I walked until I found a coffee shop, then I ordered a hot tea and sat down to read. Imagine my surprise when, instead of a book with text in it, I found page after page of sketches. No explanatory text. No captions. Just sketches. They started off simple enough, just human figures in various poses done in something like pencil or charcoal. I'm not an expert on art by any means, but it seemed like the kind of sketches an artist might make for practice. Some of the figures seemed to be of the same woman, and she seemed vaguely familiar somehow.

As the pages went on, the images grew more and more unsettling. The lines grew darker and more angry. The bodies were. . . off. The angles just seemed wrong, like the limbs weren't fitting into their sockets correctly, or the joints were bent in ways they shouldn't be. The worst, though, were the faces, with empty, gaping holes where their eyes should have been drawn it. They gave me goosebumps just looking at them.

Finally, on the last page, there were a few lines of text. No sketches, just words on a blank page. A quotation.

"It's said that spirits dwell in objects into which people put their feelings. I've always thought that, if that's true, then the same must be true of artwork. So today, I shall immerse myself in work, so as to impart my own spirit into my creations." ~Weiss Guertena

If that was the case, I couldn't help but think that maybe there was something twisted in Guertana's spirit.

I drove on the way back to New York City, since it seemed only fair. But then I nearly crashed the car when I realized why one of the figures in the book seemed so familiar.

"What the hell?" Williams said, clutching at the dashboard as the car braked.

"The woman in red. The painting of the woman in red."

The painting I had seen when we had explored the basement, the one with the woman I felt was about to reach out and grab me. It was the same woman in the book. After I explained it to Williams, we decided that we would go together the next day to check it out.

We found the painting again. The tag attached to it states the title, "The Lady in Red," but no artist. The curator couldn't find a record of the painting, but she said that it wasn't rare for information to be misplaced, especially for less important works. That wasn't the real find, though. In the same room there was a full-body portrait titled "Sleeping Man." It was a rather macabre work, because although the title proclaimed him to be sleeping, the man was very obviously dead. He was slumped over on his knees, limbs limp, skin too pale and slightly blue, eyes open but lifeless. Like a lot of corpses I've seen. Williams became panicked out at the sight of it, asking the curator increasingly frantic questions, ending with a statement of, "That's Garry. That's Garry in the painting."

After some negotiation and a few legal threats that I knew I wouldn't be able to carry out if pressed to do so, the curator agreed to let me take custody of the painting. Back at my office, I compared the painting with the photographs of Garry that Williams had given me at the beginning of the case. The man in the painting does bear an uncanny resemblance to Garry, from his hair to his clothes.

But what exactly does it mean? Perhaps Garry, a fan of the artist, modeled his look on the man in the painting. A rather strange idea, imitating a dead person, but young people were know to do odder. Perhaps Garry was a friend of the artist. Perhaps he was the model for the painting, but that thought was even more morbid, taking a subject and portraying him as a lifeless corpse.

I plan to look into any artists that Garry was friends with.

I've run into dead end after dead end. Could one of the artists Garry knew be Guertena? It seems less and less likely.

This probably doesn't belong in my case notes, but I hope that by writing it down I'll realize how silly I'm being. Ever since I brought the painting to my apartment, things have seemed. . . off. My apartment has excellent sound-proofing, and it has always done well in insulating me from the lively noises of the street outside. Recently, though, things have seemed even more quiet. My footsteps on the floor make an almost exaggerated noise whenever I walk; I hear all too clearly the noise when I place a mug on the counter or dig through drawers of paper. If I just sit there, the silence is so heavy that I find myself growing more and more uneasy, until I run to the window and throw it open to listen to the cars and people outside.

The silence, it. . . it makes me feel almost detached from the world outside. I'm separated from millions of people by a few walls, but I might as well be in my own universe. If something happened to me in this small, silent apartment, no one would know. If I screamed, no one would come help me. I feel completely alone.

My windows are shut. They won't open. The landlord had the facade of the building painted over, they painted shut the windows by accident, and they won't come back to do anything about it for another week. I hate it. Those windows were my only link to the outside world, and now there's only silence.

I had a strange feeling in the shower today. My eyes were closed as I was washing my face, and I heard my shower curtains rustle. I froze, soap all over my eyelids, unable to see anything. There weren't any noises, but I swear. . . I swear, I could sense something standing beside me, staring at me. All the little hairs in the back of my neck were standing on end. I couldn't move for fear of bumping into whatever it was that was there. I didn't wash the soap off my face for fear of seeing something truly horrible beside me. So I stood there, completely still, as I sensed it getting closer. I sensed it reach out, inches from my shoulder. I sensed it about to grab me. . .

And then my doorbell rang. Whatever feeling I had, it was gone instantly. I quickly washed the soap off my face and turned, only to see the translucent plastic of my shower curtain, as closed as it ever was.

I think I might be going crazy.

I got out of the shower, threw on some clothes, and went to answer the door. It was Williams with Indian take-out, worried because my secretary said something about how I didn't seem to be getting a lot of sleep. Apparently she also said something about my love of lamb vindaloo. Whatever the reason, I was just glad to have another person around. We ate and, somehow, ended up talking all night, about everything and anything. The case, our lives, our pasts. It was really nice, actually, but around three a.m. we both drifted off to sleep on my couch.

It was around five a.m when I woke up again, my head on Williams' stomach. It was too dark in my apartment, with almost no moonlight coming in through the window. I could barely make out Williams' silhouette next to me. I stood up slowly, as not to wake Williams, and walked to the window. . . there wasn't any light out there either. No street lamps. No light from other people's windows. I could barely make out the outlines of the buildings. Had there been some kind of a blackout? I didn't want to turn on the light in living room, but I walked to the bathroom and tried the switch there. Nothing. Well, at least I kept a large candle there, and I lit it for some more light.

I stared at myself in the mirror, and I really did look a bit tired. The shadows being cast by the candle probably didn't help either. My skin was a little bit paler than usual and there were bags underneath my eyes. Maybe I was putting too much time into this case. I turned on the faucet and looked down in order to splash water in my face. When I looked up, my reflection seemed a little more refreshed.

Thinking that the hallway lights might be on, I made my way to the front door, only to find that I couldn't open it. It didn't matter which ways I turned the locks and bolts; the door wouldn't open. Eventually I was shaking the door in its frame, and apparently it made so much noise that it woke up Williams. A sleep-addled 'what's wrong?' came sounding from the couch.

We both tried to open the door after that, to no avail. We even unscrewed the hinges, but couldn't get that side of the door to push or pull in any direction either. To say that we were unnerved would have been an understatement. Why wouldn't the door open? It was then that I realized we hadn't looked through the peephole yet.

For some reason, the thought of looking out there terrified me. I don't even know why. I guess it's just that, in case there was something awful out there, I didn't want to see it. My heart was beating like crazy as I leaned against the door. My eyes were closed as I pressed one of them against the peephole. I took a deep breath, swallowed, and opened my eyes. . . only to see an empty hallway. Nothing scary at all. I almost laughed. There was a light coming from the side somewhere (maybe an emergency light on the stairwell?), casting shadows along the narrow space, but it was just a hallway.

I stood back with a relieved sigh, but then I nearly jumped as I heard a loud, sharp noise behind me. Like something smacking against something else. I turned around and felt all the blood in my body freeze. There, on the glass of the window, was a handprint. It started to fade quickly; by the time I was able to answer Williams' questions about what was wrong, it was gone.

Then the lights came back on. And it was so strange, how different things seemed in the light. I was almost instantly relieved and comforted, sure that everything I had felt had been the paranoia of an overworked P.I. Williams was looking at me like a was crazy, but hopefully it was crazy in an endearing way. What exactly was I so scared about? So the block had lost electricity; it wasn't like that had never happened before in New York City history. There was no reason for me to be so scared. Williams decided to leave then and I retired to my bedroom.

Only once I was in my bed, I couldn't help but think about everything some more. The blackout didn't explain why my door was impossible to open. The blackout didn't explain the handprint on my window. I felt a chill go through my body and pulled my blankets up over my head. I tried to tell myself it was nothing, but even with my lights on I couldn't be sure.

Williams came over today to look at the painting. Williams also asked me about the ethics of a private investigator dating a client. I was about to reply that there was no rule against it and suggest dinner when something about the painting caught my attention. The man wasn't in the painting anymore.

I walked over to inspect the painting. It was just swirls of black and dark blues. The tag read "Abyss of the Deep." Had I accidentally taken the wrong painting? How was that possible? I clearly remember picking up "The Sleeping Man." I swear I had it in my apartment this whole time. But memory is a funny thing; once you start doubting it, it becomes harder and harder to remember the truth.

I apologized to Williams and decided to go back to the museum. I couldn't find "The Sleeping Man" there, and they have no record of it after I took it. I have no idea what happened.

Last night I spent an hour staring at the paint. Abyss of the Deep. I propped it against my wall and sat in front of it, not two feet away. I don't know what it is about it, but something about it speaks to me. Calls to me. I just sat there, staring, still and silent, although every now and then swear that I heard the sound of a little girl and a young man laughing.

Last night I spent a good four hours staring at the painting. The lights went off again, but I kept staring at it. I couldn't stop. The blues seemed even more vibrant in the dark. And the more I stared, the more I could hear the laughing. They sounded like they were having such fun. I felt like if I put my hands against the painting, I might fall right through it. Into it.

I'm sure that's where the laughter is coming from. From inside the painting. If I go, if I investigate, maybe I'll find Garry and Ib.