“Detective, is the door stuck? I'll open it. George! George! What are you doing? For the sake of the Merciful Father, open the door quickly.”
Mrs. Freeman tried to find the key to the room, but with a click, Shade had already opened the door.
Leaving the bewildered little girl with Mrs. Freeman, Father Augustus and Shade rushed into the boy's bedroom.
The room was not large. A thirteen-year-old blond boy lay on his side on the bed, his back to the door. Even the sound of strangers bursting into the room did not make him budge.
Shade hurried over, but the spell [False Undead] was ineffective; the boy was not seriously injured. Father Augustus also stepped forward and flipped the boy over on the bed, only to discover that he was simply asleep.
“Child, wake up, wake up quickly!”
The priest shouted with some urgency, even lightly patting the boy's face a few times before the boy finally stirred awake.
However, the eyes that opened were filled with extreme terror; he didn't even seem surprised that strangers had entered his room
“There's something in the house! Mommy, I want Mommy!”
He shouted incoherently, and no matter how the priest tried to soothe him, it was useless. It was not hard to tell from his words that the boy had just had a strange dream, to the point where he could not distinguish between the dream and reality upon waking.
“I'm here! Oh, my poor little George! What happened to you?”
The middle-aged woman entered the room holding her young daughter's hand. Father Augustus continued to comfort the boy, trying to get him to describe what happened in the dream, while Shade walked back to the bedroom door, looking at the empty living room outside.
The cozy home suddenly seemed a bit terrifying.
“Can you really feel nothing?”
【Very slight elements of Whispers, very slight. Even an ordinary person wouldn't be affected unless they insisted on living here for a year. The elements appeared after you used the spell to open the door.】
She answered softly in his ear; the murmuring sound always made Shade want to turn around and see if someone was clinging to his back.
“The appearance of Whisper elements means this is indeed a Relic, but the question is, where is the Relic...”
Under the comfort of his mother and the old priest, the boy gradually calmed down, but he was unable to provide detailed information about what happened in the dream. After waking up, he had forgotten almost everything, only vaguely remembering that a strange person wrapped in bandages had appeared in the house and had tried to kill him.
“Have you seen the missing oil painting? This is your father's relic.”
Seeing that he couldn't get much more out of him, Father Augustus took the portfolio from Mrs. Freeman and opened it to the blank page for the boy to identify. But the boy shook his head in confusion, stating that he had not touched his father's relics.
“Brother, on the day we first moved in, we went to look for toys together. Didn't you flip through this?”
The girl holding Mrs. Freeman's hand suddenly spoke. The girl was about five or six years old, with bright eyes, and she tended to linger on the ends of her words when she spoke. She looked at her brother curiously, but the blond boy shook his head blankly
“Did that happen?”
When speaking to his sister, his tone was no longer so fragile.
“Yes, I remember you pulled out a painting, and then... and then what happened?”
The little girl tilted her head and thought for a long time but couldn't provide an answer.
“Child, where would you hide your most favorite treasure?”
Father Augustus asked again. His kind expression made the somewhat reluctant boy instinctively look away, but seeing his mother and sister looking at him with concern, he gritted his teeth and spoke
“There's a big cardboard box under the bed.”
“Priest, let me.”
Shade walked over and reached under the boy's bed to pull out the cardboard box. Upon opening it, the five of them immediately saw the rolled-up oil painting.
Upon touching it, Shade immediately confirmed that this was the Relic. Unrolling the painting, there were no creases. As Mrs. Freeman had described, the background showed curtains dancing in the sunlight, with a tabletop and various sundries upon it.
“Look at this!”
Father Augustus narrowed his eyes, his tone sounding horrified. He pointed suddenly to the center of the painting, at a wooden three-story house model sitting on the table.
It was the kind of high-end toy scaled proportionally to a real building.
The side facing away from the viewer was a cross-section of the house, revealing exquisite movable furniture, decorations, and puppets inside the model. At this moment, on the second floor inside the model house in the painting, there were actually two puppets, one large and one small. Furthermore, the layout of that model house looked exactly like this three-story rental apartment, and the position and arrangement of the room where the two puppets were located were very similar to the room they were currently in.
Looking at the two exquisitely crafted puppets in the painting, Shade looked puzzled, then suddenly widened his eyes
“Priest, look at the two puppets in the painting. Don't they look like me and this boy?”
“They do! They really look like Brother!”
The little girl was the first to raise her hand and speak.
Father Augustus also leaned forward
“I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't mentioned it, they really do... wait, what is that?”
Due to the perspective of the oil painting, they could only see part of the interior of the model. In the model within the painting, outside the door of the room where the two puppets were, something seemed to be crouching behind the door panel. However, the painter had not emphasized that area, so only a pair of eyes could be vaguely discerned.
Shade and Father Augustus turned simultaneously to look at the real door, but the real door was wide open, and there was nothing outside.
“Oh, look! The painting has changed!”
Mrs. Freeman suddenly shrieked. Shade looked at the painting in his hand again, and sure enough, a tall puppet wrapped in bandages had, at some unknown point, moved from outside the model room to the inside.
None of the five had seen this process happen.
And combined, the puppets of Shade and the boy were not as tall as the bandage-wrapped puppet holding a knife.
Under the gaze of five pairs of eyes, the bandage-wrapped puppet wearing a black hat actually began to move within the image. This terrifying scene made the girl scream, and George was scared trembling, clutching his mother's arm and refusing to let go.
The bandage-wrapped puppet approached the other two puppets in the model house, then raised its knife and stabbed. The large and small puppets also moved to dodge; the small puppet failed to dodge in time and was nearly stabbed, and the larger puppet hurried to help him, only to be unfortunately stabbed in the shoulder.
“Oh!”
Shade let out a cry and immediately clutched his arm. With difficulty, he used his other hand to remove his coat; the white shirt on his left shoulder had already been stained red. Although the injury was not as exaggerated as the puppet's in the painting, he was truly wounded
“I'm fine.”
There was no time for treatment; his eyes remained fixed on the oil painting. Despite the cost of being stabbed, the two puppets still could not escape the attack. This was because they were only maneuvering within one room of the model and had not thought to move to another location through the door
“Quick, let's go to another room.”
Father Augustus saw the pattern and hurriedly supported Shade as they walked out. Mrs. Freeman also followed anxiously with the two children. The group moved from the boy's room to the living room, then left the second floor and ran down the stairs to the first floor.
During this time, with his back to the Freeman family, Shade used "Satiating Meal" to treat the mysteriously appearing wound on his body. In the oil painting in his hand, the two small puppets finally escaped the room as the real people left, moving onto the stairs of the model house just as they had.
The bandage-wrapped puppet with the black hat and sharp knife moved quickly when it was in the same room as the small puppets, but when they were not in the same room, its movement was very slow. As long as the two small puppets didn't go upstairs, they were temporarily safe.
“Leave this house!”
Shade said, walking quickly with the priest to the first-floor foyer. He had originally thought they wouldn't be able to get out at all, but unexpectedly, the door opened normally, and outside was the street view of Tobeisk on a Thursday afternoon.
The priest and Shade stepped out together, but the painting held in Shade's hand suddenly vanished from his grip the moment he left the house, falling flat on the floor in front of the door.
Subsequently, Mrs. Freeman and the children also successfully exited the house. When Shade looked back at the oil painting inside the doorway, he actually saw the puppets representing him and the boy walking from the entrance of the model house back into the interior.
“Mrs. Freeman, have you touched this oil painting?”
Shade suddenly asked the middle-aged woman beside him. She was holding her children's hands, standing at the door in a state of bewilderment
“I must have touched it when we moved... but I was wearing gloves then! Yes, when packing these oil paintings, I always wear gloves!”
This somewhat indecisive woman suddenly understood Shade's meaning.
“Only those who touch the oil painting directly with their hands will have corresponding puppets appear in the image. This thing probably isn't very strong; otherwise, it wouldn't need to blur memories to let only one person contact it at a time,” Father Augustus concluded.
Seeing that the two small puppets in the painting were thinking of going upstairs, Shade immediately stepped back inside the door. His puppet then turned and went down the stairs, and both the real Shade and the puppet stood in the foyer.
“Child, you go in too.”
Father Augustus said to the boy, but the boy clung to his mother in terror.
The middle-aged woman, who was clearly also afraid, looked down at her children, gritted her teeth, and actually let go of her daughter's hand to pull the boy back into the house. She was trembling as she stepped through the door, but she still remembered to say to the old man outside
“Priest, please look after little Leah for me first.”
“No problem, but Mrs. Freeman, the danger is not over yet.”
PS: Refers to the Merciful Father. Mr. Freeman believes in Mr. Dawn, and Mrs. Freeman believes in the Merciful Father.
(End of Chapter)