The box was wrapped in newspaper. Not even proper wrapping paper, just two sheets of Thursday's classifieds taped together with electrical tape, because Tat had used up the Scotch tape weeks ago and never replaced it.
"You didn't."
"Oh, I absolutely did."
Piper pulled at the electrical tape, which didn't want to come off and took a strip of newsprint with it. Tat sat cross legged on the kitchen floor with her back against the dishwasher, a joint between her fingers, grinning the way she grinned when she'd done something either brilliant or terrible.
"I found it at that estate sale on Morrow. The one with all the porcelain cats."
"You went to that?"
"I went to that."
The newspaper fell away. Underneath was a painting, maybe fourteen inches by eighteen, unframed, the canvas curling a little where it had been stretched over cheap wood. It was a clown, painted in oils by someone who had clearly never been taught how to paint in oils. The face was a lumpy oval, the features crowded toward the centre like they were trying to escape through the nose. The background was a murky green that might have been intentional or might have been every leftover colour on the palette mixed together. There was a ruffled collar rendered in what looked like cake frosting technique. And across the right side of the face, cutting diagonally from the forehead down through the cheek, was a single red streak. It bisected the painted smile so the clown looked like it was grinning through a wound.
"Tat."
"I know."
"This is the worst thing I've ever seen."
"I know! Happy birthday."
Piper laughed. The painting was aggressively ugly in a way that felt almost personal, as though the artist had held a grievance against aesthetics itself. She turned it over. The back of the canvas was bare except for a pencil marking in the lower corner. F.H. 2019.
"The woman at the sale told me the story," Tat said, taking a drag. "The lady who painted it, she was eighty something. Had a stroke while she was finishing it. That red line across the face? Last brushstroke she ever made. Her hand just dragged down the canvas on the way."
Piper looked at the red streak again. She ran her thumb across it without thinking. The rest of the surface was rough, the amateur brushstrokes built up in ridges you could feel like tiny mountain ranges. The streak was different. Smooth. Almost slick. Made with a different substance, or a different pressure, the brush pulled instead of pushed.
"That's horrible."
"I know. But look at him. He's so bad he's good. I saw him and thought, that's a Piper painting if I've ever seen one."
The thing was, Tat wasn't wrong. Piper collected bad art the way other people collected first editions. She had a velvet Elvis in the bathroom and a paint by numbers ocean sunset in the hallway she'd bought at a charity shop for two quid. She liked things that tried and failed. She liked the evidence of the trying.
"How much?"
"Five dollars."
"You spent five whole dollars on me."
"Five dollars and forty five minutes of my life listening to the estate sale lady describe her sciatica."
Piper set the painting on the kitchen table and Tat passed her the joint. The smoke was sticky sweet and heavy, and underneath it Piper caught something else, a thin chemical smell coming off the canvas. Old oil, turpentine maybe. The two smells braided together in her sinuses.
"Where should I hang it?"
"Bedroom. First thing you see every morning. Last thing you see at night."
"You're a monster."
"I'm a visionary."
Piper took another hit and studied the clown. The eyes were the best worst part. They were slightly different sizes, painted in a flat black the artist had tried to give depth by adding a tiny white highlight to each pupil. It hadn't worked. The highlights just made the eyes look wet.
She hung it in the bedroom. She told herself it was to humour Tat, and that was mostly true. But there was another reason she didn't look at directly. The painting bothered her, and Piper Richolt prided herself on being unbotherable. She was the one who'd taken a philosophy course in second year specifically so she could better articulate why she didn't believe in ghosts. Hanging the thing over her own bed was a way of proving it didn't matter. Bad art on cheap canvas, and nothing more.
She used a nail already in the wall from a previous tenant's picture. The painting hung slightly crooked. She left it.
They smoked the rest of the joint on the bed, Tat sprawled sideways with her feet up the wall, talking about a guy from work who'd started bringing a different flavour of yoghurt every day and eating it with a fork. Piper half listened and half watched the painting from across the room. Under the overhead light it looked flat and harmless. Just a bad clown.
Tat fell asleep around eleven, still in her clothes, one arm flung across Piper's pillow. Piper turned off the lamp and lay on her side listening to Tat's breathing settle into its familiar rhythm.
The room was dark. Not unusually dark, just night dark, the streetlight outside pressing a thin orange line through the gap in the curtains. Piper could make out the shapes of her furniture. The dresser. The chair with clothes piled on it. The closet door, half open.
She looked at the wall where the painting hung.
It was harder to see than it should have been. The streetlight gave everything else in the room that faint orange suggestion of shape, but the painting sat in its rectangle of wall like a hole. Not reflecting. Not catching. Absorbing.
Piper stared at it, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
They didn't.
She rolled over and noticed that Clementine wasn't on the bed. The cat slept on the bed every night, had done since she was a kitten. She had a spot at the foot of the mattress, slightly to the left, and if Piper's feet encroached on it she'd bite her toes through the duvet until she moved.
Piper sat up and looked around the room. No cat.
She got up and opened the bedroom door. Clementine was in the hallway, sitting perfectly still beside the bathroom, her eyes catching the dark.
"Come on, Clem. Bed."
The cat looked at her. Looked past her, into the bedroom. Then stood, turned, and walked to the living room at a pace that made it clear she wasn't coming back.
Piper stood in the doorway a moment. Then she shut the door and got back in bed. Tat mumbled something that wasn't words and pulled the covers tighter.
It took Piper a long time to fall asleep.
Over the next few days, things were mostly normal. Piper went to work. She ate leftover birthday cake for breakfast two days running. She called her mum and thanked her for the Amazon voucher. She did a load of laundry and forgot to move it to the dryer and had to wash it again.
But.
She started hearing something. A laugh, or something like one, high pitched and thin, sitting right at the edge of audibility where sound and imagination blur. It happened when she was alone. Brushing her teeth. Making coffee. Once, while she was unlocking the front door, the laugh came from directly behind her and she turned so fast she dropped her keys. Nothing there. The hallway was empty.
She noticed the painting. Or rather, she noticed herself noticing it. It seemed different, though she couldn't pin down how. The brushwork looked finer. The eyes sat more centred in the face. The ruffled collar had a depth she didn't remember from the first night. But when she stood right in front of it and looked properly, it was still just a bad painting, still crooked on its nail.
"Hey," she said to Tat one evening. They were eating pasta on the couch, some reality show playing at a volume that made conversation a competition. "Does the painting look different to you?"
"What painting?"
"The clown."
Tat glanced toward the bedroom. "Different how?"
"I don't know. More... detailed?"
"Babe, it's a five dollar painting by a dead grandma. It's not developing new details."
"I know. I just—"
"Are you seriously creeped out by it?" Tat was grinning now, fork halfway to her mouth. "Oh my god, you are. Piper Richolt, noted sceptic, ghost debunker, the woman who made Brad Keeler cry at that house party for saying he saw an orb."
"I didn't make him cry."
"He cried."
"He was already crying when I got there."
They laughed. The moment passed. Tat turned back to the TV and said something about one of the contestants, and Piper said something back that she forgot immediately. The conversation slipped away from her like something going under water.
That night Piper smoked alone in the bedroom before sleep, sitting on the edge of the bed facing the painting. The smoke curled up and the chemical smell was already there waiting, and the two scents merged so completely she couldn't separate them. She couldn't get high without smelling the painting. She couldn't smell the painting without feeling high.
Clementine still wouldn't come into the bedroom. Piper heard her at night sometimes, claws clicking on the hallway hardwood, a small staccato retreat that sounded like something counting down.
She woke up standing.
That was the thing. She didn't wake and then find herself standing. She woke already on her feet, the way you sometimes surface from a dream mid sentence. She was in front of the painting. Her bare feet ached with cold against the hardwood. Her right hand was raised, fingers extended, close enough to the canvas that she could feel the texture of the paint without touching it, those tiny ridges making a geography of pressure in the air between her skin and the surface.
Her hand was reaching for the red streak.
She pulled it back. Stepped away. Her heart was going fast but her body felt slow, reluctant, obeying her under protest.
The clown's face was the same. Or it wasn't. The smile seemed wider. The mouth was open now and she didn't think it had been open before, though she couldn't be sure, because she'd never studied it that closely. The eyes were still flat black with those wrong white highlights. But the black seemed deeper. Not painted on black. Behind something black.
Piper got back in bed. Tat was asleep. Of course Tat was asleep. She put her back to the wall and did not close her eyes until the light came through the curtains.
The next day she decided to take the painting down. It was a clear, clean thought and she felt good about it. She walked into the bedroom, looked at the nail in the wall, and reached up.
Her phone buzzed. Her mum.
"Hi, love. Did you get the voucher working? Your father says sometimes they don't activate properly."
"Yeah, Mum, it worked fine."
"Because he ordered it online and you know how he is with online things."
"It worked."
"Good. Listen, your aunt Helen's had a thing with her knee, did I tell you?"
Piper sat down on the bed. Her mum talked about Aunt Helen's knee. About the waiting list for the specialist. About the neighbour's dog that had got into the garden again and dug up the dahlias. Piper said "mm" and "right" and "that's awful" at the right intervals. When she hung up twenty minutes later she was scrolling on her phone, legs crossed on the duvet, and the intention to remove the painting was gone. Not suppressed. Just gone, like a word she'd been about to say that dissolved before it reached her mouth.
She stared at the phone a few seconds, feeling like she'd forgotten something. Then she went to make coffee.
The laughing got closer. Not louder, closer. It was in the walls now. She could feel it in the plaster when she pressed her palm flat against the bedroom wall, a vibration so faint it might have been pipes, or wiring, or her own pulse conducted through her skin. She heard it in her own breathing sometimes, a high whine riding the tail of each exhale.
She smoked more. It helped. It smoothed the edges of things and gave her a reason for the strangeness. I'm just high. I've been smoking too much. That's all this is. The thought was a room she could step into and close the door.
Tat was out more. Work, friends, a guy she was maybe seeing but hadn't committed to talking about yet. When she was home she stayed in the living room or the kitchen, and the bedroom where Piper spent more and more of her time became a different country with a border neither of them acknowledged.
"You okay?" Tat asked once, standing in the bedroom doorway. She didn't come in. Piper noticed that.
"Yeah. Just tired."
"You look tired."
"Thanks."
"You know what I mean."
Piper almost said it. She almost said, the painting is doing something and I need you to believe me. But the words were too large for her mouth. They sounded insane even inside her own head. And Tat was watching her with a concern already softening into something lighter, already hunting for the joke, because that was how they navigated. Everything was a bit. Everything was funny.
"I'm fine. Seriously."
"Okay." Tat hovered a second. "Love you."
"Love you."
Then she was gone and Piper was alone with the painting and the chemical sweet smell and the thin sound that lived now inside her chest like a second heartbeat made of laughter.
She stopped trying to take it down. The thought surfaced sometimes, distant and pale, like something seen through deep water. I should take that down. Then it sank again and she'd be doing something else, or nothing else, just sitting on the bed looking at the painting with a feeling that hung somewhere between fear and fascination, in a neighbourhood she didn't have a name for.
She saw it for the first time on a Tuesday. A shadow in her peripheral vision while she brushed her teeth, tall and wrong shaped, standing in the hallway behind her reflection. She spun round. Nothing. Just the hallway, and Clementine's food bowl on the floor, untouched for two days now, because the cat had stopped coming inside at all.
Then at the foot of the bed. She woke to it. Not a shadow this time but a shape, a presence, tall enough that it nearly touched the ceiling. The outline of a ruffled collar. The suggestion of a painted smile. And the eyes. The eyes had stopped being paint. They were openings, apertures, as though someone had cut two holes in the fabric of her bedroom, and behind them was a depth that went further than the wall, further than the building, further than anything she had a measurement for.
She opened her mouth.
She closed it.
The shape was gone. The room was just a room. Tat was sleeping at her friend's place. The streetlight pressed its thin orange line through the curtains.
Piper pulled the covers up and did not look at the wall.
The last night went like this.
She was in bed. She was alone. She'd smoked enough that the room had the soft, tilted quality of a photograph taken at the wrong angle. The painting was on the wall and it was not a painting anymore. She didn't know when it had stopped. The surface was moving, or the thing behind the surface was, pushing against the canvas like a face pressing through a wet sheet.
The laugh was everywhere. It came up out of the mattress springs and down through the plaster and along the ceiling. It rode every breath she took, and then it stopped riding and simply was the breath, carried out of her lungs like something that had been living there for weeks.
The clown stood at the foot of the bed.
It was impossibly tall. Its head didn't touch the ceiling because the ceiling didn't seem to exist anymore, just darkness going up and up. The ruffled collar was grey and stiff and real. The smile was not paint. The face was a face and then it wasn't. The features began to slide, to soften, to pull toward the centre like water circling a drain. The nose went first. Then the mouth, still smiling as it collapsed inward. The eyes stayed longest, those two voids, patient and deep, holding Piper's gaze with the gentle insistence of someone offering their hand.
She screamed.
The scream started in her chest and pushed up through her throat and came out of her mouth and then it changed. Halfway through, the way a road changes surface and you feel it in the steering wheel, the pitch shifted. It went up. It thinned. It curled at the edges.
She was laughing.
She was not laughing.
Something was laughing with her mouth and her lungs and her voice, and Piper was still inside it, still there, still thinking. The thought was clear and small and utterly alone, like the last light in a building being shut down floor by floor.
This is not me laughing.
The thought dimmed.
This is not
The thought dimmed.
This
Tat came home the next morning around ten. She'd brought coffee from the place on the corner, the good place that did the oat milk properly. She pushed open the bedroom door with her hip.
Piper was sitting up in bed. The covers were pulled neatly to her waist. Her hands were folded in her lap. The wall behind her was bare. The nail was still there. The painting was gone.
"Hey," Tat said. "Where'd the clown go?"
Piper turned to look at her and smiled. A normal smile, a Piper smile, the right shape, the right warmth. It stopped before it reached her eyes. It stopped the way the red streak had stopped on the canvas, mid drag, interrupted by something that shouldn't have been there.
"What clown?" Piper said.
Tat laughed and set the coffee on the nightstand. Out in the hallway, Clementine sat still as stone, watching through the open door, her eyes catching the light.
The cat did not come in.