The evening sky outside the window looked gray when Dikta—a senior private detective—stepped into Galeri Biru. The room was silent and carried the distinctive scent of oil paint. This place was both an exhibition space and the private studio of July, a surrealist painter who had been reported mysteriously missing three days earlier.
What made the case confusing was the condition of the gallery. The main door was locked from the inside with a steel chain and padlock, and not a single window was open or showed any signs of forced entry. July seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth, leaving behind dozens of artworks adorning the walls.
Dikta switched on his small flashlight and examined every corner of the room. There were no footprints, no suspicious fingerprints. Yet one strange thing immediately caught his attention: the large canvases displayed along the gallery walls.
As a meticulous investigator, Dikta had seen the gallery's documentation photos taken by the police on the first day of the missing-person report. In those photos, the canvases depicted abstract surrealist landscapes—floating mountains and a purplish sky.
But when Dikta stood before the main canvas that night, the scene inside the painting had changed.
He frowned and leaned closer to the canvas's surface. The floating mountains had shifted positions, forming the silhouette of a large room with towering pillars. Even more astonishing, in one corner of the room within the painting stood the small figure of a middle-aged man in a brown suit, holding a flashlight—dressed and posed exactly as Dikta was now.
This is impossible, he thought, shivering. He figured he was beginning to hallucinate from exhaustion caused by lack of sleep.
He hurried to another corner of the gallery and faced a medium-sized portrait canvas. On the first day, the painting had depicted a vase of withered flowers. Now the flowers were gone, replaced by a detailed image of July's worktable, complete with a cup of coffee sending up a thin curl of steam and Dikta's investigative notebook lying on top of it.
The man's heart began to pound. He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and compared it with the painting. The corner of the table, the folds in the tablecloth, even the ink stain in the corner of the notebook—all of it had been rendered with terrifying precision, as though the painter were watching Dikta directly from close range.
Day after day, Dikta's fear grew worse. For three days straight, he had come to the gallery searching for clues, and each day the canvases there continued to shift, depicting his own activities.
The horror reached its peak on the fifth day.
That night, the gallery felt much colder. The air reeked of fresh paint, so overpowering it seemed as though the paint on the canvases had been applied only seconds earlier. His hands and feet trembling, Dikta stepped toward the largest canvas on the north wall—the canvas that had previously been completely blank.
Now, it was no longer empty.
A large painting was displayed clearly before him. It depicted the corner of the gallery where he was standing at that very moment. In the center of the canvas stood a man in a brown suit, his eyes wide with terror, holding a brightly lit flashlight.
But that wasn't what made his knees give out instantly...
Directly behind the male figure in the painting stood a tall shadow with long, skinny fingers, wrapping its arms around the detective's shoulders from inside the canvas. The shadow's face wore a wide smile, revealing a row of familiar pale teeth—July's face, the missing painter.
Dikta wanted to scream, but his throat suddenly closed up. He stiffly turned toward his own reflection in the gallery's glass wall beside him.
Too late.
In the real world, cold fingers from behind the canvas suddenly burst through the fabric's surface and clamped tightly onto his shoulder. Dikta felt his body being slowly pulled forward, sucked into the layer of wet oil paint, while the last remnants of his consciousness gradually froze into a permanent part of the art gallery.