Chapter 9: The Artist's Gaze

Chapter 9: The Artist's Gaze

The Atheneum was no longer a workplace; it was a battlefield. The crushing despair that had followed Alistair Finch’s revelation had hardened into a cold, diamond-sharp resolve. Every tick of the grandfather clock in the main hall was a chisel striking stone, carving away at his life, bringing the replica in the hidden hall closer to completion. The image of Maya, her fragile life now a hostage to this place, was a fire in his gut that burned away the fear. He was no longer prey waiting for the slaughter. He was a strategist surveying the terrain.

His nightly patrols transformed. He moved with a new purpose, his worn sketchbook and a charcoal pencil now his primary tools. He was not just documenting positions; he was mapping a consciousness. Finch had called the museum an ‘Artist.’ Leo, the failed art student, decided to take him at his word. If this place was an artist, it had to think like one. It had to have a process, a style, and most importantly, a weakness.

His mind kept returning to the cracked ID badge of Elias Thorne. The man had lasted a year. How? What had he learned before the museum finally consumed him? Leo’s first stop was the dusty storage closet where he’d found the badge. He had been too panicked then to search thoroughly. Now, he was methodical. He ran his hands over every dusty shelf, tapped every loose floorboard, his fingers searching for anything out of place.

Tucked behind a stack of yellowed cleaning logs, his fingers brushed against a loose piece of canvas. He pulled it free. It was a small, rolled-up painter’s drop cloth, stiff with age. He unrolled it carefully on the floor. On the stained, paint-flecked surface, written in what looked like charcoal and desperate, frantic scrawls, were Elias Thorne's last thoughts.

It wasn’t a diary. It was the manifesto of a crumbling mind. Sentences spiraled into diagrams. Sketches of the statues bled into paranoid ramblings.

They only move when I don’t look. The moment I turn away.

It’s one thing. Not many. All one set of eyes.

Can’t see everything at once. Too much canvas.

Leo’s breath caught in his throat. Elias had been onto something. He wasn't just being hunted by individual monsters; he was being observed by a single, vast entity. The phrases were a mix of terror and artistic critique. Then, near the bottom, circled multiple times as if it were the key to everything, was one cryptic phrase:

It’s all about the Artist’s Gaze. Find the blind spots.

The Artist’s Gaze. The words resonated with everything Leo had been taught. In art school, they had spent weeks on the concept. The gaze of the artist determines the composition, dictates what is in focus and what is in the periphery. An artist cannot render every single detail of a scene with perfect clarity at once. They choose a focal point. The rest is suggestion, texture, atmosphere.

What if the Atheneum worked the same way?

A wild, terrifying theory began to form in his mind. The museum was a single, massive predator, but its attention, its ‘gaze,’ was a resource. It could only truly focus on one thing at a time. The statues weren’t just moving when unobserved by him; they were moving when they were outside the focal point of the Artist’s consciousness. When he, the sole living human in the building, stared at one exhibit, the museum’s attention was drawn there, making it the subject. Everything else was relegated to the periphery, free to shift and crawl and hunt.

He had to test it.

He walked to the Gallery of Antiquities, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He chose a statue of a Roman Legionary, its marble face stern and impassive. He stood before it, staring directly into its blank eyes, but his awareness was stretched thin, trying to sense the room behind him. He could feel the familiar, oppressive weight of the other statues in the hall, their silent potential for movement.

He pulled a small, polished silver locket from his pocket—the one with Maya’s picture inside—and held it at an angle. In its curved, distorted surface, he could see the reflection of the statue behind him, a snarling Gorgon. He stood there for a full five minutes, his gaze fixed on the Legionary, but keeping the Gorgon captured in the reflection of his locket.

Nothing happened. The suffocating tension in the room remained, but there was no scrape of stone, no subtle shift. His gaze, even through a reflection, was enough to pin it in place.

It was a start. A small, desperate proof of concept. But mirrors were not enough. He needed to control the gaze on a larger scale. He needed to create a blind spot big enough to move through.

His eyes fell on a security camera mounted high in the corner of the hall. The museum’s own eyes. In his earlier, futile attempts to gather proof, he had learned that the Atheneum could corrupt any new recording. But what if he didn’t try to record something new? What if he used its own system against it?

He sprinted to the security office. The system was old, but its bones were familiar. He wasn't a hacker, but he knew his way around basic video feeds. He found the controls for the camera in the Gallery of Innocence, focusing on Camera 3, which was pointed directly at the pedestal of the small, shrouded girl holding a dead bird. He couldn't create a false image, but maybe, just maybe, he could create a loop. A tiny, imperceptible one.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, sweat beading on his forehead. He isolated the feed, captured a five-second clip of the statue sitting perfectly still on its pedestal, and set the system to play it back in a continuous, seamless loop. To the central system, to the Artist’s Gaze, it would look as though Camera 3 was still broadcasting a live feed of an unmoving statue. It would appear to be under constant observation.

The real test would be in the gallery itself.

He walked back to the Gallery of Innocence, his every nerve ending screaming. He stood in the archway, his eyes sweeping the room. The girl with the dead bird. The boy with the ball. The twins holding hands. All still. All silent.

“Okay,” he whispered, his voice trembling. He took a deep breath. “I’m not looking.”

He turned his back on the gallery, deliberately facing the long, empty corridor, his heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his ears. He was presenting the Artist with a choice. It could focus its Gaze on him, the living, breathing anomaly in the hall, or it could trust its own electronic eyes that told it the girl with the bird was being watched.

He counted to sixty, each second a lifetime. The silence behind him was absolute, a terrifying, pregnant void. Had it worked? Or was The Contorted Man about to lurch out of a side corridor and snap his spine?

With a shuddering breath, he turned back around.

His eyes darted first to the pedestal for Camera 3. The statue of the girl with the dead bird was exactly where he had left it, perfectly still.

But the rest of the room had changed.

The boy with the ball was no longer on his pedestal. He was now standing three feet to the left of it, his head cocked at an unnatural angle. The twins were no longer holding hands; they stood on opposite sides of the gallery, their small stone forms bracketing the room. They had all moved, converging on the center of the space.

And they were all staring, with their blank, hateful eyes, at the one statue that had remained frozen in place. They looked confused, their poses a mixture of curiosity and malevolence, as if trying to understand why their sister had refused to join the game.

A slow, triumphant smile spread across Leo’s face. It was a haggard, terrified expression, but it was a smile nonetheless. It worked. He had carved out a tiny pocket of safety. A blind spot.

He looked at his own reflection in the darkened glass of a display case. The same tired, gaunt face stared back, but the fear in his eyes was now tempered with something else. It was the sharp, calculating glint of an artist who had just discovered a new technique. He was no longer just the subject of the masterpiece. He was learning how to paint over the canvas.