Chapter 1: The Unwanted Gift

The blinking cursor on Alex Mercer’s laptop screen was a tiny, mocking heartbeat. To its left, the number ‘$27.54’ glowed with an almost malevolent intensity. His bank account balance. Below it, an overdue invoice for a logo design—a job he’d hated for a client he’d hated more—remained stubbornly unpaid. Rent was due in three days.

A familiar coil of anxiety tightened in his chest. This was the reality of a 23-year-old art history student: a head full of Renaissance techniques and a wallet full of dust. He leaned back in his worn-out office chair, the pleather cracking in protest, and ran a hand through his unkempt brown hair. His small apartment, usually a refuge from the pressures of his double life as a student and a struggling freelancer, suddenly felt like a cage closing in. The walls, covered in cheap prints and his own charcoal sketches, seemed to be watching him.

To escape the blinking cursor of doom, Alex did what he always did. He procrastinated. He opened a new tab and dove into the digital rabbit hole of obscure online art galleries, the weirder the better. It was a masochistic habit, scrolling through works by artists who had either found success or had the financial freedom to create whatever haunting nonsense they wanted. Tonight, he found himself on a site called ‘The Liminal Canvas,’ a forum dedicated to anonymously posted, unsettling art.

He clicked through images of distorted sculptures and nightmarish digital collages. It was a parade of manufactured horror, most of it trying too hard. He was about to close the tab when a thumbnail caught his eye. It was titled simply, 'Portrait.'

He clicked on it. The image that filled his screen was profoundly, unnervingly simple. It was a portrait of a man, from the shoulders up, done in thick, aggressive oil strokes. But there were no features. The space where the eyes, nose, and mouth should have been was a smooth, unsettling void of flesh-toned paint. The background was a murky, indeterminate smear of grey and bruised purple. There was no detail, no context, just the suggestion of a human form, hollowed out. It wasn't scary in a jump-scare way; it was unsettling on a deeper, existential level. It felt like looking at a person whose soul had been scooped out.

A cynical laugh escaped him. It was the perfect blend of pretentious and creepy. He had to share it.

He took a screenshot and sent it to his best friend, Maya.

Alex: Found my new spirit animal. This is what I feel like before my morning coffee.

Her reply was almost instantaneous.

Maya: God, that’s awful. It looks like a sentient thumb. Please don’t hang that on your wall, I’ll never visit again.

Alex: Too late. Already commissioning a life-sized version for the living room. It’ll really tie the room together.

Maya: You’re a weirdo. Get back to studying for your mid-term. Or better yet, finishing that freelance gig.

Alex smiled. Maya was always the anchor, the one pulling him back to the shores of reality. He typed a quick reply, promising to be productive, then closed the laptop. The image of the featureless face, however, lingered in his mind as he microwaved a sad-looking cup of instant ramen.

Three days passed. The rent was paid, barely, thanks to a last-minute payment from the difficult client. The memory of the creepy painting had faded, replaced by the more immediate horrors of art history essays and looming deadlines. That’s why he was so confused when the delivery guy buzzed his apartment.

“Package for Alex Mercer,” the voice crackled through the intercom.

“I didn’t order anything,” Alex replied, pressing the talk button.

“Well, someone ordered it for you. You gonna come get it or what?”

Sighing, Alex trudged down the three flights of stairs. In the lobby sat a large, rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper. There was no return address, just his name and address scrawled in neat, blocky handwriting. It was oddly heavy. Curiosity overriding his caution, he hauled it back up to his apartment and set it on the floor.

He tore at the paper. Beneath it was a sturdy cardboard box. He slit the tape with his keys and opened the flaps. An immediate, powerful scent hit him—linseed oil and turpentine. The sharp, earthy smell of a fresh painting.

His heart gave a strange little flutter. Inside, nestled in bubble wrap, was a wooden frame. He carefully lifted it out.

It was the painting.

The real one.

Alex stumbled back, his hand flying to his mouth. It was identical to the screenshot. The same sickly, featureless face. The same murky background. The texture of the oil paint was thick and visceral, the strokes layered with an unsettling energy he couldn't have appreciated from a digital image. It was roughly two feet by three feet, a substantial, solid object that had no right to be in his apartment.

His first thought was a surge of bewildered anger. “Maya!” he muttered, pulling out his phone. This had to be her. It was an incredibly elaborate, expensive prank, but it was exactly her kind of dry, committed humor.

He snapped a picture of the painting leaning against his sofa and sent it to her.

Alex: Okay, VERY funny. How much did this set you back? You’ve officially won the prank war.

He waited. A minute passed. The three little dots appeared and disappeared.

Maya: What the hell is that? Is that the thumb-man painting? Alex, what is going on?

Alex: Don’t play dumb. The delivery, no return address? Classic. I’m impressed, honestly.

Maya: Alex, I swear on my future marketing degree, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m in the library. I haven’t sent you anything. Why would I send you that monstrosity?

Her denial was so firm, so immediate, that a sliver of genuine confusion pierced his amusement. If not Maya, then who? One of his other friends? No one else knew about the picture. It had to be a joke. Someone was messing with him.

Refusing to be unnerved, he decided to lean into it. Fine. If someone wanted to send him a cursed painting, he would treat it like the joke it clearly was. With a defiant smirk, he found a hammer and a nail and hung the portrait on the largest empty wall in his small living room, directly opposite the sofa where he spent most of his evenings.

“There,” he said to the empty room. “You really tie the place together.”

The featureless face stared back at him, absorbing the light from the window. For the rest of the day, it was a source of amusement. He’d glance up from his textbook and chuckle. He took another photo and posted it online with the caption, “My new roommate is a little quiet.”

But as day bled into night, the amusement began to curdle. The shadows in his apartment grew longer, and the painting seemed to change with them. The murky background looked darker, deeper. The smooth, blank face seemed less like an artistic choice and more like a deliberate, unnatural emptiness.

He ordered a pizza, sat on his sofa, and put on a movie, trying his best to ignore it. But he couldn’t. He kept feeling a prickle on the back of his neck, the distinct, unshakable sensation of being watched. Every time he glanced up, his eyes were drawn to that void. It was just paint on canvas, he told himself. Pigment and oil and fabric. A stupid, elaborate prank.

But as the movie credits rolled and the only light in the room came from the flickering television screen, the feeling intensified. The silence in the apartment felt heavier now, charged with a strange new energy. The ambient noises of the old building—the groan of pipes, the distant wail of a siren—seemed to orbit around the thing on the wall.

He turned off the TV, plunging the room into near darkness. He stood up, his own reflection a ghostly shape on the black screen. He couldn't bring himself to look at the painting, but he could feel its presence, a dead spot in the room that somehow had more weight than anything else in it.

"This is ridiculous," he whispered, the sound startlingly loud in the quiet.

He forced himself to turn and face it. In the gloom, the portrait was just a dark rectangle on the wall. An object. Nothing more.

But as his eyes adjusted, he felt a cold dread wash over him, a primal fear that had nothing to do with logic. The empty space of the face seemed to pull at the shadows, creating the illusion of depth where there was none. It felt like he was not looking at a painting, but into a doorway. And in the dead of night, in the suffocating silence of his tiny apartment, he got the terrifying, impossible feeling that something on the other side was looking back.