The Last Paint-by-Number

My mother’s house had a way of holding onto summer even in the dead of winter, the radiators ticking like heartbeats and the smell of dust and lemon polish layered over everything. After my father’s passing, I’d moved back in to help her sort through the decades of clutter, and I’d been there for six weeks when I found the paint-by-number kit in the back of the hall closet. It was an old one, from the 1960s, the box faded and the cellophane torn. The picture on the front showed a lighthouse on a cliff, waves crashing below, and the sky a gradient of pinks and oranges. I remembered it from my childhood, tucked away on a high shelf, never opened.

My mother, who was seventy-nine and had the unnerving habit of speaking to people who weren’t there, told me to throw it out. ‘That was your father’s,’ she said, her hands fluttering like moths. ‘He never finished it.’ But I was looking for something to occupy my hands, something mindless, and I’d just lost my job at the auto parts plant, so I took it to the kitchen table and opened it. The paints were dried to brittle discs, but the brush was still wrapped in plastic. The canvas had the usual numbered sections, but there were also letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. I didn’t think much of it.

I went to the hardware store and bought a set of acrylics, matching the colors as best I could from the faded labels. And I began to paint, section by section, in the evenings after my mother had gone to bed. The first few nights were peaceful. The brush moved smoothly, the colors seemed to blend themselves, and the lighthouse began to take shape. But then I noticed something odd. In the sea section, where the waves were meant to be, the paint seemed to shimmer with an oily iridescence that I hadn’t mixed. And the lighthouse beam, painted a pale yellow, seemed to pulse, barely perceptible, as if it were alive.

On the fifth night, I heard a sound from the basement, a dull thud, like something heavy had fallen. My mother was asleep, and I was alone, so I ignored it. But the next morning, I found a small, unlabeled key on the kitchen counter, a brass thing with intricate teeth. I asked my mother about it, but she just stared at the wall and said, ‘He always kept it in his shoe.’ I had no idea what that meant.

The painting progressed faster than I expected. By the end of the first week, I’d completed the water and the cliff, and I was starting on the sky. That’s when I noticed the figures. They weren’t in the original picture, I was certain of that, but there were tiny shapes in the foam of the waves: faces, featureless, their mouths open as if screaming. I tried to paint over them, but the paint wouldn’t cover them. It slid off like oil on water, and the faces seemed to move, shifting, coming closer.

I stopped painting and put the kit aside, but it called to me. Every time I passed the kitchen table, I felt an urge to pick up the brush, to continue. It was like the pull of a current. My mother began to sleep more, and when she was awake, she’d sit in her armchair and hum a tune I didn’t recognize. The tune was low and repetitive, like a chant, and it seemed to sync with the ticking of the radiators, and with the pulse I now felt in my temples.

On the tenth night, I finished the sky. The last paint I applied was a deep, bruised purple for the horizon. As I set down the brush, the painting seemed to shudder, the canvas rippling as if under a breath of wind. The lighthouse beam flickered, and I heard a voice, as clear as if someone were standing behind me, say, ‘She’s coming.’ I whipped around, but the room was empty. My mother was in her room, asleep. The voice had been a woman’s, low and velvety, not my mother’s.

I should have thrown the painting away then. But I didn’t. Instead, I found myself picking up the key I’d found, and I went to the basement. The basement was unfinished, with concrete walls and a dirt floor, and it smelled of damp and old newspapers. There was a heavy oak trunk against one wall, locked, and the key fit. Inside, I found letters tied with a ribbon, a stack of them, all addressed to my father, all in the same elegant, old-fashioned handwriting. I read one. It was dated July 1944, and it was signed, ‘Ever yours, Elinor.’ The letter was full of longing and fear, and it mentioned a place called Greywater, and something about a promise that must be kept.

I had never heard of Greywater. My father had been a quiet man, practical, a factory foreman. He’d never spoken of any Elinor. I took the letters upstairs and read them all. They spanned years, from 1944 to 1986, the year before I was born. In the last letter, Elinor wrote, ‘I have waited, but you chose another. The painting is a map. When you complete it, the way will open. Do not finish it, or she will come through.’

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the painting, at the nearly completed sky, and at the small, blank space where the last number should have been. There was a single patch of unpainted canvas, shaped like a door, about the size of my hand, in the bottom right corner. The number on it was not a number, but a symbol, an interlocking spiral. I had no paint for it.

I tried to find a matching color, but the symbol seemed to absorb light, and my paints looked dull and muddy. I was frustrated, but also terrified. I knew I should burn the thing, crush the canvas, destroy it. But the pull was too strong. I dipped my brush into the nearest paint, a dark red, and touched it to the spiral. Immediately, the canvas went cold, and the room darkened. The paint on the brush was gone, as if the canvas had sucked it dry. And then, the lighthouse beam turned blood red, and the sea turned black.

From the painting, a sound began to rise, like the howling of wind, but also like a woman’s sob, and the smell of the sea filled the kitchen, salt and rot. The faces in the waves grew, stretching, their mouths gaping, reaching out of the canvas. I stumbled back, knocking over the chair. My mother appeared in the doorway, her eyes wide, and she whispered, ‘You finished it.’

And then the canvas flexed, and something pushed through. A shape, like a woman, but made of roiling water, dripping, with hollow eyes. It stepped out of the painting, and the painting fell to the floor, empty. The woman turned to me, and I saw that her face was my mother’s face, but younger, untouched by age. She smiled, and her smile was the last thing I saw before darkness took me.

I woke up on the floor, hours later. The painting was gone, the kitchen was as it was, and my mother was sitting in her armchair, humming that same tune. I asked her what had happened, but she just said, ‘She’s gone now. She’ll be back when you least expect it.’ I searched the house for the painting, but it was nowhere. That was three years ago. I live alone now, in a different town, but sometimes, at night, I hear the sound of waves, and I smell the salt. And once, I saw a figure at the foot of my bed, dripping, with hollow eyes, and I woke up screaming.

My psychologist says it’s a manifestation of my grief and anxiety. But I know the truth. I finished what my father started, and I let something in. The key still hangs on my wall, a reminder of the doors we should never open. And I have not slept through a night since, without dreaming of the lighthouse, and the sea, and the woman who wears my mother’s face, waiting for me to come to Greywater.