The Painted Lady

The summer I turned thirteen, I crossed the creek to help my cousin Mara and her father clear out the house at the end of Bramble Lane. It was a sagging, Victorian thing with peeling green paint and a porch that groaned under our feet. The air inside was thick with dust and the smell of old mothballs. I hadn’t been back since the party when I was eleven, the one where I saw the pale girl in the mirror.

We were hauling boxes of old records and kitchenware when I noticed the portrait. It was propped against the wall in the hallway, wrapped in a tarp, but the corner was torn. I pulled it free and uncovered a painting of a young girl in a white dress, her hair so pale it was almost silver. She was holding a single white rose, and her eyes followed me. I dropped the tarp and backed away, but Mara laughed.

‘You’re still seeing things?’ she said. ‘That’s just Painted Lily, the girl who lived here back in the 1800s. Dad says she haunts the place, but it’s just superstitious nonsense.’

But I couldn’t shake the feeling. That night, the sounds started. Soft scratchings on the walls, like fingernails dragging. I lay in my sleeping bag in the parlor, too scared to move. Then, from the hallway, came a child’s whisper, barely audible: ‘Let her out.’

I bolted upright, and the moonlight streaming through the curtain revealed a figure standing by the door. A little girl in a white dress, her hair glowing like moonlight. She wasn’t solid; I could see the wallpaper through her. She lifted her hand and pointed toward the attic stairs, then vanished.

I woke Mara the next morning, babbling about the ghost. She rolled her eyes but agreed to explore the attic. We found a locked trunk beneath a pile of moth-eaten blankets. The lock was rusted, but it broke with a twist of a crowbar. Inside, we found a child-sized dress, a tarnished locket, and a diary bound in cracked leather. The diary’s pages were filled with the scrawled writing of a girl named Lily. She wrote about being trapped in the attic, about a man with cold hands who visited her, and about her ‘sisters’ who came before her. The last entry read: ‘Papa says I must be patient. He will paint me soon, and I will live forever.’

We looked at each other, the same horror dawning. That portrait in the hallway—it was of Lily, but I remembered now that on the party night, the girl in the mirror wore a white dress, but her face was blank, featureless. And in the portrait, she had no face either—just smooth, pale skin where her features should be. The painting was not finished.

Then we heard it: a scraping from the attic room we had just left. We ran back up, and the trunk was empty. The dress, the diary, the locket—all gone. Something in the air smelled like turpentine. And from downstairs, my uncle’s voice, urgent: ‘You better come see this.’

We found him in the living room, staring at the portrait. The girl now had eyes—dark, hollow pits. And her lips were curved into a thin smile. The rose in her hand was starting to bloom. My uncle whispered, ‘It’s growing.’ Indeed, the paint was still wet. Behind me, a small giggle echoed. I spun around, and there she was—the girl, more solid now, reaching out a small, cold hand. ‘You have to finish me,’ she said. ‘You brought me out.’

The room grew icy. My breath fogged. The walls seemed to pulse. And in the mirror across the room, I saw myself, but not myself—my reflection was the girl, her face now bearing my features. She was stealing my face. I screamed, but the sound was her laugh. My hands flew to my face, feeling nothing but smooth skin. In the mirror, I saw my own horrified eyes in the girl’s reflection, but my body was still there, only my reflection had been taken.

Mara grabbed me. ‘Run!’ we shouted, but the door slammed shut. The portrait grew a new face—mine, screaming silently. The girl, now free, took a step toward me, and her fingers elongated, touching my cheek. ‘Come play,’ she said, ‘you’ll stay forever.’

We broke through the window and tumbled into the garden. Behind us, the house seemed to sigh, and all the lights went out. We never went back. They never moved out—the bodies were never found. But sometimes, when I pass a mirror, I catch a flicker of a face that isn’t mine, and I hear a girl whispering, ‘You have to finish me.’ And I know, one day, she will. The painted lady is patient, and she needs a new face for her portrait.