The Painted Veil

The first time I saw the thing in our apartment, I blamed it on the poor lighting and my exhaustion from working the night shift at the 24-hour grocery on the edge of town. We’d moved into the old carriage house behind a Victorian mansion that had been converted into four units, and the landlord had warned us about the drafty windows and the occasional mouse. But nothing about a figure in the corner of our bedroom.

It was a Tuesday, I think, when my husband, Marcus, came to wake me for my shift. He’d been out of work for a month, and we were surviving on my paycheck and ramen noodles. He shook my shoulder, and when I groggily turned over, his face was pale. ‘There’s something in the corner, by the closet,’ he whispered. I sat up, squinting into the dim afternoon light. I saw nothing but a pile of clothes and a laundry basket. ‘You were dreaming,’ I said, but he insisted he saw a tall, cloaked figure with a skull-like face. I dismissed it, kissed him on the cheek, and went to work.

But the dreams started that week. Not just Marcus’s, but mine too. His were about me dying in childbirth, leaving him alone with a crying infant he didn’t know how to care for. Mine were less specific—just a sense of being watched, a cold breath on my neck, and a weight pressing down on my chest. I’d wake gasping, but the feeling would linger like a stain. We tried to laugh it off as stress, especially after I found out I was pregnant. We were nervous, excited, terrified.

Two weeks after the first sighting, we found a painting in the attic. Actually, Marcus found it while looking for a box of holiday decorations. It was a large, dusty canvas in a cracked gold frame. The painting showed a woman in a Victorian dress, standing in a field of white flowers. Her face was strangely blank, a smooth oval of flesh, and her hands were clasped behind her back. We thought it was spooky but beautiful, and we hung it in our bedroom, thinking it would add some character to the room. That was our mistake.

The night we hung the painting, the dreams intensified. Marcus dreamed he was in a field of those same white flowers, calling my name, but I was nowhere to be found. I dreamed I was inside the painting, my face slowly being erased, my screams silent. And every night, I woke to see the painting in the corner of my eye, the woman’s blank face seeming to tilt toward us as if listening.

A month later, I started having a persistent headache. It felt like my skull was being squeezed. The doctor told me it was normal, that pregnancy could cause migraines, and he prescribed bed rest. I spent long days in the bedroom, staring at the painting. I began to notice details I hadn’t before: the flowers seemed more vivid, almost alive, and there was a faint outline of a face in the blank skin, like a watermark. I tried to tell Marcus, but he was distracted, interviewing for a job at a shipping warehouse. He also started sleeping on the couch, saying my tossing and turning kept him up.

One night, I had a vivid dream. I was in a grand old house, the one our apartment might have been part of a century ago. The woman in the painting was there, wearing the same dress, and she was holding a baby. She turned to me, and her face was no longer blank—it was mine. ‘You have what I could never keep,’ she said, and I woke with a scream. The painting was on the floor, face down. I hadn’t touched it.

Marcus rushed in, looked at the overturned painting, and said, ‘It fell off the nail.’ But I noticed the nail was still in the wall. He wouldn’t look at the painting again, and when I tried to turn it over, he stopped me. ‘Just leave it,’ he said, his voice tense.

The headaches got worse. My memory began to slip. I’d forget simple words, lose track of conversations, once I even forgot Marcus’s name for a moment. The doctor became concerned and ordered an MRI. The results showed something in my brain—a mass that seemed to have no clear boundaries. The doctor said it was likely a benign tumor, but they’d monitor it.

The painting remained face down for a week until I finally couldn’t stand it. I flipped it over. The woman’s face was no longer blank. It was mine, but older, more tired, with a hollow stare. And in the background, where the field had been, I saw a figure—a tall, cloaked shape with a skull-like face. It was the same figure Marcus had seen.

I screamed, and Marcus ran in. But when he looked at the painting, he saw just the original blank-face woman. ‘It’s your mind playing tricks,’ he said, but his hands were shaking. I made him sleep in the bedroom with me that night, but he lay awake, staring at the ceiling. I pretended to sleep, but I watched the painting from the corner of my eye.

That’s when the figure stepped out of the painting.

It wasn’t solid, more like a shadow that came alive, slipping from the canvas like ink spreading into water. It grew tall, mirroring the cloaked shape in the painting. Its face was not a skull but a smooth, white surface with no features, except for a faint reminder of a nose and mouth. It hovered over me, and I felt a cold hand on my belly. I tried to scream, but no sound came.

The next morning, I woke up with a sharp pain in my abdomen. Marcus rushed me to the hospital, where the doctors said I had a placental abruption. They did an emergency C-section, and our daughter was born at 28 weeks, her tiny body inside a glass box. I was told I was lucky to be alive. But when they wheeled me to the NICU, I saw something that made my blood run cold—the cloaked figure standing at the foot of my daughter’s incubator, its featureless face tilted down as if watching her.

I pointed and screamed, but the nurses saw nothing. Marcus held my hand, trying to calm me, but I know what I saw. The figure looked up, and though it had no eyes, I felt it looking into my soul. Then it dissolved into the air, leaving behind a faint scent of white flowers.

When I was discharged, we moved out of that apartment. We left the painting behind, but I’m convinced it followed us. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I catch a glimpse of a tall, dark shape at the foot of our new bed. And my daughter, who is now six months old, sometimes stares into the corner of our room, cooing as if she sees something I don’t. And I wonder if that thing, whatever it was, is still waiting, biding its time, knowing that it already has a claim on my daughter, and all we’ve done is painted over the cracks of a curse that has followed us like a veil that cannot be lifted.