The Palette of December

I had just turned nineteen that autumn, and my gran had slipped a crisp fifty-pound note into my birthday card, along with a note in her shaky handwriting: ‘For something that makes you happy, love. Not for bills.’ I knew exactly what I wanted: a proper oil paint set, the kind with tiny tubes of pigment that promised to turn blank canvas into something that could hang on a wall and make people feel things. The art supply store was on Princes Street in Edinburgh, a city I’d grown up with but never really loved—too many tourists, too many tartan shops, too many ghost tours that felt more like theatre than anything real. But that day, the sky was the colour of a bruise, and the wind off the Firth of Forth bit through my jacket, so I kept my head down and walked.

Near the Scott Monument, there was a man dressed as a gargoyle, painted head to toe in grey, frozen on a plinth. He was so still that even his eyes didn’t move, and I had to admit, it was uncanny. A girl about my age stood beside me, also watching. She had a shock of red hair and a mustard-yellow coat, and she was holding a sketchbook to her chest.

‘I hate these things,’ she said, not looking at me.

I assumed she meant the gargoyle, but I asked anyway, ‘The statue or the tourists?’

She looked at me then, and I saw that her eyes were the colour of the sky—grey, but with something deeper behind them. ‘The pigeons,’ she said, nodding at the flock that had settled on the monument’s base. ‘They’re not real pigeons. They’re spies.’

I laughed, but she didn’t. She just watched the birds with a tight jaw.

Her name was Elowen, and she was an art student at the college just off the Royal Mile. She told me she was working on a series of paintings based on the idea of ‘lingering moments’—the seconds after a door closes, the silence after a scream, the stillness before a shutter clicks. I told her about my birthday money, and she offered to show me her favourite art supply shop, a cramped little place down an alley, where the owner was a woman named Mrs. Whitlock who still kept the old-fashioned receipt books and let you sniff the turpentine before you bought it. I said yes, and we walked together through the cold, past the closed-up shops and the huddles of tourists, and I forgot about the pigeons.

The shop was called ‘The Palette and the Lamp,’ and it smelled of linseed oil and old paper. Mrs. Whitlock was a tiny woman with glasses perched on her nose and a cardigan that looked like it had seen better decades. She showed me the oil paints, the sable brushes, the canvases stretched so tight you could almost hear them hum. I picked out a set of twelve colours, and as I was paying, Elowen picked up a small, unlabelled tin. It was round, like a tin of boot polish, and it rattled slightly when she shook it.

‘This isn’t for sale,’ Mrs. Whitlock said sharply, but Elowen had already opened it. Inside was a dark, viscous liquid that shimmered with an iridescent sheen, like oil on water. ‘It’s just old pigment,’ Elowen said, but she looked at it for a long time.

That night, back in my flat on the south side of Glasgow, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Elowen, about the way she’d looked at the pigeons, about the tin she’d almost bought. I had her number in my phone, scribbled on a receipt, and at 2 a.m., I texted her: ‘You free tomorrow? I want to try out my new paints, and you said you’d model for me.’

She replied almost instantly: ‘Meet me at the monument. Bring your paints.’

The next morning, the sky was still that bruised colour, and the wind was stronger. The gargoyle man was back, but this time he was covered in frost, and I noticed that his eyes were moving—just a flicker, left and right, tracking something. I looked around, but there was no one else except a few pigeons, huddled together on the ground. Elowen was already there, leaning against the monument’s base.

‘I saw something last night,’ she said, not greeting me. ‘I used the pigment from the tin. I painted what I saw, but I can’t show you because I burned it.’

I asked her what she’d seen, but she just shook her head. ‘Let’s go somewhere quieter,’ she said. ‘I know a place where the light is better.’

She led me down a series of narrow streets that I’d never noticed before, past a boarded-up church, past a graveyard where the headstones were leaning like drunkards, and finally to a small courtyard that seemed impossible—a perfect square of grass enclosed by tenement buildings, with a single cherry tree in the middle, bare and black against the sky. There was a fountain, empty, with a stone nymph at its centre, her face worn smooth by time.

‘This is my spot,’ Elowen said. ‘I come here to paint. But lately, I’ve been seeing things here. Not ghosts, exactly. More like echoes.’

I set up my easel, but I didn’t open my new paints yet. Instead, I watched her. She took out a small canvas and a palette knife, and she began to mix a colour I’ve never been able to describe since—a grey that seemed to have veins of green running through it, like something that had been growing underground for a long time.

‘I’m going to paint the air,’ she said. ‘The air between the buildings, the air that’s been here before us, that will be here after us. Can you feel it? It’s heavy.’

I felt a shiver, and not from the cold. The courtyard was silent, but it wasn’t a peaceful silence. It was the kind of silence you get after a scream, when the noise has stopped but the shape of it lingers.

Then I saw them. At the edge of my vision, the pigeons. They were all over the courtyard now, silent, watching us. They didn’t move, just stood there, their heads cocked, their eyes like little black beads.

‘Elowen,’ I said, but she was too focused. She was painting, and I saw that she was crying—not sobbing, just tears running down her cheeks, and her hand was moving fast, as if something else was guiding it.

‘They’re not pigeons,’ she whispered. ‘They’re the people who used to be here. They’re the ones who forgot to leave.’

I wanted to grab her, shake her, tell her we had to go, but I couldn’t move. The wind had died, and the only sound was the scrape of her palette knife on the canvas.

Then the cherry tree began to bloom. In December. The blossoms were white, but they had a tinge of grey, like they’d been bleached. They fell, not gently, but in a sudden flurry, and each petal that touched the ground turned to a dark smudge, like a bruise on the pavement.

I looked at Elowen’s canvas, and what she had painted made my stomach drop. It wasn’t the courtyard. It was a field, and in the field there was a mass grave, and the ground was bubbling, and from the soil hands were reaching up, not grasping, but waving, as if they were saying goodbye.

‘She’s coming,’ Elowen said, and she dropped the palette knife.

‘Who?’ I asked, but I already knew.

‘The statue,’ she said. ‘The gargoyle. He’s not a man dressed up. He’s a door. And tonight, he’s going to open it.’

The pigeons rose into the air in a single, silent motion, and the courtyard went dark, as if the sun had been swallowed. I heard a sound like a stone grinding against stone, and then the fountain at the centre began to fill with black water.

I don’t remember running, but I must have, because the next thing I knew, I was back on Princes Street, and it was normal—tourists taking photos, the gargoyle man still as a statue, and the pigeons pecking at crumbs. Elowen was beside me, her canvas tucked under her arm, but the painting was gone. All she had was the empty tin.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

She looked at me, and her eyes were full of something that wasn’t there before—a deep, ancient exhaustion. ‘You didn’t see it,’ she said. ‘You didn’t see what’s underneath all of this. The city is built on bones, and some of them are still moving.’

She handed me the tin. ‘Take it,’ she said. ‘But don’t open it. Just keep it somewhere safe.’

We parted ways. I went home, and I tried to paint with my new oils, but every colour I mixed felt wrong, too bright, too clean. And at night, I could hear a scratching at my window, like something trying to get in. When I looked, there was only a pigeon on the sill, its head tilted, watching me with an unblinking gaze.

I moved a month later, to a flat on the top floor, with windows that faced away from the street. But the nightmares stayed. And in the dreams, I’m back in that courtyard, and the cherry tree is blooming, and Elowen is painting a door. The door opens, and inside is not darkness, but a grey, infinite space, and I can hear thousands of voices whispering together, not words, but a sound like wind through a dead forest.

I kept the tin. It sits in a drawer in my kitchen, and sometimes, when I’m awake at 3 a.m., I swear I can hear it rattle, just once, as if something inside has turned over in its sleep.

I haven’t painted since. And I don’t think I ever will.

I saw Elowen one last time, about a year later, on the news. She was missing, reported by her family. They said she’d been last seen heading towards the Scott Monument, carrying a canvas. They never found her.

Sometimes, late at night, I think about the pigeons. I think about how they’re never in flocks of three, always in pairs or in a crowd, but never three. And I remember a story my gran used to tell me, about how the birds carry the souls of the restless, and how they wait for a moment when the world is thin enough to cross back over.

I don’t look at pigeons anymore. I can feel them watching me, even when I can’t see them, and I know that one day, the gargoyle will come to life for me, and the door will open, and I’ll have to decide whether to step through or to stay on this side, with the light and the noise and the people who don’t know what’s underneath their feet.

I think about the tin, and the pigment that Elowen used, and the painting she made that I never saw. It was a field, and a grave, and hands waving. But I never told anyone the last thing she whispered to me before she disappeared. She said, ‘The door is always open for the ones who see. You just have to be willing to walk through it.’

I’m not willing. But some nights, I feel the handle in my palm.