The painting was listed on eBay in February 2000 with a warning. The sellers — a couple in California — said they had found it behind an old brewery. They said they did not know the artist. They said they needed it out of their house.
The warning was specific: the figures in the painting moved at night.
The painting shows a boy, perhaps five years old, standing in a doorway. Beside him stands a girl, or rather a figure that is almost a girl — a doll, or something wearing a doll's face, with eyes that are just slightly too present for an object and not present enough for a person. Behind the doorway is darkness and glass, and pressed against the glass from the other side are hands. Many hands. Human in shape. Pushing from the dark.
The sellers said that at night the boy appeared to step out of the painting. That the doll-girl raised her arm. That the hands changed position between viewings.
They included photographs. The photographs showed the painting. They showed the paintings at different times of night. In the later photographs, the positions of the doll-girl's arm and the boy's stance were, in fact, different.
The eBay listing received tens of thousands of views. People reported feeling sick looking at the low-resolution image on the listing page — headaches, nausea, the sense of being watched. The listing's comment section, which eBay allowed at the time, filled with accounts from people who had seen the image and been disturbed in ways they could not explain.
The painting sold.
It was painted in 1972 by an artist named Bill Stoneham, based on a photograph of himself as a child. The door represented the boundary between waking and dreaming. The doll-girl was a guide. The hands were possibilities, futures, the alternatives. He has said none of this makes the painting less disturbing to him.
Two people who owned the painting early in its life — a gallery owner who displayed it and a critic who reviewed the showing — died shortly after contact with it. Stoneham has pointed out that he was also in proximity to the painting during this period and has not died, which is a reasonable point. Death follows people who encounter it. This is not evidence of anything.
The current owner has not been publicly identified. They have never reported any anomalous behavior. The painting sits in a private collection somewhere, in whatever light the owner keeps in that room, watched by whatever eyes still look out from the canvas.
I have seen a high-resolution image of it in print. I looked at it for about two minutes.
I can tell you that the hands in the glass look like they are pressing. Really pressing. Like they want to come through.
And the boy's eyes — painted in 1972, oil on canvas, looking out of a photograph of a five-year-old from fifty years ago — look directly at you. They have always been looking directly at you. They were waiting for you to look back.
I closed the book. I put it on a different shelf.
I still think about the hands.