When my grandmother died, I was the one who cleaned out her attic.
She'd told me once — I must have been twelve — that there was a painting in the attic covered with a sheet that I was never to uncover. Not because it was valuable or fragile. Because of what it showed. She wouldn't elaborate. I was twelve and it was one of those instructions that lodged without explanation.
Fifteen years later, alone in her attic with boxes and dust, I found the sheet-covered painting.
I stood in front of it for a long time. Then I uncovered it.
It was a landscape. Rural, unidentifiable — a field, a tree line, a grey sky. Technically competent, not remarkable. Victorian in style, dark in palette. No signature I could find.
I looked at it for a while trying to understand what was wrong with it. Nothing obvious. A field. Trees. Sky.
Then I saw the figure.
In the tree line, small enough that you'd miss it unless you were looking closely: a figure. Dark, slightly indistinct, standing just at the edge of the trees. Looking out at the field. Looking, given the perspective of the painting, directly at the viewer.
I went and got a flashlight and came back and looked again.
The figure was closer to the edge of the tree line than it had been.
I told myself I'd misremembered. I told myself I'd seen it wrong the first time, that the lighting had changed, that the flashlight was showing me something the ambient light had obscured before. I stood in front of the painting for twenty minutes.
The figure moved twice while I watched. Both times I caught it in peripheral vision, not direct gaze — a shift, a step, a change in position that was gone when I looked directly.
I covered the painting. I left it covered.
It's in storage now. I can't throw it away — I keep trying to and stopping. I don't know why I can't throw it away.
My grandmother covered it for fifteen years. She knew. She didn't explain because some things can't be explained without making them more present.
Don't look at it too closely. Don't look at the trees.
Don't look away.