Eileen in the Painting

Ever since that Frog had ripped out his heart, Yu Sheng felt as though he had become a lot more broad-minded.

For example, he had just woken from a bizarre dream that felt wrong no matter how he looked at it, opened a strange locked room, found a talking oil painting, and even realized that something sinister was obviously hiding inside it—yet he remained perfectly calm.

He even stepped forward, took the painting off the wall, and carefully examined it before his eyes.

The frame was rather heavy, and its feel in his hands made it seem quite valuable. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that the black frame was covered in intricate, exquisite patterns. The lines resembled some kind of continuously written text, yet they connected cleverly with one another, twisting into structures like Vines before finally blending seamlessly into the patterns along the edge of the painting.

Yu Sheng knew nothing about paintings or art, but he felt that this thing had to be worth a fortune.

The thing hiding deep within the painting still refused to show itself. Only a corner of a skirt at the edge of the image drew back slightly.

Yu Sheng tried looking into the painting from the side, but saw nothing.

"I know you're in there." He shook the heavy frame and spoke to the painting. "Hiding now is just fooling yourself."

A faint rustling came from one corner of the painting, but there was no response.

Yu Sheng set the frame on the floor, crouched down, and took a Lighter from his pocket.

He lit the flame and brought it close to the frame, his expression blank. "I'll count to three. If you don't come out, I'll set this thing on fire."

Two or three seconds later, a soft, childish voice came from inside the painting. "...It's merely ordinary fire. That thing is useless against bizarre entities."

But Yu Sheng could tell that the voice was hiding its unease.

So he directly held the flame to one corner of the frame. "Oh, then I'll try lighting it—"

A scream rang out almost at the same moment he moved to ignite it. "Don't! You're really doing it?!"

Yu Sheng immediately extinguished the Lighter. Then he saw a figure hurriedly jump out from the edge of the painting, which looked like thorny flower Vines.

It was a young girl in an elaborate, gorgeous black Gothic dress. A hair clip adorned with white lace rested atop her head. Her long hair was jet-black, her skin white as snow, and her features adorable, but she possessed a pair of inhuman scarlet eyes. Those eyes were wide open now, staring straight at Yu Sheng as if confirming whether the human outside the frame would truly burn the painting.

Yu Sheng admitted that he had been startled when the girl suddenly jumped into the center of the painting.

The maiden in the painting was not actually frightening when examined carefully. She was even quite pretty. But against such a gloomy, eerie backdrop, with such a sudden entrance, anything jumping out of the painting would have startled him. Not to mention that she had eyes that looked as though they had been soaked in blood—then she moved right up to the front of the picture, pressing her whole face against the canvas. Those eyes nearly filled the entire painting, making her look even more unsettling.

"Don't set it on fire," the girl's voice came from inside the painting. "This is the only place I have to live."

"Step back a little first." Yu Sheng instinctively kept some distance from the painting. For some reason, he felt that her scarlet eyes were exceptionally sinister. When that red gaze fixed on him, it seemed as if it would gradually seep into his memories and thoughts, becoming harder and harder to erase from his mind. But in order to maintain the upper hand in their conversation, he forced himself not to look away. "I won't light it."

"Oh." The girl in the painting was surprisingly easy to reason with. She seemed not to notice Yu Sheng's momentary abnormality. Nodding, she retreated to the center of the painting and sat down in the chair covered with thick red velvet. Then she bent over, picked up the Plush Toy Bear she had tossed onto the floor earlier, hugged it to her chest, and continued staring straight at Yu Sheng from the chair.

A Gothic girl sitting in a red velvet chair with a toy bear in her arms—dazedly, Yu Sheng felt that he was seeing the painting's original, "normal" image.

Then he frowned slightly, noticing something unusual in the picture.

He noticed the girl's exposed wrist. It was clearly... a ball joint.

Human joints could not possibly look like that.

Only a doll's could!

Perhaps the gaze from outside the painting was too obvious. The maiden in the painting shifted uncomfortably and frowned at Yu Sheng. "Why are you staring at me?"

Yu Sheng opened his mouth. At first, he wanted to ask about her wrist joint, but stopped himself before the question left his lips. He knew too little about this "world"; rashly asking about supernatural matters might expose his ignorance. So he changed the question at the last moment. "...Who are you? Why are you here?"

The maiden in the painting clearly hesitated, but after a moment, she answered Yu Sheng's question.

"My name is Eileen." She adjusted her posture slightly, as if trying to appear more solemn. "I came from Alice's Cabin. I am one of Alice's Dolls... but that was a long time ago."

Dolls?

Yu Sheng sharply caught that word. At the same time, he subconsciously glanced again at the distinctly inhuman ball-jointed structure on Eileen's wrist. Then his attention shifted to the two terms she had mentioned so naturally:

"Alice's Cabin" and "Alice's Dolls."

What did that mean? He understood dolls. He could even accept talking dolls and dolls hopping around inside paintings through imagination and broad-mindedness. But that "Alice"... what was that?

That cabin sounded like a place name, though it could also be some organization named after a place. And "Alice's Dolls"... it sounded like a collective name for some kind of group?

Was the girl in this painting a member of a large group calling themselves Alice's Dolls?

Once Yu Sheng's train of thought got going, it instantly became difficult to stop. His imagination began racing wildly—

There was more than one like her? A whole group? Were they all hanging in people's homes like her? Housing prices were already so high, and they still took up a room in someone else's house, kept the door locked, mocked the homeowner for not having a key, yet could be intimidated by a single Lighter...?

...It really felt as though the purpose of this organization was rather mysterious...

Perhaps because Yu Sheng had been silent for too long, Eileen finally could not help speaking. "Why did you suddenly stop talking... You're not still thinking about setting it on fire, are you?!"

"I want to ask you something." Yu Sheng suddenly raised his head, and the seriousness on his face startled the girl in the painting.

"Ah... go ahead."

Yu Sheng looked utterly earnest. "Is that Alice's Cabin you mentioned specifically hired to lower housing prices?"

Eileen: "...Huh?"

"I mean, someone pays you, and then you hang yourselves in other people's homes, occupy a room, lie around on the floor, secretly laugh in the middle of the night, lock the door during the day—the goal being to drive down property prices in the neighborhood. It's basically like hanging yourselves in front of the property management office to contribute to stabilizing housing prices..."

Eileen stared with her scarlet eyes. It took nearly half a minute before she finally caught up with Yu Sheng's lunatic line of reasoning and understood what the man holding the Lighter meant. She immediately looked furious. "You... you can insult me, but you cannot insult the Ancestor of Dolls or my sisters! I... We are a very formidable..."

"Then why are you hanging in my house?!" Yu Sheng directly cut off the maiden in the painting with a glare. "And you locked a room! Oh, right, and that dream I had earlier—was that your doing too? And that irritating laugh..."

He fired off question after question, looking fierce in the heat of the moment. But after he finished, he felt a little uncertain again. He recalled the Frog from that rainy night. This painting looked just as sinister, and he felt that it should be equally dangerous. This doll in the painting calling herself "Eileen" seemed easy to talk to now, but perhaps in the next second her expression would change and she would suddenly attack, raising the bear in her hands and bringing it down to kill him before the painting...

But he quickly cast aside that unease again. He remembered that nothing much had happened after the Frog had "opened up his heart"—he had merely died once. Could this doll in the painting, who could be frightened by a Lighter, really eat him?

Yu Sheng was broad-minded now. This world was already this bizarre anyway, and he had experienced being so happy that he died once. He no longer wanted to have so many misgivings. He just wanted to understand what all the strange things around him actually were... starting with this painting.

And Eileen was even easier to talk to than he had imagined.

The doll in the painting did not suddenly attack, nor did she swing the Plush Toy Bear in her arms into Yu Sheng's face. Faced with his fierce barrage of questions, she merely shrank back in her chair, and there was actually a trace of... guilt on her face.

"I... this is an accident. I wasn't like this before." She shifted uneasily, squeezing the toy bear in her arms out of shape. "A long time ago, I encountered an accident and was sealed inside this painting. I also lost contact with the other dolls..."

She raised her head again and looked at the room outside the painting.

"As for why I'm in your house, I... don't know either. I'm trapped in a painting. I can't decide where I get hung... It wasn't you who bought me at an art exhibition one day and hung me on the wall, was it?"

Yu Sheng: "..."