Darkroom by Graham Masterton Page B

patiently outside his house while Stu jabbed his key at his front door again and again, as if he were trying to pin the tail on the donkey.
    Jim stumbled over Vinnie’s uncle’s shoes yet again before he found the light switch in the lobby. The living room was dark and silent, except for the ticking of the bronze Italian clock on the mantelpiece.
    â€˜Tibbles?’ he called. ‘TT?’
    He went to the side table and switched on one of the lamps, and then another, and then another. ‘Tibbles, are you OK? Where are you hiding yourself, baby?’
    It was then that he saw Tibbles sitting in the very center of the hearthrug, utterly still. She was staring up at the wall above the fireplace. And hanging on the wall above the fireplace was the painting of Robert H. Vane, with his black cloth draped over his head.
    Numbly, Jim lifted the blue canvas satchel off his shoulder and laid it down on the couch. His feeling of dread was so overwhelming that he could have believed his hair was crawling with lice. He approached the fireplace and looked up at the painting in disbelief. It must have weighed well over 120 pounds. Who could have lifted it up and re-hung it? Who would have
wanted
to? And why?
    He looked down at Tibbles. She must have been washing herself today, because she looked a little sleeker, even if she did have five or six raw patches.
    â€˜What’s going on here, TT? Did somebody come in here while I was away? Huh? Who did this?’
    Tibbles briskly shook her head, but that was all.
    Jim took two or three steps back. He didn’t know what to think. He was so nonplussed that he laughed, but then he immediately stopped. This simply wasn’t funny, even as a practical joke.
    â€˜So, Mr Robert H. Vane!’ Jim challenged him out loud. ‘Do you want to explain how you got yourself back up there, you bastard?’ He waited, but underneath the black cloth that covered his face, Robert H. Vane remained as silent and mysterious as ever.
    Jim walked through to the kitchen and took a beer out the fridge. He came back into the living room and stood in front of the painting again, just like Tibbles, and stared at it. He knew that the supernatural was a day-to-day reality. He had spoken with ghosts and he had seen a kitchen table rotating of its own accord. But there were limits to what spirits could do, and re-hanging an oil painting, in his opinion, was way beyond those limits.
    Maybe Vinnie’s uncle had a cleaning-lady, who had thought that she was supposed to dust the painting and put it back up again? Maybe the super had replaced it, thinking that Jim had been unable to do it himself?
    He looked around and saw that the gray blanket with which he had covered the painting was neatly folded on one of the chairs. Spirits don’t fold blankets, do they? This must have been done by a human. One of Vinnie’s relatives, possibly? Maybe Vinnie hadn’t told the whole family that he had rented out his uncle’s apartment, and one of them had called by to inspect it.
    Eleanor Shine? She had seen the painting, after all, and come to the conclusion that there was something strange about it, something powerful. But why would she hang it back up, even if she were strong enough to lift it, which she probably wasn’t? Maybe she had decided that it was against the co-op’s rules and regulations for paintings to be taken down if they had been hanging for longer than a certain number of years. If you started letting people take their paintings down, what next? Champagne parties in the elevators, and pet lions?
    Jim approached the painting as close as he could. Like Vinnie had done when he was a child, he leaned his head against the canvas and looked upward, at an angle, as if he could see the man’s face under the cloth. Of course, it was impossible; but the unsettling thing was that he felt that there
was
a face, covered by the cloth, and that in some extraordinary circumstance