The Painting by Ryan Casey

see him.
    “Donny, you’re going to have to come out of there at some point.”
    At first, he didn’t recognise her voice. He thought it was his mind tricking him—his consciousness playing games, like it did when one woke up from a dream and were still readjusting to reality.
    “Donny, darling, please. We’re here for you now. We know you’re in there.”
    The voice grew more real—more comprehensible. She’d come for him. She’d got the call and she’d come for him.
    He pulled the quilt from over his head and looked around the room.
    He’d made it.
    But the painting. They would still be watching him from the painting. He felt them in his flesh. He felt them inside his body; their cold hands wrapping around his neck and squeezing the life out of him.
    A man’s voice: “We’re going to have to knock the door down if you don’t come out, mate.”
    Then a crash, then her face.
    He couldn’t let them come in here. He couldn’t let them get them too close. “Get… get out, just go, you can’t be here, they’re watching—”
    “Donny, it’s okay, it’s me,” the man said. He was holding his hands in front of him. Sara’s brother.
    “It’s the painting. They’re watching, and they’re behind you and—”
    “Donny, there’s nothing on the painting. Nothing on it. See? Look at it. There’s nothing there.”
    Donny tilted his head towards it. The bronzing frame.
    No. They’d be there. If he saw them, they’d come in. They’d get him and they’d get them all like they got Manny Bates.
    “Just look at it, Don,” Sara said, edging her fingers up to it. “There’s nothing there.”
    He squeezed his eyes together again before looking at the picture.
    The six trees. The forest. The grey sky. And the figures.
    The six hooded figures.
    He felt their presence as he smiled and shook his head, before the room was enveloped in darkness and cold.
    “See, there’s nothing there,” she said, as he drifted away into the darkness.

    Nobody spoke a word on the car journey home. He started to piece things together in his head—to make sense of what might or might not have happened. When he was in the room, in the bed, he forgot the rules of the gap. Only he could go through the gap, or at least, someone like him. Sara and her brother, they were safe.
    Probably.
    But he was back. He was home. He was safe.
    Sara’s brother—Jack—grumbled a few times as he drove them down the highway, accelerating past the already-speeding cars. Donny could tell that he wasn’t happy to be out here. Fucking madman, he’d say, and he was perfectly within his rights to say just that.
    As the car turned into the car-park of his high-rise apartment complex, he thought about Reginald. He thought about the things he’d seen—the things he knew—and what they meant for him and Sara. He felt them inside of him. He didn’t know who they were or what they were but he knew they were there now. Watching, waiting .
    Jack opened the car door and helped Donny out, who shook as he stepped into the fresh air. “Come on, buddy,” he said. “You get inside and get some rest. You look like you need it.”
    Sara smiled at him as he stepped out of the car. How long had he been out there? Had they come right away after he’d called her? He couldn’t be sure.
    When they stepped inside, Sara’s brother told Donny he’d make him a cup of tea but to go right through and get some rest. “If you want to talk, y’know… in your own time, okay?”
    Donny nodded. Sara was still completely silent, barely looking him in the eye. He stepped into the bedroom and sat on the bed, his mind easing off as he tried to comprehend it all.
    A few minutes after he’d been sitting alone on the bed, Sara came into the room.
    She moved slowly, as if too much action was bad for Donny’s senses or something. She was holding something to her chest—his notepad. Donny’s eyes lit up. His book. She’d saved his book.
    “You okay?” she asked.
    Donny