Alice asked her driver to drop Matilda off after leaving her at the front gates of her garden. Although looking at the darkened skies with clouds hovering above her head and a full moon lurking behind the huge leafless tree, she wished she hadn't told her driver to go. As she walked across the garden, she heard a loud snap that made her jump. However, when she felt a lump under her foot that felt like a wooden twig, she laughed at herself for her unbased fear. Nevertheless, she started walking faster.
Her grandfather's butler, Gerald, was waiting for her at the front door. "Were you waiting for me, Gerald?" asked Alice, "Did grandfather ask you to?"
"Let's not worry about all that, shall we?" remarked Gerald. "It's nice to see you home safe and sound. I hope you had an amazing night."
"I'm afraid not, Gerald." said Alice, heaving a sigh while thanking him for opening the door for her and closing it behind her as she walked into her oversized home.
Gerald walked quietly behind her while she tried to block memories of Rishabh walking down this very corridor holding hands with her merely hours ago. Had it just been hours? Tears were threatening to prick her eyes again, so when her room arrived, she asked Gerald to go and have some sleep. It was past midnight, after all.
As she stepped into what we would call a fairly huge bedroom with a large oval bed in one end of it and a fitted grey wardobe spanning the walls on the other side, her eyes fell on the portrait hanging on the side wall opposite to the door. Initially, she had rolled it and kept it in a drawer, but after receiving the beautiful frame from Miss Cook, she decided to hang it on the wall. It stung her heart to see it there for the first few hours, but gradually, she became accustomed to it. Sometimes, she even found herself staring at it for hours on end, admiring every feature that it highlighted while comparing them with the mirror of her dressing table.
But something looked different today. She felt slightly repulsed as she glanced at the portrait from the door. As she went closer to examine it, she turned on all the lights in her room to be able to see it properly. She traced the highlights of her hair with her eyes and glanced at the green lines extending from her pupils and followed down the nose to her mouth. The mouth that she could have sworn had a cheerfully childish smile on its face was now giving her an evil crooked smile. She squinted her eyes to focus more closely. It couldn't be, she thought. She instinctively went to the dressing table mirror to check. Her lips were absolutely the same shape they had been a few hours ago. Yet those in the portrait had altered.
She suddenly remembered the mad wish she had uttered in Miss Cook's classroom that the portrait would age instead of her and take all her maladies while she remained young and beautiful. Had her prayers actually been answered?! No, that wasn't possible. This wasn't some Harry Potter movie where paintings suddenly started having their own emotions.
But could it be possible that the atoms of her mind and the atoms of the painting were connected in some way, quantun entanglement perhaps. But that would make the atoms of the portrait mimic the atoms of her brain and create a 3D copy of it rather than interpret and represent the emotions she was feeling in the form of a changed expression. That would only be possible if there was a processor attached to the painting that somehow wirelessly gathered information from her body and converted it into these expressions. She felt around the portrait for such a processor but could not find it.
Even if such a microprocessor existed, there was no way Miss Cook had advanced technology like that that could take MRI scans of her brain without her realising it and make accurate predictions of conscience and guilt. No one had such a technology.
As she could not find her answers in science, Alice had to resolve to the supernatural again. Could she pray to make the portrait stop changing instead of her just like she had prayed the opposite a few months ago? Would it work? But why would anyone give away the chance of remaining young and beautiful forever?!
She contemplated further what this meant for her and her future. Would she resolve to a life of sin and pleasure while the painting bore the burden of the consequences? Would it be a mirror to her soul just like it had been a mirror to her beauty? Would she actually not age, and the portrait would grow old instead of her? Did that mean she would live forever?
Alice had a lot of questions she could not answer, but there was one that bugged her the most. Would that crooked smile remain there forever, reminding her of the sinful act she had committed today by sending her beloved boyfriend down the train tracks?
She immediately took the portrait and went out covering it with a curtain so that no one would see it. Taking the key to one of her secured storage units from the key hooks down the corridor, she tiptoed silently down the stairs and stuffed the portrait into the storage with her childhood toys. It was a shame she had to hide the hideously evil painting behind the innocent memories of her childhood, but she did not have any other secured storage for personal use. She was afraid Gerald or her grandfather or one of her cousins might come into her room one day and see the hideous painting hanging on her wall. Perhaps even interpret what it meant. Or one of the cleaning ladies might find it behind her dresses when dusting up the wardrobe. This was the safest place for it to be.
She did not put the key back onto the key hook but placed it in her locker alongside her jewellery and cash.