Shadow Gallery 1

Part I: Bloody Canvas

(Chelsea Gallery, New York)

Erin's restoration knife was suspended in midair.

The smell of turpentine was mixed with a hint of rusty sweetness - this was wrong. She leaned over to "Dancer in the Shadows", and her nose almost touched the dried dark red on the canvas. Oil paint from three hundred years ago should not smell of blood.

"Ms. Carter?" The security knocked on the studio door, "It's closed."

The tip of the knife suddenly slipped. A crack appeared in the interlayer, and a yellowed paper slipped out like a snake's tongue. Latin cursive pierced into the pupil: five performances, five drops of blood.

At 2:17 in the morning, the phone vibrated and broke the silence.

The body of gallery owner Matthew Gray lay in the middle of the exhibition hall, and a blood flower the size of a cosmos bloomed on his white suit. What made the detectives' necks colder was the graffiti on the wall: a modern spray-painted reproduction of "Dancer in the Shadows", with the masked man's dagger pointed precisely at the left chest of the corpse.

"Coincidence?" The detective with a goatee poked Irene's shoulder with the evidence bag, "I heard that you just found a death notice in the painting today?"

She took a half step back, and her heels hit the iron bucket of turpentine. The sound of the liquid sloshing reminded her of Matthew's collection of 1821 red wine. At the celebration party last week, he raised his glass and said: "Art restorers are like time and space detectives, right Irene?"

The phone vibrated again.

A text message from an unknown number appeared on the pale screen: What you restored is not a painting, but a curse.