Marisol Flores hated funeral portraits.
She hated the black clothing, the carefully folded hands and the solemn expressions people chose when they wanted to remember someone who had died. To Marisol, they always seemed to turn a person into something they had never been. Someone who had once chuckled too loudly, danced badly at weddings, burned bread, told dreadful jokes and argued over which chair belonged to them was suddenly reduced to a stiff figure dressed in their Sunday best.
“Death has enough grey,” Marisol used to say. “Why give it more?”
She painted people differently.
If somebody brought her a photograph of a dead husband, Marisol would ask what made him laugh. If it was a child, she wanted to know their favourite sweet, whether they hated peas, whether they preferred dogs to cats. She asked what songs people sang while cleaning the house, what flowers they liked, what ridiculous expressions they made when annoyed.
Then she painted them alive.
Not alive in the literal sense. Marisol never pretended she could return anyone from the grave. She simply refused to paint death.
Her canvases were filled with colour. Bright flowers grew around shoulders. Sunlight fell across faces. She painted a woman who spent forty years working in a bakery, surrounded by flour and crusty bread, not dressed in black. An old man stood next to the fishing river where he had spent most Sunday mornings. A little girl who had died of fever was painted beneath a tree covered in yellow butterflies because her mother remembered her chasing them.
People cried when they collected Marisol's paintings, but they usually smiled as well.
That mattered to her.
For several years, her little studio became known throughout the surrounding towns and villages. Families travelled considerable distances carrying photographs tucked inside envelopes, lockets or old books.
Most never questioned how Marisol captured expressions photographs had missed.
A photograph might show a stern father staring directly at the camera. Marisol somehow painted the warmth itself that his daughter remembered.
A grandmother photographed at eighty became the mischievous young woman her grandchildren had heard about in stories.
Marisol claimed there was nothing supernatural about it.
“You tell me who they were,” she would say. “I just listen properly.”
Professor Barnabas Ravenwood later described this explanation as both perfectly reasonable and almost certainly untrue.
The first painting to change was Isabella Serrano's.
Her husband, Mateo, had died after a short illness. Isabella brought Marisol three photographs, none particularly good. Mateo disliked cameras and usually turned his head away just as someone pressed the shutter.
“He always said photographs stole time,” Isabella explained.
Marisol liked that.
She painted Mateo sitting beneath the orange tree behind their house, one hand resting on his knee and the other holding the little wooden cup from which he drank coffee every morning.
Isabella wept when she saw it.
“That is him.”
Marisol smiled. “Then take him home.”
Three days later, Isabella returned.
She had brought the painting with her.
Something was wrong.
Mateo no longer looked toward the viewer.
His eyes had moved slightly to the left.
Marisol assumed Isabella had imagined it. Sadness could do peculiar things, particularly when people stared at a familiar face for too long.
Then Isabella showed her a photograph she had taken when she first brought the painting home.
There was no mistake.
Mateo had moved.
Only his eyes had moved, but they had definitely moved.
He was looking towards the left edge of the canvas.
Marisol kept the painting overnight.
Nothing happened.
The following morning, she returned it to Isabella and suggested that perhaps the varnish, shadows or changing light had caused the illusion.
Two nights later, Isabella returned again.
Mateo's head had turned.
This time even Marisol could not deny it.
His painted face now looked sharply towards the side of the canvas.
And his look had changed.
He looked frightened.
Marisol brought the painting back to her studio and placed it on an easel.
She stared at it for nearly an hour.
“What are you looking at?” she eventually asked.
Mateo did not answer.
Marisol laughed at herself, covered the painting with a cloth and went to bed.
In the morning, the cloth lay on the floor.
Mateo had changed again.
His right hand was raised.
He was pointing.
Not towards something within the painting.
Towards the room.
Marisol slowly turned.
There was nothing behind her.
The studio contained canvases, brushes, shelves of pigments, jars, books and flowers drying from the ceiling.
Nothing else.
She returned her attention to Mateo.
His face had changed.
His mouth was open.
That was when Marisol stopped believing the paintings merely captured memory.
She did not tell Isabella what she suspected. Instead, she repainted the eyes and mouth, restoring Mateo to his original expression.
By evening, the paint had dried.
By midnight, his eyes had moved again.
Marisol burned the painting that evening.
Isabella never forgave her; however, Marisol never explained why.
For nearly a year, nothing similar happened.
Then another portrait changed.
And another.
A young man's painted hand shifted from his pocket to his side. A dead woman's smile slowly disappeared over three nights. A child painted playing beside a stream began looking towards the trees.
Always the same pattern.
First the eyes moved.
Then the head.
Then the hands.
The dead seemed to notice something.
Marisol began keeping the paintings longer before returning them to families.
She also began working at night.
At first, she told herself she was studying changes in the paint. Different pigments behaved differently depending on humidity, temperature, and light. Some alterations had rational explanations.
There was no rational explanation for a dead man raising a painted finger to his lips.
Nor was there an explanation for when, beneath the portrait of a woman called Emilia, Marisol discovered three words scratched into wet paint she hadn't touched for several hours.
IT SEES YOU.
Marisol stopped painting for two weeks.
She almost never began again.
But people continued arriving.
They brought photographs, memories, and stories.
A mother wanted to remember her son laughing.
A husband wanted a portrait of the wife he had lost.
A little boy brought a photograph of his grandmother and six coins he had saved himself.
Marisol could not refuse them.
So she painted.
And the dead kept moving.
Eventually, Marisol realised the paintings weren't showing the dead themselves.
They were showing what the deceased could see.
That distinction frightened her far more.
There was another side to death. That much she accepted. Whether one called it heaven, the spirit world, the afterlife, or simply somewhere else did not matter.
Whatever stood beyond ordinary sight, Marisol's paintings had somehow become windows into it.
Sometimes what the dead saw was beautiful.
One portrait slowly began filling with flowers Marisol had never painted. Tiny blue blossoms appeared around an elderly woman's feet.
Another acquired sunlit light along its borders.
A child who had died very young gradually began smiling towards someone outside the frame.
Those paintings never frightened Marisol.
Others did.
Dark shapes appeared in distant doorways.
Faces emerged from behind curtains.
Hands rested on shoulders, with no bodies attached.
Some spirits looked terrified while others seemed unaware of what stood next to them.
Marisol became obsessed.
She began copying every alteration into notebooks. She measured the positions of eyes and hands along with shadows. She dated every change.
Her workshop walls covered with sketches.
The dead were not alone.
Something moved among them.
Marisol eventually gave it a name.
The Watcher.
She never saw it completely.
In one painting it was just a shadow.
In another, fingers gripping around a doorframe.
Sometimes a face seemed to appear where no face should have been.
But it appeared too often to be coincidence.
The Watcher was moving closer.
Not to the people in the portraits.
To Marisol.
Professor Ravenwood first heard of her several years later through a collector who owned one of her paintings. The collector insisted his grandfather's portrait occasionally looked toward the door just before someone knocked.
Ravenwood naturally became interested.
He arrived at Marisol's studio carrying notebooks, measuring instruments and the sort of enthusiasm that sensible people reserve for considerably safer hobbies.
Marisol nearly threw him out.
“You want ghosts,” she told him.
“I want answers.”
“They are rarely the same thing.”
That pleased Ravenwood enormously.
Marisol showed him the notebooks.
He spent hours reading them.
Eventually he asked the question she had been trying not to ask herself.
“Have you ever painted yourself?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Marisol looked towards the canvases stacked against the wall.
“Because I'm alive.”
Ravenwood shut the notebook.
“That wasn't what I asked.”
Marisol did not answer.
The truth was simple.
She was afraid.
For years she had painted people only after death. Strange changes appeared in portraits of those who had already crossed whatever boundary separated the living from the dead.
She did not know what would happen if she painted somebody living.
She certainly did not want to discover what might appear behind her own face.
Ravenwood left the following morning, but before he departed, he gave Marisol a small card with his address.
“If something changes,” he said, “write to me.”
Marisol never did.
Three months later, she began her self-portrait.
Nobody knew why.
Perhaps she had grown tired of being afraid. Perhaps curiosity at last outweighed caution. Perhaps the Watcher had already decided for her.
She placed a mirror beside the easel and began.
Marisol did not paint herself as she appeared in life.
Instead, she painted herself as she wished to be remembered.
She covered her face with bright colours and floral patterns. Flowers surrounded her head. Pink, blue, yellow and orange blossoms formed a crown around her features.
Her clothing became a storm of colour.
Blue.
Purple.
Yellow.
Green.
Pink.
The painting looked more like celebration than mourning.
She worked for three days.
On the fourth morning, another figure appeared in the painting.
It stood behind her.
Tall.
Thin.
Colourless.
Marisol painted over it.
The next morning it returned.
Closer.
She painted over it again.
Again it returned.
Each time the Watcher appeared nearer to her painted shoulder.
Marisol ceased sleeping.
She pushed furniture against the studio door.
She covered all mirrors.
Flowers started appearing inside the room.
Not painted flowers.
Real ones.
Fresh marigolds, roses and daisies spread across the floor.
Some mornings she found petals in her bed.
Then her own portrait began to change.
Her eyes became darker.
The flowers around her face multiplied.
Her smile disappeared.
Marisol wrote a final letter to Barnabas Ravenwood.
He received it four days after she died.
There were only a pair of sentences.
“I know why they look behind them.”
“It is waiting for someone to paint the door.”
Ravenwood travelled immediately.
He found Marisol's studio locked from the inside.
The authorities had already removed her body.
There were no signs of violence.
She had simply been found sitting before the unfinished self-portrait.
Ravenwood entered the studio alone.
Flowers covered the floor.
Hundreds of them.
Some were fresh.
Others had dried years before.
Every painting had changed.
Every dead face looked toward Marisol's self-portrait.
Ravenwood approached it slowly.
Marisol stood surrounded by flowers, her skull-like face bright with pink markings, her body wrapped in impossible colour.
The Watcher was gone.
In its place was an open doorway.
Beyond it stood hundreds of people.
The dead from Marisol's paintings.
Some smiling.
Some crying.
Some simply waiting.
And at the very front stood Marisol herself.
Ravenwood stared for several minutes.
Then the painted Marisol raised one finger.
She pointed behind him.
Ravenwood did not turn.
Later, he admitted it was one of the wisest decisions of his career.
Instead, he closed his eyes and covered the painting.
When he looked again, the room was empty.
No flowers.
No voices.
No movement.
Only the portrait remained.
Marisol de Flores was never buried in the traditional sense.
Nobody could agree on where she belonged.
Instead, her friends placed flowers around the empty chair in her studio and left her brushes exactly where she had last used them.
Her self-portrait disappeared several days later.
Ravenwood denied taking it.
For once, most people believed him.
Years went by.
Then reports began appearing of a colourful ghost seen near old paintings, photographs and forgotten family portraits.
She never frightened people.
Quite the opposite.
Sometimes a faded snapshot unexpectedly regained a little colour.
Sometimes somebody discovered flowers beside an old portrait.
Sometimes a face almost forgotten suddenly became clear in a dream.
Marisol had become part of the thing she spent her life trying to understand.
She still paints the dead.
Only now she works from the other side.
Professor Ravenwood believes the flowers surrounding Marisol have a purpose. Each one represents somebody she has painted, remembered or guided.
He also believes she still watches for the Watcher.
Sometimes Marisol appears calm.
There are other times when she is seen staring fixedly past whoever encounters her.
Those are the moments Ravenwood worries about.
Because someplace beyond ordinary sight, something still wanders among the dead.
Something without its own face.
Something that learned long ago that humans will open almost any door if the voice on the other side belongs to someone they love.
And occasionally, when Marisol de Flores appears, she does not look at you.
She looks behind you.
If that happens, Ravenwood offers only one piece of advice.
Do not ask what she can see.