Most everyone has heard the Ben Franklin saying that death and taxes are the only constants in life. But there’s one more. I call it the Law of the Door. If someone tells you not to open a door, you absolutely will anyway, especially if you’re thousands of dollars deep in credit card debt and there’s a fifty percent chance priceless treasure lies behind the door. Not even the fifty percent chance that there could be charred corpses behind it instead will deter you.
I know, because I’ve been there.
When I pulled into the private driveway of Deer Park Manor for the first time, I waved at the security cameras and gawked at the parapet-like towers flanking the mansion surrounded by privately owned woods. It was the first day of my new job, which I had obtained after answering a job posting from the art department email listserv.
The job? It was to model for a painting, fully clothed. Disappointing, because B—full name redacted for my protection—was one of the most gorgeous women I had met, with a symmetrical face and a flowing mane of electric blue hair.
“I live on Deer Park Road,” B had said when we met during the morning rush at a campus coffee shop, her eyes framed with large crimson-rimmed glasses that gave her an air of innocence. “It’s a half an hour from campus by car. I hope it won’t inconvenience you too much to come every day. I can help with directions, of course—cell phone reception is spotty around Deer Park Road.”
“I know where it is,” I’d replied, speaking up over the din of a barista calling out names. “I grew up nearby.”
Deer Park Manor and B were both infamous in our town, although the grainy newspaper photos had done a poor job of capturing her likeness. She was a graduate student, said to be a once-in-a-century genius in the art department, according to my fellow art majors. Supposedly, she had an art dealer already, and her paintings regularly sold for five figures. Also supposedly, she was a Satan-worshiping witch. Several of my classmates disappeared at a slumber party at her house when we were both in high school, and both her parents passed away when she was eighteen.
There hadn’t been enough evidence to indict her for either incident. But the missing girls from the slumber party shared one trait in common. They were all Asian. Instead of being repulsed, as I should have been, I decided she’d be a perfect mark.
I put on my best smile in that coffee shop, the one I wore to charm all the white boys and girls. My favorite were the ones who hung katanas in their bedrooms and called me their dragon lady in bed before I stole their swords and anime girl figurines to resell to pay for my clothes. But since the mall banned me for shoplifting one too many times and Nordstrom fired me a few weeks ago for stealing jewelry during my shift, B’s job was my only shot at being able to repay the two thousand dollars I owed creditors in a month.
I needed B more—much, much more—than she needed me. To B, I was just another disposable model, worth a mere three thousand dollars to be paid after our final session. There was no way I’d have to sit for this painting more than a week or two, which made it perfect for my impending deadline.
So I fluttered my eyelashes for extra effect. The shoplifted Clinique eyeliner must have worked, because B smiled slightly.
“You’ll be perfect,” she said. “I’ll see you the Monday after finals, Waverly Hsu.”
The first day, B led me into a foyer with an intricately carved grand staircase, like out of Titanic. B lived alone after the accidental fire that ended her parents’ lives, a blaze that had been well-publicized via the town rumor mill.
“The north wing is still burnt and hasn’t been restored. I haven’t had the heart to fix it,” she said while preparing her easel and setting up for our first session in the drawing room, west of the foyer. “There are only two rules while you’re here. On the first floor, there’s a door at the end of the hallway on the left beside the burned wing of the house. Don’t go into that room. You’ll get exposed to asbestos and ash, and the whole room is collapsing.”
“Got it,” I said. I could see the red Chanel bag I would reward myself with after this summer was over. The forbidden room had to be hiding secrets—whether it was forbidden treasure or her dead parents, there was definitely something in there. If there were corpses, I would use the evidence as blackmail. If there was treasure, I would sell it and profit. “What’s the second rule?”
“No looking at the painting before I’ve finished,” B said. “Nothing against you, but I’m a believer in the magic of the creative process and don’t want your subliminal influence changing what the spirit of the painting wants to express. Now, please sit down in front of the flower centerpiece.”
She had this way of looking right at you that made you feel special, made me want to obey everything she said. I’m sure the other girls thought the same thing, but I still liked how attentive she was, how she paid careful attention to every fold of my shirt and every contour of my body. It felt nothing like the white boys who yelled the name of their favorite K-Pop idol or anime girl as they came and then rolled over, before I would go home and jerk myself off to thoughts of Kate Upton instead.
The elaborate flower arrangement in the drawing room had been designed in ikebana style and must have cost a fortune, and the velvet-lined chair in front of the pristine fireplace was clearly an antique.
B covered the canvas with a cloth when we finished for the day. I asked why she wasn’t worried about red paint, to which she shrugged and told me she made her own paints that happened to dry much faster than what was available commercially. On the way out, I swiped a small ornamental bird from the fireplace mantel. There were a dozen matching birds, and surely she wouldn’t miss one.
I clutched it while waiting in the Starbucks drive-thru. The session had left me strangely listless—but it might have just been from waking up at seven in the morning during summer break.
The first three weeks went the same way. Each Monday afternoon, an increasingly urgent letter warning me of the penalties for paying late would arrive. Every morning, I arrived early at B’s castle-like home and sat in the velvet chair after brushing my hair and doing my makeup. Stress made me paler than usual, requiring more makeup to hide the dark circles. I started finding gray strands in my hair, likely also caused by stress from the imminent threat of the collection agency. Each day, the furniture arrangement changed. There were replica Ming vases behind me one morning, a Hokusai folding screen the next. I posed for hours without a break, and after each session, I was more and more exhausted
On the fourth Monday, another letter arrived. I had missed the original thirty day deadline. But, they would only add a five-hundred dollar penalty and forgive me, as long as the full bill was paid within two weeks. B wouldn’t pay me until after our final session. My parents thought I had quit shopping already and had repaid my credit card bills, so calling them was out of the question. I had no choice; I would have to plunder Deer Park Manor’s treasures.
The next day, I brought my makeup supplies and wore a trench coat with a lot of pockets. If B asked, I’d say that I ran cold after waking up each morning.
“I need to do my makeup before we start,” I told B after arriving. Her eyes were on my tight crop top, which I had purposefully exposed with my unbuttoned trench coat. “Where’s the bathroom again?”
She looked surprised I had expressed an opinion, before pointing toward the cavernous hallway to the right. “Past the library.”
She picked up a book. Satisfied she wasn’t going to follow me, I made my way down the hallway, briefly stopping in the library, filled with supple reading chairs and floor to wall bookshelves. The room was cozy and dark, reminiscent of an English study on a stormy night from a scene from my mother’s favorite historical dramas. I ran my fingers over books on the shelves, cutting myself on the sharp page of a Regency-era etiquette manual. In the dim lighting, the blood was only a watered-down red.
I slipped off my shoes to mute my footsteps and explored a little more of the house, with its dark, wide hallways lined with Victorian-style wallpaper and glass display cases filled with looted artifacts from East and Southeast Asia. I returned to the bathroom to do my makeup.
I started doing my makeup at the house every morning before our session started. By that Friday, I knew the layout of the house well enough that I walked through those dark hallways in my dreams. After I posed in front of Cambodian bodhisattva statues, B admitted she acquired them from illicit sources—she just found their bloody history “too fascinating to ignore.”
Things I stole from those display shelves: a Meiji-era geisha doll, a golden crane brooch, a Ming Dynasty porcelain plate, a simple golden ring, a Thai antique folding fan.
Things I couldn’t steal: any of B’s paintings. I searched the entire mansion, minus the forbidden room and the woods surrounding the mansion, but couldn’t find them, which was a shame because they were sure to fetch a good price.
I’d hoped to wait until the job was over before selling the stolen items. It seemed prudent, and B wouldn’t need that much longer. But then a letter arrived: I had missed two deadlines, despite repeated notices, and only had a week before they would pursue legal action.
I needed to come up with twenty-five hundred dollars as soon as possible. I couldn’t wait however long B’s creative process demanded.
A qipao hung from the velvet chair when I arrived for our next session, even as I schemed of ways to come up with more money. After today, I promised myself I would take what I could, then drive two hours to the city—far enough from B to be safe—and sell them off.
B pointed to the red qipao. “You should wear this for today.”
The qipao was smooth to the touch, and according to my Nordstrom sales associate experience, real silk.
I changed in the bathroom by the library. In the mirror, I could barely recognize my face. My skin was paler than the marble floor, almost the same shade as rice paper, despite a beach trip with my shoplifted Lululemon beachwear last weekend. My hair had become a washed out dark gray instead of its usual jet black. I told myself the stress would be over soon. The qipao had given me an idea. The key? The forbidden room. I needed to distract B long enough to get inside.
“You’re so delicate,” B said when I returned to the velvet chair. “Almost like a doll.”
Did B tell any of the other missing girls the same thing, or was I the only Asian girl who had this level of attention? Her eyes were on my curves, on the qipao molded to them, and I did my best to make sure our gaze met whenever she looked up. Her fingers slipped on the brush, and she appeared to be painting and repainting the same small section of her canvas. After we finished up, she smiled slightly at me. Strangely, I wasn’t tired at all this time.
“I wasn’t able to get much done today. It’ll take me a minute to put my canvas back into storage, but would you like to stay here tonight?” she asked. “You haven’t seen the master suite yet, have you?”
I wondered if she meant it the way I wanted to. Her red lipstick looked like blood. I wanted to know what it would look like against my skin. I closed the distance to touch her arm lightly.
“Take me there,” I said.
She covered the canvas with a cloth and turned to kiss me.
B asked me to hit her, and I was happy to oblige. She said she liked the pain because it meant she didn’t have to think. I liked the way her lipstick left marks on my neck, my back, my inner thighs. It felt good to mark her back—I was going to be the Asian girl she remembered.
When we were done and the qipao lay discarded on the floor, B fell asleep, snoring softly. I wriggled out of her bed, creaking open the ensuite bathroom’s door so that she would think I just needed to use the restroom. I stole a shirt and pants from her huge walk-in closet—it was larger than my studio—and then slipped out of the room.
Because of the manor’s U-shape layout, the large glass windows in the hallway outside the master suite overlooked a rose garden and the winding private road up the hill. Beyond that was the ruined north wing. From here I could see a light was on in the forbidden room adjacent to the wreckage. It beckoned to me.
The door to the forbidden room had been carved with ornate fleur-de-lis patterns, and it creaked as I turned the French handle. A chandelier was lit. B must have forgotten to turn it off. The walls were covered floor to ceiling in paintings, the most exquisite portraits I had ever seen. The subjects were girls and young women so detailed I could make out individual pores, full of vitality, as if they could come alive at any moment. There were two characteristics all the subjects in the paintings shared: they were women, and they were Asian, all with double eyelids and willowy builds. Here was a woman in a kimono with her hair done up as if for a wedding, regal yet demure. There a woman in an ao dai. Yet another pictured a woman in a hanbok, another in a hanfu, then a Japanese schoolgirl uniform.
The last I recognized from the newspaper as one of the missing girls from high school. Hana had been in the year above me, in line to be captain of the track team when she vanished. We had spoken only a few times, but she had many friends at school who organized vigils and were generally inconsolable in class for the rest of the school year. Her portrait pictured her skinnier and paler than I remember her being, if memory served.
In the center of the room, an easel stood, holding a half-finished painting, the canvas uncovered for all to see. It was my portrait. The painting was incomplete, yet my painting-self’s eyes met my gaze.
B had painted me even paler than I was, with double eyelids and bigger eyes than I had in reality. The qipao was still only vaguely outlined. My hair was partly filled in with watered down, thinned-out gray. She hadn’t finished filling it in yet. I checked the camera on my phone—my hair was even grayer now than it had been in a selfie taken last week. The women and girls in the paintings all looked so radiant—could the same thing have happened to them?
I met my painting-self’s eyes. Her mouth lifted into a sneer. I covered my own to stop myself from screaming, but heard one anyway.
I looked around—Hana’s mouth was open now. The painted woman in a hanfu to her right let out a horrible keening cry, and the other paintings joined together into a cacophony of screeching, a choir of anguished screams. I backed toward the door, covering my ears. hudding footsteps echoed down the hallway—or was it only my heartbeat? There was no way B hadn’t heard the commotion. I couldn’t believe she thought she was going to add me to her collection, like the geisha dolls in her display cases. I wouldn’t be anyone’s shiny toy—not for the credit card companies, not for the white boys, and certainly not B.
The only painting that wasn’t screaming was my half-finished portrait. I grabbed it and ran back into the hallway. The footsteps were louder and faster. B must be right around the corner.
I hoisted the nearest celadon vase from its display shelf and threw it at the windows. They shattered, gleaming shards landing on the carpet. In each one, reflected in the moonlight, I saw B standing right behind me.
“I’m quitting!” I yelled. “You can keep your money.”
I jumped through the broken window, glass cutting my arms and legs, my blood blending into the maroon carpet. Without looking back, I trampled her flowerbeds on the way to my car, snatching the unscathed vase from the hydrangea bushes as she yelled my name. The stolen painting sat shotgun and I drove down the hill as quickly as my car would go.
That would be the final time I set foot onto Deer Park Road.
The pawnshops in the city didn’t look twice when I sold them B’s stolen trinkets. The celadon vase was a Qing dynasty original, worth over a thousand dollars. Combined with the other trinkets, they netted me the money I needed. I abandoned the studio I was subleasing in favor of a different illegal sublet, in case B went looking for me.
Before the semester started again in the fall, I transferred to a school in the city and moved into the dorms with help from my parents. I stopped sleeping with white boys who asked me whether I was secretly a kung fu master, and I stopped shoplifting because I couldn’t risk being in the news. The portrait of me, the one stolen item I couldn’t bring myself to sell, hides in the back of the standard issue school wardrobe.
Sometimes, when I hear footsteps outside my dorm room, I wonder whether B has arrived to collect her portrait. Because when that day comes, I know I’ll need to disappear again amongst the crowds of dark-haired, dark-eyed Asian women in this city in order to escape.
Surely she won’t be able to tell us apart.
Originally published in The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread , edited by dave ring.
