“What do you mean by that?” Mystica asked, his voice half-caught in his chest. “Apprentice?”

The girl, her demure face still bearing that lopsided almost-smile, could only snicker at his question. Without warning, she suddenly stepped forward and placed her hands upon his shoulders in an intimate gesture. Her deep brown eyes once again found their home in his own as the two stood before the portrait, now face-to-face. Evoking a small giggle, she suddenly planted a short, dry kiss upon his stubbled cheek before retreating from his personal space back and beginning anew her process of pacing in thought.

“I mean,” she muttered, lowering her head in deference to him, “that I have been raised from birth to be your assistant.”

She was being vague – trying to elicit a sudden response from him, as though digging into his interior like a proliferous archaeologist. But many a brilliant mind had perished attempting to find something in the sleeping god, and he was not one to simply react to her mysterious nature. He would not be fooled, though he found himself greatly captivated by her pure wit and aptitude toward social exchanges.

“Ah,” he said, beginning to grasp the nature of this strange girl. “I’ll assume this has some form of connection to worship, yes?”

She looked up, meeting his curious gaze, and nodded quickly before returning to her back-and-forth march of concentration. Or perhaps it was not concentration which caused her to move in this farfetched, awkward manner. He smiled, finally understanding these motions. She was anxious.

“You’re an object of spirituality,” he announced, deducing her down to the bone; it was now his chance to play archaeologist turned detective. “A literal representation of an entire community’s faith in my power – an avatar through which some sect has placed their full belief and hopes and dreams of me. You have been raised from birth to become my servant. You have been waiting your entire life…for this very moment.”

She froze, unable to look at him. He had hit the nail directly on the head, and utterly bent it into the wood below, crippling the truth in his understanding. She stood, terrified, as he chuckled to himself. A shiver wound its way down her spine, tingling her to the very core. With her abdomen nearly heaving in near-panic, she forced her head to turn in order to behold her god become physical. He was glorious, but not at all what she had been raised to expect. Her life had been all in wait of this meeting, but in the process of experiencing it, she had lost everything that she had been trained to anticipate. Like the average person meeting their idol, she could not bring herself to recall what to do. This was so far out of her comfort zone that her brain had nearly shut down.

“Yes,” she answered, her voice falling to an almost-whimper. “You’re right.”

“I always am,” he chuckled, thumbing his nose in conceit. “So…apprentice…what’s all this about disappearances?”

With Mystica’s odd bit of warmth adorning the word which referred to her, his apprentice let the anxiety melt away, and managed a small smirk. She raised her head once more, and began to rattle off on the fine details of this small town mystery which had gripped her and the entire populace of White Gulch, Utah.

“It’s an enigma,” said the diminutive girl, resuming her pace around the chamber, not bothering to even look up at the various pieces of artwork as she passed them by. “Those who went missing were all last seen in this room. Odd, considering the lack of visitors to the gallery. I’m sure you’ve noticed how uh…untended to…this place is.”

“I have,” Mystica confirmed with an added nod, as if to implore her to continue.

“So it’s kind of anomalous, you know? No one comes ‘round here just to gawk at these shitty paintings. Heck, they were pretty much the only visitors the gallery’s had in the last month!”

“Curious,” said Mystica, eyes closed in thought. “But your hearsay evidence of this fact must be taken with a grain of salt. Where might I find the curator of this forsaken place? Surely he or she might be able to offer some insight into these disappearances.”

“You’re looking at her,” the apprentice replied. Catching Mystica’s sudden open-eyed gaze, she did a little curtsey with the hem of her shirt acting as a makeshift skirt bottom as she genuflected before her god. He furrowed his brow in further disbelief at this notion.

“How in the world are you the curator?” he scoffed. “You can’t be even out of school by the looks of you!”

“I’m nineteen, thank you,” she shot back with sass staining the very words. Mystica could only offer a somewhat warm titter at her sauciness. He rather liked his newfound apprentice’s utter gall and refusal to be shoved into a corner. She had wit – a biting sort of tongue that pleased him to the core. Yes, he thought, this might be a worthy disciple to his benevolence and malevolence alike.

“Right,” he said with a crediting nod in her direction. “So what did you mean, then, when you said, these paintings are haunted?”

“Look closely,” she answered, pointing to her left. Mystica turned his head to behold one of the gallery’s many uninteresting paintings, this one depicting two children in Victorian garb engaged in play with some carved wooden toys. Nothing about the painting struck him as odd or outlandish, and accordingly, he threw up an open hand in dismissal.

“What of it? It’s completely—“

“Look closer, beloved.”

Her hand remained aloft and pointed at the canvas. Mystica sighed and continued to watch in half-interest as the painting stood plainly beneath the fluorescent lights of the ceiling above. Then, in a sudden flash of existence, something he had never expected occurred. The light bouncing off the fine brush strokes of the painting suddenly shifted, as though he were looking at the tides of an ocean lapping at the shorehead of some far-away beach. In an instant, the peculiar phenomenon passed, and the painting returned to normal.

“Fascinating,” Mystica whispered, mostly to himself, but just loud enough that his apprentice was able to discern his single word of interest.

He moved closer to the painting, drifting across the tiles of the room like a midnight phantom, and pressed his open palm against the canvas. For a moment, in accordance with Newtonian physics, the portrait pushed back against his hand, pressing the fine texture of the acrylics into his unyielding, cold flesh. Then, a moment later, the integrity of the painting gave way to the shimmer the pair had witnessed a minute earlier, and Mystica suddenly fell forward as the majority of his arm suddenly disappeared into the painting. But it was not that his hand had torn through the canvas. It had simply passed through the fabric of reality and into somewhere else. Shocked, Mystica suddenly felt his hand, still inside the impossible portal of the painting, close around something. He quickly pulled his hand back and held it close to his chest. He doubled over, as if nursing an injury to his hand. The girl quickly rushed over to his aid and pulled at the coat on his back, imploring him to show her.

“What is it? Are you alright?”

“Fine,” he answered. Then, he extended his hand to show her. Enclosed in his palm, resting against the broadness of his fingers, was one of the wooden toys from the painting. As though both were riding on the same train of thought, the god and his devotee turned their heads back toward the painting. One of the wooden toys that had been at the feet of the children in the portrait was now missing. Mystica dropped the plaything in utter bewilderment, and it clattered across the tile floor below, sending an echo all across the chamber’s walls.

“Impossible,” the girl muttered, her hazel eyes wide in astonishment.

“Not impossible,” Mystica replied as his hand flew up to massage his closed eyes with thumb and forefinger, as though remedying a coming headache. “It would be impossible to the unsavvy mind. But this is me we’re talking about. Even I don’t want to acknowledge this. But it’s true. Oh, my, oh, my. How fun.”

“What?” she asked, tugging in his coat sleeve like an impatient child does to its father. “What is it?”

“An anomaly in time,” Mystica explained, letting his arm drop to his side. “I’m afraid this…could mean a number of things.”

“W-wait, what are you saying?”

“These ripples in the paintings,” he said, making a broad gesture toward the entirety of the paintings adorning the chamber walls, “are portals. Rips in space-time, leading to the moments they depict! Veritable time warps. And that’s what happened to your missing townspeople. They’ve disappeared into different moments in time, as depicted by the art.”

“What?” she asked, face curled up in disbelief. “But that’s—“

“Madness,” he finished on her behalf. “Utter madness. But the most disconcerting part? As much as you’ve been raised to worship me, as much power as I have over reality…”

She looked up to meet his concerned gaze, knowing and dreading how he would end his statement. No, her eyes seemed to beg, please don’t.

“Even I cannot tear holes in time.”