(Thank you to everyone who provided the support and encouragement for me to keep going. Hopefully this next chapter will live up to your expectations.)
I have been turned into a painting, stuck to the wall in a long, dark room. I have no idea how this happened or where I am. I try to move my limbs, only to find that I am frozen in place. I try to call for help, but nothing comes out. I can't even move my face. I am trapped on this canvas, locked in my current position.
A young girl steps out of the shadows and walks in my direction. I struggle to discern who she is at first, but she is coming closer, and her form is becoming clearer; her golden blonde hair, her bold green dress…
No. Not her. Please let it not be her.
I can now make out her facial expression. Her bold blue eyes are fixed intently on my picture. Her mouth curls into a twisted grin. Her overall expression is a combination of spite and dark satisfaction. At this point, I notice that she is clutching a short metallic object in her left hand.
Oh God. It's her.
She stops. "You abandoned me," she says chillingly. "Didn't we promise to be friends? Why did you break your promise?" The metallic object turns out not to be her palette knife after all, but rather… a lighter?… Oh no. Please don't!
I can't run. I can't plead with her. I can't so much as even show my fear on my face. My calm expression on the canvas remains fixed and frozen, locking in my actual feelings of panic and terror. I hear the flick of the lighter and see the glow of its small orange flame. "You could have said something. You could have stopped him." she hisses as she draws the lighter closer and closer to me.
I want to scream. All I want right now is simply the ability to scream.
The lighter's flame touches the bottom of the canvas, igniting it. "But no," she says as fire begins to devour me alive. The pain is as real as if my actual flesh were burning. "You let it happen."
Ib bolted upright from her bed. It was just a nightmare… It was that nightmare.
Writing a new entry in her diary, Ib sighed as she thought about her dream last night. She was seated at the little desk in her room that morning, jotting down the details she could remember and occasionally pausing a moment to think about them. Ib normally wouldn't record something like this, but it was the third night in a row she had had this dream. By writing out all of her thoughts on the matter, Ib hoped to resolve whatever mental qualm might be triggering the dreams.
It had been just shy of three years since her encounter with the Fabricated World. The anniversary was only a few days away, in fact. As brave and mentally tough as Ib was, the incident left the same mark on her that it would have left on anyone her age. For the most part Ib was still the same quiet but well-adjusted girl she had always been, except now she wanted nothing to do with art. She used to love drawing and working with watercolors, but following the trip to the gallery, those activities came to a sudden end. Her grades in Art class had dipped noticeably. Whenever Ib walked past a portrait, she would subconsciously cling to the other side of the room. Even if her outward demeanor didn't always show it, internally Ib's experiences had taken their toll on her.
Ib's parents noticed the shift in their daughter's behavior and naturally wanted to know what was troubling her. They knew it had something to do with the trip to the gallery. That was when the changes abruptly occurred, after all, and within a day of the visit, her parents found all her old artwork crumpled in the trash. Her mom, an art enthusiast and large fan of Guertena's work, in particular took notice and was concerned. Enthralled by all the artwork of her favorite artist, she loved the visit to the gallery was subsequently among the group of wealthy donors who helped make the originally-temporary Guertena exhibit permanent. Yet when she so much as suggested a second visit, Ib immediately refused to even set foot in the gallery again, practically begging not to be taken back. She was taken aback, but reluctantly accepted this turn of events. Saddened by her daughter's sudden disenchantment with art, Ib's mother ruefully wondered if she was somehow to blame for it all by having taken Ib along to an exhibit that evidently was not suitable for someone her age.
At least initially, Ib's parents also suspected that the issue might be connected to Garry – that strange, effeminate, purple-haired man who Ib apparently befriended at the gallery. They were wary enough when he abruptly showed up at their door one day with Ib's handkerchief, but his disturbing familiarity with their daughter and the fact that he had their contact information in the first place was too much. Despite his seemingly friendly manner and Ib's apparent fondness of him, her mother and father saw every reason for them to be suspicious and subsequently grounded Ib for having given her address to a stranger. Ultimately, though, Garry managed to demonstrate his genuine intentions and gain her parents' trust. This wasn't easy, but thanks to his patient efforts and Ib's persistent lobbying, it eventually happened. It became increasingly clear to Ib's parents that Garry was unlikely the source of their daughter's troubles; if anything, he seemed like heshared whatever traumatic experience Ib had gone through.
Yet whenever her parents tried to ask Ib what was wrong, they couldn't get a straight answer. The most they were able to get out of her was that she accidentally wandered into part of the gallery that probably wasn't supposed to be open to the public and got lost; that it was really scary and hard for her to find her way out; that she met Garry in there and gave him her handkerchief because he had cut himself and was bleeding. It was far from a satisfactory answer, but Ib wouldn't say any more.
After all, she knew better than to try to tell her parents what actually happened. There was no way they would believe her. Nor would her teachers or friends. Not even they could know.
There was only one person she could talk to about the Fabricated World. Ib looked up at her little calendar hanging from the wall. Today she was going to see Garry again. He would be coming by very soon to pick her up, in fact. Despite the rocky start between Garry and Ib's parents, her mom and dad had since come to trust him enough to allow the two to go out on their own together, without a parental chaperon. Ib always looked forward to these days. More than just close friends, they were the only two people who the other could confide in about what really happened that day at the gallery. They would not be able to keep their sanity otherwise
Finishing her diary entry, Ib swapped her pencil for a big red marker and drew a bold "G" on the corner of the page. It was how she marked entries related to the incident, so she could easily seek out – or avoid – them later on. Lost in thought, Ib absentmindedly flipped back through her diary to read these past entries. There was one entry on how part of her almost felt bad for Mary, the living painting who she and Garry ultimately had to kill in self-defense. Another dealt Ib's frustration at being unable to tell her parents what really happened. Yet another one, a relatively recent entry, focused on how she occasionally wondered what was going on back in the Fabricated World.
Finally, Ib reached the large entry on the incident itself. Upon escaping the Fabricated World, she initially lost all her memory of what had happened and only regained it thanks to a chance encounter with Garry back in the real art gallery. Afraid that she somehow might forget it all again, Ib wrote a detailed account of everything that happened at the gallery upon arriving home. Marked especially boldly, it covered how she first found herself in the Fabricated World, the monsters she encountered, how she first met Garry, and how the two of them finally escaped shortly after Mary's death.
The doorbell rang. "Ib!" her mom shouted, "It's Garry!" Ib snapped back into reality and realized she wasn't fully ready to go yet. Not wanting to leave Garry waiting, she hurriedly gathered up everything she needed and raced over to the front door. In her rush she forgot to shut the door to her bedroom or to close her diary. "Bye Mom! Bye Dad!" she called out as she left, adding, "We'll be back before dinner!"
Several minutes after Ib and Garry departed, Ib's mom happened to walk by her daughter's bedroom and saw that she had left her reading lamp on. Sighing, she entered the room to turn out the light, making a mental note to admonish Ib when she came back. As she reached for the lamp's switch, her eyes briefly fell upon Ib's still-open diary and the red-highlighted entry that it was open to.
Ib's mom froze, her eyes widening.
"Yeah, I've also been having a lot of unpleasant flashbacks about the gallery recently," Garry said after Ib told him about the nightmares of Mary. The two of them were eating lunch together at a diner in the middle of town. Although they were not the only patrons in the restaurant, they had managed to find a table far enough away from everyone else to be able to talk more freely about their "shared experience" without drawing incredulous stares. A TV was quietly playing an old comedy film, but the two paid little attention to it. "Still," Garry then said, "you can't let yourself feel guilty about what happened to Mary. She tried to kill us – twice. We had no other option when we burned the painting. Her death was her fault."
"I know, you're right…" Ib replied halfheartedly. "It's just…" She trailed off. Mary was one area where Ib and Garry had their differences. Ib knew that Garry was right and wanted to agree with him fully, but she just couldn't shake her slight sense of guilt over Mary's death. To be sure, Mary had certainly made bad choices, but all she wanted was a normal life. Ib sometimes even wondered whether killing her was the right thing to do, or if there might have been a way that all three of them could have worked out their differences and escaped the gallery together. Garry, on the other hand, was not so inclined to feel sympathetic for Mary. He could see why Ib might take pity on her, but he did not share the feelings. The subject almost made him slightly defensive, in fact.
"But anyway," Garry said, changing the topic, "I guess it makes sense that we're thinking about the Fabricated World so much right now. Can you believe it's already been three years?"
"I can't," Ib replied, shaking her head. Following that, Garry asked Ib about school, and she in turn asked him about his work and graduate studies, but by and large the Fabricated World continued to dominate their conversation. "So, I'm not sure if you've heard already," Garry said at one point, "but it's official now: Our favorite art gallery has been formally renamed the Guertena Art Museum."
"I guess it has been in the making for some time now. My mom would be really excited to hear this," Ib responded, adding "although she probably already knows."
"Yeah, you mentioned that your mom is a big Guertena fan and was one of the donors behind the shift in the first place," said Garry. Ib nodded somewhat embarrassedly and then tried to focus on the food before her, falling silent for a short amount of time. After two minutes of quiet, though, she looked back up and asked Garry, "Why do you think Guertena created the Fabricated World and made it the way he did?"
"I was actually wondering the same thing and read up on him at the library," Garry responded. "Although he was very well-off financially, he became extremely bitter and cynical towards the end of his life. He felt that the world had abandoned him for other artists and that his work was underappreciated. Guertena also apparently had a life-long interest in the occult. Regardless, shortly after painting 'Mary,' he committed suicide… I guess all of this might explain why the Fabricated World is so twisted."
"That would make sense," Ib replied thoughtfully. After a short pause, she asked another question. "Do you ever wonder about what is going on back there?"
"Hmm? What do you mean?"
"The Fabricated World. What might be going on back there? Do you think the gallery or anyone in it remembers us?"
"I hope not. That whole place felt like it was out to kill us, and if it or its inhabitants remember us, I doubt they have any good intentions," Garry replied. He paused for a moment to think. "Come to think of it, I –"
Just then, the programming on the restaurant's television abruptly stopped, replaced with an emergency broadcast display. "We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news," an announcer said. Everyone in the restaurant fell silent, including Ib and Garry. An employee turned up the volume.
"Heavily armed attackers have begun pouring out of the Guertena Art Museum and are overwhelming the security and local police forces. Their nature is not known at the moment, but witnesses described them as 'surreal,' 'alien,' and 'inhuman.' Law enforcement officers have closed off the area around the gallery and will try to contain the attackers until heavier reinforcements arrive. It is unknown if they are connected to the museum or to Weiss Guertena, the artist to whom it is dedicated."
Ib and Garry turned pale as they stared at each other in horror. They instantly knew what was happening, and they knew exactly whose heads the "attackers" were after.
(Now the real fun - along with the the real challenge - begins. Anyway, Looking at how Ib & Garry were actually faring, it appears that Guertena likely "cherry-picked" the scenes he showed Mary in the previous chapter of them in the real world in order to instill as much anger as possible. Special credit goes to Musapan, whose great Ib fanfic "Purple" provided much of the inspiration behind the initial setup involving Ib & Garry.)