First Vaughn sketched The Wedding Feast at Cana, a canvas that covered the entire wall on the left side of Morse’s painting. Then the Titians, the van Dycks, Raphael and Rubens – all with the kind of detail that anyone watching would have thought only possible after long hours, perhaps even days of work. For Vaughn, his copy of the painting took shape quickly, his fingers flying across the page.
Only trained Orion agents were able to travel across art in this way. At least, that’s how it used to be. Sandie and the twins had done the impossible, circumventing Orion agents’ training, and instead travelling through art by their own means. If the Hollow Earth Society or even the world’s five Councils of Guardians discovered that the twins and Sandie not only could fade across paintings but across time as well, life as they knew it would be over.
Vaughn could not let that happen.
The light around Vaughn began to soften, bathing him in a buttery haze, its illumination suffusing every part of his body, slowly muting his physical presence while he sketched on. Sounds muffled in Vaughn’s mind as if all his senses were fluid. He relaxed and let his imagination assume control.
It was at that moment it all went wrong.
A horrified scream cut through the thinning sounds of the gallery, snapping Vaughn’s concentration. He hesitated, his fingers lifting off the page for only a beat, but long enough. His imagination stalled, his pulse plummeted. Every particle of his being exploded in pain. He collapsed to his knees on the floor, in agony as every nerve ending sparked and snapped and shot bolts of light through his body.
He was burning up from the inside.
He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the windows. His body looked like the negative of a photograph, a profile of light and dark against a halo of fading light, and his eyes were a fiery red. Crumpled on the floor, his body spasming against the pain, Vaughn glanced towards the stairs and saw the dark-haired girl from earlier staring in terror at his electrified silhouette.
‘I dropped my p… p-p-pen…’ she stuttered, her eyes wide and disbelieving. With a final piercing scream, she dropped her schoolbag and took off down the stairs.
Her panic would bring security guards and questions. Lots of questions. Too much was at stake for that to happen. Vaughn had to get into Morse’s painting, or he had to destroy himself before the guards reached him. It was what was expected of an agent when caught.
Vaughn focused first on his hands, willing them to move, to draw again. If he couldn’t regain control, his entire being would implode.
Ignoring the heat searing into his bones, he struggled to his knees and then to his feet, with a burst of strength that fuelled rather than drained him.
Draw!
Forcing everything but Morse’s painting from his imagination, slowly, carefully, painfully, Vaughn willed his blistered fingers to move again, to shade the arched doorway of the Louvre at the centre of the painting, to outline the Roman statue of Diana the goddess of the hunt in the corner, to scribble the men and women in the forefront. And with every curving line, every shade, streak and stipple from his charcoal, Vaughn felt the heat dissipate, felt his heart rate rise and his bones cool. When he glanced at his hands, his skin was translucent, the smoky fog of light finally starting to absorb him.
He hadn’t faded completely yet, and he could hear a mob of questioning voices approaching. Time was running out. Vaughn took a deep soul-filling breath and closed his eyes, sketching the rest of the painting from memory, hoping it would be enough.
In front of him the Gallery of the Louvre began to pulse, as if inhaling and exhaling colour and light. Slowly at first, then faster, until the images in the painting were bursting from the canvas, cascading over Vaughn, reaching across space and touching, melding with the corresponding images on his sketch.
The mob was almost at the top of the stairs. He was at the point of no return.
Ribbons of reds and yellows, greens and blacks raked over Vaughn. At that precise moment and not a second before, he began to fade, lifting off the ground in a cyclone of colour.
In a snap of a second, Vaughn materialized next to James Fenimore Cooper, one of the figures in the corner of the painting, leaving two security guards, a curator and a schoolteacher puzzling over a set of smoking black burn marks on the gallery floor.