The Magic Collector

Prologue

A year after his young son Xander's death, a painter set about to do something terrible.

He set his old wooden easel in the center of his studio, a good-sized room on the second floor of his home. A home once filled with love and a beautiful wife, with friends that visited almost daily. Now it was abandoned. Everyone else had moved on after Xander's death.

Everyone but him.

The painter gathered his paints and paintbrushes, mixing his colors carefully. Then he placed a large canvas on the easel, and got to work.

He outlined a shadowy head, then a body. A hand stretching out, reaching for him — even as it fell away, deeper into the canvas. Then deep, dark blue water that filled the entire canvas, save for the very bottom. On this he painted the edge of a wooden raft, slick with puddles of water.

And in the reflections of these puddles, he painted children running toward the edge of the raft, faces struck with desperation — and horror.

At the very surface of the water, around the outstretched, sinking hand, he painted small bubbles rising upward. And in the largest of these bubbles, he painted a tiny face. A boy's face.

Xander's face.

The painter set down his brush and stepped back, studying his work. The painting was wrong, and he knew it. He'd painted this scene before — again and again, in different forms, always wrong. Because it was never Xander's face he painted in the water. It was his own.

He was the one who had been there. He was the one who had reached for his son's hand and missed.

He picked up a fresh brush and opened a jar of deep black paint. His hand was steady, which surprised him. He felt nothing. That was the only mercy the past year had given him — after a certain amount of grief, you stopped feeling it. You simply carried it, the way a man with a broken back learned to carry himself upright: not from strength, but from having no other option.

He began to paint over Xander's face in the bubble.

And then his hand stopped.

Not because he willed it to. His hand simply would not move. He stared at it, confused, then frightened. The brush trembled slightly in his grip — but would not descend to the canvas. It was as if the air in front of the painting had solidified into something he could not push through.

He released the brush. It fell toward the floor — but never arrived. It stopped, suspended at the height of the canvas, hovering in the air before the boy's painted face.

The painter took a step back.

The brush floated where it was. Still. Patient. As if waiting.

Then, slowly, it began to move. Not in the jerky, purposeful way of a hand at work — but the way a brush moves when it knows exactly what it's doing. Smooth arcs. Careful detail. A correction, made in the very place he had tried to paint over.

It was putting Xander's face back.

The painter sat down heavily in his chair. He did not run. He did not call for help. He simply watched as the brush worked, and felt — for the first time in a year — something he had thought was gone forever.

Hope.