“Stay on your toes, and meet me back here in twenty minutes.”

I nodded agreement, and we split up, he toward the Colorium, me toward the main square. It was only a hundred yards or so down the street and was equally desolate. The awnings in front of the shops were shabby and faded, and bones were strewn upon the floor tiles in the arcades, some even at the feet of the twice-lifesize bronze of Our Munsell. There was no color garden in the square, but there was a fountain, now choked with weeds, and I noted that the last vestiges of faded color could still be seen on the outside of the town hall. The doors were open, so I trod silently up the stone steps and looked inside.

The hall was perhaps even bigger than the one at East Carmine, but a good deal gloomier. The clockwork motors on the heliostats had long since run down, but by chance one was at rest in a vaguely correct position, and a slanting shaft of light was shining down onto a scene of such utter desolation that I felt my eyes moisten. The wooden parquet flooring was covered with dust, twigs, bird droppings, windblown detritus, scraps of clothing, wrist-watches, hairbands, shoes, jewelry, the odd spoon, coins, a buckle or two and, most of all, bones. Thousands of them, all human, all sorts and all sizes. Most had been scattered by animals, but some were still vaguely complete, and the musty smell of ancient decomposition lifted from the floor as I walked among the Mildew dead. There was no sign of panic, simply a sense of resignation. The residents of Rusty Hill had known they were doomed and had sought solace in the center of their world as they waited for the end. Scattered about among the bones were faded sheets of stretched canvas, which would have been hastily painted green and handed around among the residents to dull the pain.

I shivered and turned from the hall to finish my task so I could leave the town. It now felt oppressive, even though I knew from Munsell’s Quietus that death was just a natural part of the cycle of renewal, and that life should be seen not as a two-hundred-yard hurdle with a tape to reach before anyone else, but more like a relay race without end, and only one team.

But as I turned to leave I looked up and there, painted upon the curved plaster ceiling was a vast mural that told me in pictorial terms the story of Munsell’s Epiphany and the Founding of the Collective.

Although there was much that I didn’t understand, there were sections that were instantly recognizable, such as The Dispersal of the Treasures, The Expulsion of the Experts and The Closing of the Networks. I had never seen anything quite like it, but unlike the less complex version at home that had been been overpainted several times, this ceiling had never been completed. About a third of it was still uncolored, the many shaped blocks that made up the picture empty, the color reference numbers still easily visible. The village had made a start but were unable to finish it. Most of the mid-blues had been filled in, some of the red and nearly all the green. Most attractive of all were the folds of Munsell’s cloak, and the forty or so different shades of rich univisual violet made me feel a heightened sense of anticipation, as though something truly wonderful was just about to be revealed. I knew it was only a feeling brought forth by the combination of violets, but it wasn’t a feeling I’d ever felt from a color before. My mentor, Greg Scarlet, had explained that in the early days of the Collective a huge effort had been made to try to bypass the conscious mind and take emotions straight to the core—that the essence of a great novel, a rich symphony and a restful garden might all be combined to give one truly extraordinary sensation that was the abstract product of the mind alone. Although we still had the Green Room to show for it and Chromaticology, National Color had explained that further research into “direct feed” had been abandoned in favor of more pressing problems—such as maintaining the supply of hue and the National Colorization Project.

But looking up, I felt how the painting might have worked. The story of Munsell and his Epiphany was apparently a dramatic tale, full of great deeds and personal sacrifice. No one knew the full details, but it wasn’t important. A viewing of the ceiling would bring out that same emotional response—the joy, loss, defeat and eventual triumph—without ever having to know the story at all. I jumped, for a movement in the chamber had caught my eye. Beyond the tables still laid with the remnants of the last dinner was a woman, faded—she was insubstantial and little more than an impression that she was there, a glitter in the air. I blinked, but she didn’t leave, and although I should have been terrified at the appearance of a Pooka, I wasn’t. I was intrigued. I blinked again, then noticed something odd. She didn’t vanish with the close of my eyes; in fact, she was almost more substantial with my eyelids firmly shut. She wasn’t actually in the room at all— she was in my head.

I opened my eyes again to at least give her context and saw her diaphanous form move expertly among the detritus, staring at me all the time. Then she opened her mouth to speak and abruptly faded from view, and I was alone once more. I quickly departed the hall, thoroughly confused but not worryingly so; the known had been so long dwarfed by the unknown that confusion was an easy bedfellow. I returned to the square, keen to finish my task and leave. I took a left out of the main square and then a right, and soon found the house I was looking for; a large modern building of oak-framed construction. The front door was locked, so I climbed in a broken window and fumbled my way to the kitchen, found the stat-crank and gave it ten or twenty turns. I then dialed in the time, date and year to manually reset the mirror. There was a buzzing from the roof, and a moment later light burst upon the interior of the house. I could see then that this was the dwelling of a well-to-do merchant, although art custodianship wasn’t hue-dependent; you would be as likely to find a Caravaggio or a Williams in the home of a Grey as you would a Purple. I unbolted the front door to allow easy escape in case of a nesting swan or something, then walked into the kitchen.

I searched the drawers until I found some sugar tongs for Mrs. Blood, then climbed the stairs. Once on the top landing, I pulled the brass knob to swing the mirror across to illuminate the upper floors. I checked the front rooms first and found only bedrooms; one was occupied, one not. The last place to explore was at the end of a short corridor, and the door swung open when I touched the handle. The room was large and unfurnished aside from a single armchair and a plain oblong carpet on the oak floorboards. As in most galleries, a large oval skylight covered in linen filled the room with an agreeable soft light, perfectly tuned for viewing. On the wall opposite me hung the Caravaggio, and it was every bit as spectacular as the pictures I had seen. But those images had been monochrome, and here for the first time was something I had not suspected: The drapes above the scene of Frowny Girl Removing Beardy’s Head were in a most spectacular shade of crimson, which counterpointed the spurt of arterial blood, also a vivid red. I stared at the large canvas for a few minutes, breathless with the consummate skill of the painter, the fine subtlety of light and shade, and wishing that for just a few minutes I could see more than just red.

I wasn’t the only one staring at the painting, just the only one breathing. Sitting in the armchair was the previous custodian. Though the carpet below him had been stained black with the liquids of putrefaction, he hadn’t rotted to nothing in the closeness of the room, but still had dark skin stretched taut across his bones. His hands were resting on the arms of the chair, and even though his chin had fallen to his chest, I think he would have been looking at the painting as the Mildew overcame him. He was wearing a Red Spot and a prefect’s badge, and poking out from where his clothes had rotted away, a shiny spoon was clearly visible. It proved that no one had been here since the outbreak, and as he had no use for a spoon any longer, I slipped it out of his pocket and into mine.