Docent

For eleven years, Theo Marsh has lived a careful, quiet life as a docent at the Ravenhill Gallery. He knows the building better than almost anyone: the smell of the staff corridor in the morning, the light in each room, the subtle crack in a frame he checks every day, and the Victorian painting on the north wall of Room Seven that has always unsettled visitors without ever fully explaining why. The painting is called A Gathering at Dusk. It shows eleven figures standing before a treeline, all with their backs turned. Until one day, one of them isn't. At first Theo thinks he is mistaken. Then he begins documenting the changes. Archival photographs do not match what he sees. A long-buried personnel file suggests a former docent may have witnessed the same progression in 1967 before suffering a collapse. The landscape in the painting points back to a real place in Derbyshire. And as the months pass, more of the figures turn to face him. What begins as a discrepancy becomes a private investigation, then an obsession, then something stranger and more intimate than Theo can explain. The gallery that once rescued him from a diminished life now seems to be drawing him toward a threshold hidden inside the very thing he has spent years teaching others how to look at. Elegant, unsettling, and deeply atmospheric, DOCENT is a slow-burn literary horror novel about art, loneliness, perception, and the cost of being recognized by something that should not be able to see you at all.