Finally the painting was completed, and he asked them to come over in the evening and see the finished product. That day he corrected the last minuscule details, a final line here, a last shade of paint there, and all the time the air itself around him seemed to be alive, full of strange moving things, which he couldn’t see and couldn’t understand. Sometimes he feared he was going insane.
They couldn’t speak when they saw the portrait, that evening. Cenaide said in a hushed voice that it was… beautiful, more beautiful than any face she had ever seen, and surely this couldn’t be HER face he had painted? Of course it was her own face, and it had to be beautiful, but for the first time she was seeing herself as Jack saw her, covering all mediocrity with the radiant colour of love, which he would never see on her real features.
He laughed at their sincere admiration, and listened to them proclaiming a great future for him as a portrait painter, knowing that he would never be able to do it again. They had brought a few bottles, which were opened and emptied, and there was a lot of joking and small talk before they finally left.
After they had gone, he locked the door carefully behind them, then turned and confronted the picture. The eyes of the painting seemed to be following any movement he made. ‘Now, at last, we’re alone, my love,’ he whispered softly.
Again he drew the big pentagram on the floor of his room, then placed the painting in the centre of it. He lit the five strangely wrought candles at the five corners of the star, and burned the ingredients he had prepared. A strange but not exactly disagreeable odour began to spread through the room. Darkness came, not gradually as when evening falls, because it was night outside already, but sharply; an alien darkness which began seeping down from the ceiling where it had started as a black spot, growing till it reached the walls. Long black fingers began crawling down the four walls, and there they touched the other paintings and objects on those walls, the dark took their colours from them, they faded, became grey and then disappeared, swallowed up by the descending black shroud. As the unearthly darkness deepened, grew thicker as some abominable fog, the colours of the portrait seemed to sharpen, to radiate almost. It was as if the face of the girl began to spread a strange light of her own to counteract the growing darkness. Then he stepped inside the pentagram and spoke the last words. Only the big circle of the pentagram was lighted now, the room outside it seemed to have disappeared completely. It had been absorbed by thick string of almost material darkness, an obscurity which seemed in a frightful way to possess a private life, which seemed to be watching him constantly though it had no eyes.
He was looking at the painting. The very air around it seemed to shiver, as if acted upon by heat from some unknown source. Cenaide’s face seemed to shrink until it was like a jewelled flower in the middle of a pulsating circle of black light. He stretched out his arms towards the shrinking face, and they seemed to grow and grow, his hands blossoming at their ends as alien flowers. Then her face expanded again, filling the whole picture. Her eyes were looking at him, blue shards of sparkling glass, burning with a deep fire which reached right through his head into his brain. He thought he saw himself approaching in those eyes, very small and distorted. As he was looking, the hidden fire came through her eyes, burst through her pupils and came swirling at him in threads of burning light, as a spider’s web suddenly catching the sunlight of autumn and shining silvery. It exploded in all directions, beyond the pentagram, shivering as a silver maze, before the darkness outside absorbed it too.
It was as if the colours of the painting detached themselves from it, changing into alien, moving shapes of things for which there were no names, crawling and shrieking, blasphemous monstrosities moving inside the pentagram, before they too were taken by the darkness of the room. The darkness seemed closer, as if it was trying to edge inside the protecting pentagram; it was everywhere around him, circling him like a cocoon. Jack didn’t notice it.
‘I love you, Cenaide,’ he whispered. Though spoken so softly, the words seemed an explosion of sound, repeating themselves through endless corridors, as if the dark rejected them and bounced them back along its inner walls. ‘… love you… love you…’
Only the portrait seemed to keep its reality, and the woman in it, who was looking at him, straight at him with her blue burning eyes. Then her lips parted, ‘And I love you, Jack,’ she said. The colours around her began to change, they seemed to melt though this was impossible, and dripped down from the canvas. Cenaide moved, slowly, deliberately, she stood up. The colours became a cloaking fog through which she came to him, slowly stretching her arms out. The colours were imploding in his brain, he couldn’t think, could hardly react to what he saw and experienced. On the bare canvas, the silver pentagram was pulsating, emitting beams of an unearthly black light. The darkness around the greater pentagram was throbbing as with an immense heartbeat, and slowly the first fingers of the dark began crawling inside the pentagram. But he didn’t see, didn’t hear, except for the face coming to him, the face he had wanted so much, with the eyes burning fiercely into his own; the only clear thought in his mind was, ‘God, if it is a dream, let it continue, let it never stop, if it isn’t real it doesn’t matter!’ And then she was in his arms, soft, warm and very alive for the petrified shard of one second; he felt the silk of her hair, the softness of her parted lips as he kissed her, just before he tasted the bitter staleness of dry paint on his mouth.
After four continuous days of silence, they broke down the door of Jack Morgan’s study, and found him, lying in the centre of his chalk-drawn pentagram, like a crucified spider. Paint was everywhere inside the pentagram, as if a madman, and who else could it have been but himself, had opened all his tubes and squeezed the paint in all directions. Most of it however, was on Jack Morgan himself, on his chest and arms and face, covering his eyes and nostrils completely, a thick mass of dried paint. There were severe burns on his face and hands as well, below the paint, but it was not this, nor suffocation which had killed him.
They buried him with the little savings they found in one of his drawers, among some records and old sketches; Cenaide wore a black veil and cried, but then she always had cried easily. There were also some friends, who said some nice words about him, though they would forget him before the year had passed. None of them could explain why the paint of what had been Cenaide’s portrait had run off the canvas as if completely fresh and fluent as water, so that except for some snatches of background detail, there now only stood a black glaring pentagram.
There was an official investigation, of course, but they came to a dead end when the coroner disclosed, baffled, that suffocation hadn’t killed the painter. None of the experts was able to explain the murderous presence of thick quantities of paint inside his stomach, lungs, brain and heart.
THE SATYR’S HEAD
by David A. Riley
To turn and look upon its face,
Brought fear I’d never known -
The shadow has ever haunted me,
As I walk the earth so alone -