“Very. What does it mean?”
“I have no idea. We should get an appraisal.”
“Who’d come here to do that? We can’t move it.”
“I’ll photograph it, and put it on the internet. I’ll find someone who knows where it’s from and what it is.”
Helen left him be, and sure enough, he picked up the camera and began clicking away at the frame, ardently hoping that the painting’s mystery would eventually be revealed. For a good long while, he had been unable to avert his eyes. He uploaded the pictures onto the internet—on all the relevant art websites anyway—and hoped to hear from someone soon. Throughout the rest of the day, he finished project after project, but made a number of stops in front of the painting until he had exhausted himself. He had gotten too tired, and the painting had drained him until he couldn’t stop his eyes from closing and falling asleep.
He woke up before Helen and the kids, only to find himself standing before the painting again. There was something different in the air of the room now. He sniffed the air for a moment before crawling around to find it. And he did . . . right under the cabinet. It was fresh. This is ridiculous, he thought. Most definitely not ok. Oh, no. He picked up the second grotesque dead bird of the week and stormed into the kitchen.
“Martha! I don’t care what reason you have for doing this, what bizarre belief system you subscribe to, whatever! This has to stop.”
She just looked at him with blank eyes.
He waved the corpse in her face.
“Hey, you comprende? Don’t do it again.”
“Sí.”
But he knew they were getting nowhere with this. Why did she continue this nonsense? Why in the house, always in his hallway? Why? He froze in place. Come to think of it, whenever he found a bizarre knick-knack, a dead bird just happened to appear flattened out underneath the cabinet. In fact, her ritualistic killings seemed to be placed directly below the giant, looming depiction of that old landscape on purpose. Lowering his voice, John gave Martha the most serious expression he could.
“You knew my uncle pretty well, right? Did he ever . . . did he ever tell you what this painting was all about? Is this some sort of idolatry?”
After his question to her, Martha shifted slightly. He knew that she knew exactly what he was talking about.
“No . . .”
He approached her easily, wanting to get to the bottom of the painting’s mystery.
“Martha. The truth.”
Her hands dropped to her side in exasperation.
“You don’t understand. It is best left like this. Your uncle was a good man, he knew.”
“Knew what?”
She fixed him with her sternest gaze. “He knew not to look.”
What could that possibly mean? Wait a minute. Pointing into the hallway with urgency, he asked her. “So I cleaned it up. What about it?”
Eyes unwavering, her mouth no more than a tiny slit, she answered reluctantly.
“No wanna look. Never.”
She turned to leave, but John quickly caught up with her. With the dead chicken still in his hand, he grabbed her face and forced her to face the wall. Wanting to prove a point, he made her look at the painting.
“Look! It’s just a picture.”
“No! Let me go!”
“What do you see? What?”
Her bulging, scared eyes ran all over the painting. “Guts, guts . . .” She turned to face him. “Why did you do that to me?”
She took off upstairs, and in the following moments he heard the sounds of closets opening and closing, and loud banging on the floor. Soon, Martha reemerged at the top of the stairs with her luggage in hand; and just like that, she was gone. She had packed her belongings into her car and left without so much as a word. As he was still trying to process this turn of events, Helen walked down the stairs and stood at his side.
“What was all the commotion about? What’s that you’re holding?”
He turned to the bird in his hand, then glanced back at Helen in a daze. “Martha. Another chicken.”
“This is insane. She seems like such a nice person, too.”
“Yeah . . .”
Helen was getting a little worked up; he could tell by the way she shot questions at him. “Is that why she left? You think she’s coming back? We can’t even fire her.”
He dropped the chicken onto the table, grabbed her by the arms, and began dragging her to the hallway. Pointing at the painting on the wall, at the large pile of eyes staring at him, he asked her.
“Helen, what’s up there? What is that pile made of? Tell me!”
She looked at him like he was nuts. “What do you mean?”
“Tell me. Please.”
“I told you, it’s bizarre. All these limbs . . .” Limbs. Limbs. She paused again, unsure how to answer. “They’re so weird, so realistic. All different but all purposefully put in their right place. Where they should be. Take one out and the whole structure would collapse.”
Not guts. Not eyes.
“Have the kids seen it?”
“I . . . I guess. How could they not?”
After talking to Helen, John couldn’t shake off the way Martha was so scared of it—the way she had reacted to the painting. Dammit, he was scared of it.
“Helen, you should take the kids, and go. Go to town and stay there for a while.”
“What has gotten into you?”
“Goddammit, just go!”
He must have gotten through to her, or at least seemed dangerously out of his mind—because that was all the coaxing she had needed. She hurried and packed the kids, leaving with some overnight bags in hand. At the doorway, she turned to look at him.
“Call us at the inn if you come back to your senses.”
It wasn’t going to be easy to do that. As soon as they were gone, he opened his laptop to find an explosion of comments about the painting, all equally exasperating:
Very interesting surrealist attempt. How old did you say the piece was?
This structure of bony remains is extremely intricate.
Um, I'm pretty sure it's made of lungs. It's what human lungs look like.
What makes you say that? It's all random guts to me. Long rows of pink, soft lining. Maybe pig? Really unappetizing.
Just don't put it in the kitchen!
I SEE DEAD PEEEOPLE! LOL!
We probably need a pic with better resolution.
Very bizarre. Post a close-up.
He picked up the phone and called the only person he knew could explain this to him.
“Amanda? I cleaned up the painting. Whatever you have to tell me about it, now is the time. Martha’s gone. So is my family.”
He could hear her sigh from the other end of the line.
“Now, why did you have to go and do that? Your uncle resisted the urge for years. Couldn’t you?”
“What is it? Nobody on the internet seems to know.”
“How could they? It’s so old. You could destroy it, but I have a feeling that won’t be enough.”
Another sigh. “If it was, it would have been long gone by now.”
“What is it? Some sort of soul mirroring?” He couldn’t believe he had even asked her that. “Everyone sees different things in it.”
“God . . . your uncle told me too many stories. I wouldn’t know which one to believe. All I know for sure is that he was scared of it. And if that burly, toughened-up asshole was scared of something, then I am too.”
“This is not helping.”
A moment of silence followed his statement, and then she answered.
“I’m sorry. Don’t call me again. I’ll be gone, somewhere far away from here.”
And just like that—just like Martha—she hung up and was gone.
At this point, his head was throbbing, and there weren’t many options left. He had to figure out what it was . . . or destroy it. He unhinged it from the frame and began checking it from top to bottom for any artist’s signature or dis
tinguishing marks. There was nothing. He grabbed it by the frame and began ripping it, trying to take all the pieces apart. He stopped when he spotted a little something drop near his feet. Enclosed in the lining of the frame was a folded piece of paper, looking as old as the painting itself, and he bent over to carefully pick it up. As he opened it, he noticed his hands were shaking. In stark contrast to the detailed depiction of the actual work, the paper was inscribed by a heavy hand and a rough prototype of the original. Standing in the middle of a field, where the undefined mass should have been, there was a giant human body. It was scribbled all over, with short strokes that either stood up straight, or bent over like wriggling worms. All entangled in perfect alignment, the scribbled strokes made up its whole structure.
Gaining awareness, he noticed that his headache was gone . . . vanished completely. He also realized that his own body was propped up against the wall. It was all starting to make sense.
With nothing left for him to do, he waited for the others.
He seemed to sleep for a couple of hours, until the sound of a car engine jolted him awake. He looked out the door, and noticed a heavy female form exiting the vehicle. Martha’s back. She stepped inside and began making herself some tea as if nothing had happened, so he decided to join her. Soon, another car pulled up—his own this time. They were all here. Now that they had seen the painting, there was no escaping the truth. Something must happen. He hugged them all.
His youngest, his love, asked, “You wanna hear what I saw daddy?” He did.
More and more people arrived during the day. By noon, they all started moving toward the clearing, toward that green vastness of the painting. Critical mass reached. With enough of them, they would fill it up. Finally, they were going to breathe new life into it. One after the other, they gathered at the edges and melted into each other as they got closer and closer to the center mass. Once the first layer was done, they climbed on top of it, mixing more and more as each layer formed. All the bodies dissembled and re-formed, innards and appearances, all perfect in their hideousness. He said his goodbye to his family because he knew he would be the last to go.
When he finally made the climb himself, it was exhilarating. Like reaching for what he never knew he missed. At the top, his group clotted to form a layer over the bodies that preceded them. He didn’t mind any of it, though—even having their rancid breath so close to his face. He didn’t mind the bodies piled on top of him. From that point on, he was all eyes. He looked below, to the rest of them. The limbs, the heart.
“Glistening, daddy. It’s so smooth.”
Somewhere underneath the arch of carefully intertwined bodies, his family was scattered—scattered too far from where he was. That was the only thing he minded. Gazing at the world around him, he did not know what would happen next . . . because that wasn’t his job.
He just watched as they started moving.
Kallirroe Agelopoulou is a med intern with a severe case of sci-fi and horror addiction. Writing helps. Some of her work appears in Dark Bits, Sanitarium, Dark Edifice, Bewildering Stories, Gone Lawn, Fiction Vortex, Thick Jam, and MicroHorror. She keeps trying to hit her daily writing quota in Athens, Greece, but it’s been a while since she’s updated her blog: kallirroe.blogspot.com.
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He reached into the dark,
where insects crawled over his arms;
he felt the sticky switch of it
within his sweaty palms.
The deep sound from the thick wall
slowly slid over the floor . . .
A distant sound of fear,
a smell of hell so near;
and an abyss made up of stairs
leading down to (where?) nowhere.
He walked in silence,
followed by demons
whispering warnings in his ears;
ancient spells of evil . . .
When at last he reached the well,
an eternity of black,
he was trapped in his own hell;
the mirror showed him looking back.
Heavily he fell,
sinking to the bottom
as the watery darkness filled his lungs . . .
and the demons sang a song
that opened the door to insanity.
Mathias Jansson is a Swedish art critic and poet. He has been previously published in The Horror Zine Magazine, SNM Horror Magazine, and The Poetry Box. He has also contributed to several anthologies: Horrified Press’ Just One More Step, Suffer Eternal volumes 1-3, and Hell Whore Anthology volumes 1-3. His homepage is mathiasjansson72.blogspot.se.
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Kelly?” Jim called, shutting the door behind him, “Hey, you home?”
He shook out of his jacket, hanging it on the coat tree by the front door as he listened for a response from his wife. Hearing none, he set his briefcase down on the floor and took off his tie and suit jacket, tossing them on the small table by the door. He looked at the dozen wilted flowers he’d bought off of a street vendor in hopes they might make up for last night’s fight. He planned on taking her out for dinner; they needed to get away from the house for a while. He set the flowers down on top of his suit jacket and walked down the hall towards the kitchen rubbing his hands together, trying to rid his body of the cold November chill.
“Hey Kelly,” he called louder. “You home?”
“Up here,” came the muffled reply from upstairs.
He retraced his steps back towards the foyer, grabbing the flowers as he mounted the stairs two at a time. The smell of fresh paint and cut lumber permeated the upper hallway as he made the landing. The interior remodeling outfit they hired must have finally begun work on the upstairs, which placed them almost a week ahead of schedule. He’d be glad when they finished. It was becoming aggravating having the house in a constant state of disarray.
“You in the bedroom?” he called as he turned left on the landing, walking towards what would be their master bedroom.
“Yeah.”
“Hey you,” he said as he entered the room. “How was school?”
“Don’t ask,” she said without turning around. Jim noticed she’d already changed into sweats and sneakers and had pulled her blonde hair back into a ponytail, which he pushed aside to kiss her neck. He could feel the tension as he held her. They’d been arguing over the cost of remodeling their new house since they’d moved in. It’d been his idea to buy the place and renovate it. Kelly had been worried about the costs from the beginning, but he’d assured her it wouldn’t be more than they could afford. If anything, it was far above what either of them thought possible and only seemed to be escalating. The money was quickly evaporating out of their bank account and it’d caused more than a few sleepless nights for them both. He was thankful Kelly had never once said I told you so, which was more than he felt he deserved. He pulled her close with his free hand as she leaned back into his embrace, her two hands gripping the arm that held her.
“The kids were monsters all day, and I have a ton of papers to grade this weekend,” she said. “Judge agree to your motion?”
“Nope, hasn’t ruled yet. He was more worried about getting off early for the weekend.”
“Glad you’re home early. These for me?” she asked, seeing the flowers in his hand.
“Yeah, cost me a fortune, too.”
“I see that,” she said. She took the wilted flowers and raised them to her nose to smell the fragrance. “I should put them in water.”
“Later,” he said, taking the flowers from her and tossing them to the floor. He turned her around, pulling her close. “Sorry about last night.”
“Me too,” she said.
“We’ll be fine, Kel. I promise. I’ll hold off on having the outside redone until next year, okay? That’ll save us a lot. I know we’ve been spending more than we planned to, so the outside can wait.”
She pulled back from him and looked up into his
face. “You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Okay, sounds good.”
Jim smiled and glanced at the hole in the wall Kelly had been standing in front of when he entered. “Chris finally started in this room, I see,” he said, releasing her. He looked around at the progress the workers had made. They were having the room they stood in extended halfway into the next by tearing the wall down, and the remainder of that room turned into a master bath with a whirlpool. The room they stood in now was bare except for the few items the carpenters left at the house. Ladders, a few tarps, large plastic pails of paint, as well as a few power tools were all placed in the far corner of the room.
“Yeah, you just missed them,” she said. “Chris found something strange in there as they were taking the wall down. He showed me when I got home.”
“In where?”
“In the hole.” She motioned towards the four-foot wide gap in the wall, stepping closer to it. “Aren’t you listening to anything I’m saying?”
He made a “hmph” sound deep in his throat and crossed the room to look.
“Chris said it shouldn’t be a problem, but thought you should look at it first before they tore it out.”
“Tore what out?”
“That,” she replied, stepping out of his way so he could look past her.
He stepped closer to the hole and peered into the dark interior of the wall. It was obvious even in the gloom within that the space between the wall he stood at and the far wall was much wider than normal. It looked more like a hallway than an interior space for a wall. Jim squinted his eyes trying to see better but couldn’t make out much more.
“Wow, that’s a big space in there. But I don’t see how that’s a problem,” he said as he pulled his head back from the opening.
“No, that’s not it. Hold on a sec, let me grab a flashlight.”
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