Issue # 124
“Shhhh!”
Shelton spun around in his crouched position, and glared back at Tyler. They needed to keep quiet, but the one thing he hated was to be shushed. He put a hand up, jabbing one finger through the air at his friend, close to smacking him in the process.
“Shut up!” he hissed at him. “You’re making more noise than I was. Keep it the fuck down!”
Likely, he was being too harsh, but he wasn’t going to to put up with that kind of crap all night long.
The Kittridge house was silent that night, the moonlight casting long shadows. Shelton tried, but couldn’t even articulate in his head why his stomach felt so unsettled. He was just nervous, had to let it work its way through his system and focus on the task at hand. The Kittridges were out of town for the weekend, the painting would be there, all alone, nobody around to stop them.
As they emerged from the hallway, into the private gallery, light was creeping in through the windows, where it struck the floor and washed up onto the toes of the furniture throughout the room. The painting itself was bathed in an incandescent light that seemed to come both from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The subject in the portrait sat there, obscured in darkness. Shelton could see the vague outline of someone hunched over, leaning on something out of the frame for support. He had no idea who was being depicted in the portrait, but in his minds eye he somehow made out the vivid image of an old woman, glaring out at the viewer, disdain mixing with disgust.
“What are we doing here anyway?”
Shelton took in a long breath as he tried to bring his irritation back under control.
“I told you before we came in here, you idiot. We’re taking this thing out of here to show old Kittridge how easy it is to get to him. He calls the cops, a few days go by, he freaks out over his stupid painting and then magically, someone finds it when an anonymous tip is called in.”
There was a pause at the other end of the moron hotline before Tyler responded. “Okay…it just seems like a lot of work to get back at a guy for pissing you off.”
Shelton shook his head, but didn’t answer. He couldn’t explain it to Tyler, how the painting had drawn him, pulled him with a kind of tidal force from the moment he had seen it during a tour of the house the week before. It had gotten to the point where his daily routines were filled with the thought of it, and the person depicted, who she might be and why the image had been obscured by such harsh shadows. In truth, he wasn’t sure if he ever would give up the painting. Maybe he would just leave it in his basement where he could visit it and contemplate it until the day when he finally unraveled the mystery of the thing.
“Just help me,” he said and moved forward to take the frame down off the wall.
His mind blurred from that moment, and he found himself sitting on the sofa, in his basement, staring at the painting and wondering how long he had been here. A part of his subconscious suggested that he should be asking how long he had been sitting here this time. It had been so long since stealing the thing, the weeks that had passed since had seemed like one blink of an eye, sitting on this couch.
The shadows in the painting started to move.
Shelton sat forward with a start, positive that he had seen it, and at the same time sure that it couldn’t have been possible. How could the painting really have moved? It wasn’t possible but what else could it have been? Had it been the person seated in the painting, twisting around to get a better look at him? Was that a tendril of darkness now emerging from the canvas, or was it just a trick of the light, something to go through the machinations of his mania, and flower into something menacing and beautiful?
The darkness touched him and darkness he became.
Shelton didn’t know how much time had passed. He was hunched over on some kind of bench, looking down at the floor which was bathed in darkness. Everything around him was dark, impossible for his eyes to penetrate despite his best efforts. He tried to wave his arms around, but did not detect the sensation of movement from them. Likewise, his legs refused to function as he tried in vain to stand up. He tried to scream, to call out for anyone that might be able to help him but of course no sound emerged. It was like he was trapped inside of a shell, trapped in darkness.
Then, light began to form in front of him. It was like a window that had been fogged up and was now starting to clear. He was looking out into some kind of private residence, a room that looked strangely familiar. He heard hushed voices as vague human forms began to clarify before him. He was looking out into the gallery from which they had stolen the painting in the first place. The man standing there, staring in at Shelton, was also unmistakable.
He was looking into the face of Mr. Kittridge.
Shelton tried to twist and turn, to wave and yell to get the man’s attention, but he was stuck, fixed in this hunched-over position, stuck in profile, most of the room out there lost in his periphery. The same position she had been in.
He was stuck inside the painting.
Somehow his obsession had become his being. He railed on the inside, trying to kick, to scream and rip his way out of this impossibility. It was hard to breathe, getting harder as if his lungs were starting to freeze.
Like paint, drying on a canvas.
