The Portrait of Madness

Horror Short Story

The woman in the painting, with the sharp blue eyes, had intrigued me the entire night, drawing my gaze to hers even when I made an effort to focus on the card game. It was almost as if she were alive inside the oils and beckoned for me to join her. The painting was tacky and lewd, but, somehow, that made it all the more convincing. I could not help but return to her.

“I call,” Masters belched out, lips wet with the shitty beer he swilled, a true specimen of the troglodytic male that he was.

I had won the hand with aces high, and, as I began to rake in the small pot, ones and a few scattered fives with faces of dead men, the lights flickered, as if a storm were approaching or something somewhere was gnawing on the power lines. Though I did not notice it at first, it soon struck me as odd that, with the brown out, the light, the quality of it, seemed to have changed colors, slightly, just enough for me to finally see it. The room was now lit within an odd, sickly green tinge, like a dirty bathroom in a subway, when, before, it had been a warm, cozy orange. Masters and Crosby didn’t appear to notice, but for all the world, I thought the woman in the painting seemed to be aware of it, though it had not affected her shades.

“You’ve been on a roll, there, Rick,” Masters barked, in a tone meant to mask his annoyance behind good-natured ribbing. He grinned at me sardonically.

“Maybe the lady is gracing me with some good luck for a change,” I retorted, flashing a wry, uncommitted smirk and gesturing to the oil, hoping to distract Masters from eyeballing me. Crosby and I had known Masters for over a decade, but he was a crass brute and we knew it. Crosby, a naturally shy man, just stared at the table, lost in his introversion.

Masters shot a glance at the painting, and, then, turning back to me he said something unexpected, in a tone that struck me as far too serious, “You flirting with my girl, you son of a bitch?” I wasn’t sure how to respond. Masters was an asshole, but he wasn’t normally prone to mood swings. I decided that he was far too drunk on his swill.

The lights flickered again, this time changing the room’s aura to something almost imperceptibly red. At first, I thought I was, myself, inebriated beyond the limits of my constitution, but quickly I recalled that I wasn’t drinking. Masters now sat across the table and was, as far as I could tell, naked, though I could not, and did not want to see below the table, and he had pulled a large Bowie knife out from … nowhere, which he was digging into the table. How his clothing could have vanished, and why, would have been my chief concern had it not been for that menacing sight.

“I asked you a question, you commie bastard,” he growled, scowling at me as if he’d gone mad.

Crosby gasped, and Masters shot him a look that bore every mark of insanity, causing Crosby to retrain his gaze onto me accusatorily. “Yeah, Jennings, you trying to steal Masters’ woman?”

I was incredulous. Believing it to be some kind of deranged prank, I laughed it off. “Alright, boys. You got me.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Masters snarled, his left eye twitching from apparent rage. “I asked you a goddamned question!”

Though I was, at this point, beyond humor and not sure of Masters’ intentions, my will could not help but seek out those sharp blue eyes, now more defined in contrast with the red tinge. I felt constrained by Masters’ rage, fear gripping me as I could not rationalize what was happening, but she lent me solace and kept me calm. Still, I suddenly needed to leave, and I had no idea how I was going to get out of that room alive.

Masters raged, seeing my vision trained upon her. “You motherfucker! I should cut off your balls!”

“Yeah! Do it, Jim. Cut ‘em off … and make him eat them,” Crosby echoed in a grotesquely sycophantic way, now looking as if he’d escaped from a mental health ward and his antipsychotics had worn off.

I felt desperate, as if I were suddenly trapped in a cage with two wild animals. “I don’t know what’s in that beer or what in the ever-living hell is going on right now, but you guys need to calm the fuck down. It’s a painting!” I did not believe my own words, but the urge to lie to save my life was overwhelming. I needed to get out of there … and take her with me.

Masters grit his teeth together so roughly that I could feel the enamel being stripped off of his molars. The lights flickered again. The room became a dark shade of sepia, like an old photo that hadn’t been exposed long enough, casting Masters and Crosby into amber tones of negatives. But the painting, the woman, remained unchanged, shining out in her original color, with her penetrating blue eyes fixed upon me, and I felt a surge of anger and jealousy rise. My fear melted away with it. Masters was now a joke to me. Some other man took hold of my frame.

“What are you going to do you slovenly pig?” I demanded. “She clearly wants me. Now come at me with that pig sticker, so I can shove it up your ass!” As I threatened, I found that I was wildly waving a gun in the air, an old-style, pearl-handled six shooter, from where I had no clue, but it was mine and I intended to use it if need be. She must have sent it to me. I could read her pleasure, and it barely occurred to me that I was now dressed like an Old West gambler.

Masters went white upon seeing the gun, all of his bravado draining from him onto the floor under the table. The stench rose. But Crosby still looked manic, and gnashed his teeth at me, like some sort of raving lunatic, as if he thought he were a vampire. He was a sickly, pale slip of a man, but now he looked diabolical, his hair wild and his teeth sharp.

I eyeballed him hard and he shrank into himself. “What do you have to say, you little cunt?” I sneered at him, using a vernacular that was foreign to me.

“Yeah!” Masters suddenly piled on. “What are you going to do, Crosby, you wuss?”

Crosby looked confused, having thought that Masters was his ally. Then his demeanor changed altogether. He slithered over himself like a snake. “She hates you both,” he finally hissed.

Masters darted the gleaming knife blade towards him, and I jumped out of my seat and rounded the table. Grabbing him by the hair, I jerked his head sideways and put the gun to it. “What did you say, you wretch?”

“What are you two going to do? Kill me? You shoot me and the whole neighborhood will hear it. She loves me. Let me take her and go.”

I wanted to pull the trigger. I wanted it so bad, as if it were someone else willing me to do it. I pleaded with her from behind my eyes, but she said nothing, just stared into me, cooing to me in silence.

The lights went out. When they came back on the room was ultra-saturated. Masters sat where he had been but he wore an ear to ear smile, the blood having coated his lower jaw in a neon red, and the black hole in his head was still smoking.

In my hand, the gun was hot. I was aghast, and I threw it across the room without thinking. Looking down at Crosby, I found him grinning up at me with his sharp teeth. The Bowie knife in his hand was smeared with Masters. Before I could react, he slit my forearm, starting near the elbow and running down toward my wrist. The wound gushed a deep black on my then Titanium white skin. I saw her eyes, blue, before I landed my fist full in his face and tore the knife from him.

Through his broken nose, the blood shot out unnaturally crimson, and his eyes were already blackening. He glared at me with deranged anger. “You killed Masters, you fucking psycho! You better run!”

The words did not correlate in my mind with the scene in which we were unwillingly immersed, but she drowned out all reason. “And give her to you?”

“Yes!”

Whatever took hold of me was more animal than man, and, as my hands wrapped tightly around Crosby’s throat, they were not mine. But I could not let him have her, not this sorry excuse. He gasped, and I squeezed harder with abandon. He tried to claw at me, but pain was no longer anything I could perceive. I watched him in the neon blur, his face becoming so white that it seemed to blend into the light itself, and his eyes losing that light at the same time. He seemed like a doll, and I was sure his throat would collapse any second. The he stopped flailing, and I stared into eyes with no sheen, standing in stark contrast to the neon circus of gore around me. As my blood spattered his clothes and slicked the floor, I was woozy.

The lights flickered. The room was as it had been, a warm, subtle orange. Masters was clothed as he had been, no bullet hole, no gashed mouth. He was, however, dead. There was no sign of trauma, but no question. Crosby was gone as well, almost conjuring a look of innocence as he sat unmoving, staring at the painting but without breath.

Yet all I could think of then, the only thing that possessed my mind, was her. I had won her. I went to the painting and dropped to my knees before her. And I only noticed then that … I was holding the knife, and my arm was gushing blood.

“I love you,” I whispered, as I stared up at her.

The lights went out and the only color imparted was black.