As with my later work with the Style Matching project, this piece is intended to replicate something of a Lovecraftian feel. It’s something of an early foray into unsettling fiction.
The whole of the Royal Admiralty Hotel had been booked for Mr. John Varley Fitzroy’s Conservatory. This distally-flung city felt the strain, far into the provincial periphery and long into the autumn of the year. It quickly became the talk of the staff that never before in a single phase of bookings had the middens grown so heaping with the detritus of highest art, nor since had the faucets in the veranda suite on the fifth floor worked. Yet the particulars of the hospitality of the Fitzroy Conservatory are not what need be reported. Rather, it is the most peculiar demise of Mr. Samuel Langbroek, a critic come to the hotel for the fete later that month, one which continues to stymie all attempts at clarity, if only for one miniscule detail.
The critic Langbroek had arrived in weeks prior, with the intention of bringing legitimacy to Mr. Fitzroy’s weekly galleries leading up to the autumnal fete. In the testimony of the Royal Admiralty staff, in particular the words of one bellhop, his arrival had come in the middle of the night. He was carrying two heavy duffels, one of which he tore back from the bellboy when he in his utmost incompetence attempted to fit both on a pushcart. From there, quite altogether ruffled, Mr. Langbroek huffed and carried the second duffel himself, waiting half-turned by the stair for the boy to follow him with the pushcart to the luggage pulley. When they made the little cupboard where the crane was, Mr. Langbroek stopped, and in a reversal of his earlier attitude, faced the porter and inquired, in a steeped yet nearly educated-out accent, “Would you like to see what Mr. Fitzroy asked I bring?”
Needless to elaborate, the bellhop agreed warmly, as was the custom at the Royal Admiralty.
Mr. Langbroek without further preface unhitched the top of the duffel he himself had carried, withdrawing a number of banded sleeves. One, with penultimate care, he unrolled, and nearly slapped the boy silly when his look of runny curiosity did not deepen into recognition. He indicated, reasserting his belligerent carry, a canvas bearing an oil painting, of unmistakably skilled technique, but with no immediate recognition that could be inspired in the bellhop. Instead, Mr. Langbroek made a chalky, bitter laugh, and said, “So it is true that the youth of today have lost their appreciation for fine art and the old masters. This malady, young porter, was diagnosed to me by Mr. Varley Fitzroy, who arranged for me to port a number of the pieces from the great old museums, to discern whether his students would truly recognize their value when placed in stark contrast with the dowdy work his galleries otherwise display. This, my boy, is a peerless secret you must keep. The tier of journeyman who people these shows are mean and base in art, and will undoubtedly scry any advantage they espy to make their attempts at swaying the patron; you must preserve my confidence.”
Then, willed by his own belligerence, Mr. Langbroek hitched the other duffel to the porter crane, and with a slap on the back, sent the bellhop to hoist it to the fifth floor. He himself fastened the canvases back into their sleeves and ported the luggage to his room, where he retired for the evening.
The next occasion on which the bellhop saw Mr. Langbroek was a weekend gala on the ninth floor of the Royal Admiralty, one of the esteemed evenings on which Mr. Varley Fitzroy called up the porter staff to assemble a gallery of contemporary art extracted from his private collection and the works of his Conservatory. The occasion called to mind Mr. Langbroek’s words by the porter crane, and indeed, the bellhop spied several of the pieces Mr. Langbroek had fussed over while composing the gallery. Their attributions had been struck, signatures carefully hidden by ornamental prominences on the frame, and counterfeit attributions to figuratively nameless artists, with names which called to mind long toiling hours between shifts at the manufactory. The art of the remarkable yet unheroic, footnotes of their era.
Of course, the bellhop knew nothing of such things. Rather, he in the spans between portings dreamt himself an artist in a seaside town, further flung from the Royal Admiralty, among the clink-clinking of plates and the stilted chatter and surfeit of decadence. The lazy cloying of the daydream left him as his task pivoted to that of a doorman, but he carefully kept Mr. Langbroek in his eye, fitfully tailing the critic as he fretted over the fruits of the modern age. He traced a forefinger along the brassy ostentation of a frame, worried his thumb on the other hand and felt the layering of the oil. In Mr. Langbroek’s eye, he watched the pretention of each work stripped away, laid bare, and violated for hint of artistic value. He helmed a posse of critics-hopeful who, following, worried their thumbs as though they could taste the flecks of paint strewn off by a careless stroke of a master in the resin of their saliva, but for the varnish.
Each time, Mr. Langbroek would smack his lips, and his apostles would follow suit, echoing his decrees of amateur or outmoded, in spans apart from the vaunted techniques of old. Such was his supernal clout that his following would wait, agog, for his decree. When he reached one of the disguised museum works, the bellhop detected in him a canny sneer, as he stopped, gesticulated like a hierophant, and asked his flock what they thought. After a moment of milling silence, one brave soul came forward, licked a thumb, and extended his arm– only for Mr. Langbroek to strike it red, condemning the hapless application of his divining practice. The bellhop would have terribly liked to continue his observation, but for the arrival of a pair of porters at the door, pushing a framed gallery piece on a wheeled cart.
The bellhop, though he had scrutinized the critic Langbroek’s specifications for the gallery showing the morning prior and would have otherwise suspected no further pieces to come through the door from the porter crane, reached for the sheet slung over the piece, because the instinct engendered by his repetitive task had come to full swell, burying what he thought was a reasonable confusion.
He stopped, a reaction which he would only later recount with a sense of peculiarity. A third figure had inserted himself in front of the sheeted frame, a person shorter than the bellhop was himself, and wreathed in a big red robe and cowl. Strangest of all was that he hadn’t noticed the person– who seemed to be a young boy– until the moment he had gone to remove the sheet. The boy did not chide him.
Instead, the boy lifted his chin, pristine except for a lichtenberg mark struck across his lower face. The bellhop struggled to meet his eyes, but perceived that one was lifeless and instead in fact a cut stone, white and yawning. The other was a vitreous amber, but for a trick of the light which called to mind that of a cat or a serpent. The bellhop did not trouble himself with further scrutiny, and instead remained agog, arm outstretched, until the boy spoke, “Please don’t, it isn’t time yet,” and gave him a peculiar smile, at which point the bellhop gladly stepped back.
The other porters were far more imposing figures, both towering and with a musculature the bellhop had seldom seen in his life. When his eyes reached their heads, which were cowled as well, he regretted looking. Where he had expected to see the weathered and heavy-set jowls of the sturdy older figures who had otherwise worn such silhouettes in his experience, from within the cowl came a terrible, squirming, probing mass of appendages. They were purpureal in color, and burnished and muscular like sea serpents’ tails, but their lengths were suckered and gripped upon themselves as they seethed. The bellhop felt nausea churn in his gut, and before he broke his look, a shine glinting from further up in the cowl told him that his observation had been noticed. Nothing further came of the encounter as both porters proceeded with the gallery piece.
The following is well-attested by the onlookers, the bellhop’s so-called critics-hopeful and apostles of Mr. Langbroek. Though the bellhop had been only dimly aware of this fact, among this gathering was the esteemed Mr. Varley Fitzroy, and of note if only for his testimony, one Mr. Hanraets. The stranger– the bellhop’s ‘boy’– approached the assembly, only noticed by the body, so engrossed in the choleric gesticulations and spoutings of Mr. Langbroek, as he approached, directing his porters by means of some inaudible and invisible communication or not at all to bring the sheeted frame to pass in front of the piece Mr. Langbroek was discussing, in terms which verged on the vainglorious.
For a time, Mr. Langbroek valorously stymied his approach with sheer disregard, but as the stranger continued to eke closer to the center-space previously occupied alone by the critic and his painting, and as his porters continued to placidly wheel their charge to eclipse the gallery piece, such a susurration of unease emerged in the crowd that Mr. Langbroek was forced to give pause and respond. As one porter drew near, evident in Mr. Hanraets’ testimony, Mr. Langbroek noticed the fervid massing of protrusions from under its cowl, and was struck to galled silence a moment longer, before he drew away.
Finally, as if he had been waiting for the stranger to give word, Mr. Langbroek’s face grew with a figment of purpura and he demanded, “What is the meaning of this? Which incompetent was it who allowed you in here, or otherwise left me unaware that your arrival would coincide with this gala?” He fixed Mr. Varley Fitzroy in a deep grimace, then impugned him, “Did you permit this? Do you wilfully invite your esteemed guests to be so embarrassed?”
At long last, if only to break the long-drawn sigh held by the assembly at large, the stranger spoke. According to the word of Mr. Hanraets, the content of the character of this stranger was of utmost concern to the assembled guests, as the picture of his porters even negating their ghastly countenances, a feature which most tried to put out of mind outright, had put them to a great deal of fright on account of their evident strength. He doubted very much that anyone in the room might stand up to them alone, and that was on the assumption that they were unarmed, which felt to him entirely unsafe considering the brusqueness of their entry, and their uncertain, and in fact quite otherworldly, origin. He was greatly relieved when the words that passed the stranger’s lips were in a quite ordinary and modern mode.
The stranger said, “That man had as much foreknowledge as you did that I would come. Nevertheless, I was made aware that this is a gallery viewing, here in this Royal Admiralty. Therefore, I have a piece I wish to submit, if you would permit this viewing to take place, Mr. Langbroek. Please, permit it.”
If he could ever hope to express such a simple fact to the hotel-goers before him, the stranger would have wished to express an earnest confusion. The whole affair had begun rotten, if partly for the bellicose character of Mr. Langbroek, an impression he had prised gently from the mind of the bellhop, but here he found he had to quit any expectation he had brought of a reasonable reception. The stranger watched in dawning curiosity as the critic Langbroek stirred, his face deepening in its bruisy color. He spoke like the snap of a whip, “So too has the gallantry of rogues past been lost in this day. You are no artist, I mark you for a common cutpurse, hoping to make hostages of Mr. Fitzroy’s Conservatory, with your entourage of ruffians. I will not be cowed by it, nor will Mr. Fitzroy, or his esteemed guests. And I take your so-claimed piece for what it is– I have caught you in your attempt to spirit one of Fitzroy’s from this very hotel, and I have sniffed out your plot, in your flaccid hopes to conceal this truth from the minds of the Conservatory!”
From here, the testimony of Mr. Hanraets grows frantic. Much deliberation has been put into the composition of his statements on the matter, stemming from a great deal of effort put towards divining the exact procession of events which concern the demise of Mr. Samuel Langbroek. Needless to say, that tale begins, in full, with his conversation with Mr. Hanraets’ stranger. The testimony ensuing was withdrawn following great effort on the part of Mr. Hanraets to expurgate his own mind by way of the imbibing of various spirits and medicinals, though, in his words, no more perfect a testimony could exist than that which floods into his dreams every night, and by day threatens to invade his waking thoughts. Perhaps the preceding is an adequate pretext for what grave misdeeds are therein accounted.
From where he stood, the stranger remained utmostly placid, as though a supernal stillness had taken him in its grip. He wrung his hands for several long moments in silence, then replied, “I am here because an acclaimed critic of fine art has come from a great distance to this gallery, here in the Royal Admiralty Hotel. So, you mistake me. This is not a stolen piece, but my own making, and I wish to submit it for viewing. Please, Mr. Langbroek, if you would,” he said, and in Mr. Hanraets’ words, an uneasy pause ensued, as the stranger seemed struck in thought, or perhaps by mere dark whimsy. The stranger then finished, “Criticize.”
Mr. Langbroek did not stop to consider a reply. Like an old war cannon, already loaded, he decreed, “It is amateur.”
The assembly was much disturbed when with superlative swiftness the stranger withdrew a hand, pristine and unblemished from his robe, and seemed to caress his own jaw as though puzzling. It slithered until curled in a facsimile of thought, puissant in its movements. The flesh of it seemed to shine. It tugged on his lips, as if the expression produced made any hint at the thoughts he weighed behind eyes he kept shadowed in the cowl. Then, in a tenor which belied what struck Mr. Hanraets as genuine curiosity, he replied, “How can you say that, if you have not seen it?”
Mr. Langbroek replied, as in his belligerent custom, though the act of decreeing had instilled in him a faint ebb to the ruddiness in his veins, and he deflated. He said, “A critic of art cannot help but to be a critic of artists, scoundrel. A masterwork is not presented by an amateur, nor, indeed, are any great masterworks presented anymore. But this farce has endured long enough. Submit your piece.”
At last, all gathered could espy in the stranger a monition, a upwelling, one that appeared like elation, as though stricken with some dancing plague he turned in childlike glee and set both smooth hands on the sheet, and pulled it from the frame. Mr. Hanraets continues to struggle to describe the composition which was revealed by the pulling of the sheet, and was dimly aware of the towering porters kneeling to take up the sheet in a bundle and ferrying it aside. He fascinated himself with the edge of the image before him, like the verge of insanity opening itself in full presentation before his mind. Some of the gallery pieces Mr. Varley Fitzroy had exhibited in weeks prior followed newer fringe movements, those that cherished rather than concealing the work of every brush. Mr. Hanraets was a dilettante, but moreso a devotee of the critic, Mr. Langbroek, and disdained such a revelry in poor technique as he observed it. Cognizant of the factual foundation which now fell away from him, sending him careening into a fissure he could not comprehend, he nauseously contemplated for a brushstroke on the periphery to which to anchor himself, but found none, only lineaments which betrayed this end in the merest fact that they were not brushstrokes, but seemed to shift under scrutiny.
Even in the recounting of the features of the piece presented by the stranger on the night of Mr. Samuel Langbroek’s demise, the effort demanded in Mr. Hanraets’ imagination, in hopes of providing accurate testimony, seems at times likely to doom him. As he described it, he rapidly turned between raving utterances, describing ululations issuing forth as from the painting itself, though in fact imagined, by the transfixed faces around him and seeming unawareness of the critic, Langbroek, and worried shouting, anguished by the thought that his testimony might transmit whatever nightmarish theme had so transfixed him. Of chiefmost evidence in his testimony is the simple fact that the piece presented by the stranger on the night of Langbroek’s demise was no mere painting, or was otherwise rendered in such a way that it engendered a look far too near to the Other to leave the observation of onlookers unmolested.
He describes growing weary of the nauseating trammels of the periphery, a destructive urge, like that of self-annihilation; and resigning himself to wander deeper. The tethers of the frame, festooned with silvery prominences, remained the only thing markedly ordinary about the piece, and it had been in that shadow made where the frame met canvas that Mr. Hanraets had confined the wandering of his eyes, with the comfortable towhead of normalcy to stay him from the riptides and lineaments leading deeper across the canvas. Then he let them free. Mr. Hanraets describes an eternity in an ever-shifting image in the moments when he can speak. For the rest, and indeed for a marked majority of his testimony, he has folded into himself in silence, but in other, sparser moments, spoken of colors and forms never before seen, and indeed never seen since. When the attacks subside, Mr. Hanraets seems as if a mewling infant, in awe of the world he finds himself in, but it is superlatively clear that his mind is burdened by what he saw that night.
Though he made no pretense at understanding, Mr. Hanraets came to understand the stranger as he looked upon his artwork. At times, though the stranger merely waited to be addressed again, he felt as though he had been spoken to, and imparted an awareness of the stranger’s own thoughts.
Pride was chiefmost. As the stranger surveyed his work, he felt a cloying pride in his chest, one so potent he could sing! In his time, though critique was far from the urges which possessed him body and mind, he had come into contact with what must be considered amateur work, and it wounded him sorely that a genteel critic such as Mr. Samuel Langbroek might perceive his own as amateur, especially before having laid eyes on it. Dimly, the stranger must have been aware of what was meant by the span between silver limit and silver limit, inside the frame, where the lineaments worried together and became great, gaping, and celestial form. He must have been aware of how the colors danced, and how they obscured the oil strokes which gave them shape. He must have, because the stranger considered them duly part of his technique. They were what instilled him with that most puissant pride, only second in instilling the ferocious spirit that took through his gut as he looked at it to the miraculous afterbirth of its execution.
He did not need to view his piece to know it, though this knowing could seldom be communicated in the ways the stranger desired. He wished for the critic to lay it bare and divine from its entrails something which approached his pride, but the sorry man, red face and all, was turning a sickened color as he fought to find purchase in the artwork the stranger had brought forward. The want it left him, watching Mr. Langbroek’s insides knot in on themselves by proxy of his face, made him want to take the critic bodily and shake from his lips an analysis that might satisfy him, but he let patience grow instead. He returned his hands to a clasp at his beltline, and waited, and indeed, at last, was rewarded.
When Mr. Langbroek spoke, the stranger could not help but to lean forward and furtively chew on his fingertip, which was once again by way of the curling of his hand pressed between his lips at the corner. Gone was the deep sanguine in Mr. Langbroek’s countenance, and the heady rage at his jowls. Instead, shaking like all hell, he raised a finger, and high-handed, brought it trembling forth in an accusatory thrust. Suddenly, that bellicose color revived in his dour cheeks, and when he spoke, his voice rumbled, like a righteous decree. He said, “I rescind my prior assessment. Mr. Varley Fitzroy, I am only sorry that I have erred in countenancing this as amateur, when it so clearly falls short of such a vaunted definition as art. It is worse than puerile, for it goes without any attempt at delivering truth. This, I say, is core to the very practice of art, and there is no truth to be found in this color-smeared canvas. Where is the hope to deliver some honest simile of form? Where is the loving sculpt of some landscape, of a face, of the terminator of a cast shadow, drawn from some invisible luminary? Where, I demand of you, is the respect for the craft? Even the graspers of today, so perplexed by the novelty of impression, of the betrayal of form, belie a certain preoccupation with essential truth! Even the liars who tease form in between their hollow assessments of shape, abstracting away the very substance an artist ought hope to imprison by brush, and wholly pregnant with their surfeit of occult and self-indulgent expression, those sappers of the fine arts, are possessed of greater integrity! But here, I say, there is nothing! What substance, what integrity? Mr. Varley Fitzroy, the greatest of travesties is upon us! I say, that to countenance the mere submission of this canvas, the mere presence, is tantamount to the slaying by knife of the very masters of our craft. I urge you, banish this smatterer.”
The critic Langbroek’s incensed words fanned a black flame in the deepest nook of the stranger’s chest. Here, trammeled by the vitriol of his words, the critic had transgressed a pace too far. Though professed in him was a sole, solemn hope, one which Mr. Hanraets reports an utter lack of certainty as to how clearly it had been transmitted to him, except perhaps by the miraculous painting which sits so centrally in the demise he witnessed, excepting further that even he professes that the critique was perhaps unduly scathing, here again the stranger’s hope had been stymied. Perhaps, he might have been thought to conclude, his loneliness might thereafter grow. There would not be a gallery here which might cherish his work. There might not be one in all the world, but for the works of its deified figures, perhaps only regarded in their death as great. But what good was it to be a saint to such critics of art? If here was presented truth, could it not be witnessed?
Mr. Hanraets reports one further peculiarity before the occurrence of the event which is most pivotal on that night. By his observation of the painting, he has since been aware of a presence, as though observed from the eaves of every building he passes. He has no hope of naming it, nor would he ever wish to, since the events of the night he witnessed, except for the fact that the stranger thought kindly of an individual, one who, excepting the critics of the gallery, might reflect fondly on his efforts on that evening. He has never once claimed any justification for how he might know this, and indeed, it seems any clarity demands far more fleeting a hope than most would afford, but he imagined the stranger must have thought his father might be proud.
All in attendance on that evening recount well what events afterwards transpired, though in what continues to be a most peculiar fashion, Mr. Hanraets’ telling, though superlatively comprehensive, is fitful. He is plagued by what he describes as ‘seizing terrors’, for their propensity to wind his body in on itself in suffocating fear of what occurred. It bears report that the stranger has not been otherwise recorded in the province, nor indeed elsewhere in the world, since the night of Mr. Samuel Langbroek’s demise. Along with the painting, which disappeared shortly after, the stranger and his porters remain integral to this mystery.
The stranger was now thoroughly steeped in his vexation, first at the critic Langbroek’s refusal to even observe his painting, then further at his condemnation. The critic’s finger still hovered like a dagger in his field of view. He dropped his hand to his side and made manifest his dejection. For the briefest of spans, it was apparent to those assembled that the stranger might simply leave, as though his arrival had so wrenchingly captivated the guests, to the extent that all present had brought their glasses and hors d’oeuvres and left their conversations to observe the commotion, his sorrow seemed to eclipse any recollection of his previous vim. The lapsing of this period was only heralded by a single, sleek motion, which saw the hood he’d worn over his head thrown down to rest on his shoulders; his head was hairless and smooth, though seemingly made of scales, like the body of a serpent. There was something distinctly thalassic about the texture of it; a motif which only called to mind the seething tentacular appendages which bevied the porters’ lower faces. His countenance was roundly youthful, and though erroneous, this characterization justified the bellhop’s prior assessment that the stranger was a mere boy.
The whole attention of the gallery that night in the Royal Admiralty now fell upon the stranger, who seemed once again to commune with his porters as though speaking without words, such was the fluidity with which they acted as one. He said, “Why do you only lick your thumb and touch when you stand before the work of a contemporary artist? When I passed the bellhop, it was made manifest to me that you stood before the work of an old master in disguise. Oh, do not be angry, he did not volunteer this to me. Then, why did you not lick your thumb to judge it?”
Mr. Langbroek, in the mode which has throughout this accounting been made greatly manifest, replied, “Among the surest marks of bygone mastery which exists in the mind, to us critics, among their studious and lasting respect for anatomy, their concern with good and righteous subjects, and the edification of their apprentices, is a true respect for the power of the brushstroke. If one can observe the strokes that one feels, from the distance of the arm, it is clear that the amateur has relied on the contour of the stroke to provide a mere deception of form. There is no respect, and the substance is hollow. The masters need not pretend to respect the form which they impart to canvas. Nor must I molest their work with such a question.”
The stranger looked on, as though some spirit of friendliness had returned to his features. He worried his hand back up his cheek, then finally, like an odd animal, cocked his head. He inquired, “How do I become an old master?”
Like the blazing sword of some avenging angel, the critic Samuel Langbroek brought his finger up again, then arced it, as though presenting his ire to the assembly. Choleric, he said, “There has been no master who was born, all were given to us, as though by intercession with the divine! It is tantamount to blasphemy to even suggest that you– you who soundly cannot party with the barest necessities of art, nay, who so blatantly undermines what substance the fine arts have given us– could ‘become’ one, of all the amateurs in the world.”
With all finality, the stranger’s jaw set, and the greatest peculiarity of all then transpired. He said, “Tell me if my brushwork is a deception of form, then, Mr. Langbroek. Lick your thumb. Touch my painting,” and as one, his porters seized Mr. Langbroek, and with strength unbecoming of any living men, lifted him from the ground. All assembled were too transfixed by the horrible might they displayed in plucking an adult man from the ground and ferrying him, as though a mere piece of luggage. They loped forward and brought him within an arm’s span of the painting. A horrible worm of fear seized Mr. Langbroek, and he was unable to lift his arm for the horrified juddering of his body, until the porters set him down again.
The stranger looked on, as though judging the quality of his brushstroke, and said, “Then help him,” which were the first three and only words any heard him say to his porters, and indeed seemed in response to nothing at all. They eased his arm back towards his face, gentle as anything else in existence, as though any resistance posed by his body did not require aggression or strain, or the cruelty of a stern grip. Mr. Langbroek fought, a man drowning, to turn his head away, and up, back at the crowd. His eyes pleaded; but none could help, such was the horrible transfixion of the scene which played before them, as though actors in the wings. Inaction had pierced them through the heart and taken them like yoked livestock, they could merely watch with the eyes of staid oxen, lashed to the hitching post as it transpired. One meaty hand eased his jaw until the lips parted, another extracted his tongue. Finally, the thumb touched it, and wet. For the span of a breath, the thumb was wiggled against his tongue, until saliva cloyed at it like a string from his mouth when it was gently let to pull away.
One porter eased his arm back to full extent, and the thumb touched the canvas. Impassively, the stranger inquired, “Can you see any brushstrokes?”
Mr. Samuel Langbroek stuttered over the first syllable, the start to a negative his voice couldn’t manage. As his saliva pressed between his thumb and the dark, lineamented canvas, it bowed out around his thumb, and both of his eyes went wide as serving-plates. Mr. Samuel Langbroek looked at the stranger’s painting, and his jaw twitched in dumbstruck awe, still desperate in his attempts to reply to the stranger’s inquiry. None, least of all Mr. Hanraets, could attest to what they thought Mr. Langbroek might have seen, as his thumb drew his eye to the square center of the painting, which at a distance thwarted any attempts at resolution into any recognizable form; rather, seeming a iridescent pattern one might expect in the swellings of the sea, or in the shape of wind. The lineaments which had stymied Mr. Hanraets must have resolved at such a distance, when Mr. Langbroek touched the canvas, and he must have felt the quality of technique the stranger had applied, in his assessment, but now, it seemed, the critic Langbroek must have joined those gathered in his state of transfixion, as the stranger observed with a placid smile, as though his face was merely a mask cut in such a rictus of serenity.
Then, something occurred which shattered any state of transfixion which had taken the Royal Admiralty. As tears welling for the vision he alone could have seen, blood issued forth from Mr. Langbroek’s eyes, then from his nose, and finally from his ears, before spilling from his still-open mouth. As the very innards within him liquefied into that sanguine flow, issuing from every orifice of his head, the spell in the room was broken, and calamity arrived to the gallery scene. Both porters let the critic Langbroek fall to his knees, whereafter he looked up in mystified horror at the scene that must have appeared to him, that afflicted him with such a devastating vision as this, and in his eyes, the slickened lineaments still played, a reproduction of the substance captured within the painting.
Such was the terror that seized the ninth floor of the Royal Admiralty Hotel, that as in his reporting the good Mr. Hanraets arrived to his accounting of the moment of the critic Langbroek’s demise, he could speak of it only falteringly, as if recalling the details of some afflicting night terror. Chiefmost among his recollections was the issuance of clotted matter and viscera through the thickened grotesque of blood which rapidly surged from every particularity of his countenance; further, as it spouted it had borne with it some essential factor of Mr. Langbroek’s mien, as when he collapsed, his very carriage exited with the stain of rage and the great irascible animus in his cheeks diminished as they went slack with pallor. A great portion of the sanguine matter issued fell upon the canvas, whereafter, with great timidity Mr. Hanraets thought to look, and seeming near to exhibit symptoms of the seizing terrors he had before described, saw to his utter horror that the red coverage of much of the canvas did not abey the peculiar sense of drowning which had previously afflicted him when he looked at the canvas. Instead, where the great patch of red drew the eye, he recalls himself marooned in the great dazzling expanse between the silver frames, where the great horror of the painting around offered no easy path for the eye to escape to safe harbor. Solace, then, only existed in the slow, dripping expansion of that sanguine patch, which, dimly cognizant in his reporting of the horror that saved him, Mr. Hanraets followed gingerly down until it spilled over the edge of that silver ornament and onto the floor. Perhaps another matter might have saved his attentions, but it seemed that the gurgles issued by the critic did nothing to dissipate the hold that peculiar canvas held on his eye.
Of final, yet critical import to this most peculiar demise is the matter of the critic Langbroek’s eyes, which seemed to replicate the character of the painting to such a degree that Mr. Hanraets was timid to look too closely. At first, the change was merely that of a strange glimmer visible through the film of sanguine matter which burgeoned past the eyelids, but as the critic collapsed and convulsed and finally looked upward to the center of the canvas, the very image of the painting overtook and reflected on both sclerae. As the moment of his expiry became certain to have passed, though none had any method of reckoning beyond the quitting of that hideous gurgling, his eyes did not shut, and in fact, one brave soul among the gathering issued forth and attempted to close them; but found them held fast, as though stunned, and came away with only a building smear of red matter cloying to the hands, until, bodily, one of those horrible porters diverted him back into the assembly.
For the stranger’s part, the matter of the critic’s death briefly stumped him, though no doubt existed in the onlookers that he was responsible for this most peculiar demise. For his part, however, he felt a most curious pang, in the fashion of dawning discovery. This, perhaps, he had not expected. He seemed to stand taller in the room, his skin shined, as though fortified by the bloodshed, or perhaps he was merely alone in that it had not cowed him. Then, he spoke. He said, “Does anyone else wish to take a closer look?”