The Mezzotint Chapter 6 Dorian Gray

They polished off the Shiraz between them content in the knowledge that, as elderly gentlemen, three glasses of a good red was not only an equitable volume but also elevated one to that genial state that borders the countries of sober indifference and drunken wantonness.  On the doorstep the offered to stay the night if Creest could put him up.  He was convinced the professor was more than a little shaken by the revelation in the picture although he couldn’t imagine why.  He was politely excused, Creest assuring him he was quite robust and if he were a little piqued a good night’s sleep would elicit its own sweet remedy.

The heavy clunk of Creest’s front door shutting echoed in the space behind him.  He stepped slowly from the hall toward his front room to a point where he could espy Hope’s painting, resting on the floor up against the small coffee table where he’d put it down.  Stopping in the doorway between, he forced himself to look at the picture, inducing his self-conscious to extract the figure he had seen there and prove to him that it really was an illusion and the result of a conglomerate of strong wine, self-reproach for his unwarranted entry into Hope’s house and the Vicar’s horrible history of poor Harriet.   Unfortunately for Creest the figure was there still and he quickly flipped the painting over, grabbed it in his right hand and walked upstairs. 

He went into his own bedroom and opened up a closet and grabbed a spare bed sheet.  Returning to the landing he pulled down a trap door to the loft which enabled a pull down ladder.  Creest fixed the steps then climbed rather awkwardly pulling upwards with his free hand.  The loft was dusty but relatively free of jumble.  He’d inherited a junkyard of tat and had it cleared the following day as an obligation to his own sense of the aesthetic.  He had left one piece of furniture untouched; an old oak stool.  It was sturdy and not unattractive but required a degree of recovery which he hadn’t got around to.  It stood, lonely, at the far end, but not for long.  Creest sat the painting on the stool leaning it back against the brick wall behind it with the picture facing outwards.  Again his eyes were drawn that corner of the painting.  ‘Good God' he thought, ‘if anything the shape is even more pronounced’.  He threw the sheet over the canvas.

‘Why don’t you just throw it away or burn it you old fool’ he thought?  But she had given him it and as bad and mysterious as it was, he couldn’t bear the thought of destroying something she’d given him, and yes, he was hoping she’d come back for it.

*

Tired, tipsy and in still floating in an unnatural state, Creest made himself a Horlicks drink, his usual ritual, hoping that a return to monotony might dislodge the supernatural that had solicited its way into his humdrum but contented existence.      

He took it upstairs and laid it on the table next to his bed, with his Hardy – The Return of the Native - and a small lamp.  The bedroom was Spartan which suited him.  Apart from a small table in the corner on which his laptop sat (his only real excursion into the 21^st century and his best kept secret from his fellow Greevens) there was little else.  His clothes were kept in a wardrobe and dresser in the second bedroom. 

Switching off the main light he undressed quickly and stockpiled the pillows behind him.  After draining half the cup and a saunter on Egdon Heath, the physical world was drifting beyond him and he surrendered, lying down flat and letting his eyelids slide to a close like a slug on the side of a glass.  The last fleeting thought he had before darkness smothered him was of Hope’s painting which he only now realised was sitting directly above him the other side of his bedroom ceiling.

*

Nevertheless Creest slept; and then woke.   It was still dark.  He hadn’t closed the small curtains on his window.  Outside the shadows of the trees that encircled his cottage threw their shapes on the wall to his left, lit by a distant but effervescent moon.   He watched them for a while anticipating their gentle list might send him back to slumber when without warning, in unison, they began to dance as if a gale had sprung from the earth and was piping the devil’s own tune for them to reel to.  He looked outside fearing the wind may break the delicate glass in his windows but he could hear no roar and in fact the trees, contrarily, were still. 

He looked back at the shadows.  They were still moving but had slowed, almost as if they were children caught in a pretence trying to bamboozle an elderly relative.  The professor relaxed his rigid grip on the blankets and continued to scrutinize them as a child would a kaleidoscope.  And as if obliging the silhouettes began to coalesce to form a single figure that slinked languidly against the white wall of Creest’s bedroom.

After a few moments the figure seemed to peel itself way from the wall and took on another dimension.  It stood there motionless in the ebony void.  It had a head but no discernible features but the force of it was immense as if it incorporated all the dark matter from the universe that moved, imperceptibly, above the roof of his cottage.  He wanted to scream but his throat was restricted and his head locked tight against the bed.  It was as if a pair of hands had emerged from the mattress beneath him and pinned him solid by the neck.

Sensing he was defenceless the shape slid along the end of the bed toward the window.  A slim arm reached for the latch and pushed it open.  A pale moonshine illuminated the shadow and he saw that it was Hope.  Her hair was carelessly tied in braids and some had unravelled.  Her face which was so winsome that day she swept into the art class had a colourless countenance which accentuated her garish make-up.  The mascara was over applied and gave her eyes the appearance of two nuggets of coal pushed into a meringue base with her lipstick draining away from both corners of her mouth like a tragic clown.  Perhaps a child would look like that if she had found her mother’s vanity case and was aping her.  Her silhouette was clothed now too.  He could see that she had on a white bib like shirt above a short pleated royal blue skirt.  From the hem her legs stretched toward the floor dressed in long socks and flat red shoes.  She at once both appalled and fascinated him.

Hope stared at the professor and then grinned, but with little sense of warmth or humour in that shapely mouth, only malevolence.  The claw on his throat lightened its grip and he gasped for air like a diver coming up from the deep.  ‘Take your picture back Hope…please. ’ he heard himself cry.

Hope skipped away from the window, ran her fingernail across his laptop like a malicious student scratching a blackboard and crossed to the other side of the bed.   ‘But it was a present for you, daddy’ she replied coyly.

‘I don’t want it.  I don’t deserve it’ he bleated, as if his disjointed reasoning would hold any significance with her.

‘Then take something else’ she whispered and leant toward him, shuffling off her pants with both thumbs.  As the fabric fell to the floor she threw back his bedclothes and sat astride him.  Despite his fear Creest knew he was as erect as ever he had been, so much so it felt painful.  She corralled her skirt around his penis and pulled it to her stomach holding it there.  Anticipating consummation with relish and dread, his nose was suddenly assailed with a sudden heavy pungent scent that emanated from outside.  It was sweet and nauseous but familiar.  Hope noticed it too but she said nothing.  She turned to look out the window at something in the distance and began to beckon it inside with her forefinger.  Creest knew exactly what it was.  

*

This time he did wake up - in his dominion, at least.  It was morning but what sleep he’d enjoyed had given him little rest and lesser still comfort from the inexplicable events and dreams that were permeating his demesne.  The room looked as it always did first thing on a summer morning - sunbeams threading through the air illuminating the dust particles.  He noticed quickly too, that his bedroom window was closed.  Though the evidence helped confirm that last night’s events were all a dream it provided no solace to the professor. 

He dressed but consumed nothing more than a cup of sweet tea sitting in his favourite armchair.  He sat for more than an hour ruminating.  He was raised a Presbyterian but the first time he’d entered a church since a young boy was when he first moved to Greeven and that being a tactic toward desegregation.  ‘Perhaps the vicar could help, after all this is his thing’ he mused, without conviction.

He walked into the kitchen to clean his cup and stared out into his back garden.  There was the fence running along the bottom – no hooded figure, no gap, just plain green privet.  For a fleeting moment his curiosity superseded his trepidation.  ‘Sod it! I’m going to see for myself’

            Still in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers he padded down the lawn like a cat trying to ambush a pigeon, his gaze intensely focused on that spot.  The nearer he got the more he felt the likelihood of the hooded fiend leaping out at him, its features now visible and ghastly.  He pressed on drawing on nerve born out of a greater will to purge his mind of this irrational nonsense. 

He was now a couple of feet away.  The privet was thick with no hint of a gap that would allow even the hardiest rodent passage.  He gripped it with both hands and smiled feeling the thorns scrape away at his skin.  He sat back on his haunches in relief just as a wren flew out of the privet in front of him rocking him onto his back.  After the initial fright he suddenly began to laugh heartily.   

‘Whatever is happening is confined to art and art alone then’ he cried.  ‘It has no import in this world.  It’s a trick.  Yes, a trick, in fact I have it.  I, of all people, should have guessed it straight away.  The figure was always in the original.  She’s simply painted over it.  She must’ve treated the section with some kind of removal fluid just before she gave it me and that’s why I didn’t notice it at first.  It’s all been a game….but why?  Some disgruntled student paying me back in kind for telling them the awful truth; someone I over criticized trying to ‘disprove’ my expertise?  Why follow me out here?  How did she even know where I had moved to?’

The relief gave way to more ominous considerations.  Whereas before this paranormal business, though disturbing, could now be explained; but this was a real threat.  He climbed to his feet ruminating over the magnitude of this new hypothesis and turned to go to the cottage.  He suddenly froze.  There, between him and the house, stood the hooded figure, seemingly immobile but with a latent intent that it was moving toward the cottage.  Creest looked up at his bedroom.  The window was open again though he’d left it closed.  He turned back to the figure and cried aloud ‘Stop!’ but it had disappeared.         

Creest rushed indoors and with his heart hammering in his chest and sweating profusely, hurled himself up into his loft and ripped back the blankets covering Hope’s picture.  What he saw confirmed everything.  The figure in the painting was now half way between the house and the privet fence and the bedroom window which had been closed was open as if the approaching demon had the kinetic will to impel it to open or another demon was inside assisting its evil compatriot in its malignant pursuit of Creest.   Like Hope, in his nightmares.