David Sutton - The Satyr's Head - Tales of Terror

He was looking at the painting. The very air around it seemed to shiver, as if acted upon by heat from some unknown source. Cenaide’s face seemed to shrink until it was like a jewelled flower in the middle of a pulsating circle of black light. He stretched out his arms towards the shrinking face, and they seemed to grow and grow, his hands blossoming at their ends as alien flowers. Then her face expanded again, filling the whole picture. Her eyes were looking at him, blue shards of sparkling glass, burning with a deep fire which reached right through his head into his brain. He thought he saw himself approaching in those eyes, very small and distorted. As he was looking, the hidden fire came through her eyes, burst through her pupils and came swirling at him in threads of burning light, as a spider’s web suddenly catching the sunlight of autumn and shining silvery. It exploded in all directions, beyond the pentagram, shivering as a silver maze, before the darkness outside absorbed it too.

It was as if the colours of the painting detached themselves from it, changing into alien, moving shapes of things for which there were no names, crawling and shrieking, blasphemous monstrosities moving inside the pentagram, before they too were taken by the darkness of the room. The darkness seemed closer, as if it was trying to edge inside the protecting pentagram; it was everywhere around him, circling him like a cocoon. Jack didn’t notice it.

‘I love you, Cenaide,’ he whispered. Though spoken so softly, the words seemed an explosion of sound, repeating themselves through endless corridors, as if the dark rejected them and bounced them back along its inner walls. ‘… love you… love you…’

Only the portrait seemed to keep its reality, and the woman in it, who was looking at him, straight at him with her blue burning eyes. Then her lips parted, ‘And I love you, Jack,’ she said. The colours around her began to change, they seemed to melt though this was impossible, and dripped down from the canvas. Cenaide moved, slowly, deliberately, she stood up. The colours became a cloaking fog through which she came to him, slowly stretching her arms out. The colours were imploding in his brain, he couldn’t think, could hardly react to what he saw and experienced. On the bare canvas, the silver pentagram was pulsating, emitting beams of an unearthly black light. The darkness around the greater pentagram was throbbing as with an immense heartbeat, and slowly the first fingers of the dark began crawling inside the pentagram. But he didn’t see, didn’t hear, except for the face coming to him, the face he had wanted so much, with the eyes burning fiercely into his own; the only clear thought in his mind was, ‘God, if it is a dream, let it continue, let it never stop, if it isn’t real it doesn’t matter!’ And then she was in his arms, soft, warm and very alive for the petrified shard of one second; he felt the silk of her hair, the softness of her parted lips as he kissed her, just before he tasted the bitter staleness of dry paint on his mouth.

After four continuous days of silence, they broke down the door of Jack Morgan’s study, and found him, lying in the centre of his chalk-drawn pentagram, like a crucified spider. Paint was everywhere inside the pentagram, as if a madman, and who else could it have been but himself, had opened all his tubes and squeezed the paint in all directions. Most of it however, was on Jack Morgan himself, on his chest and arms and face, covering his eyes and nostrils completely, a thick mass of dried paint. There were severe burns on his face and hands as well, below the paint, but it was not this, nor suffocation which had killed him.

They buried him with the little savings they found in one of his drawers, among some records and old sketches; Cenaide wore a black veil and cried, but then she always had cried easily. There were also some friends, who said some nice words about him, though they would forget him before the year had passed. None of them could explain why the paint of what had been Cenaide’s portrait had run off the canvas as if completely fresh and fluent as water, so that except for some snatches of background detail, there now only stood a black glaring pentagram.

There was an official investigation, of course, but they came to a dead end when the coroner disclosed, baffled, that suffocation hadn’t killed the painter. None of the experts was able to explain the murderous presence of thick quantities of paint inside his stomach, lungs, brain and heart.

AS HENRY LAMSON looked from the gate of his brother’s farm on the outskirts of Pire he noticed that someone was walking along the lane in his direction. Although it did nothing to disconcert him at the time, he did wonder, as he bid farewell to the silhouetted figures in the doorway, before setting off for his bus stop, why someone should have been coming back from the moors at this time of the night, especially when it had been pouring down with rain all day.

Shrugging his shoulders, Lamson pulled his raincoat collar up high about his neck against the drizzle and picked his way as carefully as he could between the puddles in the deeply rutted lane. He wished now, as his feet sank in the half hidden mud, that he had thought to bring a torch with him when he came on his visit, since the moon, though full, only faintly showed through the clouds, and the lane was for the most part in shadow.

Engrossed as he was in finding a reasonably dry route along the lane, he did not notice until a few minutes later, when the lights of his brother’s farm had disappeared beyond the hedgerow, that the figure he had seen was nearing him quickly. Already he could hear his footsteps along the lane.

Petulantly pausing to disentangle a snapped thorn branch that had caught on his trouser leg, he turned to watch the hunched figure hobbling towards him. A threadbare overcoat of an indeterminate colour swayed from about his body. In one hand he grasped a worn flat cap, while the other was thrust in his overcoat pocket for warmth.

When he finally succeeded in freeing himself of the twig, Lamson made to continue on his way; the man was obviously nothing more than a tramp, and an old one at that. As he started off, though, he heard him call out in a cracked bellow that rose and died in one breath:

‘’Arf a mo’ there!’

Irritated already at the drizzle that was soaking inexorably through his coat, Lamson sighed impatiently. As the tramp hurried towards him through the gloom, he slowly made out his bristly, coarse and wrinkled face, whose dirt-grained contours were glossy with rain.

The old man stumbled to a halt and raucously coughed a volley of phlegm on the ground. The pale grey slime merged in with the mud. Lamson watched him wipe his dribbling mouth with the top of his cap. Disgusted at the spectacle, Lamson asked him what was the matter.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ He hoped that he wasn’t. The last thing he wanted was to be burdened with someone like this.