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The Painting

John Ragusa

    Maury Amherst didn’t quite know what it was that attracted him to the painting he saw at an art exhibit. It was an ugly portrait of a gargoyle, and there was nothing appealing about it. But it was bizarrely fascinating. Amherst couldn’t take his eyes off of it. He knew he just had to have it.
    He approached the curator. “Do you suppose I could buy this painting?”
    “You’ll have to ask the artist who painted it,” the curator replied. “He’s standing over there in the corner. His name is Brock Linzer.”
    Amherst walked up to Linzer. “Hello there. My name is Maury Amherst. That’s quite a painting you created.”
    “That old thing?” Linzer laughed. “I think I was drunk when I painted it.”
    “There’s something about it that is awesome.”
    “I guess it’s okay if you like weird art.”
    “Would you be willing to sell it?”
    “I’d do anything to get rid of it.”
    “I’d like to buy it. How much do you want for it?”
    “I suppose $5,000 will be enough.”
    “Consider it sold, then.”
    Amherst wrote out a check and gave it to Linzer. “There you go.”
    Amherst took the painting home and hung it on a wall in his bedroom. It added decoration to the plain design in there. Amherst looked at the mural closely. It seemed very lifelike. Every detail was vivid and realistic. The gargoyle looked like it would spring out of the painting and fly into the room at any moment.
    He couldn’t stop staring at it. His rapt attention was focused on the gargoyle. It was almost impossible to look away from it. It was certainly different than any painting he had ever seen.
    The gargoyle seemed to be breathing, but it was a trick of his mind. Whenever someone looks at a photograph too long, it will appear to move. This was a similar optical illusion.
    Amherst wondered how Linzer had been inspired to paint the portrait. The man must have a great imagination to have conjured such a vision. The gargoyle truly resembled a creature from hell.
    Of course, no such monster existed in real life. It was a product of superstition and myth.
    Amherst was curious about the other macabre subjects Linzer might have painted. He was comparable to Goya, that master of ghastly images.
    The painting would adorn his bedroom with a horrific magnificence.

* * *

    That night, his girlfriend Sondra came over for dinner. After they ate, they went into his bedroom to watch TV.
    “Where did you get that awful painting?” Sondra asked, pointing to the canvas.
    “I bought it at an art exhibit today,” Amherst said. “Isn’t it brilliant?”
    “I think it looks creepy. I can’t imagine what you see in it.”
    “It’s true that it’s not pretty. But it does happen to be unique.”
    “It doesn’t do a thing for your bedroom.”
    “Well, I paid too much for it to just throw it away, so I’m going to keep it.”
    Later that night, after Sondra had left, Amherst glanced at the painting again. He got the feeling that the gargoyle was looking straight at him. Seized with a sudden nightmarish feeling, he no longer admired the painting. It seemed grotesque and repulsive, and it gave him shudders.
    Why did he ever buy this horrid painting? He must have been out of his mind to have wanted it.
    A strange thought then occurred to Amherst: What if the gargoyle came to life and killed him? Such an ogre would surely delight in tearing him to shreds. It would cherish the act of slaughtering him.
    But that was absurd; he was letting his imagination run away with him. Such a thing could only happen in a horror movie.
    He decided to take the painting out to the junkyard in the morning and leave it there. He neither needed nor wanted the portrait to be in his house with him.
    He realized he was tired, so he got into his pajamas and brushed his teeth. Then he bolted his bedroom door, turned out the light, got into his bed, and fell asleep.

* * *

    The next morning, Amherst’s housekeeper Cammie came to his house to do her weekly cleaning. No one answered her ring, so she got worried and called the police on her cell phone. They arrived 20 minutes later and bust down the front door and Amherst’s bedroom door.
    Lt. Horton found Amherst dead in his bed. There were claw marks on his throat and a look of abject terror on his face. Since the bedroom door and window had both been bolted from the inside, Horton concluded that Amherst must have committed suicide, though he couldn’t figure out how he could have clawed himself to death. To compound the mystery, no suicide note was found, either.
    What puzzled the detective most of all was the wet blood he saw on the gargoyle’s talons in the painting that hung on the wall.

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