This week’s prompt was: Write a story inspired by this painting.

Daemon ex Parietem Pictum

Paul stumbled down the rickety wooden stairs to the kitchen and nearly fell through the painting he was carrying.  His mother, serving eggs and buttered bread to Paul’s father at the scarred and time-darkened table, harangued him as he braced his back against the stairwell wall and an elbow on a step.  The air of the cramped room at the back of their laundry business had been the scene of many such tender maternal moments during Paul’s twenty short years.  Through her bluster and seeming indifference to his every pain and frequent disappointments was a care that manifested itself physically.  Paul knew she would deliberately forget how many eggs she was poaching and he would receive an extra, as well as a little brandy in his coffee.  All for a stumble.  Hidden behind his enormous painting, he smiled, despite the trouble he was having regaining his feet and her reluctance to assist him.

“What are you doing, you silly boy?” she asked in her thick Gascon accent, lumbering her wide body between the table and the painting.

Paul carefully swung his painting around and set it on a chair against the grease-stained wall.  The ceiling was only just high enough for the painting to stand upright on the chair.  Paul held out his hands to either side, hesitantly stepping away.

“It is my latest painting, mama,” he said quietly.

“Move, woman!” his father said, trying in vain with his stick-like arm to budge his wife, leaning over the table to push her enormous hip.  With a mouth mechanically puffing air around scolding egg, he said, “I can’t see!”

“I’ll bring a candle,” she said and moved toward the cupboard.

“No!” Paul cried, throwing himself in front of his painting.  “No, no, it is still a bit tacky in places, mama; I don’t want the smoke to darken the colors.  There is enough light from the doorway, isn’t there, papa?”

“There would be if she’d move,” papa grumbled before stuffing a huge hunk of bread into his mouth.  “And don’t waste candles, woman!”

“What’s that?” mama said, stepping close enough to point, which put her in front of the kitchen door and plunged the room into near darkness.

“Move!” papa roared.  Paul laughed at their perpetual bickering.

“There now, you,” she said, “stop laughing at your mama.  What is that?  A cat?”

Paul looked where she pointed and his laughter trickled to nothing.  There, between the two men in the cart, was a figure he did not remembered painting.  In the faint light, he squinted to determine if it was merely a shadow.  He found it was not.  He cast his thoughts back over the month it took him to finish the painting at Monsieur Croque’s request; he stroked his chin and, looking into the darkness below the chair upon which the painting stood, he remembered the late nights with an expensive electric torch borrowed from Pierre, collapsing on his bed fully clothed, awakening before dawn with a prayer on his lips that this time, this painting would please the Academy and his poverty and obscurity would in that instant be banished forever; a prayer so fervent it bordered on blasphemy.

“It’s too big to be a cat,” papa declared, refilling his wine glass; he drank nothing except claret, not even water.

“Well, it’s not a panther,” mama said suspiciously.  “Panthers are black.  I saw one once in a zoo.  Or are you being silly with colors again?  Like that hooligan Monet!”

“Mama!” Paul cried, springing to the door and looking outside.  “Please, please you must never say such things.  My god, what if someone heard you?”

“A panther?” his father laughed.  “You think this nice bourgeois family goes for a ride in the park and brings their pet panther?  Have a glass of wine, you crazy woman.”

“Then what do you think it is, oh patron of the arts?” she demanded, hands on hips, nearly filling the room.

“I don’t know,” papa conceded, still tickled by his wife’s guess.  “Ask our young artist here.  Is it a leper?  A leper in a linen shroud?”

“Ha!” mama shouted in triumph, raising a fist to the ceiling.  “Panthers you say are ridiculous on family outings but lepers!  Lepers everyone is bringing to the park.  Fool!”

“Hush!” papa demanded.

“Fool!”

“Silence!”

Paul shaken from his cataloging of the last month in his mind by his parental squabbling gave up on his memory and took up his future.  As the argument behind him adopted the usual tone of two people who have surrendered love, passion, even lust, for the surety of perpetual—if playful—battle, Paul found the brown paper and string he needed in a cupboard and wrapped his painting for its trip to the Academy.

“Hey there, boy,” mama said as he was pulling on his coat.  “If it is still tacky, why do you bring it to Monsieur Croque?”

“Because I must, mama,” Paul said, knowing it would be difficult to make himself understood to her.

“Why must you?” she pressed.

“Because he asked,” Paul said.  Seeing she would continue this game and not step out of the way until he satisfied her, he added, “because he chose my last painting from this year’s submissions and promised to show my next three.  I must strike while the iron is hot.  I must bring him paintings quickly or he will forget his promise.  This is very important, mama.  Simply saying, ‘I have shown paintings at the Academy’ and ‘Monsieur Croque has requested my work’ will open doors for me.  People will buy my paintings on his word alone!”

“Oh, such a big man is this Croque,” she said, making a face like a bad smell.  “Well, kiss your mama then and be off.”

Paul did and then struggled to get the painting and himself through the kitchen door at the same time.  As he walked the dozens of blocks to the Academy, he wondered again when and why did he paint the strange figure lurking in the middle of the canvas.  He wished he had the time to paint it out, cover it with another child or rebuild the older brother’s trousers and shirt.  The reason he did not have the time, however, asserted itself and his thoughts soon soared among the heady heights of success.  It would not take long, he assured himself.  A few words to the right people and his work would be requested, payments would be made.  And then, he told himself as his breath caught in his chest and his eyes reddened, then I will take them away from that miserable hovel and they shall live in a nice house, tending their garden instead of other people’s laundry.

The Academy was housed in a building classical with its columns and pediment, opulent with its dome, and overwhelming with its many-windowed wings flying out to either side as if to say to artists such as Paul, “We are always watching.”  The steps to the entrance sounded as unyielding as they felt under his thin shoes.  But for all his shortcomings—seen all to easily by those he passed in his disheveled appearance, his shabby clothes, in the eyes sunken by little food and less sleep—his heart pounded within his slight chest with excitement and pride.  He was carrying his painting to the Academy.

He paused on the threshold in the sudden grip of memory, of all he had had to endure to come this close to his dream.  He remembered the toilsome days, fantasizing as he washed, and the hellish nights where his tired limbs shook too much for him to make manifest the images in his mind.  The rare days of leisure, came back to him, walking among the great works of art amid the swelling gallery crowds, hearing storied names and being pressed back from their paintings with the ultimate disrespect of indifference.  He had never risen to their notice before and the capriciousness of their choices had burned through countless nights.  His eyes clouded away the granite portal he had long hoped to pass as he remembered nights of rage so uncontrollable, so overwhelming he had ran from his room and out into the darkness to find an anonymous if not deserted region in which to scream his frustrations at the moon.  The poorly concealed laughter of a well-dressed passerby shocked Paul back into the present.  Such nights are behind you, he told himself, no such rage twists my heart now.  He entered the Academy sanguine.

Monsieur Croque awaited him in a room to the left of the entrance, hung to overflowing with the grand works of the day, surrounding a marble pedestal upon which would rest that year’s awards, later in the season.  He was a large man, well-fed, the roundness of his shoulders bespeaking a solidity that the roundness of his belly belied.  His mustachios curled luxuriously, thick and waxed, on his florid face.  Eyes, black and penetrating, like the portholes of the new dreadnought battleships heralded in the papers, scanned his surroundings and—tiny amid his swollen features—missed nothing.

“Hmm, Pétrin,” he said, sticking his thumbs into the arm holes of his vest.  Monsieur Croque could not be bothered to Monsieur anyone of Paul’s status.  He would become Monsieur Pétrin when the critics lauded his work, but not before.

“Monsieur,” Paul said in his most respectful tone.  “I have the honor of bringing my next painting to you, as you condescended to request.”

“Did I?” Croque said, looking unmoved at the cowering artists before him.  Paul felt his muscles begin to shake, feeling it was impossible that Croque could have forgotten, and fearing his fear would soon vibrate his painting to pieces.  “Well, if you’ve brought it all this way, I suppose I should look at it.”

He stomped over to an easel positioned before a blank space on the wall.  Paul turned and nearly collapsed: the space exactly conformed to the dimensions of his painting, which he had informed Monsieur Croque of when his painting was requested.  Impatiently snapping fingers brought Paul’s limbs to life far more efficiently than his own will and in a moment, the painting was on the easel and the torn paper lie in ribbons across the floor.

“Hmm, Rousseau lover, eh?” Croque mumbled and dug Paul in the ribs with his elbow.  “What is that?” he then asked, pointing at what Paul’s mother thought was a cat and his father thought a leper.

If Paul’s hair had slithered to the floor with the torrent of moisture he suddenly felt burrowing rivulets into his collar, he would not have been surprised.  Again, the mysterious figure.

“You, you ask me to explain my art, Monsieur?” Paul asked, trying to buy time.

“Certainly I do,” Croque said.  “Well?”

“I, that is,” Paul began but could only stand trembling in lip and limb: he did not know what!  Where did it come from?  I don’t remember ever painting it.  I don’t know.  I don’t know!

“Well?” Croque pressed, clearly seeing the young artist’s perspiration and restraining a laugh.  “Come now, out with it.”

“I, I,” Paul tried to begin.  “I will not explain my art, Monsieur!”

It was a pose he had heard many an outraged amateur—and not a few haughty masters—adopt when faced with unflattering criticism.  That he should say such a thing was ludicrous, he knew, and could ruin everything, but what else could he say?  Monsieur Croque laughed at last, once Paul’s knees began to visibly wobble.  He landed a tremendous blow on the young man’s back and then took him around the shoulders.

“Oh, you won’t, won’t you?” Croque said.  “I think you will!  You are no Monet.  No Cézanne.  Not yet, Paul, not yet.  What is that there, then?  Hmm?  Look at that child!  What are you doing there?  Why, its proportions are not those of a child at all; merely a shrunken human.  They used to paint children that way before the Renaissance, in early Christian paintings.  Is that the idea?”

“Yes, yes Monsieur,” Paul stuttered.  “It is, exactly.  It has meaning.”

“And you persist in not condescending to explain, eh?” Croque said before exploding with laughter again.  “Fine, fine, my tender young man.  You may remain silent on the subject.  Or object, as it were.  Your thoughts are irrelevant, as it happens.  Whatever you think your work means, whatever you hoped to communicate to the public, to the critics—to me!—we will make up our own minds about it.  And you may be certain that what we say is what history will record.  Haha!  Do not frown.  It is for the best.  With every fervent painter, sculptor—my god, even writer—things appear in their work that they did not intend.  And often, my little man, those things are the best!  Yes, the best for they come from the soul.  They spring from some inner source and imprint themselves on the work without the corrupting influence of the artist’s intent.  Damn intention!

“Yes, yes,” Croque said and released Paul’s shoulder.  Paul stepped back, lightheaded at the sudden removal of physical support.  Croque moved closer to the painting and peered at the mysterious figure.  “I am beginning to see it.  Intriguing, if nothing else.  Well, what are you doing standing around there?”

After so much encouragement, Monsieur Croque needed time among his paintings and an hour or more to consider his lunch.  He sent Paul away and said he would advance a small sum to him so he could buy suitable garments for the next showing.  Paul was alternately elated and tormented by the interview as he walked home.

The next day, Monsieur Chœur ascended the very same steps up which Paul had struggled and down which Paul had floated.  Monsieur Chœur was a critic of no small influence and, not coincidentally, a good friend of Monsieur Croque.  Slim as an Englishmen, as strict in his appearance as a German, Chœur moved like a dancer as he weaved among a crowded sidewalk, always peopled with those who insisted on walking slower than he.  At a showing, he crept up on paintings, moved his head like an owl, and scribbled notes to himself in a notebook not much larger than a thumbnail.  His intimacy with artists and patrons, however, made up for his unaccountable speed in everything (most unforgivably, in eating) and he attended the most select salons in Paris.

Directed by a valet, Chœur found Croque in a state in which he had never seen him.  One side of the enormous man’s shirt was untucked, the hair which encircled his balding head stuck out in several directions as if straining to alight from the madman to which they were attached, and his mustachios had uncurled and forked for lack of wax.  But his dress was, for all its eccentricity, less disturbing than Croque’s demeanor.  Pacing occasionally in wild steps and then pausing before a painting that Chœur had never before seen, Croque gnawed at his thumb, growling with exasperation one minute and sighing in a mode Chœur could scarcely bring himself to describe.  It might have been fright.

“Croque, you devil,” Chœur said after a minute or two of watching his friend.  “What on earth are you doing?”

Croque barely acknowledged his friend’s appearance.

“Is this, what?” Chœur tried again.  “A new Rousseau you’ve found or an imitator?”

“An imitator,” Croque mumbled, trying to tear his eyes from the canvas but succeeding only for a moment.

“I see,” Chœur said, examining the painting.  “Well, he is not without talent.  Quite nice, really.”

Croque gnawed all the more savagely at his thumb and suddenly he bled.  “Damn,” he murmured, sucking the blood from his hand.

“My god,” Chœur said.  “What is the matter?”

“You see!” Croque roared, waving his unwounded hand at the painting.  “You see for yourself what is the matter.  What is wrong.  Terribly wrong,” he finished in a whisper.

“Not with the painting,” Chœur said.  “With you?”

“Nothing is wrong with me,” Croque said absently.  Chœur followed his eyes back to the canvas.  Croque stepped closer, stooping to bring his eyes to the level of the mysterious figures’.  Turning suddenly, with an anxious glance at the room’s doorway, he asked, “What do you think it is?”

Taken aback by the question as much as the manner in which it was delivered, Chœur peered at the small central figure, squatting, it appeared to him, in the lap of the young man.  “I don’t know,” he said slowly.  “Croque, you begin to alarm me.  Tell me: have you been here all night?”

“All night, all night,” Croque repeated and stepped back from the painting with a sigh.  “No.  If only all night, then perhaps I would know.  I tried to go to dinner but had to excuse myself and return; I tried to read in my library, and had to return; I tried to sleep but again I returned.  Again and again.  It won’t leave me be; it is in my thoughts.  What is it?  What is it, Chœur!”

Chœur heard the question demanded of him after his eyes had reverted to the figure of their own accord.  Was it man shaped?  What covered its body?  Fur?  Scales?  “I do not know,” Chœur said quietly.

“Neither do I,” Croque concurred.

“Its place in the painting, though,” Chœur began but stopped and pulled pensively at his lip.

“Yes, yes?” Croque asked.

“It is central, important,” Chœur said.  “The eye is invariably drawn to it and yet it hides there, lurking between the men in the foreground, master of the man in the background.  It hides in its color.  It gives one the feeling of pushing through a canopy in the woods, or past flowers in one’s garden, and coming face to face with the eyes of some predatory thing.  This painting bothers me, Croque.  It is menacing.”

“Menacing,” Croque repeated.  “Yes, menacing.  I dare not turn my back on it.  Even as I left the room last night and this morning—only to return again, by god’s blood—I never turned my back upon it.”

“Yes,” Chœur mumbled as he backed away from the painting.  “I think you are wise not to, my friend.”

“But where are you going?” Croque asked him when Chœur reached the doorway.

“I am going for a walk and a brandy,” Chœur said.  “And if you are truly wise, my friend, you will do the same.”

Monsieur Croque was not truly wise.

Paul awoke with a start, his heart pounding so violently that his vision shook with each pulse beat.  Someone hammered on the kitchen door.  Down the stairs with waking nightmares of police after the wrong man, burglars armed with knives, and assassins bent on the pleasure of murder, Paul crept to the besmeared kitchen window and peeked between the grimy curtains.  He started back, amazed, and crossed himself before wrestling open the latches and throwing open the door.

“Monsieur Croque,” he said.

The haggard man, mole’s eyes protruding red and round from his now pale face, pushed into the small kitchen, trembling hands firmly grasping Paul’s shoulders.

“What, what is the creature?” he shouted.  “Explain yourself!”

“What are you talking about?” Paul cried though he knew, he knew at the first sight of Monsieur Croque what had brought the great man from his house in the dark hours of the morning, dressed as if fleeing the razing of a city.

“The creature,” Croque growled.  “What is it?”

Paul pulled against the hands that held him but to no avail.  His interrogator, many times his size and his master in strength despite his days without rest and little food, was as implacable as a dam, as ferocious as a storm.  “I don’t know,” Paul breathed and then expected a blow.

Croque shook him by the shoulders and drove him against a post that upheld the ceiling.  “You don’t know?  Answer me,” he demanded.  “Answer me: what is it?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Paul wailed.

“You do,” Croque spat.  He hunched so he could pin Paul with his gaze.  “I can see it in your eyes—and remember it from when you brought that accursed painting to me.  Then I thought it was fear of me, of what I could do or withhold from you.  No!  It was fear of it.  Of the creature in the painting.”  Paul said nothing.  “You refuse to tell me?”

“I cannot tell you, Monsieur,” Paul said, “because I do not know.”

“It is as I said,” said Croque, turning swiftly away and pacing to the doorway.  Pointing a long and unsteady arm at Paul, he continued: “I told you that day.  I told you, things appear in an artist’s work that are straight from his soul.  Well, this has come from your soul, fiend!  Some evil was lurking within you and now you have imprinted it on the canvas.  You have loosed it upon the world!”

“No, no,” Paul mouthed though no sound accompanied the motion.

“Oh yes it is so,” Croque said, lowering his head and biting his bloody thumb again.  “It must be destroyed.  Burned.”

“No!” Paul shouted and flung himself at Croque.

Croque intercepted the frail young artist with his fists and beat him back and then to the ground.  As they struggled, Paul screamed that Croque must not harm the painting and Croque cried back that evil must be purged and purged with fire.  Exhausted by his ineffectual assault, Paul lie bleeding on the floor of his kitchen, looking through the door at Croque’s feet as the enormous and weary man hurried away up the avenue.  Tears sprang from Paul’s eyes and his mind tried to grasp the reason for his reaction but no thought could eclipse the overwhelming urge to protect the painting, to protect the creature.  Pushing himself first to his knees and then to his feet, Paul staggered outside and ran as well as his wounded legs would allow him.

Stumbling down the road, Paul came under the falling illumination of a streetlamp and out of the darkness beyond its glow a voice called to him.

“What has happened to you, young man?” a frightened voice asked.  A moment later a tall, thin man slid into the light.

“Have you seen a large man pass?” Paul asked between gasps.  “Disheveled.  Bleeding.”

“My god,” the man breathed.  “Croque has just passed and you follow.  You are the painter.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Monsieur Chœur,” the man answered.  “I have seen your work and know that Croque goes now to burn it.”

“No, he mustn’t,” Paul shouted and then heaved forward into the street.

Chœur followed and said, “It is for the best.  It must be destroyed.”

“No, no,” Paul almost wept.  “He must not hurt him.”

“Him, him?” Chœur said, seizing Paul by the shoulder and spinning him around.  “What do you mean calling the painting ‘him’?”

Paul tried to meet the man’s gaze but could not.  He wrenched himself free and ran on.

“Him, him?” Chœur repeated.  “You go to try to save the creature.  The demon.  Why?  Why?  Leave your madness behind and do not interfere.”  Paul pulled free, crying out, but Chœur seized him again.  “Please, please, it is evil.  You must, wait—wait!  Do as I beg, do not interfere, and I will praise all your works.  I am a great critic; if I tell the world you are a genius, none will dare oppose me.  I will make you the next Cézanne if only you do not stop Croque from burning the painting.”

Paul could not hear him over the sound of his own labored breathing as he strained and pulled free.  The continuous thought that pounded in his mind with every strike of his pounding feet was: he must not hurt him.

At the Academy, Paul flew through the open outer door and then into the first room to the left.  A flicker as of fire had driven him to nearly inhuman efforts to gain the room before it was too late.  Once inside, he saw that it was not his painting that was alight, but a thin fabric that had been placed on the marble pedestal as an adornment.  A few feet away, between the pedestal and Paul’s painting, lie the body of Monsieur Croque.

Paul crept closer and in the wavering orange light he saw that the man of power and decision was torn to shreds.  His throat had been slashed, the skin of his face and chest torn in long bloody tatters.  Though his body begged for air, Paul’s breath froze in his lungs.  Gulping to no effect, he inched closer to the painting and saw that the mysterious figure, the demon, now smiled and showed fangs dripping with blood.

“No!” Paul screamed and tumbled backward, tripping on the prone remains of Croque and falling next to the flaming pedestal.  Now believing the words of the great critic, Paul searched his pockets for something with which to pick up the flaming fabric and fling it against the painting.  Though he inexplicably felt he would burst into flames and die along with his work, he would destroy it if he could.  In his back pocket, he found a paint brush.  With it, he picked up the almost expended fabric and twirled it around into a torch.  He then turned and walked unsteadily to his painting—and saw it had changed again.  The demon now hunched forward, its back undulating with bunched muscles, its eyes glowing with unhurried anticipation of immediate action, as if it would, at any moment, leave the painting in a leap.

 I hope you enjoyed reading this short story.  I also have a few novels published through Amazon’s Kindle Store, the newest being The Parnell Affair.  Thematically, not very similar to the above but hopefully a good read, too; it’s a political thriller about a betrayed spy, a relentless journalist, and the hidden truth behind a President’s demand for war.  Don’t have a Kindle?  No problem: Amazon provides free apps to view all of the great—and inexpensive—Kindle content on your phone, PC, or Mac, here.  Thanks and happy reading!