BY DR. AGONSON
The old and withered form, reproduced there upon the thin canvas with drooping blotches of oil, stared out at me from some horrid past I knew not. The portrait, the subject, held little interest for me. Whether the decrepit figure was wholly real or imagined (there was a legend which said that a ghost had sat for it), I only knew one thing for sure—I had seen that room before.
The setting, the background, was what shocked me. It was not that the artist hadn’t, with great skill, painted a horribly frightful image, but the image was a fantasy, one man’s perception of the thing which frightened him. A calm mind would see the truth behind it, an impartial science would find its reality. The room, though, I knew that was a real place; it was somewhere I had been, and that made me shiver.
Where had I seen this room before? The question haunted me. It felt so familiar, the position of the window, the moldings upon the walls, and something else, something unnamable; it was just a feeling, really, like nostalgia, like this was once my own room, a place I knew so well that I had never needed to look at it.
And had this specter been there when I was a child?
A child? I stopped. The question seemed to reveal the answer. I had known this place as a child. I tried to think back to that time. Can anyone really imagine his own room from that age? It seemed so blurry.
“Can one find beauty outside oneself?” someone observed.
I turned upon a mustache, big and brown. The man belonging to it was of a similarly substantial size. He had great, rosy cheeks and was grinning from ear to ear.
He continued.
“That which is wholly strange is never beautiful.” He sighed. His eyes were pinned upon the portrait. “Yet what is stranger, I ask, to a man than himself?”
He laughed and walked away without further word. I glared at him. Who was this man to laugh at me? And to talk such silly rot! I turned back to the painting, back to the mystery of the room. Yet, as I studied the background, my eyes kept passing, again and again, that fantastic visage, and with each pass, it seemed, my eyes stayed there a little longer. There was a dreadful pull, I felt; something seemed to be drawing my attention to the horrific subject…
I awoke to myself. I had been staring at the ghostly face. Blinking, I tried to renew my study of the background. There, in the corner, what was that sticking out? A bedpost?
“A rather interesting piece,” a wheezing voice said.
I must have jumped a little, but the wiry curator went on without missing a beat.
“It was his last painting before he died…” the man went on to tell the group of gawkers he led what everyone had been telling me all week. Some obtuse fairy tale, a sensationalized account, no doubt, of the very ordinary decline of a great artist. He finished the story and said, “Mr. Steward will be missed.”
“Steward?” I asked aloud.
The curator turned pale. His eyes seemed to bulge behind his thick glasses as he stared at me.
“Yes sir,” he said, nearly whispering.
I had been studying the picture for hours. I stared at the canvas.
“There’s no signature?”
“Yes sir. He died before it was finished, sir.”
“Steward,” I breathed as the curator quickly led his flock on. A member of my own family?
I could recall no relations of mine which had stooped to produce such fantastic mirages. It had always been our family’s tradition: reality, science, knowledge. What hidden cousin of mine could have dishonored the family name by this outrageous fairytale?
In truth, I had not come to see this painting. I was told that my own portrait was making something of a splash. I had come to this exhibit to see myself and to be the object of awe. It was a little frustrating that, by the time I had got here, my face must have been overshadowed by this mystical façade.
A pity, really, and not just on my own personal account. It was a pity that I had missed the complement of seeing my own beauty admired, a pity that, instead of something as grand as myself, the people were now fascinated by this specter, and the greatest pity, no doubt, that the artist had squandered his remarkable talent.
The background was so true. It felt more like looking into a room than looking at a picture of one. That such ability would be spent on something like a ghost, a lie, when it might have been turned to the production of diagrams. Good money and reputation could be made by illustrating scientific texts. There was always a need in that quarter. But all the artist’s skill had been poured into this utter travesty, this waste.
The prodigious mustache was steering its large, bipedal, paradox-spouting mount toward me again. I heard the heavy footfalls and saw it barreling my way.
“Pardon me,” the man said as he brought the hairy lip near. “They told me you are dead.”
I felt flush with either anger or embarrassment. Why did they let fools wander about in museums?
The man continued.
“I’m told that vampires, at least, don’t have reflections.” Vampires! What was this idiot talking about? “Maybe you don’t either. I’m sorry. I would have let you your little moment of pride in peace had I known. I myself have enjoyed my image in the mirror at times, it is a large image, but I would not have teased you so had I known that you’d no recourse to admire yourself privately.”
He gazed at the painting and back at me.
“It’s a very good likeness,” he said bowing.
He left me in peace then to parse the mystery of this familiar room.
Tale Told 