Death's Portrait
by Hansen Adcock
Content Warning: Death, Terminal Illness
A creeping shadow gazed out of the frame at its maker, a miasma of subtle fear, dark pain incarnate. The eyes were burning brands, searching the body’s essence from end to existential end.
The entity who commissioned the painting was on its way. This was George’s third attempt. He hoped for mercy this time.
One resonant knock on the black-painted front door, almost as if by accident. George remained where he was and the thing-that-was-but-could-not-be swirled into the room. It wiped vestigial feet on the black-dyed doormat and came to rest between the painting and the painter.
“Hmm,” said Death. “A tolerable likeness. I accept.”
George uttered silence. He stared rigidly ahead, red-eyed, filthy, sore with guilt and grief.
“You are well again,” Death spoke, “in return for what you have done for me. The people in this town speak the truth. You are a gifted artist.”
“My wife.” The voice of the artist couldn't move the lump in his throat. “What did you do with my wife?”
Death seemed deaf.
“Where is she? Where’s Andrea? What have you done with her?”
The tower of twisting evil moved towards the door, past the black-painted furniture, past the blackened curtains. Even the ceiling was now black. It felt quite at home.
“I can see from the interior of your abode that you know full well. Her years have become yours alongside your own.”
“That wasn’t the bargain we made!” George stormed upright and cracked hoarsely. “The portrait for my life! That was all!”
The towering column of deeper night stood still. The artist expected to be swallowed and half-welcomed it, but Death keeps its word, even if it has its own morals.
“If I did that, and took no life, there would be an imbalance. I had to use extra time from another being. The closest being to you was more than willing to accept. The woman understood my terms.”
George could give no argument for that. He knew Andrea far too well. Of course she would sacrifice her life for him. He’d do the same for her.
“This is a con.”
Death placed its hand on the doorknob.
George noticed the painting remaining in its place of origin.
“Aren’t you going to take it? Aren’t you going to remove the revolting thing from my sight?”
Death paused, rotating soft upon the threshold.
“You and I both know that is not how I work.”
Then the apparition was gone.
🝊
Terror ended and madness began. It crept in through the silence and fulfilled itself in George’s dreams, until waking hours merged fitfully with the small hours of morning, when dreams and reality exist in symbiosis.
He opened his eyes. He lay in the bed he shared with Andrea, unable to stir. The old pain and sickness ate away at his insides, pooling in acid fire in the insides of his elbows, his knees, behind his eyelids. He hardly cared.
Someone began washing his face.
“Andrea?” His voice, unrecognizable.
“It was a bad dream. You’re safe.”
“Andrea. Am I dying?”
He opened his eyes. It all rocketed back to him: she wasn’t there any more.
He’d stolen her life.
At daybreak, he seized the picture of Death, removed the frame, and braced himself to tear the canvas in two.
It wouldn’t rip.
After lunch, he bought a hacksaw from the hardware shop on the next street and sawed and sawed at the countenance glaring out of the abomination he’d created until he was a storm of feverish movement and sweat, until he felt like an automaton.
He gave in to exhaustion as the sun migrated further west and surveyed his handiwork.
The portrait squatted unharmed, the saw blunted, his hands raw and bleeding. He kicked the saw into a corner in disgust.
“There must be a logical way out of this. Think.”
He huddled at the window, watching the day’s end. He remembered the days months after the onset of his disease, when too much movement pained him and he slept half-days and nights. He remembered the doctor’s verdict, though it felt more like a sentence. He remembered the arguments and the tears and the kindness. Andrea never left him even when he hated the world and everything in it.
George remembered the first time they saw Death.
It was a horrible shock for both of them, though he'd been pushing for it, though he'd warned her.
Life is never even.
He’d strewn salt and sand, acquired books with great difficulty, spent endless hours with them in dusty consultation. The signs he’d had to draw on the door in ash mixed with his own blood. The words he had to repeat until his tongue was lead.
The first tendrils of Death slithered in one Tuesday morning. Death had heard rumors that his next client was a renowned artist. They made a bargain: George would have three chances to paint Death’s likeness—which was nigh on impossible—and if he succeeded, Death would spare his life.
Even George could see the first attempt was atrocious. “No better than a child’s drawing,” he said aloud scornfully, and when Death looked at it, the painting withered, rotted, and peeled away in strips, like wallpaper from damp bricks.
🝊
Her breath in his ear.
George turned his back to the sunset and faced the room.
Nobody there.
🝊
Andrea stood with her back to him, in front of his easel. He could see her and his heart overflowed.
“Andrea! What are you doing?”
She carried on, oblivious, painting something. Then he realized, ice thrilling his veins, that it was the portrait of Death.
It took an effort to move. He walked past the mirror and there was no reflection. He came to an uneasy rest behind her. She didn’t turn around.
Breathing in the scent he missed, he reached out to touch her hair and failed. His fingers slipped right through... because he had no fingers. He was a patch of floating nothingness.
Death billowed in, a smoky cloud, and regarded her work. George could see the figure of a man in the spiraling storm of silence—a man in a dark grey suit, a pallid man who turned, his cold eyes stabbing through him—
George opened his eyes and wept. The moon burned into the room, as the knowledge burned into his brain: she was the one who had died and not him.
In the silver light, he stood in front of the portrait of his enemy and attacked it with a large sable brush and an entire tube of titanium white.
The following morning, Death glared from its canvas, unchanged. It was as if it shrugged off the layer of extra paint like a shroud. The picture seemed to gloat.
Trembling now, scared, George crept into the tiny bathroom and washed his hands. Again. And again. And again.
He remembered the circumstances surrounding his second attempt. Andrea was still present. They had a cruel argument. She didn’t want him to let Death in anymore. He wouldn’t listen. The painting was better, though still not accurate; he reasoned with her that if only he could persuade Death to stand still, he’d at least have a model to work from instead of a petrified memory. She stormed out.
Death stormed in, rotted the canvas as before, and turned to exit.
“Wait. Stand there for a few minutes.”
George's heart hammered in his mouth, expecting to be stilled for disrespect, but a blow wasn’t forthcoming.
“I can’t stay long,” Death replied, a gentle tornado of gloom in the center of the carpet. “I must not be late for my next appointment.”
🝊
Her face in the mirror above the sink.
He muffled a gasp. Turned.
Gone.
🝊
Convinced he was doomed to see another world where Andrea was forced to live without him as he was forced to live without her, George dared not sleep, but by week’s end, he couldn’t resist closing his eyes for a moment.
A palace at the edge of the world, where shadows met darkness. He seemed to be a fixture in a claustrophobic passage. Through a narrow doorway, two skeletal assistants were measuring his wife.
They were fitting her into a wedding dress.
Her face gazed back at him in the looking-glass but she said not a word. The assistants left.
George tried to cross the threshold. He couldn’t.
“You can’t be getting married,” he tried to say. “You’re married to me!”
No sound came from his mouth.
“Who is it?” he yelled and jerked awake, seated at his desk.
There was no point in asking the question. He knew who.
Death had cheated him twofold.
It didn’t need Andrea to keep a balance. It wanted Andrea for itself.
His blood thickened and boiled. He emptied the white spirits—usually for cleaning brushes—over Death’s portrait until it was sodden, struck a match, and flicked it at the canvas. Fire mushroomed around it but refused to touch the picture in the centre.
Dizzy, mist-minded, he watched the flames spread and claim everything he’d ever owned.
🝊
Her face blossomed out of the flames.
George’s head hit the floor with a nauseating thud.
She vanished.
🝊
“I need your help.”
“I know. You aren’t really going to live with—”
“I’ll have to. I don’t want to. It’s that portrait you did. It needs destroying. Then we’ll both be free.”
“I set light to it.”
“Well, that was silly.”
“Why?”
“You’ve burnt down the entire house. Our entire house. And you almost burned to death.”
“How come we're here?”
They were sitting opposite one another at a table outside a cafe they used to frequent on their honeymoon, in their early twenties. Customers and waiters passed around them as strange, vague blurs. No one disturbed them.
“This is the last time I can talk to you unless we do something. I’ve got to marry—him—tomorrow morning.”
“It is destroyed! The painting’s gone. I burned it.”
“No. You burned everything down around it.”
“If flames won’t touch it, and paint won’t stay on it, and I can’t break it into pieces, what can I do?”
“The only thing that can destroy Death’s portrait is himself.”
🝊
They stretched a plan between them, between their two worlds and hearts and minds.
George opened his eyes to the sounds of a heart monitor and knew what to do.
Outside the hospital window, darkness crept to the horizon. He discharged himself.
The structure where his house once stood—now a charred, smoking ruin—was as black on the outside as he’d painted it within. The portrait of Death stood untouched upon the singed easel, mocking him.
A fresh breeze caressed his face as he took the foul creation under one arm and began to walk in an anti-clockwise direction, chanting the mantra he learned so long ago, remaining watchful.
The ashes on the ground skirled and skirmished into a black column. George smiled to himself, recalling the pale man in the suit from his dreams, and when he judged the timing to be right, he threw the portrait into the amassing tendrils of malice.
Death’s head tore through its own portrait.
🝊
Breathe, beat. Move.
Fast.
🝊
“YOU!” Death roared with a thousand voices as George sped away, triumph and terror warring for supremacy in his heart. He could feel Andrea running with him. She was him, he was her–
A dead end—
A dark, threatening coil enveloping, pulling him back—
He hoped for mercy this time.
🝊
Death keeps its word. It has its own morals.
Sunlight streamed in through a café window.
A man and a woman sat, side by side, gazing at the view. No one disturbed them. They didn’t disturb anyone else.
“You’ve graduated,” the woman said, “why aren’t you happy?”
The man hesitated.
“I want to do something no one’s ever done before. Carve an angel, or paint Love. Or Death. I could paint Death, in the future. When I’m practiced.”
“Mmm,” the woman said. “Perhaps not.”
They grew silent, both half-remembering the other’s thoughts. In there somewhere, the memory of a chase.
“You’re right,” he said. “I doubt I’d get away with it, anyway.”
🜁🜄🜂🜃
Hansen Adcock (he/him) writes short fiction and longer works under the name Han or Hansen Adcock. He runs, edits, and illustrates Once Upon A Crocodile e-zine. His fantasy-horror novel “A Dark Heritage – The Nighthunter” is available on Amazon from Golden Storyline Books.