Pickman's model
methods of the artist. Scenes were blocked out with extreme care, and
penciled guide lines told of the minute exactitude which Pickman used
in getting the right perspective and proportions. The man was great--I
say it even now, knowing as much as I do. A large camera on a table
excited my notice, and Pickman told me that he used it in taking scenes
for backgrounds, so that he might paint them from photographs in the
studio instead of carting his outfit around the town for this or that
view. He thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene or model
for sustained work, and declared he employed them regularly.
There was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and
half-finished monstrosities that leered around from every side of the
room, and when Pickman suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on the side away
from the light I could not for my life keep back a loud scream--the
second I had emitted that night. It echoed and echoed through the dim
vaultings of that ancient and nitrous cellar, and I had to choke back a
flood of reaction that threatened to burst out as hysterical laughter.
Merciful Creator! Eliot, but I don't know how much was real and how
much was feverish fancy. It doesn't seem to me that earth can hold a
dream like that!
It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it
held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as
a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch,
and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present
prey and seek a juicier morsel. But, damn it all, it wasn't even the
fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain-head of all
panic--not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot
eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn't the scaly claws nor the
mold-caked body nor the half-hooved feet--none of these, though any one
of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.
It was the technique, Eliot--the cursed, the impious, the unnatural
technique! As I am a living being, I never elsewhere saw the actual
breath of life so fused into a canvas. The monster was there--it glared
and gnawed and gnawed and glared--and I knew that only a suspension of
nature's laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a
model--without some glimpse of the nether world which no mortal unsold
to the Fiend has ever had.
Pinned with a thumb-tack to a vacant part of the canvas was a piece of
paper now badly curled up--probably, I thought, a photograph from which
Pickman meant to paint a background as hideous as the nightmare it was
to enhance. I reached out to uncurl and look at it, when suddenly
I saw Pickman start as if shot. He had been listening with peculiar
intensity ever since my shocked scream had waked unaccustomed echoes in
the dark cellar, and now he seemed struck with a fright which, though
not comparable to my own, had in it more of the physical than of the
spiritual. He drew a revolver and motioned me to silence, then stepped
out into the main cellar and closed the door behind him.
I think I was paralyzed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's listening,
I fancied I heard a faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of
squeals or bleats in a direction I couldn't determine. I thought of
huge rats and shuddered. Then there came a subdued sort of clatter
which somehow set me all in gooseflesh--a furtive, groping kind of
clatter, though I can't attempt to convey what I mean in words. It was
like heavy wood falling on stone or brick--wood on brick--what did that
make me think of?
It came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had
fallen farther than it had fallen before. After that followed a sharp
grating noise, a shouted gibberish from Pickman, and the deafening
discharge of all six chambers of a revolver, fired spectacularly as
a lion-tamer might fire in the air for effect. A muffled squeal or
squawk, and a thud. Then more wood and brick grating, a pause, and the
opening of the door--at which I'll confess I started violently. Pickman
reappeared with his smoking weapon, cursing the bloated rats that
infested the ancient well.
"The deuce knows what they eat, Thurber," he grinned, "for those
archaic tunnels touched graveyard and witch-den and seacoast. But
whatever it is, they must have run short, for they were devilish
anxious to get out. Your yelling stirred them up, I fancy. Better be
cautious in these old places--our rodent friends are the one drawback,
though I sometimes think they're a positive asset by way of atmosphere
and color."
* * * * *
Well, Eliot, that was the end of the night's adventure. Pickman had
promised to show me the place, and heaven knows he had done it. He led
me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for
when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with
monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter
Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just
where we hit it. We were too late for the elevated, and walked back
downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that walk. We switched from
Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I
turned off. I never spoke to him again.
Why did I drop him? Don't be impatient. Wait till I ring for coffee.
We've had enough of the other stuff, but I for one need something.
No--it wasn't the paintings I saw in that place; though I'll swear they
were enough to get him ostracized in nine-tenths of the homes and clubs
of Boston, and I guess you won't wonder now why I have to steer clear
of subways and cellars. It was--something I found in my coat the next
morning. You know, the curled-up paper tacked to that frightful canvas
in the cellar; the thing I thought was a photograph of some scene he
meant to use as a background for that monster. That last scare had come
while I was reaching to uncurl it, and it seems I had vacantly crumpled
it into my pocket. But here's the coffee--take it black, Eliot, if
you're wise.
Yes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton
Pickman, the greatest artist I have ever known--and the foulest being
that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness.
Eliot--old Reid was right. He wasn't strictly human. Either he was born
in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate.
It's all the same now, for he's gone--back into the fabulous darkness
he loved to haunt. Here, let's have the chandelier going.
Don't ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don't
ask me, either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman
was so keen to pass off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which
might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells
even stranger things. You know how damned lifelike Pickman's paintings
were--how we all wondered where he got those faces.
Well--that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What
it showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful
canvas. It was the model he was using--and its background was merely
the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, _it
was a photograph from life_.