Devil in the Details

A short story, derived from "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

“If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that–for that–I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

Ah, there: The bargain signed. Into the portrait I slithered, filling every stained morsel until it burst with something other, not life, but death in wait. Waiting for the man standing across, his face yearning to turn and stare into my eyes, his eyes, of the harshest blue, to falter. To succumb to human desire. It might take ages. My day would come. The boy’s soul, loved so by the herbal man standing askance, gazing at his subject with longing, would be mine.

One day.

Passion filled the room. For the art, all around, but for the man, only in two: the painter and himself. The third stood aside, his own self stewing, what for I couldn’t tell, but focused it was not. I, too, became enraptured by the subject. Could it be the glisten of sunlight, streaming through the unsashed windows, brightening his fair head? Or those eyes, determined, tumultuous, a sea domineering a storm. I could smell, even with the chemicals surrounding me, the hormonal tension in the air. Lust abounded. Now these were creatures of my ilk: vainglorious, yes, but sensual, in the chaotic sense. It was not love, but carnal, of mere appearance and dominance of personality. The painter admired the subject because the latter was self assured, never having been knocked a peg. His story unfurled in every brushstroke of this home of mine. Both of theirs, in truth. Of privileged backgrounds, where the arts were duly pursued rather than sheer labor, and where one could pose for days on end with no care of wages lost, for more would be handed from greedy mitts.

Pompous, spoiled brats, the lot of them. No matter. Death stood betwixt the frame, in front of which they stood bickering, and my lure would befall the lot soon.

No sooner had they admired the painting than it was moved, into the lodging of the subject, where he spent much of the afternoon entranced with its view, the curtained visor in front thrown open. I caught his steeled gaze and held it in my own, raptured by how intense of a look came, but he spoke not a word. He only stared, before closing the sheer installed around my frame and departing, not bothering to glance in the portrait’s direction, not allowing me to see out. Red velvet blanketed my vision.

Then, one night soon after the transfer, I heard the frenetic footsteps of a man wracked with guilt. He muttered to himself, the subject, about some woman, someone he perhaps loved. Indifference lurked behind this facade of love. This gave me so much more: the man beneath was true, undeniably so, and the sparkled deity affront was merely that. Giddy, I wanted to give the subject something more, something to remember this night by. And so I shifted, these particles I inhabited, long since dried, contorting the beautiful face into something gaunt, sinister, smirking. No longer a portrait of the exterior man, but a picture of the interior: a snapshot from within, an artist’s interpretation still at hand.

When he drew back the shade obscuring my view, I readied myself for the abject terror on the subject’s face. It’s true he gasped when he saw the cruel grin in the oil, but behind those eyes was curiosity, not fear. Oh, he would tell his friends, those filthy gremlins, that he was scared, and perhaps he convinced himself of the same. I saw it differently. The gears began to wind, and while partially lubed and half inebriated, the thought of what this meant began to fester. It became clear to me that, in creating this image in his true likeness, I had established a link that was unforeseeable, save for the experience. It was a direct line to the truth of his vitality. A connection that the subject chose to test in the one way known to him: blunt force.

Yet this desire wavered when I felt a disturbance in the air, and realized the person he had been preoccupied with that evening had died by her own hand, a result of the pain over which the subject falsified grief. The news reached him at some point, for he drew back the curtains, hoping to see some reflection of his guilt in this face. No, it remained as he saw it the night before, for I saw no change within his soul, merely a delay. That, soon, was checked, and he began his debauchery posthaste.

For eighteen long years, I kept him alive, and I alone. Time has no relevance, under most circumstances, having been constructed by beings with souls. In this bargain, however, I seemed to have coopted the soul of the subject, for I absorbed every aching moment of his gross indulgence. The booze, to start, guzzled at alarming rates for most, running every bar in town dry; then the drugs, the opiates, for why feel minimal pain when none is an option? And the sex–men, women, animals, even. Whorish at best, dangerous at worst, yet none of it would reflect in his pale skin, that I ensured. Those flowing blue eyes and shimmering golden locks never strayed from the perfection I gazed upon initially, but through it all, the physical abuse the subject decided to test his body through, I could feel a quivering in his spirit. Yes, whatever this far-off connection we intimated was, it told me that his soul was uneasy, no longer capable of misleading the mind of its health.

Only once did he bring a visitor to behold our work, and it was the painting’s originator, whose painstaking work I so shamelessly coopted for myself. Alas, his fright at seeing his masterpiece in such a state greatly angered him. Why shouldn’t it? It was a mangled representation, in his eyes, of the beautiful man he loved and beheld. No one had the heart to tell him, while he still lived, that this was, indeed, the man he loved. This was truth.

The veil went up, then, for a while. The subject killed the man, I know, for I heard the hard thump of the body, the clatter of the knife, the departure of the soul.

It came to my attention at various points that I could end this, that I alone had the power to end this tirade. Yet I found myself restrained, needing more before I struck: Why, though, would I consciously choose to torture myself by remaining tied to such a vagrant? Even a creature of such benevolence as myself found it difficult, increasingly so. The answer lies no further than the man I came into this experiment with and the one that came out, the one whose reflection I crafted on this canvas, the one the subject himself began to look upon with abject horror and disbelief. Shriveled, gnarled skin, pale green from lack of sun and vitamins; hair as white as snow, even so young, missing in large clumps, as were his teeth, the ones remaining black stumps; and those eyes, once so misty, now a dense, polluted fog. It may have been the body that would have been damaged in such a way, had I not intervened, had I not waited to strike, but the soul never changed. This was a man born with privilege unimaginable, handed to him even from other highfalutin circles, to the chagrin of his wealthy co-conspirators. The beauty in his indulgence lay cast aside, dead at the beginning of these long eighteen years. What remained was gluttonous, bookended by the cold hand of Death, the father.

Punishment would come. A lifetime before I came, I watched him, awaiting the proper moment, and for a lifetime hence would I wait. The subject, though, needed to initiate it, as his vanity always forced him.

He stormed in one night, after his time away, drugs filling his veins to bursting, his breathing shallow and ragged. “Oh, Basil, Basil, sweet Basil,” the subject muttered to himself. “My dear friend! How could I? Oh, will your death haunt me wherever I go? And Sibyl! Will I be cursed to live a lonely life for the sake of avoidance? No, this is different–I am to blame. The knife is in my hand, no one else’s. Oh, I am sure of it: This murder will darken my once bright days!” His pacing ceased, and I could feel him, seething behind my veil. He drew it back. Behold, thy ghastly appearance, I wanted the painting to scream. I squirmed every fiber, letting the canvas come to life, to glow with unholy reverence. Let it grate against you, make every hair stand on end. Let your sins be laid bare, barer than the scarlet blade in your hand. “You…” the subject began. “I cannot imagine this being anyone’s fault but yours. Yes.” He took a step backwards, sizing up the frame, a twisted realization dawning. “Yes, it is not my own, but whatever curse this mockery has placed upon me, upon the lot of us! I will tear this canvas, piece by piece, and burn it, so nothing shall remain!”

He played his hand, and I played mine. He stabbed the portrait, but the knife didn’t pierce paint nor canvas; I caught it, using every ounce of oil available, and held the subject and knife there, while I did my part. Every malfeasance I had absorbed for so long, longer than some are fortunate to live, ran from the painting, down the knife, and back into the subject. It was an explosion of consumption: Every part of him rushed to catch up to where the soul had been, to where things should be, and, decrepit, pitiful, even, the subject broke the connection. He tumbled back, falling to the floor with a pained yelp.

My job finished, I exited the portrait, wisps of myself gathering to form something only mildly corporeal in this dungeon the subject had placed us in. Paint, in the hues of the work, composed me; as I looked back, I saw the masterpiece restored, the demigod frozen in time. Content, I began my departure, evaporating from the scene, when I heard the subject wheeze behind me, a singularly painful utterance: “Please…”

Every dollop of paint turned red. The nerve; I said as much with a single glance. He cowered. It wasn’t enough. I stormed to him. He looked as pathetic as I portrayed him to be, yet the dropped illusion of an artist’s touch made this appearance all the ghastlier. Even as we stood, eyeing each other before this final stroke, his hair fell and came to rest on the floor, glistening white in the light of the candle. I reached for the knife, resting helplessly at his side, took it, and plunged it into his chest, right up to the handle. “No, Dorian,” I gasped. Whether he heard me or not didn’t matter. It satisfied me enough to see the light leave his eyes, but not before he gave an awful, bloodcurdling scream, as if I’d punctured more than his heart, but everything sandwiched between, every form that he had been and never would be. Before the servants could wake, before the police could come, I would vanish. I stayed, though, long enough to admire what patience had wrought me.