Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/57

328 abruptly: "I didn't tell the police what I felt lay behind this tragedy. I have no hankering to live in an insane asylum. Now I have a faint hope that you may be able to appreciate the strangeness of my experience. Listen!

"Manuel Silva settled here a few years ago and has been doing well as a cabinetmaker. Recently he learned that I got from three hundred dollars up, for a canvas. He thought this an easy way to get rich, but I refused to teach him. You know, I never take any but advanced students of decided promise. My refusal roused Silva's furious resentment.

"I have instituted an annual art exhibit in town. Silva entered three canvases, to force my hand. They were rather terrible. One was a blacksmith, dark, sullen, sinister; he was hammering viciously at what appeared to be a battered crucifix. Another was a farmer slaughtering a wretched hog that somehow looked like a naked man; the butcher's face wore a too realistic grin of sadistic enjoyment as he wielded his bloody knife. The third—the third was the painting you've just seen in my studio.

"Harry's entry took first prize; this was inevitable. I felt inclined to encourage a couple of young local artists, so gave them honorable mention. Not to slight Silva's pride, I included him.

"The night before the canvases were removed, Harry and I were in the gallery, and he pointed out that someone had deliberately cut the honorable mention ribbon on Silva's canvas so that it hung in dangling strips. Odd, that, eh?"

"You're opening vistas," replied Funk, lighting another cigarette from the one he had been smoking. "You are absorbingly interesting."

"I criticized Silva's painting, observing that Harry was right when he said it gave him the jitters, but that in just that degree it possessed a touch of wild genius. Harry pronounced it ghastly, to paint a hunched-up old man as dead as a doornail, his hands frightful, decomposing—yet sitting up there—ugh! Silva's colors were crude, his drawing distorted—just how, it would be difficult to say, but—wrong, you understand—wrong.

"I said I dared not encourage Silva because of a very strange quality in his work—that something wrong. And then we both nearly jumped out of our skins, for in the dusk behind us someone broke into an ugly chuckle, and we turned to see a dark figure slouching out. It was Silva, and I realized that he'd heard me pronounce him an evil genius. Harry made light of my compunctions, but I was disturbed.

"We confronted the old man in the painting once more. As twilight gained the room, a murky dusk seemed creeping into the very canvas. Its shadows deepened. The old man merged into his dark background; all but his pallid face, his grayish beard, the waxen fingers dropping over his angular knees. It was wrong. Entirely wrong. And then all at once Harry twitched my sleeve, and exclaimed, 'Let's get out of here!' and we turned and plunged into the street, stricken by some subtle panic so obsessing that it was not until we were back at the Hoddeston farm that we realized how foolish and unreasonable had been our flight."

UNK lighted another cigarette.

"We went sketching next day," Barclay went on, "and Hoddeston brought our canvases back to the studio. That night he told me that Silva had sent me one of his for a gift; so Harry and I went down to see which one. We lighted candles, and really, we got a nasty shock. The flickering, inadequate candle-light made that old man appear more than ever