http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/pickmansmodel.htmPickman's Model
You needn't think I'm crazy, Eliot- plenty of others have
queerer prejudices than this. Why don't you laugh at Oliver's
grandfather, who won't ride in a motor? If I don't like that
damned subway, it's my own business; and we got here
more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We'd have had to walk up
the hill from Park Street if we'd taken the car.
I know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last
year, but you don't need to hold a clinic over it. There's plenty
of reason, God knows, and I fancy I'm lucky to be sane at all.
Why the third degree? You didn't use to be so inquisitive.
Well, if you must hear it, I don't know why you shouldn't.
Maybe you ought to, anyhow, for you kept writing me like a
grieved parent when you heard I'd begun to cut the Art Club
and keep away from Pickman. Now that he's disappeared I
go round to the club once in a while, but my nerves aren't
what they were.
No, I don't know what's become of Pickman, and I don't like
to guess. You might have surmised I had some inside
information when I dropped him- and that's why I don't want to
think where he's gone. Let the police find what they can- it
won't be much, judging from the fact that they don't know yet
of the old North End place he hired under the name of
Peters.
I'm not sure that I could find it again myself- not that I'd ever
try, even in broad daylight!
Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know, why he maintained it. I'm
coming to that. And I think you'll understand before I'm
through why I don't tell the police. They would ask me to guide
them, but I couldn't go back there even if I knew the way.
There was something there- and now I can't use the subway
or (and you may as well have your laugh at this, too) go down
into cellars any more.
I should think you'd have known I didn't drop Pickman for the
same silly reasons that fussy old women like Dr. Reid or Joe
Minot or Rosworth did. Morbid art doesn't shock me, and
when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to
know him, no matter what direction his work takes. Boston
never had a greater painter than Richard Upton Pickman. I
said it at first and I say it still, and I never swenved an inch,
either, when he showed that 'Ghoul Feeding'. That, you
remember, was when Minot cut him.
You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into
Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman's. Any magazine-cover
hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or
a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great
painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's
because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the
terrible or the physiology of fear- the exact sort of lines and
proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary
memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and
lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I
don't have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while
a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh.
There's something those fellows catch- beyond life- that
they're able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it.
Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it
as no man ever had it before or- I hope to Heaven- ever will
again.
Don't ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art,
there's all the difference in the world between the vital,
breathing things drawn from Nature or models and the
artificial truck that commercial small fry reel off in a bare
studio by rule. Well, I should say that the really weird artist
has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up
what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he
lives in. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ
from the pretender's mince-pie dreams in just about the
same way that the life painter's results differ from the
concoctions of a correspondence-school cartoonist. If I had
ever seen what Pickman saw- but no! Here, let's have a drink
before we get any deeper. God, I wouldn't be alive if I'd ever
seen what that man- if he was a man- saw !
You recall that Pickman's forte was faces. I don't believe
anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a
set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya you
have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the
gargoyles and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont
Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of things- and maybe
they saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had
some curious phases I remember your asking Pickman
yourself once, the year before you went away, wherever in
thunder he got such ideas and visions. Wasn't that a nasty
laugh he gave you? It was partly because of that laugh that
Reid dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up
comparative pathology, and was full of pompous 'inside stuff'
about the biological or evolutionary significance of this or that
mental or physical symptom. He said Pickman repelled him
more and more every day, and almost frightened him
towards the last- that the fellow's features and expression
were slowly developing in a way he didn't like; in a way that
wasn't human. He had a lot of talk about diet, and mid
Pickman must be abnormal and eccentric to the last degree.
I suppose you told Reid, if you and he had any
correspondence over it, that he'd let Pickman's paintings get
on his nerves or harrow up his imagination. I know I told him
that myself- then.
But keep in mind that I didn't drop Pickman for anything like
this. On the contrary, my admiration for him kept growing; for
that 'Ghoul Feeding' was a tremendous achievement. As you
know, the club wouldn't exhibit it, and the Museum of Fine
Arts wouldn't accept it as a gift; and I can add that nobody
would buy it, so Pickman had it right in his house till he went.
Now his father has it in Salem- you know Pickman comes of
old Salem stock, and had a witch ancestor hanged in 1692.
I got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often,
especially after I began making notes for a monograph on
weird art. Probably it was his work which put the idea into my
head, and anyhow, I found him a mine of data and
suggestions when I came to develop it. He showed me all the
paintings and drawings he had about; including some
pen-and-ink sketches that would, I verily believe, have got
him kicked out of the club if many of the members had seen
them. Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and would
listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and
philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the
Danvers asylum. My hero-worship, coupled with the fact that
people generally were commencing to have less and less to
do with him, made him get very confidential with me; and one
evening he hinted that if I were fairly close-mouthed and none
too squeamish, he might show me something rather unusual-
something a bit stronger than anything he had in the house.
'You know,' he said, 'there are things that won't do for
Newbury Street- things that are out of place here, and that
can't be conceived here, anyhow. It's my business to catch
the overtones of the soul, and you won't find those in a
parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn't
Boston- it isn't anything yet, because it's had no time to pick
up memories and attract local spirits. If there are any ghosts
here, they're the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow
cove; and I want human ghosts- the ghosts of beings highly
organized enough to have looked on hell and known the
meaning of what they saw.
'The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete
were sincere, he'd put up with the slums for the sake of the
massed traditions. God, man! Don't you realize that places
like that weren't merely made, but actually grew? Generation
after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days
when people weren't afraid to live and fed and die. Don't you
know there was a mill on Copp's Hill in 1632, and that half the
present streets were laid out by 1650? I can show you
houses that have stood two centuries and a half and more;
houses that have witnessed what would make a modern
house crumble into powder. What do moderns know of life
and the forces behind it? You call the Salem witchcraft a
delusion, but I'll wager my four-times-great-grandmother
could have told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill,
with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on. Mather,
damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking
free of this accursed cage of monotony- I wish someone had
laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night!
'I can show you a house he lived in, and I can show you
another one he was afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold
talk. He knew things he didn't dare put into that stupid
Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World. Look
here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of
tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other's
houses, and the burying ground, and the sea? Let them
prosecute and persecute above ground- things went on every
day that they couldn't reach, and voices laughed at night that
they couldn't place!
'Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and
not moved since I'll wager that in eight I can show you
something queer in the cellar. There's hardly a month that you
don't read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells
leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes down-
you could see one near Henchman Street from the elevated
last year. There were witches and what their spells
summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea;
smugglers; privateers- and I tell you, people knew how to live,
and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time! This
wasn't the only world a bold and wise man could know-
faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with such pale-pink
brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders
and convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a
Beacon Street tea-table!
'The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned
stupid to question the past very closely. What do maps and
records and guide-books really tell of the North End? Bah! At
a guess I'll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and
networks of alleys north of Prince Street that aren't suspected
by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm
them. And what do those Dagoes know of their meaning?
No, Thurber, these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously
and over-flowing with wonder and terror and escapes from
the commonplace, and yet there's not a living soul to
understand or profit by them. Or rather, there's only one living
soul- for I haven't been digging around in the past for nothing
!
'See here, you're interested in this sort of thing. What if I told
you that I've got another studio up there, where I can catch the
night-spirit of antique horror and paint things that I couldn't
even think of in Newbury Street? Naturally I don't tell those
cursed old maids at the club - with Reid, damn him,
whispering even as it is that I'm a sort of monster bound
down the toboggan of reverse evolution. Yes, Thurber, I
decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty
from life, so I did some exploring in places where I had
reason to know terror lives.
'I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men
besides myself have ever seen. It isn't so very far from the
elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries away as the soul
goes. I took it because of the queer old brick well in the
cellar- one of the sort I told you about. The shack's almost
tumbling down so that nobody else would live there, and I'd
hate to tell you how little I pay for it. The windows are boarded
up, but I like that all the better, since I don't want daylight for
what I do. I paint in the cellar, where the inspiration is
thickest, but I've other rooms furnished on the ground floor. A
Sicilian owns it, and I've hired it under the name of Peters.
'Now, if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd
enjoy the pictures, for, as I said, I've let myself go a bit there.
It's no vast tour- I sometimes do it on foot, for I don't want to
attract attention with a taxi in such a place. We can take the
shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that
the walk isn't much.'
Well, Eliot, there wasn't much for me to do after that
harangue but to keep myself from running instead of walking
for the first vacant cab we could sight. We changed to the
elevated at the South Station, and at about twelve o'clock
had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck
along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf. I didn't keep
track of the cross streets, and can't tell you yet which it was
we turned up, but I know it wasn't Greenough Lane.
When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length
of the oldest and dirtiest alley I ever saw in my life, with
crumbling-looking gables, broken small-paned windows, and
archaic chimneys that stood out half-disintegrated against
the moonlit sky. I don't believe there were three houses in
sight that hadn't been standing in Cotton Mather's time-
certainly I glimpsed at least two with an overhang, and once I
thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten
pre-gambrel type, though antiquarians tell us there are none
left in Boston.
From that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left
into an equally silent and still narrower alley with no light at all:
and in a minute made what I think was an obtuse-angled
bend towards the right in the dark. Not long after this
Pickman produced a flashlight and revealed an antediluvian
ten-panelled door that looked damnably worm-eaten.
Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren hallway with what
was once splendid dark-oak panelling- simple, of course, but
thrillingly suggestive of the times of Andros and Phipps and
the Witchcraft. Then he took me through a door on the left,
lighted an oil lamp, and told me to make myself at home.
Now, Eliot, I'm what the man in the street would call fairly
'hard-boiled,' but I'll confess that what I saw on the walls of
that room gave me a bad turn. They were his pictures, you
know - the ones he couldn't paint or even show in Newbury
Street- and he was right when he said he had 'let himself go.'
Here- have another drink- I need one anyhow!
There's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like,
because the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the
unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from
simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify.
There was none of the exotic technique you see in Sidney
Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi
that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood. The
backgrounds were mostly old churchyards, deep woods,
cliffs by the sea, brick tunnels, ancient panelled rooms, or
simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill Burying Ground, which
could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a
favourite scene.
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the
foreground- for Pickman's morbid art was pre-eminently one
of demoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom
completely human, but often approached humanity in varying
degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a
forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of
the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can
see them now! Their occupations - well, don't ask me to be
too precise. They were usually feeding- I won't say on what.
They were sometimes shown in groups in cemeteries or
underground passages, and often appeared to be in battle
over their prey- or rather, their treasure-trove. And what
damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the
sightless faces of this charnel booty! Occasionally the things
were shown leaping through open windows at night, or
squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats.
One canvas showed a ring of them baying about a hanged
witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship
to theirs.
But don't get the idea that it was all this hideous business of
theme and setting which struck me faint. I'm not a
three-year-old kid, and I'd seen much like this before. It was
the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and
slavered out of the canvas with the very breath of life! By
God, man, I verily believe they were alive! That nauseous
wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his brush
had been a nightmare-spawning wand. Give me that
decanter, Eliot!
There was one thing called 'The Lesson'- Heaven pity me,
that I ever saw it! Listen- can you fancy a squatting circle of
nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small
child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling,
I suppose- you know the old myth about how the weird
people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the
human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what
happens to those stolen babes- how they grow up- and then I
began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the
human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations
of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the
degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and
evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!
And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own
young as left with mankind in the form of changelings, than
my eye caught a picture embodying that very thought. It was
that of an ancient Puritan interior- a heavily beamed room
with lattice windows, a settle, and clumsy
seventeenth-century furniture, with the family sitting about
while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face but one
showed nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the
mockery of the pit. It was that of a young man in years, and
no doubt belonged to a supposed son of that pious father,
but in essence it was the kin of the unclean things. It was their
changeling- and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman had
given the features a very perceptible resemblance to his
own.
By this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining
room and was politely holding open the door for me; asking
me if I would care to see his 'modern studies.' I hadn't been
able to give him much of my opinions- I was too speechless
with fright and loathing- but I think he fully understood and felt
highly complimented. And now I want to assure you again,
Eliot, that I'm no mollycoddle to scream at anything which
shows a bit of departure from the usual. I'm middle-aged and
decently sophisticated, and I guess you saw enough of me in
France to know I'm not easily knocked out. Remember, too,
that I'd just about recovered my wind and gotten used to
those frightful pictures which turned colonial New England
into a kind of annex of hell. Well, in spite of all this, that next
room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at
the doorway to keep from keeling over. The other chamber
had shown a pack of ghouls and witches over-running the
world of our forefathers, but this one brought the horror right
into our own daily life!
God, how that man could paint! There was a study called
'Subway Accident,' in which a flock of the vile things were
clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a
crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking
a crowd of people on the platform. Another showed a dance
on Copp's Hill among the tombs with the background of
today. Then there were any number of cellar views, with
monsters creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry
and grinning as they squatted behind barrels or furnaces and
waited for their first victim to descend the stairs.
One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast
cross-section of Beacon Hill, with ant-like armies of the
mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows
that honeycombed the ground. Dances in the modern
cemeteries were freely pictured, and another conception
somehow shocked me more than all the rest- a scene in an
unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about
one who had a well-known Boston guidebook and was
evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain
passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic
and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the
fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was, 'Holmes, Lowell
and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn.'
As I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this
second room of deviltry and morbidity, I began to analyse
some of the points in my sickening loathing. In the first place,
I said to myself, these things repelled because of the utter
inhumanity and callous crudity they showed in Pickman. The
fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such
glee in the torture of brain and flesh and the degradation of
the mortal tenement. In the second place, they terrified
because of their very greatness. Their art was the art that
convinced- when we saw the pictures we saw the demons
themselves and were afraid of them. And the queer part was,
that Pickman got none of his power from the use of
selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or
conventionalized; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details
were almost painfully defined. And the faces!
It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was
pandemonium itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That
was it, by Heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste or
romanticist at all- he did not even try to give us the churning,
prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically
reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established
horror- world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and
unfalteringly. God knows what that world can have been, or
where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped
and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling
source of his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in
every sense- in conception and in execution- a thorough,
painstaking, and almost scientific realist.
My host was now leading the way down the cellar to his
actual studio, and I braced myself for some hellish efforts
among the unfinished canvases. As we reached the bottom
of the damp stairs he fumed his flash-light to a corner of the
large open space at hand, revealing the circular brick curb of
what was evidently a great well in the earthen floor. We
walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five feet across, with
walls a good foot thick and some six inches above the
ground level- solid work of the seventeenth century, or I was
much mistaken. That, Pickman said, was the kind of thing he
had been talking about- an aperture of the network of tunnels
that used to undermine the hill. I noticed idly that it did not
seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disc of wood
formed the apparent cover. Thinking of the things this well
must have been connected with if Pickman's wild hints had
not been mere rhetoric, I shivered slightly; then turned to
follow him up a step and through a narrow door into a room
of fair size, provided with a wooden floor and furnished as a
studio. An acetylene gas outfit gave the light necessary for
work.
The unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the
walls were as ghastly as the finished ones upstairs, and
showed the painstaking methods of the artist. Scenes were
blocked out with extreme care, and pencilled 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
oufit 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 round
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 mould-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 paralysed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's
listening, I fancied I heard a faint scurrying sound
somewhere, and a series of squeals or beats 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
sea-coast. 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 colour.'
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 wall. 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 ostracised 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 the 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!
