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Title: Pickman's model
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Illustrator: Hugh Rankin
C. C. Senf
Release date: August 18, 2026 [eBook #79401]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1927
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79401
Credits: Greg Weeks and Mary Meehan
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICKMAN'S MODEL ***
Pickman's Model
By H. P. Lovecraft
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales, October 1927.]
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 around 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
Bosworth did. Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has the
genius Pickman had I feel it an honor 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 swerved 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 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 color 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. Gad, 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
medieval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimeras 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 toward 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 said 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 school-boy 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 Marlborough
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 love is the North End. If any esthete
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 feel 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 times! 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 guidebooks
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
overflowing 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 Marlborough 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 12 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 toward the
right in the dark. Not long after this Pickman produced a flashlight
and revealed an antediluvian ten-paneled door that looked damnably
worm-eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren hallway with what
was once splendid dark-oak paneling--simple, of course, but thrillingly
suggestive of the times of Andros and Phips 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 Marlborough 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 fetor 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 paneled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill Burying
Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a
favorite scene.
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground--for
Pickman's morbid art was preeminently one of demoniac portraiture.
These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached
humanity in varying degrees. 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 doglike
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 overrunning the world of our fore-fathers,
but this one brought the horror right into our own daily life!
Gad, 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 Boylston
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 antlike armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves
through burrows that honey-combed 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 held 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 analyze 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 cruelty 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 bizarreric. 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 cellar to his actual studio, and I
braced myself for some hellish effects among the unfinished canvases.
As we reached the bottom of the damp stairs he turned his flashlight
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 disk 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
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.
[Illustration: "He had painted a monstrous being on that awful canvas."]
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_.
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