By C.O. Bonham 

Beauty is as essential as breath to me. Art is my bread and meat. I sought a painting of a beautiful young girl in an oval frame titled Death in Life. A feat of artistry so realistic that legend held it had drained the vitality from the subject herself. This portrait was the holy grail of the art world. And I am its greatest crusader.

I exited my carriage and paid the driver. He pocketed the coin I gave him and nodded at me. “Grazie, signore.”

I replied in fluent Italian, “You’ll receive twice as much if you are back tomorrow morning.” As he pulled away, I turned to the great house, wondering how it had come to be abandoned.

The villa was exactly where my contact had said it would be. The rolling hills, the winding river, even the uncovered well that, reportedly, glowed red as hellfire at sunset. It was all here.

Shouldering my pack, I climbed a winding flight of stairs to the small tower room. As the author had described, astounding lifelike paintings stretched from floor to ceiling. But the oval one was not among their number. I searched the breadth of the room, poking into every corner and crevice.

Giving myself a break—not giving up—I threw my pack upon a dusty four-poster bed and lit a trio of candles on a nearby tarnished candelabra. They cast taunting shadows across the sepulchral room as the daylight waned; I had to find the oval portrait before the driver returned on the morrow.

I picked up the candelabra and moved it along the wainscot. There. A glint. A hint of a recessed hinge. A door. The seam was so artfully crafted the joint lined up with only the finest of slits. It took but a moment to retrieve my penknife from my breast pocket and slide it along the wall to find the remaining seams and cut upward where they had been papered over.

At last, I beheld her. Death in Life. The author had spoken true. She was indeed lifelike. It felt as though the woman herself stood before me; only her head and shoulders were visible through an oval hole in the wall.

She was the standard against which all beauty should be measured. True perfection of the female form. If she were real, then only she would be my equal. She, Helen of Troy, and I, Adonis.

I reached out to caress her face.

She blinked.

I jerked back. Convincing myself it must have been a trick of the light, I reached out my hand once more, only for her glorious face to frown at me.

“Please don’t touch,” she said in Italian. “The oils on your fingers will ruin my paint.”

“I suppose they would.” I dropped my hand. “You speak?”

“Indeed. Nought to do here but speak, trapped here for eternity. No hands or feet. No human interaction save for those who come to admire me and then hide me away again for their own pleasure. None ever return.”

“Why has no one simply taken you with them?” That had been my intent.

“I am not a canvas. My life has been painted onto this very wall. Onto the most structurally important wall in the villa. I cannot be moved lest the whole house crashes down around he who dares cut me free.”

Some might question why my mind did not go mad in the presence of a speaking portrait. She was so true to life it felt no more strange than conversing with any beautiful woman. In response I could say only one word. “Why?”

She heaved a great sigh, though no breath passed her lips. “Loath as I am to repeat the story, this is the only conversation I will have this decade.

“My husband wasn’t just a great artist. He was jealous and wanted to keep me from all men, even our Heavenly Father. He made deals with fiends and studied alchemy. The alloys in the frame and the elements in the paints drained my soul from my body and trapped me in this immortal form. My captor may be rotting in Sheol now, but it is I who have been sentenced to a painted purgatory.”

Life trapped in a painting sounded dull. But oh, to be young and beautiful forever! That would be divine. Would it be possible to separate one’s consciousness from their soul? To trap the soul in an immortal painting but to keep living in the corporeal vessel? To trade places with the painting?

Galvanized with the new purpose of studying her until I knew the secret techniques of her creator, I bowed to the painting. “Forgive my manners. Lord Dorian Gray, at your service. Pray tell, is there truly no way to free you from this house?”

“Thou shalt not covet.” She smiled. Then, her face grew solemn. “Kill me,” she said in a low voice. “Destroy this graven image of my soul and send me to my Lord in heaven.”

How could I destroy such a thing of beauty? Would that not be a sin more deadly than the other seven? But then, I reasoned, if she were no more, I could melt the oval frame for the metals and scrape the paint from the walls to learn its elements. This was no person before me. If ending her meant eternal life and beauty for myself, could it not be justified?

I placed a hand over my breast. “It has been a pleasure conversing with you, my lady. But now I’m afraid I must bid thee farewell.” I removed my hand from my breast, pulling out my penknife from the upper pocket as I did so. Then I stabbed it into the most perfect face I had ever beheld, save for one. The one in the mirror.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C.O. Bonham is the pen name for a commonly misspelled first name. She loves stories of all kinds, but really likes the ones that are weird, and outside the norm. A certified book geek, when she isn’t writing stories of her own, she is busy reading stories by others. A homeschool graduate with a degree in creative writing, her goal is to create stories that make people think, feel, and have fun.

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