The William P. McGivern Fantasy MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Fantasy Stories from the Pulps

The Picture of Death

First published in Fantastic Adventures, November 1942.

When I walked into Harry Saunders’ office on the tenth floor of Republic Magazines’ new building, he looked up from his desk and nodded pleasantly.

“Sit down,” he said, waving me to a chair beside his desk. “Smoke?”

I sat down, accepted the cigarette and lit it carefully. From Saunders’ manner I began to hope he might have good news.

“Well, what’s the verdict?” I asked, trying to make the question as casual as possible. I’m afraid I didn’t quite succeed in that attempt. It isn’t easy to act unconcerned when your week’s meals and lodgings depend on an art director’s decision.

Saunders didn’t answer immediately. He leaned back in his chair and took a great deal of time in lighting his cigarette. I knew he was stalling. He was a nice guy and he didn’t like to say no soap. But he finally got around to it.

He looked at me with troubled eyes. “Id like to buy your illustrations,” he said, “but there’s an element of reality lacking. Your backgrounds are okay, your composition is nice, but your male characters just don’t have the brutality and toughness they should.”

I smiled bitterly and shrugged my shoulders.

“If I haven’t got it, I haven’t got it,” I said. “I’ve been in the ‘art’ business for a dozen years, but I’m learning that ‘art’ hasn’t got anything to do with making a living with magazine illustrations. Thanks, Harry, you’ve done the best anyone could for a misguided mural painter.”

I crushed out the cigarette and stood up, but Harry said, “Wait a minute.” He stood up and stepped around his desk.

“Don’t let a few rejections lick you,” he said. “At least, try once more. Do a villain for me, a rough, tough, nasty gent that I can really be scared of. Forget the background and incidental characters.”

“Okay,” I said, and moved to the door. “I’ll do it tonight and bring it in first thing in the morning.”

“Oh, by the way,” Harry said. He coughed and looked away in embarrassment. “If you could use a few bucks for a while—”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be okay, Harry.”

I opened the door and walked down the corridor to the elevators. Outside the building it was rapidly getting dark, and a soft snow was falling on the hurrying pedestrians.

I turned my collar up and started walking. An hour later I let myself into my bleak, cold, cramped attic-studio. I turned on the light over my drawing board and then turned up the gas under the coffee pot.

I had never been a fast craftsman and I knew that the job of drawing one character would take most of the night. I didn’t particularly look forward to the hours that stretched ahead of me. Drawing is hard work for me.

Work that I love, but, nevertheless, work.

While the coffee was heating, I blocked in a frame for my main figure. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what my character would be. Not having the money to afford models, I was forced to use my imagination in creating illustrations.

As I sat before the board, toying with ideas, I happened to glance out the window and see, across the narrow court, the figure of a man outlined against a window.

He had his back to the window, but as I watched, he turned and I had a full view of his features. They were brutal and coarse, and in his small, deep-sunk eyes there was something unimaginably evil. From his shoulders and arms I could see that he was powerfully built, probably of enormous strength. His hair was coarse and black.

The light in his room shone full on his face, and I was able to analyze each feature and line carefully.

Automatically I picked up my drawing pencil. I was hardly conscious of what I was doing, so absorbed was I in the man across the court. Something in the bestial brutality of his features fired my imagination, inflamed my senses and set my heart pounding.

My pencil flashed across the drawing paper with swift, sure strokes. I had never drawn with such ease and effect in my entire career. It was as if some psychic influence was at work, driving me on, ordering my thoughts and directing my hand.

I was afraid, terribly afraid, that the man would turn away from the light before I completed the sketch.

I worked furiously, studying my subject with white-hot concentration, and feverishly transmitting the almost sadistic brutality of his features to the drawing paper.

At last the thing was done. And at that same second the man across the court turned away from his window, and the light in his room disappeared.

I felt enormously lucky and strangely exhilarated.

I studied the drawing carefully. It was simply done, yet there was an undeniable impact in its effect. I had caught the essence of chilling evil that, to my eyes at least, was stamped unmistakably on the face of the man across the court.

I felt like celebrating. Here, the job I had been dreading as an all-night session was completed in ten minutes. But most gratifying was the realization that I had done a coldly realistic piece of work. The illustration was good, I knew. Something of myself, and something from my subject had merged together to create this drawing.

With a rare feeling of jubilance I went to the closet and took down one of my cherished possessions, a full pint of good whiskey. I had been saving it until I had something to celebrate, and this seemed the proper occasion.

I had three drinks in a row, silently toasting myself each time. I am not accustomed to liquor, and when I finally lay down on my cot, my head was spinning very pleasantly.

When I awoke it was morning.

A faint early light was creeping in through the window, and I had a bad headache. I still had my clothes on.

I stood up and pressed my hands to my temples. Gradually the memory of the previous evening returned. I didn’t feel so bad then. At least I had a good piece of work to show Saunders.

I washed, changed my shirt and, feeling almost normal again, I drew back the shades and let the North light pour into the room. I was anxious to inspect the drawing in the sometimes damning light of day.

I swung the drawing board around, and let the clear morning light splash over the illustration I’d done of the man across the court.

The sight that met my eyes caused me to gasp in astonished horror.

The illustration was completely changed!

The figure of the man was bent in a crouch, and his lips were flattened against his teeth in demoniacal leer. In his hooked, talon-like hands was an axe, smeared and bloody.

And, most horrible of all, between his spread feet was the form of a young girl, her head hacked almost completely from her shoulders.

I sat down, my knees suddenly weak. The horrible force of the gruesome drawing was physically staggering.

The illustration was a masterpiece of macabre horror.

But who had done it? The central figure was mine, but had someone visited my room in the dead of night to add the gruesome details of the murder?

I stared at the illustration for many long minutes. There was something plucking at my subconscious, some psychic half-memory of this scene, as if possibly I had dreamed or imagined it years ago.

I shook my head irritably at this thought. I was indulging in a form of self-hypnosis, trying to convince myself of something or other.

There was a rational explanation to this phenomenon, I told myself firmly. The style of the art was mine throughout the picture. I recognized that instantly. Therefore I had drawn in the figure of the murdered girl, changed my central character into a bestial maniacal killer, dramatized the illustration into a blood-chilling picture.

That much was obvious. But how had I done all this? And why did I have no recollection of it?

There was only one answer to both those questions. I must have changed the illustration during my drink-befogged sleep. That was the only logical solution. Possibly the unaccustomed stimulus of the alcohol had provided the subconscious impetus to return to the drawing board and re-design the illustration.

Possibly...

I removed the illustration from the drawing board and rolled it up tightly.

There was no sense worrying about the thing. It was done; that was that. This realistic view comforted me more had my attempts at rationalization. I left my studio with the illustration under my arm and walked uptown to the Republic Magazines’ building.

When I spread the illustration on Harry Saunders’ desk, a half hour later, his eyes brightened with interest and he stood up excitedly.

“Now you’ve got it,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “This picture has got some guts to it. It’s realistic and convincing.”

He stared a long moment at the illustration.

“Did you get the idea for this scene from the morning newspaper?” he asked abruptly.

“No,” I said, surprised. “I got it from—”

My voice and thoughts trailed away. Where had I got the idea?

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “I haven’t seen the morning papers yet. Was there some sort of murder last night?”

Saunders shuddered slightly.

“A very unpretty one, if we may judge from the harrowing details of our melodramatic reporters. Young girl, axe killer, lonely wharf. Maniac probably.”

For some reason, my thoughts were spinning crazily.

“I didn’t know a thing about it,” I said harshly.

“Okay, okay,” Saunders grinned. “It doesn’t make any difference one way or the other. I don’t care whether you get your ideas from the daily papers or the telephone book. The important thing now is that I want more work from you. This illustration has got what it takes. Now get back to your studio and turn out as many you can just like it. And stick to this main figure of the villain. You’ve got something there. He looks bad enough to be real.”

“All right,” I said.

“I’ll have a check for you tomorrow on this job,” Saunders said. “As long as you can keep up this kind of work, you’re all set.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll be in tomorrow.”

I left his office and my feelings were difficult to analyze. I should have been riotously happy at having finally made the grade with Republic Magazines, but for some reason my happiness was tempered with another emotion I could not define.

On the street I bought a paper and carefully read the story of the murder Saunders mentioned. This action was in itself unexplainable. Normally such things do not interest me, but now I read the story avidly.

The girl’s body was awaiting identification; the axe killer was still at large. Police were of the opinion that it was the work of a maniac. That was the substance of the story.

I frowned and walked on. When I reached my studio it was about noon. I had a little something to eat, then I sat down at my drawing board.

The strong North light was streaming over my shoulder and every condition was favorable to work, but for some reason I couldn’t recapture the feeling and mood that I had experienced the previous day.

I tried a dozen times to draw from memory the man I’d seen across the court, but it was worse than futile. Each succeeding attempt became less and less what I wanted, until I finally tore the sheet from the board, and with an exclamation of disgust, hurled it to the floor.

The afternoon passed and darkness fell swiftly. I turned on the light over my easel and made another desperate attempt to get to work. While I was seated there, concentrating on the scene in my mind, the light across the court flicked on, and I saw my subject again, silhouetted against the illumination in his room.

He was pacing up and down the floor with slow measured strides. The court that separated our windows was only a dozen feet wide, and I could see details in the room very clearly.

I could see his huge hands clasped behind his back and I could see the black scowl on his face with almost frightening distinctness.

Even more than the first time, I was impressed with the malignant evil that seemed to emanate from the man’s broad brutal face and close-set, blazing eyes.

Again, without conscious volition on my part, I reached for my drawing pencil and began to sketch feverishly. There seemed to be some psychic connection between this ugly brute across the court, and my own mind. When I studied him for a while something seemed to take possession of me, driving me to work, to create scenes which had before been foreign to my imagination.

I was drawing a background now, hastily sketching in a vacant lot, complete with shrubbery, refuse pile and an abandoned incinerator. In the distance were small bungalows with lights burning in the front room. It was night. The moon was shadowed by a passing cloud, and there was an oppressive, eerie stillness over the entire scene.

I began to draw a character. It was the man across the court. Without glancing from my drawing board I blocked in a figure with heavy massive shoulders, swinging arms with curved fingers, slightly bent knees, crouching along the shrubbery that flanked the lonely path leading through the vacant lot to the bungalow. The face was twisted and inhuman, one half in shadow, the other caught in the glare of a street light. One blazing eye, one distended nostril and half of the thick, slavering lips were visible, a horrible, incomplete picture of a creature from the bowels of hell.

I finished the figure rapidly. Every stroke was sure and definite, there was no hesitation, no erasure, nothing but swift sure delineation.

When I finished the picture I was almost in a trance. My work had been so automatic, so instinctive, that I had been unaware of the passage of time. I had been caught in the flow of some indefiniable force and had been swept along in a creative frenzy, which was as effective as it was mysterious.

For the drawing was good. It had a chilling horror to it that was breathtaking. The human, yet inhuman figure, crouching along the path, lying in wait like some savage jungle creature. Lying in wait...

Lying in wait for what?

I didn’t know.

With a shake of my head I tried to dislodge the thoughts that were battering at my consciousness. A mist seemed to rise from my eyes and mind and I found myself looking at the drawing through clear eyes. I had been in a kind of self-induced hypnotic state. The emotional outlet that occurred with creative work, might have the effect of dulling one’s more ordinary perceptions.

Everything was very quiet. I glanced across the court and saw that my subject’s room was dark. I wondered when he had left.

I took the drawing from the board then and sealed it in a special size envelope, for I had decided to mail this drawing in to Saunders. I didn’t intend to go back to Republic for a day or so and postage was the quickest and cheapest way of getting the picture to him.

I mailed the drawing that night. Two days later, about ten o’clock in the morning, I entered Saunders’ office.

He sprang to his feet when he saw me and walked around his desk to pump my hand.

“Glad to see you,” he said, fairly bristling with camaraderie.

“What did you think of the picture I sent in?” I asked. I had an idea of what he would say.

“Terrific!” he exploded. “Absolutely terrific! I’ve been looking for material like that for years. It was so damn convincing it almost scared the life out of me when I took it out of the envelope. Realistic? Boy!”

“Thanks,” I said. My lack of enthusiasm must have been quite noticeable, for he said,

“Why so gloomy? You haven’t a thing in the world to worry about now. Your style is right in the groove at last, and as long as you use the daily newspapers, you’ll never have to worry about your background and scenes.”

“The newspapers?” I said. A chill feeling crept gradually over me, bringing with it a nameless illogical horror. I had done nothing to be afraid of, my actions were, so far as I knew, blameless. Yet I felt suddenly like cringing into the darkest corner of the room I could find.

“Why, yes, the newspapers.” Saunders laughed in answer to my questioning tone. “You remember that first illustration you did, based on the hatchet murder at the wharf?”

“I didn’t get that illustration idea from the newspaper story,” I said, and my voice was tonelessly flat.

Saunders grinned and stuck a cigarette into his mouth.

“I believed you the first time when you said that, but not any more. This last picture you did was taken smack from the Jackson Heights murder, wasn’t it?”

“No, no,” I said. I was trembling slightly, and the words came out in a stuttering rush.

“Don’t get excited about it,” Saunders said, but he looked at me rather queerly. “If you want to protect your source of ideas, that’s perfectly okay. As I said once, it doesn’t matter to me where the hell you get your inspiration. But this last case was pretty obvious.” A horrible premonition was creeping over me.

“Let me see my last illustration,” I said. I tried desperately to control my voice, to check the hysteria that was mounting in my breast.

“Sure thing,” Saunders said. “I haven’t given it to an author yet. It’s right here.”

He walked over to a long open file beside his desk and pulled out an illustration pasted against a cardboard background. He set it on his desk, flicked a strong light against it.

“There it is,” he said; “a beautiful job.”

I stared at the illustration and I tried to speak, but it was impossible. My mouth was dry with horror that was as deep as the pit of hell.

My heart was pounding slowly, heavily, painfully.

The illustration had been changed. It was not the same drawing that I had mailed to Saunders two nights before. The background was the same, vacant lot, bungalows with lighted fronts, but—

The figure of the hulking evil brute had changed! Instead of crouching behind the shrubbery that lined the lot’s pathway, he was kneeling on the prone figure of an elderly man, and his mighty hands were closed about his neck.

My character, the character that had been inspired by the man across the court from my studio, was committing another murder. The expression of lustful brutality on his face was sickening.

“It’s not pretty,” Saunders said, “but it’s effective as hell. You can’t deny that you got the idea for that illustration from the Jackson Heights murder.”

“What happened at Jackson Heights?” I asked dully.

Saunders looked at me as if I were losing my mind.

“Are you kidding?” he demanded. “The papers have been full of nothing else for the last forty-eight hours. Seems some elderly duck was crossing a lot out in Jackson Heights, and some madman attacked and killed him. Broke his neck in two places. It was a very nasty mess. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. I haven’t been feeling so well the last few days,” I said weakly. I leaned against the edge of his desk for support. “Answer me one question, please, Harry. Did you see this illustration of mine, immediately after it was taken from the envelope?”

“Of course,” he answered. “I opened the envelope. Why?”

“The scene was just as it is now?” I said, clenching my hands nervously. “You haven’t made any — changes?”

“Naturally not,” Saunders said. “This is the way the picture arrived and this is the way we’re going to use it. No one has touched it. You can see that at a glance. Every bit of that picture is your work. It stands out all over it.”

“Thanks,” I said. My mind was in a seething turmoil. “I’ve got to be leaving now. Thanks again.”

“Keep up the good work,” Saunders said. He laughed. “We want realism in the art work here. And I don’t care if you commit the murders yourself, they’ve got to be real. So long.”

I shuddered as I left his office.

I felt as if I might be sick. My thoughts were churning wildly. When I reached my studio hours later, after tramping endlessly the city streets, I collapsed in the chair before my drawing board, and stared at the drawing paper with dazed sightless eyes. I had to think. But my brain was numb with horror. This whole nightmarish business was so incomprehensible, so mysterious, so damnably incredible that my reason rebelled at accepting the conclusions my instinct presented.

Who had changed the last illustration? That was an unanswerable question. Could it be that there was some psychic connection between that drawing and the brutal murder of an old man in Jackson Heights?

Could it have been a human agency?

I buried my head in my hands and groaned in the empty darkness of the room. I had mailed that picture to Saunders as soon as I had completed it. My theory in regard to the first picture would not apply in this second instance. It couldn’t have been an act I unknowingly performed in my sleep — because the illustration was not in the studio that night; it was in the city post office.

How long I sat in the dark of my studio I have no way of knowing, but after a while I became aware of a light in the room across the court. How long it had been on, I couldn’t say.

I stared across the court into the lighted room and I saw the man who had inspired both of my illustrations. He was sitting in a chair facing the window, in almost the same position I was sitting. But he did not seem to be looking at me.

Rather he was staring past, or through me. How long he had been sitting there was a conjectural matter. His dark brutal face was half in the shadow, and his small burning eyes were almost concealed by lowered lids.

On his heavy loose lips I could see the light reflecting from a slavering wetness. I stared at him for several minutes, and gradually the compulsion to draw came over me in an irresistible wave.

I turned to my board and picked up a pencil. There was enough light from his window for me to see by, and I went to work, furiously, feverishly.

I wasn’t sure what I was drawing. My pencil moved almost independently of my will. My mind, my reason, seemed curiously separate and apart from the figure and background that swiftly developed on the drawing paper.

I felt as if I were watching the scene objectively, but taking no part in it myself. I saw the pencil moving, but I felt it moved of itself. I heard its faint scratch as it moved over the paper, but it was a far away sound. The darkness of the room, the quietness of the night, the stillness of the air, these things seemed real and tangible, but the drawing was an abstraction apart from me.

In spite of my detachment, I could feel the power and the force of the indefinable inspiration that had seized my will and intellect and drove them on at such a feverish haste.

What was I drawing?

I forced myself to look at my work. It was him. I had drawn him in a standing position, but I hadn’t completed his background.

A tenseness was creeping into my fingers, but I worked on desperately. I felt suddenly excited and exhilarated. I glanced across the court and, although the light was still blazing, the man had left the window.

I wheeled back to the drawing board and worked with redoubled speed. Everything depended on finishing this drawing. Why, I didn’t know.

“I must, I must!” I said aloud.

Now I seemed to sweep along on a wave that was hurling me forward with increasing speed each second. My hand moved so quickly that my eyes could not follow it, and the background of the main figure was swiftly falling into place. In a minute I would be through. Even as that thought came to me I knew a moment of black horror.

Sheer black horror of the unknown, of the nameless, of all that dread darkness which man is ever fleeing.

In a moment the picture would be completed!

My instinct screamed at me to hurl the pencil from my fingers, to rip the sheet from the board, but my hand moved on, inexorably, inevitably, beyond the control of my will.

The last strokes were completed in a frantic rush.

I was through!

There was a complete, terrible silence in the room. I studied the illustration I had just completed, and gradually the mist lifted from my mind and sanity returned slowly.

I had drawn him standing in a doorway. In his knotted fist was an axe.

I shook my head slowly. I felt as if I were coming up for air, after hours of swimming helplessly through suffocating water.

The picture I had drawn was of a familiar scene. It was so familiar that for a moment I was unable to place it. I frowned and studied the illustration carefully.

Suddenly a cold, nauseating horror shook me.

“My God!” I whispered.

The scene I had depicted was that of my own studio!

I leaned forward, hardly daring to believe my eyes. But my eyes had not lied. A convulsive shudder shook my frame as I stared at that scene depicted on the drawing board.

I had drawn my own studio as the setting for his next crime!

Suddenly, in the still black silence of the room, I heard a board creak faintly.

I froze into immobility. My heart pounded madly.

The board creaked again... closer.

I fought back the scream that tore against my throat. With a courage that I did not dream I possessed, I wheeled suddenly and faced the door.

He was there — just as I had drawn him.

Mad, burning eyes, slavering jaws, rasping breath... he stood in the doorway, mighty shoulders hunched, a hand clenched about the handle of an axe.

With a white flash of understanding I knew why I had drawn the picture of my studio, lured this monster here. In some psychic way his actions and my illustrations were linked inseparably. I was his next victim! It was only right that I should be.

His heavy breathing was the only sound in the room. Then a board creaked and I knew he had stepped closer.

I knew he was ready to lunge. My feet dug into the floor, as I saw the gleaming head of the axe flash over his head.

Then he lunged!

I sprang sideways from the chair and his great bulk sprawled over me. The axe cut through the air and crashed into the drawing table. I heard a horrible gurgling sound, as I pulled myself to my knees.

There was a black bulk on the floor of the studio. The axe lay near the body, its head dull with a sticky redness.

I staggered to my feet and turned on the light. He was lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. His head was almost severed from his body.

My eyes moved to the drawing board.

His axe had slashed through the illustration I had just drawn.

His figure in the drawing was almost decapitated by the four inch rent the axe had made in the paper.

The other figure in the drawing was untouched. I was the other figure