The Scream by Newton Webb

A 1960s Extreme Horror Short Story: Arthur finds that replicating a masterpiece is easy, but replicating its soul can cost you your own.

Contents:

1. Horror Compilations

2. The Scream

Horror Story Compilations

Summer of Horror: 37 FREE horror stories, including: ‘Invasion of the Hipster Beards’ and ‘The Scream’.

Beneath the Shadow: 14 FREE horror stories, including: ‘The Braemoor Incident’, ‘Invasion of the Hipster Beards’, ‘Soulmates’, ‘Deus Vult’, and ‘The Scream’.

Terrifying Tales: 12 horror stories, including ‘Tales of the Macabre, Vol. 1’, ‘Tales of the Macabre, Vol. 2’, ‘Tales of the Macabre, Vol. 3,’ ‘Festival of the Damned’ and ‘The Morrígan’.

The Fiction Giveaway Extravaganza!: 82 FREE horror stories, including: ‘The Wild Hunt’ and ‘The Spinster’.

The Scream

1961, Soho, London.

Chapter One

The scream was the thing. It was always the thing.

Arthur Selby stood back from the canvas, the sable brush limp in his hand. He regarded his painting with a critical eye. The odour of turpentine and linseed oil enveloped him as he sucked his teeth. The paint was a sharp, chemical perfume that clung to his clothes and stained the skin on his hands. Yet he didn’t feel like an artist as he regarded his efforts.

He was exhausted. He had been up for twenty-four hours now, stood in front of his canvas, tweaking the painting and working to match the original source image.

Outside his attic window, the November rain fell in a steady, miserable drizzle. It slicked the Soho rooftops and blurred the neon lights of the club across the lane. Jazz music drifted up from the bar downstairs.

It’s dead.

His gaze was transfixed by the painting.

A dead thing. My dead thing.

On the easel, the Pope was trapped. Not with the emotional violence of the caged Pope in Francis Bacon’s design, but in the sterile perfection of Arthur’s own technical proficiency. He had the colours right. The virulent slash of cadmium yellow that cut through the Prussian blue, the fleshy, bruised tones of the dissolving face. He had mimicked the frantic energy of the brushstrokes, the accidental-on-purpose smearing that gave the original its raw, visceral power.

It had all the perfection of a photograph, but none of the fury that drove the original piece.

His forgery was a perfect, dead replica, lacking the violent emotional context the screaming Pope needed. The mouth, the singular black hole of existential terror in Bacon’s original, was on his canvas just a dark shape.

It was the best painting he had ever done.

Flawless to a fault.

Arthur would have got an A for effort from his tutor at the Slade. But for all his labour, the painting didn’t scream. It was a silent, black oval. It lacked physicality. Arthur looked at it, feeling his own throat tighten in dismay.

He knew he had failed.

Arthur had been a painter once. The Slade had told him so. A draughtsman’s eye, Selby. A good hand. But talent, he had learned through mounting debt and dwindling hope, was not the same as vision. Vision was the fire, the divine and terrible spark that separated the artist from the artisan. He was an engineer, a man of precision, who imitated rather than created.

He could, and did, paint dead Dutch masters for American tourists. He forged signatures on middling Victorian watercolours. He made a living, of sorts. He could afford the rent on his attic apartment. He kept himself in cigarettes and cheap whisky. But the man who had once dreamed of hanging in the Tate now felt unaccomplished and shallow.

A heavy, rhythmic clacking on the staircase broke his concentration.

Arthur’s stomach tightened. He knew that sound. He put his brush down, wiping his hands on an already stiff rag. He turned towards the door just as a heavy knock sounded against the wood. A flat, dead rap of knuckles.

“It’s open,” he called out, his voice hoarse.

The door swung inward and Slab filled the frame. He was an East End pugilist poured into a suit that was too tight across the shoulders. His face resembled a pack of minced beef, broken-nosed and impassive. He stepped inside and then turned back to the doorway.

“Careful, my Lord. The last step’s a bugger,” he rumbled.

Then came the source of the clacking wooden sound Arthur dreaded. The sound of Lord Marcus Thorne’s arrival. Thorne was steadied by a pair of black walking sticks, each topped with a silver wolf. He was a small man, diminished by age. But what he lacked in physical stature, his eyes radiated in pure, distilled malevolence. His face was pale and finely boned, almost avian in look, framed by wisps of thin, silver hair. His eyes, a chillingly pale blue, fixed on Arthur.

“Arthur,” Thorne’s voice was a dry, cultured whisper. He walked to look out of the single grimy window, where the grey light struggled to enter Arthur’s room. Turning, Thorne’s gaze swept the studio with a look of contempt.

It slid over a half-finished Vermeer pastiche that Arthur had painted for an American client. He lingered for a moment.

“Charming. The Girl with a Pearl Earring gets a sister, does she?” He looked closer. “You do such clean work, Arthur. So neat.”

Arthur felt the familiar flush of anger creep up his neck. He said nothing at the compliment, his own insecurities boiling within him.

Thorne’s gaze finally settled on the easel. He walked closer.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

He stared at the screaming Pope for a long, silent minute. The studio was filled with the sound of rain hammering against the glass, distant jazz, and the low hum of the city.

Arthur found himself holding his breath, waiting, as his judge pursed his lips.

“It’s good,” Thorne said at last. “I’ll take it. The colour mixing is superb. You have captured the texture of the unprimed canvas showing through the background. A fine piece of craftsmanship.”

“I’m still working on it.” Arthur tried to move between Thorne and the painting.

“Nonsense. It’s done. Look at it. This is some of the best work I’ve ever seen.” Thorne pulled out a magnifying glass. “This is immaculate.”

“No. No. No. Please.”

“You have been ‘working on it’ for a month,” Thorne snapped. “My patience is not without its limits. I have deadlines of my own. The time has come.”

“I don’t think the scream is right. It lacks passion.” Arthur wrung his hands in shame.

“I disagree. It’s a perfect replica.” Thorne’s pale blue eyes tightened with a cruel, predatory glee that made Arthur’s skin crawl. “And just in time. I have pulled a few strings. You know Sir Philip at the Tate? A dreadful bore, but his weakness for nineteenth-century French erotica is a useful lever. I have persuaded him that a small, private exhibition is in order. A ‘scholarly review’, I believe we called it. A handful of post-war British pieces, moved from the main collection for the benefit of a few esteemed patrons. My patrons, of course.”

He smiled. A thin, bloodless stretching of his lips.

Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X will be the centrepiece. It will be moved from its usual, rather well-guarded position to a secondary viewing room on the ground floor. A quiet little room, Arthur, with older wiring and lazier attendants. It will be there for precisely seventy-two hours, starting Friday next.”

The jazz downstairs faded out, resulting in a round of applause, before leaving a sudden, ringing silence in the room.

Arthur felt a profound chill that had nothing to do with the November damp. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, but I am.” The menace was palpable in his tone. “Deadly serious. I find I have a space for it on my study wall. And in its place, the Tate will receive this.” He gestured with his chin at Arthur’s canvas. “Your perfect copy.”

“But…”

“I’ll be taking it now.” Thorne leaned forward on his sticks. “Slab, pay the man.”

“No.” Arthur took a paintbrush, reversed it, and thrust it through the canvas, leaving a hole.

Time seemed to stop as the room’s inhabitants held their breath.

Thorne’s voice was a deep whisper, rage causing the old man to tighten his grip on his sticks’ gleaming wolf heads. “Explain. Quickly. Why did you do that?”

“I…” Arthur looked in horror at the hole.

“Explain!” Thorne roared, his exertion leading to a hacking cough. Slab swiftly moved over to stabilise him. When the coughing stopped, he waved away his henchman.

“It isn’t ready. You can’t put that in the Tate. It would be blasphemy.”

“I make that call, not you.” Thorne stepped closer, raising his sallow face to within an inch of Arthur’s.

“It wasn’t right. But I can make it right. I can make it scream.”

Thorne glared at Arthur with disgust. “I give you four days. I want my replica. I want it perfect. And I want it delivered to my house by Thursday evening. Fail me and I’ll see your scream. Slab will smash your hands so thoroughly that you’ll never paint again.”

Arthur nodded, still in shock. He turned to regard the painting with a look of sickly horror on his face.

What did I do?

Thorne shook his head. He turned to his minder. “Slab. I am finished here. The damp is getting into my bones.” At the doorway, he turned back to regard Arthur. “Never defy me like that again.”

Slab, who had stood silently, watching Arthur with grim amusement, moved to open the door for his master. As his master walked out, Slab turned back to Arthur.

“Be seeing you.” He smiled a broken toothed grin. “Real soon.”

Their footsteps began their slow, heavy descent, fading into the stairwell, until there was only the sound of the rain and the club revellers heading outside for an interval smoke.

Arthur turned back to the easel, his legs unsteady. The city’s neon light caught the paint and he realised he had penetrated the Pope’s mouth, tearing the canvas open.

The scream was the thing.

And now, he had only four days to learn how to see it.

Chapter Two

Thorne stood before the easel, staring at the wound he had inflicted. The ripped canvas around the Pope’s mouth gaped, a ragged, fibrous maw. An act of idiotic, suicidal rebellion that had solved nothing and cost him everything.

Four days.

Arthur had no fire of his own, so he warmed his hands at the embers of other men’s art.

He reached out a trembling hand and touched the edge of the tear. The canvas was rough against his fingertip. He could patch it, of course. He was a craftsman. He could reline it, fill the gap, paint over the scar until it was invisible. But he would know it was there.

Arthur bit his lip.

He understood now. He needed to feel the scream. To produce a copy that had soul, authenticity.

He needed to get into the mind of Francis Bacon. He needed to be Francis Bacon.

The room began to feel smaller, the walls leaning in. He looked at the other canvases stacked against the wall, their faces turned away like ashamed children. Dutch landscapes. Society portraits. All competent. All dead.

His entire life’s work was a collection of exquisitely rendered lies.

I have to get out.

He stumbled down the flights of stairs and burst out into the wet Soho night. Pulling a cigarette from a battered Woodbine packet, he struggled to shield it from the rain while flicking open his zippo lighter. He breathed a sigh of relief as he succeeded and sucked down on the tobacco.

The London air was cold and sharp, alive with the smells of fried onions, damp pavement, and diesel fumes. He pushed through crowds of men in sharp suits and women in vibrantly coloured shift dresses. Their drunken laughter cut at him. The gaiety of the night was wasted on him, as a bleak despair pulled at his heart.

He strode forward until he arrived at The French House, a small pub that was always busy. Inside, the fug of cigarette smoke was so thick it was like walking into a cloud. The air was warm and loud, dense with the damp dog scent of wet wool coats and the casual pub banter of the truly inebriated. He shouldered his way to the bar and ordered a large brandy.

The first glass burned a clean, hot path down his throat. He drank it quickly and ordered another. He was not drinking for pleasure. To pave the way for his rebirth, he needed to kill Arthur so he could be reborn as Francis.

Thud.

He pounded the glass down and motioned for another brandy.

Thud.

And another. Then another.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The sharp edges of his insecurity began to blur. The noise of the pub receded to a dull roar. Blearily, he watched the couple next to him. A young couple, their heads close together, whispering. The man wore a wedding ring. The woman had bare fingers.

An affair?

He smirked, then shifted his gaze to an old man staring into his pint.

No friends? Nowhere else to go.

He motioned for another brandy, only to have the barman, a stocky gentleman with a walrus moustache, shake his head.

“Why?” Arthur demanded, slurring.

“You are drunk, mate. I’m cutting you off.” The barman gestured at the door.

“I’m drunk? Drunk! Why do you think I came to the pub?” Arthur was about to launch into a tirade when he saw the bouncer making his way over. Instead, he waved his hands in surrender and backed out.

He left the pub, stumbling on the stone step, and drifted on the Soho tide. He ended up in another, darker bar. La Gioconda, on Denmark Street. He switched to whisky. The music here was angrier, more dissonant. The notes seemed to tear at the air. He felt a kinship with the noise, the controlled chaos of it. Gene Vincent. Eddie Cochran. Vince Taylor and His Playboys. He danced with his glass in one hand and listened to men scream into their microphones.

It was in the dead hours of the morning when the last of the bars shat him out onto the pavement. The rain had stopped. The moon was a sliver of bone behind thin clouds. He bought a bacon sandwich from a café, queuing with the other drunks, before walking—no, stumbling—across St James’s Park. Homeless people lay unconscious on benches as he made his way to the river. He sat down on the first free bench he found and reclined. The bacon tasted salty and mildly sweet as his drunken maw hoovered it up.

The sun was creeping above the buildings. Cars made their way behind him. The squares, in their traditional suits and hats, shuffled to their traditional jobs.

His head felt full of cotton wool. He sought a café for a cup of tea in a proper mug.

Drinking the milky tea, his sanity started to return. The frenetic sense of power that had infused him the night before fled.

He was a dead man unless he produced a painting by the deadline.

Turning the mug in his hands, he contemplated his options. He could fix the painting. It was doable. The only person who would know would be him.

But no. His ego wouldn’t allow him to produce anything less than a perfect replica. A painting worthy of the original.

If I run out of time, I can always fix the old one. He smiled at his own deceit. The lie reassured him.

I need to see the original painting again.

His tea finished, Arthur rose and started to walk towards the Tate. The sun was now casting golds and reds across the Thames.

He needed to stand in front of the original. He needed to feel what Francis felt when he painted the picture.

There was a small queue of dedicated tourists waiting for the Tate to open, and Arthur joined them. One of them, a tough northern lady with skin the texture of tree bark, narrowed her eyes at the whisky fumes on his breath and his generally roguish attire. He gave her a weak smile, which resulted in a damning tut.

When the doors opened, he dropped a coin into the donation box and raced through the galleries to find Bacon’s masterpiece.

Arthur took off his hat. He stood in front of the image of Pope Innocent X. A tear formed in his eye. Like Arthur, the Pope was caged. Trapped.

Isolated. Helpless.

His hands clenched as he paced, feeling the silent scream tear through his body.

Guilt. Desire. Grief. Rage.

The canvas seemed to shake as he felt the raw intensity of the image. A kaleidoscope of passion.

His soulless copy could never, ever replace this masterpiece.

The study in front of him wasn’t just a painting. It was a journey. An invitation to witness the Pope’s psychological collapse. A powerful man stripped of dignity and grace.

Arthur stepped back regretfully. He felt exhausted, filled with the emotional intensity of the painting.

It wasn’t enough to copy Bacon.

He had to become him.

Chapter Three

Arthur returned to his studio with new eyes. The pilgrimage to the Tate had confirmed his new purpose. His meticulous forgery wasn’t just a failure. It was blasphemy.

He went out again. Arthur was close to collapse from exhaustion. He knew a place on Berwick Street. The chemist’s had been part of the Soho landscape for generations. Tucked between a pawnshop and a closed-down tailor, its faded gold lettering read Wellingsworth & Son—Established 1894. Inside, it smelled of dust and carbolic soap.

Hal, the chemist, looked up from his newspaper. He was a wiry old man with nicotine-yellowed fingers.

“Arthur,” he grunted. “You look like shit.”

“I need something.” Arthur tapped his exhausted fingers on his thigh. “To keep me going. Something to stay awake.”

Hal snorted. “Trying to kill a few nights sleep, are we?” He slid open a drawer beneath the counter, the wood scraping softly. “Purple hearts. The American ones. Real Dexedrine, not that chalky shite they press in Limehouse.” He glanced at Arthur’s haunted face. “How many do you need?”

Arthur pulled a crumpled five-pound note from his pocket. “How many will that get me?”

Hal took it, smoothed it out, and poured a handful of pale violet pills into a brown paper envelope.

“That’ll get you two dozen. Don’t take them all at once unless you want your heart to pop.”

Arthur pocketed the envelope. Back in his attic, he laid it on the small table next to a bottle of whisky.

He strode to the easel and tore the wounded canvas from its stretcher bars, the sound of the staples pulling free like the ripping of sinew. He carried it to the tin bathtub in the centre of the room and threw it in. He retrieved a can of turpentine, unscrewed the cap, and drenched the painting. The potent chemical smell filled the air. The image of the Pope dissolved, the colours bleeding into a murky, indistinct stain. Arthur struck a match. For a moment, the small flame trembled in his hand. Then he dropped it.

Whoosh.

The canvas erupted in blue and orange flame. The paint bubbled and blackened. The heat washed over Arthur’s face. He watched until the fire ate itself out, leaving behind a brittle, stinking rectangle of ash.

He was committed now.

He set up a new canvas, its taut, blank surface an intimidating white void. Then, methodically, he stripped off his clothes. Jacket, shirt, trousers, underwear. He stood naked in the chill of the studio, the damp air raising gooseflesh on his skin. The neon glow from the window painted one side of his body in an unnatural, sickly light. He felt utterly exposed. To paint the raw, flayed truth of Bacon’s vision, he had to be raw and flayed himself.

From his toolbox, he took a Stanley knife. He held it in his right hand, the die cast metal handle cool against his skin. Looking at the pale underside of his left forearm, at the faint blue lines of the veins, he took a breath and drew the blade across his flesh.

The pain was a sharp, clean shock. He watched, fascinated, as a thin red line appeared, welling up into a string of dark crimson jewels that merged and began to flow. He pressed his wounded arm against the stark white canvas and dragged it downwards, smearing a thick, viscous ribbon of red across the gesso. It was the first honest mark he had made on a canvas in over a decade.

He found a rag and bound his wound tightly. Under the cloth, his arm throbbed with a dull, satisfying ache. He picked up his brushes and began to work. He uncorked the whisky with his teeth and took a long, burning drink. He painted with a feverish intensity, his movements rapid and instinctive. He blocked in the background first, the claustrophobic, architectural cage, scoring the lines into the wet paint with the wrong end of his brush. He worked on the twisted meat of the torso for hours, lost in a trance of creation, the bottle of whisky growing lighter.

At some point, the bottle was empty. He threw it against the exposed brick wall, where it shattered. But when he came to the head, he stopped. His hand froze above the canvas. The figure on the easel had a ghastly life, a body writhing in a cage of his own making. But the face remained a blur of raw, unpainted canvas. A void.

I can’t hear the scream.

The primal, existential shriek of Bacon’s Pope was a sound from a deeper, darker hell than Arthur had ever known. He needed to descend to that level to be able to see it. He had felt the blood, the rage, the confinement. But he did not understand the scream, not yet.

He threw his brush down in disgust. A sudden, terrible clarity washed over him. The scream was birthed in dark rooms, in the kind of pain and pleasure he hadn’t experienced. The violence in the painting was not abstract. It was the violence of tortured flesh, of inflamed passions. Bacon’s life was rough trade, gambling debts, and clandestine desires.

I have to descend to find the scream.

He washed himself hastily at the sink. He splashed his face, the cold water a welcome shock, reinvigorating him. He dressed in his least paint-stained clothes and went back out into the Soho night. He walked past bright lights and crowded pubs, seeking the narrow alleyways and darkened doorways.

Arthur was hunting for a specific kind of damnation.

He found it in a narrow street off Old Compton Street, a place that smelled of overflowing bins and stale urine. A single bare bulb illuminated a hand-painted sign taped to a peeling door: Male Model Upstairs. He pushed the door open. A hulking man with a flattened nose sat on a wooden stool, reading a newspaper.

“Ten bob for an hour,” the man grunted, not bothering to look up. “It’s upstairs. Knock twice.”

Arthur fumbled in his pocket, his hand shaking slightly as he produced a note. The man stretched it out, checked it, then jerked his head toward a rickety flight of stairs. Arthur ascended into a gloom that smelled of dust, cheap aftershave, and something cloyingly sweet and chemical.

He looked down at the doorstep, biting his lip, hesitating before knocking twice on the door.

A muffled voice called, “It’s open.”

The room was small, dominated by a single bed with a stained mattress. A young man, mid-twenties, lay propped against a pile of grubby pillows smoking a cigarette. His eyes were glassy, his pupils dilated. He wore a tired, well-practised smile as Arthur entered. He was handsome in an emaciated way, his skeletal body exposed beneath a worn dressing gown.

“First time, darling?” the model asked with a slurred drawl.

Arthur nodded, unable to speak. His throat was dry with nerves. The air was thick with the saccharine scent of cheap aftershave, stale smoke, and unwashed bodies.

The young man seemed to sense his nervousness.

“It’s all right, dear. Just relax.” He levered himself up to a seated position, stubbing out his cigarette on a thin metal tray, his movements slow. “Now then, let’s get you comfortable, shall we?” He reached out, taking Arthur’s hand. His touch was gentle. Arthur inhaled nervously. The model seemed to think his reticence was down to inexperience.

It wasn’t.

Arthur closed his eyes for a moment, initially trying to pretend it was a woman instead of a drugged stranger. But he forced his eyes open. This had to be an authentic experience. He made himself watch as the young man, with a professional detachment that filled Arthur with disgust, unfastened his flies and took his flaccid penis into his mouth.

The sensation was alien. He had slept with plenty of women, but this was different. There was no lust here, just an experience to open his eyes to a different world. He felt like he was observing himself from a great distance. The young man worked with an efficient, passionless skill. Arthur recognised the same level of disassociation he felt when creating his forgeries. He was both surprised and disturbed when the man’s perfunctory efforts got him to a state of readiness. The model lay back on the bed, lifted his legs, and used a small jar from the bedside table to lubricate his bruised entrance.

Arthur moved over him, his heart hammering against his ribs. He looked down at the waiting man and forced his face to remain impassive, masking the disgust within. Leaning down, he placed his hands on either side of the model’s face. The submissive smile caused his stomach to roil as he entered him roughly, pushing in with a clumsy, brutal thrust. The man grimaced slightly but didn’t complain. Arthur grunted as he penetrated. His hands snaked up to the young man’s throat. The skin was pliant and sticky with cold sweat.

“Scream for me.” The words came out as a harsh croak. “I need to see you scream.”

He tightened his grip. The model’s eyes, half-closed in a narcotic daze, flew open in genuine terror. A choked, gurgling sound escaped his throat. He began to struggle, his hands scrabbling at Arthur’s wrists. His face, slack with indifference moments ago, was now a mask of panic.

For a wild, terrifying second, Arthur almost saw it. The wide eyes. The gaping mouth. The silent, desperate agony. It was like a glimpse, a shadow of what he needed.

Come on, come on. Scream for me.

The model’s flailing hand found a lamp on the bedside table. With a surge of adrenaline, he swung it, smashing it against the side of Arthur’s head. Light exploded behind Arthur’s eyes, a universe of white stars. He reeled back, his hands falling away from the model’s throat. A sharp, searing pain shot through his skull.

The model gasped for air, his face purple, and screamed. Not the silent, existential scream of Bacon’s Pope, but a raw, terrified screech for help.

“Get him off me!”

The door burst open and the bouncer filled the frame, a blur of dense flesh and thick bone. He grabbed Arthur by the collar, hauling him off the bed. A fist slammed into Arthur’s stomach, driving the air from his lungs. He doubled over, gagging. Another punch, a heavy, solid slug to the jaw, snapped his head back.

The world tilted crazily.

He was dragged from the room and down the stairs, his feet barely touching the steps. The bouncer threw him out into the alleyway. He landed hard on the wet, grimy cobblestones. He lay there, winded and gasping, the reek of the gutter filling his nostrils.

The bouncer stood over him.

“Don’t you ever come back, you sick bastard,” he snarled, and drove a vicious kick into Arthur’s ribs. Pain, white-hot and absolute, flared through his side. He curled into a ball, his cheek pressed against the cold, damp stone. His genitals deflated against the slimy street. The bouncer kicked him again for good measure before turning and disappearing back inside, slamming the door behind him.

Arthur vomited. He rolled onto his back and lay in the gutter for a long time, struggling to regain his breath. His head throbbed, his jaw ached, and every breath was a fresh agony in his side. Eventually, he managed to push himself up to a seated position, his body screaming in protest. He did up his trousers, stumbled out of the alley, and into a late-night off-licence. He bought two bottles of whisky.

He could barely remember the journey back to his studio. Only that he arrived with the bottles clutched to his chest. Limping up the stairs, he felt a fresh wave of torture with each step. He let himself into the attic and collapsed into his chair, his body a mess of bruised flesh. His head bled from the smashed lamp. He stared at the painting on the easel. The canvas stared back, the cage and the twisted body waiting. But the face was still a blank, white void.

Arthur paced in front of it. He was exhausted. The whisky. The lack of sleep. It was catching up with him.

Without the scream, the painting was just shapes and colours.

Arthur reached into his pocket and pulled out the small paper envelope. His fingers, shaking, fumbled one of the violet pills into his palm. It was small, scored across the centre. He bit it in half, grimaced at the bitter chemical taste, and washed it down with a swig of whisky.

He stood before the canvas, undressing. The cool night air played across his purple, bruised flesh as he waited for the drug to work.

A smile graced his face.

He knew now what he must do.

Chapter Four

The taxi ride to St John’s Wood was a journey through a smeared, liquid world. The Dexedrine kept his eyes wide and awake, while his body had transformed into an anxiety-ridden mass of twitching flesh. The whisky had calmed him just enough to stay in control. His sanity was balanced on a knife edge between stimulants and sedatives. The streetlights bled into long streaks across the wet glass. Arthur sat curled in the back seat, the large, paper-wrapped canvas propped beside him like a silent passenger. Beneath his loose, white cotton shirt, his skin crawled, a million tiny insects marching to the beat of his hammering heart.

The mansion came into view, a hulking shape behind high iron gates. Its neighbours had all been turned into townhouses or luxury flats. Standing alone, it practically shouted the extreme wealth of its owner. Its pale stucco façade, strangled with ivy, looked like bone in the moonlight. The windows gave the mansion the impression of a skull.

The taxi driver eyed Arthur with curiosity in the rear-view mirror as he pulled to a stop. Arthur clearly didn’t belong here. He fumbled with his wallet and paid with a trembling hand, the notes slick with sweat. He got out, hauling his canvas and a small satchel of paints and oils with him.

Arthur pushed open the gate. It groaned in protest. As he walked up the cracked flagstone path, over a bed of lichen, the front door swung open, spilling a weak yellow light onto the damp steps.

Slab filled the doorway, his bulk stretching the seams of his dark suit. A grim smile played on his lips as if he had been looking forward to this visit. The smile never quite reached his flat, dead eyes.

“The master’s waiting for you,” Slab rumbled.

He stepped aside, his gaze raking over Arthur’s dishevelled state. The bloodshot eyes, the tremor in his hands, the faint, sweet-sick smell of whisky and chemicals.

Lord Thorne was in the drawing room, leaning heavily on his silver-wolf-headed sticks. The house smelt of dry rot and old pipe smoke. The furnishings and art spoke of a house in decline. They were weathered and worn, yet obviously expensive. Possibly bought in another era, when the family fortunes had been in ascendance. Oil portraits of Thorne’s ancestors glared down from the shadowed walls, their painted eyes following Arthur with silent contempt. Thorne’s own eyes, pale and chilling blue, took in Arthur’s appearance with a look of pure disgust.

Arthur was a ruin. His face was a pallid mask, bruised and gaunt. His shirt was streaked with a faint rust-coloured stain he had not bothered to wash out. He was shaking from a toxic combination of exhaustion, drugs, and fear.

“You look like something the cat dragged in,” Thorne said. His voice was dry, like the rustling of paper. “I trust the results have been worth the money I’ve paid. Slab is very much looking forward to seeing the results.” He gave a malicious smile. “Bring it. I have prepared a space for it.”

Thorne turned. With a series of slow, deliberate clacks from his sticks, he led the way down a long corridor to the rear of the house. Slab followed Arthur. They descended a short flight of stone steps into the cold, still air of the cellar. At the end of a narrow passage stood a square box of reinforced concrete, sealed with a steel blast door. A heavy mechanical wheel was set in its centre. Slab moved forward and turned it. The gears ground with a deafening finality. The door swung open, revealing the vault.

The air inside was sterile and cold, smelling of metal and dry paper. It was lit by a single, harsh industrial bulb hanging from the ceiling. Aluminium shelves lined the walls, filled with archival boxes and smaller, shrouded paintings. A low, constant hum came from a ventilation system in the corner.

Thorne gestured with one of his sticks towards the far wall. An empty space waited there, flanked by a small, savage Soutine and a de Kooning woman, her painted grin a rictus of fury.

“There,” Thorne said, his voice echoing slightly in the confined space. “The centrepiece. It will have pride of place before the original joins it. Show me.”

Arthur’s heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of his ribs. He walked to the empty space, his movements stiff and jerky. His satchel of tools clattered to the floor. With shaking hands, he began to tear the brown paper from his canvas. The sound was obscenely loud in the quiet of the vault.

He unwrapped the painting and, with great effort, hung it on the waiting hooks.

For a long moment, there was only the hum of the ventilation. Thorne stared, his eyebrows frozen in disbelief.

Slab took a half-step forward. His brow furrowed in confusion.

The painting was a masterpiece of mimicry. It had Bacon’s raw, violent energy. The claustrophobic cage. The smeared, visceral background. But the figure trapped within was not Pope Innocent X. The figure was small and frail, dressed in a finely tailored suit, leaning on two silver-wolf-headed sticks. The face was a perfect, merciless caricature of Lord Marcus Thorne. His pale blue eyes were wide with a familiar, distilled malevolence.

And where his mouth should have been, there was nothing. A blank, unpainted void of raw canvas.

Thorne’s face contorted. The refined mask of aristocratic disdain cracked to reveal a raw, sputtering fury. His whisper became a reedy shriek.

“You dare? You dare mock me in my own house?” He turned to his minder, his voice cracking with rage. “Slab! Break his hands. Now!”

Slab’s toothless grin returned. This was the moment he had been waiting for. He started forward, cracking his knuckles, his heavy shoulders rolling in anticipation.

As the minder closed the distance, Arthur’s world narrowed to a single point of action. The Dexedrine sang in his blood, burning away all hesitation and fear. Time stretched and slowed. With a movement born of pure animal instinct, he whipped the Stanley knife from his sleeve. The blade snapped into place with a sharp click.

Slab was too close. He had no time to react. Arthur lunged forward and slashed at Slab’s carotid artery with frenetic, desperate energy. The thin blade sliced through the stretched skin and muscle of Slab’s throat.

A look of profound surprise crossed the minder’s face. He stopped, raised a hand to his neck, and his fingers came away slick with his own lifeblood. A dark fountain of crimson erupted from the wound, spraying across a stack of archival boxes and spattering the concrete floor. He took a clumsy step towards Arthur, his eyes wide with confusion.

Arthur scrambled backwards, scuttling between the shelves, dodging around a shrouded bronze statue. Slab followed, a dying bull chasing a ghost. He crashed into a shelving unit, sending priceless sketches fluttering to the ground. He knocked over a small Henry Moore. The sculpture thudded to the floor. Slab staggered, his big hands outstretched, trying to catch his tormentor, but all he caught was air. Finally, with a great, shuddering sigh, his legs gave out. He collapsed to the floor, the spreading pool of his blood a dark, glistening halo around his head.

The vault was suddenly, shockingly silent, save for the hum of the machine and the wet, rhythmic dripping from the shelves.

Arthur’s breath came in ragged, burning gasps. He looked down at his hands. They were covered in blood. He felt a wild, terrifying thrill.

A frantic clanking drew his attention. Thorne. The old man had hobbled to the vault door and was struggling with the heavy wheel, his frail body too weak to turn it. The silver wolves on his sticks glinted in the harsh light.

Arthur walked towards him, the Stanley knife still clutched in his hand.

“Stay back,” Thorne hissed, his voice thin with terror. When Arthur continued, he changed tack. “I’ll give you anything. Money. Name your price. A house. Another studio. Just let me go.”

Arthur did not hear him. The words were meaningless noise. All he saw was the painting on the wall. His painting. Still unfinished. Still silent.

All he wanted was the scream.

“I’ll not beg.” Thorne glared at his tormentor.

Arthur grabbed Thorne by the collar of his expensive suit and dragged him away from the door. The old man was shockingly light. He felt like a bundle of dry sticks wrapped in silk. Arthur pulled him across the floor, through the sticky, cooling puddle of Slab’s blood, and threw him down in front of the canvas.

Thorne scrambled backwards, crab-like, until his back hit the wall beneath his own portrait.

“Please…”

“Shush now. You promised not to beg.” Arthur knelt beside him. He looked from the trembling, terrified face of the man before him to the blank space on the canvas. It was not enough. “Scream for me, instead.” Arthur’s voice was a hoarse croak. He raised the Stanley knife. He did not aim for a vital artery. He drew the blade across the old man’s cheek, a shallow, precise line that bloomed instantly with red.

Thorne let out a choked, agonised cry. His eyes were wide, the pupils black holes of pure terror.

And in that moment, Arthur saw it. He finally heard it. The silent, existential shriek of a soul stripped bare. The terror of a powerful man made utterly helpless. The scream of the Pope. The scream of Bacon. The scream he had been chasing through the dregs of alcohol, through the violation of flesh, through the dark alleys of Soho.

Exuberance filled him. Thorne’s gurgling cries were the sweetest sound Arthur had ever heard.

Arthur began to paint.

He worked with sublime, focused intensity. His brush, loaded with the blood of his subject, flew across the canvas. He painted the mouth. A gaping, black oval of pure agony. Each stroke was perfect. Each smear was truth.

When he was finished, he stood back. His whole body thrummed with a pleasure so intense it was almost painful. For the first time in his life, he felt no doubt. No inadequacy. Only a profound and absolute artistic satisfaction.

He had not just copied an artist. He had become the art. He had created something magnificent.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the small paper envelope. There were only a few pills left. He shook them all into his palm and dry-swallowed them in a single, bitter gulp.

He turned his gaze back to the painting. His masterpiece. His heart began to pound even faster. A frantic, galloping rhythm. The hum of the ventilation system seemed to grow louder, filling his head.

As he stared, the lines of the painting began to shift. The face on the canvas, his portrait of the terrified Lord Thorne, began to change. The gaping mouth of the scream twisted. The lips curled upwards. The eyes, once wide with terror, now crinkled with a silent, mocking glee.

A laugh bubbled up from Arthur’s chest.

He laughed with the painting.

He laughed at the blood, at the bodies, at the sublime, terrible beauty of what he had done.

He laughed as his vision blurred, as the walls of the vault seemed to ripple and bend.

He laughed as a final, crushing pain seized his chest, and his heart, after one last, defiant, explosive beat, gave out.

He fell to the floor. A manic smile was fixed on his face. His eyes open, and staring, were fixed on the laughing portrait on the wall.

THE END

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Welcome to the complete collected works of Newton Webb. Tales of the Macabre, Vol. 1-3 are intended for mature audiences.