The Painting | 18 February 2024

As he pulled up to 62 Woodlands Park Road, he had a shivering sense of déjà vu.  He opened the back of the van to start organizing the drop cloths before he knocked on the door.  “You must be Dave?” said a voice from behind.

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He turned to face a surprisingly unassuming yet creepy older man.  “No, sorry, Dave called out sick today so they sent me instead.”

“Ooooooh lovelyyyy,” the man purred, pushing the fingers on each hand together like a Bond villain.  The man cast his eyes down and onto the contractor’s coveralls, and he swatted his left breast reflexively, unsettled that the man would learn his name from his name badge.  It was too late.

“Larry!”  The elderly man clasped his hands together in front of his mouth with joy, “Oh!  I had a wuuuuuuuunderful old chum named Lawrence,” he said, now buttoning the last button on his puce cardigan, “Shame he’s no longer with us.”  He paused, eyes fixed and distant, head bowed as if in a sudden trance.  Larry noticed age spots on his shiny balding head.  The man sighed deeply and, after a beat, slowly walked his eyes up the broad façade of Larry’s body, finally meeting his face and manufacturing a grin.

“Well, Lawrence, we’re actually going in through the front of the estate.  I’m afraid this is the service entrance, and the painting is harder to access from here.  Ah, shall we?” The older man gestured theatrically toward a pebble pathway outlining the stone estate, spaciously sandwiched by manicured hedgerows that brought the home’s every curve into relief.

“Yessir, if you like.”  Larry placed the stack of drop cloths on top of a dolly along with his other painting restoration supplies and followed that man he now presumed to be Baron Warren. 

The Baron walked slowly, his oxford brogues crunching deliberately into the gravel.  His back was hunched, his hands clasped behind his back.  He spoke with authority on the history of the estate, the family lineage, and the provenance of the painting Larry was supposed to inspect for conservation.  The Baron had an eerie presence, and as Larry followed him in and out of cool shadows cast by the estate’s curvature, he now understood how it must feel to follow one’s killer into the depths of a pathless wood.

After a five-minute walk and a struggle with Larry’s dolly in the pea gravel, they made it to a pair of very tall and wide front doors.  Presciently, the righthand door opened inward, a bowing valet on the other side.  As in so many a Hollywood film, the door snapped shut like a jewel box behind them the moment Larry got his dolly over the threshold.  He was instructed to leave it in the entryway, as they had, “a long journey” to get to the painting in question.

The whole place felt so oddly familiar, and reminded Larry of a recurring dream he had where he was wandering the halls of a large manor house, unable to find anything besides a unending sequence of hallways.

Larry followed the Baron down corridor after corridor, and his dream of an above-ground rabbit warren was starting to feel more like a premonition than a figment of his imagination.  At first the halls were bright, with columns of maize milky light streaming in from South-facing windows.  The sound of plates clinking as a table was either set or cleared and the hushed din of servant chatter was all around them.  This gave way to still, dust-filled, mink-colored air in central sitting rooms.  The windows were foggy, and the air grew colder as they moved away from lit fireplaces and into darker chambers with drapes over the furnishings.

“Nearly there!” the Baron said, his soliloquy about Parliament and taxes now shifting gears to discuss his hobbies, toward gesturing toward taxidermy and noting his collection of 14th century cultural artifacts.  They reached a corridor that was almost wholly shrouded in darkness, and suddenly Larry was sure he had been there before.  He recognized everything on display before him: massive portraits lined the wallpapered walls, each with a sconce overhead that cast a cone of light that ended so abruptly it was as if the umbra had been cut with a scissor at each frames’ edge; every ten feet or so the portraits were interrupted by a plinth with one of the Baron’s treasures atop it, growing in size and eccentricity as they progressed down the dark passageway.  An iron comb, then a Shrew’s Fiddle, then an Alfet. 

“Not all that much is understood about my ancestor, and the estate’s namesake, Baron Warren.  Some say he was a simple landowner; others say he was martyred, others speak slander.  After my father assumed responsibility for the house and grounds, many of these items were found in the personal chambers of Sir Warren.  My father then led an effort which uncovered a rich history of misogyny, whereby Baron Warren begot some 28 offspring from various household women, mistresses, and his various wives, and evidence of extensive on-premises torture was uncovered as well.”

The depictions in the artwork grew increasingly troublesome in kind, and the Baron grew silent and pulled out a pocket torch which he pointed at his toes to light his way on the reddish carpet.  In the silence, Larry noted in horror images he had studied in art school: The Martyrdom of St Apollonia, followed by The Judgement of Cambyses.  Larry stopped, mouth agog at the shocking depiction Apollo flaying of Marsyas, and the Baron beckoned him not to dally.  Larry had worked on this piece before, perhaps a dozen years earlier, though he hadn’t come to the estate to collect it.  He had become obsessed with the image at that time, thinking about it fixatedly for years afterwards: Marsyas’ mouth agape in agony, Apollo looking out at the spectator with a smirk on his face and he reached his hand inwardly to peel away the skin from the muscle on his victim’s arm.

Larry had several terrifying thoughts racing through his head: he was now deep into the estate with no way of finding his way back, he was frighteningly too familiar with this home and its contents, and he desperately wanted to leave.

“It’s just here, Lawrence.”  The Baron stopped, ten feet ahead of him, turning his flashlight to illuminate a piece without a working sconce.  “You’ll see it is in quite a bit of disrepair.  I know that the common practice is to remove these items and take them to a workshop for restoration, but I’m afraid I must insist that all work be performed on premises.”  Larry approached, his mind racing, watching himself from above as he neared the image.  “It’s a crude rendering, but rather important to the estate.  You see,” the Baron continued, as Larry’s eyes came into focus on the name at the bottom of the portrait, “this is the estate’s namesake, Sir Lawrence Warren, Baron of Stockport.”

Larry swallowed, confused and dizzy, and watched himself from above as he lifted his countenance to look upon the face in the painting.  What he saw confounded and delighted him at once.  He felt a rush of life force and a shiver of disdain at what he saw before him: it was a portrait of himself.