H.P. Lovecraft. Pickman's Model
Pickman's Model
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1926
Published October 1927 in Weird Tales, Vol. 10, No. 4, p. 505-14.
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 round 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 Rosworth did.
Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I
feel it an honour 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 swenved 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 a 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 colour 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. Dore 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 mediaeval chaps who
did the gargoyles and chimaeras 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 towards 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 mid 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 schoolboy 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 Newbury 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 live is the North End. If any aesthete 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 fed 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
time! 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 guide-books
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 over-flowing 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
Newbury 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 wall 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
twelve 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 towards the right in
the dark. Not long after this Pickman produced a flashlight and revealed
an antediluvian ten-panelled door that looked damnably worm-eaten.
Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren hallway with what was once
splendid dark-oak panelling - simple, of course, but thrillingly
suggestive of the times of Andros and Phipps 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 Newbury 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 foetor 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
panelled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill Burying Ground,
which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite
scene.
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground - for
Pickman's morbid art was pre-eminently one of daemoniac portraiture. These
figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in
varying degree. 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 dog-like 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 annexe 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 over-running the world of our forefathers, 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 ant-like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves
through burrows that honeycombed the ground. Dances in the modern
cemeteries were freely pictured, and another conception somehow shocked me
more than all the rest - a sense in an unknown vault, where scores of the
beasts crowded about one who hod 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 analyse 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 crudity 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 daemons themselves and were afraid of them. And the queer part
was, that Pickman got none of his power from the use of selectiveness or
bizarrerie. 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 the cellar to his actual studio, and
I braced myself for some hellish efforts among the unfinished canvases. As
we reached the bottom of the damp stairs he fumed his flash-light to a
comer 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 disc 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 pencilled
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 oufit 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 round 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 mould-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 suspen-sion 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 night-mare 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 unaccus-tomed 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 paralysed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's listening, I
fancied I heard a faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of squeals
or beats 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 dis-charge 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 sea-coast. 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 colour.'
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 wall:. 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 hirn? 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 ostracised 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 the 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.
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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The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio Garcia
Recalde for transcribing this text.