Last Day as a Man
First night as a beast.
Elliot Harwood had never set much stock in curses. As far as he was concerned they were just faerie tales, silly superstitions that only the weak-minded took seriously. If you had a spate of bad luck after an old hag hissed and made an angry gesture at you, it was a coincidence, nothing more.
Cursed objects? Equally as absurd. Sit in one specific chair, and you were doomed to die within a year. Own a particular diamond and suffer misfortune for the rest of your days. Then there was the absolute cavalcade of supposedly cursed paintings. Some brought bad luck, others death or disease. Buy the wrong artwork and lose everything in a house fire or be haunted by a screaming man until you were driven to madness.
Either there was a greater overlap between painting and dark magic than anybody knew, or the whole thing was just nonsense.
Elliot was banking on the latter.
He’d purchased a supposedly cursed painting titled ‘The Great Silver Eye’ by an artist called ‘Niemand’. It wasn’t a name he recognized, but to be fair he wasn’t well-versed in the art world beyond a few big names everyone knew. Niemand didn’t seem to have any other works either; just ‘The Great Silver Eye’ and nothing else. One painting and then nothing, as if they’d vanished into the ether.
It was perfect. Obscure artist, vaguely mystical title, mysterious backstory. If it wasn’t cursed, nothing was.
On its own, it wasn’t anything sinister. A forest scene with dark, twisted trees, the full moon peeking through the branches. Just a nightscape; dark, a bit eerie maybe, but nothing that seemed overtly wrong.
Allegedly the moon would change phases from full to new and back again. Once it had completed its cycle the owner would suffer some unspecified terrible fate. Elliot snorted at that. Whoever had made up the story of a curse couldn’t even commit to something specific like death or fire or financial ruin. Just a ‘terrible fate’.
The lack of imagination was almost sad.
He hung it in the hallway where night by night, the moon began to wane. Elliot didn’t even notice at first, but when he glanced at the painting after dinner and found himself staring at a half moon his stomach lurched.
It should be impossible. There was no reason for it to change. No way for it to.
Magic wasn’t real.
Curses weren’t real.
There had to be some sort of trick. A mechanism of some kind, something he didn’t notice earlier on. With trembling hands Elliot took the painting down and ran his hands across it, finding only the smooth, slick expanse of painted canvas beneath his fingers. No latch or seam, nothing that would suggest trickery.
The back, maybe?
He flipped it around, only to find nothing there either. Before he could think about doing anything like taking apart the frame, his wife found him there, sitting on the floor with a painting in his hands.
“Elliot, what on earth are you doing?”
He flipped the painting back around, showing it to her.
“Getting to the bottom of this.”
“Of what?”
“Of this!” Elliot gestured angrily to the canvas, not seeing why he had to explain something so obvious. “Look at it! The moon’s changed! There’s no way that should be possible if not for some trick, some mechanism this ‘Niemand’ passed off as a curse.”
Diana frowned. “It’s the same as it’s always been,” she said. “A full moon peeking through the trees. Nothing’s different.”
She didn’t see it. Elliot wanted to yell, to shake her, to say ‘How can you not see?’, but no. He wasn’t a violent man by nature. He’d never laid a hand on his wife before and he wasn’t going to start now because of a picture. Instead, he carefully hung the painting back up on the wall.
He looked up at it, hoping it had just been his eyes playing tricks on him the first time. That now he’d see what Diana saw, but no. There it was. Still a half moon.
Still no reason for it.
Elliot bit his lip.
“Maybe I’m just tired,” he said, turning away from both her and it. “So much so that my eyes are playing tricks on me. Perhaps I’ll go to bed early tonight.”
Without another word he headed down the hall, wanting to put as much distance between whatever terrible secret the painting held and himself.
In time the moon completed its cycle back to full, and Elliot woke up in a cold sweat, head throbbing and heart racing. He’d tried to put the painting out of his mind all this time, unable to find any sort of device that caused the change in phases but unwilling to believe in curses.
Unfortunately for him, the painting did not care if it was ignored. The moon was full, and time was up.
He stumbled out of bed, somehow not waking his wife, returning to the hall where the painting’s moon shone full and brighter than ever.
And as his jaws split wider into a maw full of jagged teeth, Elliot Harwood’s last human thought was that maybe curses were real after all.
What a twist! Cleverly constructed & executed
Did you mean to repeat the final sentence twice in the text?