The Uncommissioned Portrait

The old house on Marrow Lane had always felt like a living thing, its walls breathing with the memory of a century of families. I had moved in three months ago, drawn by the cheap rent and the promise of solitude, but the solitude had begun to curdle into something else. It was the nights that got to me, the way the floorboards would settle with sighs that seemed too deliberate, and the flickering of the gas lamps that made the shadows dance in the corners of my bedroom.

I was a painter, and my studio was set up in the spare room, the one with the big bay window that overlooked the overgrown garden. My latest obsession was a series of self-portraits, trying to capture what I felt was a growing hollowness in my own features. I would set the camera on a tripod, use the timer, and paint from the photographs. But the photographs were wrong. In each one, there was a blur—a smudge of light that hovered just behind my shoulder, like a breath on the glass. I dismissed it as a smudge on the lens, a trick of the flash, but the unease lingered.

One night, I woke to a sound like someone turning the pages of a book. I lay still, my heart thudding, listening. The sound came from the studio across the hall. I crept to the door, which was slightly ajar, and peered in. The camera was on its tripod, the red light blinking. It was set to take a picture every five minutes, a feature I had left on from an earlier time-lapse experiment. But I had shut it down before bed. I watched as the flash fired, flooding the room with a harsh white light, and in that light, I saw something—a shape, tall and thin, standing between the camera and the easel. It was featureless, like a silhouette cut from darkness, but it was unmistakably there.

The flash died, and the shape was gone. I fumbled for the light switch, but the bulb blew with a pop, plunging the room into darkness. I retreated to my bed, pulling the covers over my head like a child, and stayed there until dawn. I told myself it was a trick of the light, a reflection off a glass pane, but the memory of that shape was seared into my mind.

In the morning, I examined the camera. The memory card was empty—no new photos had been taken. But when I looked at my latest self-portrait, the one I had been working on, I saw something that made my blood run cold. There, in the background, where I had painted the empty studio wall, there was now a figure. The paint was fresh, as if I had just applied it, but I had not touched the canvas in days. The figure was vague, but it was there, a dark shape with arms that seemed to reach out toward the painted me, and I knew, without a doubt, that it was the same shape from the camera.

I tried to scrub it off, but the paint only smeared, turning the figure into a ghastly smear that made the portrait look like a scene from a nightmare. I threw the canvas into the garden, but the next morning it was back in the studio, propped against the wall, the figure now more distinct. It had a face now—or rather, the suggestion of one, features blurred as if seen through water. And the painted me in the portrait had turned to look at it, my own eyes now wide with terror.

I stopped sleeping. Every night, I heard the camera click, the shutter opening and closing, and I would see the flash through the crack under the studio door. I knew what it was doing: it was capturing me, in my bed, in my fear. And I knew that with each image, the figure in the portrait grew more solid, more real.

Last night, I decided to face it. I burst into the studio, camera already in my hand, ready to capture whatever was there. But the studio was empty. The camera was on the floor, its lens shattered. The portrait was gone. In its place, a new painting, one I had not made. It showed a figure, now fully formed, standing in my bedroom, looking down at a huddled woman on the bed—me. And in the corner of the painting, on the nightstand, was the camera, its flash arched like a lightning bolt, illuminating the scene.

I turned to leave and found the camera on the floor had been replaced. And in the frame of the door, a tall, dark shape stood, its face still indistinct, but I could feel its eyes on me. And I knew that this time, it wasn’t just in the painting. It was here, and it was waiting for me to become part of its canvas.