The Unfinished Portrait

The summer I turned twelve, my mother and her sisters gathered at our old farmhouse to sort through my grandmother’s belongings after her passing. As they rummaged through dusty trunks and moth-eaten quilts, they began to trade stories about their childhood, and one tale emerged that chilled me to the bone despite the sweltering heat.

Grandmother was a young bride when she and Grandfather moved into a ramshackle cottage on the edge of a sprawling cranberry bog. Grandfather was a gifted painter, celebrated for his landscapes that seemed to breathe with life. But he was also a soft touch, never charging his friends for his work, and they often left with canvases tucked under their arms, leaving barely enough coins for bread. The cottage was modest, with a sagging porch and windows that rattled in the wind, but it was home. Their only neighbor was an old hermit named Mr. Holloway, who lived in a shack deeper in the bog and was rumored to have lost his mind after his wife vanished years ago.

One autumn evening, as Grandfather was finishing a portrait of Grandmother for their fifth anniversary, a knock came at the door. It was Mr. Holloway, soaked from a sudden downpour, clutching a small, tarnished locket. “I need you to paint her,” he said, his voice trembling. Grandfather, ever kind, invited him in. Mr. Holloway opened the locket to reveal a faded photograph of a woman with sad eyes. “Her name was Elsie,” he whispered. “She was taken from me, and I need her back.”

Grandfather agreed, despite Grandmother’s uneasy glance. For days, he worked on the portrait, but something was wrong. He would paint, then stop, staring at the canvas as if it were a stranger. Grandmother noticed the paint seemed to dry dark, almost black, and the colors refused to blend. At night, she heard scratching from the bog, like something was clawing at the earth. Mr. Holloway visited often, pacing and muttering, but he never looked at his unfinished portrait—he only stared at the locket, his fingers tracing the silver edge.

On the seventh night, Grandmother woke to find Grandfather gone. She found him in the studio, standing before the portrait, brush in hand, but his eyes were vacant. The canvas was half-finished—Elsie’s face, but her eyes were voids, like holes in the world. Grandfather whispered, “She speaks to me, but I cannot capture her. She wants me to finish her, to set her free.” Suddenly, the locket on the table snapped open on its own, and a cold wind swept through the room, extinguishing the lanterns. From the bog came a sound that was almost a song, but it twisted into a scream that seemed to tear the night apart.

Grandmother knew then that this was no ordinary request. She remembered the old tales about the bog, how it sometimes swallowed things whole, and that Mr. Holloway’s wife had walked into the marsh one foggy morning and never returned. She confronted Mr. Holloway, who broke down and confessed: “I didn’t paint her to remember her. I painted her to trap her. But the ritual went wrong. She’s not in the portrait—she’s in the bog, and now she wants my soul.” He showed Grandmother a hidden page in his journal with a grotesque illustration: a hand emerging from the mire, grasping at the sky.

Terrified, Grandmother begged Grandfather to stop, but he seemed bewitched. He spoke to the empty canvas as if Elsie were standing before him, answering questions only he could hear. On the night of the full moon, Mr. Holloway was found dead, drowned in a shallow pool of bog water, his locket clutched in his fist, its chain snapped. Grandfather finished the portrait that night, but when Grandmother looked at it, she saw not Elsie, but a distorted version—her features stretched, her eyes replaced by twin droplets of black, like wet tar. She also noticed small, dark shapes moving in the bog outside the window, and she felt a pressure in her chest as if something were pressing against her heart.

Grandfather destroyed the portrait the next morning, burning it in the stove, but the image was seared into their minds. The bog grew quiet, but the paintings Grandfather created afterward were never the same. He would paint landscapes, but in the corners, there would be a shadowy figure, or a hand reaching out of a murky pond. He continued to give away his work for free, but now it seemed less like kindness and more like a compulsion. He died a few years later, leaving his family with no money, only his strange canvases that no one wanted to hang.

As my mother finished the story, she held up a small, tarnished locket that had been hidden in my grandmother’s sewing box. Inside was a tiny painting, no larger than a thumbnail, of a woman’s face—but it was wrong. A liquid darkness leaked from her eyes, pooling on the paper. My aunt gasped, and I felt a coldness drain my warmth. I don’t know why, but I reached out and touched the locket. For a moment, I could have sworn I heard my grandmother’s voice, faint and distant, say, “Don’t finish what was started.”

We sold the cottage later that summer, but the locket went missing in the move. Sometimes, at night, I think I hear a scratching at the window, and when I look out, I see the cranberry bog, dark and still. And I wonder if Elsie is still waiting for someone to finish her portrait, and whether my grandmother’s warning was meant for me.