The Unpainted Man

I never remembered the incident, but my grandmother swore it happened, and she told the story with such vivid detail that I often felt as though I had lived it. It was the summer of 1987, and we were living in a rented farmhouse on the outskirts of a town that had more cornfields than people. My parents had bought a framed print at a roadside flea market — a pastoral landscape with a small red barn and a winding creek. The man who sold it had insisted it was ‘lucky,’ but my mother always thought he had a shifty look, like he was hiding something behind his smile.

We hung the print in the hallway, near the top of the stairs, just out of my reach. I was three then, and my baby brother was barely a month old. My father worked the night shift at a chemical plant, so most nights it was just my mother, my brother, and me in that creaky old house. It wasn’t long before strange things began to happen. The television would switch channels by itself, cycling through static as if searching for a signal that wasn’t there. My mother’s favorite brooch, which she kept in a jewelry box by her bed, vanished one morning and reappeared inside a coffee mug in the kitchen. At first, she blamed her own exhaustion, the new baby, the move — anything but the supernatural.

But then the painting started to change. At first, it was just subtle — the creek seemed to bend a little differently, the barn’s door appeared slightly ajar. Then one morning, my mother noticed long, angry scratches across the canvas, as if something with claws had raked the surface from the inside. She inspected the back, found nothing, but a cold dread settled in her stomach. She tried to take the painting down, but the frame was stuck to the wall as if glued there. She left it, hoping it was just a childhood prank I had somehow pulled off, though I was barely tall enough to reach the doorknob.

The night it all came to a head is the night my grandmother tells about with a hushed voice. My father was at work, and my mother was dozing on the sofa, the baby asleep in a bassinet beside her, the television humming softly. I came padding into the living room, tugging at her sleeve. ‘Mama, let’s go see the kitty,’ I said, my voice too calm for a child who should have been asleep. My mother blinked awake, confused. ‘We don’t have a kitty, sweetie,’ she said. But I was insistent, pulling her toward the stairs. ‘It’s up there. The man said I can pet it if I bring you.’

My mother’s blood ran cold. She followed me to the base of the stairs, where I pointed up to the landing, where the painting hung. ‘He’s there,’ I said, pointing at the painted barn. ‘He wants you to come see his kitty. He says it’s lonely.’ The painting now showed a figure emerging from the barn — a tall, gaunt man with hollow eyes, his face half-erased as if someone had scrubbed it with a rag. The scratches had formed a spiral pattern around him, like a cyclone. My mother grabbed me and the baby, ran to the car, and drove until dawn. We never went back for the rest of our things; my father had to retrieve them later, and he refused to discuss what he found.

To this day, I don’t remember the event, but I carry the residue of it. Sometimes, in dreams, I walk up a staircase that stretches endlessly, and at the top, a man with a blank face gestures for me to join him. I always wake up before I reach him, but in recent years, the dreams have become more vivid. Last week, I moved into a new apartment, and as I was unpacking, I found a painting I had never seen before — a landscape with a red barn and a winding creek. I tried to throw it away, but the dumpster was already gone. It now hangs in my hallway, and last night, I swear I heard a faint scratching sound coming from the canvas.

I don’t have a cat, but something in that painting is calling to me. And I’m afraid that if I close my eyes, I’ll find myself walking up those stairs again, this time with no one to stop me.