THE SITTING
by Rik Hunik
Copyright 2013 by Rik Hunik
A slightly different version of this story first appeared in Black Petals, Summer, 2003.
Celine was so beautiful it was hard for Peter Dennis to believe she was actually paying him to just sit here in this armchair and look at her. At least that’s what it amounted to for him. He was flattered, of course, that a beautiful artist wanted to paint him, but this was his first time sitting for a painting and it was such a different experience from being photographed professionally that he remained uncomfortable.
“You’re perfect,” she had enthused to him in the nightclub when she picked him up. “I want to paint you into this picture I have to do for a book cover.”
Now he sat unmoving, but his eyes drank in the lithe movements of her arms and hips as she stroked the canvas, her long, reddish-blonde hair pulled back into a braid to keep it away from the paint. He longed to stroke that hair, those hips.
“You remind me of someone,” he said, barely moving his lips. It was something about the ears; he had an eye for such details on women. “Do you have a sister?”
“Her name was Ava.”
“Ava? For a while last year I lived with a girl named Ava. Ava Bradly, or Bradny, or something strange like that. But she never mentioned any sisters.”
“What happened?” Celine fixed her blue eyes his, then turned back to the painting.
“She dumped me. I came home one night and she was gone. I never saw her again.”
“You got over it, though.”
“Oh yeah. She was fooling around on me anyway, and there are lots of other fish in the sea. I’ve caught more than a few since then.”
“I’ll bet you have,” Celine said around the paintbrush she held in her mouth.
“What?”
She removed the paintbrush from her mouth. “Keep your mouth still for a while. I want to paint it now. Just keep your hands where they are on the arms of the chair and look straight ahead.”
He did as she requested, striking a noble pose, chin up, jaw firm. She caught his eye for a second and flashed him a smile.
“Don’t move.”
It occurred to Peter that he didn’t yet know Celine’s last name, but this was not a good time to ask. He sat still and watched her work.
Her body under the close-fitting, paint-smeared jumpsuit had enough curves to lead any man’s eyes astray and she was as graceful as a dancer, mixing paint, dabbing at the canvas, switching brushes. He amused himself by fantasizing about what he would do to her breasts when they were alone in her bedroom after the painting was done.
Time dragged. He drifted off into a doze.
# # #
He woke to see Celine standing right in front of him. He tried to ask if she was finished but his mouth didn’t work. He tried to inhale but it was like sucking molasses through a straw. He tried harder to speak, managed a gargling sound.
Celine raised an eyebrow. “What did you say?”
He gargled again and tried to bring a hand up to his throat, but his hand wouldn’t work for him either.
“Oh, you can’t talk? I understand. And you can’t move? I know. Trouble breathing? Don’t worry Mr. Dennis, it doesn’t matter. I can explain.” Her eyes, so soft and seductive before, now held a hard brilliance, and a tight smile twisted her lips.
Peter felt fear infuse every fiber of his being. Had she drugged him somehow?
She stroked around him with a large brush. “Her name was Ava Bladry.”
When she moved aside from directly in front of him he saw that he was at her end of the room, but she hadn’t moved, which meant he had, but how?
“My name is Celine Bladry.” She dabbed at his face with a little brush and he felt sweat break out. “Ava was a sweet, innocent girl, always with a song in her heart. I tried to warn her about the city but she moved here anyway. Then she met you.”
Stroke, stroke, stroke with the big brush. Colors appeared in the blind-spot-gray that filled his peripheral vision; reds, oranges, browns.
“You were so charming at first. You dated her briefly, then moved into her apartment against her will, alienated all the friends she made, isolated her, took over her life, spent her money, and then to keep her in line, you started beating her.”
Peter remembered Ava, but it hadn’t been like that. He wanted to explain, to say something in his own defense, but he couldn’t speak at all.
Celine continued the aggressive application of paint and the terse delivery of her story. “Ava never fooled around on you, but you cheated on her every chance you got, and then you beat her for it. You’re nothing but a god damned, rotten, lowdown, good-for-nothing, woman-beating bastard.” Stroke stroke.
Peter felt distinctly warmer.
“In a few months you beat the will to live right out of her. She jumped off a bridge and you didn’t even care enough to find out what happened to her.”
Even though he could not move his eyes Peter Dennis could see enough at the edge of his vision to recognize steep rock walls rising on both sides, lit from below with lurid, red highlights.
“It just wasn’t like her. I had to find out why she did it so I hired a private investigator. He dug up a lot of shit from your past and found out all about you and my sister. Then he tracked you down for me.”
Celine stepped away from the painting so he could see her. Her malevolent eyes, so different than the seductive ones she’d used in the bar, burned into his and he felt cold fear clutch at his heart.
“You don’t deserve to live.” She raised her brush like a weapon and stepped close again. “This is for Ava and all the other women who suffered the displeasure of knowing you.”
She lapsed into silence as she filled the area below him with reds and bright oranges so vivid he could hear the lava bubbling beneath him,. The searing heat blasted right through him as she extended the rock walls to enclose his entire field of vision, so he found himself hovering in the easy chair deep inside the crater of an active volcano.
The magic brush worked on him; his clothing smoldered, the skin on his arms blistered and peeled, the flesh beneath sizzled as his body cooked. Every touch of the brush brought new agony.
He wanted to scream, he had to scream, he tried to scream. He could not scream.
# # #
“This is an outstanding painting, Celine,” the art director said as she stepped back to admire it. “It’s absolutely perfect for the anthology, far beyond my expectations. There’s such genuine pain and terror all over his face and in his eyes, and in the way he grips the chair. How did you ever capture that expression in such detail? You can almost hear him scream.”
Celine smiled an enigmatic smile and brushed the question away with a casual wave of her hand. “That’s a trade secret.”
The End
Other titles by Rik Hunik:
Down Among The Hoodoos (ghost story)
The Tale Of Orm's Revenge (sword & sorcery)
The Emperor Germanicus (time traveling to change history)
For Sakina (fantasy mystery)
The Hole Story (science fiction)
Widdershins (modern fantasy retelling of old English folk tale)
The Gold Watch (western ghost story)
Defiance (horror poem)
Reality Check (science fiction horror)
Easy Money (alternate history, fantasy, paranormal detective novel)
Vacation Violation (dark science fiction)
Key Service (humorous contemporary fantasy)
On Full Moon Night (horror poem)
The Spirit Of The Game (horror story) Things go wrong when a game designer makes a special game for his widowed mother so she can play cards with h
er deceased husband.
A Clone Of His Own (science fiction, fantasy)
The Hollow Idol's Eyes (fantasy)
Incident In A Tomb (fantasy, horror, humor)
The Ghost In The Kettle (ghost story)
The Eruption At Mount Sarna (fantasy)
Worse Than An Orphan's Curse (fantasy)
Joyride (fantasy, horror)
Dead Man's Ashes (dark fantasy)
Green Eyes (horror)
Defiance 2 (poem)
The Treasure In The Monkey's Fist (fantasy)
Goodbye Grandpa (science fiction, time travel)
Witch's Skin (horror)
Goldbug (fantasy)
The Dark Gate (fantasy novel)
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