A short story by Yazidel "The Drawnist" Soleno.
Inspired on the painting "Concetto Spaziale" by Lucio Fontana.
Poor Adam Penndiangti, a passionate man, an artist who puored his soul into his making, tormented in his dreams by visions of ghosts. Gave up the purpose of his whole life for his dreams turned into an spectacle of horrors beyond comprehenssion.
Adam's awful case reached such a point that sleeping became nothing but the worst of tortures for him, desperate for the agony of his soul, the tormented artist resorted to forces beyond the natural order as a last hope to free his soul of such torment, through which he managed to contact those beings of his visions, Desperated, the man begged for the mercy of his tormentors, which, to his surprise, and without further negotiation was granted to him, just under one single condition.
Surprisingly, it turned out these beings were admirers, showing appreciation for his work in their own twisted way, so they asked the poor artist to portray them on one of his canvases.
Faced with the prospect of finally being freed of them, he didn't hesitate to grant their request.
A task now oddly easy for him, each brushstroke felt like the wight over his afflicted mind lightened and soon, his part of the deal was done and the images of the ghosts depicted in a painting.
However, it did'nt take long for him to realize that the cure was worse than the disease.
Those beings had deceived him. They lied! Lied by saying that his torment would end once his part of the deal was fulfilled.
The horrendous visions no longer tormented him only at night; he couldn't think of anything else than those things that visited him every time he closed his eyes, they were there on every blink, everytime he shut his lids.
"Liars" Whispers of voices speaking in strange dialects, thunderous laughter inside his ears, specters that watched him from the corner of his eye. "Shup up! Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!" Everything seemed to be the work of the creatures and his damned painting, that painting he shouldn't have ever made, the one that bringed his disgrace to sunlight, so horrendous that no one wanted to buy it.
Adam, otherwise very attached to his work, would completely loathe the very idea of damaging his work, even an accidental scratch to any of his works, could not take it anymore. He tried to dispose of it in every possible way, burn it, throw it into the depths of a nearby river, the canvas always reappeared in his studio without a single apparent scrape.
With his sanity hanging by a thread, Adam, the damned artist fisted a sharp blade, folded the sleeves of his shirt, and with eyes filled with tears of pain, raised the blade and attacked the canvas, stabbing and piercing the blade of the dagger, ignoring the deafening screams of agony that seemed to come from the painting until he had exhausted all his strength.
It was no until when finally not a single recognizable centimeter of the painting remained, Adam's vision began to blur, his knees trembled, his breathing became heavier with each exhalation.
Adam Penndiangti fell to the groung and when he looked up to see the horrendous figures of the last work of his life, covered with the blood that flowed from his cut wrists, he realized that what the deafening noises coming from the canvas were not screams, but shrieks of laughter.
