A very wealthy man bought a painting. He was a neophyte, a paddler in the shallows of the galleries, exactly the sort of uninformed idiot impressed by sales spiels and references to Great Art. He had the added disadvantage of having friends of equal intelligence. They had recently discovered that rich people are supposed to love art, and they and their overweight bank balances had therefore invested in some social necessities. The man had followed like the cultural sheep he was.

The painting was of an 18^th century street, one of the less morbid English things that makes the period look much more hygienic than it was. The painter, a competent artist but a relative unknown, had made a habit of using London street scenes. This painting contained cheerful urchins, hearty wenches, even heartier old people, “sturdy” looking working men, and one semi-prosperous person in a top hat. More or less the standard fare of the time, and acceptably expensive enough to be considered Great Art.

Gatherings were held each week as the idiots performed their ritual of Art Appreciation and Criticism. The man’s home was the setting for the present meeting, and he’d invited a real artist to speak. The ritual was just that. The idiots didn’t really know enough to disagree with each other, and were all on a par of ignorance. The artist had recognized that within five seconds of meeting the man, and wasn’t expecting much stimulus from the evening.

The subject was the new painting, and the artist was doing a bit of research on the painter. It seemed the painter had disappeared shortly after painting it, and it was his last completed work. Topical, anyway, and worth including in the talk. It did mildly up-value the work, too, so it would be a sop to the man’s pride. The painting was only worth what he paid for it if he was a confirmed optimist. The sort of person who would consider the loss of a limb as an easy way of losing weight. The artist decided to downplay the painter’s lack of market pull and concentrate on The Valid Cultural Context of his art. That usually impresses someone. It also at least gives the impression of a person whose judgment of art is perceptive of artistic values.

The artist arrived to see the predicted supply of sheep. These cultural cud-chewers can normally be purchased wholesale from any “avant” gallery and will never shut up unless hit with something. The painting had pride of place on a wall with a bit of drapery behind it. The artist gazed at it in passing, and thought that he couldn’t have been looking at it very closely previously, because it wasn’t quite as he remembered it.

Well, it was a fairly pedestrian piece, perhaps he’d mixed it up with a thousand or so others of its genre. The evening itself was pedestrian enough, with a decided limp about technical matters, and a bunion of sheer ignorance on the subject of the 18^th century had kept him talking till about 11 PM. Thankfully he left ahead of the guests, who stayed discussing Art. He could hear the quotes coming like heavy rain as he left.

A hideous scream stopped him in the driveway. It was a sound so high pitched that it actually felt like all his fillings were coming out. The scream continued, accompanied by total silence. There was no shouting, no sound of movement, no suggestion of physical activity. The lights were on. He thought what he should do, with an amount of adrenalin he’d never before experienced crashing through him.

Even more alarming was the realization that there was no sound coming from anywhere else. The town, a few blocks away, was quite silent. There was no sign of anything on the roads, which was extremely unusual, because they were on a main road. There was something wrong with the light. It was as if there was a bright full moon, but there was no moon.

The scream, unbroken, continued. So did the silence. Suddenly it was very cold. Unenthusiastically the artist decided to check the windows. The window of the room where the gathering was being held informed him that room was now empty. The light was on, but everything else seemed to be normal. The rest of the house, including the servants rooms, was also quite empty. There were supposed to be two dogs, and neither of them was to be found.

He dug out his phone and eventually managed to call the police. The phone rang endlessly, but there was no answer. He tried his internet connection. Nothing loaded. His email didn’t work, nor did his other messaging systems. The scream by now sounded louder, and was actually hurting his ears.

The artist decided that no choice was realistic. He had no idea what to do about the scream. He went back to his car, and started it up. The scream started sounding from his engine. Now he had two screams. Still unable to believe any of it, he ran down the driveway. The gravel began to scream at him. He leaped onto the lawn, and the gravel subsided to an insistent squeak, but continued to add to the din.

He admitted to himself that he was terrified. This was just too weird, even for his tastes. His hands were shaking and his knees seemed to be made of pure fear. He wanted to vomit, or urinate, or something, but he couldn’t. He was also freezing. The cold was tyrannical. That, more than anything, drove him back to the house. It was so cold he didn’t think he’d make it anywhere else.

He whispered through the door, and nothing happened. He entered, and found that the scream wasn’t sounding in the house. His ears cheered. Carefully, if with no confidence, he returned to the room where the people had been. Nobody was there. Everything suggested complete normality. He began to wonder if he’d be arrested for breaking and entering.

He looked around. Glasses still had wine in them. A sandwich remained half eaten. A cup of coffee waited patiently. A clock was bleeding. He tiptoed over to the clock and sniffed unwillingly. Blood. He felt reassured, because even in his condition he knew that wasn’t normal. If a crowd of police entered, he could show them that, and everything would be fine.

OK, now he had something to show someone. Happily he sprinted out of the house, and straight back into the scream, now literally deafening. He fell back into the house, not knowing how. He avoided the room, and meticulously searched everywhere else, behaving like a lost child. There was nothing, and nobody. Not a suspicion of a clue.

He refused to enter the room, and went to the kitchen, emptying a bottle of brandy and smoking every cigarette he could find. He had no idea how long he was there, but somehow discovered it was morning. Refreshed, inebriated, and feeling the effects of his experience in the tired/exhilarated haze of combined shock and sleep deprivation, he went into the kitchen garden and was again deafened by the scream. Cursing, crying, and panting, he ran back inside.

He picked up a kitchen knife and went back into the room. The clock was still there, still bleeding, and the carpet had formed a clotted mass on which more blood dripped in a stream. He got angrier as he looked at the scene. The clock, obviously, was responsible for terrifying him. In a fury he picked up an ornamental brass poker and smashed it to gory pieces.

Then he threw up, convincingly. Feeling weak but better he surveyed the rest of the room. Inevitably he had to look at the painting. That didn’t help. The crowd scene seemed to remind him of everything he loathed about crowds. The faces were ugly, not “quaint”. The scene was squalid, not “picturesque”.

Rather worse, it wasn’t as he remembered it. He’d been certain the man in the top hat had been a bit more central, and the large breasted stereotypical wench in the foreground had been holding a metal tankard. The lips looked unnatural, rouged. Someone was selling human bones in the distance, a background scene he’d obviously missed.

This wasn’t helping. Back in his normal frame of mind, his training reasserting itself, the last few hours seemed even more grotesque. He found himself thinking involuntarily of his time as a student, the deep discussions of art and nature, the laughs… his friends…

A sound, the first he’d heard, a couple of footsteps, came from behind him. A pale, youngish man in 18^th century dress, a bit threadbare, was looking at him.

“I’m White,” said the man, in a London dialect afflicted accent.

White was the painter. That made as much sense as anything had. The artist, not knowing what else to do, introduced himself.

White looked his age, somehow. His eyes grew wild but sad.

“The painting,” he said. “The painting is hungry.” A pause, with a look of real desolation, ensued. With a croaking voice he continued,

“I know not how this happened. I painted it and gave it life. Now it makes me feed it. You broke the clock, and freed me. But as you see, now it hungers the worse.”

The artist looked. The painting had taken on a sickly yellowish tone, the faces had become insane. The man in the top hat grinned a death grin. The big breasted wench was holding a human arm, blood dripping from her mouth. The picture seemed to bulge as some slithering energy began to move. A deep snarl like some vicious beast was heard.

The two artists looked at each other.

“We kill it, or it kills us,” said the artist.

White nodded, and grabbed a box of matches. Bravely he tried to make a fire of some furniture. The artist frantically helped, wishing he hadn’t drunk the brandy. The snarl was a lot closer now. Eventually a decent fire was burning, and two very frightened men grabbed the painting and hurled it onto the bonfire. There was a sound so loud that it actually flattened both of them. holding their ears and crying with the pain, they kicked more fuel onto the fire.

The painting wasn’t burning. The snarl was now slavering, and the painting writhed like a snake. Desperately the artist hit it with the brass poker, causing a roar of rage. The ornate frame began to spit at them, like a cobra, and stung them with some form of acid. White broke a chair and bashed the painting with the leg like a madman. Not much was achieved, despite valiant efforts. The painting continued to fight back and the snarl just got louder.

Something started to ooze out of the painting. The figures disappeared, and an impossibly large amount of something very like paint, of no identifiable color, emerged. They hit the ooze with their weapons, and didn’t even dent it. The fire went out. The ooze sat in the charred area, untouched by the flames. Two very worried men looked at each other and wondered what would happen next.

It started to grow. It grew to the size of an elephant. It changed color, and a big golden eye, inhuman, but clearly an eye, stared at them. Colors flickered through its body at incredible speeds, dazzling, whole spectrums at a time, per second. No strobe would dare try compete. A very deep voice said,

“Who are you to bring me here? What right have you to make me a part of this shabby world? What right allows you to make me into such criminal scum?”

This was obviously addressed to White, who was incapable of expression, let alone answer. All expression had been driven from his face. The artist saw a young and terrified man. He desperately tried to think of a way to help him.

The voice apparently knew what he was thinking.

“Humans- you know so little, and yet dare so much. Your fire and your beatings killed the things you created, images of your own kind, brute and coarse. You have redeemed the crime. But you have brought me here, from the infinite, into this tiny place. I would know more of your infantile little world.”

The artist and White were assimilated into the ooze. The artist felt like an oil paint. He was alive, but he no longer knew what he was. He assumed White was part of the being he now inhabited. He found himself being painted on canvas, drawn on paper, printed on silk, and digitally enhanced.

He also found himself being “appreciated” by people he could see. There was an artist explaining Cultural Values to a crowd of idiots…