It was with trepidation that at last I entered the old schoolroom where I had stashed away the hideous portrait of myself. Slipping the purple satin pall from the gilt-framed shoulders of a more than slightly ostentatious gold-frame, I suppressed a moan of horror at the spectacle before me.
Had I let it come to this?
This portrait of utter foulness that lay itself bare like a common whore before me was a portrait of myself: myself as I had never before allowed the public to view me. Indeed, even I was unsure of exactly when my advanced years and (as society was wont to claim) "despicable" actions had culminated in what I saw before me.
Ah, it was still Dorian Gray, but no longer Dorian Gray as the world knows me!
The crisp hyacinth curls of bright gold that crowned my head had thinned and aged on the head of this withered, vile creature that stared out from the dark confines of the canvas. Lank strands of dull gray clung desperately to the scalp, falling over scowling, thinning brows and disclosing a pair of eyes, watery blue and bloodshot, long faded into dismal holes from the burning stars they once were. Those lips, my lips thinned and cracked with age, were stretched in the remnants of a cruel grimace more akin to a wild creature baring its teeth than the boyish smile of innocence the painting had once portrayed. The teeth, ah, how horrible were the teeth! Yellow and rotted like those of a skull that had lain years beneath the finely-sifted soil.
"Dorian Gray," I whispered to myself in revulsion, –to which Dorian did I speak! -, Staring at "my" flawless, unspotted hands. "I" am not "myself" anymore. This painting, Basil Hallward's painting, revealed the truth! Aged and twisted and ugly was what I had become. The pretty, fine youth standing opposite his own self was naught but an illusion, the rash wish of what Youth is and knows he is, and wishes to remain.
And Basil.
My dear friend Basil Hallward, the enchanting artist whom I had sat for so many times as he lovingly applied me in dabs and swirls of paint to a canvas, my friend whom I had been unable to show this terrible, decaying portrait to, for he knew not what fate and wishes had inflicted on it. He had expected his one masterpiece.
And in a dark hour of near insanity, I had murdered him! In this very room, murdered Basil Hallward!
Murdered him, and burned his bones in a furnace.
Evil, vile Dorian, what have you become?
What have you always been?
Was it Lord Henry Wotton that had inflicted this mad fervor of the poisoned mead of eternal youth and corruption upon me? Lord Henry, the artist's friend, the cynical and eloquent friend of my own beloved basil, whom I had knifed and burnt to a cinder in these very rooms! Was it Henry Wotton who became my own personal Mephistopheles to my premature Faust, or had he just quickened a desire that, in my boyish innocence, I had paid no attention?
Basil had said that Henry would be a bad influence on me. I, possibly, was a bad influence of myself! It was I who had influenced Wotton!
Had I loved him then? I am no longer sure.
Love.
Love is Hell, Hell is love, and the wedding bells are a knell to the grave, except no one knows it yet!
Just ask Sibyl Vane.
Poor Sibyl Vane, the little actress who so charmingly played Ophelia and Rosalind and, so exquisitely, Juliet. I had killed her, not with my own hands, but by killing her happiness when I separated myself from her when she no longer acted the part of a lover well thanks to her true-to-life love affair with none other than myself.
Sibyl Vane, who poisoned herself in a little room. Her blood drips from the withered hands of my portrait, later joined by Basil's.
Possibly there is also the blood of Jim Vane, her brother, and the girl I met out in the country and abandoned, out of fear for her own well-being. Was her name Henrietta? I cannot remember. Did her blood, and the blood of the Vane boy splash in macabre drops of carmine paint to ooze thickly from the fingers of grim, decaying Dorian Gray?
There is no blood innocence! There cannot be, after one has broken hearts, murdered friends; abused substances in the dank and smoky opium dens.
To Hell with it and to Hell with Mister Dorian Gray! He has upstaged the Devil!
I have my dagger and Mephistopheles Wotton awaits the descent of his greedy comrade-in-arms.