It has to be finished. Once this is complete, everything will stop. My magnum opus...everything must stop...

It was a quiet place, that studio, as one would expect from somewhere buried so deeply in the earth. Thick walls lined the circumference, kept the dirt from imposing on the air inside, but their plaster and paste trapped silence. It clung to every surface in downy strands, layered up like dust. It was dark, but not in the cold manner of caverns, nor the conforming mystery of nighttime black; from the single gas lamp interred in the ceiling, the dark was stained gold, marbled with a burnished hue that fell upon everything unevenly, as though it had hoped for better things to illuminate than that dingy quarter and its sole occupant and would only go about its trade sullenly as a result.

In the centre of that room stood a man. He was neither very tall, nor very large, and held all the innate presence of a desk lamp. Seeing him, one might have felt disappointed and it was certainly the air exuded by the walls; for all their own mystic, they, like the light, might have hoped for a more suitably portent occupant.

What stood there instead of some great, unmerciful phantasm, was a mere, man-sized thing, mortal in every aspect and underwhelmingly usual. In appearance, he was the elder of his years and stooped by their weight, each one thrown carelessly over shoulders no longer imbibed with the youthful strength necessary to carry such a burden; he had the middling cast of a man who had once been handsome—regally so—but had fallen prey to time's ravishing hands and withered like an apple or flower. Such was the nature and magnitude of this glory's decay that, were men made aware of it, it's state, like its naturebound counterparts, would have been lamentingly declaimed by many poets. For it was not simply the man's body which had so stooped to time, but his mind. That majesty of genius and skill had surpassed itself, slipping, quite unnoticed, in to quiet, simmering madness.

Locked above, the oblivious world carried on. The room in which he resided, with its walls of stone silence and gold-marbled dark, did not care for his decayed mind any more than he cared for the damp that festered in the corners or the cairns of insectile bodies laid upon the floor.

Everything must end here, my darling, you see that, don't you? You know it has to stop. I can't sleep. I can't eat. You follow me everywhere...

So I have to leave you here...it has to stop...

In all the world, he had eyes only for the thing he stood before, the vast canvas that the wooden frame that had served him so well held proudly aloft. Like a reverent before the alter of his God, he cowered, making sacrifices of his brushes and staining the burgeoning fresco with both the milk and the blood of their toils. He muttered to it, confessional whispers, hoarse pleas and prayers, each turned upon the deaf ears of his merciless saviour; his most feared, his most beloved, the result of all his efforts...his finale.

The letters say I should. Sat on a desk not so very far from the easel, the scrimshaw mutter of encouragement persisted. Throats with wax-seal teeth and ribboned tongues all cheered in their ink-black voices, the rustled cracking of simultaneously deafening and so quiet it may not have ever been. They had told him he should continue. Finish her painting, and she will leave. Paint what you see in the world, Holt...

Hadn't a friend once said that?

The painter choked on a laugh, brush faltering; I haven't seen Desmond in years. Why haven't I seen him?

Impassible, the walls said nothing. The canvas, upon which he painstakingly daubed the likeness of his beloved nightmare, gave him no response.

So he continued, a desperate appeal to apathetic angels and paper demons. Steadily, the hours passing leisurely by, curious as to this latest development in the painter's abode and lingering, his work drew closer to fruition; firstly, the nebulous haze on the board gained form, becoming that of a woman, standing stately and proud; a frill of darkness flowered about the figure's neckline; the jagged, flat edges of jewels started to adorn her chest; hair or feathers—it was momentarily unclear which the painter had decided to give her, but they began to take shadowy form. From the perspective of a base outsider, it hardly seemed as though the old man was painting at all; rather, he was a magician, or conjurer, summoning forth a figure from the misted realm within the paper.

Lily! My sweet Lily; why have you forsaken me?

A rose, single and solitary, found itself upon the woman's breast. It was not red. It did not look like the sort of flower that would condone so frivolous a colour, but would sneer upon the joyful and the passionate, and leech life away with its lustreless resplendence.

And my little girl, why do you hide from me? Have I done something wrong? Was gone too long? It all ends here, Alice...

After tonight, everything stops. I promise.

Black tongues bound the woman's wrists, bracelets so tight they seemed inseparable from skin. Though their elegance only served to enhance that of the faceless woman, there was no mistaking what dark purpose they served—manacles, as though she required confinement beyond that provided by the limits of paper and paint.

Detail after impeccable detail, and then she stood before him, perfection incarnate bar one, faceless flaw. If before, the painter took his time, this last element takes an eternity, an endless purgatory in which he etches her features onto the bare swathe centring her face. The stony crook of a brow ridge, the flattened arc of thin lips, the concave puckering of cheeks and temples...slowly, the nonexistent viewer came to realise that the painting—which, to that point, had borne the makings of beauty—was not a thing of angels at all. To the common man, her jagged, gash of a smile, her limpid eyes limned with fire, and tar-streaked face branded her as unsettling.

Despite this, the painter's expression was steadfast; adoration, hatred, rage, regret, and grief...no fear. Not yet...

A final flicker of the brush—the brush he had used for all of his paintings prior; the brush he was proud to use for his last—a gently, lingering caress of the not-angel's amber eye, before she was complete. He stepped away as a man with a gun pressed to his temple puts his finger on the trigger; resigned to both the fear and finality of that last gesture.

I am so very sorry, my dearest muse. But this is our end...

There was no one to congratulate him, on the completion of this, his greatest work. Gaslight fell upon her uneasily, sifting greaseless over the flatness of canvas in a way that erroneously suggested a less linear contour, and those dispassionate walls cared for art as much as they cared for the man who painted it. With their wounded pride, they bled silence and said nothing.

With a dead man's gait, the painter stepped to the door, whereupon he reduced the leniency of the valve ordaining the flow of gas, suffocating the glow until it became the merest thing, the bare bones of a light by which no one could honestly profess to see. Gladly, it receded, dropping from the woman with little hesitancy and retreating across the floor until only the painter was illuminated. With a last regretful look at the portrait no one would ever see, the old master moved to shut the door on his last painting...

There was a noise in the shadow, like someone had torn darkness itself. Then footsteps, starting from the centre of that room where, previously, nothing had stood but the easel.

Screams. Screams that unravelled a body and left their originator limp and helpless. Screams that can only be pried from those truly afraid.

Then, a paintbrush, old and worn before its time, clattered meekly to the ground, soon joined by a rose that had never known that roses were meant to be red.

And the walls said nothing.