Grim Portrait

Dexter Cauldrose is a mildly talented artist, his technique often crude and composition amateur. Despite this, his portraits are sought after by the fashionable rich. The waiting list is several months long and as a result, Cauldrose has a richer lifestyle than many other, far finer, artists.

He is a success because of his novelty value. Cauldrose specialises is gruesome portraits, revealing his subject in death. Sometimes he portrays his subjects lying in state, but often has them disembowelled and brutally mutilated. In some circles, the more brutal the death, the better.

Then, they begin to die.

Cauldrose is the first to go. His self-portrait showed his body chopped to pieces in a barren room. (It was the reaction to this painting that led him to identify his market.) His body is found in a barren room, chopped and looking exactly as he painted. At first it is taken to be a very sick joke, then others begin to die as well.

Possibilities

1 Cauldrose’s paintings are not so much predicting the future, as creating it. Cauldrose himself was killed by an escaped lunatic. Others will become accident victims, suicides, or mauled by wild animals. Each death is unconnected, except by the extraordinary artwork of Dexter Cauldrose.

The deaths occur at the same rate as the portraits were painted. As the pattern is discerned, worried subjects will be able to determine the time of their demise. There is no way out, except for the destruction of these violent works of art.

2 Before each killing, the subject is approached by a tall black man, elegantly dressed in black. He offers a bargain, a contract. In return for signing a single sheet of paper, covered in indecipherable typescript, the subject will be spared.

At first, the subjects ignore him, only to pay the price. Then, when the first escapes the seemingly inexorable murders, the contract is brought into light. Written in an unknown language, the subject has unwittingly signed away his soul to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.

But why does the Outer God want their souls? And when will he collect?

3 The real painter is Cauldrose’s insane brother, working from crude sketches and photographs provided by Dexter. Locked in the attic, he lived for nothing but to paint. Then, his condition worsened, and he turned on his brother, dressing the body to look like his art. Now he is wandering the streets, hunting for other subjects.

© Steve Hatherley