Behind the Portrait of Magnus Von Krahl
Another attempt at something Lovecraftian. Same memes as "Folie A Vingt," "Bete Noir," and "The Infernal Tower."Not one of my better pieces. I guess in some small way this was kind of one of the stylistic warm-ups for "The Vimana Incident" but it really has very little to do with that project.
Behind the Portrait of Magnus Von Krahl
by
Rose LaCroix
My great-grandmother Matilda passed away in May of 2002, aged ninety-one years, four months, sixteen days.
If not for a battle with lymphoma starting at age eighty-five she might have handily exceeded this venerable age. She was of robust Swedish stock, hardened in the dust bowl of 1930s Oklahoma... a true woman of the frontier, tough as the weathered boards of the lone farm house where she had lived since 1940.
The recurring joke among family members was that old Matilda kept the Grim Reaper at bay with a rolled up newspaper and a scowl. I remember, as a boy, hearing about the notoriously poisonous letters she sent my mother and grandmother. The few times I had visited with her as a boy, she had always found something to be annoyed about, and generally sat playing solitaire at the kitchen table while castigating my sister for being left-handed (a peculiar thing in her time, apparently).
It was only toward the end of her life, as her manner began to mellow and she became aware that her long life was nearing its end, that family began to visit her regularly. She continued to live alone until the last year of her life, fiercely independent and always capable. When she finally went ever so reluctantly to a nursing home, her house was padlocked and hawkishly watched by my great uncle Joe-Bob.
I was unable to attend Grandma Matilda's funeral. I was a senior in high school at the time, preparing for final exams and unable to devote 4 days to traveling with my mother to Oklahoma. I was also absent when family began to pick through the mountains of random items stacked floor to ceiling in the old farm house.
I was given a few small things; some rocks, an old compass, a few 1940's farmer's almanacs, and an old art deco cigarette case. The remainder, I could only guess at the time, had either been distributed among her 34 living descendants or given away to thrift shops.
Then, seven years later, the painting arrived.
I had come home from work one day to see a large box on my doorstep, with priority mail stickers all over it and a slew of postage stamps haphazardly slathered on one corner. I was surprised to see that it was addressed from my great aunt Thelma-Lou, a relative I had only met once at a family gathering in Texas.
I promptly dragged the heavy box in and opened it with my car keys, slitting the tape neatly along the box flaps. The box had been padded with a large amount of newspaper, most of it apparently from the mid-1970s. I knew immediately that this must be something from Grandma Matilda's infamous hoard.
As I pulled the contents free of the box, I noticed a hand-written letter on floral print stationery emblazoned with the Bible verse Phillippians 4:13:
Dear Lawry,
So sorry this got to you so late. We had boxes and boxes of stuff from Mama's place just sitting in the garage for years and didn't know we had this painting. Mama said you should have it but no one knew where it was.
I'm happy to get rid of it. When we were kids this painting used to scare us, and even now it surely does give me the willies!
It looks really old. Maybe you can sell it to an art collector.
With love,
Your Aunt Thelma-Lou
Without further ado I had begun carefully unwrapping the painting from its layers upon layers of yellowed newspaper. I had no idea what condition it could possibly be in after being stored this way for so long.
I was relieved to see that both the painting and the frame were still perfectly sturdy, and then quite shocked when my eyes fixed upon the painting itself.
It was a portrait of a scholarly-looking man, painted in an early Renaissance style. He was dressed in a black robe and wearing a peculiar close-fitting hood of deep crimson, surrounded by the tools and symbols of an alchemist. In one hand was a quill, poised over a half-written page. His face was curiously gaunt and pale, with dark eyes sunk deep into their weary sockets and a brow bent into an indelible scowl. His mouth and chin were completely blocked from view by a thick black mustache and beard that came to a sharp point.
Neither the painting nor the frame had any signature or identifying mark. It seemed the artist and the subject had wanted to remain anonymous and I could only guess that this was intentional.
No sooner had I set the painting on a shelf in my closet when I heard a hiss and a growl behind me. There stood Valentine, my calico cat. Her eyes were fixed on the gaze of the man in the painting, her tail fluffed and twitching. “Easy there, Val-val. It's only a painting,” I said, reaching down to pet her. Valentine backed away and hissed angrily. “Oh, alright...” I said, taking a spare blanket from a nearby shelf and covering the painting.
Valentine seemed to calm down somewhat, but still avoided the closet the rest of the evening. I thought nothing of it; cats can be strange, fickle creatures and Valentine was no exception.
I decided the best thing to do with the painting was to have an expert look at it... though I doubted I would ever know the identity of the steely-eyed alchemist.
* * *
The painting was greeted somewhat with amusement by the art department at Bowman College in Little Rock. Although the faculty were very professional and forward about its likely origins, they seemed to treat it as more of a curiosity than anything of importance; I couldn't help but feel that they might have given the same level of cursory assistance if my great-grandmother had done the painting herself.
I learned only that it was, most likely, from the late 15th century and that the subject and artist were, indeed, a complete mystery. After obtaining several contacts from any professor who would look at the piece (including the name of an art conservation specialist in Kansas City), I thanked them all, then drove home with the painting in the passenger seat.
After dropping the painting off at home, I went to buy packing supplies to ship the painting to Kansas City. If this was an actual 15th century painting, I was determined to invest in preserving it.
* * *
About two weeks later, I got a phone call from a Missouri area code.
“Hello, may I speak to Lawrence Naylor?” a voice asked.
“Yes, I'm here,” I replied.
“Mr. Naylor, this is Fred Richards with Richards Art Conservators, I was calling in regards to the painting you sent in a couple weeks ago. We discovered a false back on the canvas, and there appears to be something hidden inside. We would like your permission to open it.”
I was somewhat surprised. The faculty at Bowman had looked the painting and its frame over pretty thoroughly- shy of dismantling the frame and canvas itself- to find any trace of the artist or subject, but could only give a rough date by the materials involved. Clearly, the conservators were onto something.
“Of course,” I said. “As long as it won't compromise the painting, I guess.”
“No, no worries,” replied Fred, “It's basically just an extra layer of canvas behind the main layer. Cutting through it carefully won't even touch the painting itself. Almost looks like they even nailed a secondary wooden frame over it to keep the top layer of canvas from bulging. From the looks of it, though, there's a lot of paper hidden in that compartment. It might tell us something.”
“Thank you,” I said, “And let me know what you find.”
"We can even send scans and pictures to you, if you like,” Fred replied.
“Better yet, could you send the papers to me?” I replied. “I know it'll be a while before the painting's ready but the documents might give me something to research in the mean time.”
“Yes, we can do that,” said Fred. “Alright thanks,” I said.
This was an exciting development. Immediately my mind turned to recent discoveries of long-lost codices of the great minds of the past. Hadn't manuscripts of Archimedes' work been found literally written over as if they were scratch paper? Hadn't texts from Alexandria been found stashed in caves across the Mediterranean? Perhaps I was in possession of something far more valuable than a 15th century portrait after all.
Later that evening, the e-mail came.
Attached were about 10 megabytes of photos and scans, the most my account would handle at the time. Accompanying them was only the brief text:
Some pics of us opening the false back on the painting, and a few scans of what we found. All I can tell you about these documents is that they're vellum, from around the same time period of the painting, and written in Old High German.
-Fred
Opening the attached images, I was treated to a shock.
They had been compressed to sizes too small to read on their own, but the pages were clearly something extraordinary. There was very little text; most of it was diagrams of extreme detail, showing the construction of some anomalous machine.
The diagrams were reminiscent of the work of Leonardo DaVinci, though pre-dating his work by some years. The machine itself seemed comprised mainly of gears and linkages, with numerous notes on nearly every component. What I took to be the final page showed the machine all together, with a mechanical arm holding a quill over a piece of parchment and a peculiar wafting miasma hovering over a conical structure atop the machine.
The very look of the machine sent shivers down my spine; it had the look of something forbidden, alien even, that spoke volumes about the madness of its designer.
But more importantly, even in the small and barely-legible scans Fred had sent, I was able to make out what I took to be the name of the author of these manuscripts. In a paragraph on what I took to be the first page was very clearly written the name Magnus Von Krahl.
* * *
Three days later, the pages of vellum arrived, carefully protected in acid-free plastic sleeves, sandwiched between two layers of cardboard, and wrapped tightly in three layers of bubble wrap. I was eager to take them to the faculty at Bowman, but was unsure as to who might know the most about them.
With no leads, I started with Prof. Martin Kinard, a specialist in medieval history and one of the few professors locally who could read Old High German.
“Incredible!” he shouted as he laid the sheets of vellum, still in their protective sleeves, out on the table. “From what I gather, this really is the work of Magnus Von Krahl. They called him the Madman of Mainz. Everyone suspected he was involved in the dark arts, but the local nobility wouldn't touch him. Where did you say you got these again?”
I told him of the painting, of the hidden compartment, and of the way the art department had more or less ignored the portrait as historically insignificant.
At length, as we discussed the parchment itself, Prof. Kinard began to explain that the diagrams were of a machine designed to communicate with the dead. These diagrams had been rumored to exist for many ages, but had eluded detection. During the reformation, the executors of Von Krahl's estate were tortured and their collections seized and burned, but the official records found no such documents of any note; most of what was destroyed were rather pedestrian books on astrology, divination, and alchemical discourse.
Prof. Kinard then asked if he could make high-quality scans of the pages. I agreed on one condition: that he provide a translation of their contents.
* * *
Almost ominously, I received the restored painting on the same day Prof. Kinard e-mailed his annotated translation of the manuscript.
As I carefully unwrapped the now-restored painting and frame, a curious sensation came over me. I was filled with a mad, burning desire to know things... to do things... and the strange idea formed in my foremost thoughts that Magnus Von Krahl's destiny was incomplete and had to be fulfilled.
Almost from the moment I hung the portrait on the wall of my apartment, I turned to begin reading intently through Prof. Kinard's translation.
By that evening, I had gone to the hardware store to buy supplies.
By the next morning, I had begun building Von Krahl's forbidden machine.
For three feverish weeks I worked on the machine, scarcely sleeping, feeling a peculiar, mad sense of urgency. My job became a hellish waiting game, and I would often ask for time off or to leave early so that I could devote more time to building the Von Krahl device.
Then, almost exactly three weeks after I had begun, I stopped... with one nail literally half-driven into the timbers. A wave of deep, severe nausea came over me, and I felt that I needed to lie down.
I felt myself losing consciousness and saw the floor of the room rising to meet me, then all went dark.
When I awoke, I found myself in my bed. It was dark outside, and my alarm clock read 11:43. My throat felt parched and my stomach felt empty, so I staggered weakly to the kitchen to get a meal. It was as I passed through the living room a second time, carrying a cheese sandwich and a glass of water back to my room, that I noticed that the machine had been completed.
I looked at my telephone and found that I had 16 missed calls, including several from Prof. Kinard. Strangely, no one had left a message.
Then I noticed something that terrified me. The date stamp on the most recent call, at 10:19 PM, was for the 19th of August.
I had lost consciousness on the 17th of August, and worked for two days on the machine without rest, food, or water... or any recollection of having done so.
Valentine came in from the bathroom, yowling loudly to be fed.
“Oh Val-val, I'm sorry,” I said, hastily pouring her a bowl of cat food. She didn't even wait for me to stop pouring before burying her nose in it.
I then turned my attention back to my work. Looking over the machine, I marveled at the refinements I had made during my dissociative state. The linkages that had once been clumsily put together with off-the-shelf hardware had been meticulously reworked, their joints now balanced with a jeweler's precision.
But perhaps the most disconcerting thing was the great black jar cradled in the center of the machine.
It appeared to be glass of some sort, but it was somehow strangely alien in its construction. Not a single seam could be seen on it, and its lid, I noticed, fit so tightly into its mouth that it could scarcely be distinguished from the rest of the jar.
From its lid protruded a pair of thick wires that looked to be of some curious marbled metal; it looked as if copper and iron were hammered together with about five other alloys. These ended abruptly, connecting to nothing and open to the air, where I noticed their core was made of a strange iridescent alloy, the like of which I had never seen.
A feeling of mixed dread and insatiable curiosity came over me, and I felt compelled at once to find a pen and paper and test the machine.
I clamped a cheap ball point pen onto the end of the machine's writing armature, and beneath this set a piece of paper on a book to give it a solid surface to bear down on. I then released a few catches on the delicate mechanism, allowing it to move freely with the slightest force.
My heart began to pound in my throat. Von Krahl's manuscript hadn't said exactly how to use the machine and I could only guess at what to do next.
“Is anyone there?” I asked in earnest. An awkward silence followed. I tried to speak again, but could only draw on what I had seen on popular television about communicating with spirits. “I built this machine. If anyone is there, you can talk to me, I want to help you,” I said, suddenly realizing how trite it sounded.
Suddenly there was a clatter as something in the mechanism engaged. The armature began to move back and forth, drawing a vertical line on the paper, then drawing a spiral that widened across the entire paper before moving the armature back to the center of the paper again.
It seemed that whatever was there was attempting to use the machine but was having a difficult time.
“Yes, keep trying,” I said. “Are you there?”
Suddenly whatever entity had hold of the machine managed to get full control of its faculties. It guided the armature steadily across the well-scribbled paper and wrote, in large capital letters:
YES I AM HERE.
“What is your name?” I said, unsure of what else to ask this presence. The machine started moving again, more decisively this time, and wrote its reply... though I was not prepared for the answer I received.
THAT IS NONE OF YOUR CONCERN, HUMAN.
This was a bit astonishing. I hadn't expected to come in contact with a non-human intelligence.
“Very well... So you're not human yourself? What are you?”
I AM THE BUILDER OF THIS MACHINE AND THIS IS ALL YOU OR ANY HUMAN NEED KNOW ABOUT ME. THE DAY WILL COME WHEN THE HUMAN RACE IS READY TO KNOW; THAT DAY, MAN SHALL DEVOUR MAN.
This line delivered chills down my spine. I had heard it in stories my grandmother told me of her childhood, of the Hill Devils, the shadow creatures that stalked the rolling hills and caves in eastern Oklahoma. They were beasts of incredible intelligence, who spoke many languages perfectly- English and Cherokee, at least- yet they were also known to prey savagely on the locals. They were too resilient to kill with a rifle and too fast to follow with a speeding automobile, and so they were left alone... but it also meant no one dared go out after sundown.
I had always figured Grandma's stories were just another local boogeyman, a scare story to get children indoors by sunset. I could be forgiven, then, for becoming quite terrified at this point.
“What do you want, then? Why did you make me build this machine?” I said, looking about to see if this creature was somehow lurking nearby in the shadows.
The armature twitched and hesitated, and I then realized that the page was full. I turned it over and placed the pen at the top of the page, and almost immediately it began to write.
BECAUSE THE DAY OF WHICH I SPEAK GROWS NEAR.
I began to feel the same wave of intense nausea and vertigo as before. The room spun, and I found myself dropping to the floor before I could move.
* * *
I woke drenched in sweat. I pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was 2:55 AM, what day?
My stomach tightened hideously for just one second before my eyes- or my thoughts- adjusted sufficiently to see that it was the 18th of August. I had only lost about four hours this time.
That was when I saw the condition of the machine. It looked as if someone had taken a bat or a sledge hammer to it. Finely-crafted hinges lay bent and mangled, thin wooden beams lay splintered into a thousand irreparable pieces.
But the most singular thing of all was that what I did not see; the ominous black jar was nowhere to be found.