Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  ‘Hi Christina,’ Matthew said, but his words came out of his mouth awkwardly so they didn’t synchronise with the movement of his lips. Nerves were making him talk like someone in a badly dubbed film.

  Christina didn’t even acknowledge him, and to make it worse, Zorba’s youngest son Theo was flirting with the 13-year-old girl of Matthew’s dreams.

  ‘I bet you have a boyfriend, you are so pretty,’ Theo said, leaning on the counter, gazing right into Christina’s eyes.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Christina told him, and then she said, ‘Do you want to go out with me Theo?’

  Matthew felt physically sick.

  ‘No!’ Theo laughed, ‘you’re too young girl, I’m nineteen.’

  ‘So?’ Christina replied, and her black lips frowned.

  ‘Behave girl, maybe when you get a little older,’ said Theo, and he grabbed a knife and started to carve the meat on the revolving spit.

  ‘I’ll be fourteen in eight months, I’m not exactly a baby,’ Christina persisted.

  ‘Look you need a guy nearer your own age, someone like that guy there,’ Theo pointed the knife at Matthew.

  Christina turned, and her large dark eyes looked Matthew up and down, but then she dismissed him with a little cruel laugh. ‘Nah, he’s a geek, I want a real guy.’

  Matthew started to shrink away from the girl he had so much unrequited love for. If she only knew, he thought, and his throat closed up, and his heart ached.

  There was more banter between Christina and Theo, but Matthew was too thunderstruck to listen. Next thing the Goth girl had gone, and so had Matthew’s appetite.

  Just after midnight Matthew went up to his room and decided to surf on his computer. He looked up the various definitions for ‘geek’ on the Google search engine, and one online thesaurus said a geek was ‘a loser who prefers chemistry sets and computers to relationships with a partner, and can even count his or her virtual friends in chat-rooms and on Facebook on one hand.’

  ‘How does that apply to me?’ Matthew asked himself. ‘How can I be a geek? I’ve had relationships with girls,’ he muttered, then looked at the three little printed photos on the wall by his computer. They were the only girls he’d talked to - from the safety of his computer keyboard. He’d even blushed when Kirstin in Minnesota saw him on his webcam for the first time, and although he was always promising to visit her, he knew it was never going to happen. It was the same story with Carla in Texas and Kate in Australia.

  ‘I’m a geek,’ he whispered, and decided to lie down on his bed. In his mind’s eye he replayed that expression of Christina’s when she dismissed him with a laugh. Matthew turned on the bed to idly glance at the oval painting, and noticed something very strange indeed. Her lips were moving. The portrait was faintly illuminated by the light from the computer monitor, so Matthew thought his tired eyes were just seeing things at first, but he got up off the bed and inched towards the painting. It was no illusion at all; the face in that portrait was becoming animated before his startled eyes. The mouth was definitely speaking silent words. Matthew was naturally scared by the eerie spectacle. Although he had a keen interest in the paranormal, and watched Most Haunted and read the Fortean Times, Matthew was scared at the sight of the woman coming to life in the oval painting. He ran to the doorway of the bedroom and slapped the light-switch. The young lady in the portrait squinted her eyes at the bright ceiling light. Her little eyelids fluttered, and she stared at Matthew with a worried look. The mouth opened and a faint voice said, ‘Hello.’

  Matthew fled from the bedroom and bounded downstairs to his father, who was watching American wrestling.

  ‘Dad! You won’t believe what I just saw in my room –‘

  Frank Brindley was perched on the edge of the sofa, swearing at the television, with a can of lager in one hand and the remote in the other. ‘Hang on son,’ he said to Matthew, ‘the ref just turned a blind eye as Nemesis smashed The Black Death’s shoulder blades in with a deckchair! What a dirty trick!’

  ‘Dad, that picture on the wall that I got from Dave’s shop, it, it spoke!’

  ‘Ha Ha! Bubba's gonna slam you Nemesis!’ Mr Brindley laughed gleefully, then cursed the television when the wrestling was interrupted by a commercial break.

  ‘Dad that picture upstairs is haunted - it talked.’ Matthew caught his father’s attention at last.

  ‘You’ve had a nightmare son,’ Mr Brindley swigged back more lager.

  ‘No, I haven’t been to sleep dad, I was wide awake, and I saw that picture –‘

  ‘No, no, listen; I’ve had dreams where I thought I was awake,’ Frank Brindley’s voice started to slur, and his eyes looked glazed. His foot accidentally kicked over a row of empty lager cans on the carpet. ‘This place is like a pigsty – can’t wait till your mother’s well again…’

  It was useless trying to talk to him, Matthew reasoned, and as the wrestling returned after the break, his father popped a ring on another can and invited him to watch the staged antics of The Black Death and Nemesis Steel. ‘Come here son, and learn something,’ Mr Brindley patted the cushion next to him, but Matthew left the room. He fetched Larry from his kennel in the back garden and coaxed him upstairs to his bedroom. The lanky-legged dog had a phobia of the stairs, but Matthew dragged him up them. The picture had apparently returned to normal, and the lady in the portrait looked just like a lifeless image again. Larry deserted Matthew and carefully descended each step with a yelp, then basked in the warmth of the living room’s mock (gas-fuelled) open-fire.

  Matthew eventually fell asleep, but woke at four in the morning. The only light filtering into the bedroom came from a sodium streetlamp, and its luminance was periodically obscured by the branches of a tree that was swaying in the wind. Matthew reached for his mobile phone and pressed its keys. The screen of the iPhone lit up and threw a faint radiance at the wall opposite. The face of the young lady in the picture was now smiling! Matthew found himself getting out of bed with a feeling of cowardly numbness in his legs. He switched on the bedroom light and looked at the oval portrait.

  ‘Hello Matthew,’ said the face in the picture with a soft satin voice.

  Matthew went outside and stood on the landing, trembling. He closed the door of his bedroom quietly behind him, and considered going into his parents’ bedroom to tell them what was happening, but Christina’s face flashed into his thoughts, and his mind’s ear replayed that insulting sentence she had spoken, about him being a geek.

  ‘I’m no geek,’ Matthew told himself, and he turned and went back into his bedroom.

  ‘Who are you? What – are you?’ Matthew confronted the framed phantasm, and his heart pounded.

  ‘My name is Rhiannon Tanglewyst, please don’t be afraid Matthew,’ said the talking picture.

  ‘I’m not scared; I’m just not used to seeing people in pictures move and talk.’ Matthew said, calming down slightly. The lady in the picture looked so kind and good, but Matthew was understandably confused. ‘I don’t understand how this is possible; are you a ghost?’

  ‘No, I’m not a ghost,’ Rhiannon told him, ‘I’m a witch – a good witch.’

  ‘Oh,’ Matthew was speechless.

  ‘It all happened a long. long time ago, in 1644, when witches started falling out of favour.’ Rhiannon said, in a morose tone. And her eyes bore traceries of some sad remembered event.

  ‘Why are you in a picture?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘I was on the run from the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins and his cruel men. I took refuge in the cottage of an old witch named Ursula, and she promised that she would deliver me from Hopkins and his soldiers if I gave her my book of white magic spells. I wasn’t sure what to do at first, but then the Witchfinder hammered on her door, and so I panicked, and I agreed to Ursula’s proposition. I made a pact with her and gave her my book. Ursula recited a High Magic spell in the ancient language of Languedoc, and suddenly I found myself in this oval frame you see before you. This picture then hung over the
old witch's fireplace and had been blank. When I realised I had been imprisoned in its frame, I screamed, but Ursula just laughed at me.’ Rhiannon blinked, and a tear fell from her eye as she relived that awful event from the distant past.

  ‘If it makes you sad talking about it, I understand,’ Matthew said to the white witch, yet he was intrigued by her tale.

  Rhiannon shook her head and a little pale delicate hand wiped away the tear. She continued, ‘The door burst open, and the Witchfinder sent in two soldiers armed with long swords, but Ursula made the weapons turn upon the men, and they were cut to pieces; it was a terrible sight to behold. Another soldier entered the house with a musket, but before he could fire it, Ursula seized his face with her hand and wiped his features away as if they were made of clay.’

  ‘Wow, ewww,’ Matthew grimaced, and imagined his nose and the rest of his face being shoved around the side of his head.

  Rhiannon told the rest of the strange story. ‘Unfortunately, Ursula was a very old and very forgetful witch, and she forgot the most basic spell for making a broomstick fly through the air. She opened the shutters of the cottage, mounted the broomstick, and then tried desperately to recall the flying spell, which is simply “Pelico tremlim Ho!” ‘

  ‘So did they capture her?’ Matthew asked. He saw ghostly images of the incidents Rhiannon was talking about in his mind, as if the witch was telepathically broadcasting her memories into his brain.

  ‘The soldiers were upon her, and when she pointed her finger at Hopkins and started to recite the death curse at him, he cut her pointing finger off with one swipe of his sword. Ursula fell unconscious with the shock,’ said Rhiannon.

  ‘What did they do to her after that?’ Matthew asked, and he shuddered as he actually saw the old witch’s hand being lobbed off by the sword.

  ‘She was subjected to a witch trial,’ Rhiannon recalled, ‘They bound her arms and legs together by tying twine between her thumbs and her big toes. Then they lowered her by a rope from a bridge into the river. If she sank and did not come up again, she would be declared innocent. But Ursula floated, and the Witchfinder said that was the sign of a black sorceress. She came up coughing and choking. They pulled her from the water and then hanged her.’

  ‘That was so cruel and horrible,’ Matthew saw the old woman kicking about as she was hanged, then the image faded in his mind.

  ‘Yes, it was very cruel,’ Rhiannon said.

  ‘And what happened to you afterwards?’ Matthew asked. He was now sitting cross-legged on the bed, with his hands on his feet, and his fingers feeling his big toes. He imagined how it would feel having his thumbs tied to his big toes with twine.

  Rhiannon told him. ‘Two thieves in the village ransacked Ursula’s cottage. The picture I was confined in was one of the items the robbers stole. I dared not even blink when they beheld my portrait, or I would have been regarded as a demon and thrown upon the fire. My picture passed into many hands. I have looked down from countless walls and have quietly witnessed many strange episodes and events in dwellings humble and grand.’

  ‘I hope I’m not dreaming. Perhaps I am and I can’t wake up,’ said Matthew with an anxious look.

  Rhiannon grinned. She gazed down at the innocent preteen and shook her head of honey-golden hair, saying, ‘No, you’re not dreaming Matthew, you’re wide awake.’

  Next door, Frank Brindley woke up with an urge to go to the toilet. He squinted in the darkened bedroom and couldn’t hear his wife breathing. Maureen was lying on her back with three pillows propped up under her head. Frank put his ear close to her mouth and listened anxiously. Maureen let out an ear-splitting cough, and Frank recoiled in fright. Maureen was evidently still alive after all. Frank Brindley rose from the bed, whispering curses, and left the room, stumbling towards the toilet. He felt dizzy and his head ached; a hangover from the lager binge before bedtime. As he passed his son’s room he heard voices. Matthew was talking to a female. Frank stopped at Matthew’s door, but a creaky floorboard gave him away.

  Matthew’s head swung to face the door upon hearing the creak. ‘Dad? Is that you?’

  The doorknob turned and the door opened a few inches.

  ‘Who are you talking to? Have you got a girl in there?’ Frank Brindley’s head slowly emerged from around the door, and his bloodshot eyes darted left and right, as if he expected to see someone in the bedroom.

  Rhiannon froze to become a static image in her frame.

  ‘No, I was talking to some girl on the net,’ Matthew said, even though the computer was switched off.

  ‘Well get to bed now, it’s half-past-four and you’ve got school in the morning.’ Mr Brindley closed the door and made his way across the landing to the toilet.

  Rhiannon giggled in the picture and threw two tiny delicate hands to her face.

  ‘Ssshhh! Wait till he’s gone back to bed,’ Matthew whispered, and he got off the bed and stood by the door, listening.

  ‘Your father’s right Matthew,’ Rhiannon said in a soft, barely audible voice, ‘you have school in the morning. You must get some sleep.’

  ‘No, I’m not even that tired,’ Matthew objected, and he moved close to the painting, earnestly hoping his supernatural friend wouldn’t desert him. ‘You said you had witnessed many strange things when you hung on people’s walls.’

  Rhiannon nodded.

  ‘Can you tell me some of the things you saw?’ the twelve-year-old’s eyes were full of expectation.

  ‘I will tell you so many tales Matthew, but not now, it’s too late, and you need to get some sleep.’

  ‘Oh go on,’ he complained.

  ‘I promise I shall tell you stories tomorrow. Now, goodnight Matthew.’ Rhiannon told him, and she became very still, and all signs of life vanished from her eyes. She was just a painted two-dimensional portrait again.

  ‘Rhiannon?’ Matthew stood before the golden filigreed frame, expecting the mysterious lady to come back to life, but she never did. His trembling index finger reached out and touched the image that had looked so lifelike seconds ago, but all he felt was cold painted canvas.

  The toilet flushed outside and he heard the thudding plodding footsteps of his father as he returned to bed. Matthew sat on the bed feeling quite sad. He crawled under the duvet and eventually sank into a dreamless sleep.

  Long before the alarm clock jangled, Matthew was awakened by the polluting aroma of bacon being burnt by his father downstairs. He yawned, stretched, and then sat up in his bed to look at Rhiannon. Yes, she was still there. He recalled the strange revelation of the night before, then said, ‘Morning’ to the painting.

  The flat image instantly became three-dimensional, and Matthew’s heart jumped.

  ‘Good morning Matthew,’ Rhiannon said, and smiled.

  ‘Matthew! It’s gone eight o’clock, come and get your breakfast!’ came his father’s voice from downstairs. ‘Alright!’ Matthew shouted back.

  ‘Never mind “alright” get a move on, come on!’ replied his father.

  ‘Look, after breakfast I’ll be right back, okay?’ the boy said to the trapped witch.

  ‘Yes,’ her head turned to face the sunlight blazing through the blinds, and her eyes had such a dreamy far-away look to them.

  ‘Matthew! Come on!’ Mr Brindley said, followed by the sound of a plate smashing. ‘I’m coming dad! Dad? Are you alright?’

  When Matthew got downstairs he found the kitchen in disarray, and a thin layer of smoke hung in the air, just below ceiling level. Frank was brushing up the fragments of dropped crockery into a shovel. He explained: ‘I picked up that plate up; forgot it had been in the microwave. It was molten hot. Next thing I can’t find my ciggies, and they turn up in the fridge – I’m losing it. Then I accidentally elbow that cup off the drain-board. Someone has the evil eye on me, I tell you – I’m cursed.’

  ‘Men!’ said a familiar voice.

  Matthew and his father turned around. Framed in the doorway of the kitchen was Mrs Brindley. She had ar
isen from her sick bed, and the bright rays of the morning sun shone around her through the smoke of charred bacon. It was like a religious vision.

  ‘Mum! Are you okay?’ Matthew asked, and ran to her side.

  ‘I’ll have to be okay or your father will destroy this house,’ she said, and she ushered a smiling Frank back to where he belonged – the sofa in the living room – then she set about preparing a proper breakfast for the two hopeless males.

  In the playground that morning, Matthew was standing on his own in a corner, gazing through the railings at a lonely cloud in the sky, daydreaming and thinking about Rhiannon, when his ears picked out a voice from the background din of screams, laughter and chatter.

  ‘Hey geek, what’s up?’ said Christina. She looked so different in her school uniform and a face devoid of heavy make-up.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Matthew, self-consciously, ‘Just looking at that, er, cloud.’

  Christina came real close, her sarcastic, smiling Cheshire Cat face filling his view. ‘You’re weird.’

  That’s funny, Matthew thought, she says I’m weird and she dresses like Dracula’s daughter. Her face was really moving in close now. For the first time he saw that her eyes weren’t brown after all, but some sort of hazel green with flecks of blue in maybe. He stood rooted to the spot and felt he was the doomed mesmerised prey of some subtle man-eating snake. Oh my God, she’s going to kiss me, Matthew thought. He closed his eyes. The school bell sounded and that kiss never came.

  ‘Saved by the bell, geek.’ The voice floated from somewhere, and when Matthew opened his eyes, Christina had vanished among the uniformed crowds.

  Matthew didn’t know what had just hit him. He felt weak and soppy and slushy and couldn’t think straight. His little friend Mousey Thompson came over with his shirt hanging out and his laces undone, claiming (falsely as usual) that he had just bought an illegally ‘doctored’ mobile phone from a hacker, and it never ran up a bill and never ran out of credit, but Matthew just looked at him without a word to say, with a peculiar blank stare. Nothing really mattered any more, just cat-faced Christina.