What Hath God Wrought?

By Charlene Pepiot

Featured art: The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de La Tour

Time alone could not be responsible for the cracks in those glass windows, or the thorns snaking up the chipped brick walls of the Porter estate. Something had happened here. God, let the rumors be lies.

My fingers curled into a fist and knocked against the weathered door. The hinges were silent as it opened. The stench of must and mold swamped me. A man slumped against the doorway greeted me. It took me a moment to recognize Henry Porter through the white spirals of hair drooping over his haunted face.

“Evening, old friend,” I tipped my hat as casually as I could. Porter had worn the same long coat when we last spoke some 30 years ago at his private exhibit. Now, the cotton was clogged with dust and dried paint.

“I appreciate you coming. Are you ready for your portrait?” Porter’s voice rattled from lack of use, yet his eyes still had that iconic Porter sharpness to them that could pick out a model’s most minuscule details. I swore those eyes could stare straight through a man.

“Of course,” I nodded. That’s what the chief wanted—causal activity to get him talking.

“Do come inside,” Porter beckoned me into the dark hallway and I followed. A splash echoed in the darkness as my boot disturbed an unidentifiable puddle. “Given the new coat, I take it business is going well?”

“Our growth has been exponential,” I said. The furniture-shaped imprints on the floor discouraged me from asking Porter the same.

I stepped around piles of half-finished sketches as he led me into the main room. The grand crystal chandelier was gone—replaced by candles on a splintered table that barely lit an old sofa and easel set up for the session. The darkness blotted out any indication of other furniture, though I recognized the shadow-laden bookshelf in the corner from my last visit. The faint candlelight made the old, archaic symbols of Lilith’s books look alive in the corner. Porter had laughed over his wife’s fascination with the ancient texts, yet when the debtors came knocking, he’d held onto them, and them alone. That had to cement his love for the vagabond he’d rescued from the streets decades ago. Surely, the police linking her disappearance to murder was madness!

But the chief had meant business, and the abrupt end to his continuous onslaught of desperate letters in my unsuspecting mailbox had sent me a new message: if I didn’t get Porter talking, more than words would be used to gain my cooperation. “You see, the success of the telegraph has revolutionized communication and I’m leading the attack! Messages from Baltimore to Washington are practically instantaneous now! People are dying for technology like that.”

“That is good for you,” Porter said. The deep-set cervices in his face lifted into a smile as he directed me to the couch. A cloud of dust rose as I got comfortable. I held in a sneeze, feeling as though time were moving both too fast and not fast enough. “I won’t lie, my commissions have dropped significantly since the cameras came to town.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. Porter tilted my head back to his liking. “But don’t fret. Photos are merely a gimmick! They can’t trap the life of a person between canvas and oil as you can! Why, generals have come from far and wide just for one of your sketches!”

Porter shrugged in his Porter way, his head somewhere else. There was comfort in knowing his little gestures hadn’t changed in the years since we’d last spoken.

“It’s not enough,” Porter limped to the canvas and lifted his brush. “All day I paint the same things over and over again to try and invent some new technique to get the audience back, but the camera is just too far ahead! Too cheap. Too fast. Too new.”

“People will always be in want for painted portraits.”

“Want. Not need. Not anymore. Not ever again,” Porter gnawed on a split fingernail as he applied quick, frenzied strokes to the canvas. “The Porter lineage has been esteemed painters of generals and great men for generations, but the dream’s dead. People have moved on. Even you left for better opportunities in the city.” His eyes clouded. “You ever think of how those boys in the Pony Express are faring? Shut down only a year into operation thanks to your telegraph?”

He was talking like the chief wanted, but my heart ached for him. For the kind painter who had taken a poor girl off the streets and loved her so dearly, who had not a mean bone in his body and had done right all his life only for the world to abandon him for some new gimmick. I should have visited sooner, but what could I have done to stifle the tide of change?

“Us Porters have made it like this for generations,” he whispered, tears glittering in the candlelight. The brush wavered in his hand. “If you paint, food is on the table. If you’re a good husband, you have a faithful wife. That’s how it’s always been!” Porter’s voice broke and he hurled the brush at the candles, knocking several over onto the tablecloth. Flames sprung up and their light lit the dirtied walls around us. Six-sided stars and other arcane symbols scrawled in what I prayed was red paint had been etched over the yellowed wallpaper.

A portrait of the missing chandelier hung in the back, each individual crystal glinting in the flames as though it were truly there. Other portraits of the missing furniture caught the light around me, the details uncannily realistic. The painted symbols in the corners were terribly vivid.

“Porter,” I started to stand, lost in the overwhelming number of surrounding symbols. “You laughed at those old books.”

“It’s a different world now,” Porter swept his hand through the air, showcasing the ruin. His tight jaw loosened into a sad smile that didn’t fit his face quite right. “But in here it doesn’t matter,” he tapped his head. “The world goes on as it should in my mind. She never left me for that bastard general. No cheeky innovations ruined a generational occupation. I’m not the Porter that failed, and you’re still my loyal, trusted friend who’d never conspire against me. I’ve painted you as you were before, and how you’ll remain.”

The flames had worked their way down from the table and spread to the floor. Porter’s grinning teeth gleamed in the light as I backed toward the exit. Whatever had happened here, wherever that blasted witch Lilith was, the police could figure it out for themselves!

“Don’t leave me,” Porter gripped the canvas. “You must see your portrait first.”

My back hit the wall. On the floor beside me was the pile of half-sketched portraits. Only now one was finished. It was the chief’s face. His tongue lolled out from a mouth stretched in a permanent scream surrounded by mystic symbols. On the wall, the equally horrified face of Lilith watched me from a canvas. How had I not noticed? Her painted eyes screamed run.

I lurched toward the exit, but Porter blocked me with the canvas in his hand. His eyes were moist. Hopeful. Pitiful. So desperate I couldn’t look away. Not when he turned the canvas to show a blank outline of myself surrounded by ancient symbols. Not when my sight stared in the opposite direction and my arms were pinned to the canvas by six-sided stars. Not even when he mounted me on the wall next to the other faces and items from better, simpler days.

“No one ever thinks of them,” Porter whimpered, rubbing his boney fingers up and down the arm of his old coat. “Those poor broke boys from the Pony Express.”

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Charlene Pepiot (she/her) is an undergrad at Ohio University majoring in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in the literary magazines Polaris and Havik as well as the newspaper The Post. She enjoys biking in her nonexistent free time.