Welcome back to yet another traipse into the fantastic, horrific unknown that we’ve so lovingly to come to cherish. That’s right, the very weekly feature that you’ve come to set your clock by: Monster Laboratory!

Before we begin, I’d like to point you back in time, back to last week’s entry, the ever
infamous Shapeshifting Android Trolls! As you’ll see when you take a peek, our favorite artist Rey from Illustrated Movie Reviews has crafted a tremendously AWESOME rendition of the beasties that devour in order to transform. Take a look because I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of the art - it’s precisely what I had in mind when I wrote the piece!

Now that you’ve got a glimpse of one of my diabolical fantasies come to graphic reality, let us progress further down the demented path I’ve delighted in rendering for you here this evening. Let us go back centuries in time, to the mud-splattered reality of the old days. Back to Europe during the time of the great Black Plague that brought so much horror to peasants across those lands. Let us peer through the distorting glass of history.

Listen to the clop of horses carrying knights in clinking armor, listen to the village dogs
barking and carrying on long before leash laws. Listen to the merry and unruly children
screech and giggle in the filthy streets, playing with the carcasses of rats and other such childish games I’m positive were popular back in those days. Smell the dirt, the sweat, the endless piles of horse manure buzzing with crop after crop of pestilence-spreading flies! Yes, these were times of sickness and poverty and surely among them were painters, struggling in a newborn medium and trying to convey the spirit of those days as best they could.

We’ll zoom in on the grimey figure of Porlon Grumschnickle, a deathly thin man clad in a crud-coated cloak that maybe once was black. A beady-eyed, greasy-haired savant of sorts, capable of majestic colors by paint only he knew the secret of properly mixing. A guarded, distrustful sort of man with long fingernails and few teeth, fond of wine and women though of no ability to attract even the lowest class of village whore. Yes, Grumschnickle was something of an outcast, frequently pelted with rocks or rotten apples whenever he dared encroach upon the territories of others so mostly he kept in the shadows, feverishly splashing paint upon canvas. He knew nothing of other artists or even that painting was an artform.

Grumschnickle slid down the slippery slopes of madness, over time. He wandered from village to village and nearly always ended up being chased away for fear he might disease the local dogs.

He took to cutting himself and mixing his blood into the paints. This gave his work a rather unique appearance and upon his death these works of art he so ardently strove to create would find themselves in the homes of collectors worldwide. His name would be toasted by nobles as that drank wine that cost more than he ever earned his entire life. Each painting he sold somehow found its way into the home of these art fanciers and eventually even museums.

These days a Grumschnickle goes for well over $200 million and so only the most well-to-do collectors could possibly afford to own one. Those who have them seem obsessed by them, staring for hours into the grim paintings that show people living and dying during the Black Plague. Images so stark and evocative that historians consider them to be likely the most accurate portrayals of life during that era that remain in existence today. The twisted faces, the running sores, the flies feasting on the fluids of the dead - all is shown in reddish shades of sorrow. Grumschnickle’s enchanting artwork far outlived him. Of course, no one knows his real name.

The name they toast is merely what he scrawled on the back of each painting. Porlon
Grumschnickle happens to be a poorly translated English version of what he wrote, but old Grumschnickle wrote in a long dead tongue that no translator on Earth could possibly interpret. He was writing in a magical language of glyphs and what each painting bears is the phrase, "You shall know my madness." As you might guess, each and every collector doesn’t last too many years before tasting the final results of owning the sad painter’s art.

You see, the spell on each painting, activated by Grumschnickle’s blood, causes it to act as an energy sponge. The painting absorbs the focus of those gazing upon it and collects it. As it collects the energy, it seems to grow more vibrant, more intriguing. People stare and stare and the painting grows stronger by the minute. Until eventually, the figures within the painting exit the frame and step into reality. Every Grumschnickle owner who’s ever kept a painting for longer than five years has died a grisly but artistic death at the hands of killers who are never found.

Why are they never found? Because they are artistic avatars summoned by the very people who worship the paintings! Those Black Plague victims leap forth and have their merry way with the art collectors in a gruesome ceremony that often lasts hours, but never leaves any physical evidence. If you think about it, Grumschnickle’s the perfect serial killer, continuing his mad reign down through the centuries from beyond the grave!

There’s no reason why this story should not be made into AT LEAST a book if not a full length feature film. Let’s make it happen, Merry Readers! Let’s make Grumschnickle a household name!

-- by GlowStormLion of http://www.happyhorror.com

Tags: dark art, Monster Lab

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 12:30 am and is filed under Monster Lab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.