Pure Black

A Story by C.S. Williams

An artist's assistant recounts his employer's bizarre descent into madness.

Of the recent immolation of Edward Cleer’s estate, I cannot say much. That is, there’s little I can say that could convince you of the truth.

It is true I have committed arson. It is true that Mr. Cleer has vanished, and I was the last person to see him alive.

But I did not kill him. I had good reason to burn down his house. You wouldn’t find the body anyway.

I had heard the name Edward Cleer mentioned in passing around town before meeting him in person some time ago. My sophomore year of college had just ended. My previous job had let me go over the phone citing a scheduling conflict, though I suspect that was merely an excuse. I found myself penniless and utterly bored that summer. My parents were lenient in my lazing, but eventually I felt restless. I needed work, preferably paid.

A chance recommendation from my mother directed me to our community center, and subsequently the cork board with “job openings” in crude letters hanging above. The cork was chewed up by years of use. There were spent staples and scraps of paper hanging like lint. Someone had made a happy face with push pins in one corner. I was growing skeptical every minute I searched the bare board.

A single paper stapled to the board, hastily written and barely legible caught my eye. I would’ve dismissed it if the words “Edward Cleer” had not been scratched in pen ink.

The man, the town’s resident artistic recluse, was always a point of fascination for me. He possessed the attributes of such a character: lived in an isolated place far from town, He was rarely seen in public except during exhibitions. There wasn’t even a proper photograph of the man. So naturally I tore the paper from its staple, and I dialed the number.

His house was quite inconspicuous. A part of me wanted him to be the enigmatic artist on the edge of town. I suppose I wanted a lowly job taken from the community center cork board to sound more fantastic than it was.

The man who met me at the door was no mad artiste. He was simply a man, middle aged but in good physical health. His smile was kind, his eyes blue. When he opened the door and I first beheld Edward Cleer, he simply stuck out his hand with a hearty “Pleasure!”

I tentatively shook his hand as he led me inside. His home was modestly furnished, another oddity I registered. “This doesn’t look like an artist lives here,” I said half-joking.

“I’m not so vain,” Cleer scoffed. “That’s what my studio is for.” He beckoned for me to follow.

The studio was an additional room built into the back of his home. Unlike the rest of his home, it remained unfurnished and unattractive to the outside. Stacks of paint cans and myriad bundles of brushes lay on harsh metal shelves. The entire place stank of chemicals and aerosol. Long slitted windows cast thin bars of light onto the concrete floor, which was stained with streaks of paint. The place resembled a warehouse more than an artist’s studio.

And yet nothing prepared me for what lay at the end of this large, barely decorated room: A single canvas reaching nearly the height of the room and about its length. The vast ship’s mast worth of paper was held rigidly in place that it scarcely moved. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could haul the thing to any exhibition, much less paint on it.

All the while I gawked at the thing, I noticed Cleer leaning against an opened ladder, arms crossed and a wry smirk across his face.

“That’s exactly what I want to see,” he said.

That was about four pieces ago, or two years. In my time working with him, I learned of Cleer’s peculiar craft: a capture of pure color. His exhibitions went thusly: he would rent a theater space to fit the canvas, and all admitted guests would sit and view the canvas while the entire theater was bathed in the color via carefully coordinated spotlights. It would create, in his words, a “pure” experience within the viewer. To know a color was to be inundated by it, and he wanted his audience to truly understand that. I went to every exhibition, setting up in the dim mornings to closing at night. There was a fanfare to it, a rush of excitement watching hundreds witness the stage lights go down and the colored lights going up. It was its own curtain, a gateway to a second experience.

I think that was why I didn’t notice how empty each successive showing had become. When I first became Cleer’s aide, the theater he rented filled the full holding capacity: five hundred. The last showing, a massive slab of white on white with blinding lights everywhere, pulled in less than 50 people. When the exhibition ended, Cleer told me to leave. I poked my head into the theater long enough to see him throwing parts of the light rigs onto the canvas, tearing into the paper.

I should’ve figured that was a warning sign, his worse tendencies emerging in private. Instead, I left without a word.

It was two weeks ago from the day that he told me of his newest project. We sat over Mexican food, and Cleer was nervously clicking his long nails against the table. “It’s too much,” he said finally.

“What’s too much?” I asked.

“Expectation. Engagement. Our entire damned enterprise. It’s too much.” He rubbed his eyes. “No one knows what they really want.”

I nodded in acknowledgement.

“We need to do something better.”

“Like what?” I said, biting into an enchilada.

He sat up, eyes meeting mine. “We need something truly spectacular. Something groundbreaking. That’s the issue, I think. Which is why I wanted you face to face to tell you. This one’s going to be completely different from the others.” He reached into his pocket and produced a small canvas and bottle. In the bright afternoon sun, the bottle appeared filled with thick black ink. “Do you know what this is?” He told me, handing me the bottle.

I turned it over in my hands. “An ink bottle?” I posited.

“It’s non-reflective paint. The material completely absorbs light. Observe.” Cleer gestured for the bottle. He unscrewed the top and, canvas on table, carefully poured it into the center of the paper. His steady hands kept any drops from spilling over. Even his eyes were locked to the stream, like a raptor watching its prey. “Now look.”

I obeyed, and beheld a distorted circle burned into the canvas. Or rather, the poured paint that now sit on the canvas. He was right how no light reflected from it. I found myself staring intensely into the spot, searching for a sign of imperfection or blemish. There was nothing.

Cleer’s eyes lit with triumph. “This is our next exhibition. Pure Black. It’s just what we need.”

Pure Black. I never wanted to hear that phrase again. But you need your testimony.

Cleer preferred to mix his own paint. He had contacts across the world that specialized in pigments, with purity of color was his aim. I distinctly remember his third piece, the deepest shade of red I’d ever seen, had materials shipped directly from the Mojave Desert and a sandstone quarry outside of New Delhi. The large boxes mainly contained dust and rock, discarded materials from mining jobs and the like. When I opened the boxes, the smell of curry and saguaro filled my nose. The fifth piece’s green pigments came from the mountains of Hokkaido and Mongolian steppes, and their scents were equally vivid. My duties as assistant required me to mix the paint, which I obliged.

The Pure Black came in four large, unmarked crates. The smell was antiseptic, without character. Looking at was like looking straight down a mineshaft. Only when Cleer dipped the edge of a paint roller reminded me it was paint. One stroke onto a test canvas prompted a wide grin across Cleer’s face.

“I can already see it,” He said to me some time later. “The audience heads into a darkened theater. The curtains are shut. Everyone takes their seats. Then the lights go out, the curtains draw back, and the audience sees�"” Cleer’s hands floated slowly away. “Nothing.” He savored the word. “But they’re really seeing that.” He jabbed a finger at the canvas. He sauntered over to me and grabbed me by the shoulder. “This one’s it, my boy. This’ll put us back on track.”

Over the next few days, we spent time testing the paint on other canvas to understand the material. We discovered its attributes thusly: the paint dried incredibly quickly when separated from its container; large brush loads were required to get a decent streak of paint on the paper; and the paint seemed to reach to itself on the canvas. Cleer dismissed it as still being wet. I didn’t believe that.

When I asked Cleer where exactly he found got the paint, the clearest answer he gave was “A friend of a friend.” He said it was experimental, a prototype kind of paint. I can’t tell you where exactly it came from. Even if any survived the fire, it couldn’t be traced. It’s better that way.

With each passing day, that canvas became blacker and blacker. It should’ve been easy, but the physical limitations made the process stressful. Unlike the previous pieces, where I would mix the large quantities of pigment into useful paints, I had to constantly watch the containers and ensure no large amounts fell off the rollers. Cleer was uncommonly paranoid about these things, and the strangeness of this paint only accentuated this.

There came a point were looking into the paint all day began to disturb me. The sensation of looking into complete darkness in broad daylight prompted me to leave the studio while Mr. Cleer continued working. He didn’t notice, having fallen into one of his working trances. As I watched him work, I wondered whether he noticed the same things I had. The canvas was nearly half covered by this point. He had to have spent enough time alone with it to see something.

Normally I wasn’t so bothered. Mr. Cleer worked harder than most when he began a project. During the fifth piece, a grim shade of green, his proposed deadline for an exhibition was coming up in about five days. One of my duties was to keep these dates, and my failing aroused his anger. I still can see that rabid panic and rage in his eyes, hear the crashing paint cans and toppling ladders.

“D****t, boy! One week?! One week?!” His screams echoed around the studio walls. He resembled more child than respected artist. After he finished shouting, he paced about like a caged animal, running fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair. I sat gripping the edge of my chair, fingers whitening.

Suddenly, like the abrupt end of a storm, a calm fell over him. His rage-filled face turned to ice. His next words were just as cold. “You and I will stay until it is finished. Do you understand?”

I didn’t know what to make of this change. All I could do was stupidly nod my head in agreement. And for five straight days I stayed at his house mixing his paint while he furiously painted the remaining quarter of the canvas. I ate and slept only when I absolutely needed to. Mr. Cleer did neither.

Every day since we’d started painting, I found myself dreading coming back to his home. The reason why was that even when I wasn’t there, the canvas was still being covered. Every day I saw Cleer, his appearance had changed. His graying hair was a little more frayed, his clothes a little more spotted with paint. All incremental, accumulating like dust in a filter.

It was his eyes that told me everything. Tiny tendrils of blood vessels growing into many branches of red before bursting into blooming broken red pools into the blue of his eyes. The bruised skin around the sockets, straining against being held opened for so long. Worst of all, I knew the mania behind them that burned like wildfire.

By this point, I surmised painting was about three quarters done. We were down to about one and a half crates of paint. He had all but forgotten I was even there in his fugue state.

In his addled state, I decided to commit the greatest blasphemy I could as his assistant: I stole a small pail’s worth of Pure Black. It was worth the risk, however. Because I had to know just what exactly it was.

Using spare canvases Cleer lent me, I painted with all the Pure Black I had. Soon I had four canvases on my bedroom floor, hands and carpet stained black. After I finished, I sat and stared at them. It all pointed to something. I didn’t know what, but something was happening to Cleer. It had to do with this paint. And I would find out what.

I slipped in and out of sleep. I had started in the late afternoon, and the light faded in heavy blinks. When I came to, my bedside clock read 12:00. The dead of night. My room was pitch black. Ideal lighting for Cleer’s exhibit, I mentally noted. I turned the flashlight on my phone and inspected the canvases. Small tendrils of black reached to each other like lovers. The flashlight’s wide beam disappeared down the dark squares. In the darkness, they had become tiny windows.

A tiny sound, a dull low mumble, reeled me closer. Despite the featureless surface, I wanted to keep staring. It was a blank mirror showing nothing, and yet I wanted to find my face.

In my own world, I wasn’t prepared for the low noise to grow. Or rather, it blasted into my ears as I flew back against my bed. The mumble rose to a loud roar, then to a shrieking shrilling sound I couldn’t discern. I covered my ears, the sound stabbing into my brain. I saw stars, but I held on.

That is, until the smell. A horrid, revolting scent of burning hair and human waste. I ran to my bathroom and spat my dinner into the toilet. I stumbled back to the canvases, daring to look again. I noticed a line of spit dangling from my lip. I thought it would splatter to the paper.

It passed into the frame. It travelled down, down, down until it disappeared.

My fist pounded Cleer’s front door. After my discovery last night, I burned my canvases tried calling him to no avail. I had to tell him what little I knew before it was too late.

“Stop, I’m coming!” His voice rasped from the other side. His haggard face was skeletal, his eyes sunken and red. A cigarette poked from between his lips. “What?”

“Sir, I need to tell you something.”

“Yes. You’re late. Get in here. We need to finish the painting.” He jerked his head as he trudged into the back.

“About that�"” I took a deep breath and dashed after him. “I think there’s something wrong with the paint.” His footsteps answered me. He disappeared into the studio while I followed close behind. “Mr. Cleer?”

I entered, and my blood chilled. All but a corner of the canvas was covered. The wall of the studio resembled a pit leading to nothing. And at that last corner was Cleer growing the darkness further.

I realized in that moment what the paint wanted: it wanted to be finished. To be joined with its disparate parts. To form…to form a window. Or a door.

Or a floodgate.

“You have to burn it!” I shouted suddenly. “Burn it and destroy the paint!”

Cleer stopped painting. He turned, bloody eyes and hawkish gaze fixed on me. I felt myself wither. “You too.” He dropped his paint roller. “You. Too.”

“I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t care. Please. Just listen�"”

“You listen, you little s**t!” He bellowed, hurling a pail at me. “I give you two years of my life! I give you opportunity, the privilege of assistance, and this is what you do?! Ruin me like everyone else? I thought you were different. But I see what you are.” He started toward me. “You’re a hang-nail. A leech,” He hissed, teeth bared.

Blood pulsed in my ears. “I’ve only tried to help you,” I said, voice shaking.

“Help me? You ruined the lighting on the last exhibit. You ruined the scheduling for Green.”

I shut my eyes. His words hurt, even if one of those statements was true. “Please listen to me,” I said weakly. “The paint. It isn’t natural. It did something last night. Something terrible.”

Cleer’s red eyes became hooded. “You…stole my paint?”

I nodded.

He rushed to me blindingly fast. His long-nailed fingers grabbed my collar and, with no effort, launched me into the air into a metal shelf. I slammed into the rack, empty jars shattering and metal parts clattering on the ground. My back ached. My hands scraped against metal. Dazed, I looked up to see Cleer standing over me, impossibly tall with the yawning darkness behind him. His face, formally kind, now held nothing but contempt. I suddenly imagined whatever lay on the other side of the painting taking him now, and how I would’ve liked it.

“Get out.”

At his command, I scurried from the floor and out the door.

That was the last time I saw him in person.

I started crying the minute I entered my car. I cried all the way home, and when I found my way to my room, I curled into a ball on the floor and continued sobbing. I replayed the last two years and the recent past in my head, trying to find some connection or correlation to what led to it. I wanted to rewind it, cut it, and insert a happier ending. I felt removed, distant from myself. I didn’t recognize myself in these recollections.

But worst of all, I didn’t recognize Cleer. Edward Cleer. My friend. My colleague. Now he was being erased, blotted out by all that I should’ve seen. Or rather, what I didn’t want to see.

The paint, in its darkness, had shown Cleer’s true face. The disappointment. The rage at his failures. It was as much a mirror as it was a window. It would be his masterpiece, his magnum opus. A pure monument to his true nature.

And as I laid there, tears spent and drifting off to sleep, I hoped the better moments remained somehow.

I woke to my phone pulsing. Cleer’s name read on the screen. I considered not answering. But my mind wandered back to the painting, and I answered.

“Mr. Cleer?” I said quietly.

As I brought the phone to my ear, I noticed the audio was loud and tinny, like wind or city noise. Cleer’s voice soon broke through. “�"Oh God. Jesus God please forgive me. I didn’t know, I didn’t know what I was doing�"” He was fading in and out, the background noise overtaking him.

“Mr. Cleer! Are you alright?”

“�"You were right. You were right about�"G�"by�"my friend.”

Then a great rush of noise, like a torrent of wind, nearly blew out my ear.

And the line went dead.

The front door was wide open. Stray leaves and branches had blown into the foyer. I tried the light. Nothing. I turned on my phone’s flashlight as I headed to the studio.

“Mr. Cleer?” I called into the dark. No answer.

My heart raced. My fear was indescribable.

The studio, I thought, steeling myself. Go to the studio. He needs you.

I moved slowly through the house, each step light and quiet. Instinctively, I grabbed a candelabra from atop a cabinet. I needed the security.

My mind wandered back to the phone call. the roaring wind. The sadness

A loud, bright gust of wind blew through the house, sending me stumbling to the floor. Furniture slid across the floor; curtains flew back. I heard the distant banging of the front door slamming open, its hinges most likely breaking for good. The strength of the blast was impossible. The smell was worse: Festering waste on burning asphalt, decay upon decay upon decay. I vomited onto the floor. I hated the sight of my own vomit, so I tried to block it from my mind as I kept moving. The smell lingered, so I held my nose. I could still taste the vomit and stench.

It was the same as in my room. This time it felt closer.

The hallways gave way to the high walls of the studio. The equipment was still there: the reused paint cans, the blackened rollers, miles of tarp on the carpets. And there was the painting leaning on the wall.

My light shone on crimson steel boxes and rubber hoses. A white graphic of a plume of fire glinted brightest. Kerosene.

The stench hung thick like wool in the air here. And I could not find Cleer.

“Mr. Cleer!” I shouted impotently. My voice echoed, bouncing around before fading.

I shined the light around the room, searching for life. Nothing. Just me and this impossibly large painting. I’d never seen it without Cleer with me or at night. This was his intended way of showing it. As dark as possible, per his request. Pure black. We’d finally finished it. In its endless abyssal way, it was beautiful. Everything and nothing framed in 120 by 96 inches.

I made one last attempt to call him. I opened my phone and dialed. The phone to my ear was warm and sticky from my hand.

As the dial tone droned, another sound caught my attention. I listened intently. It seemed close.

A blinking light at the corner of my eye drew me to the painting. Something flashed intermittently like a signal flare. As I listened closer, I recognized the generic xylophone tone Cleer used as his ringtone. The phone spun over and over, flashing its signal light as it floated in the painting’s void.

My stomach bottomed out. My heartbeat rocketed into overdrive. And yet a force of either curiosity or stupidity lured me to the edge of the painting’s monolithic frame. I stretched out my hand and pressed into the canvas paper.

There was no paper or wood or wall. My hand passed into a great empty space which turned my skin hot and damp. The phone spun in the darkness in an almost enticing way, beckoning me into this terrible place that Cleer and I had discovered.

Another blast of fetid wind blasted me away from my catch. Like a gale on a spring day, I struggled to keep my balance as I fought through the smelly wall threatening to make me retch again.

As the wind died down, the impossibility of what was happening made me realize something perversely wonderful: In a way, Cleer and I had done the impossible. With his infernal paint, we’d pushed past the merely hypothetical. The blank space beyond the frame, the Pure Black as its key, was a universal mirror to all. This was the state of all things, what lay behind the curtains of perception and color. I felt a kind of calm as I raised my flashlight back into the threshold.

The light caught on a massive slab of flesh shone wetly in the weakening flashlight. The mass slid open to reveal a great black pit that glistened in the light. The pupil noticed me, moving closer, shrinking as it examined my flashlight.

I think the sounds I made were screams. I can’t remember. My body moved independent of my mind. My hands took the kerosene and splashed the fluid across the floor and wall around the painting. Both cans emptied and a lit match fell into the puddles. By the time I’d gotten to my car, the house was a blazing pillar of fire. I suspect the stray aerosol and oil paint helped.

As I said, I figured you wouldn’t believe me. You probably think I’m insane. I know it sounds like that. But it’s true. Every word.

I stand accused of arson and suspected murder of Edward Cleer. I am guilty of one of these things, I know. What I did was far more important than you realize, though.

Ed and I didn’t know what we were doing. We were just creating, trying to realize his vision. His “Pure Black”. We did it, for a price.

I know I’m not going home. I’ll spend the rest of my life in a cell, no doubt. I’m okay with that.

Just keep the lights on. Please God, keep the lights on. I know it saw me that night. I don’t want it seeing me again.

Author's Note

This is a draft I haven't looked at in a while. I'm just looking for general thoughts. Additional comments are welcome!

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Reviews

CM Joshua

This was awesome!
The descriptions and general wording on point. You took the general premise of “artist descends into madness” and really honed in on the physical art elements to create something that is very creative and vivid. I could practically see the Pure Black oozing off of my screen as I read some of the later bits!
The story itself is also very well paced. Watching Edward Cleer start out as an enigmatic Doc Brown figure downward spiral into obsessive insanity was very well documented by the narrator, and then there’s also the tonal shift in the story as well.
What starts out as an assistant watching his employer become more compulsive after a short string of flops eventually divulges into something more along the lines of cosmic horror. The characterization and descriptions of the Pure Black, like the harrowing noises it makes and the foul smells it emits, and how it seemingly overtakes Cleer’s mind the more he fills out his canvas, becoming more present and physical, looking for a gateway into our world, was impressive writing to say the least.
One minor thing I will note is that at random points in the text there are these little “?” emoticons that I don’t think are intentional, but there weren’t too many of them that they completely detract from my enjoyment of the story, plus it could just be a problem with my web browser.