Madame Painte: For Sale

By John Langan

“This?” the man behind the counter says. “Why, this is Madame Painte.”

The figure is short, a foot and a half tall, and squat, about the same dimensions across, composed of what might be porcelain. The face is round, the eyes squeezed shut by the wide smile lifting the cheeks. A pointed hat fails to conceal the pointed tips of the figure’s ears. It wears a long apron dress over a peasant blouse. A somewhat typical garden gnome, you think, except for the colors, from which it obviously derives its name. It’s been painted without regard for the margins of clothing and skin. Black, green, and orange slash down the figure from right to left. The face is mostly dark green, the hat orange mixed with black. A splash of white paint traverses the closed eyes; the effect is less a mask and more a piece of webbing. You saw the figure sitting to the left of the door to the antique shop as you walked up the path to it and were so struck by its remarkable grotesquerie that you lifted and carried it inside, setting it on the front counter. On the way, you read the notecard strung to the top of the hat: MUST BE KEPT OUTSIDE.

“I didn’t mean its name,” you start.

“Of course not,” the man says. He’s on the small side, more wiry than slender. Based on the ratio of salt to pepper in his mustache and hair, he’s somewhere in the deep middle of middle age. He says, “You meant the warning.”

“Must be kept outside,” you read. “Why must?”

“The official reason is, she’s covered in lead paint.”

You step back from the counter, wipe your hands on your jeans. “There’s an unofficial reason?”

“There’s a story,” the man says. “Would you like to hear it? It’s brief.”

“Um. Sure,” you say, but do not move any closer.

“Madame Painte,” the man says, “hails from Holland by way of Guam by way of Australia. She was part of a line of garden ornaments manufactured by a factory outside of Amsterdam in the 1980s. I’m not sure how she traveled to the western Pacific, possibly via cargo ship. I know she was decorating the front lawn of a house in Yigo by 1995. This was the residence of a colonel stationed at the U.S. Air Force base there. She was already sporting her distinctive paint job; though I’m unclear who gave it to her. It may have been the colonel’s wife, whose name was Priscilla. As I understand it, she was an artist—bit of an amateur anthropologist, too. She’s the first person I’m aware of who insisted the figure be kept outside. This was when she sold it to a young Australian couple, Trudi and Lenard Niles, visiting the island. The colonel had been transferred back stateside, and he and his wife had decided to take the opportunity to thin their possessions. The Nileses—well, mostly Trudi—were quite infatuated with the Madame. Priscilla was reluctant to part with her, said she couldn’t let her go with just anyone. The Nileses thought she was trying to up the price, but that wasn’t it. She’d give the figure away for free to the exactly right person. I guess the young couple wasn’t quite perfect, because she took their money, but they were good enough for her to part with Madame Painte. Only after they’d sworn to keep her outside their home, though.

“This was how the figure made her way from Guam to Canberra.”

“Let me guess,” you say, “the couple brought her inside their house.”

“Not at first, no,” the man says, “but eventually, yes. Initially, they placed her in their back garden, next to a tall claret ash. The Nileses had a small metal table and pair of chairs near that spot. When the weather was warm, they would bring their morning coffee there. Trudi was a writer, a travel writer; Lenard was high up in an electronics company. After he went off to the office, she would carry her notebook, and later her laptop, to the table and work on whatever article was due that month. Actually, she wrote an article about the trip to Guam, which is how I know as much as I do about Priscilla and the promise she extracted.”

“What changed?” you say. “I mean, what made the couple break their promise?”

The man shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m not certain anything did change, which is to say, I’m not sure there was a moment when one of them looked at the other and said, ‘The time has come for us to forsake our vow.’ I suspect their promise wasn’t that much to begin with, just words said to get what they wanted. Then one day, years later, they decided to redecorate, and thought their garden ornament would look better in a corner of the living room. If they recalled their conversation with the colonel’s wife, their pledge to her, it was in a bemused, hey-do-you-remember way. They cleaned the dirt and insects off Madame Painte, and brought her inside.”

“And?”

“At first, nothing. As I said, they were redecorating, painting walls, replacing furniture, putting in a new kitchen. For a time, the interior of their house was fairly chaotic. Madame Painte sat in her corner and waited.”

“Waited for what?”

“The right moment. Months had passed. Everything had calmed; the house was in its new configuration. One night, Lenard woke up to use the toilet. On his way back to bed, he saw something on the wall outside the room. It was a splash of white, as if someone had swiped a paintbrush across that spot, or as if moonlight were reflecting off a mirrored surface in the living room. He waved his hand in front of it, which had no effect. He placed his palm against it, but could feel no difference in texture. To the best of my knowledge, he did not notice a resemblance between the white streak on the wall and the white mask Madame Painte wore.

“Next morning, after her coffee and writing, Trudi saw that a patch of the wall beside the bedroom door was discolored, faded the way paint gets after years of direct sunlight. She touched the spot, and it crumbled under her fingertips. She found it strange, especially since the surface had been painted so recently, but she decided it must be some form of dry rot. When she discussed it with Lenard over dinner, he mentioned his late-night vision, but neither drew any conclusions from it. They made plans to call a contractor.

“A couple of days later, Trudi saw the white streak. Once again, it was late at night, the house dark. She had stayed up finishing an article whose deadline she had let draw too near. Walking into the bedroom, she glimpsed something white draped over the hindquarters of Toro, the Nileses’ cat, who was asleep at the foot of the bed. So tired was she that she took the white streak for moonlight shining through the venetian blinds; only later would she realize it had been a new moon that night.

“In the morning, Toro was gone from the bed, which was not unusual, and he didn’t come for his breakfast, which was. Trudi found him in the garden, when she brought her coffee out there. (Lenard had left for an early meeting.) The minute she sat, she heard a low moan from somewhere nearby. She recognized it as the cat, but it was a sound he’d never made before, halfway between a complaint and a warning. It raised the hairs on the back of her neck. She stood, called the cat’s name. He uttered that weird groan again. She looked around the garden. He wasn’t hard to find: what remained of him lay under a bush—some variety of hakea, I think it was.”

“What do you mean, ‘what remained’?”

“From a little below his midsection, the cat had shriveled, the fur gone, the skin blackened and shrunken against the bone. It was what you might have expected to find had the cat been dead for years. He was panting, obviously in pain, unable to understand what had happened to him. Trudi’s first impulse was to take him to the veterinarian, but Toro wouldn’t let her near him, hissing and clawing at her as she reached for him. She had to settle for calling the vet, who promised to stop by after her office was closed. By then, it was too late. Toro had bared his fangs at some unseen foe, and breathed his last. The vet was puzzled, to say the least. This degree of atrophy suggested some type of venom, but the speed with which it had acted was, in her experience, unprecedented. She asked to take Toro’s remains to her office for an autopsy, which Trudi consented to. As the vet lifted him, though, the cat…came apart. His lower portion crumbled and his insides slid out onto the ground. The vet removed what she could, but it was a messy business.”

“Did she find anything?” you say.

“Not exactly,” the man says. “She phoned Trudi a day or two later. From what she’d been able to see under the microscope, the cat’s cells had collapsed, lost their integrity and dissolved into one another. It’s the kind of effect certain kinds of spider venom have on their victim’s tissues. There was more. The worst affected portions of Toro were completely dry, every last drop of moisture drained from them. Of course, Trudi wanted to know what spider or other creature had done this to her cat. The vet didn’t know. It was a familiar joke that Australia was full to the brim with deadly wildlife, but nothing she was acquainted with operated in this fashion on mammals of any size. Possibly, they were dealing with an invasive species. She was going to make some calls, ask if anything new had snuck into people’s back gardens. In the meantime, Trudi should be careful, and should tell her husband to be careful, as well.

“During the following day, there was a moment Trudi looked at Madame Painte, at the white swath across the figure’s smiling face, and was struck by the resemblance between the decoration and the white stripe she had seen on Toro. Hadn’t Lenard mentioned a white mark on the wall outside their bedroom? She remembered the promise she’d made to Priscilla. For an instant, the details threatened to cohere into a bizarre and awful whole. As quickly as the thought occurred to her, however, she rejected it. It was ridiculous, absurd, like something from an old horror story. Over dinner that night, she shared the idea with Lenard. He nodded at the coincidence, but dismissed it, as well.

“Do I have to tell you what happened, next? Sometime late in the night, Trudi dreamed she sat up in bed, looked at Lenard asleep beside her, and saw the splash of white traversing his face, from just above his right eyebrow down to the left corner of his mouth. In her dream, she wasn’t afraid as much as curious. With the index and middle fingers of her right hand, she touched the white streak where it crossed Lenard’s nose. It was like brushing her fingers against a spider web. She lowered her head onto her pillow, and was instantly asleep.”

“It wasn’t a dream, was it?”

The man shakes his head. “It was not. You can imagine the sight that greeted Trudi when she woke that morning. She ran screaming into the street, and who can blame her? Eventually, the police were called, and the emergency services, but it was all over. The best anyone could do for poor Lenard was opine that at least he hadn’t suffered, and how could they be sure? Initially, there was some suspicion of foul play. The idea was that Trudi had murdered Lenard by pouring acid on him while he slept. There were too many problems with the theory for it to hold up very long, not least of which was the coroner’s report. This showed that Lenard had died from something that had liquefied a portion of his face, skull, and brain, then drained the liquid, all without spilling a drop on the pillow. The closest analogue the M.E. could suggest was a spider melting its victim’s insides with its venom and slurping them out. But like Trudi’s veterinarian before him, he couldn’t name an arachnid capable of dissolving and consuming this amount of tissue. Eventually, the cause of death was settled on as a previously unknown strain of MRSA.

“Which was bullshit, but more acceptable than the explanation Trudi was giving.”

“Madame Painte.”

“To anyone who would listen, she repeated the story that had become overwhelmingly, hideously obvious to her. She refused to reenter the house, and it wasn’t long until she was taken to the hospital, where she was given a bed in the psychiatric ward. No doubt, she was prescribed a sedative, at minimum. When all was said and done, she agreed to return home, but she insisted that the figure be removed from the living room, first. Her doctor decided it was easier to comply with this request than continue to go back and forth with her. Someone—it might have been the psychiatrist, herself—entered the house, located Madame Painte, and brought her to a local charity shop. She went so far as to follow Trudi’s instructions and stipulated that the figure must be sold with a warning to keep her outside.

“This was how I found her. The charity shop listed some of its merchandise online. I subscribe to a couple of groups that keep an eye out for unusual pieces. The instant Madame Painte popped up on my screen, I clicked the purchase button.”

“Weren’t you, I don’t know, nervous?”

“No—although that was because I didn’t know the full story behind her. Not that I do, now: let’s say I didn’t know Trudi and Lenard’s portion of it. I assumed the instruction to keep the figure outside had to do with the paint that had been used on her. I went so far as to e-mail the charity shop, but they weren’t much help. What I’ve told you I learned from Trudi, who sent me a long e-mail a few months after I set Madame Painte outside my front door. For weeks, Trudi had been plagued by a combination of guilt and anxiety at passing on the Madame without disclosing her history, until she decided the only thing for her to do was contact whoever had purchased the figure. The charity shop supplied my e-mail, and she wrote me the whole strange, sad story.”

“And you believed her?”

“I didn’t not believe her. Before I opened this place, I was a cop in Albany for twenty years, and as the saying goes, I’ve seen some things. Business was slow, which let me do a little digging online. Lenard’s death had made national news, briefly, and had sparked a series of articles about the dangers of drug-resistant super-bacteria. Based on the information included in the initial report, I was able to track down the veterinarian, who confirmed the details of Toro’s death. In the end, I decided there was nothing wrong with leaving Madame Painte where she was. She seems happy enough watching the front door, and I’ve noticed a decrease in the local rodent population.” The man smiles thinly.

“What do you think, I mean, what is she?”

“Aside from the focal point for a woman who suffered an excruciating loss? I don’t know. My father was a big fan of Kipling, Stevenson, and this sounds like the kind of story one of them would have written. White people encounter a cursed object in the mysterious east—which, my older daughter would say, is pretty racist. (She’s working on her Ph.D. over at Amherst.) I suppose it is. I wonder if there mightn’t have been something wrong with the figure early on, right after she emerged from the factory. Maybe something attached to her, or was attached to her, whatever the white mask is. Maybe a version of what happened to the Nileses took place in a pretty house beside a canal, and the decision was made to send her far away, to the other side of the earth, where she wouldn’t harm any more Dutch folks. Like dumping your supernatural toxic waste in a place whose inhabitants you don’t give a rat’s ass about.”

“Why not just smash her, then, solve the problem that way?”

“What if I let loose whatever’s in or on her?”

“Sounds like that’s happening already.”

“Only if she’s kept inside,” the man says. “Apparently, Priscilla, the colonel’s wife, had her in their garden for years without any problems. There are fewer mice, chipmunks, around, but I can tolerate that.”

“You sound like her caretaker.”

“I suppose. That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Then why have her for sale?”

“Because it’s a big responsibility. One I’m not certain I completely believe in, but I feel better erring on the side of caution. I would be happy to pass the care of Madame Painte onto someone I could be satisfied would maintain it with due diligence.

“Now that you’ve heard the story, the question is, Is that someone you?”

There is a moment, which is not that long but which will lengthen in your memory, when you think it might be. Not for any good or noble reason, but due to the cause that chased you out of your house this morning, sent you driving east on the Thruway until you took the first exit for Albany and wound up here: your grandfather, ninety-two, who lives in the basement apartment under you and your spouse’s home. His brain clotted by dementia, but his body strong from a lifetime of construction work, he has been expelled from the last three nursing homes to which you’ve brought him. He can live on his own, he insists. Surrendering to necessity, you and your spouse have refurbished the basement to a reasonably safe space for him, from which he nonetheless flees once a week, usually to the next-door neighbors’, to whom he appeals for protection from the strangers he says have kidnapped and imprisoned him. This is not to mention the daily trials, the small acts of meanness, vindictiveness, the piss and shit left on the bathroom floor, the stale and rotten food hidden under the bed and in the cushions of his easy chair, the sudden insults and rages. He could live another ten years, his doctor has said, he could give up the ghost tomorrow. You didn’t sign up for this, you’ve said to yourself with increasing frequency, neither of you signed up for this.

Madame Painte might be the solution to your dilemma. Yes, the story is likely so much fantasy, but suppose it isn’t? Just suppose. Your grandfather wouldn’t have to know she was there. You could wait till he’s asleep, hide her in his bedroom closet. Didn’t the man say Lenard hadn’t felt any pain? Plus, how would—how could—such a thing be traced back to you?

The wave of horror that sweeps through you carries the, “No, it isn’t,” from your mouth before you realize you’ve said it.

“That’s all right,” the man says. “Feel free to keep browsing. I’m sure you’ll appreciate, I’d like to return the Madame to her proper place.”

“Sure,” you say, your face burning with shame.

For politeness’s sake, you spend a few minutes wandering the shop’s narrow aisles while its proprietor carries the figure out to the front step. Once he’s behind the counter again, you depart the antique shop at something close to a run. The man nods to you as you pass him; in reply, you lift your left hand in a half-wave.

You can’t help yourself: as you hurry up the front walk, you cast a glance over your shoulder at Madame Painte. She smiles her closed-eye smile at you, as if she knows you’ll be back.

Host Commentary

There’s a lot of cursed object stories out there, it’s a tried and tested staple of the genre. The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs is the first to come to my mind. Next would be stories by M.R. James, the so-called Father of Folk Horror. “The Mezzotint”, “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”, and possibly the creepiest cursed object story I’ve read, “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad”. There are many others, of course, such as “The Monkey” by Stephen King, “The Jar” by Ray Bradbury, or “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson.

In many of these stories, the featured object is something grotesque or odd or… other. What I like about Madame Painte is the sheer mundanity of the cursed object – a garden gnome. Weird colour scheme or not, who feels threatened by a garden gnome? Is it even possible to be afraid of a garden gnome?

Well, yeah it is when it causes some kind of horrific flesh-eating decay! And especially so as when the curse strikes, there’s no going back. At least with the Monkey’s Paw you can sort of backtrack. Here, it’s final, it’s inevitable and it seems to always be fatal.

Which is why the true horror is at the end of the story when it occurs to the protagonist that the little gnome might solve a convoluted problem. And that’s the problem with that kind of idea – it ain’t going away. Imagination will work at it until it seems a reasonable act.

Sherlock Holmes once said, “Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.” Well here is horror, because you know he’s coming back for it.