Leo found the artwork in a dark corner of the museum basement. A dusty label on the frame identified it simply as The Nightmare Portrait. The canvas showed a pale man with hollow eyes against a pitch-black backdrop. Feeling an odd pull to the piece, Leo bought it and hung it on his bedroom wall. It took less than an hour for him to realize he had made a terrible mistake.

The horror began the very first night when Leo turned off the main lights. A cold chill filled the bedroom as he crawled into bed. When he looked up, the painted man was staring directly at him.

Leo shifted to the far left side of his mattress, but the dark pupils shifted too. He stood up and walked over to his desk, yet the gaze tracked his every step. The constant stare created an intense, heavy feeling of paranoia. Desperate for relief, Leo turned the heavy frame to face the wall and went to sleep. When he woke up at dawn, the canvas had flipped back around. The eyes were locked onto his face once more.

As the second day went by, the painted image began to alter its form. In the morning, the subject possessed a flat, neutral expression. By noon, the painted lips looked tight and strained. By dinner time, the corners of the mouth had curled upward into a slight smirk.

Leo stayed awake that night, holding a flashlight tight in his hand. When he clicked the beam onto the canvas, his blood ran cold. The neutral expression was completely gone. The man’s mouth was now stretched into a wide, jagged grin that showed too many sharp teeth. The face radiated pure malice. The oil paint looked fresh and wet, dripping slightly at the edges. The room began to smell like old dirt and copper. Every time Leo blinked, the smile grew wider and more sinister.

Just after midnight, a soft scraping sound broke the silence of the room. It sounded exactly like sharp fingernails scratching against tight cloth. Leo watched in frozen terror as the flat art took on three-dimensional life.

The man’s hands were no longer made of flat paint. Long, pale fingers gripped the outer wooden frame. The dark background of the painting began to spill outward, staining the bedroom wall like black liquid ink.

With a slow, agonizing grovestreetart.com heave, the figure pulled its chest forward out of the flat surface. The head and shoulders emerged into the bedroom air, gaining real weight and mass. The figure dropped its bare feet onto the hardwood floor with a dull thud. Leo looked back at the wall and saw that the frame was entirely empty. The subject had escaped. Leo slowly turned his head toward the foot of his bed, where the tall, pale man now stood smiling down at him.