Basil's Murder

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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A small solitary figure in a dark Victorian coat walks down a fog-blurred London street at dusk, gas-lamps glowing as soft halos through the soot-grey mist. — On a foggy November evening, when the lamps of London blurred into halos and the streets had softened into something almost theological, Basil Hallward made his way to Dorian Gray's house for what he intended as an act of rescue.

Two faces in lamplight: a horrified painter beside his own portrait, now transformed into a figure of corrupt beauty and cruelty, the gilt frame catching old gold between them. — He turned the key with the careful ceremony of a priest opening a reliquary, and let the lamplight fall upon the portrait. Basil looked — and saw, in his own brushwork, a stranger of bestial cruelty and slack corruption, the eyes gleaming with the intelligence of a beast that had learned to read and to mock.

A still Victorian studio: a man's body lies slumped near an easel beneath a cracked, looming portrait, a knife glinting on the floorboards, fog pressed against the window. — The body slumped near the portrait, and for a long moment the only sound was the house settling around its new secret, the fog murmuring at the windows like a congregation that had wandered into the wrong church.

On a foggy November evening, when the lamps of London blurred into halos and the streets had softened into something almost theological, Basil Hallward made his way to Dorian Gray's house for what he intended as an act of rescue. He came armed only with conviction and the sincere belief that an old friend's voice might yet recall the boy he had once painted in a garden of his own devising. The rumors had grown too loud to be ignored: a young man dead by his own hand in a shabby hotel room, a girl's broken heart trailing behind her like a ribbon after a carriage accident, a name spoken now only with a certain wary shrug in fashionable clubs. Basil pleaded as he had not pleaded since boyhood. Deny the stories, he begged. Go into the light. Pray, if only as a kind of aesthetic discipline, for the soul, he insisted, is a thing that withers when neglected, like cut flowers left without water in a darkened drawing-room. He spoke of repentance as one might speak of a particular shade of blue — with the fond, almost girlish belief that beauty could be coaxed back into the soul as one coaxes it back onto a damaged canvas, one careful stroke at a time.

Something in Dorian's face shifted as he listened. Perhaps it was the fog pressing at the windows, or perhaps it was the simpler, more ancient pleasure of corrupting the last honest man who still believed in him. On a savage impulse, sudden as a knife drawn from a drawer, he decided to show Basil what he had become. He led the painter up the stairs, past the doors of polished hospitality, to the locked room at the heart of the house. He turned the key with the careful ceremony of a priest opening a reliquary, and he let the lamplight fall upon the portrait. Basil looked. The face that greeted him from the canvas was his own work, his own brushwork, his own loving labor — and yet it was also a stranger, a thing of bestial cruelty and slack corruption, the eyes gleaming with the intelligence of a beast that has learned to read and to mock. Basil staggered back. He saw his own handiwork transformed into a kind of ledger, every sin he had refused to imagine in his pupil now catalogued in paint and shadow. He urged Dorian, with the desperation of a man watching a building catch fire, to fall upon his knees and pray.

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Dorian seized a knife from the table beside the easel and did not pray. He struck, and the painting received a second painter that night — a darker one, whose brush was not of bristles but of consequence. The body slumped near the portrait, and for a long moment the only sound was the house settling around its new secret, the fog murmuring at the windows like a congregation that had wandered into the wrong church. Then, with the cold efficiency of a man arranging flowers after a dinner party, Dorian began to plan the erasure of his friend. He thought of names. He thought of debts. He thought of the particular kind of loyalty that is only the reverse face of fear, and which can be purchased for the right price. Somewhere in London there was a chemist who had loved him once, and who would, he was certain, love his own survival more than he loved any memory of that long-ago devotion. Within hours he would ride through that same dissolving fog to call upon that old acquaintance and trade a man's body for a man's silence, leaving the portrait alone again with its monstrous inheritance — beauty rotting underneath, the varnish still fresh, the curse still feeding, the painter's last lesson written in a hue no palette had ever named.