xoxoxocd: Al and Josie Martineau

October 31, 2010

In honor of Hallowe'en

We present

An Eerie Tale of a Haunted Portrait!

A long time ago, in a deep and dark Korean forest, a young man named Lenny was forced to live with an evil battalion of soldiers . Lenny was homesick, and thought of his family back home constantly.

One cold December day, Lenny met a decrepit and impoverished old man who insisted that he could immortalize Len's parents by painting a likeness of them such as the world had never seen! Lenny was skeptical, but being in need of a way to spend his money, agreed to let the old man try.

So Lenny gave the man a photo of his parents to use as a guide. The man put brush to canvas with gnarled and mangled claws, and in a matter of hours produced quite a good portrait of Albert and Josephine Martineau!

Lenny was very happy with the results, but later that evening, as he prepared to package the painting to ship it home as a surprise for his Mom and Dad, he felt a strange sensation pass through his fingers, a tingling --- as if his hands were becoming frostbitten! Lenny was a little unnerved by this, but his evil Sergeant called "Lights Out" and so he went to sleep without thinking much more about it.

The painting was shipped home, and arrived just a few days after the Christmas Holiday. When it was unwrapped, it proved to be a very nice gift, indeed. But as Len's Mom proceeded to hang it in a place where all who entered could admire it, it became warm to her touch and she dropped the painting, chipping a small corner of the frame. She hung it anyway, and it DID inspire all who looked at it to declare it's exquisiteness!

And then a year passed.

And an unusual phenomenon began to occur. The faces in the portrait began to change, ever so subtlely at first, and then with greater intensity...until, horror of horrors...