Prompts: first sentence, Image by _Marion from Pixabay
“Careful,” warned Stanley, “won’t do us no good if you leave blood spatters at the scene of the crime.”
“Idiot,” hissed Gordon, “you didn’t know the first thing about a successful heist until I met you. You were still wet behind the ears when you started working at the pawn shop!”
His job and their partnership had been fortuitous, thought Stanley. He had been desperate for work, down on his luck. The pawn shop was the ideal location to spot their next wealthy target. There’s something about a lifetime of luxury followed by financial stress that makes one easy to befriend.
“You mean, like Rob,” jousted Stanley.
Gordon shot Stanley a warning look, as he turned back to focus on cutting the rest of the canvas free. Rob had been Gordon’s original partner. Art was a new focus for him, it had been Rob’s idea, and it had so far paid off handsomely. That is, before Rob disappeared a few months back. Gordon remembered the last time he saw Rob, speaking with a new special buyer. She blew in with the snow in a deep hood that shadowed her features, golden curls erupting like fur lining. Business had been slow since, until the week prior when the golden fleece had returned.
Stanley walked around the room, running his hands behind the art for a hidden safe. There were rolling pastures with a stray cow, gentle rivers with weeping willows trailing their fingers sorrowfully in the water. He grazed past until he reached a painting of a clearing in a forest with a sole tree sprouting from its center. Something about the gnarled trunk and twisted branches drew him closer, and his eyes fastened on a large knot reminiscent of a tortured human face. His hand rose involuntarily, and as his fingers made electric contact with the canvas a wild shriek of terror ripped through his brain and shot him reeling backwards.
“What are you doing? Why am I doing all the work, while you loaf about!” Gordon stomped towards Stanley and roughly shoved him with his wounded hand. A glint of gold from Stanley’s back pocket caught his eye, and his thick eyebrows knitted together. “What’s that? A bit of the loot you squirreled away for yourself?”
Gordon lunged for the knife in Stanley’s back pocket, both men grasping it at the same time. In the struggle Gordon managed to slice one of Stanley’s fingers before wresting it away. He turned the knife over to examine it, the handle glinting with rubies and emeralds the size of marbles.
“It’s just a letter opener! I was going to add it to the pile!” protested Stanley as he sucked his finger. “Everything else here is rubbish!” Stanley flung out an arm towards a painting of a desert scene, and as his hand passed the canvas a tumbleweed followed like a shadow.
Both men blinked incredulously as the brush strokes vanished. The scene of dry cracked earth sharpened into focus as if the photographer focused the lens, and the dry serpentine tree trunk wobbled back and forth as fluffy white clouds skidded across the horizon. Warm puffs of air blew their hair as their boots crunched shards of dried clay. Stanley’s mouth fell open as the dry dust on their boots thickened to bark that climbed their legs, and four arms stretched into leafless branches knotted by knuckles.
The whistling of the wind peaked in a glorious note then tapered to still silence. The door to the study opened, softly sweeping across the high pile carpet. The woman walked to the desk and touched the ruby blade gently before she padded to the desert scene painting. In her grasp was a paintbrush whose thick wooden handle was stained multicolored. She raised her fist to brush back a golden curl, then rested her chin upon it in thoughtful study.
“Yes, a couple more trunks, that is precisely what it needed.”
Oooh, this took such a creepy turn. It reminded me of the movie "The Ring" where a flat image comes to life in a horrifying way. Lots of great lines in here, like "The angry burr of torn skin wept darkly" and "golden curls erupting like fur lining".
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