RICHARD RAVEN, PAINTER

It was the summer of 1547. The sun baked the dense streets like a sadist. It reeked of shit and piss. Richard Raven strolled through it all. He wore a large beaked mask stuffed with herbs to keep the stink out. His black hood was up and his long dark cloak trailed in the sewage. He looked like a crow.

He entered his home knuckling the graveyard. It was crooked and its four front windows stared over the massing graves. They heaved like mole hills in the offended till. His home was his sanctuary. The Exorcist's House because Richard raven was an exorcist of paint.

When he painted people he could protect them. His portraits guarded them from their demons and for this he was handsomely rewarded by the grateful rich. This was the contract. Paint for monthly purses of gold and silver and you shall live a happy life free of torment and canker. This was the Raven's stipend, an allowance for the pain his rigours brought him. Recently those pains had worsened and he stooped often with increasing fatigue.

Still he endeavored to exorcise the coming dark with brushes and oils and his strokes of sanctuary hung on the walls of the City's elite like stays of execution. They were mounting too as if some foul edifice was braced above the town poised on the very brink. Their demons were massing.

The painter also assisted the poor and the decrepit of the slums near his house, the overwhelmed and the gangrenous teeming like rodents in the slurry creeping down from the high villas. He painted them freely requiring no payment but the obvious gratitude and sorrow seeping from their faces.

Thousands of these tiny paintings covered his own walls and Raven drew succour from the humility captured within. These were the seraphim in the hell they'd not constructed. The elvers in the priveleged piss. They too twitched like stricken flies at their dismal end. The gutters seemed fit to burst. Talk of malignancy hissed round the cramped alleys like a tide of adders; talk of Death and the Devil himself.

But Richard Raven had a weakness, which was also his escape from the banal, the strain and the growing unease.

He liked to eat and drink the finest meats and wines in the city's most expensive hostelries and bed the most sophisticated women of the night, who's clothes were lavish and quims were washed anew. For this decadence he strew his gold like confetti. Or rather, the gold of the fortunate and the bloated, piled high in the salted cellars of the exorcist's house, his hidden pension.

It was on a night such as this, a night of opulence and copulation that the beaked man staggered home under the misty smoke of the torches by the church.

"Raven!" whispered a voice in the darkness. "Richard Raven, Painter!"

A figure stepped out of the shadows and stood before the startled man.

"Yes. I am Raven. How can I be of service to you?"

"I am Merelda. Contessa of Stygia. I seek your famous skills as an artist of rare hue as I suffer the prospect of injurious blows this very eve."

"What ails you Contessa and I shall see if I can help."

"I am followed by a person of twisted character. A brute who wishes to do me harm. An ogre hell-bent on my mutilation and the violation of my very self."

"Who is this man?"

"He is a force of nature, a terrible lord, who's name remains unknown to me. I know him by his dreadful aura as you would do too".

"I need not meet the man but rather protect you from him If I am correct?"

"Yes. Yes. Oh please help me!"

The lady came closer and kissed the artist's hand and a sudden surge of temptation swept through him. His pulse quickened and he fevered under the mask.

"I shall help you Madame but I require recompense in advance and then monthly forthwith. How will you pay me?"

The Contessa blushed under the dusky torchlight and unfastened the top button of her velvet camisole. Her slow fluttering was unmistakable to Raven, a proffer of passion and a wage he immediately approved of.

He wished heatedly to bed this noble and show her the lengths he would go to capture her essence. He took her hand and walked into his house.

He handed the Countess Merelda a small glass of claret. She smiled and bowing he stepped into his wash room, where Raven removed his beaked mask and his hooded cloak and with spiced soap flannelled his hands, face and loin.

With more claret flowing and deep in the silks and taffetas of his boudoir he wooed the Contessa and felt his passion burgeoning like never before. Her visage, her perfume, her shapely curves all concocted a feverish desire in his weakening soul.

"No Richard! First you must paint me. Then you shall have me!" the Contessa advised.

Raven flicked and dabbed through the night to render the Lady's impression onto his canvas. He was distracted throughout but by and by it was done.

"It is complete Contessa".

The Stygian royal stood in front of her portrait perfectly still.

"You have done well Richard, esteemed painter, but I am unsure of you have captured my truest of natures".

"I have tried my very best my Lady and wish most eagerly to now take you to my bed and describe further my technique," cooed Raven.

"Of course Richard, you shall have me but first you must see me fully in the atelier's light."

The Contessa began to slowly remove her garments; the velvets, the brocades, the camisole. When her petticoat was all that remained Raven held his breath.

It fell and in the dusk of the artist's room revealed a body so hateful, so inhuman that he held his hands over his mouth.

The Lady's breasts were those of a cow, her arms the twisting, biting lengths of serpents, her waist the hairy hide of a warthog and her legs .. it was her legs that made Richard Raven scream, a scream that left the Exorcist's house and carried down the cramped streets of the city like a mad crier.

The Contessa's legs were those of a goat, matted with thick brown hair. Her feet were coarse cloven hooves. Raven stared in disbelief and gagged.

His eyes rose slowly to the head and there .... before him .... was the horned Devil! Lucifer himself!

"You have been busy Richard. I thought I'd better pay you a visit myself before you put me out of business in this Godforsaken hovel completely! I hope you approve of my guise, the voluptuous Contessa, whom I knew would ... erm, wet your palette so to speak! You may still bed me should you wish but I advise against it unless you wish to be incinerated by my particular hot passions!"

"No!"

"Ah, No! As I expected. I have no wish to char your manhood Richard but I do wish to burn all of your paintings. My demons have waited quite long enough and they do so wish to plague your townsfolk so diligently once again. I aim to set them free from your pesky canvas prison".

"You may still wish to bed the Contessa before I start Richard. On the house. Your last brush with lust you might say."

"No. No thankyou".

"Ah well, Never mind. I am keen to free my friends anyway, so they may degrade this pathetic town afresh. I think I shall begin with my Asteroth, who has been sorely missed by his Duchy of pain."

Satan stared at the painting of an Admiral in which his Arch Duke of Hell was bound in a second portrait behind it.

"Ah yes. Asteroth my old infernal fellow. Naturally the Admiral will suffer a terrible demise I'm afraid."

"No! My Lord Satan!" intervened Raven, "Perhaps start here! My own self portrait! You know you want to and since I am plagued by many demons you will release them all at once, a veritable windfall of devils and I shall perish right before you!"

"Hmm. a most enticing proposition Richard. A windfall you say. I like the sound of that. Let the devilry begin!"

Satan whiplashed his flaming fork-tail and lit the painting. It flared in a noisy sizzle of oils and Raven's image quickly sagged and wilted.

The painter began to sweat and cough.

Lucifer laughed.

"Soon this town will be writhing in my demons' filth again and you my friend will hang on MY wall for eternity in my gallery of despair!"

As the rear painting caught as well the painter coughed a little more but then looked up at Satan and smiled.

"Why do you smile so Painter? You have little to delight you I would have thought!"

"I'm smiling because you have not inspected those portraits closely enough my Lord Lucifer. In fact you have simply taken my word for it!"

"What are you talking about mortal, I can clearly see that it's you in the frame you dullard!"

"Ah, but is it? In fact it is not me, it is my twin brother Clifford, who has been dead these past ten years, ensnared and heinously murdered by your mistress The Black Death. He lies not one hundred feet away in the graveyard, where I had him interred, whilst vowing vengeance on pestilence and your Hellish breed."

"What! Dead? the Black Death? You trickster Raven! You talentless dauber! And who in Satan's name is on the second portrait?"

"Why, you are correct My Lord Lucifer!"

"What!"

"It is you that I have painted! You Satan! You Lucifer! In truth you were my Brother's demon and his executioner, the Blackened Death simply your idiotic slave. It is you that is burning in oil!"

As the painting of the Devil went up in flames the smell of searing soulless flesh filled the room as Satan began to burn. Though born of flame and fire, this vengeful charring was a pogrom he could not withstand and with a final glare of primal rage toward the smiling painter, he spread his blazing wings and smashed through the roof of the Exorcist's House and sought the solace of his foul abyss.

"I shall return Raven! Mark my words! I shall return!" bellowed the Devil.

The painter laughed even louder.

"I think not you Fallen fool!" Raven chortled, "Look!"

The painter held up a whole stack of portraits he'd made of Satan and howled in triumph.

"Damn you Raven! Damn your soul to Hell!"

As Lucifer flew smouldering into the Pit Raven looked toward his brother's grave, where a curl of smoke was rising.

Raven smiled.

"Rest in peace my dear Brother; after my brush with the Devil by God's grace I live on yet to fight another day."

The painter then raised a glass of claret to the oil of the grinning Contessa still glistening on his easel.

"My Lady," he bowed.