A Canvas Fantasy

The old painting from uncle William’s attic was gone now, lost in the fire of ’84. The house was saved, but at the cost of my access to my uncle’s collection of girlie magazines and other pleasantries so important to a boy of that age. The painting, though, was what I remembered best. It was done in classical style so far as I knew about such things. The woman was not smiling seductively towards the artist. Hers was not an enigmatic look such as is found on the Mona Lisa. She looked bored. No, not bored. Resigned. Adapted to fate. She sat on a bed of straw in an old brick building, perhaps a barn. The steel collar around her neck was her only adornment, and the chain leading to the wall, a mere couple feet long, was her only accessory. So no, she was not a happy woman. She sat leaning against the wall, the window above her shining a golden ray of light into the otherwise barren room. She herself was quite dirty. I believed she could be real, a true captive in some old estate, possibly in Europe for all I knew. Everything in the picture said desolation to me. Who could know what vicious secrets were hidden then or today in the remote homes of hunters of humanity?

It was one of my favorite memories of my young adolescence, so one might easily imagine not only my shock but my utter elation twenty years later when a casual browsing at a yard sale turned up that very scene in a stack of paintings in cheap frames. And yet, it was not the same scene exactly. This wasn’t another print. It was an entirely new painting. The woman was the same, as well as I could remember. She was lying on her side more in this one, and she wasn’t as old as my fevered young brain had thought. Time plays that trick in viewing another’s age. The girls that seen mature when I’m twelve seen dreadfully young when I’m thirty-two. But it was her, no doubt about it. She was on the straw, a larger pile this time. The scene looked colder. The golden ray was gone, and the sky in the picture, through the window above her head, was greyer.

Needless to say I paid the twenty four dollars. But I had ask where it came from. The homeowners, alas, couldn’t say. The paintings had been in the attic. They found them when they moved in last year. But they had the name of the previous owner. Ben Seigmann. That was all the wife at the yard sale could recall.

I hung the painting promptly, in the bedroom of course. Sometimes I did have company, and though reasonably tasteful in style, it wasn’t the sort of painting one displayed in the open. I could have been satisfied there, but a hunch had me looking up Ben Seigmann. The phone book didn’t help. Last year’s phone book did, but the number was at the home I’d bought the painting from. An internet search proved both fruitful and useless. Seigmann had passed away at age 84 from a heart attack the year before.

Naturally I found the idea intriguing that more paintings might be around. Alas, I knew nothing, not one damn thing, about the art world. I showed the painting to a few people who might know it, but apparently it wasn’t a Rembrandt or van Gogh. I was ready to give up on the idea when I realized I was an idiot. Uncle William was still very much alive. Maybe he knew something about it. It meant admitting I’d been sneaking around in his attic, but since it was twenty years past it seemed safe to bring that up.

“I should have known you weren’t just playing,” he told me.

“I was twelve or thirteen,” I said. “Well, at least when I began to care about that stuff. You know how it is.”

“So what about that painting?”

“Oh, right. What about it?”

“Do you remember where you got it? Do you know who painted it?”

“I got it at a little store in Elmira. No idea who painted it, but sometimes the name is at the bottom, covered by the frame.” I wanted to do a Homeresque “d’oh!” So simple an idea and I’d never thought to take the painting out of the frame. “Let’s take a look at it and see,” he suggested, getting up from his chair.

“You still have it? I thought it was destroyed in that fire!”

“Nah, it was on the other side of the room. But your mother didn’t want you playing up there after the fire. Anyway, it’s in the closet now, in the den. Let’s go check it out.” We went to his den and he poked through years of accumulated junk until pulling it out from the very back. “Now I remember why I bought this,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to hang it again.”

I looked at it, seeing an old boyhood memory return to life. The woman was there, just as I’d left her. And now, she was definitely older than the one in my own painting. It was the same woman, just at different ages. We took it out of the frame, carefully of course. There was nothing at the bottom or along any edges. No initials or anything. But on the back of the canvas were two lines of writing. ‘Sullivan’ and ‘#14’.

To my delight, I convinced uncle William to sell me the painting, though I had to fork over seventy-five dollars for it. I eagerly brought it home. A look at the back of my other new painting confirmed what was obvious. ‘Sullivan’ and ‘#5’.

Now I had something to search on. If only Sullivan were a rare name, but at least I had something. I tried various search combinations. I had only one useful picture hit, to an unexceptional site with various uncoordinated pictures on it for reasons unknown. But what a great hit it was. The woman was now trying to stand up. She was trying to look out the window, but the chain was too short. She stood, but hunched over, peering wistfully upward. She was still naked, and she was older still than either of my paintings. The web site caption said it was Sullivan, but no number was given.

Now thoroughly intrigued by my findings, I resolved to figure out the mystery, and that meant consulting with a professional. I found a local art gallery and made an appointment. I spent several awkward moments with a stern-appearing dealer trying to explain what it was that I wanted. But when I was done he seemed at least professionally interested.

“I don’t know the artist,” he said. “It’s technically competent, of course, but this is not the work of a professional. I can tell you these paintings are not very old.”

“How old?”

“A few decades, I suppose. They’re not antiques by any means.”

“You can tell from the style?”

“No, from the canvas. You can find it in any art store.” He paused. “I think they were painted in real time. The subject has clearly aged. I believe the paintings were made several years apart, at least five, maybe more. And I believe I’ve seen one of these before. Not these two or the one on the computer. Let me make a call.” He vanished into his office, and I browsed the gallery for a time before he came out holding a notepad.

“Here’s the address of a gallery in Piscatua. I just spoke to the owner, a Henry Reed. He’s pretty sure he has two of them in the back room. He picked them up in an estate auction last year and may be happy to sell them to you, since they’re of no use to the gallery.”

I thanked him profusely and headed out on route sixteen. It was an eighty minute drive, but it was only a Saturday afternoon. I found the gallery without a problem, since Piscatua isn’t much of a town. By the time I arrive, Reed had found not two but three paintings from the series and had them ready for me. I breathed in the new visions. In one, a decidedly young teen lay on the straw, pulling desperately at the chain in the wall. In another, the woman in her forties sat, leaning forward with her head between her knees, dejectedly. The third showed her sleeping on a very hot, sweaty day. Like in the others, she never moved from that spot. The weather and her age changed, but nothing else.

“These came from an estate auction?”

“Yes, must have been three years ago,” Reed said. “The name was Craig Miller. I checked the records before you got here. You can have a copy if you like.”

I found the address information and eagerly headed out there, hoping to find a farm. I was finding the idea of this woman irresistible. What would it take to keep a kidnap victim chained and nude for years at a time? How incredibly weird would that be? Alas, the address was a one story ranch house in a tightly packed subdivision. There was no barn there. There was nothing that could serve as a captive woman’s home.

I seemed to be at an impasse. I had no more leads to follow. But I did have my paintings, plus the jpeg from online. And they were wonderful to gaze upon. That was how matters lay for about the next seven or eight months. Then new information struck me entirely from out of the blue. While cruising for porn I came across a picture, and I stared at it in shock for some minutes. It was clearly that same location. It was clearly the same woman. Now there were several men in the picture, their faces hidden from view. They had her chained and spread out wide. Cum was on her face. Whip marks, some bleeding, covered her body. She was in plain misery. And it was a photograph!

I could only stare at it. There was no other picture like it on the site, and it was some Ukrainian server so there wasn’t much chance of asking any questions. I saved it of course, and that was when the next flash of inspiration hit me. The filename on the jpeg was sylviabarnpartyslut7. How hard could it be to do an internet search on that name, without the number? Logic suggested there were at least six more like it. So I did, and I hit pay dirt. There were only a few hits on the image search, yielding numbers 2 and 10. The woman did appear to be having a most miserable time of it. I because more and more convinced that she wasn’t just a kinky wife who sometimes let her hubby paint her picture. If it weren’t for the paintings I would have assumed she was a paid performer. But the paintings were done in different years.

The image search went well. But on a hunch, I also did a regular web search and looked through the hits. Like most such searches, most sites were just gibberish of no value. But way back on the fifteenth page I found a useful looking link. So I clicked it. The site was just non-thumbnailed picture links on a black background. One by one I went through them. The sylviabarnpartyslut pics were there. I found seven, with numbers going up to twenty-two. But there were others. There were jpegs of three more paintings of the woman aged from twenty to probably fifty. And there were two pictures of a barn from the outside. It was a farm, like the thousands that dotted the countryside around here and in the northeast. And the craziest part was that in one picture there were some hills in the background, and I was pretty sure I’d seen them around somewhere.

This was incredible. Absolutely unbelievable. Now I just had to place those hills. I wracked my brain for days, and only seemed to make the mental block worse. I drove around the state hoping for inspiration or some kind of recall. I’d practically given up until two weeks later, driving back home from my brother’s kid’s birthday party I realized where I’d seen them. They were on the drive back from Boston. I found myself looking at them right in front of me.

It was already late in the afternoon by then, so I stopped to find a place to spend the night. I had some searching to do the next day, albeit in an unfamiliar area. I could hardly sleep at all. I had my laptop with me and spent forever going over everything. I was out at the crack of dawn with a local map and a full tank of gas. I tried to position myself at the right viewing spot for those hills. Of course that part of the state was just full of old farms, half of them deserted these days. It was about two in the afternoon when I rounded a bend, peered through some trees, and spotted the barn. It was several hundred yards from the road. The farm looked deserted. At least it wasn’t an active farm anymore. The fields were overgrown. There were no vehicles. It seemed like I’d found my spot, but no woman. Even so, I parked on the road and walked onto the seemingly deserted property.

There was the barn, an old silo, and a sagging farmhouse. No livestock was visible. I noted the continued absence of people and headed right for the barn. There was no sound from inside. It was a great big structure, but easy to find the door. It was padlocked.

Fuck!

I started towards the empty farmhouse, passing the silo on my right, when I heard a sound. It was perfect. It was female, distressed, and coming from the silo. There was no lock on that door, to the little structure at the base. I went in, then opened to the door to the silo interior itself. There, in front of my eyes, lay a stunning, naked, heavily chained young woman. She was gagged, but screamed in distress when she saw me. She was spread eagled, lying on the floor facing up. I didn’t see any keys. “Hold on,” I told her. God, what I wouldn’t give to be the one keeping her. She was a shapely brunette, with truly oversized breasts for her body, which was quite thin.

Now I headed back to the barn, and picked up a cement block lying in a pile. It was more than sufficient to knock the padlock off the door. I strode in and looked to my right where I expected the woman to be. And there she was. Her hair was white by then, more so than in the paintings I knew about. She wore the old steel collar and chain, just as I expected. She looked at me but barely seemed to notice. I just stared back until a tiny noise directed my attention to the rest of the barn. The woman occupied one corner. Three other women, all chained and naked and of various ages, occupied the other three. I felt like I was dreaming, and the blood rushing through my head drowned out all other noise. It was almost frightening to ponder these women’s ordeals. How long had they been there? How long and how much had they suffered? There were five in total. Were they it? Had there been others? How much collective misery had these five women endured, and how could I best jack off to the images in my mind?

I was only shaken back to reality by a loud blast and the splintering of wood near my head. The shotgun blast had missed, but now I saw the old man tottering over from the farmhouse. He was taking aim at me again. I dove to the floor as another burst of fragments whizzed past me. I hadn’t been in even a fistfight since I was eleven, so the next few moments were a blur. I was seeing events unfold around me simultaneously in slow motion but also incredibly fast. When the man paused to reload, I began the frantic sprint out the door and across the weedy grass to stop him. It was a race to see who was first, because he was no match for me, but I was no match for that cannon he held. I was first.

The aftermath may have made the news in your area. I somehow gave an explanation to the police about seeing something amiss and stopping to help. The paramedics said I’d beaten the old guy pretty badly, but he did recover to stand trial. It was a pretty sensational story, actually. Four women rescued. The oldest, my inspiration, Sylvia Barnard, had vanished at the age of thirteen in 1969. My own local news certainly milked the story for all it was worth. How often do four sex slaves get rescued, some after decades of abuse, rape, and torture?  I was a hero, of course, and above suspicion in anything. No one checked my own trunk for anything, obviously. I was the honored citizen who had rescued four women from the barn of hell, but many people speculated on whether the old man had been planning for a fifth victim. After all, the empty chains in the silo seemed ready made for another unfortunate girl.

I wondered if I should make a lifetime study of painting.