Chapter 7: The Auction Block

The first thing to pierce the blackness was a voice, calm and methodical, cutting through the fog in his head. "…multiple lacerations, looks like a utility knife. BP is 90 over 60 and dropping."

The second was the blinding white light of a paramedic’s flashlight sweeping across his face, followed by the sharp, antiseptic smell that scoured the memory of turpentine from his nostrils. Alex’s eyes fluttered open. He wasn't in his bedroom. He was on his living room floor, the ceiling a blurry landscape above him. Uniformed figures moved around him with practiced efficiency. The distant wail of the sirens he’d heard before was now a pulsating throb just outside his window.

A police officer, a woman with tired eyes and a stern expression, knelt beside him. "Son, can you tell me what happened here? Can you tell me who did this to you?"

Alex’s throat was a desert. He tried to speak, to form the words that would explain the impossible truth. "The painting," he rasped, his voice a broken whisper. "It was… me. It was a painting of me."

The officer exchanged a brief, knowing glance with a paramedic. It was a look Alex would come to know intimately—a mixture of pity and professional detachment. The look one gives to the irrevocably broken.

"There was a struggle," the officer said, her voice gentle but firm, as if speaking to a frightened child. "We found the knife. Your prints are on it. Your neighbors heard screaming, just one voice. Yours."

His 911 call, a frantic, incoherent babble about a painting that smelled of paint, was the cornerstone of their narrative. They found the shattered remains of the frame, evidence of a violent, self-destructive outburst. They saw the paint splatters on the wall, the chaotic mess of his art supplies, and drew the simplest conclusion. A stressed, overworked art student, isolated and drowning in debt, had finally suffered a complete psychotic break. He had attacked a painting, then himself.

He tried to tell them about the doppelgänger, about the torn canvas that had been its body. But when he looked to where it had fallen, there was nothing. The floor was clean, save for the dark, pooling stain of his own blood. Every trace of the entity—the ruined fabric, the viscous globs of multi-colored paint—had vanished, as if it had simply evaporated, leaving him alone with the consequences.

The next few weeks were a blur of sterile white rooms and calm, probing questions. After his wounds were stitched and bandaged, he was placed under a mandatory seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold, which quickly became an extended evaluation. A kind-faced doctor with a soft voice would sit across from him every day, asking him to recount the events of that night.

The first time, Alex told the truth. He spoke of the featureless portrait, the smudges that became eyes, the terrifying mimicry of his own artistic style, and the final, bloody confrontation with his painted self. He watched the doctor’s pen glide across a notepad, transcribing his surreal horror into the clinical language of delusion: visual and olfactory hallucinations, persecutory ideation, paranoid schizophrenia, fugue state.

He learned quickly. He learned that the truth was a cage, and the only key was a lie. So, he changed his story. He spoke of stress. He admitted to the pressure of his studies and freelance work. He agreed that he hadn't been sleeping, that he’d become paranoid, that he might have imagined it all. He played the part of the confused, remorseful patient who was finally seeing the light of reason. It was the most difficult and demeaning performance of his life, and it worked.

He was released, armed with a prescription for antipsychotics he never filled and a referral for therapy he never attended. He walked out into the pale afternoon sun a free man, but forever branded as unstable, a man who had declared war on a piece of art and lost.

His friends, especially Maya, were a whirlwind of guilty relief. They had known he was struggling, they said. They should have done more. Maya helped him clean his apartment, her presence a comforting but constant reminder of the official story. She carefully swept up the last splinters of the wooden frame, never knowing she was disposing of the broken cage of a monster. They never spoke of the painting again. It became a taboo subject, the ugly centerpiece of his “episode.”

Months passed. A fragile, brittle sense of normalcy began to form over the chasm of his trauma. The physical scars on his arm and shoulder faded to thin, pale lines. He went back to his classes, finished his freelance projects. He forced himself to paint again, though the smell of turpentine now made the muscles in his back clench. He lived with the ghost of what had happened, a quiet, humming horror in the back of his mind. Sometimes, late at night, he would trace the scars on his arm and wonder if he truly had gone mad. It was an easier thought than the alternative.

Then, one rainy Tuesday afternoon, his phone buzzed. It was a message from Maya.

Maya: Hey, this is super random and weird, but remember that creepy painting you had? The one with the blank face?

Alex’s blood ran cold. He stared at the message, his fingers hovering over the screen, unable to type.

A new message popped up before he could respond.

Maya: I was browsing some weird online galleries for a marketing project (don't ask lol) and I swear I just saw it. Or something that looks exactly like it. Freaky coincidence, right? Anyway, thought it was funny. Hope you're having a good day!

Below the message was a link.

His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. A part of him screamed not to click it, to throw the phone against the wall and pretend he’d never seen it. But he couldn’t. He had to know. With a trembling thumb, he tapped the link.

It took him to an obscure, minimalist website. The Durand Collection: Acquisitions & Private Sales. The page was for a recently concluded auction. There were only a few items listed, all esoteric and strange. His eyes scanned down the list and then stopped.

There it was.

The image was crisp, professionally lit. A square canvas in a simple, dark wood frame. The face was a smooth, perfect, featureless expanse of pale, gesso-primed white. It was exactly as he had first seen it, a blank slate pregnant with terrifying potential. It looked pristine, immaculate, as if it hadn't been stabbed, torn, and destroyed in a bloody battle for a man’s soul.

Beneath the image, the text was simple, clinical.

Lot #734. Artist: Unknown. Circa: Unknown. Medium: Oil on canvas.

And then, the title. The two words that validated his every moment of terror and confirmed his deepest, most cosmic fear.

Title: 'The Unfinished Man'

A choked, ragged sound escaped Alex’s throat. He was the unfinished man. The one who got away. He wasn't the first, and he wouldn't be the last. He was just a failed project.

His eyes darted further down the page, past the final bidding price—a disturbingly high number—to the final, chilling piece of information. It was a single word, stamped over the image in bold, red letters, a final judgment delivered from an indifferent, digital void.

SOLD

The cycle hadn't been broken. It had just been paused. He hadn’t won. He had merely survived his turn. Somewhere out there, an unwanted gift was being packaged for shipping. A new cage was being prepared for a new, unsuspecting subject. And a featureless face was waiting patiently in the dark, ready to begin its next portrait.