Layers of Fear

Book excerpt: An talented artist is currently working on his "magnum opus" after his wife died from suicide. After he adds the first layer, he starts having hallucinations about his past encounters. The man was an ambitious young painter who used his pianist wife as a model for his painting. Soon his wife became pregnant and she bore a daughter. After she gave birth, he decided to spend more time working on his paintings, leaving his wife to care for their daughter. After buying a dog for his family, he started to have drinking problems due to constant stress and noise outside his workshop. He attached a muzzle to the dog, but was soon plagued by rats, likely a figment of his schizophrenia. The dog may have later been killed by him. His talent started to slowly decay and his vision for the painting became twisted, and he began to drive away his friends by painting gory and horrific works for simple jobs, including a set of illustrations for Little Red Riding Hood. After a long period of neglect, his wife decided to burn his paintings, including his most cherished work, "The Lady In Black". He had a drunken fit and apparently beat her, driving her to leave with their child. He tried calling her multiple times but failed to reconcile with her. After some time, he got a phone call telling him that she was critically injured in a fire. She ended up horribly disfigured, but their daughter survived. After the fire, he took his wife, now a wheelchair user, and daughter back home so he could take care of them. His drinking problems continued due to the constant "distractions" of their presence. After regaining her ability to walk, the wife was neglected even more because her husband thought she lacked "beauty". After he had another drunken outburst, his wife committed suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathroom. In the present day, it is revealed that he went insane and possibly took six body parts of his wife to work on his painting: her skin as the canvas, her blood as the overlay, her bone marrow as the undercoating, a brush made from her hair, her finger for the smearing and her eye as the spectator ...