The Painter of Dead Women
"The Painter of Dead Women" by Edna Worthley Underwood is a Gothic horror tale narrated by an Englishwoman recently married to Luigi Leopardi, a Neapolitan, during their honeymoon in Naples. Over breakfast, her husband reads a newspaper account of the mysterious disappearance of the Contessa Fabriani, part of a decades-long pattern in which beautiful young women of high social standing — Italian and foreign alike — have vanished from the city without a trace. The narrator pays little attention, absorbed instead in preparations for a ball that evening at the Cinascalchi Palace, where she is to be escorted by her cousin-in-law Lucia while her husband attends to business. Dressed deliberately to look as unlike an Italian woman as possible — tall, fair-haired, in white satin — she sets out by carriage with the coachman Pietro. After a suspiciously long drive, he delivers her not to the palace but to an isolated country estate, then departs before she can question him. Finding no other carriages and no sign of Lucia, she enters what she assumes is the ball, only to find herself alone inside a vast suite of mirrored, crystal-hung rooms whose blinding, disorienting light seems almost supernatural in its power over her senses. She discovers the door through which she entered has vanished, sealing her in. A hypnotic mental presence overtakes her before she ever sees its source: an elegant, unnervingly thin old man with white hair, youthful black brows, and pale ice-blue eyes utterly devoid of visible soul. He introduces himself as Count Ponteleone, "painter of dead women," and reveals that he lured her there deliberately, just as he has lured other women, using the coachman as his instrument. He is a self-described "cerebral" being who has renounced ordinary human passions in favor of a purely intellectual, aestheticized existence. In a red-draped drawing room, Ponteleone explains his philosophy: that beauty is perishable and threatened above all by aging, and that true perfection can only be fixed and preserved through death. He claims descent from a Roman governor in Spain whose court physician, the Jewish scientist Ibn Ezra, developed a rare mineral-derived compound — administered as a single injected drop — that kills painlessly while halting the body's decay indefinitely, hardening flesh over time to the density and whiteness of marble while, he believes, leaving the brain's consciousness intact for years afterward. He has selected the narrator, prizing her Englishness and the coloring he attributes to England's climate, as the crowning specimen for his private collection, and formally invites her to accept death at his hands as an honor. Maintaining outward composure and probing for time and information rather than betraying panic, the narrator persuades him to show her his methods and his existing "collection" before agreeing to anything, and he readily obliges, evidently delighted to display his life's work to an admiring audience. He leads her through a ballroom where roughly fifty women stand frozen mid-motion in a macabre eternal minuet, preserved exactly as they were at the instant of death, which he intends to bequeath to Naples as an art gallery after his own death, expecting to be remembered as a benefactor and scientist rather than exposed as a murderer. In a boudoir he shows her the Contessa Fabriani herself, not yet dead but paralyzed and mute, still being "painted" from life as her portrait nears completion. Further rooms hold dark-skinned Eastern women arranged in poses of languorous death among tiger skins and divans, women he claims to have loved most intensely. Finally he brings her to a chamber facing the sea, designed to capture a particular silvery effect of moonlight and starlight on flesh, crystal, and silver — an aesthetic obsession he calls the "dust of light," which he considers the supreme unsolved problem of his art. He tells her this room, with its sea view, is the one intended for her, and that he will one day join her there in death so they may be "immortal" together. Excusing himself to fetch the preserving liquid from a heavily guarded vault, he locks her in the room — his fatal error, since this door, unlike the others, has no interior bolt he can secure from outside. The instant he leaves, the narrator bolts the door from within and realizes the room opens directly onto the sea below. Recognizing her chance, she strips off her gown and dives from the window into the water, drawing on her skill as an expert swimmer. She swims through the night toward Naples, briefly glimpsing Ponteleone at the lit window, his white hair visible in the moonlight, before diving again to escape the pull of his gaze. She is eventually picked up by Neapolitan fisherwomen mending nets, who ferry her back to the city for payment. The story closes with her reunion with her husband Luigi, to whom she reveals that she has inadvertently solved Naples' long-standing mystery of the vanished women — the horror having been, all along, the work of the aristocratic collector hidden in plain sight among the city's elite.
By Edna Worthley Underwood · First published 1910 · Genre: Gothic Horror, Psychological Thriller, Mystery