"The Beast in the Hollow"

Some say it’s a trick of the light. Others claim it is because of the size of the three canvases. But it is undeniable that when one enters the Munkácsy Gallery one feels a sense of vertigo.

I remember my first trip to the museum. I was eleven. It was for a fifth-grade field trip from my primary school in Budapest. Our teachers planned cultural events like this quite often. By the time I was ten years old I had already attended, with my class of twenty-five other precocious students, three operas, five ballets, and dozens of trips to museums throughout our country. Many of those experiences were unmemorable. But I will never forget the Munkácsy Gallery.

It was bright autumn with the leaves just beginning to change. We took the train two hours east of Budapest to the provincial town of Debrecen. Our little class was bubbling with excitement, much to the consternation of our teachers. Our enthusiasm gave rise to paper airplane throwing contests up and down the train carriage and countless smeared fingerprints on every inch of the windows as we pointed out to one another the cows in the pastures, the leaves falling in the forests, and the many bicyclers wobbling their way through the shabby countryside of Hungary during the waning years of the Socialist 1980s. By the time the train pulled into Debrecen, the county town which was home to the Deri Museum where the Munkácsy Gallery was housed, our teachers had impressed upon us a need to behave in a decorous manner.

The museum was a short fifteen-minute walk from the train station, and we all held hands with our partners and walked in a careful line behind the teacher. Our clean school uniforms caught the eyes of many passersby who must have recalled similar school expeditions from their own young years. We finally reached the museum and made our way up the central path between well-trimmed hedges.

No sooner had we entered the museum than the sunlight was shut out with the closing of a massive wooden door and a tall, elderly museum director stood before us. He seemed, to my young eyes, impossibly old, with creases and wrinkles spiderwebbing their way across his gaunt face. He said nothing, yet his daunting presence caused all of us to lose our inclination towards chatter and we followed him silently through several dim hallways until we finally came to a halt outside the entry to the Munkácsy Gallery.

It was here that our guide finally introduced himself. He turned and spoke to us in a low voice which held within it a tone of effortless gravity, as though the owner of the voice knew, merely by speaking, that our class would be held in rapt attention, as indeed we were.

He introduced himself as Mr. Bocskai. He had, as we soon learned, been the museum director for the last thirty years, but the Munkácsy paintings preceded him by one and a half centuries. They were painted, in the middle of the 1800s by Munkácsy Mihály, a painter whose name any Hungarian grade school student would recognize, even if they did not precisely know why.

Mr. Bocskai explained to us, in ever deeper tones, the snapshot history of the paintings. Munkácsy painted the three canvases during a period near the end of his life when most historians believed he had succumbed to insanity. Up until the two-year period when he completed the three paintings, he had been most well-known for his work chronicling the daily lives of Hungarian peasants. He underwent, however, a religious conversion after the death of his mother in 1856, after which he spent a complete three months confined to his bedroom in his family estate in eastern Hungary. Few details were known about those three months except that he was attended to by a single manservant who brought him regular food and drink. This man would claim, on his own deathbed, that the room in which Munkácsy lived during those nine weeks had been painted completely black and that Munkácsy not only did no painting during that span of time but also kept with him nothing but a small journal in which he recorded his thoughts. The manservant reported that on many a night during those three months he could hear, emanating from the bedchamber, not only Munkácsy’s voice, lamenting the loss of his mother, but the voice of a second person. Munkácsy spoke questions and the manservant heard the voice give answers, but it spoke not in Hungarian but in an indecipherable foreign tongue. The manservant said this second voice had no identifiable pitch, but warbled both high and low and never failed to send a shudder of fear through him when he heard it.

When Munkácsy emerged from his room after his three-month self-imposed silence, he stripped his portrait studio of all previous works and began immediately upon the three canvases which became his most famous works. Munkácsy completed the final painting on a Saturday and promptly shut himself into his attic and hung himself. He was found three days later by his manservant. There was no suicide note. There was only a single piece of paper on which was scrawled, “The beast in the shadow will not leave.”

Mr. Bocskai stopped speaking. A chill ran through my veins. When he spoke again it was to tell us the rules we were to follow when we entered the gallery. We were, he impressed upon us, not to touch the paintings—in fact we were advised to stand in the center of the gallery, at least five feet away from the canvases. The paint was ancient and had, for the sake of authenticity, not been treated with any preserving chemicals. The air in the gallery was filtered from the center of the room directly up into a series of pipes. These carried all olfactory evidence of human visitors so that nothing, not even a tiny smear of human skin oil in the air, could mar the surface of the three paintings.

We were not allowed to take any photographs of the paintings. There was no food or drink allowed in the chamber. We were not permitted to speak in any voice above that of a whisper for fear that the air in the room might be disturbed in the slightest way and which might thus inadvertently cause some minute damage to the paint or canvas surface.

And finally, Mr. Bocskai maintained, with utter conviction, while we were allowed to look at the three paintings, there was one particular spot we must avoid looking at. It was at this point that Mr. Bocskai stopped speaking and took several deep breaths, as though he was composing himself. We, as a class, collectively held our breath and leaned closer to him in the silence.

When he spoke again, he described to us the reason for the caution. Mr. Bocskai told us that the paintings were of three particular moments from the life of Christ. The first was Golgota, a picture of the crucified Jesus on the hill. The second was Christ Before Pilate, which was a visual representation of the Messiah presented to the Roman magistrate. The third, and when he spoke of it his voice diminished to a whisper, was the dangerous painting in question. It was called Ecce Homo, a visual portrayal of Pilate presenting Jesus to the crowd.

Mr. Bocskai said all three pictures were masteries in form. They each were immensely large, covering the three walls of the gallery in which they hung. The centerpiece of each picture was, obviously, the character of Jesus, but gathered around the Christ in each picture were all manner of smaller descriptive visual moments. The pictures were filled with figures of people in various poses, and each smaller moment in the larger picture was meant to tell a portion of a greater story. In one corner of Christ Before Pilate, men argued over Jesus’s condemnation. There were, in a distant section of Golgota, tearful women, hands thrown to the air, despairing over Christ’s death. Mr. Bocskai described the paintings, in a manner designed undoubtably to appeal to our young crowd, as though he were referencing a nineteenth-century version of a comic book in which many small, individual pictures made up the entirety of the complete work of art.

Ordinarily this news would have elicited a series of playful comments from me and my friends, but we were still spellbound and gripped with a desire to know the darker secret. We still had not heard the mystery of the dangerous spot in the third painting. Finally, he bent forward to unfold the final secret.

Mr. Bocskai said it was the third painting, Ecce Homo, which was the most controversial. In the picture, Pilate stands on a raised balcony and presents Jesus to a crowd, impelling them to free him rather than condemn him to death. Jesus himself stands with his eyes heavenward, calmly accepting whatever fate might come, indeed, knowing what the outcome will be. The crowd below Pilate alternately fumes with desire for the crucifixion and quails with hope that the sentence will be averted.

Mr. Bocskai took out a handkerchief to mop his brow and then said, “And now, children, the moment which I must insist upon receiving your greatest attention.” And indeed, he had it, for we were rapt in the telling of his tale. He told us of the mysterious spot. It was located upon the section of canvas directly behind Pilate’s head. He said we would know it immediately because it was a darker spot of paint, comprised mostly of dark browns and blacks, as though that section of the ancient scene was meant to evoke shadows and a hollow from the sun. Mr. Bocskai said it was in this dark section behind Pilate’s head where, if one’s gaze lingered too long, one would see the faintest impression of a shape. It was the shape of a demon. Because of the suicide, Munkácsy was never able to tell his side of the story. But many art historians believed this dark figure, hovering behind the head of Pilate, was intended, by Munkácsy, to represent a dark force which compelled Pilate to finally sentence Jesus to his death.

When Mr. Bocskai revealed this to us, a small shudder touched my frame. I thought, in my mind’s eye, I could see this dark figure, though I had never before seen the painting. I imagined it, hovering behind Pilate’s head. I imagined I could see faint yellow hollows, eyes in the dark paint. Near the back of our crowd, one of my classmates began to cry, and a teacher immediately swooped in to comfort her. The rest of us, still completely spellbound, continued to lean forward, hoping against our better judgment to hear more.

Mr. Bocskai said the story of the demon in the canvas slowly grew over time. Once the canvases were completed, they were initially taken on a tour throughout Europe and the United States. Little evidence of trouble presented itself from the first smattering of viewings. It wasn’t until a wealthy American department store magnate, John Wanamaker, purchased the paintings that the tale turned. Wanamaker conceived of an idea for the paintings to be displayed annually in the week leading up to Easter, as was befitting of the canvases’ Biblical theme. Wanamaker decreed the paintings were to be displayed in the Grand Court of his Philadelphia department store, but the installation of the paintings proved troublesome. Their size was more immense than anything previously hung in the store, and the fragile nature of the canvases required greater reinforcement before they could be hung. The services of a portrait hanger were secured, a man named Bartholomew Stringer. Stringer spent a day surveying the Grand Court of the Philadelphia store and then resolved to examine the paintings individually once the store had closed for the evening.

The next day when the store was opened, Stringer was found dead on the floor before Ecce Homo, his body rigid in a seated position. A doctor was called for who promptly examined Stringer’s body and determined the cause of death to be a heart attack brought upon by shock.

Stringer was given a proper Christian funeral in his home church, First Baptist of Doylestown, north of Philadelphia, yet, unusually, the church was required to hold a closed casket ceremony. The reason being that Stringer’s eyes could not be closed. Each time the lids were pressed into a likeness of sleep, they popped open again in a sprightly yet gruesome display of alertness. The funeral director maintained he could not send anyone on their journey into the beyond while their eyes still hungered for some purchase on the land of the living.

A private investigator was hired to look into the manner of Stringer’s death, and he found nothing of suspicion, save a single piece of paper upon which was scrawled, in Stringer’s handwriting, a single crooked sentence. The sentence read, “The beast in the hollow beckons me.”

Several other of my classmates were whimpering and sobbing by this point, and the teachers were pulling brave duty, soothing the troubled spirits which were manifest all around our sorry group. I felt a tug of conscience, wondering whether I might be of use to my teachers, yet I could not pull myself away from the tale which Mr. Bocskai had not quite concluded.

After he composed himself, Mr. Bocskai spoke again. After the Philadelphia ordeal, Wanamaker tired of the controversy which inevitably swirled around the gathering stories regarding the painting’s Biblical curse. He sold the canvases to the national museum in Prague where a number of prominent theologians and historians were brought in to examine the picture and to sift through any past evidence of ill-doing. Things were discovered. Two years after the paintings were completed, a janitor was contracted to clean Munkácsy’s studio. After spending three hours with the paintings, he returned to his home and killed his wife and slit his own throat. A few weeks after that, a priest was given a tour of Munkácsy’s studio. He returned to his church and burned a pile of Bibles and then leapt from the parapet to his death. Several other stories were unearthed. Eventually the paintings were returned from Prague to Hungary, and in 1955, the Deri Museum became their permanent home. Mr. Bocskai became the caretaker of the gallery and the teller of the painting’s terrible history.

He told us the national arts council of Hungary had not seen any reason to limit the viewing of the paintings, and they had been on display in Debrecen for the past thirty years. But Mr. Bocskai said it had become his personal ordeal to describe to all visitors the painting’s grim past and to prevail upon them to reconsider their desire to view the cursed object.

Our teachers unanimously decided we should return to Budapest immediately and leave the paintings undisturbed and unseen. We left the museum as quickly as we entered. I trailed a backward glance as we exited the dark confines of the dim halls and saw Mr. Bocskai nervously passing back and forth before the dark doors of the gallery, occasionally stopping to lay a head against the black, wooden door and mutter a silent prayer.

By the time we reached Budapest, many of us had forgotten the experience as children will do. We returned to our gay lives and remembered very little of Mr. Bocskai’s haunting tale. In fact, I recalled no further thoughts about the Munkácsy painting through the next many years of my life. Until, I regret to say, last week.

In my current job, I work for one of the many technology companies which dot the edges of Budapest’s tech district. My job is to scour new websites and to assure their owners that there is no malware lurking anywhere in the twisted corners of the web programming. It was during one such episode of website work, a website devoted to tourism in Eastern Hungary, that I came across a chance fragment of a sentence regarding Munkácsy and his famed paintings.

Immediately, the childhood memory returned to me. I wondered, somewhat fancifully, what could have possibly frightened me so much. I decided, on a whim, to look up the painting in question, assuming, correctly as it turned out, that the paintings had long ago been scanned and uploaded and that images of it could be accessed online. Moments later I had the infamous image before me on my screen.

I spent a few moments poking around the large, scanned canvas, and soon I decided to rid myself of any doubt. I proceeded to zoom in, very far in, to the dark spot on the painting which Mr. Bocskai had spoken about so long ago. A moment later and Pilate’s head hovered on my screen. And behind it, in dark pigments of brown and black, I saw the hollow.

For a moment nothing happened. I believed I had satisfied my curiosity and was just prepared to exit from the page. But then I sensed something. Or rather, I heard something. It was very low and incredibly quiet. Almost a whisper. But it was definitely a voice. And it said my name. For a moment I couldn’t believe it. But then it repeated itself. I leaned in toward the screen. With my finger on my mouse, I zoomed in as far as the image would allow until my screen was saturated with nothing but dark pixels, quivering in the plasma of my monitor.

And then I saw them. Two eyes, open and terrible. They looked at me. They looked into me. And they said awful things to me. They told me to do things. To my friends. To my family. And finally, to myself. How long I stared into those eyes I cannot know. Finally, with a tortured howl, I pushed the monitor from my desk and saw, with great relief, the screen shatter as it struck the floor.

This was three days ago. And I have not been able to stop thinking about it. About those dark pixels and about the beast’s eyes. What I have written here are my true recollections and my solemn testimony. When I have finished this document, I will post it on the bulletin boards and social passages of every network and webpage to which I have access. If you have come across this document, then it is hopefully for your own good that you are reading this.

What I write next I intend to come across with greatest gravity. Do not search for the painting. Do not seek it out. Do not find it. Do not look at the dark hollow. Do not permit what nests there to find you. Please do not.