I Invented a New Colour. It's Going to Kill a Lot of People...

All the trouble I’ve caused, the pain, the death… It all started with a breakthrough.

I’m an artist and painter by trade, but also an inventor. I like to spend some of my spare time experimenting by creating new colours. It's a hobby but I also make some money on the side, primarily through a shade of purple I made that is marginally popular as well as an ultra dark shade of black. That one is fun because it looks really weird in everyday life to see a coffee mug or a t-shirt that is unnaturally colourless. Like a black hole or something.

But this new one is different. I call it grurple.

The name is dumb, I know. But it’s got my last name buried in it, and it’s a combination of the words green and purple. That makes sense because that’s what the colour is…

Except that doesn't describe it well enough. Because people have combined those two colours before and it just turns into an ugly brownish black barf sort of hue that nobody would want to use for anything.

But this is different. It retains the essence of purple and green and makes something never before seen and amazing with them in the process. It's like looking at a rainbow for the first time – startling and otherworldly.

But since I created it, I've been seeing things. And they're all the same colour: grurple.

My laptop, for instance. I turned it off because the colours had begun to look strange, and the problem had proved to be uncorrectable. That was when I saw movement in the corner of the blank screen, the reflection of something sliding just out of view at the edge. I looked over my shoulder and saw there was nothing there.

I left my room and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. The computer could be fixed, I thought to myself. I'd just take it over to my friend Dave's place, since he always knew what to do with computer problems.

In the reflection of the bathroom mirror I saw the tub was no longer the old-fashioned shade of horrible out-of-fashion pink that it had been before, the one it had always been since I moved in. It was now grurple.

It was as if someone had come into my home and replaced my bathtub with someone else’s. But of course that was impossible. My hands started to tremble, my heartbeat quickening as it felt like the world began to turn sideways on its axis.

I tried to calm myself down, focusing on my breathing, focusing on anything that wasn’t the bathtub.

The bathroom mirror was dirty so I decided to quickly clean it to distract myself. As I finished wiping it off, I saw something in the corner of the glass surface, slipping out of view just as my eye noticed it, just like earlier in the computer monitor’s reflection. The slender, pointed tail of a lizard? That was how it looked anyways.

I went out into the hallway to check if a stray Komodo dragon had snuck into my house somehow, but again there was nothing. I couldn't help but think that the colour of whatever it was looked familiar, though – whatever it was, it was coloured grurple.

I got the impression of something looming and large, crafty and elusive, its skin rough and thick like that of a dinosaur.

Suddenly it was there again, at the periphery of my vision, but upon inspection I saw only empty space. Nearby I could sense something enormous and awful, like a storm head rolling in.

Deciding to get out of the house, I left with my laptop to walk over to Dave’s place. He was only a few blocks over.

It was a sunny day outside, humid and clear. I immediately wished I had brought my sunglasses but decided not to go back for them. It was a short walk.

As I ambled down the street, lugging my heavy old laptop, I started to have more and more trouble seeing. The sun was so bright I found myself blinking repeatedly, then having more and more difficulty opening my eyes each time. My vision became reduced to momentary glimpses between each blink until my eyes simply forced themselves closed and I couldn’t see at all anymore. The only thing I could see was the new colour I had created, it filled my vision instead of the usual darkness when I blinked.

I didn’t know where I was, only that I had been walking on the sidewalk a moment before. There was no shade nearby and I was stranded, completely blind in the middle of my walk. Unfortunately for me I had unwittingly crossed into the roadway and was no longer on the sidewalk but standing in the middle of a busy intersection.

Suddenly someone tackled me, landing on me and sending me flying. I heard a car’s tires squealing and smelled burnt brake pads, a loud bang and the crunching of metal and breaking of glass.

Then people were yelling at me.

“WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU DOING STANDING IN THE ROAD LIKE THAT!? YOU SHOULD BE DEAD!” came the chorus from the people all around.

I was in the ditch and my vision came back suddenly and I had no trouble seeing as fear and adrenaline took over my body.

Two cars were mangled and wrapped up together in the roadway where they had crashed into each other. The drivers were both bloodied and unconscious in their seats and people were pulling them out as a fire started to spread from the engine of one vehicle.

“I couldn’t see! I couldn’t see!” I screamed, but nobody listened.

The police came and took a statement from me, then gave me a tongue-lashing I would never forget. I told them it was sun-blindness (which was true, I suppose) and they let me off without a charge of public endangerment causing bodily harm.

Thankfully everyone survived and nobody had any lasting effects from the accident. If it hadn’t been for the stranger who pushed me out of the way I would have been dead. But he wasn’t too impressed with my behaviour, either.

My laptop was a write-off and I limped home with a quickly-swelling twisted ankle.

When I got back there I could sense it waiting for me. It was like I could hear its breathing. The creature I had brought forth with my invention.

Terrified, I decided I needed to destroy it. There was something wrong with that colour. It wasn't meant for this world - I could tell that already.

The experimental batches of grurple were in my studio, in the basement, and I rushed down there.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I felt the thing following behind me. I was too afraid to look back.

As I raced down the stairs I nearly tripped, my bad ankle giving out on me as I hobbled down the wooden steps. My studio was just ahead and I raced inside and went to my locked cabinet where I stored all my experimental work.

The paintings I had done in the new colour were there, as well as the jars containing the hue itself. It was a shame to destroy it, but it had to be done. It wasn’t supposed to be here. I should never have brought it into existence.

Pouring paint down the drain is a really bad idea but I was desperate so I went over to the sink with the small test batch and opened it, tilting the container to dump it out. But then something, a voice, stopped me and my skin went ice cold, goosebumps spreading across it.

“How did you divine my colours?” hissed the thing from behind me. From the shadows.

It wasn’t real. The monster wasn’t real. I just had to pour out the paint.

But something was stopping me.

My eyes were drawn to the test paintings I had done. One of them stood out among the rest and I found myself setting down the jar of paint and looking at it.

I couldn’t remember painting it.

The image showed a beast coloured vividly in grurple. It shone and reflected the light back at me, making me think of things. Awful things. Beautiful things. I couldn’t tell the difference between them after a while as they flashed before my eyes.

A dead girl at the bottom of a well

Roses in bloom

Roadkill with maggots

Bloated corpse coming in with the tide

Rotten skin being peeled from a hand like a banana

Lemon meringue pie

A sunset over the ocean

Broken fingernails on the inside of a coffin lid

“How did you manage to paint me? Did you see me in a vision? For when you made this I had not yet been to see you. You summoned me, in a way. With this.”

A long talon on an even longer finger reached out and pointed at the image I had made. The one I had forgotten making.

I could feel the thing behind me, its breathing hot on my neck.

“Over the years I have been named many things. They have called me Charon, Azrael, Shiva, and Anubis. I have NEVER seen a depiction as striking as this, though. You perfectly captured my… essence.”

“Thank you,” I croaked.

“Why don’t you do more of these? It would be a shame to waste such a precious talent as yours.”

My hand hesitated and I found myself not wanting to destroy the paint after all. I wanted to use it. There was an image I had always wanted to depict and the paint would be perfect for it, I just knew it.

I set up my easel and began to draw, then prime, and then laid down the big blocks of colour for what would be my greatest work to date.

The piece consumed my life for three days. For 72 hours I did nothing but paint.

Once it was complete, I knew it was the best thing I had ever made.

The image depicted Charon, the ferryman from Greek mythology. He was taking someone across the river Styx from our world into the underworld, the afterlife. The Ferryman himself was richly painted in my new colour.

“You should share it with the world,” said the voice again.

And I found myself wanting to do as he suggested. So I did.

I took it to galleries and the first few people who saw it didn’t really like it as much as I did. Despite an excellent composition the consensus among them was that the colour of Charon was off – that the colour of him just looked like a brownish-black barf sort of hue. They didn’t see the new colour for some reason.

So I brought it to more galleries, circling out further and further from my home, until one owner I showed it to saw it and I knew he REALLY saw it.

The well-dressed man immediately exclaimed in delight and took it from my hands, holding the piece up to inspect it. Fawning over it, he told me how much he loved the painting and insisted on buying it for himself. He looked mesmerized and couldn’t take his eyes from the piece.

“I’ll pay any price,” he said, reaching for his checkbook.

I wanted to work with him more so I gave him a reasonable price and told him I would be back. I would have plenty more paintings to share with him. All with similar subject matter.

The thought had occurred to me that I needed to do a series of paintings focusing on Charon. But that would require a lot more paint.

A couple more gallons would suffice, I told myself. So I ordered my supplies and within a week I had another large batch of grurple made up.

My next paintings were similar to the first. I rarely slept or ate anymore, I just worked in my studio non-stop. The pounds were shedding from me and I needed to make new notches on my belt pretty soon just to keep my pants up.

The only thing that seemed important was painting.

Until I called the gallery and heard the news.

It turned out the owner of the place who had bought my painting of Charon was dead. He had committed suicide. He had stopped leaving his house, becoming more and more isolated and catatonic, doing nothing but staring at the painting. Until one day he had slit his wrists in front of it. He positioned furniture to lean against so that he could die while sitting up, admiring it.

Green and purple, purple and green. Life and death, death and life.

I thought about this more and more after that. It’s hard to want to paint when you know that your work will kill someone. Maybe not everyone, but those who can truly see what lies beneath the colours, what glimmers back in the reflections.

I'm afraid of what this has caused, what my work has brought about. Terrified of what will come of it. But part of me still seems intent on showing it to others.

Do you want to see a sample of my work?

TCC