1408- Crooked Paintings

What Mike had noticed at that point were the pictures on the
walls. There were three of them: a lady in twenties-style evening dress
standing on a staircase, a sailing ship done in the fashion of Currier &
Ives, and a still life of fruit, the latter painted with an unpleasant yel
low-orange cast to the apples as well as the oranges and bananas. All
three pictures were in glass frames and all three were crooked. He had
been about to mention the crookedness on tape, but what was so
unusual, so worthy of comment, about three off-kilter pictures?
That a door should be crooked . . . well, that had a little of that old
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari charm. But the door hadn’t been crooked; his
eyes had tricked him for a moment, that was all.

The lady on the stairs tilted left. So did the sailing ship, which
showed bell-bottomed British tars lining the rail to watch a school of
flying fish. The yellowish-orange fruit—to Mike it looked like a
bowl of fruit painted by the light of a suffocating equatorial sun, a Paul
Bowles desert sun—tilted to the right. Although he was not ordinarily
a fussy man, he circled the room, setting them straight. Looking at
them crooked like that was making him feel a touch nauseated
again.
...

He went on like that for nearly ninety seconds, and when he
opened his eyes again, he felt normal. The pictures on the wall? Still
straight. Fruit in the bowl? Still yellow-orange and uglier than ever.
Desert fruit for sure. Eat one piece of that and you’d shit until it hurt.
...

The pictures on the living room wall were crooked again, and there
were other changes, as well. The lady on the stairs had pulled down
the top of her gown, baring her breasts. She held one in each hand. A
drop of blood hung from each n****e. She was staring directly into
Mike’s eyes and grinning ferociously. Her teeth were filed to cannibal
points. At the rail of the sailing ship, the tars had been replaced by a
line of pallid men and women. The man on the far left, nearest the
ship’s bow, wore a brown wool suit and held a derby hat in one hand.
His hair was slicked to his brow and parted in the middle. His face was
shocked and vacant. Mike knew his name: Kevin O’Malley, this
room’s first occupant, a sewing machine salesman who had jumped
from this room in October of 1910. To O’Malley’s left were the
others who had died here, all with that same vacant, shocked expres
sion. It made them look related, all members of the same inbred and
cataclysmically r******d family.

In the picture where the fruit had been, there was now a severed
human head. Yellow-orange light swam off the sunken cheeks, the
sagging lips, the upturned, glazing eyes, the cigarette parked behind
the right ear.

- 1408, chapter II