The following things are known with certainty about Malcom Schrieder:
He came from good stock.
His father and three uncles were proprietors in a pharmaceutical concern specializing at first in nerve tonics and later in anything profitable.
Those Schrieders.
He was “sickly,” having been born prematurely. He owes his existence, he claims, to being placed inside a rectangular nest constructed of bricks warmed in a fire. That story was told to him by his mother.
The phrase “to build a little house”—used by Schrieder in conversation and in documents as a synonym for well-being—may, in fact, stem from this incident.
In the hall outside his childhood bedroom, a painting by an unknown artist depicts a young girl napping in the grass in what may be the front or back yard of the house in which she presumably lives. In the left foreground is a small white dog. The painting was not well executed. The watchful dog looks feral. His face contorted.
It was a gift from his father.
His father told him that his mother became deranged after his birth and went missing for a week. Her stories were not to be trusted.
There was recurring dream of a house on “slow fire.”
His first acquisition was a mechanical hand, bought in secret, while he was still a child.
Originally the painting hung above his bed, but was removed after it seemed to be the cause of night terrors. It was subsequently moved to the dining room, then the sitting room by the fire, and then the cellar, because, in succession, the food began to taste rotten, the fire to smell like gasoline, and the ground water to turn bad. His father never got over the perceived slight of its movement. He hung it outside the boy’s bedroom door, where it remained.
The Schrieder estate was known for its spectacular imitation of a different and specific English garden every year, which were burned to the grouned at the beginning of each winte. The annual burning was open to the public, which could not get its fill of burning objects.
A later recurring dream of inhabiting a house made entirely of dogs. Dead and taxidermied.
His first wife died while on the hunt for a segment of skin purported to have curative powers. The skin had been cut from the torso of a young man who was near death but not yet dead. Before being removed, it was tattooed with an incantation meant for healing. It was important for the young man not to scream or to cry or to contort his features at all. He was, as it was called, giving a gift. Once in and under the flesh, the knife was moved once a minute for a period of four hours. After removal the skin was cured and hung in the back of a cave on the side of a mountain. The patient, upon finding the cave and then the skin—if indeed he had found the actual skin, for decoys were rumored to be employed—was to recite the incantation and, using a small knife, cut the skin slightly, whereupon blood would trickle mysteriously from the wound. The blood had to removed by the tongue and only the tongue.
His wife died by falling into a ravine. The item itself was never found.
His second wife died of brain cancer. His third wife of creeping or falling sickness, an ailment later discovered not to have existed at all.
After this there were no more wives.
The girl in the painting might not be sleeping after all. What appears to be a vial lies several feet from her. This might explain the look on the dog’s face, which may be said to look a bit too human.
“Each object is a word in a thought I have yet to think.”
Perhaps it is a tonic of some sort, something for her health, which is obviously frail.
It was known that he slept with the painting next to him in his later years, or at least a copy of the painting. There is documentation that several different painters were commissioned to make a copy with a slight alteration of detail so that he might understand what was essential and what was not.
No information is available on which painting he took with him to what he called the bigger house.
The other copies were burned.
If the dog is, as it seems, protecting the girl, or is still in fits from a failure to protect her, who is he staring at beyond the borders of the painting? Is it doctors?
