The first time Oliver Winters ever saw the picture it had in fact, hardly registered with him. It had been during a less than satisfactory course in Spanish, in which he had been trying to polish up his less-than-satisfactory intermediate grasp of the tongue, during an early-evening course with the obligatorily imported native speaker, Maria Gonzales. He had been planning on a short trip to Seville in the near future, and he had not wanted to be like the typical, arrogant Englishman abroad, expecting all the locals to kow-tow to him in his own language. And anyway, his company had made it clear that they had expected him to be able to demonstrate sensitivity to local culture.

Maria, he supposed, had not actually been a truly bad teacher. She had clearly planned her lessons in a rough-and ready sort of a way - and after all, the object of her lessons had always been that he himself and all his other tongue-tied classmates, actually speak, rather than painstakingly master more verb-endings and the like. Yet somehow the woman’s ways had grated on him, unreasonably so. She had not been young - thirty-something maybe or even older - not attractive to any of the male students at all, as far as he could judge. Not so much of the charming Latin Señoritas here, sorry to say. She had had a pinched, sallow face with a protruding mouth, thin arms, flabby torso and a high-pitched, rapid gun-fire squawk which had often gone right over the heads of the slower members of the class. Her teeth were yellow from smoking, and her breath had not always been sweet. And the inevitable over-tight tweed skirts and the high-heeled shoes that had always caused her to mince. Also, the way she had tried to encourage the class, draw them out, had often, albeit probably unintentionally, seemed condescending to him. Treating them all like five-year-olds. Perhaps she had had an exaggerated sense of her own dynamic charisma as an entertaining linguistic facilitator. At any rate, her in-your-face style with them had frequently brought him out on the verge of unforgivable rudeness with her.

In one such class, she had been showing the group a series of pictures and drawings. ‘What is this person wearing,’ she would ask in that tiring Spanish. ‘What does she look like, what kind of a person would you say she is?’

‘Erm, erm, erm.’ Why do English people all sound so inane when they try to speak another language, he had been wondering.

An uncomfortable feeling at his back. Uh-oh, he thought. The damn woman has come to me. Seeking yet another offering of half-baked elicitations. Her dank, breathy presence leaning over his shoulder, gesturing at a stark monochrome of a tempestuous-looking woman in profile. He could just recognise what Maria was asking from him. Get it over with, he tried to tell himself, once more feeling that irrational inhibition of sounding stupid, just because he was using a different language. Then maybe she’ll go pester another student. Concentrate, now.

It was an artist’s drawing, neo-Beardsley-esque in style, almost a silhouette: a tall, thin woman with a hooked nose in profile, cheroot in hand, staring out at a distant view from a promenade. How do you say ‘hooked’ in Spanish, he wondered.

Obviously he did not know how to say this. But he was certainly able to say that she was very ugly, once the redoubtable Maria pressed him for still more, and then he was able to lean back in his chair. There was a slightly muffled snicker from Jenny, a divorced single mother who was also on the course. Why couldn’t she know any better, he wondered to himself. Behaving like a child in class again.

But Maria was not quite finished with him yet. ‘Would you like to meet with a lady like this?’ she had asked him with quirked eyebrows. Trying to be amusing and witty again.

Even then, in retrospect, the ‘no’ had come out even more vehemently than he had intended, or maybe it had been the too-close presence of Maria which had irritated him: that or general atmosphere within the classroom. Certainly, the picture had not depicted a pleasant portrait - the profile had displayed genuinely unattractive features and in addition, the expression showed on the face had seemed to be both pathetic and sneering...

The business trip to Spain came and went, and he had managed to negotiate what had been needed without too many hiccups. He chiefly retained memories of sunlight, dark evenings spent in bars and of constant, exotic-sounding names and banter. His boss had appeared to be pleased with him when he arrived back, yet at the same time, felt that there was also the very faintest undercurrent of disapproval about the impression he had made out there. He put that down, however, to his being insecure in a new job environment.

The first time had had felt conscious that a problem had started to haunt him was during an unfortunate incident at a lunch break. There had been a busy crossing, and two women in front of him were talking at nineteen-to-a-dozen, partly blocking his view of the road. He probably would not have registered their presence at all, apart from the fact that one of them had been talking animatedly with a Spanish accent. He remembered that she had in fact been quite tall and angular, and not especially young.

He had been conscious then that time was running out and he had not wanted to meet disapproval at work by coming in late, and anyway he had given in to a momentary weakness by having more than one glass of wine with his meal. These were the kind of things that might easily give a bad impression of his performance at this delicate stage of his career. So, he had stepped quickly into the road once the pelican had showed green, vaguely remembered a shouted ‘look out!’ then the squeal of breaks. Heart in his mouth, he had frozen - but the crisis was over, breaks had been applied, and all he heard now was a growl of muffled curses from behind the wheel of the over-impulsive driver. But still very shaken, he had turned, only to see the Spanish lady. Briefly, their eyes had locked, a wave of dizziness and muzziness then overcame him, and then it had seemed...

it seemed that a veil had momentarily occluded his real vision, and just briefly, somehow, super-imposed on his everyday reality... of course, the Spanish lady had been amused, and that was all he had perceived, rather than anything else. Yet to his overwrought senses at that precise moment, what he though he had seen, what it had looked liked to him... for a brief moment, the features of the Spanish lady had coalesced into a mask of almost demonic contempt. The eyes had flashed with unholy glee, the full lips obscenely gloating, the hooked nose high in disdain, the sheer and utter disgust at it all: the picture, that awful picture, somehow reflected back at him in all its warped and distorted loathing.

Oliver Winters faltered in mid-stride, then stopped: his briefcase had fallen, now he must pick it up, try to pull himself together and, sobered, he made his way back to his office space at work where, fortunately, neither his colleagues or his boss, were able to perceive anything whatsoever the matter with him...

That should have been the end of it, but it was not. For that very night, Oliver woke up after disturbing dreams in which an ageing, bony hag had somehow managed to forcibly slobber her foul wet mouth over his protesting face and lips, his body shaking with revulsion. He had reached out to turn on the light, hoping to recognise the mundane normality of his rented room, and there indeed it all stood before him, until his eyes took in the knotted wood of the wardrobe in the far corner. And what he saw hit him forcibly in the diaphragm, his stomach turning on itself in frigid and sinking realisation. Not again, oh please to God, not again!!!!!!

But it was. A face leered out at him from the wooden features of his wardrobe. One that he now was starting to have great reason to dread. It was not the way the light played on the surface, it was not because of anything especially unusual about the wardrobe itself, as he had had been familiar with its idiosyncratic features for quite some time, it was nothing to do with any chemicals, as he had never experimented with any kind of illicit drug in his life, and it certainly could not be his imagination, as he was awake now.

Maybe it is some kind of a hypnagogic image then, a small voice inside himself tried to rationalise. He had read about those once, he remembered. One of his friends telling him about what happened after she had woken up suddenly, after having watched a horror film, a nearby chair tranformed into the shape of a ravenous wolf with cavernous jaws and bloodied teeth, set in a mindless sneer... Oliver rubbed his eyes, and tried again. He peered directly at the wardrobe, tried to stare at it objectively, through and around it. But as the waking state took hold more, so did the fascinated revulsion of his obsession with what the whorls and lines within the wood now mercilessly taunted him: the lines and whorls of that loathsome, hated face, and that contemptuous expression. He was quite unable to drag his eyes away from the site. Somehow, the revulsion and dread fed upon itself, it was almost as though he was compelled to look at the lines, despite himself. And night after night it came to be the norm, whether or not he was alone in his bedroom, on public transport, even in the office.

Such a state of mind had its way of leaking out, being noticeable to others, as time went on. First the solicitous questioning of his landlady over the increasing loss of appetite, the pallor, which he had tried to pass off as insomnia or overwork. Colleagues becoming aware of an increasing distractedness. And finally, inevitably his immediate boss. In fact, so it was hinted, even bosses who were higher-up than that had been starting to notice. His evaluation assessment interviews now started to include warnings about the need to stay on the ball in this kind of challenging, pro-active environment, just how important it was to show that he was the absolute team-player, totally adjusted of course, at all times. The riot act had been read out to him. Oliver now new that he had to do something about it, and fast...

He had not especially taken to Dr Wilson at first, finding him obnoxiously solicitous and unctuous. And that stupid, affected bow tie under that porcine double chin. The way he had always continued to observe him, stared at him, as he had sat there in his office, as though every single nervous mannerism and idiosyncrasy was capable of giving away some kind of deep dark inner kink, festering neurosis or psychosis. Just like the clinical process of opening up an innocent organ with a well-honed knife, only to find it festering with a whole canker of worms... Was his inner soul really that corrupt, he wondered.

Shame had therefore made him economical with the truth, and he had expounded a lot on how it was merely the pressures of work that had got to him, and not pictures, nor malignant images on his inner eye, trying to destroy him, no, nothing like that at all. Not until desperation finally caused him to attempt something a lot worse, against his own person, did the story finally come out, so that Dr Wilson was finally enlightened: the paternal hand on his shoulder, soothing him, finally...

‘It’s an organic condition,’ he was told. He was not actually crazy at all he seemed, having unwelcome thoughts like these was actually far, far more common than most people ever recognised, because its sufferers, just like himself, tended to be so secretive about it. Just a little glitch in the workings of the brain, just like a computer could sometimes ‘catch’ a virus.

More to the point, it was eminently curable. Just take this medicine regularly, he was told, and he would soon find his life getting back to his old perspective. No need even to take any time off work, which might have looked bad on his employment record in the future. You just need to consent to taking the treatment straight away, and no one need be any the wiser.

So Oliver Winters undertook the obligatory tests and scans on a couple of discrete afternoons and did everything that Dr Wilson had instructed him to do. And surely enough, he did start to get better. To begin with, he was not able to completely banish the disturbing images of the picture from his mind or his imagination straight away, but now that he knew there was a name for the problem, he was no longer quite so distressed by it.

Then as the weeks went by, the images began to recede more and more and, as the year began to mellow more fully into a late Spring, he began to experience a growing sense of well-being and optimism about himself and his future. As the year then moved from Summer into Autumn, he had finally, almost managed to forget about it, to the point that he had almost become flippant about it. So when he heard that an exhibition was going to be shown in his area, from a similar artist to the one who had penned the image the dreaded Gonzales woman had once shown him, he decided to visit the opening show. Let everyone see how far he had come since the beginning of the year.

It was already dark by the time he found the venue, along a hidden street in one of the less well-known areas of the city. The gallery looked a little run-down on the outside, but it seemed moderately sophisticated inside.

The drawings - some of which were etchings - depicted much the same thing, and Winters learnt that they were actually meant to represent the negative, or shadow-aspect of the Feminine. Honouring the Kali or the Witch Within, and other such mumbo-jumbo. All a little bit esoteric for him, though he had to admit that the artist indeed possessed a certain charm in her somewhat quaint drawing style. He was not actually tempted to speak with her, but instead, observed her from afar. The pictures could easily have been, at least in part, some kind of a self-image, he decided. She was certainly no great beauty, apart from those long locks of raven, plaited hair; age had hardened her thin features, making her somewhat stern in countenance. Still, he would support her meagre earnings in whichever way he could... he purchased a small card of hers, turned up his collar, then moved out back into the darkness, on his way home, whistling his way along the mean streets, though no-one tried to accost him. He arrived home in good time, prepared for bed as usual, and slid beneath the covers, ready for sleep and then the next day at work.

He woke up for no reason at about 2 in the morning, with vague feeling of uneasiness, stretched, then rubbed his eyes. With no feeling of panic, he looked at the wardrobe; nothing untoward there all this was, after all, in the past now.

It was only when he turned out the light, than he suddenly became aware of a physical presence beside him, in his bed. Heavy, like a grey stone. Still unalarmed, he squinted more closely in the darkness. At first, he was not able to make out the presence in its entirety, but a certain musky stench, did. And a sudden wheeze of overripe breath. His body became stiffened, paralysed as a supposedly-vanquished dread squeezed his very vitals yet again. Surely, he was merely dreaming, or it was just his imagination... wasn’t it??