The cursed red paint in Montmartre (foreign horror story)

To Yujin, Paris was grey.

The whole "city of art" reputation? For a talentless foreigner, it was just cold, heavy reality. In her tiny attic room up on Montmartre hill, what she faced wasn't romance. It was the horror of a blank white canvas that refused to fill itself.

Her portraits had everything. Everything except life.

Her advisor called her work "technically perfect but soulless. Like a well-made mannequin." Brutal.

She found the shop on one of those days. You know the kind. Wandering the back alleys with no destination, drowning in despair. Tucked between rundown buildings where no tourist ever goes, there was this tiny store. The sign read *L'Artisan Sombre* in dusty cursive. And here's the thing. She'd walked this alley hundreds of times. She had NEVER seen this shop before.

Like something was pulling her, she opened the door. The smell of mold and old oil hit her in the face. Inside was packed with the weirdest art supplies she'd ever seen.

The owner was a hunched old man. He flipped through her portfolio in silence, then pulled out a small wooden box. Inside were old oil paints that looked handmade.

"Try these, mademoiselle. Especially this red... it holds memory."

The tube he pointed at read *Sanguine Primaris*. Dark, muddy, like dried blood.

That night in her attic studio, she squeezed out the new paints like she was possessed. And Sanguine Primaris. The second it touched other colors on her palette, it did something miraculous. Plain old raw sienna and cadmium yellow, the moment they hit that red, they turned into warm living human skin tones. Not paint. *Skin.*

She painted a self-portrait through the night. Every brushstroke, the "her" on the canvas came more alive. When she finished, she couldn't breathe. The Yujin on the canvas looked more real than the one in the mirror. Like she was about to blink. About to speak.

That painting changed her life.

The professor who'd trashed her work was now gushing about her "genius." At a small school exhibition, her self-portrait had critics falling over themselves. The director of the most famous gallery in Paris personally reached out. A solo show. Her. It was all a dream.

And Yujin? She literally could not paint anymore without Sanguine Primaris. The addiction was horrifying. It was also so, so sweet.

Prepping for her solo show, she asked her best friend Chloé to model. She wanted that bright, alive smile on canvas. Yujin squeezed out the dark red paint and started on Chloé's red lips and flushed cheeks.

"Hey Yujin. Why am I so cold?"

About an hour in, Chloé was shivering.

And after that day, things got weird. The more vivid and beautiful Chloé got on the canvas, the more the real Chloé withered. Her color drained. She tired easily. Her eyes went unfocused and glassy. By the time the painting was done, Chloé was hospitalized with severe anemia.

Yujin was eaten alive by guilt. But she couldn't put down the brush. She couldn't stop.

When the Sanguine Primaris was almost gone, panic hit her and she went back to find that weird shop. But where the store had been, there was just a cold stone wall. Like nothing had ever been there. She wandered the alley like a madwoman. The shop had evaporated.

Desperate, she went back to her studio and carefully sliced open the last paint tube with a knife. And in the oil and pigment, she found them. Tiny dark red fiber-like particles.

Something felt very wrong. She secretly sent a sample to her friend who studied biology.

A few days later, the call came.

"Yujin. Where the hell did you get this. The analysis... this is insane. These are dried human red blood cells."

She dropped the phone.

She hadn't been painting. She'd been grinding up human lives and smearing them on canvas.

She went down a rabbit hole online reading about ancient curses, forbidden alchemy, every horror story she could find. But none of them were as bad as what she was actually living.

Opening night of her solo show. The gallery was packed. People stood speechless in front of her paintings. The figures looked like they were about to move. The centerpiece was Chloé's portrait, impossibly beautiful. Meanwhile the real Chloé was lying in a hospital bed. Unconscious.

Yujin stood in front of her first self-portrait hanging in the corner. The one that started everything. The "her" in the canvas looked down at her with arrogant, confident eyes.

But something was different.

A tiny change that hadn't been there before. Down the cheek of painting-Yujin, a single red tear. Like a drop of blood. Slowly sliding down.

At that exact moment, she felt something hot run out of her nose. A nosebleed. With shaking hands she wiped her own blood and pressed it onto the canvas next to the painted tear.

The colors were identical.

That's when she got it. The paint wasn't just MADE of blood. It was a curse. It pulled the life force out of both the subject AND the artist, and trapped it inside the painting. The sacrifices weren't just her models. She was one too.

Weeks later, a famous art critic wrote a column about her show:

*"...the rising star Yujin is an artist who grinds her own soul and pours it onto the canvas. Her portraits are not mere paintings but relics holding the essence of life itself. Her sudden disappearance from the art world immediately after her debut only adds to the mystique inevitable for a true genius..."*

The little attic in Montmartre.

In the dark, Yujin sat curled up. She looked like she'd aged 20 years in a month. Her skin was paper-pale. Her hair was going white in patches. Dozens of fresh blank canvases leaned against the walls. On the easel, a new portrait. Barely started.

Her empty eyes were locked on one thing. The very last drop of Sanguine Primaris sitting in front of the easel.

In a voice like dry leaves crumbling, she whispered.

"...more."