The First Sketch of Scream
As the light vanished, the photo the seller had uploaded to the monitor came into view.
A sketch that seemed to resemble Munch’s The Scream.
At that moment, the world began to blur.
"No way... again?"
It was the same sensation he had felt when he peeked into the memories hidden inside the bird box.
The ability to see the memories contained within an object had been activated.
In an instant, the world flipped over.
[Ekeberg Hill, Oslo, Norway, 1892]
A cold wind rushed in and slapped him across the cheek.
On the hill overlooking the fjord coast stood a gaunt man.
Edvard Munch.
At thirty, he was as pale as a ghost.
Two friends were walking ahead of him, chatting as they went.
But Munch could not walk.
He was leaning precariously against the railing,
his trembling eyes lifted toward the sky.
The sky...
His gaze followed Munch’s and rose to the heavens.
At the same time, he could hardly breathe.
This was not an ordinary sunset.
The clouds were burning red, so intensely that they seemed to have congealed into clots of blood, stuck fast to the sky.
Over the dark blue city, scarlet blood seemed to be sweeping in to swallow the world whole.
Then an unknown sound came crashing down.
-Kiaaaagh-!
It was not a human scream.
It was a horrifying cry of pain from the earth and sky, from nature itself.
The world itself felt as if it were collapsing.
The sound seemed to tear through his eardrums and churn his brain inside out.
"Ugh... Please, stop... stop it..."
Munch clamped both hands over his ears.
But the sound did not stop.
The friends walking ahead kept drifting farther away, oblivious to everything.
It felt as if he alone had been abandoned here.
That perfect, dreadful isolation, as though he were on the verge of going mad.
I have to draw it... drag it out.
Munch fumbled through his pockets.
There was no proper canvas, no sketchbook.
What his hand found was the diary in his coat pocket.
He tore out a sheet of paper.
Then he sat down and pulled out a pencil with trembling fingers.
This was not art.
It was a struggle to survive.
If he did not trap this terror on paper, it felt as though his head would burst open at any moment.
Scritch! Scritch!
He sketched on the page as if the pencil lead might snap.
A ghostly face.
Himself, wide-eyed with fear, hands clamped over his ears as he screamed.
The blood-red sky twisting and rippling in curved waves.
In a very short time, he transferred his fear onto the paper.
"Haah... haah..."
Only then did the screaming begin to die down.
Soaked in sweat, Munch looked down at the drawing he had made.
A record of madness, so horrible and so nakedly exposed.
He wrote a few words beneath it.
Naturen skreg.
Nature screamed.
Then, without looking at the sketch again, Munch folded the paper and shoved it deep into the inside pocket of his coat.
* * *
Whoosh!
His vision snapped back.
He was in his own room, unchanged from before.
And yet his heart was hammering as if he had just sprinted a hundred meters at full speed.
His body was shaking, and he felt as helpless as though a panic attack had seized him.
His chest felt crushed tight.
No matter how much air he drew in, it seemed like none of it reached his lungs.
The emotions Munch had felt back then.
That overwhelming fear came through intact.
"Hah... hah..."
He gasped for breath and wiped the cold sweat beading on his forehead.
In his ears, the piercing scream from Ekeberg Hill in Oslo, 1892, still echoed like a hallucination.
It’s okay. I’m back.
He drank the water from the tumbler on his desk.
The water slid down his throat and calmed him.
Only then could he see it clearly.
The sketch on the monitor, on old paper that was crumpled and yellowed with age.
It was the first sketch that led from Munch’s painting Despair to The Scream.
At the same time, a status window appeared.
The first conceptual sketch of Edvard Munch’s The Scream
The paper has oxidized over time, but its overall condition remains good
The worn phrase at the bottom, “Nature screamed,” matches Munch’s handwriting exactly
The torn edge and material of this sketch perfectly match the lost fourteenth page of the K-12 Pocket Diary held by the Munch Museum in Norway
Estimated value: at least 20 billion won
Good God.
The original sketch for The Scream?
And something like this was sitting openly on an auction site?
Given the symbolic weight Munch carried, a price of 20 billion won made perfect sense.
The pastel version of The Scream sold at Sotheby’s in 2012 for 135 billion won.
There had even been cases where a simple study or a small sketch by a master like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci fetched hundreds of billions of won.
Twenty billion was not strange at all.
If anything, compared with other artists’ works, it almost felt cheap.
- Item name: Sketch resembling Munch’s The Scream (photo)
- Seller ID: Nor**c_p**son (reputation 98.5%)
- Current Price: $12,500 (about 16.5 million won) / Time Remaining: 23 hours 15 minutes
Beneath that was the seller’s description.
- Hello. I found this while cleaning out my late great-grandmother’s house. She was an immigrant who came from Norway to the United States in the early 1930s...
(Omitted)
There was an old trunk in the house, and inside it I found a thick black wool coat my great-grandmother supposedly wore when she was young.
It was badly moldy, so I was about to throw it out, but on a whim I checked the pockets, and deep inside the inner pocket I found this folded sketch.
It feels similar to Munch’s The Scream. I think it may be a study copy drawn by my great-grandmother or someone she knew after seeing one of Munch’s paintings.
As you can see from the photo, the paper is extremely old and yellowed. The left edge is roughly torn, as if it had been ripped out of a notebook.
(Views: 504)
(Saved to watch list: 58)
Sure enough, there were people who had caught the scent.
When he clicked the Q&A inquiries, sharp questions were waiting there just as expected.
- ArtHunt**: Seller, there seems to be writing in pencil at the bottom. Can you read it? Even when I zoom in, it’s too blurred to make out clearly. Please confirm.
- Seller: Hmm, not sure. It’s so old the graphite has smeared. It looks like Norwegian, but I can’t say for certain.
- Euro**_Dea*: Seller, have you had this sketch appraised by an expert? I know someone who appraises art objects and can introduce you. Please send me a message.
- Seller: I already posted the item, so that probably won’t be possible. :(
- Vintag*_Lo**: The paper looks quite old. Could you upload some more enlarged photos? Especially the torn left edge.
- Seller: I’ve uploaded a few more photos, but the camera’s just my phone, so the quality isn’t great.
- Sia**_Ad*: You said it was found in the inside pocket of an old coat. What happened to the coat itself? Do you still have it? Could you check the brand or the year it was made?
- Seller: The coat was badly moldy, so I already threw it away. I couldn’t see the brand.
Dragging this out is dangerous.
The bidding was already at 42 offers and 16.5 million won.
If the rumor spread and more people became interested, the competition could turn vicious.
He looked to the upper right corner of the screen.
- Buy It Now: $45,000 (about 60 million won)
Thank God.
The seller had set a buy-it-now price.
From a normal perspective, paying 60 million won for a single scrap of old paper with no way of knowing whether it was genuine was insane.
But now that the status window had told him it was authentic, there was nothing to hesitate over.
Click.
He pressed Buy It Now.
A window popped up.
Of course he had to buy it.
* * *
Oliver was staring at the monitor with bloodshot eyes, his leg bouncing in agitation.
He rolled the mouse wheel idly, staring at the screen.
[My Bid: $12,500 (about 16.5 million won)]
Some people would call it madness.
To throw this much money at a scrap of paper on the internet, something he had never even seen in person or smelled once, was absurd.
If Oliver hadn’t spent more than twenty years working at a pawnshop, he wouldn’t have placed a bid like this.
He had built his instincts by seeing countless objects.
And Oliver’s gut kept telling him the same thing.
Don’t let this go. Absolutely not.
He leaned back against his chair for a moment.
He picked up the coffee sitting cold on the side table and swallowed it down, but all that remained in his mouth was bitterness.
“Damn it. Calm down, Oliver. You’re a professional.”
He muttered to himself and turned back to the monitor.
The screen still showed the sketch, as if it had been crudely scribbled in a hurry.
At first glance, it looked like a doodle fit for a trash can.
The seller’s photos were lousy too.
But Oliver wasn’t looking at the image itself. He was looking at the data beneath it.
He brought up the right side of his dual monitor.
It was the image restoration result he had hurriedly requested a few hours earlier from a digital forensics expert he knew.
“AI upscaling really is something.”
The seller’s original photo was blurry, and the text was so smeared it was hard to read.
But once the latest technology restored the pixels and removed the noise, the hidden truth emerged.
He stared at the screen where the blurred graphite marks had been transformed into clear letters.
“...Naturen skreg.”
Oliver mouthed the words.
“Nature screamed,” or “Nature cried out.”
He checked Munch’s biography and the papers spread out on his desk once more.
In Edvard Munch’s diary, a sentence strikingly similar to this had been recorded.
Jeg følte det store Skrig gjennem Naturen.
I felt the great, endless scream through nature.
“This isn’t a coincidence.”
More than anything, what convinced Oliver was the handwriting.
The restored script matched Munch’s own nervous, sharp curves perfectly.
Even the angle at which the stroke of the N bent,
down to the habit of letting the tail of the g drag out long.
All of these circumstances pointed to a single conclusion.
“...This is likely the original sketch by Munch.”
If it was real?
If its connection to The Scream could be firmly proven, then this was an object worth hundreds of billions, no problem at all.
An object he couldn’t afford even if he sold the pawnshop he worked in whole.
And it was sitting there right now for only a few tens of thousands of dollars.
But fear held him back.
...What if it’s a sophisticated forgery made in the early twentieth century? Or a fake produced recently using a method I don’t know?
Working in a pawnshop had taught Oliver suspicion.
There was no such thing as a free lunch in this world.
Even a Rolex that looked perfect could be opened to reveal a Chinese movement inside.
This could be someone’s vicious prank too.
His psychological limit was $20,000, about 26 million won.
Anything beyond that was too much.
“Play it safe. Right, I’ll wait and then move in at the end.”
But there was one irritating bastard.
The one in the inquiry thread asking about the coat’s whereabouts.
That guy had definitely picked up on something.
As Oliver slowly raised his bid, that bastard kept following and pushing the price higher too.
Oliver bit his lip and glanced at the red button in the upper right corner of the screen.
- Buy It Now: $45,000 (60 million won)
Oliver snorted.
“Unless he’s crazy, there’s no way he’d hit that.”
Dump 60 million won into it without even a certificate proving it was authentic?
That wasn’t investing. That was speculation.
No matter how much it looked like a sketch by Munch.
Spending that kind of money without seeing the original was insanity.
Oliver was only planning to nudge his bid up to $13,000 and test the waters.
He needed to see how the other guy responded.
“All right, let’s see what you do.”
He moved the mouse cursor over the Place Bid button.
And then.
The screen refreshed.
The bright red bid button that had been there vanished and died into gray in an instant.
SOLD OUT
This item has been purchased via "Buy It Now."
“...Huh?”
What was this?
Oliver’s thoughts came to a stop.
For several seconds, he could do nothing but stare at the screen blankly.
He rubbed his eyes and looked again.
But the screen was stamped with letters so sharp they felt cruel.
[Sale ended]
Someone had thrown down the full 60 million won.
“D-damn it! That’s impossible...”
Oliver shot up from his seat.
Crash!
The chair toppled backward with a clatter, but he didn’t even hear it.
“Who? What kind of crazy bastard bought this immediately?!”
Anger, disbelief. And then a chill followed close behind.
He had used every technique at his disposal to verify the thing and still hesitated.
But that bastard had thrown down the outrageous price without a second thought.
As if he already knew the answer.
Oliver clutched his head.
The chance to change his life completely, one that had appeared once in twenty years behind a pawnshop counter.
No. It had to be fake.
Right. It had to be a sour grape, nothing more.
But according to the material he had analyzed, the likelihood that it was real was extremely high.
Should he not have hesitated?
An ominous intuition swept over him, the feeling that he might have just lost a once-in-a-lifetime windfall that would never come again.