On the Verge (6 page)

The room started to swim in front of Freya’s eyes and she made a stumbling move for the door, but Beldame had anticipated her reaction and already stood in front of her only means of escape. She grasped Freya’s outstretched arm with a strength that she wouldn’t have believed possible for such a diminutive woman. Freya collapsed to the floor as her knees buckled beneath her, while Beldame’s sharp nails dug into the skin of her forearm.

“Don’t leave just yet, dear,” Beldame said. “I’m not quite done with you.”

She let go of Freya’s arm and readjusted her posture so that she was once again standing prim as a schoolmarm, no evidence of her unusual strength or aggression from only a few moments before.

“I don’t show these pictures to many people for obvious reasons,” Beldame said, “but I thought you would find them particularly inspirational.”

“Inspirational?” Freya sputtered. “They’re atrocities.”

“No, no, nothing so brutal as that, Freya. No, these photos are my very favorite objects because they represent the height of my lifelong pursuit of collecting. You see, I have stripped away their unsightly lives, these whores and addicts, and I’ve given them everlasting beauty, I’ve made them into masterpieces. You must admit they are gorgeous and I spared no expense in recreating every single detail of the original work. I pared away their desecrated humanity and made them objects that can be enjoyed forever. I sit in my office sometimes and just stare at them, my prized collection. They are the ultimate expression of the incorruptibility of the art object and the divine power of the collector.”

“You’re insane,” Freya whispered. She had pushed herself back up so that she was once again on her feet although leaning heavily against the wall.

“Only those without the insight of the true collector would assign me such an epithet. I am an artist and a visionary, a giver of everlasting loveliness and grace. I’ve created masterpieces from filth.”

“I only see death in these pictures,” said Freya.

“That is unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. As a fellow collector I thought you might recognize genius when you saw it. No matter, though. The real reason I showed you these photos of mine is to provide you with a bit of motivation. Money works for ordinary tasks, but, as you will soon find out, your task is no ordinary undertaking, so it requires a bit more inspiration.”

Beldame paused and Freya felt her heartbeat quicken. She knew what the old woman was going to say. Abject fear and contempt lit up Freya’s brain replacing any wide-eyed sense of excitement she might have had at the beginning of her visit, but she remained rooted to the spot.

“Part of the selection criteria I gave Ophidia included the provision that whoever she found should be competent and compliant but also a fair facsimile of the languorous vamp in John White Alexander’s
Althea
. As a Symbolist enthusiast, I’m sure you’re familiar with the painting: that sinuous creature in an opulent periwinkle gown.”

Beldame didn’t wait for Freya’s confirmation, but the girl nodded despite herself. She was intimately familiar with the painting. It was one of her favorites, in fact, but the thought of actually becoming her in death made her stomach turn.

“There are others, of course, who could become my Althea, but you would do most nicely. However, I’m willing to look elsewhere for my model if you deliver the colors I ask of you in a timely manner. The exhibition opens quite soon, you know.”

“You’re threatening to kill me,” Freya said, indignation barely winning out over terror in the tenor of her voice.

“No, my dear. Have you heard nothing I’ve said? Not kill you! I would memorialize you, make you an eternal object of wonder. When you look at it that way, it is more of a reward than a punishment. Unfortunately, most people don’t regard it that way.”

Freya felt the room begin to spin again, but she fought to stay upright. She considered her options. The police would never believe her. She could run, but Beldame was a powerful woman with untold connections. She didn’t think she could outpace her influence.

“I can see you are coming to the only sensible conclusion,” Beldame said, studying Freya’s face intently. “The list of colors and where to find them are on the back of my card.”

Freya looked down at the card she still held clenched in her fist. The neat print slowly came into focus.

Cobalt Blue – Rusty Berger, Stone Lodge Quarry

Vermillion – Vasilisa Kuklachik, The Belfry

Gamboge Yellow – Channary Im, House of Kour

“I’ll be expecting delivery of the colors on the day of the gala,” Beldame said, “so you better get started.”

She opened the door to her study and Freya wasted no time in escaping the suffocating confines of the office. She ran across the small antechamber with its remarkable cabinet of curiosities, through the narrow hallway, and past the grand stair before tearing open the front door and sprinting from the property. She never turned around but she could feel Beldame’s eyes on her the whole time. She didn’t stop until she was far away from the mad woman and her trove of beautiful, sinister things.

D
akryma glowered. It was something he was particularly well suited to doing. It also seemed particularly appropriate given his present locale. He’d decided to come back to Lake View Cemetery.

Last time he’d been there the girl had interrupted his luncheon but, he had to admit, it had been a rather fortuitous meeting. He’d had no luck locating Ophidia, so when Freya showed up stinking of the succubus he took it as a sign that his luck was about to change. He usually kept his supernatural side a secret, but her stumbling upon him while in
koshmar
was perhaps a blessing in disguise. He needed her help. It didn’t hurt to make a strong impression.

He was pretty sure he had accomplished his goal and it had been rather more fun than he would have thought. She wasn’t really his type, but there was something there in her haughty demeanor, the shy indifference with which she approached even his unexpected appearance that appealed to his own studied aloofness. He’d always considered standoffishness a mark of refinement rather than arrogance, but that was most probably the former aristocrat in him. Old habits died hard. Or never die, in his case.

He turned his attention back to the granite obelisk in front of him. It was the one that he had been standing in front of earlier when Freya had found him. It had just what he needed: plenty of mourning had gone into this passing, real sadness, not just a show put on for the benefit of the survivors. He put his hands on the gravestone, passing his fingers sensually over the smooth surface, the concave letters carved deep into the hard rock. Grief and sorrow radiated from the memorial even after the many years it had been since the heart buried six feet below had last pumped blood, and it was this misery that he needed right now.

Few people understood his kind although the needs of an incubus were quite simple. The legends all made incubi out to be lascivious demons, lechers who came to women in their nightmares and ravished them indiscriminately. To a certain extent it was true, incubi were sensual creatures with the power to enter dreams when necessary to get the nourishment they needed. However while this was the most well-known and grandiose of their pastimes, they could be found anywhere where melancholy reigned.

For Dakryma and others of his kind the pensive and heavyhearted and the wistfully disconsolate were the things that fed his eternal soul and stirred his passions. Nightmares, or at least the bad dreams of remorse, regret, and bittersweet nostalgia, certainly fit the bill, but places too could feed the heart and soul of an incubus. Few other locales were more fruitful in the incubus’s search for sustenance than a cemetery.

Dakryma leaned his head down on the stone, breathing deeply, and felt the exquisite thrill of sadness and longing. The poignant chill of melancholy permeated his blood, muscles, and bones. He exhaled and let the stone go, his eyes aglow with the incandescence of melancholy.

It was raining, not an unusual occurrence in Seattle, and it suited Dakryma. This was his first time in the city but he could imagine being quite happy here. Seattle was young, only an infant in comparison to his beloved Sofia, but it seemed to have a depth of soul reserved for cities of much greater age. Maybe it was the romance of the scenery, the snowy mountains presiding over an island-dotted Sound, or the rain that didn’t so much fall out of the sky as float like a mist, settling like tiny crystals on the needles of the ubiquitous pines. Add to that an overall greyness, especially in late autumn, that was atmospheric and gloomy without being grim, and the place was like melancholy made manifest. Dakryma adored it. If only he could stay. Regretfully, his tenure here lasted only as long as his blasted painting remained in the exhibition, and he had important things to accomplish in the limited time he was in town.

It was hard for Dakryma to believe it had been more than 120 years since Stuck had laid brush to canvas and painted the incubus. Dakryma’s portrait had become one of the German artist’s most famous works. The world had just entered the last decade of the nineteenth century and there was a kind of energy, a dynamism that the immortal incubus had never experienced before. In the big cities of Europe, culture was changing. The human experience of life itself was fundamentally altered by technological and medical advances, mass production, urbanization and rising secularism.

While it was an exciting time, the shift from the certainties of a life lived under the iron thumb of tradition to one forged on the razor’s edge of modernism left generations of anxious urbanites adrift on a sea of uncertainty. In the space between the exhilaration of freedom and the many pitfalls of a system built on self-interest lay melancholy.

Dakryma had never experienced such a bounty of the wistful ennui that was his sustenance. He thrived in the disconsolate ambiance of modernity. He remembered he had just traveled from Paris to Munich. Having siphoned his fill of bohemian dreams from Montmartre, he was in search of new fare, and he found it among the artists that would later go by the collective title of the Munich Secession. Their work was a reaction against the sterile art of the period. It was everything the art of the mainstream, of the academies, was not: expressive, vibrant, and steeped in sexuality and a rawness crafted to produce a visceral reaction.

It was in one of those wonderful new creations of the modern world, the café, where Dakryma first came across the Munich Secession’s co-founder, Franz Stuck. With thick dark hair swept to the side, intense eyes, and a dramatic mustache over sensual lips, he was the embodiment of the now-clichéd vision of the romantic artist. Dakryma knew instantly what his next meal would be and he was certain it would be delectable.

At first Dakryma had only intended to visit Stuck’s dreams, just as he had done with the many Parisian artists he had called upon in the weeks previous. Several of those avant-garde painters complained of their nightmares, each blaming their poor diet or the cheap wine on the strange visions they saw in their sleep. They had called it an affliction, but Dakryma knew his little sojourns into their subconscious had been just the stimulation those free spirits had needed. It wasn’t an affliction so much as creative illumination. They provided him with sustenance and he gave them inspiration. He was their muse.

Usually Dakryma would surreptitiously follow them home. As long as he knew where they slept he could find them; it was one of the talents of the incubi. But Stuck had found him in that crowded café and approached him with an offer: sit as a model for a new painting he was undertaking. The recompense was of little matter to Dakryma. He was wealthy with money and property gained over the many centuries he had haunted the world, but the thought of being the subject of a work of art painted by this intriguing man was intoxicating.

The two men walked the short distance to Stuck’s studio, each edified by the company of the other. The afternoon was dreary and they strode quickly, hoping to avoid the coming downpour. Just a few blocks from Stuck’s apartment, they lost the race. The skies opened and torrents of rain soaked both men’s fine jackets and crisp linen shirts. It ruined their soft leather shoes and caused their carefully coifed hair to droop inelegantly into their eyes.

In the studio they stripped off their soaked clothes. Stuck changed into the working clothes he kept in a small cupboard, but he asked that Dakryma remain nude. The incubus was used to seeing the naked body in the service of art. In his recent travels around Paris he’d come across plenty of models, usually female but occasionally male, posed in various states of undress. He knew from his nocturnal visitations what often happened between artist and model as the soft light of day faded into the sensual dark of night. Dakryma enjoyed the company of both sexes, finding that the different varieties of melancholy they exuded satisfied his varied needs. He thrilled a little at the idea, but it was not to be. Stuck had a more limited view of sex and, more than that, he was devoted to his beautiful wife.