On the Verge (9 page)

Neither one of them said anything for several minutes until Ophidia sighed wistfully and stepped away from the painting and crossed the floor in a few purposeful strides to stand again in front of Freya. She studied her for a moment with dark eyes.

“You look like hell,” Ophidia told her.

“Thanks a lot,” Freya replied. “Being blackmailed into working for a psychopath tends to do that to a person.”

“Yes. About that, I’m sorry,” Ophidia began.

“Sorry?” Freya sneered. “You trick me into doing this woman’s dirty work, knowing her plans for me, and that’s all I get? I shouldn’t even be here right now.”

“Please let me finish. Believe me when I tell you that I would never be helping Beldame if there was something I could do about it. You’re not the only one to find herself trapped into working for the bitch.”

“I know what you are,” Freya said. “What about Beldame could possibly frighten a creature like you?”

There was a crack in Ophidia’s self-possessed bearing for a moment, but it was gone before Freya really had a chance to register it.

“Oh, really?” Ophidia drawled. “What, exactly, am I?”

“A demon. A succubus.”

“Did Beldame tell you that?”

Freya remained silent.

Ophidia shook her head in mock disappointment and stroked Freya’s cheek in a manner that was both lascivious and motherly.

“Oh, come now, deary. We won’t get very far if you don’t trust me.”

“I don’t know who to believe anymore,” Freya said as she pulled her cheek away from Ophidia’s touch.

“I understand it’s all been a bit much.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“And I know all about Beldame and her plans. That’s why I asked you to come. I’m offering you some information that might help.”

Ophidia gestured for Freya to follow her. The girl regarded her with suspicion, but with more than a little interest despite her grave misgivings. She was already in over her head; she might as well hear what this creature had to say.

She willed her exhausted body to follow Ophidia out of the Salon, through the connecting foyer and into the large white-walled room of the main exhibition space. It was littered with crates and packing materials in which the pieces on loan from other museums had been shipped for the show. Special mounts stood ready to secure the precious works of art to the walls, but so far they all remained empty except for one. It held a single painting that immediately drew Freya’s attention away from her aching body.

It was the only image in the room, but that wasn’t why Freya’s eyes went right to its jewel-like surface. It wasn’t the outlandish gold Greek columns that framed the piece, giving it the appearance of an altar. It wasn’t even the enormous snake that glared out from the picture plane as though the viewer was not only an intruder but also a potential meal. No, what made Freya’s breath catch in her throat was that the nude in this painting looked exactly like Ophidia.

“Wait, is that you?” Freya asked. She knew the answer before Ophidia even had a chance to respond. The resemblance was too obvious; it had to be her.

Ophidia stepped gracefully around the miscellaneous debris that stood between her and the painting. She sighed deeply as she approached the captivating work. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“I don’t understand,” Freya said. “Why is there a painting of you hanging in the Frye? Isn’t this a Stuck exhibit? He died in, like, 1928. It’s not possible. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Slow down, my little inquisitor,” Ophidia said, a smile in her voice. “Frankly I’m surprised that a self-proclaimed Symbolist enthusiast wouldn’t have come across this work before. It’s basically the quintessential Symbolist painting, but at any rate I’ll get to the logistics of it in a minute. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate its artfulness, shall we?”

Freya wasn’t in the mood for careful observation. Her mind was reeling and she wanted answers, but she could tell from the way Ophidia gazed at the painting with a mixture of longing and admiration that she wouldn’t be getting any explanations until the strange vixen had gotten her fill of the piece.

At first, Freya was too agitated to really appreciate anything about the painting. However, after standing in front of it for several minutes, anxious and confused, the art historian in her couldn’t help but be seduced by the striking portrait. Freya’s eyes first took in the torso. It was a greenish white swath of skin in an otherwise shadowy painting punctuated by the swell of hip and breasts, enticing even as they were dismayingly cadaverous. Then, out of the smoldering blackness it was possible to make out a dark curtain of hair framing an impassive face regarding through the gloom whomever should dare to stand before her.

While the woman was a distressing mixture of death and desire, perhaps even more disturbing was the snake that seemed to manifest itself from out of the dusky atmosphere, a terrible surprise waiting in ambush on the woman’s shoulder. Yellow eyes glared hungrily above an unnaturally large mouth teeming with sharp, needle-like fangs, while the serpent’s grotesquely thick obsidian body wrapped itself sinuously around the dark beauty’s figure in a salacious blending of scales and skin. The painted Ophidia wore the snake like a living mantle that, like a proud but jealous lover, revealed and concealed her anatomy. It both welcomed the viewer’s gaze while strictly controlling any outsider’s access to the body it held in its possession.

After breaking with the snake’s hypnotic stare, Freya looked again to the painted Ophidia’s adumbral face. She seemed placid, even apathetic. Her eyes returned Freya’s gaze with dispassionate potency, as though she were sure of her dominion over the viewer. She punctuated this assertion with a smug Mona Lisa smile that played around the corners of her blood-red lips. It was an expression both seductive and suggestive of the power latent in that pale being.

The whole unsettling artwork was presented within a massive gilt frame composed of a heavy lintel supported by two substantial Doric-style columns that rested atop a stylobate inscribed with the words “
Die Suende
,” in stately capitals. In her elaborate frame she was enshrined, deified.

“
Die Suende
,” whispered Freya under her breath, feeling the incongruity of the words on her tongue.

“It’s German for ‘Sin’.” Freya’s quiet utterance seemed to have roused Ophidia from her contemplative observation of her disquieting likeness. “That’s actually the title of the piece.”

Freya jumped slightly. Ophidia had a knack for catching her off guard. In fact, she was fairly certain Ophidia relished startling her in the same way a cat enjoys playing with its prey before it ultimately dispatches the unfortunate creature.

“So are you going to enlighten me as to why you are the subject of a painting created more than a hundred years ago?”

“Of course,” purred Ophidia. “You’re right. I have been stringing you along. It’s just that I’m afraid we would be all business all the time if I didn’t slow you down a little bit. You know it doesn’t hurt to indulge in life’s little pleasures occasionally, make a little small talk, flirt, satisfy those innocent fantasies you’ve got buried under all that seriousness. You’re a little uptight.”

“Seeing demons can do that to a person.”

“Oh, come now. Do I really look like a demon?”

“Not now.”

Ophidia smirked. “True enough. And as a human you are right to be circumspect in your dealings with the supernatural. But demon implies I’m some sort of fiend straight out of Hell, and I’m nothing so crude as that.”

“Oh, right, excuse me” Freya said with sarcasm. “There’s nothing crude about coming to men in their dreams and having sex with them so you can steal their soul.”

“Ugh,” Ophidia scoffed, “history has given us such a meager reputation. It’s true we do seduce men, and women too, in order to siphon some of their life force, but we only have sex with the truly special ones and we inhabit this world mostly. Dream walking is just a tool in our arsenal.”

“Sure,” Freya said. “I cannot believe I am actually having this conversation right now. A succubus, I mean, seriously? I’m just a college senior who agreed to an interesting job opportunity for some extra cash. I never thought it would lead to all this, this, nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense, actually, it’s just that you are seeing more of the world than you previously thought existed. Welcome to the Verge, my lovely.”

“The what?”

“The Verge is a borderland that surrounds your world. It’s an undiscovered frontier on the edge of human reality wherein exist all the creatures and beings of myth and legend.”

“Okay,” Freya said with uncertainty. “And how did you find your way from there to here?”

“The Verge and your world exist in a symbiotic relationship; one cannot survive without the other. We, the creatures of the Verge, are the dreams and nightmares, gods and devils of the human imagination. We inspire the human spirit to create and in turn that spirit feeds us. The human capacity for creativity and invention is how we came to be; we sprang from the religions, fables, and folklore of centuries past. We were imagined in order to explain any number of phenomena from why the sun rises and sets to why little children should listen to their parents.”

“Once we were brought into being, our survival depended on the continued investment of human belief in us. The more relevant and important we were to the human condition, the more substantial we became. Sometimes, some of us become so significant in the human world that we are actually able to cross over from the Verge. The more we walk in your world, the more we can exercise our power here, and the more people believe in us. We grow stronger in this way, feeding off the faith and superstitions of the human mind.”

“So you came from this fairytale land to Seattle because a bunch of people imagined you were real, like some kind of messed up Santa Claus?”

“It’s not so simple as that, I’m afraid.”

“Look, right now I need some answers that make sense,” said Freya. “There is a madwoman promising to kill me if I don’t deliver some colors she has hinted are not exactly your normal art store material, and you said you could help.”

“I’m getting there,” Ophidia said. “Remember what I said about that painting of Voluptas next door, that the best subjects are the fantasies people actually believe in?”

Freya nodded.

“Well, this painting is by far Stuck’s most well-known piece, and widely regarded as the crowning achievement of his career. It’s not because I’m a succubus, though. It’s because when Stuck painted me he gave me a new identity. He made me the female embodiment of sin.”

Ophidia paused to gauge Freya’s response. The girl simply stared at her blankly, so the succubus continued.

“Let me explain,” Ophidia continued. “You see the story of original sin, and the story of Eve specifically, doesn’t begin with the Bible as some people believe. She has had many incarnations. Some say her origins can be found in ancient Egypt as Wadjet, the protector of gods and kings. Others believe the Minoans summoned her from the Verge as their great snake goddess, the guardian of the home and the embodiment of fertility and the renewal of life. She was a figure of feminine strength then, a defender of women, and worshipped across cultures and time, from east to west and for thousands of millennia.”

A look that Freya thought must be longing suffused Ophidia’s features. It was the first time she seen her as anything but hard and dangerous.

“She was awe-inspiring in those days,” Ophidia went on. “The being who would become Eve was revered for her strength and power and possessed of great external beauty that only minimally reflected the profundity of her nature, a nature that was deeply feminine with all of the complexity that entails: nurturing but fiercely protective, undeniably sensual but in control of her genitive capacity, wise and kind but steadfast in her sense of justice. She was to be respected, not out of fear but out of admiration, for to worship her was to venerate your mothers, your daughters, your sisters, yourself.

“Then the story started to change,” Ophidia said, her eyes clouding over. “The words of a few whispered from ear to ear spread slowly at first, as these things do, from neighbor to neighbor, village to village. Reverence and awe slowly turned to suspicion, distrust, and doubt, as belief in the goddess was slowly but ineluctably eroded by rumor repeated into truth. The dynamic and compelling deity she had been became a fragile, guileless figure in a garden, her symbol the snake.

“In particularly injurious irony, the snake was transformed into the source of her own downfall and, damningly, that of her companion, man. Eve became a powerless figure who succumbs to the serpent’s temptation, the temptation of powers that used to be her own now corrupted into their most base forms. With a bite of that fateful apple she and her hapless male companion were expelled from paradise.

“From that point on the world’s pain and suffering are attributed to Eve and, by extension, all women. Divorced from her power, she is made abject, a figure to be derided, her only redemption found in dumb subservience. At the same time her considerable gifts, now perverted and polluted, are made fearful. The mighty goddess is now effectively split, becoming at once pathetically disenfranchised and wickedly vicious. She is simultaneously disregarded for her triviality and abhorred for her degeneracy. Her story has changed irrevocably.”

Ophidia paused and Freya breathed deeply. She couldn’t fathom where Ophidia was going with this tale, but nothing that had happened to her in the past few days made sense in the reality that she was familiar with. Ophidia began again and Freya listened, deferring her skepticism for the moment.

“Humiliated, vitiated, Eve mourned her former glory,” Ophidia said, “but her fate is tied to human belief and even the most dynamic and compelling deities and monsters of a time and place can find themselves changed beyond recognition or forgotten completely, obliterated by time and circumstance.

“By the time Stuck painted me, the passive obedient Eve had become simply an archetype for the latest troupe of humanity to parade about as an exemplar of acquiescent femininity. There is no room in the Verge for archetypes; they are static and sterile, merely a mannequin upon which social roles are built. When Stuck gave me my new name, when he elevated me from common succubus to a legend with real power in the world of man, I knew that other part of Eve was as good as dead, a withered limb to be amputated.”