On the Verge (7 page)

But Stuck was mesmerized by the man even without the promise of pleasure. He sat for him on a plain bench, feet close together, knees almost touching. One elbow dug into the flesh of his thigh so that his forearm became the sinewy pedestal upon which his hand, fingers curled rapaciously, supported the full weight of his heavy head. His other arm was cocked out to his side and bent at the elbow forming a right angle that drove his curled fist down in a gesture that simultaneously indicated stability and the potential for imminent violence.

Stuck asked Dakryma to stare intensely at him, to imagine himself as a mesmerist in the throws of a hypnotic revelry. For Dakryma this was not something he had to feign; it came naturally, so entranced was he by the artist working in front of him. As Stuck worked he didn’t descend into a frenzied mania of flying paint and scrubbing brushes. He calmly applied pigment to canvas with deliberation. It was with these deeply reflective gestures that he crafted Dakryma’s image and the incubus devoured the melancholy of the artist’s energy with its heady mixture of dreams and yearning.

He came back to Stuck’s studio often. He wasn’t sure how many times he posed. He would sit there for hours, arms asleep, neck stiff, but he never minded. Stuck wouldn’t show him the work-in-progress. He said he only wanted Dakryma to see the piece once it had been finished. Stuck never explained, but Dakryma heard the nerves in his voice and didn’t press him for a glimpse. He didn’t want his curiosity to ruin things. The energy he gained from their sessions was intense and it was worth a great deal to him to keep their relationship on good terms.

Finally one day Stuck paused, sighed and backed away from the canvas. It was done he said, and he wanted Dakryma to see it. The incubus remembered the moment well. It was overcast but not raining and a perfect diffused natural light filled the large windows of Stuck’s studio illuminating his latest canvas. Dakryma advanced apprehensively. He was worried that Stuck’s actual work would pale in comparison to the one he had envisioned so many times as he posed on the hard bench, eyes trained on the huge canvas in front of him and the handsome artist who would peer around its borders from time to time, using his alchemy to transform life into art.

When he saw it he was stunned, and he suddenly realized why Stuck had wanted to keep the piece to himself until it was finished. Dakryma’s muscular body was accurately rendered and even the contraction of his brows with the two vertical lines that appeared just above his aquiline nose, a mark of his pensive nature, were tenderly reproduced. But the eyes. Dakryma was astounded. They were his eyes, to be certain, but not the glacial blue ones he had been expecting. Instead, two phosphorescent orbs seared the surface of the painting, each one with a glistening ruddy pupil that was more like an abyss, a tunnel straight to hell, than a window on the world. They were Dakryma’s eyes when he was in
koshmar
.

Dakryma hadn’t realized it, but the energy that permeated the air of Stuck’s studio had activated the incubus he had always tried to hide from the daylight world. No wonder he had been able to remain so focused, so fixated on the artist before him. Stuck’s work had been feeding Dakryma’s soul and in return the artist had laid the dreamwalker’s essence bare on the canvas.

It took Dakryma a long time to take in the rest of the painting, so concentrated was he on the intensity of those incubus eyes, scorching yellow fires amid the gloom of dark grey and midnight blue. Many minutes went by before he was able to take in the iridescent black feathers trapped beneath the heavy fist of his right hand. He had to stare for a few minutes more to see that the feathers were only the end of a magnificent wing, shadowy as a crow’s, that grew from his back. The traces of another wing filled the other side of the work, but the details were lost to the inky background.

He should have known, should have destroyed it when he had the chance, before he had even seen the painting. Having laid eyes on it, that powerful portrait, he had consigned himself to fate. There was no way he could lay a finger on it now. The painting was nothing like the avant-garde art he had seen in Paris. In fact, in comparison to those modern masterpieces, this work was almost outmoded in its realistic depiction of the human body and the way the canvas became a window into another world. It was the subject matter, Dakryma himself, that made the painting special. The French modernists appealed to the brain. Their work was cerebral and Dakryma appreciated them for their intelligence. But this portrait operated on a purely visceral level. It struck at the emotions, with the capacity to send a frisson of alluring terror down the spine of whoever stood in front of it.

“It’s called
Lucifer
,” Stuck said in a barely audible whisper.

Dakryma had nearly forgotten the artist was even there, and he started a bit when the whisper interrupted his deep revelry. Lucifer, of course. The name of the devil before his fall. The morning star, the bringer of light consigned to hell, his wing broken, his essence occluded by pride and jealousy. Here Stuck had shown the angel’s inner light corrupted by rage into a vile luminescence, but there was still room for empathy in this painting, a way to understand and acknowledge the darker parts of humanity and find in them a strange beauty. It was a masterpiece of emotional connection and it had Dakryma trapped.

He had revealed his true self and now it was captured in the work. It was a dear price to pay for vulnerability. When you come from the Verge, you keep your identity close. They all knew how susceptible they were to transference, to becoming attached to objects, the dreaded ligature. It was usually books, because stories had been their cradle and would be their grave, but sometimes other objects could become talismans too, and this painting was one of those instances. It revealed too much and so it held him, and he was no longer just an incubus—he was Lucifer. His existence would never be the same.

The damage had been done. Dakryma had heard from others of the Verge about what it was like to be in the thrall of ligature. Depending on the reputation and whereabouts of the object, some lived wonderful lives in grand cities; others were consigned to dusty attics in obscure locales. The objects were their anchors, but they had a range in which they could roam, usually within the confines of the city or, in more rural places, a given tract of land with definite boundaries.

Luckily for Dakryma his object was kept in Munich for a time until it was acquired by a Bulgarian prince and finally made its way into the galleries of the national museum in Sophia. He’d spent most of the last dozen decades tied to the city of Sophia, traveling only occasionally when the artwork was put on loan to other museums.

In the intervening years he had taken up art history. While he was a man of taste and refinement, he had only a passing knowledge of art. He had assumed that an expertise in the field might serve him well considering his anchoring object was a masterwork of the Symbolist movement. Becoming a professor had also given him something to do with his time, and college students were often dripping in melancholy, especially around exams.

But he’d never become fully accustomed to the limited life he’d been forced to live, nor had he enjoyed his augmented identity. He could understand why Stuck would think him a demon. He had always been surprised, frankly, that the artist hadn’t run away screaming the first time he had entered
koshmar
. That strange incongruity bothered him after the initial shock of the unveiling had worn off and he had asked Stuck in the dwindling light of his studio why he had kept painting even after he saw he clearly wasn’t human.

There was a woman, Stuck had told him, and she had threatened the lives of everyone he held dear unless he painted the incubus. Dakryma had asked Stuck the name although he was fairly certain he knew the answer already.

Ophidia, the terrified man had intoned with great trepidation as though she might appear at any moment to make good her murderous promise.

Although he had been expecting to hear that damned appellation, the thought of her stooping to such a level just to exact some petty revenge filled Dakryma with cold rage. Their love affair had been quick and intense. Relations between succubi and incubi were taboo, however, and Dakryma wasn’t prepared to face the consequences if they were to be found out.

His former lover had called him a coward and a litany of other curses gleaned from centuries of feeding off some of humanity’s most colorful people. She begged him to stay, but nothing she could have said would have made him change his mind. At the time he knew it broke her heart, but he was certain she would get over it. After all, in the grand scheme of things they barely knew each other. But it appeared he had underestimated the scope of her heartbreak.

Ophidia had sentenced him to this painted prison out of vengeful retaliation, he assumed. Yet, just as he had miscalculated the extent of her acrimony, she perhaps had not fully considered the implications of consigning a man of his nature to nearly a century and a half of enforced confinement. He wasn’t sure if it was the new moniker the architect of his peculiar jail had bestowed upon him, or whether the poison of retaliation had turned the bittersweetness of melancholy sour, but either way the incubus felt himself changing. His outlook had grown increasingly cynical, his actions more corrupt. While he was still able to feign decency most of the time, occasionally his evolving nature boiled too close to the surface and his dalliances into dreams became more violent. Flights of strange fantasy became nightmares that became psychotic episodes, sometimes wreaking irreversible damage on his chosen victims.

In time he’d grown to relish the terror he inflicted on the innocent, but it never seemed to compensate for the fact that he was a captive held in place by the flimsy bastille of oil and canvas. In Bulgaria, his rage had blossomed like a putrid flower and he longed for the day when he would see Ophidia again. He envisioned all the terrible ways she could meet her demise and it made him smile. It wasn’t possible for him to be happy, but thinking of how he would murder her brought him as close to the emotion as an incubus-cum-dark-lord could get.

He was nervous when he found out his picture was traveling to the New World. He of course had access to television and the Internet so he was aware of the world in which he lived but more as an abstract concept than a concrete reality. The last time he had been a free man, Seattle was little more than a pioneer village. Nobody in Europe even knew it existed. Thus when the sleepy docent whom he had bribed to keep him apprised of any updates concerning his accursed portrait told him his next port-of-call, he was floored. It had been almost a decade since the picture had last left the shadowy confines of Sophia and the handful of times the painting had ventured out of the Eastern European capitol it was always to somewhere on the Continent.

He scrambled to secure a sabbatical with his department at Sofia University. For the first several decades after he’d begun teaching at Bulgaria’s oldest institution of higher learning, nobody had been too suspicious. A few of the older faculty wondered why he never seemed to age, but Dakryma was quick to explain it away with talk of good genes and good health, and none of those ancient academics gave it much thought anyway. Most of the time they were too self-absorbed in their latest research to really devote much of their precious brainpower to his surprising youthfulness.

But as the years began to pile up, it had become harder and harder to explain away his agelessness. Luckily this period happened to coincide with his moral decent so those professors or staff members who did question his longevity were quickly visited by horrendous nightmares that either scared them into submission or drove them stark raving mad. Either outcome worked for Dakryma. As an added bonus his nocturnal visitations had the side effect of giving him a lot of clout among the members of the University’s administration. Thus, it was usually no problem to get what he wanted, even with short notice.

This time was no exception. Although many questioned his need to go to Seattle, the exhibition, of which his portrait would be a part, provided a convenient rationale. As an art history professor specializing in Symbolism, he could plausibly if somewhat improbably make the case for a trip halfway around the world to attend the first monographic exhibition in the United States of Franz von Stuck. It hardly mattered to Dakryma whether his sabbatical application was convincing or not, but really the type of nightmares he needed to dream up in order to persuade people of his unquestionable authority were rather draining. A good excuse saved him a lot of work.

The night that
Lucifer
left Bulgaria, Dakryma flew right along with it. Not in the cargo hold of the big jet, of course, but on the shadow-dark wings Stuck had given him so many years before. When he landed in Seattle, amid the scattered headstones of Lake View Cemetery, he stood on the inky hillside and took in the bright lights of the strange city by the water. The air was damp, the leaves withered on the trees. A lonely crow glared at him with one malevolent eye in the dreary half-light of a soggy dawn.

He smiled. This was his kind of place.