Freya shook the motionless woman again, a little more vigorously. Suddenly an arm shot up from within the derelict’s filthy, tattered clothing and a grimy hand grasped Freya’s arm. The woman’s eyes fluttered open, but they were rolled so far back into her head that Freya could only see the whites of her eyes. She tried to pull herself free of the wretched woman’s grasp, but she held fast to Freya’s jacket. Then she spoke, and it was like the distant growling of thunder, deep and subdued.
“The Samhain is coming.” As she spoke the woman buried her blackened nails into the folds of Freya’s pea coat and pulled her closer. She could feel the vagrant’s foul breath, hot on her cheek. The woman’s other hand closed tightly around the collar of Freya’s shirt. She pulled Freya down until her face was nearly touching the woman’s cheek.
“Nightmares ride.” Her lips were cracked and peeling and they trembled slightly as she formed the words as though immense effort were required to push her stale breath out through time-twisted vocal chords.
The woman’s grip pressed Freya down into the lumpy folds of her mildewed overcoat. Freya’s knees dug into the rough concrete as she strained against the hands that forced her down. She felt suffocated by the woman’s smell and by the fear that crept up her own throat making her breathe in short, tortured gasps. Freya’s hands clung to the woman’s gnarled fists in an effort to peel the fingers away from the edges of her jacket. Then, changing tactics, she pressed her hands into the woman’s chest and began pushing away.
The woman’s elbows were locked in tight to her body but slowly they began to yield. Freya could feel the distance between them increasing, inch by inch, and she began to pull her legs under her, ready to burst up and out with all the power she could summon. Just as her feet had found purchase on the cracked sidewalk and Freya’s hope for escape grew, the woman suddenly began to convulse. Freya redoubled her efforts to escape, but as the paroxysms wracked the old indigent’s body her elbows pulled in reflexively and her fingers tightened with a ferocity Freya had previously thought impossible for a human being to possess.
Just as Freya was beginning to think she would be pulled so closely to the woman that she might very well merge with the fetid furrows of her damp clothing, her writhing abruptly stopped and her arms exploded out with the rapid contraction and expansion of a piston. Freya was thrown several paces away.
She rolled over onto her stomach and propped herself up onto her forearms. Sweat trickled down her back. She stared silently at the crumpled heap of the old woman who now appeared decidedly frail, almost insubstantial, in the dark shadows of the city sidewalk. Time seemed to slow and then rapidly lurch forward again. Angry bile worked its way out of Freya’s stomach and onto the ground. In the next instant, time seemed to snap back into place. The homeless woman groaned and rose unsteadily to her feet. Freya lay still, unsure of what she should do next.
The woman cleared her throat several times, mumbling to herself as she took several unsteady steps down the street. Freya tried to stand and the sudden movement caught the old woman’s attention. She turned and looked at Freya with vacant eyes.
“What the hell is your problem?” she slurred in a voice that was tired and flat, nothing like the roiling boom of a few moments before. “Get off my street.”
Freya was more than happy to oblige. Taking the woman’s uprightness along with the reappearance of her pupils as a sign of normalcy, if not exactly well-being, Freya walked as quickly away from that strange spot as possible. She broke into a run as soon as she felt her legs would sustain it and nearly sprinted the four blocks that stood between her and the museum.
When she finally reached Terry Avenue and the reassuring mid-century modern exterior of the Frye Museum she leaned her exhausted body against one of the concrete pillars that formed a minimalist colonnade in front of the entrance. She put her hands on her knees and bent over in a desperate bid to regain her breath and her grip on reality.
Terry Avenue was a quiet side street compared to the hustle of Broadway a few blocks to the west and the horns and roaring motors of James Street, the hill’s main artery, just to the south. Normally Freya appreciated the solitude the little oasis offered, but tonight she wouldn’t have minded seeing a few more passersby.
Freya considered going home but her curiosity about Ophidia overpowered her desire to walk the other way. Plus, she wasn’t keen on traversing those few, dark blocks back to the relative safety of Broadway and the veiled glow of late-night coffee shops and seedy bars.
She stepped away from the pillar and ran her hands through her hair, smoothing the frizzy mop as much as possible. She did the same to her jacket and pants although they both were stained and torn from her run in with the unexpected oracle. She took a deep breath and set her expression into the semblance of a determined stare and entered the shadowy colonnade, striding purposefully toward the main entrance, soothed, partially, by the quiet trickle of water from the tranquil pool that bordered the walkway on her left side.
She passed through the tall, narrow doors reminiscent of a modern-day Renaissance basilica. They were substantial, marking a clear boundary between the outside world and the sacred ground of the museum space. Just inside those doors, the Frye greeted its visitors with a soaring rotunda, capped by a domed ceiling and oculus. It always felt to Freya like a chapel built to art. It was hard not to pass through it without experiencing a sense of reverence and solemnity. It was the right frame of mind to approach the artworks that waited inside: calm and ready to be inspired, lifted out of the everyday and into the world of the imagination. Freya had never been much for the Holy Spirit, but the creative spirit was something she could believe in.
She let her footsteps take her to her favorite place, perhaps, in all of Seattle—the Frye’s Salon. It was a single, square room with light wood floors and white walls. A rectangle of skylights ran along the ceiling, letting in natural light during the day. At night it formed a black rectangle of sky, stars, and clouds that lent the space a touch of the metaphysical. A solid white box of concrete walls and an infinite black quadrangle just overhead made an apt frame for the mosaic of paintings that hung from the walls.
The unusual configuration was meant to mirror the way the artworks had been displayed in the home of the museum’s founders Charles and Emma Frye. It was a feeling augmented by the large oriental carpet and potted plant in the gallery’s center, as well as the inclusion of two unusual red divans at either end of the space. Freya loved them for their peculiar shape; it was as though three low, curved-back chairs had been placed together to form a pinwheel configuration, such that if you wanted a different view of the room, all you needed to do was move to another section of the couch. They were furnishings particularly well-suited to a gallery setting, and to a room paying homage to a Gilded Age parlor.
Freya approved of the cheeky set-up. It made the museum experience feel more intimate, as though she were a guest rather than an anonymous visitor. Yet the room was still refined and formal, like a turn-of-the-century sitting room would have been. It was welcoming yet genteel, a place where appearances mattered.
It was one of the museum’s most popular rooms, but when she arrived that night it was empty. She walked across the floor and took a seat on the southward facing cushion of one of the twinned davenports, crossing her legs and exhaling slowly as she did. As usual, Freya found her senses galvanized by the glowing collage of oil paintings before her, but one in particular caught her attention.
It was an image of a woman she hadn’t noticed before, and she wondered how the beauty’s luminescent body had escaped her attention. She had the inner glow of good oil work, the kind where layer upon transparent layer is built up until the color seems to emanate from the canvas, voluptuous in its seduction of the eye. She was nude save for a strategically placed drapery that concealed her sex and appeared to be just moments away from slipping down the gentle curve of her hip in a tantalizing promise of what was to come.
She had her arms up an
d bent at the elbows as her hands and fingers disappeared into the thick, dark waves of the long hair that flowed past her graceful neck. She appeared powerful, sure of herself and her raw sex appeal. She was wanton and exposed, yet she seemed, at the same time, distant and elusive like an allegory or a symbol rather than a real woman.
“I see you admire the female form.” Ophidia’s voice was like an icicle, smooth, sharp, cold. It went straight to Freya’s heart, freezing it for a moment in mid-beat before it found the courage to continue pumping.
“I—I do find her quite beautiful,” stammered Freya. Her nerves were completely shot after her run in with the transient outside. Now that she had heard Ophidia’s voice, she wasn’t sure she was prepared for this meeting.
“What is it about her that you find particularly appealing?” Ophidia sauntered across the room, a palpable potency emanating from her sinuous frame.
“I don’t know exactly,” replied Freya. “I guess her nudity is eye-catching. Her body seems to be lit from within. That’s what originally caught my eye, but what held my attention is her grandeur. She does not appear to be a victim at the mercy of the viewer’s gaze. She is reveling in her nudity; she’s enjoying it. She doesn’t need the person looking at the picture to define her. She has autonomy and in that way she seems very modern.”
“Well now, you are a little art-historian-in-training aren’t you?”
While Freya was speaking, Ophidia had sidled up behind her. She put her cool fingertips on either side of Freya’s bare neck in a gesture that struck Freya as both disconcertingly intimate and oddly dispassionate.
Freya rose from the divan. She didn’t like feeling as though she were a small child, caressed and applauded for getting the answer right.
“Don’t patronize me,” she said, looking Ophidia in the eye.
“I apologize if I gave you that impression. I just appreciated your choice of words and your talent for reading what the image is telling us.”
Ophidia approached the painting and came to a stop just in front of it, cocking her hip and standing in contrapposto before reaching out her long, elegant fingers and tracing the outline of the woman’s hip. Freya inhaled sharply. Touching a painting in a museum was akin to sacrilege. She looked around for the museum guard, the enforcer of such well-known rules as no flash photography, no food, and definitely no touching the artwork. Most of the time visitors weren’t even allowed to get within a foot or so of the canvases, and when the paintings were touched it was by highly trained conservators with white gloves lest the oil from one’s fingertips eroded the paint in any way. However, there was no sharp reprimand from a shocked museum official at Ophidia’s nonchalant gesture. In fact, they were quite alone in the large gallery.
Ophidia glanced over her shoulder when she heard Freya’s stunned disapproval.
“Oh, don’t worry, my dear. My fingers won’t be doing this beauty any harm. People always think paintings are only there to be looked at, but have you ever touched one? There is a whole other sense that can be activated by following with one’s fingers the application of paint on canvas, imagining the way the artist’s brush caressed each inch of flesh. The painting doesn’t live until you place your hand on it and feel the energy pulsing there under the surface. The paint you can see is just a trick of the light, an electrical pulse interpreted by the brain. What you feel when you touch a painting is oil and canvas of course, but also the idea, the process, the creative energy it took to transform a white void into an image.”
“Who is she?” Freya asked, transfixed.
“She is Voluptas, the daughter of Cupid and Psyche. With parents like that it was all but preordained that she would embody sensual pleasure. But those gods are long dead. Now she is just a story, a metaphor used for shorthand. She might be beautiful, self-possessed and compelling, all those things you described her as, but she’ll never have the power that the portrait of a living deity has. It is only those things we still believe in that have an impact on our souls. And we can only believe in something if it still animates us, still works in the darkest corners of our hearts, sparking fear and spurring shame. Old gods make good art, but the demons of the present inspire masterpieces.”
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.
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