On the Verge

by Garen Glazier

  Freya hesitated. The road slipped quickly beneath the tires of the old Cadillac as it roared up the hill. They were only minutes away from the Briar Rose. She gripped the steering wheel tightly and let out her breath.

  “The colors are yours,” she said, and then slammed on the accelerator, rocketing the four unlikely accomplices toward her apartment.

  Freya picked at her nails nervously and wished she hadn’t forgotten her phone back at her place; that way she could at least pretend to be deeply absorbed in whatever distraction was currently occupying the social networks. As it was she was stuck next to Rusty’s equally awkward presence trying to look like the gallery might not become a battlefield in the next few moments.

  The big white box they occupied was one of the Frye’s main galleries and it was filled with all the key players in the Seattle art world, and what Freya liked to call art groupies, those people who had very little to do with the making, displaying, or promotion of art, but who just liked the secondhand sophistication that the gathering bestowed upon them. Freya had been to several of these opening night receptions for big shows around town and they were usually standing room only, but always filled with a kind of quiet hauteur exuded by lots of people trying too hard to be intellectuals. This one had many of the same attendees, but the atmosphere was unlike any other that Freya had yet experienced. There was an electricity in the air, an excited nervousness that seemed to animate the words and motions of even the most jaded art mavens in attendance.

  Those without Freya’s inside knowledge probably assumed it was because it was Halloween, an energy held over from the days when the night had meant breaking bedtimes, dress codes and the embargo on candy. They might have attributed it to the exoticness of the paintings surrounding them. The combined effect of Franz Stuck’s great Symbolist works that lined the walls made the gallery twinkle like a sinister jewel box of the dark, the mysterious, and the sensual. But Freya knew the jolts of voltaic energy sizzling through the room originated from Ophidia and Dakryma in such close proximity to their binding objects on a night when their power here was at its zenith.

  The two demons stood at either end of the long rectangular space each near their own respective portrait. Seeing them there, so close to Stuck’s handiwork, it was obvious that the works could never have resulted from copying mere mortal models or fabricating likenesses from the imagination. Paintings with that kind of palpable charisma could only be based on the reality of a fantasy come to life.

  On the far left side of the room hung Sin. The raven-haired temptress embraced by the lascivious curves of the tumescent snake smiled Mona Lisa-like from her flat canvas plane while the three-dimensional Ophidia stood a few paces in front of it looking even more dangerously beautiful than usual in a red lace column dress. Her lips were a dark burgundy and her dusky eyes shone out of artfully applied black kohl. Her presence was captivating and people noticed. They tried to concentrate on their companions or on the amazing paintings surrounding them, but their eyes kept finding their way back to her.

  That is, if they weren’t drawn to the right side of the room and the equally enthralling presence of Professor Dakryma elegantly attired in a sharply cut suit, a thin, silk tie dissecting his pure white shirtfront. He too had established himself directly in front of his portrait. The dark angel with his likeness was monumental not only in its size but in its threatening allure and strange vulnerability.

  In each work there was something familiar, something that made these creatures reverberate with humanity despite their obvious otherworldliness. That recognition was comforting at the same time that it was unsettling, and the success the works had enjoyed over the decades stemmed from this uneasy dichotomy.

  Freya tore her gaze away from Dakryma and glanced at the front of the space where on top of a small dais stood a sleek lectern where in a few moments Imogen Beldame would deliver her opening address for the much-anticipated grand opening of the Stuck exhibition she had so meticulously curated. People marveled at how she had managed to get notoriously stingy museums from across the world to lend their paintings to the show. What they may have forgotten about were Beldame’s connections to the black market. While it was true that she finagled a deal here and called in a favor there to get some of the secondary pieces into the Frye, she had acquired Sin and Lucifer, the unquestionable stars of the show, through a series of negotiations that surpassed the unethical and bordered on the depraved.

  It was hard to believe that the petite, silver-haired woman with the candy apple cheeks and sweet smile who would soon stand before the room to the deliver the keynote address might be capable of such immorality, but Freya knew who she really was. She’d been inside her house, and she knew the decadence of her collections. It wasn’t difficult for her to imagine the lengths she would go to in order to amass the ultimate collection of nightmares-made-manifest that would do her sick bidding at the snap of her fingers.

  Freya looked down at the wooden crate at her feet. It was a diminutive version of the plywood boxes that had been used to ship the artworks to this exhibition and inside, nestled amid the shredded excelsior, were the horn of the kobold queen, the ceramic jar of Baba Yaga’s red carmine paste, and a bamboo shoot filled with the sap of an ahp’s garcinia tree. She was meant to present it to Beldame during her speech so that supposedly they could act as physical examples of the process used to create the works holding pride of place on the gallery’s opposing walls. However Freya knew what such a hand off would really signify. A public presentation would give Beldame possession of the colors, not just physically but ceremonially as well.

  Suddenly all the voices in the room quieted although the peculiar hum of energy that gnawed at Freya’s gut continued to fill the room. The museum’s director had stepped through the entrance to the gallery and took her place behind the podium as a wave of applause rippled throughout the assembled crowd. She launched into her opening remarks, her laudatory introduction of Beldame delivered against a disquieting fabric backdrop featuring the eyes of Stuck’s Lucifer blown up to gargantuan proportions. Freya quit listening after the first few sentences, too distracted to pay much attention to the sycophantic speech. Instead she looked over at Rusty.

  “Are you ready?” he asked her in a whisper. “It’s almost show time.”

  Freya nodded, but she felt nervous. Her thoughts wandered back to her apartment. Once Dakryma had explained himself, his plan had seemed too obvious, too easy, and Freya wondered now if it would actually work. He’d labored all night and into the morning after raiding the art supply store on Broadway for brushes and linseed oil to mix into a small amount of the pigments they had collected. He’d worked with a kind of intensity that had actually scared Freya, and he wouldn’t let any of them come near the canvas.

  Freya was more than willing to oblige his request. She and Rusty set up camp at her small kitchen table, drinking multiple cups of strong coffee, while Ophidia languished in self-imposed exile in Freya’s bedroom. The whole situation had struck Freya as rather absurd until she was reminded of the evil that had brought them together and stood poised to tear Seattle to shreds. It put an immediate damper on her already fragile spirits.

  When the painting was finally finished, Dakryma covered it with a black linen scarf from Freya’s closet and sat slumped across her cherished chaise longue, his normal charismatic melancholy dampened into a kind of disconcerting grimness. His mood pervaded the whole apartment, so much so that Freya found herself drawn to her aunt’s old cabinet and the odd little dagger still sitting next to her parents’ broken ashtray, the green devil’s long tongue split in two. She touched the bandage on her finger, remembering the sharpness of the blade. It seemed like the right kind of thing to take along. The dagger was small, but it gave her some semblance of protection, a little agency in a battle where she felt largely powerless. She slipped it into the side of her boot.

  When the time came, they took the small canvas, no more than two feet by three feet, to the Frye. The fo
ursome had split up and entered the gallery separately, so Freya had no idea where Dakryma had hidden the portrait of Beldame. She hoped desperately that the plan would work, but she had her doubts.

  She was snapped back to reality from her disconsolate revelry when the crowd erupted into applause. There she was, Beldame, atop the dais, a formidable foe wrapped up in an adorable grandmotherly package.

  “Welcome, everyone,” she said in her warm, expansive way.

  Her eyes scanned the crowd, stopping when she saw Freya. The old woman gave her an almost imperceptible nod, a hint of triumph passing across her face. Freya had been wondering why Beldame hadn’t asked for confirmation that the colors were in hand. With that look, though, she understood that her presence was enough. The colors were here. And even if she hadn’t succeeded Beldame still had Ophidia. The succubus was the key to her twisted game. Freya was only a minor player, the colors an added advantage. She only hoped that their own plan to stop the madwoman would work before Beldame claimed her prize and made Freya a part of her dreadful collection of travestied art.

  “Welcome,” Beldame continued, “to this unprecedented exhibition of some of the most dark and dramatic paintings to emerge from the turn of the last century. These canvases are the work not of some mad genius but rather a seemingly ordinary artist haunted by the demons of the period, of a skilled painter acting as a medium, translating the angst and uncertainty of a world in the midst of massive change into visual interpretations of a volatile period. Certainly we must attribute some of the success of these works to the painterly prowess of Stuck himself, but it is obvious to even the casual observer that these pieces, especially when viewed in person, radiate a kind of authenticity that couldn’t spring strictly from the imagination.”

  Beldame paused in the delivery of her remarks. Freya swallowed hard. She was worried that when the time came she wouldn’t be able to walk the short distance required of her to deliver the box. She breathed deeply and tried to focus.

  “It’s been said that the artists among us, the creators, have access to a higher realm, a world of ideas, philosophies, and emotions. Of dreams and nightmares. It’s said they can glean inspiration from the world of the imagination that lies beyond the recognition of us mere mortals. Those of us who have built our lives and careers around the creative works of others label them visionary. They become our connection to a world disengaged from its origins, from the gods and monsters that helped us explain life, those mythical beings we made in our image. The best art is a spiritual experience that unites us once again with our true selves, and often what we see on the canvas is raw, unsettling, and even disturbing, because it’s true. Art reveals to us the divine and the damned in all of us.”

  The crowd broke out into appreciative applause. Freya looked first to Ophidia and then to Dakryma, and was not surprised to see that neither one of them were joining in the ovation. In fact they both looked uncomfortable, agitated. Ophidia was late for her Morrigan duties. The crowd of raucous demons and monsters gathered at the Vestiges Club would start to notice at any moment. For now they might chalk it up to a diva’s desire to make an entrance, but in not too long they would start to get impatient, and impatient creatures of the Verge are volatile, especially if they’ve been drinking. They wouldn’t wait long for a delinquent Morrigan, and then there would be no holding them back, especially on a night like tonight.

  “It’s Halloween,” Beldame continued after the applause had died down. “Tonight is a night of revelry and mischief, but more than that it’s a celebration of the darker side of life, when we commemorate the evil that lurks in everyone’s soul. So it is an appropriate night for an exhibition like this to open, because, as I said before, these paintings are not mere fabrications, they’re portraits, portraits of our inner demons. The visions you see before you are striking because they remind us of the most secretive parts of ourselves. Stuck rendered the sinister side of our Janus-faced souls.”

  “He did it with skill,” she continued, “and he did it with tools made especially for the work at hand. I have devoted the greater part of my adult life to the study of the Symbolist painters, but never have I come across a discovery as intriguing as the one I am about to share with you here tonight. You see most of the paintings in this show were created with colors not so very much unlike the ones available for purchase today. Bottled up in convenient tubes, portable, relatively cheap and of acceptable quality, but the colors used to make the two unquestionable masterpieces of Stuck’s career, Sin and Lucifer, came from an altogether different source.”

  Beldame paused to indicate the two grand artworks on either side of the gallery and Freya felt her heart begin to race. She knew the time was near when she would be called upon to present the colors to Beldame. She shifted her weight nervously from foot to foot.

  “These two works were painted with colors gleaned from a world that is our darker sides made manifest. Stuck’s colors are not just pigments, they are talismans of our shadow selves, and in the right hands they can capture the veiled monsters of our darkest fantasies, and I have them here tonight. You all will be the first to see the strangeness of these artifacts and the first to know that with these precious colors I plan to let other artists of our time, just as talented or perhaps more so than Stuck, capture the fiends that still haunt us today. Freya, bring forward the colors. The time has come for these good people to see the tools with which we will harness the evil engendered by our collective subconscious.”

  Freya started when she heard her name, although she had been expecting it with dread since Beldame’s speech had begun. She hoisted the box and began walking toward the podium and the expert demagogue that stood behind it. She wondered what the people assembled here could possibly be making of Beldame’s strange speech. If they had come expecting the usual opening remarks and light hors d’oeuvres, they would be gravely disappointed. In fact, as she approached the front of the room, Freya wondered what the audience, gathered before Beldame, would do when the action started. Mostly she hoped no one would get hurt.

  When she was within arm’s length of Beldame she offered her the box, holding her breath. The elderly woman took it with surprising ease given her small stature. Her dark eyes looked nearly black in the sharp light of the gallery, and they were filled with a kind of wild, almost manic craving.

  “Finally,” Beldame whispered, grasping the box tightly and bringing it in close to her body like a hyena guarding carrion.

  She placed the box on the podium and retrieved the objects inside, holding the horn and bamboo in one hand, the little piece of crockery in the other. She lifted them up and out so that they were fully visible to the crowd.

  “These are the colors that will tame the wild evils of our darkest nightmares,” she said.

  For a moment nothing happened. No one moved, not a word was spoken. It was just Beldame and a silent audience unsure of how to react. Then, slowly, heads began to turn. Some looked to the left, others to the right. They turned and looked and the nervous buzz that had enlivened the museumgoers in the minutes before Beldame began her speech blossomed into a terror-ridden panic. The throng of polished artists and aesthetes launched into an inelegant rush for the exit. The chronically self-aggrandizing and genuinely art savvy alike ignored decorum and ran like hell.

  Freya couldn’t blame them. If she hadn’t been initiated into the world of the Verge, the blackness that seeped from Ophidia’s and Dakryma’s portraits and drifted eerily over the floor like heavy smoke would have inspired her to seek out the nearest exit as well. Fortunately or unfortunately, however, she recognized the Verge when she saw it. She remembered it vividly from the night at Rusty’s lodge. She recalled how it had been kept in check there by the blue-white flames, and how it had slammed down ruthlessly on the kobold, absorbing them effortlessly back into the dark depths of the human imagination.

  Freya took a few steps back from the podium, but she didn’t lose it and run. In fact, she rather enjoyed seeing the creepin
g shock of surprise and dread erase the spark of pure maliciousness she had seen in Beldame’s eyes only an instant before. Beldame might have made the Symbolists her life’s work; she might have discovered the secret behind Sin and Lucifer and the power that the colors of the Verge held. Yet what she hadn’t realized was that the Verge does not give away pieces of itself easily.

  Freya now understood that the Verge was not a place or a land. At most it could be considered a dark margin. It was the accumulation of the million colored pieces of the inspired fancies and terrifying depths of the creative mind, a melting pot of mosaic dreams and chromatic visions. The Verge took them all in, became the black hole at the center of the color wheel, absorbing the Technicolor creations of a thousand civilizations.

  The fantasies and nightmares that did escape its centripetal force were pulled from it by the equally powerful beliefs of humanity. But the Verge was always tugging on those creatures that escaped, drawing them inexorably back to the shadowy borderland of the imagination’s event horizon. Fragments divorced from their source never lasted long before the Verge reclaimed them, and on Halloween it was more eager than ever to salvage the pieces of itself that Beldame held in her greedy hands.

  The once eager crowd had dissipated with surprising speed. After the last straggler had hightailed it out of the gallery, only the five of them remained. Ophidia and Dakryma stood near their portraits as the gelatinous smoke poured unceasingly out of the frames, forming two thick, snaking trails of Verge that curled straight toward Beldame. Her victorious gesture had crumbled into a protective hunch as she curled her fingers around the colors, holding them fiercely to her chest.

  “What is this?” Beldame hissed. “The colors are mine now.” Her words rang through the air with false confidence.

  “The Verge wants its colors back, Beldame,” Ophidia said.