Corcitura

Nightmare: Taken from Chapter 4, Hello, Good-bye...Hello

 “The Winged Victory of Samothrace, or Nike, as she is known, came to the Louvre in 1884.”

       We were standing at the Daru staircase underneath the giant headless, armless stone statue of the winged maiden of the Aegean. I had latched onto an English-speaking tour and seen all the great spectacles of the Louvre in the interim, but now the time was ripe for me to escape in search of Stefan. It was a quarter past noon already, and still he had not shown himself.

       I hung back as the tour moved on. Once they were out of sight, I hastened away and made for the Melpomene Gallery, taking a cursory glance at the giant statue of the hall’s namesake on my right as I passed by. I had thought Nike was gigantic, but this muse made her seem almost Lilliputian in size. Apparently, all Louvre statues were enormous. It must have been a prerequisite.

       I walked down this gallery and came out into the Salle des Caryatides. As I moved into the hall, I caught sight of my erstwhile companion, thankfully Boroi-less, staring at a large canvas that had been propped up in the center of the salle. I thought it odd that a painting would be on display in a hall filled with statues, but I didn’t let the incongruity of the situation trouble me for more than a second.

       “There you are! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Where have you been?”

       I was expecting to receive a response and would have been happy with one of his sarcastic remarks, but he acted as though I did not exist. Very well, then. I decided to give it another go. “Been walking the same halls as the Kings of France and that great poisoner herself, Catherine de Medici, have you?” I was beginning to sound like Luc.

       Still nothing. He just stood there, head tilted to one side, his hand on his chin, absorbed by the painting before him. It had taken me forever to finally locate Stefan, and this was all the response I received? Not even so much as a flicker of an eyelid. Now we would have to rush out to the entrance to meet Vladec Salei, whom I hoped by some miracle was still waiting for us. My plans were crumbling before my eyes. And did he care? Absolutely not. He was as still and lifeless as the statues surrounding him. “Honestly, Stefan,” I said hotly, “what’s so bloody fascin…”

       I stopped dead when my eyes finally flashed toward the painting. I hadn’t bothered to look at it until then, but now as I took in the nightmarish spectacle painted on that canvas, a shudder passed through my body and chilled me to the marrow.

        A woman, shrouded in white, was draped over a divan in a dead swoon, her arms hanging limply over her head. In the background, a horse, nostrils flaring, eyes aglow, stuck its head through the crimson drapery. The horse looked crazed. Its lips were drawn back in a grimace that made it look as though it were sneering. But the most horrifying aspect of the painting was not the half-mad horse, nor the seemingly dead woman.

       It was the demon.

       A grotesque, dwarfish creature crouched atop the woman’s chest. They weren’t very visible in the foreground, but I could just make out the shadows of the thing’s horns reflected off the curtain. The creature’s entire visage was hellish, yet there was something taunting about its colorless eyes, pug nose, and grim, frowning mouth. I felt as if the thing were challenging me to push it off its perch. I doubted I would have possessed the courage to do so had this tableau been real.

       I laughed nervously and immediately felt ridiculous for chuckling aloud. The incident this morning with Sorina had turned me morbid. Try as I might, I could not shake the feeling of unease the painting had instilled in me. Nor could I make myself turn away. It was demonic, yet fascinating, and it had captured Stefan’s imagination, too, for his eyes were still fixated on the painting.