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
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
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