Our curator walked her date into the main showing room of La Galleria.  The soft lights flickered on with a smart flip of her anorexic wrist, and their footsteps echoed loudly in contrast to the deathly quiet that had preceded their arrival.  The man stumbled some; it seemed he had been drinking.  The curator sauntered after him on stilt-like legs, her high heels clicking impatiently on the floor.

The man took a look around—slow, deliberate, as if seeing for the first time where he was.

"Wow," he slurred in delayed amazement.  "You work here?"

"Yes, I do."  She flicked another switch and soft instrumental music began overhead.

"We have La Galleria all to ourselves tonight."

"What about the night watchman?  I didn't even see him . . . "

"Bob?  Oh, Bob does . . .  favors for me."  She jangled the keys toward him.  "Tonight, La Galleria is empty as a tomb."  She slid an arm behind her, slyly locking the door while his back was turned.

He turned on her then, a strange look on his face, but said nothing.  Lurching forward, he approached The Church. A magnificent, full-sized painting, a good seven feet tall. It depicted a crumbling, antediluvian cathedral, devoid of any crosses.  The stained glass of the windows appeared to reflect as real glass and were painted in brilliant, blazing colors that contrasted the dark and dreary tone of the rest of the piece.  The windows had such minute detail that if one were to closely inspect them at specific angles, one would see countless impressions of faces contorted into masks of fear and agony and twisted bodies with outstretched arms pounding on the windows for rescue.

The man blinked several times, studying the windows with mild and fleeting interest. "Creepy, ain't it?"  he snorted in self-amusement and strolled clumsily to Les Fleurs Mortes—a pointillism piece by Robard.  "Dead flowers. Weird.  Never could understand all that artsy crap."

The curator clicked her way up to him. "This is The Graveyard here," she explained, pointing out the next painting the man had taken an interest in—a complex, detailed painting of a large cemetery in the moonlight.

"They say that if you stare at it long enough, you can almost see the ground move in front of the tombstones."  She smiled coyly.  "As if something was clawing its way out of the grave."

"And this here," she pointed to the next, a painting of man morphing into monster, entitled, The Beast Within.  She licked her lips.  "This one, people say, changes fully to a beast, if you look at it from the right angles.  Marvelous skill these artists had."

"Morbid, if you ask me," the man muttered.  "All this death and . . .  and gore . . . " he said, swishing a hand to illustrate his point, in the direction of the next painting, Battle of the Dead.  He sniffed as he stared at it, swaying where he stood.  "Skeletons fighting corpses.  Look at this guy." He leaned in closer than necessary and pointed solidly at a skeleton holding a chunk of flesh overhead triumphantly, ripped from the sprawled body of a half-rotted corpse at his feet.  "I don't  get it.  What's with the death?"

She sauntered up to him, gaunt cheeks glowing.  "That is what La Galleria specializes in . . .   death."

The man crinkled his face in distaste and continued.  He stopped in front of us, and stared slack-jawed for some time.  Moments passed before the curator spoke.

"The Succubus and the Incubus." She read the nameplate below us.  "That one is my favorite – the largest, most breathtaking work in the whole gallery."  Then, softer in his ear, she whispered, "They're beautiful, aren't they?  The most divine specimens, each of their gender, ever created with paint."

He nodded dumbly.  "That . . .  that woman . . . "

"The Succubus?"

"Yes.  She's gorgeous."

I felt a subtle ripple beneath the canvas from Adrien—a nudge.  He stood behind me in the painting, half in the shadows of the stony hall just outside my castle chamber room.  Inches across the canvas that might as well have been miles.

The man's eyes were on me, as Adrien's were always on me, following the contours outlined in the red velvet of my Renaissance dress. The soft strokes of my dark hair, as with all inside the painting, stood paralyzed in an agonizingly eternal moment.

"The story of this one is interesting."  Our curator's eyes glowed.  She had always struck me as a romantic.  She slipped her arms around the man's shoulders, and he caressed her forearm absentmindedly.  "It is said that the Incubus and Succubus are creatures somewhere between demon and vampire - in this case, they are brother and sister, according to the artist.  He claims they visited him and tempted him with all manner of carnal vices.  Instead, he captured them - their spirits, if you will, in the paint, and subsequently painted in a fevered frenzy until completion of the piece you see here.  And, all the while, his mind was filled with images of their story, of their lives.  He felt the heat of their undying passion for one another and the strength of their need to feed on the sexual energies of others.  He painted the moment when the Incubus returns to the Succubus after a night of feeding.  And when he was finished, he felt the deep, cold despair that his placement of them in the painting caused."

The man glanced at her, confused.

"He separated them," she explained, "for all eternity."

He shivered.

"It is also said," she added, her voice dropping to a husky whisper. "That at certain times, on certain days of the year, the bonds that hold them within the painting dissolve, and then they are free to wander the world for a time before returning to the painting."  She pulled her arms away from him.  "Almost every work of art here has a story like that.  Even this gallery itself used to be some type of black magic supplies store or something."  She shrugged.

"You believe all that crap?"  He turned to face her.  She smiled, and it was such a smile that the man shifted uncomfortably where he stood.

"Shouldn't I?"

He waved a dismissive hand at her and wondered back toward the angels.  Then I felt the cold that held us dissolve and turn warm, and my eyes moved slowly, very, very slowly, in the direction of our curator's date.  Adrien shifted infinitesimally behind me.  It was time.

I wiggled my fingers, and the canvas rippled with movement.  I pushed on the outer layer of the painting and it stretched tightly over my fingers before snapping and dissolving off my hand.  I stepped forward out of the painting and onto the gallery floor beneath it.  Adrien stepped out after me.

The man's back was to us; he hadn't heard anything when we left the painting, but the rustle of my skirts and the soft sound of our steps, audible even over the faint music above us, seemed to alert him to the presence of someone behind him.  The curator, seeing us approach, backed silently, knowingly, toward the door.

It took the man a moment of drunken squinting while we advanced on him before he recognized us.  In the next moment, as realization sank in, his eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open, and in the next, I was upon him, my tongue in his throat.  He relaxed some in my arms as I kissed him.  I could feel the desire well up within him and I sucked it out of him through his throat.  He gagged and struggled in my arms until finally, there was no desire left and he crumpled, limp and sweating at my feet.  I turned to Adrien.  His eyes glowed with love for me, and I rushed into his arms, kissing him to impart some of the meal of energies I had just gathered.  And the others rustled in the background, freeing themselves from their own prisons.

Adrien and I turned to watch them take their turn, and I basked in the pleasure of feeling Adrien's arms hold me tight—it had been so long, so long since I had felt any part of him touch me . . . so long . . .

The man-beast was the first to free himself.  He lunged with wild animal abandon at the man whose eyelids were too heavy for him to lift.  But he felt the first strokes from the man-beast's claws, the bites from his teeth, and he did his best to scream.  The scent of blood attracted the skeletons and the corpses, who spilled forth from their battlefield to tear off chunks of the man for their own.

They made short work of him; I believe he died of shock even before blood loss. The man-beast tossed a lump of muscle toward Les Fleurs, which they leaned out of their painted vase to catch eagerly and gobble among themselves like Venus flytraps.  Then, the man-beast fastidiously licked up the remaining puddles of blood off the floor.  The skeletons and the corpses hoisted the remains of the man, spraying red droplets that the man-beast would attend to, and lumbered back to their battlefield.  All within the confines of that frame, organic or otherwise, returned to particles of paint and froze again.  The man-beast, having lapped up all traces of blood, returned to his moonlit canvas.

"You know," the curator said, her eyes glazed over in a far away gaze.  She had returned cautiously to where we stood.  We stared expectantly at her.  "That was just the appetizer.  Tomorrow is the party for the special elite patrons of La Galleria.  A small gathering, to be sure,  but enough for all of you.  Then," she said, turning to Adrien. "Then, will you do as you promised?  Will you . . .  take me and . . . " She gestured to her body. "End this misery?  Let me feel beautiful to someone one last time and then . . . "

Adrien nodded reassuringly.

She looked deeply relieved.  "Thank you," she said breathlessly.  "Thank you."

Adrien and I turned to climb back into the painting.  He held my hand to help me up first—a true gentleman - then followed me into our painted chamber.  The music faded immediately to silence, and the lights went out.  La Galleria was silent again.

About the Authoress:

Mary SanGiovanni is a production coordinator for the editorial department of a large reference book publishing company and a member of both the Garden State Horror Writers and Horror Writers Association.  She served as judge for the 1999 Garden State Horror Writers Short Story Contest, and currently serves as contest coordinator for their 2000 Contest.  She writes primarily supernatural horror and dark fiction.  Her short story, Dead is Dead, appeared online in the webzine, Dark Annie, and her short story, The Killing Tree, appeared in the summer issue (#19) of Welcome to Nod.  The Thirty-Seven Parts of Albie Muensch, another of her short stories, is pending publication in FLICKER, and Weeds is pending publication in Deadbolt Magazine.