Prologue

London: Spring, 1782

Henry Fuseli had run through three models already, each unable to hold the pose he demanded. Now the fourth girl, Sophia, was complaining, “I have to move. I can’t feel my arm. The blood is running to my head. I may faint.”

“No,” Henry said. “Not yet.” The girl was lying on her back; head, neck, and left arm hanging off the bed, fingers twitching. He waved away her plaint. The pose was nothing for a girl of sixteen years. Why, he himself had lain on his forty-year-old back for weeks in the Sistine Chapel, musing on Michelangelo’s ceiling!

The girl’s cheeks were tinged with pink, her hair a lemony pool on the Turkey rug. Turning back to his canvas, he painted an incubus squatting on her breast, its head toward the viewer, an impish smile on its thin lips for what it was about to do.

The arrangement was perfect: folds and pleats of reddish drapery; the arm white as milk; the soft curves of flesh—he touched the nipple with his brush, let it linger there. He stood back to contemplate the painting. It was coming to fruition; still, it lacked something. He wiped his hand on an oily rag and breathed in the turpentine, the linseed oil. He squeezed his eyes shut, straining for the vision that had come to him the week before, when he had woken from a bad dream. The raw pork he had eaten for dinner did that to him: bad dreams. But then the images came flooding, like this one—idea and image, fused. The sleeping woman, the incubus, the light from the south window illuming her body, and in the upper left corner—ja! He would paint a horse, that ancient sexual symbol. Just the horse’s head, the pointy ears, the bulging eyes of the voyeur, the open mouth—saliva on the tongue.

He was painting furiously now, deaf to the model’s whimpering; he applied a dab of burnt ochre with a fine brush. When the candle burned to the nub he lit another. He was inside the painting, inside the dream. He was horse and incubus, voyeur and participant. Horse and devil, unseen by the sleeper but instilling in her its terror. He was the female sleeper as well: dreaming, unaware of horse and devil, yet filled with its dread. Wanting and not wanting to be taken, ravished.

But how to show the literal—the reality?

A looking glass, ja! There would be a looking glass, showing only the sleeper—not the incubus, not the horse—only the sleeping woman in her nightmare. Nightmare... The title of the work came to him. The Nightmare! Night-mare. He laughed out loud at the pun; with his trembling right hand he picked up his mug, tipped the strong ale down his throat, and let it spill into his collar. He glanced at the young model and saw she had fallen asleep. The fingers were quiet. It was better that way. Later he would take her to bed and she would have her reward.

He took up the brush again in his left hand, and leaning forward, propelled his vision onto canvas.