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where there had been only calm restraint before. She wanted to believe that it was only the passion with which she regarded collecting that animated her in this way, but there was a starkness to her speech that made Freya’s pulse quicken and her nerves jangle.
    “It’s the same with all collecting, you see,” Beldame said, her back still turned. “When you take a piece for your collection, you give it a life it never would have had otherwise; you make it exceptional. You divest it of the ugly parts and all that’s left is the specimen, perfected. In that way, we humans can become gods, the ultimate creators of a collection of perfected things that will live forever in the glass worlds we have so carefully fashioned for them.”
    “I—I’ve never thought about it that way,” Freya said, feeling more uncomfortable as the conversation progressed.
    “Oh, but you have, haven’t you?” Imogen Beldame asked her, suddenly turning to face her. The petite woman’s kindly visage seemed to have melted away in the interim and a harsher version had taken its place. Freya shifted in her seat. She didn’t like the way this conversation was going.
    “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Freya replied.
    “I mean,” Beldame said, “that you are smart and resourceful and that will get you far. But you are also a collector yourself and all collectors know, deep down, the sweet feeling of possession and of dominion. Even if they deny it, it’s there in the dark recesses of their primitive brains. So you understand my motivations, even if it’s only on a visceral level.”
    “That’s not really how I look at collecting,” Freya said quietly, but Beldame’s sharp words had exposed an ugly truth hiding in Freya’s healthy self-concept of her collecting impulse. The uneasy connection that collecting shared with ownership and desire was ever present, even if it was repressed, and Beldame had unearthed those difficult truths from the depths of Freya’s subconscious and made the student feel as though she were looking at her once-familiar reflection in the crazy convex waves of a funhouse mirror.
    Beldame’s eyes sparkled with the cruel shine of a magpie tending its nest of treasures.
    “Come over here a moment,” she said as she crossed the room with short, frantic steps to where a series of brilliantly colored photographs hung on the wall.
    Freya stood reluctantly and followed Beldame to the pictures. At first all she could see were colors and lines, a visual bounty of perfect composition. But then as she stared at the mesmerizing photos, she began to realize they were actually portraits based on famous paintings.
    There was one that Freya noted was obviously inspired by Gustave Klimt’s portrait of Adele Block-Bauer. The photo’s subject wore a dazzling byzantine mosaic of a dress just like Adele’s, with little tesserae jewels scintillating against a sumptuous gold background such that it was difficult to tell the difference between body and wall. Emerging wraithlike from this opulence was the pale, aristocratic face of the new Adele, with limpid eyes and livid cheeks.
    The photographic reimagining of Klimt’s masterpiece was undeniably beautiful, but there was something off about the woman posed as the turn-of-the-century aristocrat. Freya stepped closer, hypnotized by the impressive detail of the photo. The obvious effort that had gone into painstakingly reproducing the intricate particulars of the original could not be denied, but the woman, whose face swam out of the resplendent background, seemed eerily static, and not only because she’d been captured for eternity in a single moment in time, but on a much more fundamental level, as though even after the camera clicked she would have remained motionless.
    With a sickening wave the realization crashed through Freya’s consciousness that the woman was not just uncannily still but dead, and newly so, based on the Snow White quality of her still perfectly