To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

then his head dropped forward, sudden, without any intent or control. He was asleep, unconscious. The lacuna lasted two seconds and then he raised his head and I observed, licking my lips, “It tastes all right to me. Not the best bottle I’ve ever drunk, but few of them are.”

Did he realise what had happened? He seemed not to. His eyes were heavy but he thought himself apparently only a little pissed.

“Give it here,” he said. And he took the glass back, now unsteadily, and once again he swallowed the lot. Refilled it, drank.

I said, “Let’s have some cheese, shall we? Only cheddar, but I’ve got some biscuits…” I stood up slowly. I said, joking, “I’m afraid I’m a bit drunk. I don’t usually have that much at one go.”

I watched as his head dropped again, then again sluggishly rose. “Me too,” he said distantly. “I keep falling asleep.”

“I just did,” I said. “Maybe we should skip the cheese. There’s a camp-bed upstairs. I’m told it’s not uncomfortable. Will that do? Maybe we should both get some…”

His head surged down again. Stayed down. His hair curtained his face.

I could hear his breathing, heavy and slow, loud and solid as thick wet steam hissing through a vent.

How much had he drunk? I took the bottle and inspected it. About three large glasses were gone. Just a couple of mouthfuls left in his glass. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? Enough to knock him out for several hours, and not enough to kill him.

XI

(‘Untitled’: Page 163)

Black worms slide through

A needle’s eye.

Slick with shattered gold

THE crooked stair led up to a lofty attic of the house. As they climbed it a rat scratched enviously in the wall, and water dripped; the Master’s house stood close to the river.

The general assembly had already gathered.

In the uncertain candlelight, Vilmos saw many faces he knew and besides, as sometimes happened, a couple of persons quite unknown to him. All would be sworn to the secrecy of the Order. Some would still gossip. There had been the occasional tale of events befalling one or two of these traitors. Whatever else, they never returned to the Master’s house.

Reiner pushed through the throng.

“What will happen, Makary?”

“Who knows?” Makary shrugged. “There has been a summons. Here we are.”

“How did his summons find you?”

“At the Tavern of the Golden Grapes. A boy brought it.” Makary said to Vilmos, “Look at you, you disgrace. Your shirt’s dirty. Is it wine or blood?”

“Blood. I fell down and cut myself.”

None of the men in the room had donned the ritual robes brought out for particular meetings. None of the rare incenses burned. This anyway was not the Chamber of Revelation. That lay behind a hidden door far down in the creaking, river-damp timber warren of the house.

Vilmos said, “No summons was sent to me. Why do you think that was?”

Makary said, “The Master’s messenger failed to find you. You’re elusive.”

“Or have I been excluded from our fine fraternity?”

“That’s not for me to say.”

Makary turned his back on the poet, went to a long wooden table and took up one of the greenish glass goblets, ready-brimmed with an oil yellow wine.

Vilmos also took one of these. He raised it to his lips, while his mind went on with its inner task.

And she lies red among the lilies

Of her sullen sheets,

Her sapphire soul hung wry-necked from a beam.

A dark curtain shifted. The Master had entered the attic, and deep silence filled the air like river fog.

Slowly raising his right hand as if at first, priestlike, to bless the company, the Master pointed directly at Vilmos.

“Step forward.”

“I?”

“None other.”

Vilmos smiled and swung, seemingly carelessly, through the crowd of men, which drew back from him, staring with all its eyes.

“I present myself, Master.”

“Take this,” said the Master. He extended his left hand, and now held before the poet a broken shard of stannum tin – whose original source or purpose was no longer apparent.

Vilmos accepted the object.

He found it very cold to the touch. The contact reminded him instantly of some memory he believed he had never accrued, concerning a garden by night, with vines crossing an arbour and white stars far beyond.

“Lean closer,” said the Master.

Vilmos obeyed.

The old man’s bearded mouth approached his ear and the Master whispered solemnly, without emotion or any energy, “You are accursed. The Arch Beast, Satan himself, has singled you out. Take yourself away now. In one hour, return. Come to the little side door above the river. You will be granted admittance. Ask nothing. Go. Return.”

SEVEN

Her flat was the smallest I’ve ever seen in my life. It was the flat of a doll.

One entered and was in a narrow hall, that angled left in front of a red and white kitchen about twelve feet by six, and on to a sitting-room about twelve by nine. To the left at the start of the corridor was first a bathroom and then a bedroom, also both very small. The bedroom window, since her flat lay at the end of the block, ran ceiling to floor and looked out on the concrete hind roof of the Co-op, and the iron stairway from the flats above. She too had ‘nets’.

The oddest thing in the flat was the wallpaper. It had been there, Maureen assumed, for about twenty years, and was autographed with various blotches and scrapes, but in the hall, sitting-room and bedroom, it was all virtually the same: a tiny pattern of French fleur-de-lys, orange in the hall, dove-grey in the front room, pale blue in the bedroom.

Maureen didn’t work for the Co-op. A friend had found her the flat; a male friend, I believe. She worked in Woolwich at Fernes, on the lingerie counter. My mother had been used to shop at Fernes. I think I’d been in the shop too, although perhaps obviously not in Maureen’s section.

Aside from the bedroom I came to know the flat quite well. Sometimes on my day off in the week, she