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

a large and fiery black nail began to be hammered through into his brain.

In youth he had wrenched clumps of his hair out of his head to mitigate this agony with another. Older, he had recourse to alcohol and opiates, which dulled the anguish but could not dispel it. It never lasted less than five hours nor more than sixty. In the latter, long form, it would in any case lessen from about the thirty-sixth hour. He could then feel the white string slowly slackening, melting away, while the hammered nail turned to a dying coal and went out.

This time the headache was Shosa’s fault. His anger at her, the effort of slaughtering her. Perhaps even the sight of her beauty sodden with blood.

Vilmos, having once more left the stultifying venue of his father’s house, had gone back via a circuitous route to the house by the river. Only in one place did he pause, rubbing his forehead violently against the angled corner of a building, momentarily to obliterate the claw of the headache in his temple.

But by the time he reached the Master’s house, he was dizzy and the string of the demoniac violin had already wound tight.

The river here ran in a wide canal, and the house perched directly above. There was no invented light at all, and only the vaguest hint of starlight. Nevertheless something white was just now floating by under the brink of the house. It might have been a bundle of washing, or someone drowned.

Vilmos turned from it and scratched on the side door.

After a moment a slot appeared. The bloodshot eye of a servant peered out at him. Then the door was opened, and Vilmos entered the house, for the second time that night.

The premises had been emptied of any crowd. Only the three speechless servants remained; two of these were already concealed, and the porter too now slipped off down a narrow dank stair. Vilmos, unbidden but knowing the way, climbed the other stair upward, towards the Chamber of Revelation.

“Enter. No, you need put on no robe. You come to me in a robe of the Devil’s, and veiled in the mask of Hell. What is that blood on your head?”

“I rubbed it on a wall. I have the hemicrania that plagues me.”

“And your shirt.”

“Ah, that.”

“Yes, you have murdered again. No, say nothing of it. The act too clothes you. You are clad in the wreckage of the Sixth Commandment. Have you brought with you the stannum you were given? Then stand here. Now we shall see.”

The chamber was lit solely by a half score of glims set high up in cups of oil. There were otherwise no windows.

The Master read words aloud from a large book on a stand, then made a single pass in the air with a wand of ivory.

Gradually something began to glow in the centre of the floor, about equidistant from the Master and Vilmos.

Vilmos had been witness to apparitions in this room before. Most of the Order, which was that of the Indian Mystery, had done so. The society was loosely alchemical in its nature, but deviated strongly in many directions. Although it claimed, as did most such sects, the primary goal of knowledge, to be demonstrated by unlocking the secrets of firstly, the Making of Gold from inferior metals, or indeed filth, secondly finding the Source of Eternal Youth, and thirdly, Attainment of the Power of the Inner Self, these godlike gifts were construed through the spectrum of an Eastern philosophy by the group, at least, called Indian.

On the floor had been engraved the Wheel of life and Death, having to do in Sanskrit with the Seven Cakras.

The thing which now manifested evolved within the circle.

Unlike the ethos of the Cakras this was a hideous image.

Vilmos stared at it through the agony in his head, and saw it was the figure of a skeletal king, crowned with a diadem of bones that dripped blood. At its back shadowy wings stirred restlessly. Its garments were ragged, grave-clothes perhaps. Through a hole both in the cerements and the being’s chest, there suddenly peeked out the head of a lean, black, rat-like creature, whose eyes were like sulphur.

Colours began to burn up in the torso of the apparition. Yellow showed like the rat’s eyes in the bones of the lower chest, and a surging muddy amber in its bowels. At the region of the male member a scarlet flower appeared, but a snake’s head writhed in it, the jaws ejaculating sparks of poison.

Vilmos raised the cold piece of tin and pushed it against his forehead. For a second the pain sank, then flared to greater pitch. He had perceived that the ruinous and rotted king was none other than himself. It had his face. It too seemed in anguish.

A flash of nothingness filled the chamber.

Dropping the stannum, Vilmos fell forward and knew no more of anything.

TEN

I had thought, or would have done if I had ever compared it to anything at all, that the greatest and most telling shock of my life happened when I entered the hospital room where my mother lay, and my father said to me, in a kind of dreadful hope, “Look, she’s sleeping really peacefully now.”

In fact it was not. Inevitably I had expected her death, and therefore perhaps that something poignantly terrible would accompany it.

And now too, doubtless, I had in some form expected this.

I replaced the glass of whisky, unfinished, on the round white mat.

Through the top of the bar counter I gazed down and down into the abyss.

All about me rational everyday life went on. I remember, someone laughed.

But it wasn’t as if they laughed at me, at my predicament. That laughter of theirs was so far removed it came from another dimension.

When I looked up again he was still there, sitting by the palm. He was reading a magazine. He wore black again today, the black jeans, and a light black sweater with a little