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

wish to discuss with you the cloth revenues. We are in arrears, it seems. Follow me to my study.”

Once these two men had left the room, the women quickly got up. They went into a corner by the fire and took up their tatting.

The other brothers sat drinking. They had taken out a draughts board and now played a ponderous game.

Vilmos stayed where he was. He watched the candlelight creep on the ceiling, now and then faltering or flaring up. Two servants came in and cleared the table. The mother called them sharply. In a malicious undertone she berated then both over the goose.

Vilmos thought, with deep, comfortable melancholy, of Reiner, struggling and sinking in the river where he, Vilmos, had flung him. Reiner could swim a little. Besides debris was everywhere that he might reach and cling to. It was interesting to Vilmos inwardly to debate if his former companion had survived.

But then the image of the king, crowned with bones and with a rat in his breast, returned, slicing through memory like a knife.

In his chair, Vilmos sat upright. Something strange in the candlelight seemed to show him the king again upon the ceiling.

The colours in his torso, yellow, orange and crimson, were those of the three lower illuminated Cakras. They indicated appetite, greed, carnal desire. The added symbols, such as the rat and the snake, indicated blockages and perversions.

The higher colours, such as the green of the emotive heart, had not been contained in his vision. The piece of tin, when he revived and was shown it, had been burnt, apparently by some dreadful aspect of Vilmos himself. The Master was gone and had explained nothing. The servant, of course, had no tongue.

Vilmos now brooded on all this.

Few had ever attained the greater goals of the Order of the Indian Mystery. Few had seen as high as the sky-blue of the Cakra of communication, speech and song. And none, Vilmos thought, had viewed any higher. Unless the Master himself had done so.

Self-enlightenment, the dominion over self – and so over all other things – was reached only by unleashing the Gem of the Brow. It was the last stage of utter power. Beyond it no man could rise, save to reach up from the physical self into the Infinite, which was both Bliss and Annihilation: Death, Eternity. The Gem was therefore the ultimate state possible while yet living.

They said, not the Master but his Master, he who had ruled the Order before him, had done this. Armed then with the abilities of a god, he had vanished from the City.

“I want it,” Vilmos murmured. He clenched both his hands on the table’s edge, gripping it so hard a vibration seemed to pass through the wood.

When he went out, one of the servant girls, beaten by the cook because of the goose, wept against the panelling. She was about fourteen. Vilmos stared at her with a kind of revulsion. She smelled of grease, and her own unwashed body and hair. What wretched things humans were.

“Cheer up, my pigeon,” he said to her in passing. “We’re all damned. We’ll all roast in the Scalds of Hell.”

Her sobs choked to silence. She was afraid of him. He was the Chosen of the Devil. This notion filled him with great joy, and also with trepidation and a leaden disappointment. Why could God not have chosen him? Now he would never rise up beyond the genitals, the bowels and belly, the heart, the voice, into the dark blue sphere of the Elect. Unless, obviously, the Master was mistaken. Vilmos left the house thinking this. He walked through the darkness of the City to the lodging of the harlot Klavdisa. She knew better than to take other custom without his permission. He could practice with her his dominion over others, in case the Master were wrong.

FOURTEEN

Two of the letters were printed with my name and address. Two were handwritten.

The fifth, the last one lying on top of them, was different.

It was a clean, white ordinary envelope, the kind anyone could buy somewhere like Smiths, neither opulent nor cheap, empty of either name or address.

I picked it up and found it was sealed in the usual way. I ripped it open so roughly bits of it fluttered off back to the floor.

One sheet of typing or computer paper was inside, again medium quality.

Unlike the envelope, the sheet was printed, a font widely used with nothing special about it.

One word, and three numerals:

Compasses. 7.30

I use the name The Compasses for the pub. This isn’t correct. It was the dodgy place Joseph had stayed at in the high street. I’ve changed the name.

After a while I carried all the letters into the kitchen.

The table had been pulled back from the door, which had been relocked and re-bolted. Out on the paving his black dustbin-present was now stationed neatly to one side. When presently I opened the fridge, I found he had put the bottle of Wincott’s into the chiller. The fridge had been reconnected too. It was as cold as it should be, and the freezer as well.

He had washed up the dinner plates and put them to drain, and the cutlery, (all but the missing fork), was standing in its proper section. I’d rinsed the glasses. These he had put away, in the right place.

There was no mess. In fact the kitchen looked as clean as when Franziska tended to it. There was a faint smell of bleach too, as then.

I felt a type of nervous curiosity. I went into the library. That copy of my book, Last Orders, lay on the little table. A piece of paper lay on top of it with an erratically written splash of words, (his writing, already recognizable to me). Really brilliant, Mr Phillips. Should have won a prize – or did it?

Nothing else seemed changed. At least he had not dusted the table.

Upstairs, the computer had completed its deletions but was still on. I