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

“On – what – who?”

“My spectacles. It was Sherry. She pushed me. She’s jealous because she’s so fat. And they fell off and someone just trod on them. Look.” She showed me the ruination of her glasses. “I can’t afford to get a new pair, not till next payday. And I can’t see without them.”

I’d been going to get a taxi anyway. Some of them always hung around the disco after midnight, like vultures, ready to charge double and a half. “Where do you live?”

She snivelled something.

She didn’t have a coat and her bare shoulders were dewed with rain. She had a nice skin, and her hair, though very thin now it was wet, gave off a pretty smell. I put my leather jacket, (yes, I had one then), round her shoulders, and when the cab swarmed up I took her home. She lived with her parents in an end-of-terrace “mansion”. She let me kiss her outside the door. She wasn’t Maureen. But she seemed to be available. She had already confessed she’d split up with her boyfriend three nights ago and was puzzling as to whether she should come off the Pill. I was nearly twenty-one. What was I likely to do? I did it a week later, having taken her, by then in new glasses purchased by her father, to my room in Brampton Way.

She refused to do a thing with the light on. But once it was off she was up and ready. She rocked the house with her noise. I was embarrassed but not unflattered. Maureen had never been that loud. But then too, Maureen had never been that desperate.

XIII

(‘Untitled’: Page 220)

SUMMONED from the bed of Klavdisa, Vilmos followed the tongue-less servant in a daze.

The City before dawn was in its darkest and most abysmal mode. Now and then uncanny lights flitted through the black, overcast sky. Most likely they were lightnings, but for Vilmos they had ominous shapes, like those of racing greenish mares or lions, whose heads were skulls.

The Master’s servant had sometimes indicated his – the Master’s – purpose, by means of gesticulations and grimaces. On this excursion he revealed nothing, and when Vilmos had clapped one hand on his shoulder the dumb man thrust him off with a controlled violence that warned of strength.

“But I was called to the house, you know as much, five days back,” Vilmos had protested.

Klavdisa all this while had kept to one corner of the bed, shivering. She was afraid of the Master, his alchemic reputation. Vilmos, having been with her for over three days and nights, had thought himself obscured from all search.

Truth to tell, he had dreaded that the Master would locate him now. What had appeared in the chamber, blurred as it was by his fainting, had left an impression of deep horror. And this had grown rather than diminished as time went by.

When they reached the building above the river the servant led him to its street door.

Vilmos had the urge to run away, but a line of light was showing in the east. He had an aversion to daylight, it hurt his eyes. And so he slunk inside.

The Master was seated in the main hall, in his tall chair. A fire crackled on the hearth and the toad sat there, warming itself, the Master’s strange pet, which had always been about the house, so far as anyone knew. Some said it was as old as the Master himself, a creature therefore in its seventieth year. Vilmos had never beheld it before.

“I’m here,” said Vilmos, affecting nonchalance.

“Oh, is it you?” said the Master, as if he had not had Vilmos brought.

“What do you want with me?”

“I? Do you think I want something?”

“Yes. I was dragged here…”

“It is the Great Powers.” said the Master, terribly, “which want something of you. I am only their instrument.”

“You have told me, jesting, I’ll assume, I’m the Devil’s.”

“So you are. I will tell you something else, however, Vilmos. The Devil is himself punctilious and fastidious. He does not like you very much, though he intends to use you.”

“Use me? Well, already he does.”

“That? Murder and madness and debauchery? The Devil does not attend to such matters. His minor demons deal in those things. Satanus Rex. He’s not called a king for nothing. His tastes are more refined.”

“You know him well, then.”

“All men know him. But he. He himself will condescend to know only a few.”

Wine stood on the table in an ewer. Vilmos now, without asking, poured some into a glass, which also stood there, and drank it.

“You’ve said he chose me.”

“So he has. But better not be flattered, Vilmos. The Beast has selected you as a man selects a piece of bread to mop up the gravy. He will use you, consume you perhaps. He does not mean to keep or cherish you.”

Vilmos had drained the glass. He threw it at the toad – which nimbly hopped aside. The glass, meeting instead one of the stone pillars either side the hearth, shattered.

“I’m done with this. I’m not here for the Devil’s use, let alone yours. I’m in the world for myself.”

“Do you think so?”

Vilmos turned, at a loss. In the cramped windows a bloodless dawn was rising, showing the City, towers and roofs, the gleam of the dirty river, the ruined citadel on the Hill of Kolosian.

The toad had come to Vilmos’s foot. It stared up at him. There was a poisoned jewel between its eyes. But its eyes also were like that. He wanted to kick it away. But he could not do it, just as he could no longer verbally fence with the Master.

“Let me go,” he said.

“Impossible. You’ve been recognised. Not by ourselves, by That we resort to. Now you’ll go upstairs. A room’s prepared. Once you swore to serve this Order. Now you shall.”

Vilmos said nothing.

The toad’s eyes seemed to him luminous and compassionate.

To it, he muttered. “What shall I do?” But the Master replied.

“You must now undergo various