To Indigo

by Tanith Lee

  Ten minutes later the door bell went again.

  I was disinclined to go down. It must be George, or Vita even, coming to see what I thought of the cake. There’d been a similar visit over the last piece of cake she’d awarded me, years ago.

  Idly I went to the unlit study window and looked down. George was there, standing on the paving talking to the paunchy man with cigars from No 80.

  I drew back and took out the sheets of ‘Untitled’ from my printer-tray and left them lying by the computer.

  The bell went again. I ignored it.

  I ran a bath and lay in it listening to the Third Programme. By which I mean Radio 3. It was Rachmaninov, the Third Symphony, or do I mean Symphony 3?

  As a boy I’d found him too emotional. But that was insanity. Every age of one’s life seems to carry some particular intellectual failing. If we learn one thing we seem to have lost another. Or probably only most of us. Some, surely, truly do grow up. But they are rare.

  He returned into my life a couple of evenings later.

  It was slightly less time than Mr C had promised. More, perhaps, than I had originally instinctively credited.

  XIX

  (‘Untitled’: Page 323)

  TO be on fire, to burn, was neither an agony nor alarming. The fire was cool, and although he felt it moving upward through his body, it had a certain familiarity. He seemed to have experienced its passage once or twice before. Then, however, it had given no light, and so he must not have known what happened to him.

  Nothing of him had burned away. Still he stood, motionless in the centre of the Wheel of Life. No other light but that within him now illuminated the Chamber of Revelation.

  It had begun with the deepest rose red, which flooded not only the lowest area of his belly and the area of his loins, but shone outward there and through his thighs. The veins and arteries in his calves and feet were also lighted with this colour. One could not be afraid of it, the gorgeous redness. It seemed life-giving.

  Despite that, and the fact the chants and magical gesturings of the assembly had caused it to ignite, a concerted groaning gasp had risen from them all when the red fire began.

  Vilmos had gazed down at it, his head bending a very little and so enabling him to see. He was delighted, intrigued.

  He knew very well what now must follow.

  He felt in fact a curious, perhaps inexplicable excitement, as the ruby colour seared upward and in turn awoke the intense shade of fiery marigolds in his bowels. In this light the faint shadow of his intestines appeared. How fascinating they were, labyrinthine coils and the tiny secret cavities between, like a thousand serpents mating in a cave. But the flame rose ever upward and next became the colour of the palest yellow topaz. The sack of stomach, and the shape of another organ, maybe the spleen, hung like ripe fruits in the morning glow. The liver represented an amorphous landmass, or perhaps a cloud…

  Vilmos was perfectly conscious the fire would next pass into his heart; already arteries in his hands and arms were catching faint streaks of amber and saffron and now the reciprocated hint of emeralds. The heart was green. It was a leaf in latest spring. Beyond the heart lay the cornflowers of the throat. He would be able to see this blue aspect of the fire only through its reflection outward.

  After that the flame must rise into and through his head, his eyes and brain. On his forehead the blue of it must darken. For there the fire would turn to indigo. And in that moment, Vilmos, the prepared alembic, would become the final crucible. Indigo would open to him a knowledge of All Things. Indigo would remake him and he would rupture, he would crack and explode, as had many of the alembics and the crucibles of the Order. But now, from him, the genius of knowledge would burst forth and cover everyone in the room.

  Vilmos was unafraid.

  When the red fire started he had begun his own soft chant. Over and over, nearly laughing, he whispered it inside his mind. His mouth and tongue could not be operated; he could not say anything aloud. But the chant within him was now so forceful and so sure he seemed to hear it dinning in his ears like a trumpet. Even the fire, ever rising, ever changing, pouring upward in its rainbow, red to orange to yellow, yellow to green to blue, even the blue fire reaching now, stretching upward, seemed to flicker in rhythm with the voiceless chant of Vilmos.

  “Twelve not thirteen. Twelve not thirteen. Twelve not thirteen.”

  For, since their ritual had been flawed by their own ignorance, the Moment of Revealing was to be also his. The supreme Moment of the passage through to indigo initially would be his alone. For one instant he would contain the powers of spheres and ages and dimensions and angels. Dominion.

  After all he could touch God, even if God then shied away and shattered him.

  And he yearned for it. He welcomed it. He rejoiced in it.

  “Twelve not thirteen.”

  The fire soared, clearly visible to every watcher in the Chamber, even to the ancient toad crouching by the wall, at last blue – to indigo.

  To Indigo.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The sky was overcast that evening, it rained, and by six o’clock the sun might as well have set.

  I’d been doing some clothes in the washing machine. I was thinking I’d have an early dinner and decided, rather than cook, to order in pizza.

  Some of the streetlamps prematurely had come on. The darkness was dreary. The sound of the rain oddly put me in mind of marbles dropping into wet cement.

  When the bell sounded I wasn’t thinking of anything much. I’d glimpsed a man in a raincoat going up and down about twenty minutes before, canvassing for something, miserable and unwanted in the rain. It seemed ridiculous to me, even as I undid the front door, to do this only in order to tell him I didn’t want double glazing or a new look for the house, or to sponsor someone to lie in a bath of jam for charity. But I opened the door and there he was. Joseph Traskul. Sej. Standing in the rain in blue jeans and a deep blue shirt, his hair rain-plastered to his head.

  He said nothing. He didn’t even smile. Perhaps to smile would hurt him: there was a bruise on his right cheek despite what Mr C had said.

  The way he stood too, slightly bending forward. He had a denim jacket over his left shoulder and it seemed to weigh him down a bit. His ribs, I thought, bruised too or cracked, on that side.

  Nor did he stride forward, try to push past me.

  He just stood there, over seven feet from the door. Looking at me.

  I had known he would come back.

  He was like a machine you could not turn off, however often you threw the switch or pulled the plug or hacked through the electric cable. Although demons don’t exist in any supernatural sense, they are here. They are among us. They are called fellow human beings, and Sej was one.

  I said nothing to him. But I must make this quite clear, I easily had time to slam the door, bolt and lock it. If it came to that, once safely inside, I could have activated the new burglar alarm.

  But both of us simply stood there, watching each other,

  In the end, he spoke.

  “So you shaved your head.”

  When I heard his voice I felt the most peculiar rushing sensation inside my gut, the cavity of my chest. This wasn’t disturbing. It was more like circulation spinning back in a foot or limb that had gone to sleep. A shutter seemed to fly up in my brain. I blinked, and seemed to see not only Sej but everything, with a bright abnormal clarity. It felt, and I use this phrase with dismay, as if my eyes had been cleaned like windows. I wasn’t frightened. It wasn’t like that. Perhaps I’d felt something like it before, but if I had, misunderstood and so forgotten it.

  And I stepped aside and said, “You’d better come in.”

  In the kitchen, where the light was on, he sat down gingerly on a chair.

  I made some tea. If he scrutinised this I didn’t see it particularly. He didn’t tell me to taste the mug I handed him, nor did I offer.

  “White mugs,” he said. “What did you do with the others?”
/>   “Oxfam.”

  “Very wise,” he said. He stretched his legs out, and regarded the revolving washing in the chugging machine. He said, without much expression, “They knocked me about a bit. Nothing terminal. The hospital assured me I’ll be fit enough in a month. Till then, I must just be careful. Lucky that. I came to in the hospital car park, about 1 a.m. No one in A and E. Can you believe it? It’s normally packed out. Someone did ask how this had happened. I said, Personal matter. Girl I shouldn’t have fucked. Did I want the police? I said no, I’d probably deserved all I got. And how have you been?”

  “Here,” I said.

  “How’s the book? I mean Kill Me Tomorrow.”

  “Going quite well.”

  “Glad to hear that.”

  I too had sat down. We drank the tea. The chocolate biscuits were on the table. I pushed them over.

  “Thanks.” he said. He took out two and ate them, also as if being careful, now, of his jaw.

  I didn’t ask him why he had returned. He didn’t tell me. We both knew, at least both of us, I assume, thought we knew.

  The machine finished its cycle. I got up and put on the drying programme.

  “Funny that,” he said, “the comforting noise of a domestic washing machine. Never like that in a launderette.”

  “So you use launderettes,” I said. I was thinking of the flat in the roof and the washing machine that couldn’t be there unless there were another way in and out.

  “Oh, now and then. You meet some weird people in launderettes, Roy.” It was the first time now he’d used my name.

  “I expect you do. I expect,” I added, “they do, as well.”

  “Me, you mean? Yeah.”

  He smiled. I did.

  “I was going to order pizza,” I said. “You’ve got me into bad habits – junk food, takeaways.”

  “I did, didn’t I. Yes. Pizza would be extra comforting. Only tonight I can’t pay. Sorry.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. You bought so much last time. Just one thing though, Sej. Now I answer the door. You can stand on the top stair if you like, and keep watch.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I trust you.”

  We both ordered the Pizza Double Plus, which had pepperoni, bacon and steak on it, along with mushrooms and olives, tomatoes, mozzarella and ricotta cheese.

  It arrived around seven. I paid and brought it in. We sat in the kitchen, the windows dark as if it were January, and the washing machine chugged on, and we ate pizza and drank a bottle of decent if not wonderful red wine.

  Afterwards I brought the slab of dark chocolate I’d got myself out of the fridge. We broke this up and ate it too – I noticed he let his melt a little in his mouth before he’d bite – dental work? A broken tooth? I made more of the Brazilian filter coffee and brought out the last of the vodka, which I’d never poured away as I didn’t drink it. There had been little conversation – comments on the food, the weather, London, the world. As before.

  But reaching the coffee-chocolate-alcohol stage: “So,” I said, “now tell me about yourself. Tell me who you are.”

  “Joseph Traskul.”

  “I know that. At least I know you told me that. Last time you told me too you were in a children’s home. True?”

  “Did I? Well yes. It is true.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I can’t, Roy. But. It was shit. Look.” He rolled back the left sleeve of his blue shirt. “See?” I could see a long thin old scar. “I have a few of those. Someone there liked to use me as an envelope. He, you understand, was the letter opener. Bloody letters.”

  “And you learnt from him,” I said.

  “Learnt from him? No. I just learned.”

  He leaned back in the chair. He was looking at me, and all at once he was crying. The tears ran from his eyes.

  I thought, with great compassion, he can do this at will. But how and from what has he learned that?

  He said, “Roy. Life plays with us. It plays. Cat with mouse. And all we can do…” He spread his hands, lowering his eyes. When he looked up they were dry. “We can play, Roy. Play. Roy. If there’s a lesson, that’s it. Learn how to play.”

  We sat in silence, as we often had this evening. The rain and the washing machine, now at work on the towels, filled the gaps, marbles in wet cement, domestic chugs. We drank the coffee. I poured him another double vodka.

  “I shouldn’t drink this,” he said. “I’m on prescription pain-killers. But vodka is better.”

  “You’ll be OK.”

  “You should know,” he said. He smiled, but it wasn’t like the other smiles he’d always used. “You arranged it.”

  “Arranged what?”

  “I wonder.”

  “Did I? So you’re angry?” I asked. “Resentful?”

  “No. I said. I deserved it.”

  I must justify nothing.

  “You can always sleep here. I have a put-you-up bed. It’s not too bad.”

  “I remember. Only last time I couldn’t use it, because I had to watch you.”

  “Well now you don’t have to.”

  Bluff? Double bluff? Double Plus Pizza bluff?

  He said, quietly, “There are people staying at my place. I – have to let them do that. I’ve got a couple of couches that turn into beds. But I can’t stay there. These people – need some space.”

  “This is at your flat, 66 Saracen Road?”

  “Yeah.”

  He put his arms down on the table, and rested his head on them. This lasted about two minutes. I drank my coffee. At last he looked up, sat back.

  “Thank you for dinner. Perhaps I should just get out.”

  “Well, if you prefer. But – why don’t you play the piano in the front room. I used,” I said, smiling, “to like that. My father used to play. And a woman I loved. She played the piano – not as well as you, but very well. I loved it. I loved her, Sej. I thought she might have been your mother. Only she wasn’t.”

  “No, Roy. No. My mum’s name was Ashabelle.” He spelled it. “A.S.H.A.B.E.L.L.E.” He laughed, deadly. Not like any of his other laughter. “She was about fifteen when I was born. So she was carrying me at fourteen. It’s too young. I don’t know much about it. Only that she shat me out and dumped me. Ashabelle. Is that black?”

  “You don’t look as if you have black blood.”

  “No. God knows, Roy. Do you,” he paused, “do you really want me to play?”

  “Have another vodka. Play the piano. Then – crash on the other bed. You’re safe with me.”

  “Am I?”

  “Nothing sexual,” I said, “I can assure you.”

  “Touché,” he said.

  I made more coffee and tipped the last triple measure from the vodka bottle into his glass.

  He explained about the wasp after I’d opened up the front room and turned on the standard lamp covered in splashes of red paint.

  “I ought to explain,” he said. “I mean I don’t want you to think you have to be guilty about putting it in a sandwich. Or too triumphalist either, I suppose.”

  He’d sat on the painted sofa, still nursing the vodka, and I on one of the painted chairs. The curtains had stayed drawn. He had been right about the red walls. In lamplight they did glow. If everything else had been OK, it might have a wonderful effect, modern yet warm, different.

  “So you’d found the wasp before I used it. You knew I would use it.”

  “Thought you would.”

  “When did you find it? I only put it there that morning.”

  “I’d been on the look-out. One or two of them had got into the house. I had a feeling it might occur to you. But I let the ones I saw out of the kitchen window. It was after your bath,” he said. And flashed me a dim shadow of his former impervious smile.

  “When I stayed in the bathroom.”

  “It happens,” he said. “So I had a look upstairs. I looked in your wardrobe as a matter of course. You hadn’t concealed it superlatively well, Roy. For a writer of detective
fiction… I can tell you though, the beast was angry. I let it go at the bedroom window and got stung in the process. But I never have much of a reaction to wasp stings.”

  “No,” I said. “So the wasp I found later in the glass was another one?”

  “A dead one. Much less lethal. I’d found it on a windowsill in here. The paint smell probably killed it.”

  “It was dead?” It had seemed to me the wasp in my glass had still had some life in it, if not much. No doubt, in the state I’d been in, I’d imagined the slight vestige of response, expecting to see it.

  “It was dead. Then I waited, and you put it in the sandwich, between the top slice of bread and the ham.”

  “But you didn’t bite down on it – did you?”

  “I was looking out, Roy, remember. When I took the sandwich about which you’d made such a scene… I could feel the wasp through the bread. Poor sod felt like a prawn. So I bit well clear.”

  I recalled the corpse of the wasp, undamaged, lying under the rim of the plate.

  “Then your reaction was one more fake.”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Your mouth bled. I saw it.”

  “Ketchup, Roy. When I went into the kitchen.”

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t, myself, tell if this were genuine mirth at the madness of all this, or an actor’s laugh, used for effect. Something of each, maybe. I recollected he, like most of us, liked flattery. “You’re a genius,” I said. “Did you train at RADA?”

  “Oh, sure,” he seriously acquiesced, smiling a little, still not in the old ways. “A year. I was expelled.”

  “RADA? Expelled? Why?”

  “Not good enough.”

  A lie. Or not. Either was unlikely – that he’d been there, that, being there, he’d be thrown out.

  I said, “You could act Olivier or Jacobi or Sher off the stage.”

  “No I couldn’t. But thank you. The world’s my stage anyway, Roy, and all the men and women merely players.” He finished the vodka.

  I said, “There’s only whisky now, I’m afraid. I can taste it for you, if you’d like some.”