To Indigo by Tanith Lee (read along books txt) 📕

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.