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

What was he? What?

But through the melody stared all the rest of what had been, and what he was otherwise. And I had known from the beginning, from before even he had come back to my door.

Returning into the room I sat quietly behind him, back on my chair, holding the dog. I rubbed my fingers over the smooth glass, and Rachmaninov poured from the piano.

No mistakes now.

In the upright wooden shell of the instrument, where the strings stretch unseen from keys to hammers, like the hidden muscles of the emotional body itself, I could see his face reflected. Lowered towards the keyboard, intent and pale, only the dusting of the bruise under his cheekbone. His eyes seemed closed. He lived and expressed the music.

I remembered how I had known I couldn’t harm his hands.

Some trick of the light, the redness of the room, cast a red glimmer across his forehead. It was where the smear of paint had been when he worked on the walls. Red, the lowest chakra, reproduced at the exact region of the higher sixth chakra, the Third Eye, Vilmos’s focus, the goal of his corrupt Order, (Indigo), inner seeing and self-knowledge and thus the dominion over All Things, but firstly of the Self.

Slowly I got up again and moved quietly across, as if drawn forward by the music and wanting to watch the movement of his hands up close.

I stood behind his left shoulder, as the Devil does in some Mediaeval woodcuts. Retro me Satanus…

Yes, he was entirely absorbed in his playing, and I too could become so. The rapid dance of his fingers and the waves, black to white to black to white of the keys, were mesmerising.

I went on watching, until the aching melody had almost reached its end. Although the ultimate theme of the last Movement is the greater, this Second Movement premonition of it is perhaps more pervasive. Unheralded, it invades. Unfinished, it haunts and echoes on the corridors of the mind.

But he would stop. He was tired and in pain. He might have to.

I stepped back a little, and half turned away, and stood almost with my back to him.

My reflection too would be in the upright wood.

I changed the position of the red glass dog in my right hand.

Steady as a rock. Nothing in me felt frail. I wouldn’t falter.

The stream of music was running to its close. Now, then. It would have to be now.

Turning round again I struck him violently on the back of the head, with all my weight – and if undersized and slight – still I’m a grown man – behind it.

The dog was heavy, solid. I felt the point of its nose connect with the parietal lobe to the left of his skull.

Unlike the scenes in so many films, there was no discordant clash of chords. His hands slipped noiseless from the keys. His body jerked once and slumped forward, his head striking again, the frontal lobe now, on the wood of the piano.

I’d believed the dog would shatter. It hadn’t. Instead, very neatly it had split in two sections, breaking just behind the neck. I bent down and retrieved the smaller piece, the head, examined it and quickly saw I would be able to superglue it back together.

XIX

(‘Untitled’: Page 333)

THE cataclysm that had destroyed the Chamber had been visible to Vilmos only for those six or seven brief seconds, when he seemed to hang in space between earth and sky, day and night, life and eternity. Then came the locomotion of a colossal fall, worthy of Lucifer’s it seemed to him, although later he spurned a comparison of such ineptitude. The end of the fall, its destination, threw him feet first through the collapsing cellarage of the Master’s house. He found himself then, abruptly, as if just waking from a vivid dream, floating comfortably on the broad bosom of the river, a bridge before him that was not the Flavel, the moon, thin as a cat’s closed eye, squinting down from above.

He knew the water would buoy him up, carry him. There was no need to struggle. The river did so and presently bumped him home against the bank.

The stone jumble of the City was sparse here. A tree craned to the water and Vilmos caught its lowest bough and hauled himself in with little effort.

It was not cold. Already his garments seemed to dry themselves in the extreme incandescent energy which still radiated from his body.

The lights of the mystic Cakras had faded from him, at least to the physical eye, but every part of him felt charged and effulgent.

Vilmos was well aware of what had happened.

Twelve, not thirteen.

They had made an error in the formula of their spell, and this had warped it. And so he had been able, on reaching the indigo instant of utter power, to claim himself back from them, and so wrench free. The power he shed, meanwhile, when this took place, detonated instead in the room.

He doubted any of them had survived, but now, standing on the bank and gazing back along the curve of the river, he saw a livid rusty glare, and a solid black cumulous of smoke that was rising up. It came to him this went on about where he would expect to find the Master’s house. And that therefore, not only had it been shaken down, but it was on fire, and burned.

Imagining the crowds of neighbours in their nightshirts springing out in horror on the street, gazing at this in frightened awe and malign disgust, Vilmos smiled to himself.

Without questioning or reticence, he knew that all the might of the ritual and the alchemical surge had entered and refined only him. What now then might he not do?

On an impulse he turned, and with a look struck a flame on the black river. It lit at once and blazed there like a lily of phosphorous. He had done this by his will alone.

Notions of Satan and