To Indigo Read online

  3

  It hid a cupboard, the door to the right.

  Opened, that revealed an electricity meter, a plastic bucket and a tattered broom leaning sidelong in space. On a wooden shelf were two large boxes of matches, an empty milk bottle from the past, with a candle stuck in it, a London telephone directory with its cover off, a broken terracotta flowerpot.

  These things looked to me like the accumulated and forgotten detritus of many occupancies. Even the matchboxes were void when I inspected them.

  I had put on plastic gloves by then. The rest of my DNA would have to take its chance. I have never been fingerprinted. I have no form. And today anyway, I wasn’t really myself.

  The other door, to the left, gave on a not unspacious room, probably about fifteen feet square. To the left side a single step went up into an open plan kitchenette.

  There was a lot of light in the room, from two front windows, and from the kitchen itself, which had two side windows plus a closed, locked and keyless clear glass door, that led on to a balcony above the street.

  A door to the right of the main room showed a narrow corridor, off which lay a bathroom with a suite of an intense murky brown, a bedroom, and a further, narrower enclosure that must be intended as a spare room. These three rooms had back windows only.

  Outside the bedroom was a fire-escape, and below the brief back gardens of the terrace, some beautified with small trees and plants in pots, others, like this one, left to weeds and ragged grass.

  After I had gone through the whole flat, I returned to the main area, and stared about again.

  The walls throughout had been painted white. That must have been at least five years ago. Nothing shows dirt, as my mother had been used to say, like pale things.

  The radiators, also painted white, had streaks of metal striped through.

  Nowhere was there any carpet. The floors were bare boards. The kitchen space had been tiled but the tiles were cracked, and some loose, coming up as one trod on them. On the electric cooker something had spilled long ago and, over years perhaps, been regularly baked into a sort of laminate. The once trendy units were without pans or tableware.

  I found one overhead bulb with a shade. This was in the bedroom. I assumed it was the bedroom because there was a bed in it, a meagre double, with a pillow having no pillowcase. There were no sheets or covers. The mattress was nude as the floors.

  Each of the windows however had a single flimsy curtain, wrapped over the quaint, old-fashioned, now intermittently fashionable rails above. These unhemmed strips of material, could – supposedly – be dragged partly across to offer some privacy.

  In the bathroom there was a water glass, the kind one can pick up anywhere. Nothing rested in the glass, or anywhere else. A wall cabinet, a fixture maybe, was vacant but for a dead moth.

  Here and there about the flat I found other small corpses, a beetle, a couple of flies, some spiders in sagging webs that had died most likely of starvation. On the window-sill of the spare room a dead leaf. My knowledge of flora is limited, but it seemed to have fallen from a tree that had once been a flaming red. But it had curled together and lost almost all its tint.

  By the lavatory in the bathroom lay the single page of a book.

  I picked it up at once, put on the glasses I need now for small print, and tried to read the words. But not only was it in a language I failed to recognise, but the Cyrillic alphabet. Russian?

  There was a doughy odour everywhere of neglect and inanition – a word I use only because no editor will ever demand that I excise it.

  Throughout the whole of the flat, at least during my first investigation, this was the sum of all I found. There was absolutely nothing concrete that indicated anyone still lived there, came from there, might go back there. Nothing of any sort.

  XII

  (‘Untitled’: Page 191)

  VILMOS was aware that the headache, to which he was often subject, was returning. Since the age of ten he had been its victim, and with the years it had increased its attendance on him. Now it arrived so frequently it seemed in fact it was his constant condition, the days without it being the curiosities. But too, strangely, when he was without the headache he quickly forgot it, being always filled by a ghastly shock on its reviving, and a sickened dread.

  The pain invariably commenced with a stiffening of his neck muscles to the left side. Soon a burning tension began to fill his skull. Next there was the sensation of a shrill white violin string, tightening and tightening on an unseen peg, between the base of his skull and his left temple. Central to these two junctures, about the region of the parietal lobe, a large and fiery black nail began to be hammered through into his brain.

  In youth he had wrenched clumps of his hair out of his head to mitigate this agony with another. Older, he had recourse to alcohol and opiates, which dulled the anguish but could not dispel it. It never lasted less than five hours nor more than sixty. In the latter, long form, it would in any case lessen from about the thirty-sixth hour. He could then feel the white string slowly slackening, melting away, while the hammered nail turned to a dying coal and went out.

  This time the headache was Shosa’s fault. His anger at her, the effort of slaughtering her. Perhaps even the sight of her beauty sodden with blood.

  Vilmos, having once more left the stultifying venue of his father’s house, had gone back via a circuitous route to the house by the river. Only in one place did he pause, rubbing his forehead violently against the angled corner of a building, momentarily to obliterate the claw of the headache in his temple.

  But by the time he reached the Master’s house, he was dizzy and the string of the demoniac violin had already wound tight.

  The river here ran in a wide canal, and the house perched directly above. There was no invented light at all, and only the vaguest hint of starlight. Nevertheless something white was just now floating by under the brink of the house. It might have been a bundle of washing, or someone drowned.

  Vilmos turned from it and scratched on the side door.

  After a moment a slot appeared. The bloodshot eye of a servant peered out at him. Then the door was opened, and Vilmos entered the house, for the second time that night.

  The premises had been emptied of any crowd. Only the three speechless servants remained; two of these were already concealed, and the porter too now slipped off down a narrow dank stair. Vilmos, unbidden but knowing the way, climbed the other stair upward, towards the Chamber of Revelation.

  “Enter. No, you need put on no robe. You come to me in a robe of the Devil’s, and veiled in the mask of Hell. What is that blood on your head?”

  “I rubbed it on a wall. I have the hemicrania that plagues me.”

  “And your shirt.”

  “Ah, that.”

  “Yes, you have murdered again. No, say nothing of it. The act too clothes you. You are clad in the wreckage of the Sixth Commandment. Have you brought with you the stannum you were given? Then stand here. Now we shall see.”

  The chamber was lit solely by a half score of glims set high up in cups of oil. There were otherwise no windows.

  The Master read words aloud from a large book on a stand, then made a single pass in the air with a wand of ivory.

  Gradually something began to glow in the centre of the floor, about equidistant from the Master and Vilmos.

  Vilmos had been witness to apparitions in this room before. Most of the Order, which was that of the Indian Mystery, had done so. The society was loosely alchemical in its nature, but deviated strongly in many directions. Although it claimed, as did most such sects, the primary goal of knowledge, to be demonstrated by unlocking the secrets of firstly, the Making of Gold from inferior metals, or indeed filth, secondly finding the Source of Eternal Youth, and thirdly, Attainment of the Power of the Inner Self, these godlike gifts were construed through the spectrum of an Eastern philosophy by the group, at least, called Indian.

  On the floor had been engraved the Wheel of life and Death, havin
g to do in Sanskrit with the Seven Cakras.

  The thing which now manifested evolved within the circle.

  Unlike the ethos of the Cakras this was a hideous image.

  Vilmos stared at it through the agony in his head, and saw it was the figure of a skeletal king, crowned with a diadem of bones that dripped blood. At its back shadowy wings stirred restlessly. Its garments were ragged, grave-clothes perhaps. Through a hole both in the cerements and the being’s chest, there suddenly peeked out the head of a lean, black, rat-like creature, whose eyes were like sulphur.

  Colours began to burn up in the torso of the apparition. Yellow showed like the rat’s eyes in the bones of the lower chest, and a surging muddy amber in its bowels. At the region of the male member a scarlet flower appeared, but a snake’s head writhed in it, the jaws ejaculating sparks of poison.

  Vilmos raised the cold piece of tin and pushed it against his forehead. For a second the pain sank, then flared to greater pitch. He had perceived that the ruinous and rotted king was none other than himself. It had his face. It too seemed in anguish.

  A flash of nothingness filled the chamber.

  Dropping the stannum, Vilmos fell forward and knew no more of anything.

  TEN

  I had thought, or would have done if I had ever compared it to anything at all, that the greatest and most telling shock of my life happened when I entered the hospital room where my mother lay, and my father said to me, in a kind of dreadful hope, “Look, she’s sleeping really peacefully now.”

  In fact it was not. Inevitably I had expected her death, and therefore perhaps that something poignantly terrible would accompany it.

  And now too, doubtless, I had in some form expected this.

  I replaced the glass of whisky, unfinished, on the round white mat.

  Through the top of the bar counter I gazed down and down into the abyss.

  All about me rational everyday life went on. I remember, someone laughed.

  But it wasn’t as if they laughed at me, at my predicament. That laughter of theirs was so far removed it came from another dimension.

  When I looked up again he was still there, sitting by the palm. He was reading a magazine. He wore black again today, the black jeans, and a light black sweater with a little green dart of something high on the left side of his chest, some logo.

  Nobody out there took any notice of him. No, actually one of the women did, a young one with long hair. She looked round and gazed at him a moment, evidently liking the look of him, but not intruding, passing on and away.

  What should I do?

  There were a lot of people here. Should I grip the waiter and mutter, Get the police! This seemed unreal and useless. Again, who would believe me?

  Besides, I had drugged him. I might have killed him. Was this phantom definitely there, or only an illusion…? But the girl had seen him too. There he was.

  Exactly then he glanced up and met my eyes in the bar mirror. (How long had he watched me before I glimpsed him?) He raised his right hand, as he had in the Crescent, a friendly, almost non-committal wave of hello. He didn’t get up.

  I took the whisky, put it down again. I turned and came smartly out into the foyer.

  Should I now walk past? Surely he would follow. The same if I got into a lift. Did he know my room number? Christ, he’d found me here, why wouldn’t he?

  There was another chair facing his, I think he had drawn it over into that position. I went directly to the chair and sat down.

  I heard my voice come out cool and flat.

  “Well, Sej.”

  “Well, Roy,” he said. And smiled.

  “I’d better explain at once, hadn’t I? We both got tired of that last guessing game.”

  “How you found me here.”

  “Exactly. I looked in your books, the most recent publication. This very year. Then I contacted the publisher – Gates. I said I was trying to trace a Mr Roy Phipps. I didn’t use the landline for this, of course. It didn’t seem to work, perhaps because the wire had been ripped out and the receiver smashed. Whoever did that, Roy? You should have got it fixed.”

  I said nothing.

  He said: “I kept insisting that it was vital I speak to someone about you. I gave your nom de plume – R.P. Phillips. In the end, I reached some guy – Lewis something. Lewis Ryburn, that’s it.”

  He had the wrong name. Would that count? I guessed it would not.

  “Ryburn said graciously Who is this? I said, Actually I’m Roy’s son. I’ve been trying all night to locate him. I hadn’t been, obviously, I’d been asleep. I do apologise for that, Roy, by the way. Falling asleep so boorishly. I woke up on the floor. I’m afraid I also threw up in your sink. That wine – it must have been off.” Smiling ruefully now he looked at me. “Were you OK?”

  I said nothing.

  Joseph Traskul Sej went on. “Mr Ryburn was diffident at first. But I explained I’d been expecting you at Old Church Lane and was already there myself, but you hadn’t turned up. I gave the address of course so he would see I knew this important personal detail, was an intimate of yours. Then he became quite concerned. He said he had had a call from you and you’d seemed rather – what was the word he used? – flummoxed. That was it. I said I knew there’d been some family trouble. He said he’d never known you had a family, let alone a son. I said neither had I known I was yours until comparatively recently. But we’d been due to meet and I was worried sick. After a bit more of my ham acting he told me you were here. People do let one down, don’t they, Roy? My God. You ought to tell the bastards to be more careful of their authors, lucky he only told me. It could have been anyone.”

  I could just picture Lewis Rybourne, intrigued by the story, (old Roy with a son!) and also delighted to shove me off his plate on to this handy other one.

  And a son again. I could hear, mentally, how plausible and winning the demon had made himself sound. Even after his sedated coma and resultant nausea.

  And he knew he had been drugged. By me. What else? Who else?

  “How are you feeling?” I asked blankly.

  Smilingly he said, “I’m fine. You seem surprised.”

  “No, I’m not.” This was in fact true. Shocked but not surprised.

  He said, “Oh, by the way, I brought your mail,” and lifting his tote-bag off the jazzy carpet he presented me with two business letters and an electricity bill.

  I’d forgotten all about post and what it might reveal to him, but he hadn’t slit open any of the envelopes, not even cleverly undone them with steam from a kettle, thereafter resealing them, I knew the tell-tale signs, having experimented with the method for my work in the 1980’s.

  Without saying anything I put the letters in my jacket pocket.

  “Where shall we go for lunch?” he said.

  More or less just like the first time.

  “I can’t afford,” I said, “to treat you.”

  “Don’t worry. My turn. What’s it like here?”

  “Expensive.”

  He laughed. “I get the feeling you think I’m penniless.”

  Recently I hadn’t. I said, “Are you?”

  “No, Roy.”

  “Then why try to move into my house?”

  “Did I? I thought it was just a visit.”

  “You mean you’d have eaten the food, finished the wine, and left?”

  “I might have. I do have a place of my own. Up here, London. Not bad though not very cheap. Worse thing is the fucking awful music the rest of them in the building play.” (I didn’t think I’d heard him use a four letter word before.) “I prefer a bit of tuneful jazz – the old kind, Dixie, New Orleans, or Bach or Handel. Do you like Handel, Roy?”

  It occurred to me he had somehow heard Handel playing on my radio that night he unloaded the dustbin, noiselessly, in the back garden.

  “Sometimes.”

  “But in the flats they play rubbish. It gets on my nerves.”

  Across the foyer, through the glass doors, the
slender-pillared dining-room was revving up for custom. The Americans had already gone across.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I don’t want to eat with you.”

  Benignly he looked at me. He said, “Get over the guilt, Roy. I forgive you. It doesn’t matter.”

  I knew. I said, “What?”

  “Drugging me,” he sweetly said. “Don’t be concerned. I’m tough and strong. It takes more than that. I knew you had, anyway.”

  An insane curiosity took hold of me. I found I leant forward. “Then why…”

  “Why did I go on drinking your plonk? Well, I didn’t think there’d be enough to kill me.”

  “There could have been. It could have done.”

  “No. You know how to judge such things, or Mr R.P. Phillips does. I read one of your books, by the way. Last Orders. Really liked it. Well written and no fuss. I guessed who done it, but only three quarters through – and the twist at the end was a stunner. You had me fooled on that. I’m impressed. Why aren’t you much better known?”

  I thought, as once or twice in my youth I bitterly had, Because I am not part of the Oxbridge fraternity and have no influence. But such carping bores me by now, and anyway I’ve come to see it’s more likely I am simply not original enough, don’t have enough of the slightly deranged zeitgeist of the modern day. Presumably too I never did. I recall one review from a well-known and influential critic, which greeted my twelfth book: “Phillips is dependable, nearly always a pretty good read if never a magnificent one.”

  This was when something very odd happened.

  Perhaps I was already disturbed enough, but the fact he had selected the only published book of mine I personally still rated quite highly, seemed to affect me in a way I could neither express nor explain to myself. I looked at him hard, and seemed to see his face for the first time, handsome and quite ordinary, intelligent even, and couth, nothing in it to display madness or ferocity. I understood even as the feeling washed through me that this assessment was unwise. Everything he had done so far demonstrated ably enough that he was, as my father had once liked to say, off his rocker.