(Author's Note: In the process of developing the character of Judy Merrigan for a new multiple-plot novel called 'Soho Black', I wrote her part out as a short story. If you're planning to read the novel, you may wish to delay reading this tale, although the two versions are substantially different.)
Everyone knows about the Midas touch, right? Those M's are among the few pieces of mythology one still remembers; the Medusa, the Minotaur and Midas – the man with the golden touch. I should have been warned by his name.
My name is Judy Merrigan, another M and no myth, just an ordinary Mrs. I was thirty-two when I moved from Arizona to England to be with my husband for the four inglorious years our marriage lasted. Michael and I met in Phoenix, where he taught classical history at the university. He took me out to dinner and asked if he could take me home. It turned out he meant all the way home. From Phoenix to Sussex, England, quite a culture shock. It was my first trip to Europe, only I didn't see any of the things you're supposed to see. Even Texas boys get to visit Paris when they graduate, but I found myself marooned in a silent English suburb with funny little front gardens and round red mailboxes and bay windows, looking after a man who needed a mother more than a wife.
I had given up a successful career as a graphic artist to do this. There was no way I could keep my clients from my new overseas base, and I couldn't start afresh without contacts. Besides, Michael didn't like me working. We separated because he wanted more children, and I wasn't crazy about the ones he already had.
I had no intention of returning to Phoenix and subjecting myself to my father's barbed remarks about the failure-rate of modern marriages; I decided to stay on in England so long as I could move to London. My divorce papers came through and suddenly I was on my own in a city I hardly knew. Most people would have been thrilled at the prospect of independence, but I was scared. Michael had spent four years bullying the confidence out of me. As I walked down an impossibly crowded Regent Street, I realised just how much I had distanced myself from the world outside.
When my mother died she left me a little money, and as there wasn't much forthcoming from the divorce settlement, I used her bequest to fulfil a dream. I bought my own property. Not the kind of place Michael or my father would ever have approved of – that was part of the charm – a town apartment, cosmopolitan and chic and central to everything. The third floor of a renovated two-hundred-year-old building with polished hardwood floors and large airy rooms, in Great Titchfield Street, part of the area they call Fitzrovia (I loved those names), where the sidewalk cafes and corner pubs and late night stores steeped with trays of exotic vegetables make it the closest you can get in Central London to a New York neighbourhood.
This was the first time I had a place I could truly call my own, and I spent every last penny fixing it up. I thought I could use part of the lounge as a studio and resume my interrupted career. Got myself a deal with an illustration agency, made a few contacts, but the industry had changed while I'd been away – computers had replaced illustration work with photo-composites. I didn't get downhearted. At the start of that hot, thundery summer I leaned out of my window watching the world pass below, convinced that somebody somewhere would still need watercolours, gouaches and pencil sketches, and that I could produce them from my penthouse eyrie.
There were others in the building; a woman in the apartment below, and an old Greek couple in the first-floor flat with its ground-level grocery. There was one more apartment, opposite mine, separated by a small dark landing. The brass sign on the door read Midas Blake, but I never saw him. Maria, the Greek lady, told me he was strange. 'What kind of strange?' I asked her.
'Very quiet,' she explained, 'keeps his door closed. Comes and goes late at night. Doesn't have a job, but always has money.' That didn't sound so bad. 'A nice man, though?' I asked.
'Oh yes,' she said, smiling with her big white false teeth, 'very nice.' And then one night there he was, rattling his key at the lock as I arrived, looking over his shoulder at me. I didn't introduce myself. We just nodded to each other and turned our backs. He closed his door and I closed mine. I didn't see him again for an age. Never heard his latch click, or any sound from his apartment. For a big man he had to be very light on his feet.
Then one hot Monday morning in June I had my bag snatched on the tube platform by this – child – no more than fourteen I swear, but strong and fast enough to break my shoulder strap and hightail it out of the station. The policeman I complained to at Tottenham Court Road took details indifferently, another statistic to be tallied. I cancelled my cards, bought a new wallet, then realised I was missing my spare keys. When I got home, Maria's husband Ari stopped me on the gloomy landing, where he was repairing a junction box. A tiny man, as soft and grey as a waterlogged potato, very gentle. Always giving advice, not all of it good. He told me I should change my locks just in case.
'More expense,' I complained. I was up to my limit for the month, with still a week to go, so the lock stayed as it was.
The good thing about London is you don't get brownouts. The bad thing is, I didn't know how to fix an English fuse. On the Thursday of that week I came home late to find the stairway in total darkness. I managed to grope my way up to the second floor, then heard someone on the landing above, and there was something about the sound that told me it wasn't right. I felt my heart beating faster and set my shopping bag down, listening. There was an angry shout, a scuffle of boots, the sound of someone being punched or slapped, and suddenly that someone was coming toward me at great speed, stamp stamp stamp, crashing past me and downwards, out of the door at the bottom of the stairwell.
'Are you all right?' asked a deep male voice, cultured, out of breath, and I said yes, and in the flare of a match I found myself being introduced to Mr Midas Blake.
He had long dirty-blonde hair to his shoulders, a stubbled chin scarred at the jawline, pale sensitive eyes. My God. Beautiful, but big and crazy-looking, at least a foot taller than me.
'You sure you're all right?'
'Yes,' I said again, puzzled now.
'Your shopping got knocked over.'
'Did it?' I couldn't see – too dark. How could he tell?
'I'll fix the lights. I'll bring up your purchases.'
And that was it. He showed me to my apartment and waited with another match while I dug around for my key. As soon as I was through the door he pulled it shut behind me. A few moments later I saw the hall lights go on and found my shopping stacked neatly on my doormat. No sign of my neighbour. I nearly crossed the landing and rang his bell, but decided to let it go. In cities it's hard to figure out where privacy begins.
The next morning, just after eight o'clock, there was a knock on my front door. Naturally I was looking as unattractive as I could possibly make myself, face cream, bendi-curlers and old sweatpants, and there he was, a big gold god, smelling of something fresh and citrus, standing awkwardly in faded shorts, a grey T-shirt and Nikes, unsure where to place his great hands.
He explained that someone had tried to burgle my apartment last night, and pointed out scratchmarks on the front door. He'd seen the guy off before he could do any real damage. This morning he had reported the matter to the police.
I offered my thanks, made coffee, told him more about myself than I intended. His size was daunting. The palest eyes stared out beneath a heavy brow, so that he appeared permanently angry. I explained about losing the keys, how the police would blame me for keeping my home address in my purse, how I couldn't afford to change the locks let alone install a proper security system.
'You have to do something,' he said. 'These front doors are as thin as cardboard. You could put a fist through them.' When he asked me to come and see the security set-up in his own apartment, I accepted his offer.
I found myself standing in a mirror image of my own rooms but the decor was radically different. The flat was filled with talismen and mystical paraphernalia, found-art, totems, prayer-wheels, trompe l'oeil wall paintings, mandalas and plants, greenery everywhere, thick green stems bursting from all the corners of the lounge, explosions of red petals, terracotta pots of every size. The kind of place a hippy would have if he was rich and had taste.
I was enchanted by Midas Blake, placed under the spell of a charismatic man. His speech was slow and earnest, his manner accidentally charming, as though he had no idea that he was attractive. He seemed aggressively prepared to protect his privacy. A simple question would crease his brow in fury, as if he would hit you for daring to pry. He was the first man I'd ever met who looked capable of killing. We spent over an hour together. He told me he was good with plants. He enjoyed 'helping people out'. He was Greek by birth, but had been raised in London. I left knowing little more than this.
I returned to my own apartment, to the tiny studio I'd built with its drawing board, racks of pens and – concession to modern technology – computer, and attempted to immerse myself in work. But with no freelance projects coming in I knew I would soon have to consider a full-time office job. The break came when Daniel Battsek, one of the few friends I'd made during my marriage, called me with a commission. He'd taken over a key position in the marketing department of Buena Vista in Kensington Village, and had some ideas for a movie poster he wished to explore. He was prepared to pay half up front, which would allow me to cover my overdue mortgage repayment. I was off and running.
Much about London puzzled and bothered me. Ari warned me that conmen targeted single women in the nearby flats, and that many of the victims were nurses working at the Middlesex Hospital. He said these men could sense when a woman had been hurt, and gave me a funny look, as though he figured I was especially vulnerable.
Maybe I was. I know I spent too many evenings in with the cable remote and a tub of Marks & Spencer's Chocolate Chunk, which is the ice cream for depressed women who need to move up from Haagen Dazs. The clouds held in the heat all week, and I kept every window in the apartment wide open, the British summer not lasting long enough to require the purchase of an air-conditioning unit. On Saturday night the weather broke, thunder rolled and great fat raindrops began to fall. I was running around shutting the windows when Midas Blake knocked.
'Why close the place up?' he asked, looking around. 'What's a little warm rain on the floor?'
And I thought, he's right. Why do I always act on the instincts my father bred in me? I leave the windows open, it gets a little wet…
He said, 'I've just opened a bottle of very cold Chablis. I shouldn't keep it all to myself.' His eyes stayed on mine as he spoke. I accepted his invitation and followed him across the landing. Shifted from my territory over to his. He poured the wine into glasses that released the faint glissando of evaporating frost. We drank, and he talked in a strange soft way that made me listen to the rhythm of his voice but not the words. When he went to the open window and leaned out to look at the sky, fat spots of rain stained his shirt. He turned and spoke so quietly that his words just appeared in my head. I remember little of what passed between us, but before we parted he said something odd, something about how we mustn't be scared of going out into the night because there were darker places in our hearts. It sounded familiar, a Robert Frost quote paraphrased. He smiled, and something about his expression chilled me. It was the only time I saw him look helpless, imprisoned by his own image. At the end of the evening – against my better judgement – I kissed him goodnight.
Well, the high heavens didn't fall, but I'm pretty sure the earth moved when my lips brushed his cheek. The trip home across the landing was like stepping between worlds.
Gloria, my agent, warned me against being too cautious with men. 'You wait and they're gone,' she said over lunch the next day, 'and let's face it, you're not getting any younger. What's the worst that could happen?'
'He lives in my building,' I said. 'The worst that could happen is I date him and it goes horribly wrong and I end up regretting it until the very day I die.'
'There is that, I suppose,' she admitted.
Mr Midas Blake sent me flowers. Wild carmine orchids, followed by a tree of fat, petulant roses. He left glistening, leathery plants on my doormat. He invited me to lunch. Lunch. A woman can build dreams around a man who takes her to lunch. Plants and flowers arrived daily. He called me over to dinner. He was a great cook. He told me he'd learned in the galley of a yacht when he had sailed around Europe. Pointedly mentioned that he'd settled now because he was tired of being alone. There was something about him that was so foreign, exotic and yet familiar, as if he had always existed in a root-memory. Studying his still eyes gave me heat-stroke.
The dreams started when I began sleeping with him.
This would be around mid-July. I hadn't intended to sleep with him and they weren't normal dreams. The sheets stuck to my body as I tossed and turned beneath the carved headboard of his bed, my mind awhirl with scenes from a heat-drowsed pagan past. In the ruins of a Grecian temple I saw something scamper between vineclad columns, watching me with small red eyes. Little boys, naked and plump, with the legs of brown rats, sat in shadowed corners patiently observing. Panpipes and birdsong filled my head. Fever reveries, I decided, born of hot nights. I would wake to find him raised on one elbow, watching me.
And then there was the sex. My God, the sex. His charm became licentiousness, his energy, violence. He knew he could hurt me, and took pleasure in teasing me across the threshold. But before you think this was some kind of stroke-book fantasy – and I'm the first to admit it was less romantic than pornographic – mitigating his power was something else, another dimension to the experience. While he was inside me my mind became drenched with fantasies, saturated with images of a forgotten tropical paradise. When we were combined the city around us disappeared, the old bursting through the new, flora and fauna reclaiming the streets until all brick and stone had been replaced with dense choking greenery. I felt drugged, transfigured, hauled back to something ancient and dangerous.
He told me his semen contained the power to open my mind. I told him I'd heard that line before, put slightly differently. I wanted to introduce him to jealous girlfriends who would throw him sidelong glances over dinner and whisper behind his back. My agent Gloria, who was so independent everyone assumed she was a lesbian, would be reduced to coy girliness beneath his intense gaze. He was a new new man, unashamedly masculine. But when it came to the ordering of a normal social life, Midas remained elusive. One lunchtime he failed to show up when he knew I had specifically invited Gloria to meet him, then called three hours later with a half-hearted apology. He had no interest in civilised conventions.
Was it a coincidence that my artistic ability began to germinate? The Disney designs I'd been commissioned to produce became such a delightful riot of colour and chaos I was hired to develop artwork for an upcoming jungle epic. My confidence grew with my prowess. The drabness of my suburban imprisonment was blasted aside by this new fertility of mind. Thanks to the endless gifts of plants, my apartment grew into a tropical jungle. It seemed that even flowers responded to the Midas touch. Our lives became idyllic; the building took on an oddly Mediterranean atmosphere, becalmed and pleasant, drifting above a summer sea of traffic fumes. Only Ari and Maria failed to notice the change. Midas and I carefully maintained separate apartments, awaiting invitations from each other before crossing thresholds, a matter of territorial privacy. I painted the overgrown cities of my dreams, filling my bedroom with lush acrylic vistas while Midas -
That was the problem; what did he do? Where did he go to late at night? Could he be seeing other women? Where did he get his money? Why did he have no friends? He'd told me his parents were dead, but surely others were close to him? There were no family photographs in his apartment, no personal mementoes, just things he'd collected on voyages. He drank vast amounts of red wine, as if trying to blot out bad memories, and would behave like a reprimanded schoolboy when I asked questions, dropping his head to his chest, his hair flopping down to shield unforgiving eyes. He occupied my every thought.
My prying developed subtlety, and when that failed I tried snooping around his apartment, only to find locked drawers without keys. I complained; our relationship was based on little more than a feral sex-life. Midas was content with the way things were, happy to float on the summer tide. His moods were a series of heatwaves inexorably rippling toward a storm, which broke when he drunkenly barged into my flat one night and accused me of trying to emasculate him.
Emasculate! His fury frightened me; we argued over whether he should have my keys, and the matter added to the mysteries between us. Questions of trust. What did I really know about him? No more than if I had passed him in the street. I had held nothing back; why should he keep secrets?
We entered August in deepening bad feeling. The more I complained, the drunker and more unreliable Midas became. On the first Saturday of the month he failed to show for a dinner party, only to appear at three in the morning smelling as if he'd been dropped in a vat of Chianti.
'Where have you been?' I calmly asked.
'Where I always am at night,' he slurred, sprawling heavily into an armchair.
'And where is that?'
His eyes held mine. 'Where do you think?'
'Midas, I'm tired of playing games with you.'
He turned his attention to his boots, trying to loosen one and failing. 'I work,' he said. 'I'm not the layabout you think I am.'
'What is it you do?'
'I wonder if I should tell you. You wouldn't approve.'
I called his bluff. 'Try me.'
He stared long and hard. 'I inherited certain – powers – from my parents.'
'What kind of powers? Healing powers?'
'In a way. Abilities that stem from my virility. People need my help.'
'What sort of people? Where do you meet them, Midas?'
'At parties. Specially arranged parties. I am in great demand, especially with older women. And some men. They pay me well. My sex gives them strength. It opens their senses. As it has done to you.'
'Are you trying to tell me you're paid to attend orgies?'
'They're ceremonies. Ceremonies of pagan veneration. I don't see why I should have to explain this. It has no bearing on our relationship.'
'Think again,' I said, attempting to drag him from the chair.
'But we're good together,' he said, 'you know that. Don't spoil it now, Judy.'
'I'm a pretty liberal person,' I explained, 'but I draw the line at allowing other people to worship at the shrine of your dick.'
He shook his head in disgust. 'You cannot forsake me now. I cast spells. I can help you. Your life would be much less pleasant without me.'
I didn't want to believe what I'd heard, but I knew it was true because the role fitted him so perfectly. I just wanted him out of my flat. I would never have managed it if he hadn't been so drunk. By the time I had slammed the front door and double-locked it I was shaking with anger and fright. This, I told myself, was my reward for trusting too fast.
I avoided him. There was no question of moving out, or of coming to terms with what he had told me. I would not be bullied, and anyway I couldn't afford to leave. He put a note through my door begging to talk to me. I tore it up and posted it back through his letterbox. The next time I passed him on the stairs, I warned him to leave me alone or I would tell the police I was being pestered.
Two nights later, the real trouble began.
I was trying to paint, staring at a great blank sheet of Daler Board. Nothing was coming out right. I told myself that the idea of Midas affecting my artistic ability was simply some form of psychosomatic suggestion. Just then, the walls of my flat started shaking with the sound of Greek music. Midas held a party that carried on until dawn. People were still arriving at four in the morning. I donned earplugs and went to bed, but didn't sleep a wink.
'You missed a great night,' Ari said the next day when I passed him on the stairs, 'a great night! How we danced and laughed! Midas is a wonderful host.'
'I thought you said he was very quiet.'
'Yes, but a party, that's different! Such singing! It's a pity you couldn't come.'
There were seven binbags filled with wine bottles by the front door.
Hey, I figured, live and let live. Maybe this was his way of coping with rejection. But it was just the first of the parties. From being the quietest guy in town, Midas suddenly became the neighbour from hell. Crashing and banging, deafening me at all hours with music, howls of laughter and even what sounded like screams of pain. People came and left at three, four, five in the morning. Sometimes I went on to the landing and saw them climbing the stairs, dangerous types, criminal lowlife, drug dealers, crazies, whores. Each week it got worse. Several times I got up the courage to hammer on his door, but he would never answer. I angrily complained to Ari and Maria, who were dumbfounded.
'But you must be able to hear the noise, even two floors away,' I insisted.
'No,' they said, shaking their heads, 'we haven't heard a thing. As far as we know, Midas only had one party.'
'But the rubbish he throws out on to the landing, the people, the mess…'
'You see any mess around here?' asked Ari defensively. 'I think maybe you're overreacting. We never have any trouble from Midas.'
I was not imagining it. The woman in the apartment below mine was spending summer at her daughter's house in Cornwall. That just left me.
The noise and the mess continued. I asked the residents in the buildings on either side of mine if they had suffered disturbances, without luck. I visited a harassed young man at a council advice centre and was told that nearly fifty per cent of all flat owners move because of problems with neighbours. He outlined the alternatives, patience or the police, and counselled the former. I was reluctant to involve the law, as I had done during the stormy end of my marriage, and finally persuaded the community officer to call on Midas. The report he sent me after his visit made me wonder if we knew the same man; it was virtually a love letter. My neighbour, my ex-lover, had certainly turned on some full-strength charm. As the community officer was almost certainly gay, I found myself wondering if he had done more than that.
I felt like selling my story to the Enquirer: I DATED A PAGAN GIGOLO. Surely he was just an ordinary man with a smart line in seduction. Could Midas have found a way of preventing others from hearing his noise? If he really could cast spells, perhaps he wasn't just directing them at me. Legally my hands were tied. No previous problems had ever been recorded at this address. If anything, I was the nuisance. Perhaps I was going crazy. I could imagine the community officer's official report: Ms Merrigan complains that her neighbour is bewitching her.
My patience was pushed to the limit. My relationship with Midas became a war of nerves. Thunderous music that no-one else ever seemed to hear played all night. Bags of stinking rubbish split and spilled against my front door. Creepy characters sat at the top of my stairs drinking, picking their teeth and flirting; a smacked-out kid who played with a knife, a laughing fat whore with gold teeth, a sickly bald man who constantly hawked and spat – Midas's acolytes. Ari and Maria swore they saw nobody pass them, but how else did these sleazeballs get on to the staircase, by flying in through the skylight? The first few times I saw someone sitting there I raced down to the ground-floor apartment and dragged Ari upstairs, only to discover the landing deserted. It was like living in a carnival funhouse. I could feel my ordered life cracking apart as quickly as the plants in my flat were drying and dying.
One hot evening I heard a noise outside my door and opened it to find Midas drunk and nearly naked, smeared with paint and slumped on the landing smiling at me.
'I'll call the police if you come any closer,' I warned, trying not to panic.
'And I'll send them away with love in their hearts,' he replied, smoothing his stomach, allowing his hand to brush his genitals. 'Don't you know the story of the wind and the sun, and their wager to remove a traveller's coat? The wind tries to blow the coat off but the traveller pulls it more tightly around himself. The sun just smiles and warms his victim until he sheds his clothes…'
He was tumescent now. I yelped and darted back into my apartment, slamming the door with a bang. There was no point in ringing anyone for help. I knew Midas would be sober, clothed and full of charm by the time they arrived.
That night my dreams betrayed me, conjuring him into my bedroom, pacing before my bed, whispering happy obscenities. Wherever his bare feet touched the carpet, grapevines sprang up in verdant knots. Wherever his strong hands touched me, silvery green tendrils traced lines of moisture on my skin. I reached between his broad brown thighs and buried my face there, at the source of his heat, to fill my head with searing comets. In the morning I awoke feeling spent and sluttish. Later I passed Midas on the stairs, smartly attired, going out. 'Sleep well?' he asked with a knowing smile.
I was going mad. I sought Gloria's advice over lunch, and after trying to persuade me to go to the police she produced a more workable idea. 'Find out about him,' she said. 'Make him your quarry. The more you discover of a man like that, the less strength he has over you.'
I knew Midas often received mail from a woman. Her unwanted letters, handwritten in purple ballpoint, accumulated in the hall. When I returned home, I made a note of her return address.
Her name was Danielle Passmore. She lived in Notting Hill, on the top floor of one of those grey Victorian houses large enough to garrison a regiment. The front garden was filled with dead rhododendrons, the ground floor boarded with corrugated iron, so that at first sight it looked as if nobody lived there.
I rang the bell and stepped back, squinting up at the filthy windows, wondering what I would say. She took so long to come to the door, I was about to leave. Danielle was small and shy, thirtyish, fair and very pale, probably once attractive. It was hard to tell now, because her face was disfigured. A livid crimson scar traced a series of crescent-shaped indentations from forehead to chin, as if someone had tried to cleave her skull in two. She was missing her right eye. Skin had dried dark and tight across the socket. I tried not to look too hard.
'I hope you don't mind me just turning up like this,' I said, but before I could continue she interrupted; 'It's about him, isn't it? You've come about him. I knew someone would eventually.'
I asked her what she meant, and she invited me to the silent heart of that shadowed house. We sat facing each other in faded armchairs, in a shuttered room that showed too many signs of a woman living long alone.
'He is still beautiful, isn't he?' she asked. 'Did he touch you? He did, I can tell. You smell of him. Have you felt his power? He places people beneath the spell of his fertility, the spell of the satyr. You knew he was a satyr, did you? The distilled essence of everything male. A priapic satanist, a pagan. A god.'
While I was trying to form a response to this she continued. 'I tried to leave him. We were lovers for months but he frightened me. He showed me things inside myself that I couldn't bear to think about. He lived in South London then, in the great old house he used for ceremonies. I told him I'd have no more to do with him. He was very gracious. Said he was sorry I felt that way. Kissed me on the forehead as I left.' She touched the first of her scars, retracing his lips. 'When I reached home it was late and the hall lights were out. The timer wasn't working. I made my way upstairs, let myself in and boiled the kettle. Then I heard a noise in the lounge, a clanking sound. Metal on wood. Couldn't think what it was. Went in to see, but there was nothing to see.
'There was a chest of drawers against the far wall, and that's where the noise was coming from, a steady rhythmic knocking, the only sound in a silent house. It was where I kept a few tools for home repairs. Curious, I opened the drawer and a wooden-handled claw hammer flew out at me, smashing into my face. Each time I shoved it away it flew back, hammering at my eyes, my nose, my teeth. I saw it returning through a curtain of blood, over and over. Eventually I passed out. In the morning I awoke and managed to call someone. I was in hospital for nearly a month. They wired my jaw but couldn't save my eye.'
'My god, what did the police say?'
'It was just a hammer. There were no prints on it except mine. There was nobody else here, Miss Merrigan. What could the police say?'
'Who else knows about this?'
'No-one. I knew he wouldn't want me to speak of it.'
'But we have to tell someone. If he has some kind of – power – over people, he must be stopped.'
'You don't understand,' whispered Danielle, wiping her good eye with the heel of her hand. 'He refuses to see me. He ignores all my letters.'
'It sounds like you're safer if he does – '
'I still adore him. I pray for us to be together again. Why else do you think I call and write? I have no control over this awful – desire. He has left me with a thirst that can't be quenched. I worship him. That's what he wants.'
I left the poor thing shortly after that. In the dessicated garden I looked back up at the window and saw her crooked face staring down at me. I believed in darkness then. Perhaps her wounds were self-inflicted and she was simply deranged. It made no difference. Her suffering was real. I understood now. The price of the gifts Midas bestowed was slavery. Every god needs to be worshipped. And those who lapse are cast into damnation.
I couldn't just walk out of the apartment. Aside from the financial problems it would involve, those rooms represented every shred of independence I had mustered for myself. I wearily returned home to find the landing at the top of the stairs sombre and silent, but when I listened at Midas' door I could hear a faint chanting of madrigals. I dreaded to think what he was up to in there.
Two days later my ex-husband came to London to discuss the maintenance payments he had failed to keep up. When I returned from the station with him, Midas was lying in wait, standing casually outside his front door as if keeping a prearranged appointment.
'Judy's told me so much about you,' he said, extending his hand, which was shaken in puzzlement. 'She and I are neighbours but I like to think we share much more than just a landing.'
I attempted to shepherd Michael into my apartment, but Midas caught his arm. 'Before you two go off and talk business, I'd love to offer you a drink.' Michael looked at me unsurely, but I could tell that he was prepared to be swayed.
'Judy says you collect science fiction. I have quite a decent collection myself.'
His door was open. His arm was extended. His smile was wide. Michael was lured inside, and I followed like a fool. Over the next half-hour, Midas exuded so much sincerity that I nearly passed out with the strain of smiling back. The two men sat cross-legged on the floor pulling books out of racks and laughing together. Michael was completely taken in and proved reluctant to leave, even when I insisted on keeping our restaurant booking. The neighbours of serial killers never notice anything unusual. What do they see? Smiling strangers who quietly close their doors. Good citizens. Likeable men.
My personality withered beneath the force of Midas' onslaught of charisma. How could I be expected to compete? He was more believable than me, more fun to be with. All I did was moan through dinner. It didn't take a genius to see that Michael would rather have spent the remainder of the evening bonding with my neighbour. I had no allies. Midas could direct his fury at me and shield others from any awareness of it. I realised with some alarm that I had a less forceful personality than the enemy plaguing me. When Michael left, he told me I was lucky to have someone so interesting living next door, and that I should see a doctor about my depression. Perhaps I should try Prozac. I told him to mail me a cheque or I'd see him in court.
I wish we hadn't parted on bad terms. It was the last time I saw him uninjured. He shouldn't have been driving; he was way over the alcohol limit. His car ploughed into the outer lane barrier on the M2 at the Medway Bridge, a hundred feet above that black river. Midas stopped me on the landing to tell me that my ex-husband had not been wearing a seatbelt. Shocked into silence, I tried not to imagine how he knew. Michael was hospitalised. They wouldn't let me see him for days.
The last week of August was unbearable, the hottest for years. The icemaker in Ari's store broke down and all his vegetables spoiled. The days were stuck together, melting into nights. In the height of summer a London night has but five hours of darkness. Many of the clubs and bars in the area close with the rising sun. Midas' guests stayed long after that. I lay sleepless and lost in an empty hot bed, listening to the obscene laughter of the revellers on the landing. I could feel my nerves fraying further each day. The most I could ask was for Midas to leave me alone. And he did until the first Friday in September, when there was a familiar knock.
'I must talk to you,' he said quietly. 'May I come in?' I held open the door. He had lost a little weight, looked great. I felt a wreck, not up to confrontation.
'You've changed things around.'
'I had to,' I said. 'All the plants you gave me died.'
'I can't afford to lose you, you know. I've never lost anyone.'
'Oh? What about Danielle Passmore? Do I look as much of a victim as her? Did you think I'd be easier to convert?'
He showed no surprise. 'I can do so much for you, Judy, if you believe in me.'
'Oh, I believe. You're no crank, I'm sure of that. But I prefer to rely on myself.'
'Then I must make you realise your mistake.' He disclosed a clear plastic tube in his hand and snapped open the cap, allowing the milky contents to leak on to the doorframe. 'Just as my seed can bring fertility to the barren lives of others, so it can be used in other, more persuasive ways.' As soon as I realised what he had in the tube I shoved him out of the doorway. He allowed me to do so. He knew his strength. 'Let me know when you're ready to reconsider,' he called.
I had no idea what he meant until the next morning. I had taken two sleeping tablets, and groggily awoke to another cauldron-hot day. The bedroom was stifling; the window had slid shut in the night and wouldn't budge when I tried to open it. None of the lounge windows would open, either. I thought perhaps the paintwork on the sills had become sticky – until I tried the front door. The latch refused to move even a tenth of an inch. The wood had become sealed in its frame. There was no other way in or out of the apartment.
Determined not to panic, I picked up the telephone receiver to call Ari, but found the line dead. The junction box in the skirting board looked as if it had been damaged. Okay, I thought, I'll have to break a window. At first I considered using a hammer, but remembering what had happened to Danielle I decided to stay out of the storage-closet where I kept the toolbox.
Instead I entered the lounge with a tea towel wrapped around my arm, clutching a hiking boot, and whacked the window with all my might. Nothing happened. No sound, no shatter, nothing. The glass didn't even shake. That was when I started to lose it. I screamed my lungs out for a while hoping that someone would hear me through the walls, but no-one came running up the stairs. In the boiling streets below, pedestrians passed without stopping to look up and listen.
By midday the temperature in the flat was 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and I forced myself to stop panicking long enough to take stock of my position. I carried out an inventory of supplies; I had half a day-old loaf, a little butter, some yoghurt, a tin of beans, a packet of sliced ham, an almost-empty jar of peanut butter, some breakfast cereal but no milk. That was it. I usually stocked up on Saturday. At least there was an unlimited supply of tapwater. I tried the windows again, this time hammering them with a steel-framed kitchen chair, but they seemed to absorb the sound and impact of every blow.
The computer. I ran to it and switched on the modem. I tried E-mailing Gloria through the internet but my message just rerouted itself back to me, endlessly scrolling down the screen until I was forced to shut the monitor off. The next time I tried it, it didn't work at all.
My clothes were stained with sweat, so I took a shower. I do my best thinking in the shower. There had to be a way out. I figured I'd be wasting my time taking the floorboards up or burrowing through the walls with the puny hand-drill Michael had left me. There was an attic above the apartment that might be able to get me to the roof – except that the entrance to it was set in the landing ceiling, beyond the front door.
If I was truly under an enchantment, I wouldn't be able to escape so easily. I thought about the few friends I had made in London. They never came around without calling first; how long would it take them to report my dead telephone line? How long would it take an inquisitive friend to climb my stairs?
The first night seemed to last forever. Through the front door I could hear Midas' damned madrigals and the imbecile laughter of his debauched acolytes. Secured in my baking cocoon, I began to consider the possibility that he had decided to let me die here.
I tried a few other ruses to attract attention; turned the TV, the radio and the CD player way up until the collective volume was ear-splitting. No effect at all. He was keeping the sound in, just as he kept others from hearing his celebrations. It was like being sealed away from the world in an impenetrable bubble. On the third day my food supply, with the exception of a few items like gravy mix and maple syrup, ran dry. I had carefully bagged my garbage but the flat was still starting to smell funky and I was out of ideas, trying not to panic. What could I do but sit and wait for someone to find me? I watched TV, read books, played music, listened at the sealed front door as Midas prowled back and forth, laughed, partied. I couldn't believe I was being held prisoner in the middle of a city of eleven million people. It was as if nobody knew I was still alive. Perhaps they didn't; the thought flipped my stomach. Perhaps he had changed their perception of me. Perhaps, like an unloved octogenarian, my bloated body would be found weeks after my death. That night, the fourth night, I lay in bed and cried myself sick.
The following morning I rose unrefreshed and switched on the TV. The weatherman promised that the summer's endless heatwave would end in the mother of all storms, then a game show host unveiled a cheap-looking car to a collective wave of oohs and aahs. I tiredly followed my track around the apartment, trying to think of ideas and clutching at even the most foolish, like running to the radio for a phone-in number, only to remember that the phone wasn't working.
I carried out my daily inventory; I was out of soap, shampoo, washing powder and suddenly I was out of water. Turning on the faucet produced a thin trickle, then nothing. He must have turned it off at the mains supply in the attic. I had half a can of flat Sprite in the refrigerator and nothing else. How long, I wondered, could a person survive without water? Three days, four, more? I lay on the floor of the lounge, drained of energy, watching as simpering couples won video recorders on the game show: The thought of giving in to Midas no longer occurred to me. I knew now that this apartment was to be my oubliette. I would die here, an unremembered martyr.
That afternoon I carefully scooped the water from the toilet cistern into a saucepan, boiled it, then stored it in the fridge. Going to the bathroom wouldn't be a problem; there was nothing to eat. My stomach growled constantly, but there was no pain. I told myself it was like going on a diet. But I knew it wasn't. It was dying by degrees. I felt myself slipping into a fugue state, aided by the incessant drone of the television and the stifling heat of my cell. The door and windows remained unbudgeable. I lay with my burning forehead pressed against the window as the tide of passers-by ebbed and flowed. Day faded to night and back to day. I could feel myself wasting away, stomach shrinking, tongue swelling, muscles atrophying, and I no longer cared.
The heated, hallucinatory hours crawled by. In a brief moment of lucidity I noticed the appalling state of the apartment. Empty food wrappers littered the lounge. One of the wastebags had split, a dark stinking residue leaking on to the kitchen floor. And at night, all night, the satyr sang his song. It pounded against the walls, rattled the crockery cabinets and shook the windows, a high, atonal wind instrument rising beside his voice – and nobody heard it but me. I no longer slept, existing instead in a perpetual mental twilight as his delicate, persistent jungle sprouted around me; phosphorescent sprays of greenery shielding my body, the fragile tracery of ferns brushing my bare flesh. Bright insects buzzed around engorged shoots pulsing with rhythmic growth, rooting me into dank hot earth. More than anything, I remember the suffocating heat that made me tear off my clothes with the little remaining strength I possessed, a humidity perfect for succumbing to an orgiastic pagan past.
And like a true pagan, I decided that I needed a totem, a spear, something primitive to carry beside me. In my weakened condition it took the next few hours to loosen and remove the wrought-iron embellishments from the coatstand that stood beside the front door. By the time I was left with just a five-foot bevelled metal rod in my hands, it was nearly midnight. It was then that I called out to him. I had no need to summon loudly. A whisper would have done as well, providing it was done in good faith. I called softly again, then held my breath and listened at the door, knowing he would come…
…and heard his boots scuffing together, just outside the sealed entrance to the apartment. 'Judy,' I heard him murmur, 'oh, Judy.' Behind me, one of the lounge windows gently slid down from its jammed position. The door lock loosened and unclicked. The spell was waning with his arrival, and my acceptance…
And with my last ounce of strength I ran at the door, ramming the point of the stand through the thin plywood panel until it met with resistance. There was a shout on the other side as the rod passed through and struck him a damaging blow to the stomach. The iron shaft I retracted was smeared with blood. I was beset with a feeling of infinite loss, a terrified animal trapped in the heat-death of the rainforest. The sudden exertion had been too much for me. The room shifted. There was only blessed oblivion.
And then nothing until – raindrops on my face.
That's the next thing I remember. Fat wet baubles bursting on my parched skin. A cool zephyr traversing my arms and exposed breasts. More rain. And thunder, blessed deafening thunder as the promised storm finally broke above me…
'Miss Merrigan.'
An elderly woman with too-large teeth, upside down. Ari's wife, Maria. She was holding out a mug of tea. I tried to raise my head. I could hear the rain falling steadily. The air was cool. My mouth and throat were dry, too parched to speak. I gulped at the tea, scalding my tongue.
'How did – how did you get in?'
'The front door was wide open. We could smell something. We thought you'd gone away. Are you all right?'
'I – think so.' Ari was at the other end of the flat, opening the windows. Clouds of flies were resettling on the rotting bin-bags beside the sink. One thought passed through my disordered mind. I had to confront Midas in the company of Maria and Ari, to prove to someone that I was not mad, that I had not done this to myself. I pulled my shirt down overmy breasts, staggered to my feet and all but dragged them across the landing to his door.
'Are you sure you're all right?' Maria was asking, and Ari was saying something about getting me to a doctor when the door opened and there stood a small grey-haired man in a patterned cardigan and slippers. He had a pot-belly and rimless glasses. He looked like a retired accountant.
'Where's Midas?' I shouted. 'Is he in there?'
The little man shot a puzzled look at Maria, then back at me. 'What does she -?'
I was hysterical now. 'Where is Midas Blake?'
'I'm sorry, Mr Blake,' Ari was saying, 'she's not been well and she -'
'Young lady, I am – '
'Where the hell is he?'
' – I am Midas Blake. I don't believe we've met before.'
'You're lying, you're all lying!' I pushed past the little accountant. 'He must be in here!' But the apartment was completely different, floral wallpaper, cheap padded leatherette furniture, no plants at all. 'You know where he is,' I screamed, 'why are you protecting him?'
They're all in it, I thought, he's got to all of them. But he hadn't; I know that now. The grey-haired man in spectacles really was someone called Midas Blake, and he'd been living there for years. We'd never met. He'd only ever had one party, the one Ari had so enthusiastically attended. If I had gone as well I would have realised the truth, but we had never bumped into each other.
The man I had known as Midas was someone quite different. I suspect he has many other names. He is the stranger who comes to lead us into temptation, the one who can give us everything we need in return for blind allegiance. He may appear at a certain co-ordinate on the map, to a certain type of person, when the skies are strange and the time is right, and to many people, stronger people, he may never appear at all. An arid marriage, four years of loneliness, how ripe I had been for his attentions! There was no point in returning to Danielle Passmore and asking to see a photograph; his likeness would not be the same. He would never adopt the same guise twice.
One thing puzzled me. Why was I released from his power? Why did he allow the door to open, why did he not let me die? I can only assume he plans to come back for me. He thinks I am still weak enough to accept him. He is in for a surprise. Through the changing seasons I watch from my windows and calmly await his return, armed with a faith I never knew I had.