Personal Demons

by Christopher Fowler

  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.