0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (29 page)

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.