Christopher Fowler - Personal Demons

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 -