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.