It’s a lie: I don’t dream. There are people who don’t dream, you know; my nights here in Highgate are slices of oblivion where even God may not intrude. If God is unable to reach me, tell me, why should she pace my dreams, smelling of lilac and deceit, soft and murderous as a poison shirt? I don’t see her: I don’t feel her hair brush my face in the small hours of the night; I don’t hear the sounds of her skin touching the silk of her dress; I don’t glimpse her from the corner of my eye, standing at the foot of my bed.

I don’t lie awake, wanting her.

I thought I was past the age of searching for Scheherazade: I had ploughed a thousand furrows in a thousand girls…young girls fair and dark and red-headed, plain and beautiful, willing and unwilling. I opened their secret flesh, fed them and fed from them; but still the Mystery eludes me. Every time I arose from their fetid couches, sated and raped by their arid hunger, I knew it: there was a Mystery, but the more I delved the less I uncovered of its essential self. They watched me with their flat, stupid eyes, hungrily, knowingly…the Mystery gone like the mythical castle in the fairy tale, never in the same place for longer than an hour. I begin to understand King Shahriyar, who married his brides in the evening to execute them the next morning: perhaps, like me, he thought to perceive a part of the Mystery in the eviscerated remains of the night’s orgy; perhaps like me he crawled home too pale in the pitiless light of day with nothing but blood and semen on his hands. But he and I, brothers in disillusion, had this in common: we never lost hope.

Maybe if by magic I had been able to shrink back to the size of a foetus, to swim back into the red darkness of my mother: then, maybe, I might have understood the Mystery without the need to bludgeon and destroy…but I have no magic. My last impossible dream was Scheherazade, renewed each morning like the Phoenix from the embers of my lust, to deliver a new message of hope and acceptance, every night a new texture, a different face: a thousand and one unbroken vials containing an elixir of awesome, Biblical potency…the Mystery of eternal life.

Do I dream of her?

Perhaps.

I took nine grains of chloral before I left the house: I was strangely apprehensive, my hands straying constantly to my mouth, like a child taken in some misdemeanour. Strange thoughts crossed my mind like ill omens: as I passed the cemetery I thought I saw the figure of a child all in white, standing barefoot at the gate, watching me. I cried to the coachman to stop: looking again I realized that there was no child, merely a white gravestone just within the walls, reflecting the moon. As I watched, a cat leaped up on to the stone and stared at me with a glittering, feral gaze over the dark spaces. Magnified into an unreal intensity by the clear night, it seemed to flex its jaws at me in fear or warning as I drove past. In my fanciful state I almost turned back, but a hunger which was far from purely carnal drew me: I could not turn back. The house was calling me.

Fanny showed me into the hall, as usual managing to disconcert me with the sheer scale of her vivid green gown, her tall plumes, her scent. As always her house was a hive of odours and for a moment I was drowned in perfumes. Then Fanny led me gently down the passage to one of the little side-parlours, a room which, in nearly ten years, I did not remember ever seeing.

‘I have someone here I think you might like to meet,’ she said with a little smile.

I felt my jaw tense: there was something in her expression which disturbed me, a kind of quiet assurance. I shook my arm free from her surprisingly strong grip, losing balance as I did and striking the door-frame with my shoulder. Fanny smiled again, her face in the lamplight distorted into an expression of vengeful glee.

‘Mr Chester…’ Her voice was solicitous and the expression-if it had been there at all-was gone. ‘You don’t seem well today. I do hope you’re not sickening?’

Sickening. In her accent the word gained a twist of eerie sibilances which insinuated themselves into my mind like snakes. I took her arm again to steady myself.

Ssssickening.

‘Yes, thank you, Fanny,’ I said randomly. ‘I’m very well. Very well indeed,’ I added, feeling the world stabilize. I forced a jovial smile. ‘So, who am I to meet?’ I enquired in a bantering tone. ‘Some new protégée of yours?’

Fanny nodded. ‘In a way, yes,’ she agreed. ‘But first I suggest a taste of my special punch to lift your spirits. Do come in.’ And lifting the latch of the parlour door, she opened it and drew me in after her.

The light was reddish. It was almost as difficult to adjust my eyes to as total darkness. Incense was burning, an erotic scent like patchouli, and as Fanny guided me to a sofa and poured the drink-she seemed to have no trouble finding her bearings-I glimpsed gilt hangings studded with fake gems on the walls, brass ornaments on the furniture and one statue in particular, a huge bronze circle in which a four-armed god seemed to dance. In the flickering red light I saw him move.

Fanny held out a glass of warm punch to me and I took it without taking my eyes off the statue.

‘What’s that?’

‘Shiva, god of the moon,’ replied Fanny. ‘And of death.’ I drank to hide the abrupt return of my unease. The liquid was sharp, cramping my tastebuds; and beneath the sharpness was something almost bitter.

‘Idolatrous nonsense,’ I said more loudly than I intended. ‘It looks…quite savage.’

‘The world is savage,’ said Fanny lightly. ‘I find him a most appropriate god. But if he disturbs you…’ her voice trailed off, questioningly and with a touch of mockery.

Stiffly I said: ‘Of course not. It’s only a statue.’

‘Then I’ll leave you for the time, Mr Chester.’ She cleared her throat politely, and I remembered to pay her, fumbling guineas out of my pocket. Ever-ladylike, she palmed the coins as deftly as a conjuror, seeming hardly to notice them. Then she turned to the door.

‘I’ll allow Marta to introduce herself,’ she said, and left.

For a moment I watched the door in bewilderment, expecting the girl to come in, then a tiny noise behind me alerted me and I spun round, half spilling the drink in a glittering arc around me. At that moment I was certain, with a superstitious conviction, that the statue of Shiva had come to life and was reaching for me with his four arms, his eyes alive with malicious intent. I almost screamed.

Then I saw her sitting in the shadows, hardly visible against the heavy folds of an Indian tapestry. I regained my composure as best I could, trying to restrain my anger at being caught unawares. I finished the drink Fanny had given me and put the glass on the mantelpiece; by the time I turned again I was calmer, able to smile reassuringly at the girl, squinting to make out her features in the troubling light.

I saw that she was young, maybe fifteen or so, and very slim and slight. Her long, loose hair looked black, but her eyes might have been any colour, for they reflected the red lamps like rubies. Her eyelids and eyebrows were heavily painted with kohl and gilt, and her skin had a kind of golden warmth which I associated with gypsies. She was wearing a silken kimono of some dull red material which accentuated her slim, childish figure, and around her neck and arms and in her ears heavy crimson stones smouldered and sparkled.

For a second I caught my breath at her beauty.

‘M…Marta?’ I faltered. ‘Is that your name?’

‘I’m Marta,’ she said. Her voice was a whisper, slightly hoarse but with a soft country accent tempered with a touch of aloof mockery, rather like Fanny’s own.

‘But I…’ Realizing: ‘I met you before. I went into your room by accident.’