The most important thing here is to get as much of this down as I can, while it’s still fresh in my head. I guess I’m trying to make as much sense of it as possible so I can figure out how all this happened – how it spiralled out of my control and got to this point.

I’d better get going before I lose this thread of sanity.

I wouldn’t exactly say we got the house for a song, but it was cheap enough. It was a ‘fixer upper’ for sure; a Victorian era townhouse with ‘character’ – i.e. woodworm and more mould than a Glaswegian cemetery.

Ally, my wife, suggested I take some time off and work on the house, seeing I had a tradesman background and she earned enough as a senior comms advisor for us both to live off.

She was a keeper, Ally. Loyal, gorgeous and sharp as a straight razor.

Ah shit. I told myself I wasn’t going to cry.

Too late for that now though, I guess.

Anyway, I got stuck into the house, cleaning out all the junk left behind by the old guy who had owned the place before us. Apparently in his youth he’d been some kind of explorer or adventurer, back when there were still things left to be discovered – before drones and satellites that could photograph every corner of the Earth.

There was nothing valuable left; the guy had been a hoarder of the highest order – there weren’t just piles and piles of towering newspapers to clear out, there were jars of urine stashed in the back of cupboards and mummified rat corpses everywhere. Ally and I had to live in a motel down the road for the first four months before the place was fit for human habitation.

Probably the most unusual of all the things that the old man had collected were his plants.

At the back of the place was a big glass conservatory. Now this wasn’t a modern conservatory; this ancient edifice was brass, bronze and massive slabs of yellowed glass – crusted with a century’s worth of verdigris, lichen, mildew and mould. It was filthy, humid, overgrown and clammy.

And I hated the place.

Ally had great plans to turn it into a hothouse for all sorts of succulents and tropical plants, but truth be told, if it had cost less to demolish it than it would to clean it up, I would have just torn it down.

Things went pretty well after we moved in for good and left the motel behind. Ally’s border collie, Jack, loved the place and would tear about, scratching up the already scarred wooden floors. He was a pretty good dog, but he ended up being another chore for me on top of all the shit I needed to do to keep the house liveable. Ally just didn’t have time for him like she used to, once her work ramped up and they started giving her longer hours.

But when Jack went missing, of course it was my fault.

I told Ally that I’d kept the gates closed, but she wouldn’t hear of it. None of the neighbours had seen him and I swear he’d been sleeping on his rug out the back near the conservatory.

We never saw him again.

That it caused a rift between me and Ally was never in doubt. It shoved a wedge in the little cracks in our relationship, and then we started banging on it and widening them even further.

I started to suspect she was cheating when she’d come up from downstairs in the middle of the night, saying the upstairs bathroom was playing up again. But when I put my hand on her side of the bed, it was cold – like she’d been gone for hours.

And then there was the smell – like the faintest whiff of a perfume she didn’t own, but never quite tangible.

I knew something was up.

At the time I remember thinking that I really didn’t think she was the type; I mean surely she could have shagged any of the guys at work, not gone sneaking out of our house in the middle of the night? She was smarter than that.

Or maybe she just didn’t care.

But like any bloke in the same situation, I feigned sleep and waited until she grabbed her robe, got out of bed and crept downstairs.

I should have guessed she was going out to the conservatory; she knew I hated it in there – all the sticky shit and little clingy bugs and flies. Who was she fucking in there though? A neighbour? Some internet sleaze she’d found on her mobile?

Goddamn, it’s ironic how naive I was.

The streetlight over the back fence and the almost-full moon gave both of us enough light to navigate by, and so I’d followed her into the moist jungle that filled the interior of the sprawling building. Near the corroding brass staircase that lead up to the mezzanine, she stopped and started talking.

That’s when I smelled it.

It was like the heady scent of another man’s sex, mixed with something potent and primal that fired some Neanderthal part of my brain.

But she reacted differently.

Dropping her robe, she stepped forward, naked as Eve, up to a pale, blossoming flower shaped somewhere between an oversized orchid and a vast trumpet.

And then from the depths of the flower, a huge, glistening stamen emerged, gently throbbing upward; the dark, almost feathery tip stroking her thigh obscenely and then parting the lips of her vulva like a bee burrowing in the folds of a snapdragon’s head, questing for nectar.

Her hands crept along the shaft and guided it further in, her head thrown backward and her hips convulsing as wave after wave or orgasm hit her.

It was repulsive and wrong but in another, less tangible way it was amazingly sexy.

I couldn’t help myself; my pyjama bottoms were down and my dick was in my hand before I could think about it – and I came so hard and so fast that it left my knees trembling.

Then, suddenly revolted by what I’d seen and what I’d done, I fled back to the house.

Ally seemed irresistible after that and I tried to initiate sex more and more often, with less and less success. I knew that at nights she was getting the fucking of her life from that plant, from that flower and it was driving me wild.

The crunch finally came when she was flying up north for a conference and I tried to get a sniff of intimacy from her, since she’d be gone for a week. When she shoved me away and told me I was a pig for harassing her for sex, I saw red.

The taxi took her away for her flight at eight o’clock at night and I waited until it was good and gone to get my axe out of the toolshed. That thing’s days of plugging my wife were numbered.

I remember feeling the hot rage and vindication as I plunged through the fleshy morass of tropical overgrowth, toward the brass-railed stairwell. But then a scent tickled at the lizard part of my brain and the anger melted away.

The flower was furled, like the creamy white flesh of a woman’s thighs, and the warm, golden scent of sex pumped from it and engulfed me. I stumbled forward, the axe falling from my fingers, and I fumbled at my belt as the white petals parted to show the glistening, endless pink folds waiting inside to embrace my aching erection.

I remember that it felt like the first time I had sex, the first time I’d felt my cock inside the warm, yielding flesh of a woman. It felt like that times a thousand and I came and came and came – wave after wave crashing through my brain until I staggered free and lay in the damp fronds of a tropical fern, my spent cock already rising again to the rhythm of the pumping pheromones pouring out of the blossoming organ.

It was no surprise that I went back again – every night for the rest of the week.

The stand-off happened the first night, as we both waited for the other to go to bed.

The sidelong glances and guilty looks toward the conservatory told Ally everything she needed to know, and the pregnant atmosphere in the dining room gave birth to the raging fight that had been brewing for months.

I guess she was stronger than me, because she picked up the biggest knife from the carving block and marched out to the garden, swearing black and blue she was going to cut that beautiful plant up and burn it.

But when we got inside the humid, yellowed haze of the glass boudoir, the seductive odour of that magnificent, incomparable organ turned my brain traitor. Before she could plunge the knife into that white and pink flesh, I had her on the ground with my hands around her throat and only thoughts of sex on my mind – the delicate pink lips of the flower already parted in anticipation.

When I went back to find Ally’s body, it had gone.

I probably should have guessed that something in that place was carnivorous, but it had never interested me enough to check.

Anyway, writing this has cleared my head. I feel logical and rational enough to take a can of kerosene and a match in there and destroy that thing now.

But not before I feel those warm, slick folds slide around my manhood one more time.

Just one more time.