For 18 months my stalker persisted. Nothing worked – so I wrote a book | Ella Baxter

For a while I received anonymous letters. They were violent, perverse, sexually predatory. Each letter was written in a chaotic scrawl and detailed intimate details about my life and my body. I changed jobs and moved house, but the letters followed. They became freakier, more sexual. One whole page was filled with a description of ritual and sacrifice. Someone was stalking me. I changed jobs and moved again, further away.

Vigilant and terrified, I consulted the police, a psychic, a private detective, stalking specialists, forensic scientists, a self-defence instructor, a home-security expert. I filled out risk assessments and reports and then spent 18 months wearing clothes to bed in case I had to wake up and run.

I told a friend I was dying. “Write a letter back,” she said. We switched from coffee to wine. I opened my laptop and began to type. I wrote deep into the night. Around dawn, I heard the wooden steps to the house creak. I stopped typing, pushed my chair back and waited. I saw the door handle turn. Standing at the mouth of the corridor, I stared at the front door, narrowing my eyes in the dark. The doorknob rotated once more.

For several nights in a row, I wrote stories about the stalker breaking in and making himself a sandwich. I wrote scenes where he used my makeup brushes, tracing the edge of his face softly. I sat at the dining table with my back to the largest window, and willed him to stand on the other side of the glass and read the words as I typed. Slowly, the fear and fury drained out of my body and into my manuscript.

I bought a ski mask from a website that sold camping equipment. It was $17 and arrived one week later. It was made from dark green wool and had large eyeholes. I walked from room to room in the mask, looking through the new eyes. I stared out of the bedroom window and into the garden, imagining the stalker staring back. I waved at no one. I vacuumed. Lit candles. Played records. I danced. I enjoyed being faceless. I enjoyed feeling like him.

“Would you say the mask is a permanent thing?” my therapist asked. “Not sure,” I replied, my mask in my hands. I told her I was reborn through becoming what I feared the most. She disagreed. She believed I was reborn through the creative process. I asked if she wanted to try the mask on.

The manuscript was too nuts to ever publish. I called my agent and told her I would have to write something milder. “This can’t see the light of day,” I said twice. She asked if it felt good to write, and I told her nothing had ever come remotely close. She said that ideas lead to other ideas and that something else would come along. I thanked her for understanding and hung up the phone. Later that evening I printed out the novel, carried it into the garden, placed it on the barbecue grill and set it on fire.

The letters stopped. The nights become quiet. I moved twice more and fell pregnant. The night I gave birth someone glued the locks shut to my home. When I inspected the damage I saw there were hammer marks smattered across the wood of the door. I held my newborn in one arm and brought my face close to the dents. Someone came to my home, in the night, with a hammer. Someone stood where my own feet were and tried to force their way in. Someone came to my door?

I looked down at my baby and grew, in the space of a few seconds, 10 feet taller. I was monstrous, livid. A petrol can in the shape of a woman. My baby and I become bigger than everything else. I lifted him up to eye level and kissed his face as I walked to my study. In the subject line of a new email to my agent, I wrote: this is an arrow aimed at only one head. I attached a copy of my manuscript and used my baby’s tiny index finger to press send.