In the Forests of the Night Read online

  “Is someone…there?” he whispered, listening intently for signs of life. But all he could perceive was a thick silence, like whatever was inside was holding its breath and waiting him out. Then he suddenly became aware of the driver’s eyes, narrow and furtive, watching him in the mirror and he laid the box quickly back down in his lap again, keeping his arms tightly around it until the taxi finally pulled up at his doorway.

  ♦♦♦♦

  His mother was serving hot chocolate to the guests in the TV room when he blundered in, keeping his Parka wrapped tightly around himself to conceal the box as he bolted for the stairs and the safety of his room.

  “I want a word with you, Stanhope,” she called sharply to his back, gesticulating at him with a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. “I need to know what’s going on, young man!”

  “Later, Mum,” he yelled, slamming his door behind him and locking it shut. He didn’t know if The Guardians existed or not, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Why, some of those losers downstairs might even be one of them in disguise. It was obvious that he could trust nobody.

  Quickly, he drew the curtains and laid the box carefully on his night table, sitting down gingerly on the bed beside it. “Now,” he whispered, “let’s see what’s really in here…”

  There was a simple catch, built into the intricate carvings of twisted tree trunks with crooked protruding roots like ravens’ claws, and he slid it back, starting as the lid rose slowly up of its own volition.

  And he was even more startled when he saw what it contained.

  The box, though just the size of his mother’s jewellery casket on the exterior, was deep and roomy inside, divided into elaborately furnished rooms like the interior of a Victorian dolls’ house, each chamber lit with small yellow lamps, the floors richly carpeted in intricate miniature Obasan rugs, the furniture perfect rococo replicas, the walls all covered in scaled-down Sanderson.

  And there, in the diminutive lounge with its little potted aspidistras and replica paintings, crouching in the shadow of a tiny grand piano, was a minuscule woman in a long grey dress, no bigger than his index finger, more like the size of his thumb.

  “Thumbelina?” he asked, incredulously.

  “Chosen one,” she sighed, relieved, her big china blue eyes glowing with adoration.

  ♦♦♦♦

  He couldn’t believe his eyes, and yet, there she was complete with her little house and all its furniture, a living and breathing little woman, looking up adoringly at him.

  “I have waited for you in the darkness for so long, chosen one,” she whispered, her voice soft and ethereal. “And my nights have been long and fearful while I dwelt in the realms of the little people.”

  He couldn’t think of any suitable reply so he just nodded.

  “But I knew you would come, chosen one, knew that the long night must eventually give way to morning and that you would come and claim me.”

  “And if I kiss you will you turn into a full-sized girl?” he asked, his voice full of hope.

  Thumbelina laughed. “Ah, the dear Brothers Grimm, what nonsense they have planted in human minds since I saw them last. No, chosen one, my magic is not as powerful as all that. But I will bestow upon you a gift far more precious in return for your allegiance and fidelity.”

  Lost for words he just nodded again.

  “I will grant you eternal youth for as long as you pledge your troth to me and keep me safe, for there are many who seek what I can give and will stop at nothing to try and obtain it. Will you guard me with your very life, chosen one?”

  He nodded again, but this time he meant it. “I will,” he whispered. “With my very life.”

  “And grant me your absolute fidelity? Even forsake the Munchkin girl that you have so recently adored?”

  He faltered for a moment and then nodded again. The sex he had just shared with Lorelei was more mind-blowing than anything that he had ever imagined experiencing in his entire life. It was a good exchange for the celibate years that lay ahead, he thought. “I am yours,” he said firmly. “I pledge you my troth and my allegiance.”

  Thumbelina laughed, reading his mind. “Oh, we will not be celibate, chosen one,” she whispered, looking up at him from under her long glittering lashes. “Come, lift me up upon your bed and let me dance for you.”

  “Dance?” he queried, but the fairy creature merely smiled, clapping her hands for music.

  Immediately a haunting melody filled the air and Thumbelina began to sway to its rhythm, and he fancied he could just make out the shadowy forms of mice against the skirting boards, clutching Japanese mandolins as she danced, her body as sinewy as a flame as she gyrated for his pleasure.

  “Are you as stiff for me as you were when I watched you with the little Munchkin, chosen one?” she asked, toying with the fastenings on her bodice.

  “More,” he gasped, still unable to believe that this was even possible.

  “Then show me,” she whispered, eyes full of promise, lips pouting and sultry.

  “You want me to strip for you?”

  She nodded, still swaying. “I have watched you naked with the little people and touched myself in the darkness. Now I want to appreciate you openly.”

  He gulped and pulled off his tee for her, letting his jeans and underpants fall to the floor, his long cock huge and curving, the foreskin pulled right back from the purple-red bell, naked and proud, glistening with fresh clear juices.

  “Lie down and lift me onto you,” she commanded in a low husky tone, and he almost came straight away as she nestled into his pubic hair and wrapped her arms around his cock, like a hippy protester desperately hugging a tree.

  The enchanted music was echoing madly in his ears, robbing him of his reason, and his cock felt like it was exploding with pleasure every time her tiny cherry lips planted a kiss upon the soft-suede skin of his shaft or the naked and exposed flesh of his head.

  “I’m going to draw your seed and bathe in your spendings,” she whispered, her arms working him slowly up and down.

  “Do it naked,” he gasped. “Please…be naked for me…”

  She smiled and nodded, quickly unfastening her gown and stepping out of it, her body completely bare save for a pair of stockings held up with ornate garters.

  “Like this, or shall I take these off too?”

  “Everything,” he groaned, eating her up with his eyes, her long auburn hair and tiny pointed little tits, heavy hips and secretive furry pussy, all warm and sleek like a sleeping ginger kitten.

  She smiled disarmingly and quickly slipped them off for him, then embraced his cock again, her body warm and electrifying against his tender flesh as she dragged his foreskin up and down the length of his, by now, pulsing shaft.

  “Now,” she whispered, raining hot kisses onto his naked head each time she exposed it. “Now, engulf me, shroud me with your very essence, and seal our union for all eternity.”

  He could feel her tiny cunt dragging against his flesh and, miraculously, feel its heat and its wetness as she ground it into him.

  “Together,” he managed to breathe back. “Wash me with your spendings as I engulf you in mine.”

  “Then cum now,” she hissed as her body tensed and she pushed herself hard onto his cock, her tiny teeth biting and her nails like claws as the tsunami of her orgasm gripped her and threw her hither and thither.

  “Oh my god,” he gasped, reeling with the pleasure and the pain as he felt his own climax take over his body, his long thin cock erupting like a volcano and shooting hot cloudy liquid into the air and all over her and himself, drenching them both with his love and desire, her eager little tongue lapping it up, her minute hands rubbing it into her skin as she consumed him, body and soul.

  “Mine for all time…” she whispered with a satisfied smile.

  ♦♦♦♦

  After two days of pou
nding on his locked bedroom door his mother sent for the police, who in turn sent for an ambulance and the social work department before breaking it down. And it took the combined strength of three officers and a paramedic armed with a hypodermic to finally subdue him, though none of them could pry the battered shoebox with the old doll inside it from his death-like grasp.

  They took him to the cottage hospital in Heysham. But they could do nothing for him there, save sedating him, and eventually a psychiatrist from the NHS interviewed him and pronounced him catatonic, adding that if he showed no improvement in seven days there would be no alternative but to commit him and lock him away in the old Cheadle Asylum on the far side of Manchester.

  His mother was distraught but, as a seaside landlady of scant means, she found herself in a blind alley, and was about to give her consent, when a man from New York came to visit her. They sat in her private front parlour and talked long into the night about the experimental facility where Stanhope could go with his box to have the care he needed and, maybe, even be cured.

  Papers were signed and custody granted and she watched, relieved, as her only son — his normally placid eyes wild and deranged — was taken by kindly nurses and transferred to a plush private facility. She sat the next morning on the slate grey steps of a pleasant old house in the Lake District and shook the American’s hand with tears of gratitude in her eyes.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” she gushed. “He’s such a sweet boy and he wouldn’t normally harm a fly…”

  “Think nothing of it,” the big American replied, patting her awkwardly with his huge clam-like hand. “That’s what we’re here for. After all, they don’t call us The Guardians for nothing, you know.”

  ♦♦♦♦

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