In the Forests of the Night Read online

  He acknowledged satiety just as a cautious dawn crept over the Manhattan skyline, tinting the tall buildings with foreplay tinges of pink and gold. He turned from me and slept, his big cock still stiff and hard, his pubic hair matted with dried semen like an autumn forest floor.

  But I, far from satisfied, rose naked and surveyed my surroundings. The locked room we were in was barren, the walls constructed of sheet steel and glass, the floor tiled like an abattoir.

  And, behind those thick glass panels… What? Aquariums? No, not aquariums, tanks of formaldehyde like the glass coffins in the Vatican where rows of dead popes lay in macabre repose. But these girls lay not in sleep-like tranquillity, their strangled broken necks deforming them, their eyes bulging, tongues lolling, broken dolls kept preserved by their deranged master as, what? A lesson to others? No, as trophies, badges of merits, silver cups for the prowess of the great man who fucked and murdered only to prove his greatness.

  And at the end of the bloody chamber an empty tank lay patiently awaiting its incumbent like an unmade bed.

  I looked around me for my cell phone but it was in my bag by the door. I looked around me for my clothes but they were scattered from my lust. I looked around me for a way out but Bluebeard was awake and barring the exit, cracking the knuckles on his huge hangman’s hands, his big cock enormous and salivating.

  “Calling your mother?” He asked, mocking.

  “Calling my maid,” I replied, seeing Beulah’s rotund form outside the door.

  “Ah, but she can huff and she can puff but she can’t blow this house down,” said the wolf. “I designed it myself.”

  “No, but she can punch in the code,” I replied, calling the numbers I had so carefully memorised out to her, seeing the flash of cold steel in her hand as she flung the door open, the scent of cordite ripping through the air.

  “Damn it, Miss Dulcie,” she complained. “When you ever going to learn?”

  Thumbelina

  ♦♦♦♦

  Story Seven

  In his dream he was walking along the boardwalk at Coney Island with Ray Bradbury and Lana Turner. Except it wasn’t really Coney Island, it was the Coney Island set from Imitation of Life. Which was rather disconcerting as it wasn’t the first of his dreams to be referencing a Douglas Sirk movie.

  Anyway, in this dream Ray Bradbury turns to him and says, “You know, I’ve always admired you, Stanhope. In fact, I based one of my most famous short stories on you.”

  “Oh yeah, which?” Stanhope says, all pleased. But Ray just looks at him kinda slyly and laughs.

  “Why, The Dwarf, of course,” he replies with a smirk and Lana Turner giggles, the both of them looking at him sideways like they know something.

  ♦♦♦♦

  And, yes, when he was being honest with himself Stanhope had to admit that he did have a thing for small women. Not small as in schoolgirls or young-in-years-small or anything like that, but small as in small-in-height — less than five feet tall or smaller, much smaller. And, yes, alright then, dwarves, if you will.

  It had all started fairly innocently, of course, as these things often do. He had been standing in the small grocery store in their seaside town, deep in thought, trying to make up his mind between Coca-Cola and Doctor Pepper, when this voice behind him said, “Excuse me, would you mind reaching a can of Diet Pepsi for me?” and he turned to behold the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Except she wasn’t a proper woman like the ones he masturbated over in his magazines. Well, actually, she was a proper woman, and way hotter than any of his magazine girls, in fact. But instead of the leggy versions he normally leered at, this beauty was only four foot six with luscious blonde hair, pouty ruby lips and the most fantastic tits he’d ever seen.

  “Diet Pepsi?” she said again, barely suppressing the impatience in her tone. “I can’t reach it, will you help me?”

  “Sure, sure,” he’d stammered, reaching for the can. “But don’t you want the full sugar version, you don’t need to diet, I mean, you’re great the way you are…” But the woman had just grabbed her drink and stalked off angrily towards the cash register, muttering something uncomplimentary about fucking nerds as she went.

  And that should have been that. But Stanhope just couldn’t get the image of her out of his head and, the soft drinks question forgotten, he hurried back home and into his bedroom, yanking down his zipper with one hand as he did so, his cock already like a broom pole and curving upward with arousal as he relived his encounter in the grocer’s shop.

  At nineteen Stanhope reckoned that he had been blessed with a pretty good cock and was ready to show it off to the opposite sex and do a little pussy pleasing of his own. But, so far, the applications for his services were looking pretty thin on the ground. He was a slender, pale youth; very thin but not puny, he thought, with profuse body hair on his abdomen and chest, and, of course, a great thicket of it round his cock. And his cock itself was pretty impressive too, long and slim with low-slung balls; firm and smooth like a young sapling when it was up, which it usually was. And, all in all, he thought he’d be a really good catch if anyone ever took the trouble to find out.

  The trouble was that nobody had taken the trouble. Although there had been this one time - though they’d both agreed never to talk about it ever again - when he and his best buddy, Rodney, had jerked off together over a particularly juicy morsel in one of Rodders’ dirty mags. They had been up in Rodney’s narrow mezzanine bedroom, an architecturally cramped chamber that had somehow been squashed-in under the staircase of his mother’s house and had only one narrow window that looked out at the struts of the rickety wooden roller-coaster in the nearby fairground. Stanhope could remember it clearly. He’d been staring at the woman on the page and was aware of how painfully erect he was, when he suddenly realised that Rod was in an equal state of arousal and, before they knew what was happening, they had both started to masturbate over the magazine woman.

  At first they’d just yanked their cocks out through their flies, because that was what guys did when they stood next to each other at a sheet urinal, wasn’t it? And it didn’t make you a homosexual or anything, did it? But as they got more and more into it, first one then the other let their jeans drop and soon everything they had was out there on display.

  “Fuck, I’d thought all cocks were the same, but they’re not, are they,” Rodney had suddenly said, his eyes darting from the magazine woman’s cunt to Stanhope’s cock and then his own.

  Stanhope gulped nervously and moved his eyes from the page, where he had held them fixed since all this started, and stole a furtive glance at his friend’s cock and was amazed. Whereas his own dick was long and thin and curving, Rodney’s was thick and stocky, his balls tight and compact, his shaft knobbly with swollen veins, the monster standing out straight in front of him like a monolith.

  “We could so fuck women as a two-some, you and me,” Rodney went on, yanking hard at his own dick, the head huge and weeping fluids. “We could just fill both their holes, me in front, you behind…”

  And Stanhope had visualised it, some curvy little fox from Penthouse sandwiched between them both, his cock right up her tight little ass while Rodders fucked her in her pussy, their two volatile members grazing one another through the thin membrane of her lower passages. And then he had started to cum, in perfect sync with his friend, both of them shooting great jets of scalding white semen all over the magazines and each other, their cocks arching with desire as they thrust futilely into the empty air, bare buttocks pumping in the greenish light of the early-season rain and the rattle of the roller-coaster as it trundled by the uncurtained window.

  “Whew,” Rodney muttered, still milking his big thick cock for fat globules of sperm. “Intense, man…” But Stanhope said nothing, still reeling from the shock of what he had just done.

  And after that he didn’t see so much of Rodders.

  ♦
♦♦♦

  However, to get back to the dwarf thing. Stanhope had been pleasuring himself like a milking machine for three whole days now, running through every publication he owned in his quest for the perfect orgasm, but all to no avail. And so, ragged with frustration, he cracked open the clay pot on his window sill, the money he had earmarked for a new walkman the next time he went into Manchester, and went down to Mister Ahmed’s newsagents on the front and boldly parted the bead curtains at the back of the ordinary magazine rack. Then, feeling like Bluebeard’s wife, he took a deep breath and tiptoed quickly into the gleaming incense-scented den beyond.

  “No more than ten minutes, Stanhope,” Mister Ahmed’s voice called after him through a rent in the fabric of the universe. But he couldn’t heed the words as he tumbled head first into wonderland, the back room with its soft Turkish rugs and faded red flock wallpaper calling him home like a lost pilgrim blundering into the garden of Earthly delights.

  Here the air was filled with wanton apparitions, and every possible form of debauchery embraced him and whispered words of seduction through its honeyed lips. There were magazines full of huge-breasted ladies; young honeys with their hair scraped into bunches and mature grannies holding open print frocks, their low slung bosoms bare and inviting. Lactating mothers beckoned, prim county girls promised unspeakable acts with their gleaming steeds, and mascara-eyed boys in tiny thongs thrust their sizable cocks in his eager direction.

  “Have to hurry you, Stanhope,” Mister Ahmed’s voice floated through the ether, and Stanhope suddenly visualised the shopkeeper dressed in a quiz-master’s glittering Lurex jacket, thrusting a microphone into his face as he fumbled for the right words for tonight’s star prize.

  Peaches, Juicy Jugs, Slutty She-Males, Bangkok Lady Boys, Mature Mamas, Nasty Vixens, Bondage Fillies, Pony Girls, Tough Little Twinkies, Studs and Stallions. The titles flew mockingly around his face as he searched vainly for the correct answer, and then, nestled primly on the top shelf, its cover only dimly visible through the thick cellophane bag that enveloped it, was what he sought.

  “Midgetina,” he breathed triumphantly to the fantasy host. “That’s my answer, ten tiny Munchkin misses all naked for my debauched delight.”

  “That’s twenty pounds for that one, Stanhope,” Mister Ahmed said warningly. “You sure it’s what you want?”

  And he nodded. After all, there would be plenty of time to save up for another walkman next summer.

  ♦♦♦♦

  He was hard well before he got home, his long thin cock almost panting with desire and quite visible through his jeans when his Parka flapped open in the brisk sea breeze. Girls shivering in fluttering spotted dresses made eyes and cat-called after him as he hurried past them along the prom, clutching his precious cargo to his chest, but he heard them not, so intent was he on his purpose. Upon his return, he ignored his mother’s greeting, threw his coat at the hallstand and mounted the stairs two at a time, unzipping himself before he had even shut his bedroom door behind him.

  The pink and white wrapping blandly stating, Ahmed’s Seafront Stores, Rock Specialists, peeled off like a stripper’s leotard, and he tore the brittle cellophane to shreds as he ripped it asunder, desperately jerking at his cock with his left hand as he thumbed the pages, groaning in pleasure as he beheld the minuscule delights within.

  The magazine was small and crudely printed, its glossy pages redolent with the smell of cheap printer’s ink, but he didn’t care. The girls were all that mattered. And, as promised, there were ten of them, the tallest just five feet in height, the smallest barely making three foot ten. Some were in costumes, some disrobed like strippers in their sets, others were just plain naked. And they were all so different. Some were aggressive and young with razor cuts and punkish makeup, defiantly spreading their legs and displaying their perfectly formed little cunts. Faded circus dwarves posed more sedately in their old spangled costumes, pulling their sparking bodices down to reveal ruby-red rouged nipples; while fat insolent little Munchkins grinned cheekily at him as they stuck their dimpled ass cheeks into the photographers’ probing lenses.

  ♦♦♦♦

  He had no idea how many times he came nor at whom. All he knew was that when he woke up in the small hours he was lying on the floor by his bed, the magazine and his underpants covered in dried semen that crackled like frost-caressed leaves when he moved, his dick feeling like it had just been put through a mangle. Twice.

  He slept fitfully for a few more hours, but by breakfast time he was up again, literally. And while his mother clattered in the kitchen downstairs, dishing up greasy platters of bacon and eggs for hungry holiday-makers, he eased his way through the whole magazine again, delaying the urge to splash spunk everywhere until he reached the very end of the book.

  And it was difficult but he managed it, just. His cock sore and inflamed as he tugged his normally fluid foreskin up and down over his red-raw and aching head, he licked his fingers to keep the rhythm moist and smooth, releasing the pressure and caressing his big heavy balls when it got too much and he thought he was going to cum. But, finally, he was there, and Princess Carlotta, a buxom middle-aged lady of four foot eight dressed only in an old pantomime velvet and ermine robe, dropped her last garment and stood naked before him in just her crown and jewels, her tiny breasts perky with sugar-pink nipples, her freshly-shaved pussy wet and inviting.

  And he could feel his orgasm building up inside him like wire rope on a winch that has been wound tighter and tighter until it snaps and lashes out, slicing through the air and slashing at everything in its path with deadly force, his own cum shooting out of him the same way, zigzagging across the eiderdown and onto the precious pages of the already-stained magazine, his guttural lust for the bare, diminutive cunt quite audible as he pumped more and more fluid out of himself and onto the pictures.

  “Oh fuck!” he muttered, seeing the cheap ink starting to run and grabbing a tissue to dab ineffectually at the stain. And that was when he saw it. Amidst the usual adverts for mail-order marital aids and obedient oriental brides. A small discreet box in an old-fashioned garnet-coloured font that simply stated, Tom Thumb’s Club, You Will Be Amazed, and an address at the far end of the promenade in his own seaside town.

  ♦♦♦♦

  He spent the rest of the day accruing money from any place he could get it: the penny jar in his wardrobe, an old post office account that he thought he’d closed years ago, the rest of his walkman fund and even his mother’s tips plate in the front vestibule. And all in all he scraped together fifty quid, not a fortune but enough to do some damage at Tom Thumb’s, he thought.

  It had been yet another grey and drizzly early summer day in a typically disappointing season and, to make matters worse, a thick sea fog had crept in at about six that evening, quickly blanking out the red warning lights on the rotten-teeth stumps of the ruined pier and caressing the faces of drunken holiday-makers with cold, dead fingers like a drowned ghost desperately trying to find its lost lover.

  Not that Stanhope even saw it, of course. He had waited-in as long as he could bear, pacing his small attic room like a caged tiger in a tiny circus cage, before finally striking out for the boulevards at a little before ten. It was dark by now, the coloured lights of the fairground and seafront fast-food stalls blurred and muted by the thick mist, the hiss and steam of hotdog men blending with the murky night and turning everything into a lurid modern-day impressionist water colour.

  The club was in Sandylands, on the darker side of the promenade where only the most ambitious of holidaymakers ventured after dark. The strings of coloured lights that had lit his way ended at the tail of Ocean Boulevard, his path now illuminated only by the warm glow of boarding house windows and the melancholy swish of light from the distant Walney lighthouse across the dark and brooding water. The road was quiet here, with just the gentle hiss of the ebb tide caressing the smooth pebbles of the beach below and a fe
w half-discernable snatches of conversation from open windows. He strode onwards by faith alone, his aching cock driving him without respite.

  Some fishermen were casting into the dark water from the old concrete balustrade, their busy hands illuminated in chiaroscuro by the little greenish miners’ lamps they wore strapped to their heads, and they whispered and nudged each other as they watched him spot the small red neon sign and gravitate to it like a lost ship following a beacon in on a stormy night.

  The club was nestled in a seedy basement, almost hidden from the street above by an old wrought iron railing that led down some stone steps to a heavy door, insulated against the night by thick velvet drapes the colour of midnight.

  And now he found himself in a cramped vestibule with yet another door leading inwards — locked — and a tiny box office window where an obese little lady sat staring coldly at him, her skimpy red satin dress barely covering her huge expanse of rotund white breasts.

  “And how old are you, my bonny lad?” she asked, slightly mockingly, her eyes quickly taking in his spindly frame beneath the open Parka, the tight drainpipe jeans and the anticipatory bulge in his crotch. “This is a club for adults, y’know.”

  Stanhope flushed bright scarlet. “I’m nineteen,” he stammered, “I have ID.”

  The woman laughed. “He has ID,” she said, not quite pleasantly, to someone behind her, and another voice laughed.

  “Let him in if he’s got the money for the ticket,” a familiar voice laughed. “I knew it wouldn’t be too long before this one sniffed us out.”

  “You know him?”

  “Oh yes, we’ve already met, and he was as stiff then as he is tonight. Quite a compliment really.”

  The fat woman looked him over dispassionately, sizing up his cock again. “It’s twenty and that doesn’t include drinks. You don’t try to touch a performer and you don’t ever expose yourself to one. That means you keep Captain Cocky there securely zipped up during the tableau. If you want to book a hostess afterwards, well, that’s another matter, but that’s at least another twenty. You got all that?”