The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

The Adventure of Thomas the Rock Star in the Court of the Queen of Faery by John Grant

Because of his name, they called him Mad Tom and they called him Tom o’ Bedlam and they called him Thomas the Rhymer, but really he was Thomas the Rock Star, and he played lead guitar for Critical Assembly, ignoring the screams and yells of the fans and focusing entirely on his fingers and the frets as behind him the banked speakers sang and wailed as they slid from something that was a bit like Mozart to something that was a bit like Bo Diddley to something that was a bit like Led Zep. He was the quiet one of Critical Assembly, the one who always wasn’t there when the groupies penetrated the carefully lax security and gatecrashed the band’s hotel suite. He was the one whose long, pale, smooth, almost girlish face, framed in hair the colour of polished oak, the unloved imagined as they gave themselves comfort to keep away the loneliness of the dark.

He was the one who once, after a gig, when the great auditorium was empty except for the echoes of that night’s excitements, found a backstage corridor that he’d never noticed before, and out of curiosity followed it to see where it would lead him, and discovered himself abruptly in a place of forest and insects from which there was no easy road back.

The only thing that startled him about this sudden transition was how little startled by it he was. Although somewhere inside him a little voice was protesting that passageways backstage in a Chicago concert hall don’t lead to daylit leafy glades, that the whole thing was an outrage, most of him simply accepted the overwhelming sensation of naturalness coursing through him. He was not to know at the time that this feeling came about because he had been ensnared by enchantment, although later of course he would recognize what had happened.

Thomas stood by the edge of a small, clear, slow-moving stream, watching the reflection of his face with behind it tiny white puffy clouds in the blue sky, and rapid, unexpected, polychromatic darts of motion that he knew must be kingfishers flying overhead. He let his mind float like a dead twig on the current; he breathed deeply of air that sparkled like cold water and had not been breathed before him by automobiles.

A sound that was no sound, coming from behind, made him turn.

She was standing just inside the shadows at the edge of the trees, watching him through eyes that were the green of jade yet flecked with occlusions of copper. She was wearing a gauzy gown upon which his eyes refused to focus, and she had hair spun of midnight that hung to her thighs. Her skin was as dark as the shadows that framed her.

“Who are you?” he said quietly, afraid his voice might burst the world.

She said nothing, just continued to stare at him. A light breeze made the folds of her gown move like smoke. A sharp tongue-tip peeped from between her lips and flicked sideways, then was gone again.

“Who are you?” he said again. “My name is Thomas. I’ve not long arrived -” he spread his hands “- here.”

She nodded slowly and beckoned to him that he should follow her. Without pausing to see that he was following, she turned and walked slowly into the woods, the twigs and the grasses turning aside so that they wouldn’t catch in the light cloth of her gown. After a moment’s hesitation, he hurried to catch up to her, but always she remained the same distance ahead of him even though the pace of her walking never changed.

At length they arrived at another glade, a cuplike space among the trees into which the sunlight fell to fill it. Here she halted, waiting with her back towards him, still silent. The sounds of his feet through the undergrowth seemed clumsy and intrusive to him as he moved to join her.

She was taller than he had thought, only slightly shorter than he was himself.

Thomas reached out to touch her shoulder, but before his fingers came close she spread her arms high to either side, so that the soft folds of the misty cloth unfurled and he saw that it was not cloth or a gown at all, that these were her wings – wings the colour of a young birch-tree’s bark – and that she was naked aside from them.

Slowly she turned again, this time to face him, and she gazed deep into his eyes. As for Thomas, he found himself lost within her gaze, seeing there a ruthless sensuality, a cold exploration of all the myriad varieties of passion, a cynical wisdom of carnality.

He shuddered in the chill of her stare, terrified by its inhumanity, wanting to flee, flee, flee from her through the forest and somehow back to the grimy familiarity of the deserted concert hall and beyond that into the safety of a cab and finally the impersonal sanctuary of an anonymous luxury hotel room, but at the same time a flame kindled in his loins so that he could not move.

At last she dropped her eyes from his, slowly lowering also her arms. Freed from the grip of her gaze, he too looked downward, seeing the curves of her dark body, her small breasts, the flatness of her belly – unmarked for, as he suddenly knew, she had not been born – and the woven triangle of grasses that, in place of hair, hid her sex from him.

She put the tips of her long dark fingers on his chest, then ran them down towards his waist, beneath which his treacherous excitement loomed. Thomas knew what she wanted him to do. Taking a pace backwards, he shrugged off his black T-shirt, eased his feet out of his shoes, unfastened fumblingly his black jeans and shoved them down so that his shaft sprang free, then further down until he could stumble and kick his way out of them, all the time aware of his own ungainliness beside her silent grace.

He stood, finally, before her. She washed her gaze slowly down over his body, and he felt its soft caress exploring him. When she reached the place where his manhood jutted it was as if she had taken it gently into her mouth, and he felt the heat of his groin build even higher. He shut his own eyes, then, leaning his head back, feeling his lips tight against his teeth as all of his awareness fled toward the focus of her attention. And then, just as he feared he was hurtling irrevocably towards the precipice, her gaze fell to his thighs and his calves and finally his feet, where it lingered, stirring the small hairs there.

She spoke for the first time, her voice like the hushing of the trees as the sun fades.

“Open your eyes, Thomas. You have no choice but to see me.

He obeyed. She was only inches from him, staring earnestly once more at him. She put a finger to his lips, sealing them, while with the other hand she took his pulsing shaft, fondling its ripe end with her small palm, draping her fingers down its sides.

Still he was filled with fear; still he was filled with desire. He had never dared to venture so far into this forest of the senses before.

“I am the Gate,” she whispered between sharp white teeth. “Only through me may you enter the court.”

She put both her hands behind his neck, then raised one of her long, long legs and wrapped it around his waist. The woven grasses of her pubis rubbed scratchily against him, stirring new sensations into life. After a moment that seemed like a day to him, she lifted herself, putting her other leg around him, her little breasts flat against his chest, and lowered her hips so that he was gradually engulfed in her warm, mossy dampness until he was entirely inside her.

She weighed almost nothing. Gently, knowing she had far greater strength than humanity could encompass yet afraid for her fragility nonetheless, he held the rounded smoothness of her small hard buttocks, pushing his fingers into the crack between them, then scampering his touch up the cleft to the hollow of her spine’s base. In response she let one of her own hands fall from his shoulders and behind and under her, taking the bag of his balls into a clasp so slight that, because he could hardly feel its touch, he felt through every last shred of his body.

She made no attempt to ride up and down upon him, and he obediently kept his own hips still. But then he felt slow ripples deep inside her, flickering regularly along the length of him, squeezing him knowingly like hands in velvet gloves, each time moving on just before he’d fully sensed their presence. Sensing that at the coaxing of these unseen hands his time was approaching, he shifted his mouth to hers, wanting to kiss her, to put his tongue into her in imitation of his rigid shaft; but she pulled her face away almost waspishly and instead he watched over her shoulder as a deer trod into the clearing and paused there, ready at any instant to bolt, sombrely regarding their two entwined bodies motionless in the near-invisible sheath of her wings.

The pulses inside her were growing stronger and more urgent now, increasing in frequency and intensity and heat. He knew his hands on her back and her buttocks were losing their coordination, jerking from one place to another, all smoothness gone from their strokings; he was powerless to control them as his consciousness shrank until all there was in the world was the forceful moist waves of pressure on him.

Urgency built up around the base of his shaft – an urgency that could not long be resisted. Her grip firmed on his balls, which rolled in her hand, the sack tautening.

Now his hips did begin to move. A dam broke inside him. He threw back his head and yelled a bestial shout at the canopy of leaves as the surges forced their way ponderously up the length of him and broke free of him, great rolling waves breaking against the shore of her depths. Forever it lasted – pleasure, yes, delight, the joy of attainment, but there was pain there as well, the pain of so much being drawn out of him, as if what he was losing were not just his seed but all the juices of his body, sucked from him, stolen.

And, astonishingly, she screamed too, arching her back, throwing her hair behind her to carpet the turf, her loins at last beginning to jerk against him, her tightness pulling on him as if trying to draw still more out of him. As his awareness leached back into him he felt as if the swollen end of his penis were raw and bleeding and being rubbed bloodier. And still a further pulse forced its way up his rigid, unyielding shaft, oozing rather than flooding into her, its energy drained.

His body juddered one last time, and then his shoulders slumped. Drawing hoarse rasps of breath, Thomas stared despondently down the length of her dark, wing-draped back and her torrent of hair at the short grass of the glade, feeling the sting of tears at the rear of his eyes. She rested her shadow-light head in the crook of his shoulder, her nose and lips against the side of his neck, her eyelashes brushing his skin.

“What is your name?” he muttered hoarsely.

“You may not know that,” she hissed in his ear. “All you may know is that I am the Gate.”

At long, long last she peeled herself from him, removing herself with a surprising delicacy. Cloaking herself in her wings, she dropped to her knees in front of him to lick and suck the final remnants of their mixed juices from him.

Standing, she spoke once more in that strange sibilant voice of hers, that voice like an echo heard after it’s gone.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “The Gate to Her court is open, but you are not permitted to see anything of your entrance there.”

Thomas made to grab for his clothes, but she halted him with a fingertip. She did the same when he moved to cover his unflagging erection with his hands. “You may not shield your maleness from Her sight,” she sighed.

He gaped at her, but her face offered no explanation. Then he shut his eyes as she had told him to do, and she whirled her wings about them both like mist creeping close to a hillside, and when she said for him to open his eyes once more they were in the court of the Queen of Faery.

The throne upon which She sat was a great black bear, its jaws agape and its pink tongue lolling amid yellow teeth; around its neck was a ruffle of crimson. To either side of her stood or knelt half a score of winged men, their skins a spectrum; all were naked, some vastly priapic, others flaccid; all wore crowns of flowers knotted about their brows, while hair of many colours tumbled and looped to their shoulders; none had navels, for like all here except Thomas they had not been born. Other flowers grew in purples, blues, vermilions and veridians all over the floor of this great forest clearing, and swarmed up the boles and along the branches of the trees beside it, so that it was to Thomas as if he were standing in a huge womb of flowers. In front of the Queen and her frond-bearing male retinue stood a dozen winged women, their skins as diverse in colour as those of the men, their hair all waist-length or longer and varying from the blue-black of a cave’s deepest depths to the yellow of a bird’s beak, and each as strangely lovely to look upon as the woman who had been the Gate, who was now gone from Thomas’s side. The women, like the men, were naked, but some had vines growing out of and over them, so that it was as if they wore knotted serpents and bright flint arrowheads.

Yet Thomas saw little of Her retinue except for glances at the fringes of his vision. The Queen herself seized his gaze and fixed it upon her form.

She seemed both tall and tiny at the same time. Her hair was the colour of sunlight, and covered the ground around the throne upon which she held herself. Her eyes were the pink of coral, smouldering briefly to a deeper, more passionate yet somehow colder red when her interest was caught – as it was, just now and then, while she studied Thomas. Her skin was the silver-yellow of a young birch’s bark, like the wings of the Gate; her own wings shimmered in the gleaming cacophony of the inside of an oyster’s shell. Her eyebrows were cusped arches; her lips were like the curled succulent leaves of a rainforest plant. Under her wings she wore nothing, and Thomas could see enough through them to know that she was slender-waisted and smooth-bellied. Her breasts were full and yet not over-large, pale apples with the coral of her eyes at their tips. Between her legs was an intricate, tightly woven, perfectly symmetrical garland of daisies and cornflowers. The fingers of her hands were twice as long as mortal fingers, and twice as supple.

One of those hands was now outstretched toward Thomas.

“Come here to me, lost stranger,” she said in a voice shrouded in distance yet full of power, like an unseen waterfall.

Thomas’s legs moved without his command, so that in a moment he stood directly before her. He was acutely conscious of his manhood still prodding in front of his belly, its full tip licked shiny clean by the one who was the Gate.

She ran her hand around the curve of his cleanshaven cheek, and tucked his hair on one side behind his ear. He felt her sweetly peaty breath on his face. “You could almost be one of us, mortal,” she said. “Almost one of us.”

And then she slapped him across the mouth, hard, so that the world spun, blurred, bled brine.

“But not one of us! she shouted as he dropped to his knees, clutching his head between his hands. He is a mortal trespasser here in the world of Faery, and as such he has offended your Queen! Take him! Take him and stake him to my wheel, while I devise his torments!

Two of her handmaidens moved swiftly to Thomas’s side, and not ungently forced him to his feet. His vision still numb from the Queen’s blow, he followed their tuggings near blindly, obedient as they pressed his back against an upright four-spoked wheel and spread his arms and his legs, tying his limbs each one to a spoke with a rope stranded of springy vines. His head hung so that his chin brushed his chest. Yet, though he slouched, his shaft still stood firm, unabashed by his pain.

“Raise your head,” commanded the Queen’s voice. “Raise it, and look at me, mortal.” Her hands were on his shoulders, her fingernails knife-like against the flesh there.

He did as he was told, and saw the full, splendid, beautiful cruelty of her silvery face with its flaring pink eyes.

“I could do with you anything I wished, mortal,” she said, “and my courtiers here would call it fair justice for your intrusion into my realm. But tell me, first, what punishment is it that you think yourself you deserve?”

“I strayed,” he mumbled. “I was brought here. I stepped through a portal that I did not know was there. I have not despoiled your land with my presence by intention, your majesty, but only stumbled into it.”

“That does not lessen your crime,” said the Queen. To urge her point she traced her fingernails down over his chest and belly, stopping just short of his groin, drawing rivulets of bright blood from beneath the skin, the heel of one palm touching the plum-like end of his shaft. “There is no such thing as chance; all things have their causes; I permit no talk of accident in my court.”

Thomas thought quickly. “But I am a mere mortal,” he said, his voice feeling clumsy in his mouth now that his lip was beginning to swell. “How could I even aspire to have knowledge of the ways of your court, great Queen?”

She turned away with a flounce and a flow of her great iridescent wings and her cascade of hair.

“You two -” she designated a pair of her women with a beckon of her hand “- you two torment him as you will.”

Thomas steeled himself to bear savage, brutal pain, and sure enough the pain did come. The handmaids opened their mouths and smiled to show the predatory shine of their needle-sharp teeth, then moved around behind him, one to either side. At first all they did was stroke him, their small but long hands flitting down his back and buttocks. One inquisitive finger twitched briefly in through the ring of his anus; another tracked a line from there to the folds where the bag of his scrotum hung from the base of his branch. Blood dripped between his legs. If such a thing were possible his shaft grew even harder as he surrendered himself to the ecstasy of the pains they were inflicting on him.

And then, as the Queen and the rest of her court watched him unconcerned, one of the handmaids bit him in the side, just above the waist. The blissful agony rushed through him like the crescendo he had shared with the Gate only minutes ago, and he let out a shout that was in part protest, in part triumph.

Another bite, and another. His blood was flowing freely now. The handmaids raked their fingernails down his back and buttocks, carving out channels of erotic anguish, sending him into a frenzy that was distanced from the world by redly pulsing banks of fog. A hand snaked around him and clutched his maleness tightly, moving the skin back and forth over the wood within; yet he hardly noticed this, so sensitive had the rest of his body become to the delicious lances of pain that the paired courtiers were inflicting upon him. Already, though he had been drained by the Gate so lately, another flood was building up inside him…

“Halt!” cried the Queen.

The handmaids’ fingers and mouths froze in place.

“Let him alone.”

They stood aside from him, and walked demurely away from him to join the others by the Queen. There was blood staining their wings and mouths and bodies; his blood.

“Attend to me,” the Queen commanded Thomas, and all at once his vision was crystal clear, so that the colours and the lights in the clearing were brighter than they could possibly be, as if he were seeing them through a shattered prism.

“You are mine,” she said, “to do with as I will. Do you understand me?”

Although his blood was puddling at his feet, although his mind was still staggering from the pounding it had received, Thomas summoned up some last shred of resolution. “You may torture me until I am dead before you, but I will never be yours,” he said.

Her eyes flamed.

She said nothing, but gestured to two of her priapic courtiers. Without needing a word of instruction, they hurried forward until they were standing one to either side of Thomas, their mighty phalluses brushing his blood-slicked sides. Then, still without a word being spoken, they abruptly pushed against the wheel so that it fell backwards to lie flat with a crash against the ground, and Thomas spreadeagled on top of it. His wrists and ankles feeling torn, he stared at the sky through the lacing of the twigs and leaves.

The Queen came into view above him, her wings draped like glittering cobwebs around her, in one hand a bunch of stinging nettles. She stared down at him, her lips skewed into a grimace of scorn.

“The ladies of my court were too gentle with you, it seems,” she said, her voice now almost thoughtful.

The Queen knelt down beside him, as a lover might kneel, and the act tricked his mind into anticipating an exquisite kiss or a soft caress. Instead, she placed the stinging nettles to his chest and then slowly, deliberately guided the constellation of erupting agony down across the plain of his stomach to wrap the plants around his maleness.

His scream as countless points of sharp pain shot through his raw skin caused birds to flee jabbering in fear from the trees. And yet still more powerful than the anguish he felt was the delight, the sinister eroticism of the pricking plants. The Queen kneaded the nettles into and around the bulb of his penis, so that the sublime agony grew greater and ever greater; and yet his mind was not flinching and cringing away from the pain but was instead embracing it and dancing with it in a slow ballet of sensation.

Thought departed Thomas; sight departed him too, as did pride and selfhood, until all that was left of him were the splinters of pain he felt.

And then the Queen threw the nettles aside.

“Attend to me, Thomas!” she commanded once more, and his rationality and vision returned. She was leaning over him again, her face and her gaze no less merciless than before. “Are you mine yet?” she whispered.

“I am mine! he whispered in return.

The Queen gave a shout of fury. The small white clouds seemed to pause their scuttling across the blue, aghast. She spread her shimmering wings outspread until they seemed broader than the sky to him. From where he lay on the wheel he could see that, between her legs, in place of the adroitly pleated garland which had once dangled there, there was now a knotted fist of rose-thorns.

She lowered her face to smile at him a truly dreadful smile. He felt his shaft jerk amid its cloud of pain in anticipatory response. The Queen picked her way fastidiously over the rim of the wheel until she was standing astride his chest, then she cast her long, long hair forward and her wings back to create a cavern that contained only the two of them. Still looking upward, he could discern through the gloom the lips of her sex spying at him from among the thorns, with a nubbin like an infant’s thumb just above.

The Queen frowned down at him. “Must I torment you further?” she said.

“You have not yet tormented me at all,” Thomas replied. “You and your lackeys have not done anything to me that I have not welcomed, have not devoutly desired. I believed I had come to this place by mischance, but now I see that I brought myself here of my own yearning, that I guided my own destiny until my footsteps brought me to the portal that led me from the mortal world.”

“But you are not mine?” she said, her frown deepening. “You are in my power to destroy.”

“That is where I wish to be, said Thomas.

She slowly went to her knees, her legs across his strained shoulders, so that her sex was only inches from his face. “You are not terrified by the cruelty of La Belle Dame Sans Merci?”

“I adore your cruelty.”

The Faery Queen lowered herself still further, so that the thorns at her pubis ground into Thomas’s face. His tongue darted forward through the thicket of points to dash its cut tip against the moist acorn he had earlier seen. Blood sprang from his cheeks and his lips and his nose as his tongue made its frantic foray again and again. Moaning her own delight, the Queen pressed ever more firmly against him, so that now his tongue could caress all the folds of her sex, tracing them around and around, lapping her saltiness, then returning ever and again to tease the hard little nub once more.

The Queen was moaning her pleasure as she rode his face. “You are my captive,” she grunted softly, each word isolated from the next.

“And you are my captor,” agreed Thomas, the words likewise seeming to be pulled individually from him. His back was arching against the ties that held him to the wheel, his hips in free air, the spasms of his excitement coming ever more frequently, ever more strongly, so that a new dull ache of his shaft came to replace the lingering pain of the nettle-stings.

And then the Queen’s thighs suddenly locked around him and she growled like a wolf – growled once, growled twice, paused, howled as if to a cold and distant moon. From her sex poured sweetly salty nectar, golden in the twilight of the cavern she had made for them, glistening as it trickled through the knitted thorns.

“I am your captive,” said Thomas softly to the heat of her sex, smelling her elixir, then drinking of it all that his bleeding tongue and lips could seize.

For a long time the Queen quivered, her cool smooth thighs flat against him, and for a long time did Thomas drink of her essence, absorbing it into him so that gradually, gradually some of her became a part of him and he, Thomas, became partly her, his eternally powerful captor. There was no world at all outside the curtains of her hair and wings; only those two, each possessing the other, sharing her soul.

And then there was a cool breeze on Thomas’s face. He opened his eyes, which he had closed some while before in order more fully to savour the taste of her, and saw that she had swept her hair back over her silvery-yellow shoulder, letting the world in once more.

She was smiling at him, her coral eyes gentle at last, and now he saw that her cruelty had been only a mask donned for him; or perhaps this lover’s guise was just another mask that she was wearing, for he knew from having drunk from her that the Queen of Faery was not just a single person, as mortals must be, but many.

The Queen stood and stepped away from him. She swirled her wings once, and where there had been courtiers there were now only tall sunflowers, bobbing their heads as the light wind played with them. She swirled her wings twice, and the vines that held Thomas’s wrists and ankles to the wheel sprang apart, wriggling away from him to tunnel themselves into the ground like blindworms. She swirled her wings a third and final time, and the blood on Thomas’s body dried into flakes that became red butterflies which rose in a cloud above him and fluttered away on the air; and where there had been wounds on him there was now unmarked smooth skin; and where there had been pain all through him there was now only warmth.

She reached down to take his mortal hand in her long-fingered faery one, and pulled him to his feet. When he was standing directly in front of her she threw one winged arm around him as a cloak of light; her other wing she draped across his manhood, which, hard as ever, felt the weightless touch of her gossamer. He put his own hands to her breasts, so that her firm little nipples pried between his fingers, then dropped one hand to her sex, garlanded as it was in flowers once more.

“I am entirely your captive,” he said.

“We are both the captive, both the captor, she corrected. We are both now merely the one, Thomas.

Then she led him to another patch of grass, and laid him down on his back, and straddled him, guiding his eager ship into her warm wet harbour where, time after time as the day rolled into evening and the bright birds watched, he gave her in return the essence of himself.

Thomas remained with the Queen of Faery for a week and a day, but when he returned to our world through the portal, guided there by the Gate, he found that all the others of his band Critical Assembly were now fat and fifty except one, who was fat but dead this past year. Without him, and without his guitar that could sing of the spaceways where the stars are a blaze of cold and distant light, they had turned from music to paint their world instead with children and three-car garages.

But Thomas, still youthful though his mind was now aeons old, took to playing lead guitar with Look at the Evidence, where he stands on the stage as if apart from them, ignoring the screams and yells of the fans and focusing entirely on his fingers and the frets while behind him the banked speakers sing and wail as they slide from something that is a bit like Mozart to something that is a bit like Bo Diddley to something that is a bit like Led Zep. He is the quiet one of Look at the Evidence, the one who always isn’t there when the groupies penetrate the carefully lax security and gatecrash the band’s hotel suite. He is the one whose long, pale, smooth, almost girlish face, framed in hair the colour of polished oak, the unloved imagine as they give themselves comfort to keep away the loneliness of the dark.

And what they see set in his face above them in their solitude are eyes that are deeper than the ocean of time himself, and wiser than the night. And the hands of his that they feel upon them are the sensitive hands that caress the neck of his guitar – hands that seem to have fingers twice as long as mortal fingers, and twice as supple.