Once (8 page)

She continued to coax those little darkening tips into thrusting peaks, pressing and kneading the soft flesh around them, using fingers, the palms of her hands, drawing the nipples out with gentle fingertips, sighing with the pleasure of it, her body quivering. Her other hand slid down over the slight roundness of her stomach, reaching down, down, diverting to one softly-defined hip, then to the other on the way, as if every part of her needed to be felt, touched, aroused, then further down to the hairless - hairless, not shaven, for there was no shadow - place between her thighs where her long fingers paused, soothed, fondled, before delving, sinking into the parting fissure, one finger, the middle one and the longest, disappearing into the fleshy folds of her cleft, re-emerging again slick with glistening, returning, her legs widening, accommodating, the pressure of her hand gentle at first but increasing the urgency and adding firmness as inner juices began to flow, collecting some of that wetness to smear the insides of her thighs, the plain area where curls of blonde hair should have grown, sinking again, this time two fingers entering to part around the little risen protuberance that afforded so much delight if served correctly, lovingly…

… the tiny lights became frenzied, as if sharing her ecstasy, their high peal reaching a new pitch, their colours almost blinding …

… and she gave out a small moan and her face tilted so that broken sunlight dappled her cheeks, blazed the fringes of her hair, and blessed her closed eyelids …

… while the frenetic light show continued around her, a number of the shining things alighting on the white plains of her skin, where they used their busy wings to delight her with delicate, rhythmic strokes. A few went to her erect nipples and excited them further…

… as her hand left her breasts to join its partner between her legs. Her moans became a long sigh and her small tongue darted out between perfect white and slightly pointed

teeth to wet her lips even more before retreating with another sigh that to Thom sounded like a musical note …

He could see the flying creatures more clearly now, as though their excitement somehow made the forms stronger, less vague: within the glows, there appeared to be diminutive human forms, these themselves somehow lit from within. He could just make out their tiny limbs, but their heads were too small to discern features of any kind. He did not study them long, for it was difficult to keep his eyes off the girl, whose rising frenzy was becoming uncontrolled, causing her to cry out.

Her age remained indeterminate to him, as was her true size given the reclining position. He was sure she was not tall though, perhaps a fraction less than five feet. And even though she appeared to possess no pubic hair, there was something about her - which had nothing to do with this unconcealed wantonness - that convinced him this was no child. Certainly she was young, for no lines or flaws spoiled her milky skin, and there was something about her expression - even beyond lascivious blissfulness - that was all too knowing for an innocent…

… now both sets of fingers had entered her body joining to enhance her pleasure, delving deep, then playing around the pouting lips, teasing herself, fingers quickening, their metre swift but regular, buried deep again, then appeasing, conciliating, gratifying the very entrance to her well once more, the high-pitched musical sounds and the dashing lights of her tiny cohorts almost as hypnotizing - as intoxicating - as the sight of this lovely young girl herself, the oscillations about her so brightly intense that they created a vibrant aura, a melded glow that pulsed and charged itself with some unworldly energy, a kind of spectral spectrum …

… and all the while Thom gazed in awe, seduced and stirred by the sight, although not sure if he were hallucinating …

… as this wondrously sexual female squirmed and

uttered sighs and moans in the discreet sun-dappled clearing, her golden hair, now damp at its edges, falling over her face, lank tips touching her little breasts, her smooth stomach heaving with exertion and pleasure, her sleek thighs opening and closing around her hands as if to pressure them. Her chin came down, teeth biting into her lower lip, her breathing strained, muscles taut; but these were merely initial paroxysms, her climax still approaching …

… her head twisted from side to side, her hair flicking across eyes that were now half open, but revealing only white, their pupils lost behind the upper lids for the moment. More lights joined the others on her flesh, using their flimsy butterfly wings to titillate nerve points just beneath the surface, their flutterings like the softest of feathers, tickling, intensifying the sensitivity…

… her eyes closing again in rapture, her mouth yawning wide as if in rictus, the muscles of her neck stretched tight, as her fingers worked quickly, her thrusts not so deep, lavishing their attention mostly on and around the small hard protuberance high inside the silky-wet cavity between her thighs…

… and he was almost in a delirium himself, his mind stunned, but his senses in turmoil, his desire barely suppressed …

… as she arched her back, her shoulders pressing into the rough bark of the tree behind. Her heels dug into the soil as her hands hurried, then slowed, hurried, then slowed, the thrusts harder, more measured, yet beyond proper control. A long, quiet, hissing scream escaped her as inner juices surged, her body now feverish, her skin shiny with perspiration, rapture reaching its glorious peak …

… before subsiding in great shudders and hushed quivering moans…

… and the bright entities around her blinked and twinkled, and quietly faded, became dulled …

… as the girl sank between the arms of the giant tree

and into the earth, her petite breasts, with their tiny engorged tips rising and falling with the joyful exhaustion that follows perfect orgasm.

Soft murmurs came from her as her excitement calmed, her body relaxed. One knee was raised at an angle, her other leg straight before her, her fine slim hands remaining at her centre as if for comfort and certainly not for modesty. Her eyes were closed once more as she raised her face to the sun and her breathing gradually slowed, became less laboured.

Thom was silent and he tried to keep perfectly still, although his heart continued to race and blood seemed to roar in his ears. He had no idea of what to do next. Skulk away? Wait until she left? Now he did begin to feel the shame. He was trembling.

And then the girl lowered her chin and lazily opened her eyes as she turned her head to look towards his hiding-place. He saw that they were, indeed, almond-shaped, saw that they glittered silver…

… as they looked directly into his…

A CHASE

THE GUILT flooded over him. He felt something else, too, something he could not define.

It was in her eyes, those startling glittering eyes. Those wonderfully oblique eyes.

He saw something in them - sensed something in them - that alarmed him … yet drew him in. He felt a frisson of emotion that had nothing to do with her allure or his desire. It was … a connection. Thom thought it might even be a recognition. But that would be impossible: he had never seen this beautiful girl in his life before.

If he thought he might detect some sense of shame also in their expression, or even embarrassment at having been caught in such privately intimate circumstances, he was wrong. The naked girl merely returned his stare, while a slow smile filtered through to her lips. Now she looked at him from beneath her lashes, chin tilted downwards, neither coy, nor coquettish, just a little shy.

Thom could only remain open-mouthed, not sure what

he should do, what he should say. If he should say anything at all. The hand that held back the leaves before him was shaking fiercely by then.

The girl, this lovely abandoned, apparently shameless, creature began to laugh, a small, delicious sound that contained no mockery or derision, only delight, and he felt his heart lift, his senses spin in a different, happier way. His body had calmed, erection already waning, yet there was a yearning in him, a different and purer kind of desire replacing the previous lust. Thom wanted to speak to her but, for the moment, he was speechless.

And then it was too late.

The girl’s companions, those strange, ethereal satellites of light, were settling around her, some drifting lethargically as others lay on her body or found leaves to fall upon; but almost immediately they began to stir again as if alerted to his presence. Their odd but sweet whistlings took on a new tone that was not unlike the sound made by agitated insects. Their inner lights brightened again but the colours were somehow fiercer than before, no longer lustrous, flashing violently instead. Thom began to fear rather than wonder.

They rose as one into the air, dashing to and fro, several sweeping towards him, but retreating after a few feet in the way that certain animals might to warn off their foe. His ears began to ring with the sound and his heart seemed to take on a fresh beat, one that was less regular than before.

Something he could not see crashed into the other side of the bush he was hiding behind and Thom staggered backwards, surprised and not a little dismayed. His heel caught a root or bump in the ground and he fell awkwardly, the cane dropping from his hand. He floundered on his back and the angry sound rose in volume, drew closer. He felt a sting on his cheek as a light whipped across his face and he held up a hand to ward it off. But others arrived and flew around his head, their excited buzzing becoming hard to bear, the noise increasing his panic.

‘What…?’ was all he managed to cry out.

There was more movement around him, but this came from the debris of the woodland floor itself, a lifting of dead leaves and soil as though things underneath were pushing through.

Impossible, he told himself. Just impossible. The disturbance wasn’t only in one location but in several scattered moving mounds, brittle leaves slithering off them. ‘What…?’ He murmured the question this time. It was like one of those late-night horror movies on TV where rotting arms and fleshless fingers burst through the soil and the observer can only watch in frozen horror: too bloody daft to show earlier in the evening and only good after a few pints in the pub beforehand and you are ready for a good laugh. Only this wasn’t funny. This was for real.

He twisted round, got a knee under him. Crouched …

A brown, grimy bump emerged from the earth nearby, clots of dirt crumbling away from it. And then - oh, dear God, and then - a pair of eyes.

A nose followed the eyes - the glaring, malevolent slitted eyes - and it was a nose that started high on the forehead, and was large and pointed, the nostrils swelling to fill half the creature’s face. The head tossed and wriggled, the thin neck stretched and strained, as the thing worked its way out of the earth like a small beast struggling to escape a tight womb, and all the while its yellow glare was fastened on Thom.

Thom yelped when the claws of a minuscule, scaly hand - a monkey’s paw of a hand - dug into his own, which was flat against the ground, fingers splayed to support himself as he knelt. So fixed were his eyes on the emerging thing a few feet away that he had failed to notice another creature rising beside him. In astonishment, he watched as beads of blood seeped through the skin where the nails had scratched him. Instantly, in a reaction that required no further thought, he was on his feet, and when he saw other pygmy heads with

baleful eyes focused solely on him, mounds of earth - ten, a dozen, Christ - twenty, twenty at least! - rising from the ground around him, he broke into a run, but came to a halt almost immediately when a brown head mounted on narrow scrawny shoulders blocked his way. He took a different direction, but stopped again as yet another thing rose in front of him, the creature’s mouth downturned, almost mournful, its teeth like needles, its expression wicked.

As he hesitated, the lights attacked him, diving and swooping, tearing across his path, stinging his face and raised hands, their drone piercing, the noise itself seeming to cut into his head, confusing him, increasing his panic. He headed in another direction, this time leaping over the next minikin creature, whose skinny arms and claws reached out to scratch at him, the rest of its runty little body still trapped in the earth. Thom ran and kept running, without looking back, without realizing his limp had gone, sheer fright and the desire to leave this bad dream far behind driving him onwards.

But the nightmare followed. Indeed, it even preceded him, for he began to see things ahead and around him in his beloved woodland never before encountered, nor imagined.

A tangle of spiky brambles and intertwined branches appeared to be a shadowy tumble of limbs and faces, entwined bodies, from which evil-looking eyes peered out at him. An old oak that had fascinated him as a child, with its rough and rutted trunk, its gnarled bumps and whorls that invoked myriad images of faces, now seemed sinister. Its great branches contorted to reach down for him, perhaps to grab him as he ran by and crush him in a cruel embrace. The faces he had once imagined were really there now, features pronounced and mouths grinning at him, calling silently, eyes of wrinkled bark blind but somehow seeing him. Little figures that sat in the grass beside the trail turned doll-sized heads to watch his flight and although he did not return their stares - he was concentrating too hard on the

way ahead - he caught impressions of narrow faces with mouths too wide, long pointed ears that resembled wings, mean sloping eyes and noses that were too large, or too small, or no noses at all but slitty apertures that must have been nostrils. Most appeared to be naked, their flesh pale, coloured green or muddy, some even blue. Others had bodies so misshapen, limbs so tortured, and countenances so wickedly cunning, they could only be described as grotesques.

Although startling, it was fleeting, for Thom had no wish to slow his pace, no desire to linger in this terrible place that once had been so wonderful for him.

Shapes with wings - these were not the shiny little creatures of earlier, for they were larger and with no incandescence - fluttered against his face like attacking bats, and their touch was harsh, sharp, like razorblades. He swiped them away with frantic hands, expecting his flesh to be cut to ribbons but, although the skin stung where he made contact, there were no wounds or blood. The assailants quickly fell away and he thought he heard - perhaps he imagined - fading laughter.

He staggered onwards, stumbling occasionally over the uneven ground or tree roots, creeping trailers across the path or fallen branches, and he had the crazy notion that these things were deliberately trying to trip him. That ridiculous thought led him to wonder if the haemorrhage to his brain had not done even more damage than was originally thought; had the damage created all sorts of post-chemical malfunctions inside his head, disruptions that created hallucinations? Maybe it was something to do with the drugs they had fed him in the aftermath of the stroke. Maybe he was just going crazy.

He kept moving, hobbling now, left foot already turned inwards, left arm, bent at the elbow, hand dangling, held to his side. His gait had become ungainly, a clumsy lope.

Thom tried to focus on the uncertain path, ignoring sly

movements in the undergrowth on either side and the low whispering and giggling that seemed to be following him, just as he had decided to ignore his own nagging questions. It matters not at all if all this was mere illusion: the fear was genuine, as was the desperate need to get back to Little Bracken where he had always been safe, where Bethan had promised him nothing nasty could ever enter…

But it was a long way home, an awful long way. And he was already beginning to flag.

As he passed beneath a low-hanging tree branch, something grabbed at his hair. He uttered a single cry as steely fingers curled into the roots, and a shout of pain followed the cry as he pulled away and stumbled on, sure that hair had been yanked from his scalp. Thom thought he heard someone snicker, a coarse, throaty kind of closed cackle that terrorized him even more, because it contained so much threat.

Panic, haste, pumping adrenaline, made his vision almost kaleidoscopic, a jumbled medley of colours and movement and his breathing was difficult, the exertion spoiling its rhythm. Glancing behind him did not help his confusion and he had to look again because, even though his sight was muddied, there were no pursuers, the trail behind was empty.

The surprise sent him veering off the path, crashing into undergrowth and nearly smacking into the thick trunk of an elm. His flailing hand caught something attached to a low bough as he went down. He rested there on hands and knees, shocked and winded, shoulders heaving as he sucked in air, and something flashed across his downturned face. He heard a sharp buzzing sound that was different from before and another tiny flying thing - although it could have been the same one - skimmed across his cheek. Suddenly there were more than one or two, suddenly there was a swarm of them and he quickly understood that these were not the same as the creatures that had chased him from the

lake, these were far less exotic, and certainly not hallucinatory. They were bees - no, they were wasps - and he realized that the earthy mound that his hand had clipped on the low-hanging bough was the hardened pulp of a wasps’ nest. He had frightened them into believing they were under attack and now they were reacting instinctively, they were counter-ing-attacking, defending their queens and their home. Within seconds the air around him was filled with long black and yellow-striped bodies and the sound of their fury.

He felt the first sting, quickly followed by the second, then a third, then - he lost count. Their poisoned barbs stabbed the skin of his face and waving hands, his bare arms, his neck - anywhere that was exposed. Thom gasped at the sudden needle-pricks of agonizing pain, some of the wounds already going numb, beginning to swell, and he scrabbled to his feet and kept moving, afraid that if he fell again he would be at their mercy, pain and exhaustion would render him helpless. He knew he had to find refuge and quickly. Had to get home …

An eyelid half-closed, the sharpness of the sting making him cry out. Thom held his hands up to his face, frightened that he might be blinded and completely defenceless. He slapped at the little whining bodies, feeling them reel from the blows, but never for long, always they came back at him, attacking, stinging, for these were the female wasps, the dangerous kind, who would not give up their attack until each one was exhausted and the enemy vanquished.

He had never been inordinately sensitive to wasp stings - as a boy he had suffered more than a few - but with so many of them injecting their venom into him, he feared that he might go into allergic shock and that in his debilitated state, it might even kill him. He screamed at them, still flailing with his arms, staggering into bushes, glancing off trees, the agony of their jabs driving him on rather than dragging him down, each separate stab causing an involuntary spasm. He knew that if he fell, if he tripped or fatigue

brought him to his knees, then he would be in serious trouble. They would not leave him alone until their anger was sated and the threat eliminated.

Thom stumbled onwards with no idea of direction, just desperate to get as far away from their nest as possible. He could feel them inside his now open gilet, could feel them at his ankles and on his bare arms, the agonizing punctures becoming one massive hurt, and when he cried yet again, he felt one enter his mouth.

He spat it out, but too late: the inside of his cheek exploded with a fiery pain that almost made him faint. With sheer force of will, Thom remained upright and he used his own anger, the thought that such vicious little bastards could torment him this way, to drive himself on. He needed to find shelter, and find it fast, but he had no idea how far away he was from Little Bracken, nor even if he was going the right way, for he had to hold his hands to his eyes to protect them, the throbbing left eyelid already shut tight of its own accord. So he just loped onwards, foot dragging, praying for the attack to stop, tempted to lie down and curl into a tight ball, using his shirt and arms to cover his head and face, but he knew the wasps would be relentless, that they would keep up their attack until he was unconscious, and, if that did happen, if he passed out, then he would be entirely at their mercy.

Then, through the gaps between his protective swelling fingers, he glimpsed a sight that was completely unexpected. Only a few yards ahead was a broad expanse of calm water. Somehow he had arrived back at the lake. Blindness and agony had driven him in a wide circle so that he had unwittingly, but oh so fortunately, returned to the lake.