I got there around 8. He was heating a frozen meal in the micro-wave. A confirmed bachelor who’d never learned to cook. Here too, the sink was an ashtray: against doctor’s orders, he still smoked. We drank white wine, a Bourgogne aligoté. The moment I rose from the table, glass in hand, Raymond followed me down the dim corridor. Our ritual took place in the passageway leading to the WC. Six feet away from the closed door he stood with his back turned, listening intently. When I came out, he groped about till his hand closed around my potion.
“Here, my friend… drink!”
And at that moment, I actually felt a little something again.
Translation by Noel Burch.
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.