The Cyberkink Sideshow (6 page)

She fumbled inside the bag for the pocket of her jeans and found the cylinder of lipstick. It was colored a deep bruised purple, like squashed deadly nightshade berries. Turning to face the mirror, she squinted through the feathery fronds of the mask that had wandered in front of her vision to apply it, then wound the lipstick down and snapped the cap back on. She dropped it back into the bag and pulled on the gloves, before stepping back to examine the overall look.

She could have been anyone. She didn’t look like Constable Sylvia Price any more, and that was all that mattered. Sylvia had never really hated her body, but she’d neither ever particularly liked it. She supposed she had been more self-conscious of it when she was younger and made an effort with men, but that didn’t matter now. She didn’t tend to think about it that much. It was just
there
. It didn’t frighten children and animals, it was healthy, and it all worked properly, and that was all Sylvia expected any reasonable person could want. She would be able to blend in here, she hoped.

As a final touch, she attached her police handcuffs to one of the D-rings on the waist strap of her costume.

She left the cubicle and found an empty locker in which to put her clothes, pressing her finger to the biometric panel to calibrate it to her. She couldn’t see anyone else around, and a paranoia that she would step out there to find everyone dressed normally came over her.

The presence of a man and a woman in the first tent allayed her fears, and she found herself taking in details of their very revealing costumes she normally would have been too embarrassed to examine. The man’s cock was riveted to his balls in some sort of metal chastity device, and he had a gas mask strapped over his face and his arms laced together in two leather sleeves behind his back. He wore jackboots, but aside from that he was naked. The mask at the back was attached to a lead, the other end of which was held by a dark-skinned woman with wild orange hair, who was dressed in a gold fishnet body stocking and stilettos. Her nipples were covered by vulgar pointy brass shapes that protruded through the holes of the fishnet. The only thing concealing her genitalia was a similar brass-colored thing, also shaped like an obscene exaggeration of nature, wedged in the crack between her outer lips.

“Hey,” she said, and Sylvia realized with a stab of fear that she was looking back. But this was an approving, curious examination with a smile, not the frowning, distrustful glares she’d received as an outsider yesterday. “Cute costume.”

“Thanks,” said Sylvia, flustered. “Yours is awesome too. Don’t think I’d ever have the guts to wear something like that!”

The woman winked at Sylvia. “It just takes practice to be comfortable with the more risqué stuff, that’s all.” She indicated her companion with her thumb. “Want to borrow him? I feel more like watching today.”

“No thanks, I’m just looking,” said Sylvia in a hurry. “But thanks for the offer.” She left the couple and went outside. The events at the arena hadn’t yet started, but several stalls and attractions were being set up around the edge.

“Hey, lady!”

Sylvia looked in the direction of the voice and found a man in a suit seated at a desk with an auctioneer’s gavel. “Hey. Are you a pony girl looking for an hostler?”

“I’m a...” Sylvia thought quickly back to what the dungeon master had said to her yesterday night. “...a
domme
.”

“Oh, I see. We’re having an auction, for charity. Would you care to buy a slave today?”

“I... I didn’t bring any money.”

The man smiled in a way Sylvia thought much too benign for someone who claimed to auction slaves. “Would you like to offer yourself in an auction then? You can name a charity of your choice, and I’m sure there’ll be some rich sub in need of a wonderful nasty mistress such as yourself.”

Sylvia came closer to the auctioneer. The area being set up around him featured lines of plastic seats and a dais upon which his desk was set. “Is it, well,
binding
if I do it?”

The man laughed. “Of course not. Think of it as like a blind date. It’s just a bit of fun to raise money for charity. You can leave any time you like, and you won’t be expected to do anything you don’t want to do. The Cyberkink Sideshow takes RACK seriously.”

Sylvia didn’t know what RACK was, but she got the gist of what the man was saying and didn’t want to embarrass herself by asking. “What do I have to do?”

“I’ll give you a number. Just be back before five when the auction starts.” The man tore off a raffle-ticket page and handed it to her. “Enjoy the Sideshow!”

She decided to kill some time by wandering around the perimeter to look at the stalls. Some of them sold fairly run-of-the-mill items such as vibrators and sex toys. There was a vacuum pumping shop, and one that sold chocolate and other sorts of sauce that were designed to coat the body so someone else could lick them off. There was also a candy floss shop, but the sticks the candy floss was dispensed from had dildos instead of handles.

It was still ten minutes before five when she arrived back at the auction, but already a significant crowd had gathered. Sylvia took her place on the seats among a number of other “auctions.” Her buttocks stuck to the plastic chair, but at least she didn’t feel as hot and uncomfortable as she did when she’d come here in her police uniform.

Probably no one would bid on her at any rate.

The auction got underway. Sylvia’s number was nine, so she watched what the other auctions did when their numbers were called. They stood beside the auctioneer on the dais while he read a description of them, and some of them made jokes or described what they wanted to do. One man said he wanted to be whipped, and a woman said she had a rubber fetish. A small man got up and said he wanted a big fat lady to sit on his face.

By the time Sylvia’s number was called, she felt as if she was about to be sick. She climbed up onto the dais and stood next to the auctioneer’s desk. The assembled crowd looked up at her. She could almost sense the gazes of some of them running up and down her body, perhaps wondering about the small areas her costume didn’t reveal. She’d kind of thought of it as just a way to blend in and find out more about the Sideshow. She hadn’t expected this reaction. Doing this was drawing attention to her, rather than staying inconspicuous.

Sylvia recognized the man from the dungeon, the one in the executioner’s costume. He stared at her, face inscrutable under his mask.

“Now then,” began the auctioneer. “This delightful creature of punishment is Madam Butterfly. Is there anything you’d like to say to your bidders, madam?”

“Hi,” said Sylvia awkwardly. “I’m kind of new to this. I’m sort of a trainee domme.”

The bidders laughed in a good-natured way.

“I’m not into hurting people really. I’m just here ’cause I want to tie up some cute guys and have some fun.”

The auctioneer smiled. “Well, that sounds like an excellent proposition to me. Who’d like to open the bidding for this lovely lady at five quid?”

Hands flicked up and down in the crowd, and in the space of a few heartbeats Sylvia’s price was up to thirty pounds. It all happened so fast, she wasn’t able to tell who the current high bidder was.

“Forty, anyone?”

Immediately the dungeon master raised his hand. Sylvia had a bad feeling he might be able to recognize her as the woman who’d been poking around his dungeon the day before. She felt horribly undressed standing there before him, an intuition that had nothing to do with her skimpy costume.

“Vaughn? Forty pounds?”

Vaughn’s jaw flexed into a smile. “I could do with someone to help out in the dungeon.”

“Anyone care to top Vaughn?”

A man in a Nazi costume saluted.
Oh shit, no
.

“Fifty pounds.”

Vaughn’s hand went up again. Sylvia wasn’t sure which prospect was worse.

“Sixty pounds.”

A hand went up at the back–some great wide person, garbed in a lurid Lycra costume.
The ringmaster
, Sylvia realized, giving way internally to an ebb of relief. He was somehow unthreatening, too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

“Seventy pounds from Victor.” The auctioneer’s voice took on a strange inflection at the ringmaster’s name.

The executioner turned his eyes away from Sylvia, his posture changing subtly, almost reminiscent of a genuflection. It was as though the others afforded this absurd ringmaster a reverence incongruous with his appearance.

The auctioneer’s gavel rapped on the tabletop. “Sold, to Victor!”

Sylvia stepped down off the dais and made her way toward him. The relief she’d initially felt wasn’t lasting. He might well have been the least scary individual in the room, but he was still a stranger who exhibited his private parts in front of an audience and he’d still won her in an auction, and what was to come next was anyone’s guess.

She wasn’t sure what he was meant to be: probably a court jester or some sort of clown, or maybe a cartoon villain. It appeared he wore nothing under his garish costume, and the tight fabric didn’t leave much to the imagination. She could even make out the shape of that weird piercing. Sylvia averted her eyes, glad her mask at least partly concealed the rush of heat to her face. “So, am I, like, your slave or something for the day?”

“It’s just for fun.” Victor shrugged. “We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. There’s a main event starting in the arena soon, if you’d honor me with your company for the first part of it. I’m afraid I’m in the second part of it, if you see what I mean.”

Noisy music started up in a stall close by. People threw hoops at male mannequins dressed in trench coats and hats. The trench coats opened on drawstrings in sync with the music, and the mannequins had black strap-ons beneath them.

“You have a lot of stalls here,” said Sylvia, thinking she ought to try to make conversation. “They’re very
imaginative
.”

“Yes, although we used to have more. We’ve been forced to shut down a lot of it. We used to have poodles,” Victor elaborated. “I don’t know how much you know about dogs, but when they have sex, their genitals swell up and they stick together. The female poodle had been sterilized, but she had a remote-controlled pituitary implant so you could make her effectively go into heat at the push of a button. Tom–the snake guy–he used to cut funny topiary into them so they looked like something or spelled a word when they were together. An RSPCA inspector said it was cruel, so we had to retire them.”

“Oh,” said Sylvia, thinking of Max and that she agreed with the RSPCA inspector. She said no more, because she didn’t want to start an argument.

“Ridiculous, really, because poodles like to be laughed at and to be the center of attention. People like to say they’re stupid and not real dogs, but historically they were bred as gundogs, and they’re the second-most intelligent breed there is. The funny thing is there was a police officer with a castrated sniffer dog here the other day. I mean, how is cutting parts off a dog and using it to hunt for drugs any less exploitative than watching dogs engaged in their natural behavior for entertainment?”

Sylvia had never really thought about it that way. Perhaps he did have a point. Dogs don’t have taboos and inhibitions about sex like humans do.

“You seen this?” Victor had produced a long, narrow, yellow rope from somewhere. Its surface looked smooth, like Plasticene. “New kind of microvelcro someone in Germany invented. Pulls apart easily from the right direction, but sticks like glue in the wrong one.” He took hold of Sylvia’s arm. “Here, let me show you.”

Sylvia snatched back her arm, fearing he would tie her up and leave her there, or worse, try to unmask her. “No, thanks, I’d rather not.”

“Of course, what was I thinking? You’re the domme. Here, you try it on me.”

Sylvia stared at him, and at the yellow string he held out to her. There was something tempting in his tone of voice, something admiring in his expression.

Almost without thinking, she grabbed his arms and pinned them behind his back. He struggled a bit, in the entirely predictable way football hooligans do. Sylvia backed him into a guy rope holding up one of the tents and wrapped the yellow rope around his wrists.

“Wow,” he said. “And you’re calling yourself a
novice
domme? Dark horse, more like!” He wriggled his shoulders, testing the bonds. “I’m well and truly stuck. Now what are you going to do?”

Sylvia found herself staring at his gray eyes, his straight nose and shapely lips, the thickness of flesh under his chin. He wore no mask and, like the zebra woman, it wasn’t as though he could shed the aspect that made him bizarre. The night she’d watched from the audience, it hadn’t been apparent quite how big he was as was clear now she was up close. Normal attire would probably make him look even more out of place. Perhaps she only felt this way because he was such a novelty, because on some media-instilled or perhaps instinctual level fat people should be revolting. Perhaps this lust she was feeling was abusive. She wanted him, and it was ridiculous because she’d never before been intimate with someone with whom she wasn’t in an established relationship, but he was offering her exactly that. And this wasn’t really her.
 

From behind a mask, the situation was surreal, almost as though it wasn’t a part of the reality she knew. No one would notice, not in this place where, to her left, twelve nearly naked people of both sexes thrashed in a mud bath. On her right, people played on what looked like a children’s playground object, but had a sign before it saying it was a Fantastic Fucking Robot Swing. Even if someone did look, she’d never be recognized.