The Cyberkink Sideshow (7 page)

There was something she couldn’t resist about him when he was restrained like this and unable to escape. She put her hands on him, feeling the softness of his flesh under his tight costume.

Victor’s eyes widened.

He didn’t know what she was going to do. And it dawned upon her that was the whole point. “You think I’m going to tell you?”

Sylvia slid her palms down his chest, over his belly to his flanks and buttocks. She watched how his expression changed as she touched him, confident because her own face was hidden from him by the mask. It made her feel the way she did at the end of a hard winter, just before the break of spring, when one can almost sense the new life building in the earth and the air.

She could touch him
anywhere
. With his arms trapped, he was powerless to resist if it tickled or made him uncomfortable. Underneath his costume she could see the deep dint of his navel and the points of his nipples on broad, heavy breasts underlined by folds that ran under his arms. She wanted to touch him here, but she couldn’t quite get past the inhibition of it not being right for a heterosexual woman to want to play with boobs, even if they were man-boobs rather than woman-boobs. Instead she moved her hand down between his wide thighs, feeling under his balls where the Lycra squeezed them, and up to examine the shape of his piercing. The wide metal barb pushed against the folds of his groin, almost as though it acted as an anchor to stop the tip of his cock from disappearing into his flesh when he wasn’t using it.

A loudspeaker crackled and shrieked from the arena.
 

“The evening’s event’s getting underway,” said Victor. “We ought to get over there, or we’ll be left with the bad seats.”

Sylvia hesitated as she untied him. “Victor...” Did she really have the courage to ask this? “Would it be all right for someone...a member of the public to do something in one of your acts? Not like how you do it!” she hurriedly added. “Maybe something like the hermaphrodites do? It’s okay if I call them hermaphrodites, isn’t it? The people who were in the ring with you on the opening night?”

Victor examined his wrist and waved his hand dismissively. “They’re both transsexuals who got halfway and decided they liked the view from there.”

Sylvia laughed.

“They won’t mind if you call them that.” Victor leaned his weight back onto his heels and frowned, stretching his arms and rubbing his wrists as he considered. “Come tomorrow. I’ll have a word with some of the other performers about fitting you into one of our acts.”

He took a seat at the back row and Sylvia sat beside him. This night’s events seemed to be less organized than the previous ones. Various acts would be set up, but this time, members of the audience could come up to participate. Down in the arena, gallows had been constructed, and five people lined up under them. They stood on stools, and Vaughn fastened a noose around the neck of each.

Sylvia stiffened. “What are they doing? Isn’t that dangerous?”

Vaughn pushed the first man off his stool. He dangled from the rope, his hands clawing at his neck.

“Strangulation fetish. Oh, don’t worry, it’s not dangerous. Vaughn is a pro, and we have trained medics on hand in the unlikely event of anything actually going wrong.”

Sylvia followed his gaze to one side, where a man and a woman in sexualized nurse costumes stood.

After a few seconds, Vaughn picked up the man’s feet and stood him back on the chair. He took hold of the scruff of his neck and disentangled the rope from his neck. The man stood there gasping for a bit, then he bowed and the crowd applauded, and he stepped away from the gallows.

This didn’t seem right, but Sylvia couldn’t pin down the feeling that told her it was wrong. Perhaps because it was an execution fetish. Perhaps it was because if a mistake did happen, the consequences would be dire. But the whole point was that a mistake wasn’t going to happen, because it was a controlled situation.

“What’s more dangerous,” said Victor in a quieter, more contemplative voice, “is when people have such paraphilias but they are embarrassed of them, and so they attempt to practice them in isolation with inappropriate equipment. Take urethral play as an example. I enjoy it, but the mainstream thinks it’s disgusting and it goes against nature. Do you have any idea how many men end up in hospital with pencils and knitting needles and other such material lodged in their bladders, or infections resulting from such unsafe practices?”

Sylvia thought back to the metal rods in Vaughn’s torture shop. “I wouldn’t know.” Although it was an interesting idea and something she’d never thought about. She almost said something about only seeing the ones that she brought in stone drunk and with suspected alcohol poisoning, or the ones who’d got involved in violent crime and had it backfire on them, and the people who tried to hide packets of drugs in imaginative places. She suddenly remembered that Victor was not her colleague or her friend or anything of the sort, and that she’d come here to get information that she hadn’t found.

“Ah, well,” Victor said at length. “I’d better get down there and do my act.” He rose from his seat. “Make it down here before three o’clock.” He winked.

Sylvia hesitated. Pikesley wanted information. Quite possibly there was no such evidence of the sort Pikesley wanted in existence, and it wasn’t like he was about to assign her another job. Something about this exhilarated and scared her, as though she rode the crest of a wave just about to break. If she had to keep coming down here, she might as well play this game.

“I’ll see if I can make it.”

She had to get up so he could get out, even though the aisle was fairly spacious. Sylvia watched him head down through the audience and up to the stage. Vaughn put him in the stocks and tore his costume off him. Then the audience pelted him with fruit while Vaughn buggered him with the blunt end of a pitchfork.

She tried to imagine how Victor must feel, being restrained and violated, total surrender of control to Vaughn. He must get a massive adrenaline rush out of it, from not knowing what was going to happen or if he was going to be able to stop it if he didn’t like it. And letting Vaughn humiliate and use him in full view of all those people–that must take enormous confidence. It was starting to make more sense.

A stab of envy hit Sylvia. What if it was her doing that to Victor? If she had that power to capture him and do what she willed, and he craved it and feared it at the same time? If she could muster the courage to stand up there and touch him wherever she wanted–and let them laugh if they thought it was improper or immodest–and force him to orgasm in front of everyone, and make him utterly ridiculous and helpless.

Who was to say that something someone did was dirty, or immoral, if it had no effect on anyone else besides that person? This festival was a celebration of weirdness. Why did so many people object to it? Why not just not go to it, if they thought it was all that bad? What business of theirs was the choice of those who did want to participate and weren’t made to? She slipped away amid the commotion and went back to her locker for her clothes.

Chapter 4

Sylvia had to get out of work early. Not least because she suspected Victor might be interested in learning her true identity if he was not already outright suspicious of her motives. She needed to think up a way of sneaking into the Sideshow without exposing her uncostumed self to the scrutiny of any prying eyes, human or electronic, that he might have posted to gather intelligence of his own. Getting in early, before the crowds, and with a valid excuse to be there would also provide adequate opportunity for her to look about for signs of any suspicious activity while it was quiet.

She stuffed a write-up of the lack of evidence she’d so far managed to acquire into Pikesley’s pigeonhole. Sylvia had reached the main door of the station and was about to leave when someone in the corridor behind called her name.

“Price!”

She turned to face Constable Baxter. Baxter was inclined to waffle, always using ten words where two would have done. If Sylvia let him get talking to her, it’d be the start of the school-run rush hour before she got away.

“I need to talk to you about–”

Sylvia cut him off sharply. “I’m sorry, Mike, it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I’m on special ops today, Pikesley’s orders.”

Before he could say anything else, she pushed through the door and headed to the car park.

Sylvia shoveled into her mouth a hurried lunch of bulgar wheat and roast vegetables out of a plastic deli pot while she waited for the lights to change out on the main road. The plastic pot spilled the remains of the meal over the passenger seat when she pulled away, and she swore at it.

When she got home, she put on the kettle and made Max relieve himself out the back while she waited for the water to boil. After she had made her tea, she took the mug upstairs and stood it on the dressing table to cool while she sorted out her attire.

If she put on her costume and wore something over it, Sylvia supposed, that might be quicker and easier than going properly dressed. She threw her mask into a carrier bag, along with a bra, a t-shirt and a clean pair of knickers. It might save time going there already wearing it, but she wasn’t driving home after a day’s work in uncomfortable clothes. The same as one might wear one’s swimming costume under one’s clothes to drive to the swimming pool, but not when it’s soaking wet afterward.

Sylvia recalled there being a boiler suit screwed up on the floor of the airing cupboard, but she wasn’t sure it was still there. As it turned out, it was lying under some towels when she went to look. The boiler suit had been left some years ago by an ex-boyfriend, after Sylvia confessed to him that penetration hurt her. Not being able to have “proper sex” as he’d called it apparently made him feel unmasculine in a way that being a car mechanic didn’t.

She uncrumpled the boiler suit. Oily stains marred its front, and grubby handprints smudged the thigh and backside areas. A faint underarm smell still clung to it, but the man who had owned it had been slight and not particularly tall. It should fit reasonably well.

Sylvia went back to her bedroom, where she took off her clothes and put on her costume. She pulled the boiler suit on over it. There was no point putting her boots on now. She wouldn’t be able to drive in them, so she’d be better waiting until she was there and she’d parked. Her lipstick she applied as she had the night before, and she also put on a large pair of aviator sunglasses. Running her fingers through her hair, she examined her reflection in the dressing-table mirror for any semblance to her usual self. She hoped she couldn’t see one.

After gathering the boots and the carrier bag, she headed out. When she had locked the front door, she buttoned the keys inside one of the boiler suit’s many pockets. The coarse fabric of the suit felt rough against her exposed skin as she got into the car and fastened her seatbelt. What if she crashed the car and the paramedics cut her out of it and found her wearing
this
when they tried to administer first aid? Sylvia wondered morbidly about what her relatives might think if she died and the paramedics gave them her clothes back.

She tried to concentrate on the road as she drove, but she was ever conscious of the reaction of the harness over her whole body to her movements in steering and changing gear, and the pressure of the strap between her legs. Where skin touched skin it stuck with sweat, and the rough fabric of the boiler suit was an infuriating tickle.

When she arrived at the Garden Festival, the day crowd was still very much in evidence. Old couples meandered painfully slowly around the flower exhibits. Kids wandered along or leaned against railings eating sweets and candy floss and played with cheap nasty toys from the many souvenir shops. Sylvia had never felt so self-conscious in her life as she stabbed her way on her impractical heels through them all toward the Cyberkink Sideshow’s tents. She was sure wearing the harness affected the way she walked, that people could tell and they were staring.

The two bouncers blocked the way. “Sideshow’s closed to the public until four,” one of them said.

“I’m here to see Victor Maynard. I’m...” Sylvia flushed beneath her sunglasses and the hair pulled over her face. “...Madam Butterfly.”

“Oh, I do beg your pardon, madam,” said the bouncer, his face falling. “I didn’t recognize you out of character. Please go in. Mr. Maynard sent you a message, madam. He asked that you meet him and Mr. Vaughn in the dungeons.” They stepped aside to let her through.

Reaching the tent at last and getting inside came as a great relief. Two days ago, the Sideshow had been an alien world and cause for unease and distrust. Now it felt like a haven compared to the outside environment, simply because of how she was dressed.
 

Sylvia quickly donned her mask and shoved the boiler suit and the carrier bag into a biometric locker.

She supposed she ought to go straight to where she’d been told. Quite possibly the bouncer had a radio to communicate with the other staff, and would let Victor know she’d arrived. It would raise suspicion if anyone caught her poking around. This didn’t feel safe at all.
Vaughn
? She thought it would just be Victor, and maybe the Hermaphrodite Twins. In a way, she did kind of like Vaughn, at the same time as being scared of him, as irrational as it seemed to afford trust to someone who dressed as a fetishized version of a medieval executioner and had a tiny skull attached to his nipple. Yet she couldn’t escape the feeling that he’d somehow been able to recognize her at the auction, and before in the dungeon, and that he might either blow her cover or do something horrible to her in his dungeon to teach her a lesson for coming here to spy on the Sideshow.