The Cyberkink Sideshow (8 page)

Another sign at the top of the stairs read,
Live interactive torture today!
The displays from the day before had been cleared away and harsh, unforgiving spotlights shone where a stage had been set up and numerous unpleasant metal racks and Iron Maiden typed-things stood in wait. The rest of the room was crowded with spectators.

“Whores and bastards!” Vaughn spread his arms wide. “Welcome to my dungeon!”

The people cheered.

Vaughn’s gaze lit upon Sylvia. “Just in time! Would you all please welcome my new apprentice domme for this first scene!” Vaughn gestured to Sylvia. “Madam Butterfly!”

A cacophony of cheers and a few wolf whistles broke out. Sylvia could feel her face getting hot under her mask again.

“Now, for our first scene, Madam shall be co-domming with me. Will you please step up here?”

Vaughn had already begun to speak as Sylvia ascended the steps to the stage. She estimated it to be about two feet from the ground. She could just see herself tripping or stumbling in these impractical boots and falling off. Crap. Now what was going on? Where was Victor? Vaughn had said she was meant to be co-domming, hadn’t he? That presumably meant he wasn’t going to try to tie her up.

“In the good old days, if the king of the castle didn’t think his court jester was funny enough, that jester would end up down here, with me.” Vaughn flexed the many whips of his cat-o’-nine-tails into a horseshoe shape between his hands. “Bring on the jester!”

A curtain to the side of the stage opened, and the Hermaphrodite Twins led out Victor, dressed in the same costume he had worn yesterday. He also wore a thick leather collar around his neck, with a dog’s chain leash attached to a D-ring at the front.

“You shan’t be needing
this
!” Vaughn got hold of Victor’s jester costume at the back. It must have been fastened with barely visible microvelcro, because it tore clean off him when Vaughn yanked it. As the crowd roared with amusement, the dungeon master tossed it to the Hermaphrodite Twins, who stood to one side of the stage, leaving Sylvia standing beside a medieval executioner and a very fat man who was naked apart from a jester hat and a collar and a pair of ridiculous boots with bells attached to the ends. She’d never thought when she’d signed up to join the police that she’d end up in this scenario, yet at the same time she struggled to keep her eyes off Victor’s body. What was Vaughn going to do to him?

“Now then, this is Victor.” Vaughn held the chain close to where it connected to the collar, tightening it a little so Victor stood straight, and turned him from side to side for the audience as though exhibiting a prize pig at a farmer’s market. “I think you’ll all agree that he’s a gorgeous slave. For one thing, he’s got lovely English rose skin.” Victor yelped as Vaughn gave his backside a quick swat with his cat-o’-nine-tails, the plaited leather whirring through the air. “Bruises beautifully, see?” He turned him slightly so the crowd could see the parallel red lines the cat had made.

“His safe word’s ‘dugong,’ ’cause he looks like one an’ all. Not that it’s going to be much use to him, ’cause we’re going to gag him.” At that instant, Vaughn forced a ball gag with holes in it into Victor’s mouth and fastened the strap around the back of his head. Laughter rippled through the crowd. “Now, now.” The dungeon master raised his index finger. “Safe, sane and consensual. Victor and I have an agreement, and he’ll let me know if he’s had enough.”

Vaughn maneuvered Victor over to a large wheel with steel spokes radiating out from a central hub. The spokes were joined with various heavy-duty crosspieces that made the wheel resemble a giant spider’s web. He stretched Victor’s arms up and out, fixing them to the wheel with thick metal bands around the wrists and just above the elbow. Vaughn bent over and got hold of an ankle, easing Victor’s leg out at the hip and clamping it likewise with bands around the ankle and above the knee. He repeated this with the other leg, before closing a pair of metal pincers around his head. Now Victor was spread-eagled out, suspended on the wheel and looking totally undignified.

“Now then.” Vaughn glanced at the audience. He rubbed his hands together and interlaced his fingers, flexing his palms outward until his knuckles cracked within the leather gauntlets encasing them. He turned to a line of upright chromed levers with handles, of the sort used in an old-fashioned railway signal box, and disengaged the lever labeled
BRAKE
. It activated with a click and a well-oiled creak. He reached up to grasp one of the spokes at the top of the wheel and gave it a hard tug down. This caused the wheel to turn on its axle and emit a deep, reverberating hum of raw metal.

“Music, that.” Vaughn’s mouth cracked a grin under his mask. “Took me ages to perfect that squeak!” A few people laughed.

Victor let out a muffled sound as the wheel’s rotation inverted him and his jester hat fell off.

“Shut up, Victor! You’re spoiling my squeak!” Vaughn gave the wheel another push, sending Victor through two more rotations. “I’d prefer it if people with a tendency to suffer with motion sickness kept off this particular ride. Emetophilia isn’t my thing personally.” Vaughn slammed the brake back on, causing the wheel to halt precipitously with Victor back upright.

Vaughn turned his back on Victor and Sylvia and selected something from a collection of horrid-looking metal implements on a steel trolley. He held it up to the crowd, its long shaft glinting. “Now, this,” he began melodramatically. A particularly loud noise of protest from Victor interrupted him, the muscles in the bound man’s shoulders and thighs tensing.

Vaughn stopped talking and dropped his other hand to the cat-o’-nine-tails handle at his hip, turning away from the crowd to face Victor, whose eyes rolled to him. “Victor,
shush
!” The braided leather flails whisked Victor’s thigh, making him start and leaving red marks glowing on the skin. “I’m speaking now, and people can’t hear me with you making that noise!”

Sylvia stared at Victor, concerned this was hurting him; that it
wasn’t
consensual. Sweat beaded on his forehead, his breathing rapid, nostrils flaring with each quick exhalation. His wide, hugely dilated pupils darted back and forth to focus first on her, then at Vaughn. A very slight tremor of anticipation was apparent throughout his whole body.
He wasn’t afraid
. The realization came to her with a slight dizziness and an odd floating sensation to the stomach. He wasn’t doing it for the audience, for money, either. He was madly excited and aroused. He
wanted
whatever perverted thing it was Vaughn intended to give him.

“This thing here is my patented specialty. In layman’s terms it’s what’s called a prince’s wand, but this one is like no other prince’s wand you can buy anywhere else in the world. In a moment, we’re going to shove it down his jap’s eye so you can all see precisely what excruciating pleasure it can induce, but first we’re going to give him a little taster and get him all hot and bothered with these clamps!”

Vaughn disentangled a knot of black cables, the sort used on the headphones of an MP3 player. When he unexpectedly threw one of the ends at Sylvia, she jumped and almost missed it. At the end of the wire was not an earphone, but a crocodile-clip-like clamp, of the sort used in school physics lessons. Vaughn clamped the other half of the cable to Victor’s nipple. Victor looked at Sylvia with puppyish eyes that managed to express how he wanted her to be anything but kind to him. His fatty pectorals were still plump enough to look like breasts even with his arms restrained up in this position, and Sylvia felt awkward touching him there. If she touched
boobs
, even if they weren’t on a woman, did that make her slightly bisexual? She tried to copy what Vaughn had done, pinching the nub as she attached the clamp so it bit in against the areola.

Vaughn stabbed the jack on the other end of the wire into a power supply that looked equally like something belonging in a school physics lab. He adjusted a dial and flicked a switch above it, and Victor gave a start and a shiver, clamping his jaw on the gag and rolling his eyes upward. Vaughn flicked the switch back and forth a few more times, until Victor trembled a little and whimpered slightly, before he returned the dial to a lower setting and took the brake back off. Vaughn gave the wheel a spin to turn it halfway and slammed the brake back on, leaving Victor suspended upside-down with the clamps still in place.

Sylvia found herself face-to-face with the piercing she’d not been able to see clearly on the opening night. It emerged from the tip of his dick as the head of a fish with intricately engraved baroque embellishments and a wide, grinning mouth reminiscent of heraldic beasts, which somehow managed to be both grotesque and endearing. The tail protruded from a hole pierced in the frenulum on the underside of his phallus, bright cyan, transforming through a rainbow spectrum to the deep burnished gold of the head.

“If Madam would so kindly do the honors to remove this last modicum of modesty,” Vaughn said.

Sylvia glanced at him, not sure what he meant.
Unscrew the tail
, the dungeon master mouthed over Victor’s upturned body. From under his mask, she caught the flash of a wink.

To reach the fish and to be able to see what she was doing, Sylvia had to step in close. She’d seen naked men before, but never a man’s wedding tackle quite so explicitly exposed as this. She couldn’t help but notice how wide his thighs were, especially when she unintentionally brushed her chest against one of them. She sensed the warmth of his body through the bare skin her costume exposed, and became very aware of the pressure of the tight strap between her legs.

The tail fin unscrewed easily, like a wing nut. Victor quivered as she carefully slid the tail through the piercing, his chest rising and falling faster. A thick gob of his sex juice came with it, dripping off the colored metal onto the underside of his belly. Not sure what to do with the fish, she screwed the tail back onto it and handed it to one of the Hermaphrodite Twins.

“The prostate gland,” Vaughn began, in a contemplative sort of tone that stilled the murmur of conversation from the audience, “is the male equivalent of the G-spot. It’s found up above your balls, under the base of your cock. Basically, it’s the muscle that contracts when you blow your load, and if you want to take orgasms to another level you need to take control of your prostate.” Under his mask, his mouth broke into a broad grin. “I’m a man of few words, unlike some of the flowery buggers you’ll come across in this freak show, so I’ll cut to the chase. There are two ways to a man’s prostate–up his bum or down his dick!” He accompanied this explanation with two suggestively vulgar hand gestures. The crowd roared with laughter.

Vaughn produced a thick knobbly dildo with a crosspiece at the handle like a sword, another cable trailing from it. It appeared to be made from white Teflon, but some of the contours on one side of it were silvered. He squeezed lubricant from a tube onto it and slowly sank it into Victor’s rectum. Victor had gone red in the face from being upside-down. The muscles in his thighs spasmed as Vaughn penetrated him. Vaughn took his hand away, leaving only the hilt protruding.

“Madam can do this,” said Vaughn. “She’ll enjoy it. I’ll just lube this up.” He slathered the lubricant down the length of the object he’d been showing to the crowd earlier, before handing it to Sylvia. It was coated with Teflon, apart from the curved tip where metal gleamed, and the shaft of it had slight ridges carved into it. On the opposite end was a steel ball, and an inch or so from the end she could see a hole where something was meant to screw into it. Vaughn guided her hands to manipulate the rod into the correct position.

Poor Victor was dribbling so much by now the lube didn’t seem to matter. Despite his obvious excitement, he was still relatively flaccid. Sylvia closed her hand around his phallus and eased the tip of the sound into the wide, loose hole and let it slide gradually into the depths. He turned to jelly in her hands at the sensation of the ridged Teflon, trembling and panting, his racing pulse conducting through her fingertips. Sylvia marveled at how powerful this made her feel. She could own his pleasure, enslave his body and give him ecstasy, and he wanted it.

The sound came to a stop with the metal ball resting just at the tip. Vaughn had the next part ready: a side arm with another wire on it, which he threaded through the hole made by Victor’s piercing and into the shaft of the sound. Finally, he used the side arm for leverage to unscrew the ball on the end, leaving a hollow metal tube threaded in. He plugged the jacks for the dildo and the sound into two ports on the same switchboard as he’d connected the clamps to, and turned the dial to its lowest setting before flicking the switch.

“Those two things we just put in there,” said Vaughn, “are in the ideal position to pass an electric current straight through his prostate gland. What you’re all about to see is the kind of legendary black magic a hundred years of Christian extremist oppression never quite succeeded in eliminating.” Vaughn fluttered his fingers and rolled his eyes fancifully. “Whores and bastards, I give you the P-spot!”

Vaughn turned back to the control box, and slowly, inexorably, he began to turn the dial.

Victor started to tremble all over. The whimpers he’d been making ever since they’d put the nipple clamps on him started to grow louder and more desperate.

“Thing with electrosex,” Vaughn shouted over Victor’s noises. “Everyone has a threshold voltage. Victor’s is something near twelve volts, so if I go over that he’ll come too early and the fun’ll be over. The great thing about it is I can go right up to eleven and hold him there!”