The Horned God was next. She’d never heard him say a word, and on the occasions he ate with the rest of them, he sat with the demons. His eyes weren’t black and his teeth weren’t sharp, but he bore several racks of antlers—one set on his head, one on the tops of his shoulders and one emerging from the back of his shoulder blades. He was furred from the V of his hips down, his penis visible through the thicket of thick, white hair but not as proudly shown off as many of the others’, and not erect.
He was just an oddity, his skin so gray it was almost blue, his nipples pierced with delicate silver rings, his white-irised eyes wide and unblinking. There was something terribly penetrating about those eyes, as though they could see more deeply than the impenetrable eyes of the demons.
Neve cried out at the next glass-case tableau. A man done up in thick leather over his ripped fireplug body held the head of the carousel engineer, Caroline.
Just her head.
It had been severed halfway down her neck, sinew swaying from the bottom, the uneven place on her spine and opening of her throat visible from the base. Her blonde and blue-streaked hair was wound around the thick man’s hand so that her head poised just over where his cock would be.
The rest of her body was on the other side of the tableau, on her knees while a whipcord-thin man strapped head to toe in similar thick leather felt up the naked body of a headless woman.
Caroline twisted around in the shorter man’s hand from where she’d been nuzzling the leather over his cock. She smiled. The headless body waved to Neve.
“That…that…” If Neve hadn’t known any better, she probably would have assumed there was some kind of mirror making it seem like two women were one. Knowing it was real was what made it so awful. “That’s not okay, Bell.”
He laughed. “It was her idea. We moved the torture carousel to later in the event because she wanted to do this in the Funhouse instead.”
Valorie came tearing through the halls in a translucent white latex bodysuit, with only nose holes for her to breathe. She skittered like a ghostly, possessed demon in an impossibly contorted body, her mouth open and eyes rolled back. Neve gave another little scream, but it wasn’t nearly as terrible as Caroline’s literally beheaded body being used, which bordered on necrophilia and reminded her of a disturbing series of true crimes.
The next tableau showed Christina, the Human Torso without any limbs, roped up with rubber tubing. The places where her limbs had been reduced to nubs appeared more cleanly removed, the visible interior not flesh but mechanical, as though she were an android who had been mined for spare parts. She sparked with malfunction as she struggled against the tubing holding her aloft.
On his knees, the tattooed man was nearly unrecognizable because his whole body was airbrushed a light green. She only recognized him because he’d kept his piercings, which looked even stranger on a man made to look like an alien. Troy teased Christina’s biomechanical folds with his split tongue, both sides surprisingly dexterous.
The man in the next glass case could hardly be called a man. If Neve had thought Caroline was the most disturbing thing the Funhouse could offer, she stood corrected.
He wasn’t just another Human Torso, although he was missing his limbs. His had been severed farther up his legs and arms, leaving him nothing but a torso alone. There were obvious scars where he’d been stitched together.
A tube had been inserted into his throat to allow him to breathe, another one lower for feeding, because his nose had been removed and his mouth had been sewn and healed shut. His eyes had been removed, the eyelids grafted closed. His ears had been removed and covered. He had the barest features of a face, his skull left intact but everything else scarred over, and not in the clean, featureless way of the Gentleman.
What was left showed signs of having been a man once, with black tattoos all over his skin, his chest and abdomen those of someone who had clearly wanted to look good, a five o’clock shadow over his chin and scalp.
He’d been left only his head, torso, cock, balls and anus. A silver plug had been inserted into his ass, and a golem in a tight nurse’s dress, face mask and the usual deadened eyes of her kind worked lubricated, gloved hands over his genitals without enthusiasm. The lube glistened over his nearly purple cock.
In case anyone thought the man was nothing but a rubber mannequin, his muscles twitched when the nurse stroked over his lower abdomen to his navel, and when she focused on his tight, dark sac, his cock pulsed and moved as though blindly searching for what had given it pleasure. He shook his head, tried to arch. It was like watching a man wearing a straitjacket in a sensory deprivation room. Touch was all he got to experience, and he fought to feel it.
“My God, Bell. What did you do?”
“Why not ask what he did?” Bell’s voice was exceedingly pleasant and exceedingly cold. “We sometimes display the Blob in Oddity Row if there’s a cool breeze, but otherwise, we mostly bring him out for Funhouse events, because it’s the only time he gets to come these days. It’s not like he can take care of it himself or ask someone else, can he? I’ll eventually give him some of his senses back, perhaps once he’s gone completely mad and earns the mercy of a clean slate. But I explained plainly what it was he would do in my Funhouse, and he wants to be here. He told me himself. So don’t you ‘my God’ me.”
Bell brought her to the next glass-case tableau, this one empty except for a luxurious four-poster bed turned down in red silk that wasn’t practical at all but looked amazing. The walls had been draped in red velvet like the oddity tent curtains. The entire feel of it was like some gothic fantasy boudoir, lit by a pair of golden lamps on either end.
The glass wall slid to the side.
His lips brushed her ear as he ran his hands down her arms. “This is your stop.”
Chapter Ten
“I don’t see any hands.” Moths battered Neve’s cold, hollow insides, nervousness briefly overtaking the effect of the rest of the Funhouse journey.
“You will,” Bell said. “Do you trust me?”
“Not nearly as much as you seem to want me to.”
“Do you trust me on this?” He gently nudged her onto the platform. “Do you trust that you’ll enjoy this as much as everyone else will?”
Neve turned around at the hiss of the glass closing back to make a seamless wall, and for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. But the glass case didn’t have a top, and it didn’t reach all the way to the third-floor ceiling. She was getting plenty of air. Her lungs just hadn’t convinced her brain of that.
“Neve.” Bell pressed a hand to the glass. She automatically placed her hand against his. “This is almost exactly the same as the haunted funhouse. Guests stare at you all day, wondering what it would be like to touch you, to feel what you’re feeling. This is no different, except you’ll be allowed to feel so much more, and they’ll be allowed to linger. But they can’t touch you, and you can always close your eyes. Trust me. Trust that I intend to give you nothing but pleasure tonight.”
Neve took a deep breath through her nose, exhaled out her mouth, again and again until her lungs worked like normal. She nodded.
“Then climb into bed like a good girl.”
He trailed his fingers down the glass as she backed herself to the bed then crawled under the covers. The silk was as heavenly as her dress over her skin, no prickly static to disrupt the experience. Just cool silk caressing what smooth limbs they could cling to.
“Now close your eyes and try to sleep, good girl. No monsters under the bed tonight. I’ll see you later this evening.”
Neve forced herself to close her eyes and keep breathing, unsure what was supposed to happen and when. When she shut her eyes, though, she saw the things in this Funhouse that were the most terrifying in their quiet cruelty. Bell had never pretended he couldn’t be cruel. Her stomach churned as she wondered whether that was okay with her.
A wave of warm calm swept from head to toe in seconds, leaving her nearly asleep.
&n
bsp; “Relax, Neve. One day you’ll understand why I do the things I do.”
She rested there, her hair splayed out on the pillow, one hand next to her hip and the other curled next to her face, which was turned slightly away from the corridor. She’d pulled the covers over her chest so that only the black straps of the dress could be seen, but the way the silk clung to her, her form was still clearly discernable.
Her brain flashed between Caroline’s severed head, the Blob’s twisting body, Valorie’s silent scream, the way she imagined Maya’s back would look after the Ringmaster finished with it, but it was as though Bell plucked those thoughts from her head like apples until her mind was quiet again.
The Funhouse had its own soundtrack—like the haunted funhouse, but with fewer screams. A string quartet played something haunting and slow in a minor key, but underneath it, almost too soft to hear, were low moans, soft groans, as though from a distance or just behind one of the curtained partitions.
When stray cries, murmurs of conversation, distant laughing and moans that doubtlessly came from the Arcanium exhibits who were unapologetically having sex rather than just being sexual accented the soundtrack, Neve knew the Funhouse event had officially begun.
All of this happened while she slipped away, untethering from consciousness, aware but not paying much attention. By now, she was used to sleeping in spite of sexual tension, so there was no reason for that to keep her awake now.
A hand wrapped around her ankle.
There was no one else in the bed with her, nowhere for anyone to hide. The silk had been flawless when she’d climbed in, no holes for anything to creep through.
At her twitch, the hand slowly made its way up her body, mapping the contour of her leg, over her knee, her thigh.
The disembodied hands that groped her in the haunted funhouse were human, but what moved over her bare leg now, teasing the sensitive inner thigh before retreating to less vulnerable flesh, didn’t feel normal. The fingers were too long. She wasn’t positive, but she thought there might have been an extra set of knuckles. It was how she imagined the Gentleman would feel like if he had the inclination to touch, but the texture was different—not quite slimy, not quite brittle, reptilian but not rough, smooth without being scaly. Her dream-trapped mind couldn’t pinpoint the exact quality, but it was unmistakably wrong.
The same wrong kind of hand smoothed its way up her other leg. She drew her knee up in a bleary attempt to shake it away, as though it was just a spider crawling over her, but it followed her up, cupping her knee then squeezing the length of thigh.
She moaned, shaking her head, her brows knitting.
“Relax. The sex demons will send out another burst of magic any minute now. You’re doing wonderfully.”
The strokes of the strange hands softened into a massage, urging her along with Bell to relax, go back to sleep.
Another pair of hands wrapped around her waist. Long-fingered like the others but with nasty claws at their tips, they gathered the dress up her thighs, ran over her abdomen with eerie possessiveness then found their way to her breasts. When she lay on her back, her breasts tended to gravitate toward the sides, but the dress kept them somewhat contained and the strange hands did the rest, testing the yield of her flesh, claws pricking at her cleavage.
Her eyelashes fluttered as she shifted against the hands exploring her body more personally, more intentionally, than the hands from the haunted funhouse. She caught a glimpse of mountainous knuckles under the silk as the hand massaged her breast, the other clawed hand overlapping with the long-fingered hand on her leg as they caressed her thigh.
A sound escaped her, a harsh exhalation she couldn’t control, as she tried to turn over. But the peace had officially been disturbed. Her bed writhed with the phantom hands slowly savoring every part of her body they could touch, as though whatever they reached was the most arousing piece of her. At this point, she could easily tell when disembodied hands were aroused—a kind of tension or restraint required not to squeeze her too hard in excitement.
But the clawless hands didn’t hesitate when she tried to roll onto her side. They clamped down on her legs and yanked her onto her back again.
Neve’s eyes flew open.
As soon as they knew she was fully awake, the clawed hands slid up to grasp both breasts in a firm, almost painful grip. The silk sheets fell away, exposing black, crackled hands connected to arms that emerged seamlessly from the sheets on either side, as though a demon beneath the mattress reached up without barrier to caress her.
There was a terrible tearing sound as the clawed hands tightened their grip, but instead of rending her, they tore the black silk of her dress until her breasts were bare. The rip extended down past her navel, pushing the covers farther down.
The other pair of hands emerged from under the covers now, with mottled bluish-green, scabrous fingers that dented the meat of her thighs until she squirmed.
And from the corner of her eye, ghostly figures watched from outside the scene. Most of them were already in a state of undress by now after everything they’d witnessed earlier in the maze. They watched with their noses pressed to the glass, fogging it with their breath until someone urged them back so everyone could see. Some turned away—Neve assumed to return to a previous tableau—or continued on, but a few stayed, observed mercilessly as the demons laid claim to her.
Allen stood there, his hand in his open trousers. She couldn’t see anything anatomical, but it was perfectly clear what he was doing. That wasn’t breaking the rules here, but Neve had to look away, pained at the reality of a supercilious ass like that taking pleasure from what was happening to her. She closed her eyes, shaking her head again, playing along with the fantasy but also oddly raw after being pulled out of her half-sleep.
The hands on her legs gripped her thighs hard enough to bruise, but the thumbs were gentler, caressing where her thighs pressed together as though to coax them to open. They disturbed the trimmed curls at the juncture, making her abdomen, mound and thighs break out into gooseflesh. Neve bit her lip as those thumbs brushed closer and closer to her clit, which peeked out from the top of her folds even with her legs closed.
Meanwhile, the clawed hands had also taken a more delicate turn now that her breasts were out for it to enjoy, as though the mind behind it couldn’t quite decide what to do with her now that he had her at his mercy. When his claws rubbed together, they made a sound like sharpening knives.
Then those claws descended upon the peaks of her breasts, closing in on the areolae, which puckered and darkened, her nipples hardening almost out of self-defense rather than arousal. But as the claws plucked at her, dangerously sharp on such sensitive places, the pink deepened to near red on the tough, pebbly flesh. She pressed her thighs more tightly together against the relentless sensations sending lightning bolts from her breasts to her clit, which throbbed with every pinch and pull of those wicked claws.
With a high moan, she brought her own hands under her breasts as the claws pulled her nipples taut. When the claws released her, she caught the tender, menaced flesh with her softer palms, but quickly brought her thumbs and forefingers to her nipples to press her own nails into the flesh.
Neve lifted her hips helplessly toward the teasing fingers so close to where she wanted them. Her folds tingled, full between her thighs, but she wasn’t quite ready to part her legs for everyone on the other side of the glass to see her so shameless, although she knew she only delayed the inevitable. She wasn’t going to be able to keep her legs closed for this, and hell, even if she did, the hands would find their way in from underneath.
Another pair of hands, human-like but skeletal and gray, grabbed her wrists and yanked her away from touching herself. She’d still been pinching her nipples, and the sudden jerk pulled them to the point of pain before she could release her breasts to quiver back against her chest. Neve cried out, struggled against the hands on her wrists, but they forced her fists back onto the pillows. The claws tapped her
breasts in a clear gesture—naughty, naughty.
Then another pair of hands—black and shiny as a spider and bigger than Ciarán’s, with claws like those of a wolf—emerged from the red silk, dwarfing the long-fingered hands on her breasts and legs and seeming to quell them as well. They stopped stroking and teasing her and instead joined the skeletal hands in holding her down as the broad black hands flexed their fingers, displayed themselves to her like a warning.
One giant hand curled its fingers to brush her cheek in a parody of tenderness. It played its nails over her lower lip, plumped from her biting it. The other giant hand slowly lowered itself to her abdomen. The clawless hands on her thighs roughly pulled her legs apart, spreading her for her audience, who watched so intently they almost didn’t breathe, perhaps because she was having trouble with that herself. She trembled with such violence that it could only be genuine. The hand on her abdomen spread its fingers, taking possession of everything it touched, then slid down to her mound.
At that moment, Neve felt a surge of desire so strong through her that it overshadowed the pain of the claws on her nipples, the bruises the other hands had left, any lingering modesty. The hand at her face closed around her neck just as she raised herself to meet his fingers descending between her legs. They brushed over her clit but weren’t concerned with it. All the demon wanted was inside.
Two giant fingers pushed rudely into her cunt, which offered no protest or obstacle, entrance smooth from a combination of what the Funhouse exhibits and fucking with Bell had already done to her and what the other hands had continued.
Hers weren’t the only moans filling her ears as the demon penetrated her, probed her, pushed as deeply as he could, curling his fingers to own her before she could adjust to so much inside, so dexterous, so big. His claws added a line of pain to the sensation, like a wasp sting on her tongue during a kiss, turning some of her moans into screams. He brought his hand down from her neck after a squeeze that made her vision blur then groped her breast, small in his massive paw.
Funhouse Page 23
