by Ophidia Cox
“Why didn’t you tell Victor?”
“’Cause I knew you were curious and you meant well.” He pulled his lips into a sardonic grin, eyebrows flexing under his mask. “I mean, everyone was vanilla once.”
Chapter 8
Victor wore a traditional ringmaster’s costume when he strode into the ring on Saturday night: a purple velvet jacket with gold brocade and frogging, fawn leggings, patent leather jackboots, a lime-green cummerbund, a black hat with a similar lime-green band around it and an oversize bow tie in lurid stripes. He looked majestic.
No sooner had he begun his opening speech, he was interrupted by the lewd clowns, in a garish Reliant Robin done up like a burger van. They threw kebabs and fried onions about and made hot dog ketchup buns with unmentionable parts of their anatomies.
Sylvia, Max and Vaughn watched the opening events from behind the entrance curtain. They’d left Pikesley handcuffed to a wall in Vaughn’s dungeon. He had sworn and spat at Vaughn when he had brought him a ham sandwich and a metal dog bowl with water in it.
“Are you not in any of the events?” Sylvia asked.
Vaughn waved a hand dismissively and made a rude blowing noise between slack lips. “I don’t like all that slapstick rubbish and cheering. It’s more Victor’s thing. BDSM should be scary and made of metal and leather, not clowns and fruit trifles.” He glanced back at the other performers seated about the room. “Besides, who’d get this lazy lot organized backstage?” He put his hand to his cat-o’-nine-tails and grinned demonically.
Victor took his position center stage. “Whores and bastards!” he roared. “Degenerate scum from all around! I am sure you are all demanding an explanation for the unprecedented closure of the Sideshow yesterday night.” On the main screen, he narrowed his eyes and lowered the microphone slightly. “Truth is,” he continued in a lower voice, “the way the law is enforced in this country these days leaves a lot to be desired.”
“That’s your cue!” Vaughn winked at Sylvia. “Have fun!”
Sylvia pushed the curtain out of the way and began to walk in sharp, confident strides toward Victor in the middle of the stage, her fingers toying with the truncheon and handcuffs attached to the hip strap of her costume, Max padding beside her.
“I used to think England was a bastion of liberty! They said the great independent thinkers, like Darwin and Locke, would have been put to death or incarcerated had they come up with their ideas anywhere else. But it would seem it isn’t that way, not anymore!”
The main screen showed Sylvia walking up behind him from several angles. She wore her stiletto boots and harness she had bought from the shop when she’d decided to go incognito here, but attached to the shoulders were police epaulettes, and a large official-looking badge had been suspended from the piercing through her left nipple. Look behind you, the audience chorused.
“Evidently we no longer live in a country where free speech and freedom of expression are valued, and the stinking coppers have turned their concerns upon the individual for what he or she thinks above what he or she does. Evidently...” His voice trailed off as he turned his head to face Sylvia and his expression dropped. “Oh shit, the pigs are here!”
Sylvia shook her handcuffs and pointed at Victor. “Freeze! You’re under arrest!”
Victor stumbled around the ring. “Run away! Run away!” Max raced after him, barking raucously.
“Seize him!” she ordered the Hermaphrodite Twins. The pair of them sprinted after him, threw him facedown on the ground and pinned his arms behind his back.
“Police brutality! Bumrape!” he yelled, and spat out sand.
As Sylvia handcuffed him, she recited the standard police disclaimer. “You do not have to say anything at this time, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you.”
“Trousers!” Victor shouted. Laughter burst out in the audience as the twins hauled him back upright.
Sylvia whipped off his cummerbund, sent it flying over her shoulder and yanked his jodhpurs down.
“Strip-search him!” she commanded the twins.
They divested him of everything apart from his bow tie and jackboots, flinging the garments up in the air or waving them around flamboyantly before throwing them away. The three of them bent him back, over the clown car’s bonnet, and they pretended to search him, and in the process inserted Vaughn’s newest prince’s wand. An awful lot of men in the audience cringed when nine inches of knobbly pencil-thick steel sank into his wet urethra. Sylvia forgot the pressing matter of finding the saboteur briefly in order to appreciate Victor’s gasp of discomfort and the expression of desperate, euphoric panic on his face as the sound violated him–his anatomy wasn’t quite adapted to the width yet.
After they’d finished, they pulled him up and pushed him back down against the car on his front, leaving Sylvia free to stride up and plug his butt with a dildo electrode disguised as a policeman’s truncheon. She snapped her fingers and the twins pulled him roughly from the car by his arm and dumped him on the sand on his back. He lay there skewered through the dick, the silvered knob on the end of the wand bobbing with his pulse, the discomfort on his face tempered by arousal and anticipation.
“I am going to ask you a question, Maynard, and I’m only going to ask it once before things will get very nasty for you.” Sylvia stood over him, set her arms akimbo and paused dramatically. “Was it Professor Plum in the library with the lead piping?”
Laughter rippled through the masses surrounding the stage.
Victor raised his chin and flared his nostrils in defiance. “I’ll never tell you!”
Sylvia turned to the twins. “Fetch the polygraph!” They spun on their heels like mirror images and went backstage. They returned straining under the weight of a nasty-looking chair made from Gothic wrought iron filigree and heavy slabs of oak. Vaughn, whose idea it had been, had bolted an electrosex control panel onto the side, and a metal colander and a mass of wiring lay tangled up in the seat.
The twins hooked up wiring to the electrodes already in Victor and pushed him roughly down into the seat. He gasped whenever they touched the apparatus connected to him. They put the colander on his head–Sylvia recalled from Vaughn’s explanation that it didn’t have any direct current in it, just some fiber optics and LEDs to make it look less like a colander and more like a high-tech torture device–and stuck the other electrodes that had sticky pads on the ends, like the wires in hospital that monitor ill people, at random over his body. Thick buckles strapped down his wrists and ankles.
Sylvia positioned herself in front of the chair, her feet apart and her bare chest pushed out. “You are going to tell me the information, Mr. Maynard, or this machine is going to make you wish you had.”
The main lighting dropped as Sylvia turned the left dial on the control box to its lowest setting. A faint electrical hum came into hearing, and the LEDs on the chair and the colander began to glow dully in the darkened arena. Sylvia hadn’t wanted to give the Compton bomber the benefit of a dark room to hide in, and this didn’t feel safe at all, but the show had to look convincing. She stepped back to address him. “Are you Victor R. Maynard?”
“Yes.” Victor sounded faintly nervous. The chair continued to hum and glow steadily.
“Did you leave the lavatory seat up?”
“No!” Victor said, indignant. Sylvia touched her middle finger to the remote control taped to her palm. LEDs on the colander flashed, and a plasma globe mounted on the back of the chair sparked into a luminous anemone beneath the surface of its glass. Victor started in his seat and a loud electrical crackle buzzed from a sound effects box under the chair.
Sylvia increased the dial on the control box, noticing the edge of the chair between Victor’s legs was becoming sticky. “If you persist in lying to me, I will take it up to twelve volts!”
“Oh, no, not twelve volts!” Victor whimpered, suppressing the quiver of laughter in his voice.
Sylvia turned the dial a l
ittle more. Victor’s skin broke into goose pimples. His eyes widened into a trancelike expression.
“Where were you on Friday the thirteenth?”
“At a ram-raid!”
Sylvia turned the dial to nine. Victor’s back went rigid. He started trembling like jelly, unable to get free from the straps anchoring him to the chair or escape the current tickling him to the core.
“Tell me who was with you that night.”
“No one!”
Sylvia touched her finger to her palm again, and the chair buzzed and flashed and Victor jumped in it.
Very slowly, Sylvia turned the dial toward eleven. Victor’s shaking became more obvious, his breathing faster and louder. He groaned slightly with each exhalation. His face tensed into a rictus of intolerable pleasure. Beads of sweat prickled on his temples and down the middle of his chest. “Please,” he managed to whisper.
“You want this to stop? Then say it?”
A spotlight came down from the roof, isolating Victor in a stark circle. The cameras all focused in on his face. Sylvia held him there, adding some dramatic suspense by sliding her hand over his sweaty chest, penetrating his navel with her fingers and further teasing the infuriated head of his phallus with circling strokes around the thick rod impaling it. He was delectable, and she couldn’t get enough of this. The overhead cameras focused on different bits of him and the audience held its breath.
“Was it...” Victor forced out between clenched teeth. “...Mrs. White...in the drawing room...with the candlestick?”
Sylvia snapped her fingers. One of the twins strode forward, holding out a black envelope on an arm. Sylvia opened it, took out the piece of paper and studied it for a few seconds.
“You’re wrong.” She turned the dial all the way to twelve.
Victor let out an agonized yell, convulsed violently and ejaculated a thick bullet of semen that landed on the sand three feet in front of the chair.
As Victor’s orgasmic spasms died away, the audience began to applaud. The Hermaphrodite Twins untied him and pulled him back to his feet. The twins bowed, then Sylvia hugged Victor and she and he also bowed.
Victor put his ringmaster’s hat back on and raised a hand for silence. Sylvia could see his legs were still a bit wobbly and he was finding it a struggle not to laugh, intoxicated on the endorphin rush. He managed to get it under control when he spoke. “Well, I’m afraid it looks like we’re done for. Unless...” Victor’s face up on the main screen became pensive, and he raised a finger to his chin. “We could bribe the police with sexual favors!”
Goading noises rippled through the audience.
“But before we do, would you all please give a round of applause to our canine performer!”
The spotlight turned on Max, who stood there with his tongue hanging out, looking bemused. The audience cheered.
“Now we all must pity the blind, because they can’t watch porn!” Victor shouted. “So tonight we’re collecting money for Guide Dogs for the Blind! Not obviously so the blind can watch porn with their dogs...” Victor waved his hands about inarticulately. “To help them out in their day-to-day living, of course. It’s all for charity and he’s a lovely dog, so please give him your shrapnel!”
At that prompt, Sylvia gave Max the thought command to search the crowd. He moved off the stage and began walking down the lines. People patted him and remarked what a nice dog he was and put spare change in the barrel attached to his collar.
Sylvia knew the drill. She and Victor had rehearsed this several times that morning. The twins leaned her backward over the bonnet of the Reliant Robin, restraining her arms. They couldn’t use ordinary bondage, Victor had decided, in case she had to get up in a hurry. Two of the leprechauns took hold of her shins and pulled her legs apart. As Victor leaned over her, his stomach pressed against her groin with a soft, smothering weight, the strap of her costume infuriatingly preventing direct contact between him and her.
As he unbuckled that strap and exposed her bare vulva to the audience, Sylvia struggled to keep focus on her connection to Max. When he pushed his fingers between her soft, wet folds, it was hard not to think of anything else. He used his thumb to slip up the loose skin covering her glans and began to push down on her clit, sliding his finger back and forth, and the aching burning of impending orgasm began to build through the nerves in her groin and back and legs. She opened her eyes for an instant and caught sight of herself, spread-eagled amidst all these people, with the fingers of some obese sideshow freak in a top hat and a silly bow tie sunk into her shamefully bald and dark red genitals, and with a realization of startling fear it occurred to her that Victor was going to make her orgasm in front of all these people, and she was held down and there was nothing she could do to stop him pushing her all the way whenever he wanted.
And the idea of them watching her lose control of herself in the event she and Victor had planned and executed, and them enjoying it, was incredibly empowering, more rewarding than solving a case in the police had ever been.
As Victor made her come she felt the urge to scream, so she did, arching her back and shaking and thrusting herself back against his fingers as the ecstasy exploded outward from him to flood her body, and her voice joined the roars of amusement and approval of the audience. She closed her eyes and surrendered everything to the sensation, to his fingers and to powerlessness, and let the climax take her.
On the edge of the insanity, something jarred a memory. A scent signature, from Max. The safe word: “Cormorant!”
The twins immediately released her wrists. Sylvia sat up and tried to drown out the final squeezes of orgasm racking her body. Max was barking. Up in the audience a man in a denim jacket rushed ahead of him, trying to force an exit through the other spectators.
Sylvia leveled her arm sharply to point out the fleeing saboteur. “Stop that man! He’s got a Compton bomb!”
People screamed and scattered left and right before the saboteur, falling over chairs and each other as he forced a gangway, Max barking and lunging at his heels. Sylvia elbowed people out of her way and hurdled chairs as she struggled to reach him. At the end of the row he tripped over something. He fell into the aisle where he sprawled on the floor. A naked gymnast covered in green sparkly stuff sprang from the ceiling and pounced on the man as he tried to rise.
Sylvia threw herself on top of him and wrenched his arms behind his back, snapping the handcuffs onto his wrists. “You’re under arrest for attempting an act of information terrorism! You do not have to say anything right now, but anything you do say may be taken down and used as evidence against you!”
“Check inside his jacket!” said a man behind Sylvia. She looked and saw it was the bionic man. She pulled open the saboteur’s jacket to reveal an archaic-looking electronic device made from bits of calculator and a car battery and copper wires coiled around toilet roll cores. Sylvia ripped the connections to the battery out, quickly disarming the device.
As she pulled him to his feet to lead him away, she noticed the thing he’d tripped over, a drainpipe-like object that looked the same color as the flooring. It was a snake with a gem between its eyes.
Chapter 9
Sylvia stood before Superintendent Scott’s desk in her office while she flipped through the card file Sylvia had just presented her.
“I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving us, Price,” said the superintendent. “Thanks for filing your report on the Sideshow case. Everything seems in order here.”
She pushed back her chair, got to her feet, and smiled at Sylvia. “Hope everything goes well. If you need a reference any time, I’m happy to provide one.”
Sylvia shook her hand. “Thanks.”
As she exited the superintendent’s office to the stairwell, Pikesley appeared. He wore plain clothes and carried an armful of personal items: his photograph of his family and his Christian paraphernalia. He scowled at Sylvia. They had let him go after they’d handed in the saboteur, but in his interview the man had named Pikesl
ey as his collaborator and, after that, several constables had come forward independently and claimed Pikesley had tried to bribe them.
“You’re leaving the police to go and live with a freak in a circus?”
Sylvia walked away from him. She could think of a number of things to say in reply, but she didn’t see the point in stooping to his level.
At the front desk, she asked the receptionist, “Do you have the discounted evidence from the Sideshow case?”
The woman had a rummage through some filing drawers. “Ah yes, here it is.”
“I’m going to return it.” Sylvia took the plastic evidence bag containing the multi-colored titanium fish. “Thanks.”
Baxter loitered in the foyer. He looked nervously at Sylvia when she entered, and took a step in her direction. “I’m sorry you’re leaving. The new super is bloody good at her job.” He glanced down at his hands sheepishly. “This’ll probably sound odd, but I...er...I feel like I’m a better person, somehow, now Pikesley’s not around. I’m sorry about what I said about Maynard, and how I reacted when you were, uh, undercover. I just didn’t expect that at all, I mean, from someone like you.” An embarrassed smile flitted over his face.
“It’s okay, really.” Sylvia returned his smile. “It’s been nice working with you.”
She shook his hand before turning to leave through the main doors. The sun slipped behind a cloud as she slid the fish into her pocket and stroked the shape of it through the fabric of her jeans.
Back at her flat she packed the two suitcases containing her possessions into the boot of her car before getting Max onto the back seats and attaching his harness to the dog seatbelt fixed to the straps there. The flat was rented. She’d left her keys on the kitchen table and canceled the direct debit. She’d lose her deposit for not giving notice, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore.
The heat wave had finally burned itself out. The air had cooled and the wind had picked up, and the leaves in the trees looked faded and parched as Sylvia drove the road to the Garden Festival, not bright and fresh with the vigor of late spring as they had a month ago.
