98 - Tale of the Sideshow - Freak Train

Jason cracked open his last beer. A smile on his lips as he offered a silent toast, and took a sip. The candle rested on his right knee.

"Well. If we've come this far, I guess I should try to end this with a good one. I call this one

FREAK TRAIN

It was a night in the lonesome October. The kids were asleep; most of the folks in the sideshow were too. The Boss and I, however, were on the road, she in her best business attire, I in the suit I saved for weddings and funerals. She had heard about a competitor. Wanted to see their show. The late-night version. Why she asked me to come, I wasn't sure. Not as muscle, certainly. Maybe as an extra set of eyes. I'd been with the sideshow for five or six seasons at that point, not including the winter seasons down in Mexico. Had a good idea how things worked. Or thought I did.

The show was on a train. Four passenger cars, set up on a siding north of Dagon's Hollow. I think that's why she was so interested; another carnival was set up in one of our regular spots. There was a crowd of punters, too. Not many, but well-dressed. Business suits. I recognized the mayor and tried not to recognize anyone else. Money changed hands; the Boss paid for us both.

No patter from the guy taking the money. He was small, balding, grey-haired, with deep lines in his face and a surly expression. Looked every person there in the eye, and then he moved and I knew he was a carny, maybe born and bred. There was an easy theatricality to his movements, but also a way he didn't look at everyone. His gaze rested on the Boss and I in turn, but on two of the punters in suits. I flagged them for ringers in the crowd.

"You are about to enter Hell," he said, his voice pitched low and sepulchral. "And there is only one way out: through. This door will be locked behind you. There is no other exit. No escape. If you enter in here, there are things you cannot unsee. Anyone who doesn't think they can bear it, leave now. No refunds. No recording devices."

It wasn't bad patter, though I didn't like it. If there was a fire or a medical emergency, there had to be another way out. I resolved to look for them. A security guy actually patted us down, confiscated smartphones, told us we could pick them up at the end.

No one backed out, not even the ones I flagged as ringers. He opened the iron door, and one by one we filed through.

As soon as we were inside, and the door locked tight behind us—I could hear the bolts being thrown—I got an idea of what kind of place this was. We were in absolute darkness. Typical spook show blackout. This was being set up like a haunted house, the captive audience moving along from car to car. Efficient set-pieces.

In the darkness, something glowing moved. It was just a head and hands, and all eyes were drawn to it. The figure did a slow, drawn-out striptease, revealing more and more of a naked, glowing body. My first thought was phosphorescent paint, maybe, but that was wrong. The colors were too vivid, the lines too organic. She looked like a harlequin baby all grown up, under a blacklight.

She wasn't very skilled, though there was a kind of sick fascination in the punters as they watched her move. I watched too, though it wasn't her glowing nipples or cooch in the darkness I was interested in. It was what was going on around her. The parts of the set we weren't supposed to see or think about.

The clink of a chain when she moved. A dark band around her glowing ankle. The figure that stood in darkness behind her, dressed all in black like a ninja. The glowing woman's dance grew more frantic, more ****, and more openly erotic. Her moans filled the space as she rubbed glowing fingers against her phosphorescent pussy. I think I was the only one to see the figure in black move. The knife was painted black. It moved across her throat and the blood that oozed down was black against her glowing skin. She collapsed in a bubbling gasp...and the door to the next car opened.

The second car was done up like a medieval dungeon. Three dead-eyed male dwarves, stripped naked and unshaven, engaged in a **** performance on a regular-sized woman. At first, they just appeared to take their turns fucking her. She seemed into it, though I noted the knots on the rope were real, designed to hold, not to be wiggled out of or undone quickly. Bad setup in case of a fire or other emergency. They gagged her before they broke out the needles, though. I watched them stab her breasts, watched her struggle and sweat, hold candles up to her feet and burn them. That part was not fake. My nostrils twitched at the scent of burning human flesh, and I noticed the manacles on the dwarves' legs.

The climax of the show was a bit of sleight-of-hand; a small fist pushed itself into her ass and pulled out a string pig intestines. Some of the suits in the crowd blanched. They were using real pig's blood, too. I wondered what they had told the girl about this, how much they had offered her. Probably a local. One night only. I couldn't see any scars that indicated she'd done this before. There were some BDSM shows that did stuff like that, even worse than that, but those were willing performers, with safe words and proper precautions. Not like this.

The third tank had a raised catwalk over a tank of green-tinted water. It was warm, humid, and two figures swam in in the water. Topless, both female-presenting, though I could see one was trans; the Adam's apple a dead giveaway despite the long hair and budding breasts. A bucket was held suspended over the water. One of the ringers reached out and touched it, then seemed to flinch back as it toppled over, spilling raw fish into the water.

The two mermaids went for it. I kept my poker face on, this was the geek show element of it, as their teeth bit through scale and skin, devouring the uncooked fish. The sex, by comparison, was almost an anticlimax. The trans mermaid propped up on a rock so the woman could blow him, her mouth still filled with pink chunks. The coitus was pretty basic, since neither could open their legs with the tail-costumes. Two people pounding pelvises together and trying not to drown.

It was the third car that made me sick at heart.

They had an Elephant Woman.

One side of her body was perfect, barely twenty if I had to guess, a Black woman with dreadlocks and full lips, small breasts. The other side of her...well, maybe more than that...was covered in growths. There are all different kinds of deforming conditions that can cause strange lumps and odd proportions, but this reminded me of nothing other than Joseph Merrick, the original Elephant Man. Massive flesh-colored tumors distorted her face, drawing her lips out into a perpetual sneer. Her left breast was the size of a medicine ball, the nipple so stretched as to be barely discernible. There was something wrong with her hip, so that she stood awkwardly, and her left arm and leg were so bloated with excessive tissue that fingers and toes were fused together.

They had her chained up between two pillars, one of the manacles deeply embedded in the flesh of her deformed left ankle. They had a sex machine set up. A dildo—I don't know what an elephant cock looks like, but I'll bet it was modeled after that—was positioned at her pussy, half of which was distorted, the labia hanging in a loose, dark flap. There was a button on a metal pole, and again, one of the two ringers stepped forward to press it.

Tears streamed down her face as the mechanism pistoned the dildo inside of her at a cruel pace. Yet she didn't fight it. I saw the scars on her wrists and ankles. The way she didn't even look to the punters for help. She wasn't playing. This was her life. She had been here for a long time. Too damn long.

I wasn't aware how hard I'd balled my fists until I felt the Boss's hand on my own. She saw it too, I know.

Other punters took a turn, once they saw the ringer do it. Some of them crowded around her, touched her flesh, to feel the texture of a swollen, deformed breast or labia. Muttered things like "My God, it's real."

Then one of the punters stuck their fingers up her ass.

I had seen people fucked in the ass before. I had done it, as part of a performance. Yet that dead-eyed stare from the Elephant Woman made me take careful note of the guy who pumped her asshole with his fingers, smiling idiotically. I was going to see him again.

Two other punters, including the mayor, took a turn. The Boss surprised me. She walked up to the Elephant Woman and gave her a soft, tender kiss, right on the lips. That was the only time in the whole performance I saw a flicker of life in those eyes.

Eventually, the door to the fourth car opened.

There were five of them. Tied to beds. A woman without arms. A woman without legs. A man and a woman without either. The last had two heads and three breasts, a genuine conjoined twin.

This was different from the others. Full audience participation. The two ringers had their dicks out immediately. The woman without legs gave one of them a handjob. The woman without arms gave the other a footjob, her feet stroking his hard prick.

The Boss and I hung back as the rest of them had their fun. I saw the exit. I saw, too, the cameras set up in the corner. I wondered how much of this the little guy who took the money was recording for later. Whether he was selling it anywhere online, or reserving it for ****. Certainly, seeing the mayor jerk off a young man with no arms or legs might have given him some pull.

The ringers noticed the two of us not participating in the fun. They hung back, when the door opened. Their eyes alert as they barred our way out.

"You don't like the show?" the one on the left said.

"The performers aren't properly motivated," the Boss said. I heard the smile in her voice. She raised her hands and touched their chests. "You boys can still get it up, can't you? Show an old lady if she still has what it takes to get both her holes reamed out."

"What about him?" The one on the right said.

Showtime. I unzipped my pants. "I like to watch."

Of all the strange things I saw that night, the weirdest might have been seeing the Boss strip down and convince those two knuckleheads to fuck her. She played the cougar well, but I don't think they really appreciated what I saw. The bite marks and slashes on her body, from her days training big cats. The tattoos on her wrist, that meant debts owed and respected by people from San Francisco to New York. That ring of scar tissue around her neck, where the noose had drawn so tight so fast it burned the skin before the rope broke. Sure, I rubbed my pecker and watched, but I think we both knew how this was going to end. I set my back to the wall next to the exit door, out of sight of the cameras, and fapped. Waiting for the right moment.

The little balding guy popped his head in, from the exit. Probably trying to figure out what the hold-up was, or to give them a mouthful. My hands went from my cock to his neck in the blink of an eye. Would you believe that squeezing the life out of that fuck gave me a harder boner than watching my boss get fucked in the ass? Well, it was true.

I'm not sure what the Boss did to them. She saw what I was about, and then those two ringers went slack, slumped on top of her. She pulled herself out from under them, something dripping from her holes—blood or cum, I wasn't sure which, the lighting wasn't great.

"Don't kill him," the Boss warned, as she saw the ringleader's face turn purple in my hands. "We have business to attend to."

"I'll spare you the details. The performers were freed. The bodies were buried. The Freak Train was now under new and ethical ownership. We've added a few more cars, refined the acts..."

From his pocket, Jason pulled out six tickets.

"And I'd like to invite each of you to one of our midnight performances. Free of charge."

He laughed...and then blew his candle out.