The Ringmaster

**"Step right up, step right up, my perverse spectators, to the most depraved and spine-chilling spectacle of the season!"**

The air was thick with the scent of fear and the echoes of desperate pleas—some for relief of a purely physical nature, the denied calling out for pleasure, others begging their dominants to spare them from torment. None of the cries were for freedom. That, Delilah thought, might have been the most frightening part for a twenty-five-year-old who'd spent her whole life choosing her own exits.

**"In this haunted corner of our twisted realm, where the veil between worlds is thin, we present a night of unparalleled deviance, horror, and humiliation!"**

The announcer stood atop a raised platform draped in crimson velvet. He was shrouded in mystery and cheap cologne, dressed in a black top hat and a red suit, wielding an aura of magic like a third arm. His every word was a spell that bound the tormented to their fate. His eyes glinted with malice as he revealed the night's bill acts and games and torments Delilah couldn't begin to catalogue without getting weak in the knees and wet between the legs.

Then the crowd parted, of to the many sights and delights available. And then she found herself face to face with him.

Up close, stripped of the spotlight and the grand language, the Ringmaster looked almost *normal*. Wild, yes—his dark curls fell to his shoulders, his shirt collar sat open—but normal. It was when he smiled that things went wrong. Beneath his moist lips sat rows of sharp, needlepoint teeth.

He saw the fear in her eyes and adjusted his posture, making himself less threatening without becoming *un*threatening. A snap of his fingers, and two figures peeled out of the darkness. Delilah wanted to call them clowns—the red lipstick, the black eyeshadow—but their outfits left little to the imagination, and what little they left invited exploration and exploitation. Their only real uniform was the collar around each neck. They took his hat. They took his coat. He was left in a suit vest and tie, curls tumbling loose. Disappearing into the nearby ringmasters trailer.

"Pleased to meet you," he said, and hooked one finger through the D-ring of her choker, gentle and possessive in equal measure, like it was the collar it had always really been. "My name is Virgil. In time, you'll call me Ringmaster." Stated with an otherworldly confidence.

His eyes were strange—amber dipping toward gold, too bright, too predatory to belong to a man. They caught the midway lights like spun gold. Both beautiful and terrifying for the girl in black

"Delilah Crowley," she choked out. Not sure why she felt compelled to give this stranger her full name. Or why it seemed to peak his interest the thick hair of his eyebrows rising as she spoke.

He laughed, relaxed. "What a lovely name for such a delicate flower."

She'd forgotten that part. She was named after the Plain White T's song—a suggestion her uncle had made and her mom had loved and her dad had hated. So whenever anyone asked, her uncle always mentioned the flower, to keep the peace. She didnt like being called delicate either but the tight grip on the d ring said she was exactly what he called her.

"Virgil like the poet?" She tried, teasing for details, for any small mental victory, anything to keep her heart in her chest instead of crawling into her throat.

He shook his head like a dog shedding water. "Actually, it's for the wrestler. Virgil Butler, to Ted DiBiase, the Million Dollar Man. My brother Theodore and I were conceived during one of their matches in 1987."

She didn't know wrestling. She did know what a butler was and why that was a crappy thing to name a twin after, especially if you give the other one the name of the rich guy.

Given everything that had happened, this man being conceived in the 1980s while looking her age should probably have been the most important detail. It was almost certainly the question that gets you killed by the monster in a horror movie—so she filed it away in the same box as everything else and kept her mouth shut.

She could not keep her mouth shut.

She is not the final girl.

"She named you after the sidekick."

Virgil shrugged. "I wasn't the favorite. That was my brother. I was the one who got kicked out at eighteen."

Delilah knew what that was like. "Been there."

Virgil laughed, it was familiar to Delilah in its bitterness. Laugh at your situation because you really don't have any other option. "And soon you'll be *here*." He paused. "Permanently."

She didn't remember deciding to run. She just did.

Delilah fled down the midway while the carnival unfolded around her like a fever dream. Screams and whimpers—other misbehaving slaves, other eager victims—filled the air. Whips cracked. Chains rattled. Every sound was somebody's penance. The dreadful atmosphere stretched from the entrance all the way to the back, past tents and tanks and contraptions that made less and less sense the longer she looked at them.

She sprinted past a dunk tank labeled **THE BUKAKKHE**—she refused to interrogate the spelling—where some poor soul was being *very* thoroughly soaked from multiple directions, and past a paddock sign reading **HEAVY PETTING ZOO**, from which the moans suggested the name was literal. She didn't stop running until the gate and the Ringmaster's trailer were beyond the horizon.

Unfortunately, she was now well and truly lost.

She stood still, catching her breath, and took stock. She was somewhere on the midway still—which meant once it was safe, she could theoretically make a straight line back to the parking lot, pretend the night never happened, move to some island far from technology, and live out the rest of her life at a safe distance from all of it.

Or at least, that was the plan forming in her head. A desperate half baked plan.

The midway, however, had other ideas. Because the midway was lined with *games*.

---

Her first stop**HOOK-A-WHORE** The sign said without shame or censorship.She found the name a bit rude—an insult to people she wasn't entirely sure wanted to be there. It was the classic magnetic fishing game, except the "pond" was a trough of gleaming oil, and the "fish" were bound submissives wearing numbered tags clamped to nipple rings that displayed the points. Players lowered a rope to catch a pole attached to an anal hook inside the poor clowns, who slipped and slid through the slick with helpless little gasps each time someone got lucky. Given the cursing coming from the sorority sisters playing the game it was very hard to win…. Whatever winning meant in this game. She picked up the pace as she didn't want to find out what happened when someone won or lost.

**TEST YOUR REFLEXES** was the next sign. It was a small game that sat between a hot dog cart that was playing polka music and a funnel cake stand.A high-striker, but the mallet drove a phallic piston up a bound clown's ass, and the harder the swing, the higher the marker climbed. The "bell" was a moan—a real one, pulled loose at the top of the climb, different in pitch for every contestant.

**RING TOSS ROW** had a bit of theming to having the trappings of a 1920s art Deco to the way the booth is constructed and decorated. Rubber cock rings, tossed at posts. The posts were clowns, bound and blushing, their erections standing in as targets. Different colors were worth different points. Delilah wondered, distantly, whether the *clowns* got points for endurance. As those Cocks were standing at full strength for what must be hours without a hint of softness or any hint of precum. Any girl or guy would be lucky to ride something that could last that long. But speaking of rides

**CUNT-ERPILLAR**

A small roller-coaster, where bound guests—*captives*—lay face-to-ass in a naked line, on all fours, forming a human caterpillar. Riders were dragged through dark tunnels, screams and moans in equal measure. Delilah noted there was a way *onto* the ride. She did not see a way *off*. A few had abandoned clothing by the entrance. The piles suggested they'd made a choice, or had it made for them.

**WHACK-A-SLUT** confused her the most because its foot print in the fairgrounds didn't fit with the operations going on. A platform of mole-holes, out of which gagged and blindfolded bottoms popped up at random, asses presented skyward. Players used paddles to whack whichever one surfaced. The subs wore chastity devices that vibrated on impact, "rewarding" the player with a moan. Delilah stared at the mechanism for a full thirty seconds.

"How does that even work?" she said aloud, letting her inner thoughts become outer ones as she tried to wrap her mind around the physics of asses being pushed up to be whacked by some wandering stranger. Because there wasn't enough room to fit a full body under that shallow wooden platform. Unless they dug underneath which seemed like a lot of effort

**THE MILK BOTTLE PYRAMID**

Stacked bottles, replaced with graduated butt plugs. Players threw rubber balls to knock them down—and the "prize" for clearing a level was getting to insert that plug into a waiting clown strapped to the prize table. Delilah had a sudden, uncharitable suspicion that the clowns weren't prizes at all. They were *equipment*.

A merry-go-round whose horses had been modified with dildo saddles and restraint straps. Riders were locked in place for the duration, the up-and-down motion driving them onto the mounted toys while the carnival lights spun. She watched some busty blond groan as the saddle dildo worked on her pussy, she was completely lost in the pleasure of it all “ oh yes oh yes” she pleaded loud enough to be heard over the music. The toy continued giving her pleasure until she needed help from two clowns to un saddle herself Delileh's cheeks went red as she saw the blond was still playing her clit as she was being led away silent pleas for more going unheard by the clowns.Delilah decided, all at once, that it was too much. She needed walls. She needed to get out of the midway and to somewhere a bit less over stimulating.

She ducked into the nearest open tent—one with a strange hand-stitched fabric featuring bears and corn, of all things as bears and corn didn't go together. She looked up to read the sign that was draped carefully over the entrance.

**THE STRONGMAN SHOW**. *Featuring Carl & Natasha.*

*twelves years married and still going strong*

Delilah pushed through the flap before she could think better of it.