The Cyberkink Sideshow (14 page)

Pinned down and unable to resist the sensation, she could concentrate on nothing else. It felt amazing, but at the same time it made her want to squirm and clench her legs together, and the way she was bound made it impossible. It also came very close to making her scream and break into uncontrollable laughter. Helpless, the only thing she could do was lie there and endure it, and wait for what Victor would decide to do to her next.

His thumb touched the top of her cleft, tightening the skin there and pulling it back to expose the clitoris. Sylvia gasped as his oily finger touched her naked glans, stimulating raw nerves and sending waves of excitement rushing over her. At the same time, Vaughn, who must have stepped up behind her head, put his hands on her breasts and pinched her nipples sharply. Victor’s finger circled, pressing and sending wild bursts of explosive force surging down through her legs and up along her spine. Vaughn swabbed something over her left nipple. Wet cotton wool. Cold where it had been. Alcohol?

The moment Sylvia realized what Vaughn was doing, the wave of orgasm had already swollen to uncontrollable heights. As spasms of ecstasy coursed from Victor’s fingertip and racked her body, a searing pain shot through her nipple. Then her ears filled with roaring silence and everything blacked out as she surrendered to pure sensation.

Chapter 7

Sylvia lay on the bed in Victor’s caravan, gingerly twiddling the peacock-blue horseshoe of anodized titanium that hadn’t been attached to her before. It didn’t hurt, not exactly, but the flesh felt sort of hot and achy, and about four times bigger than it had felt before. The barbell had balls attached to the ends, to stop it from falling out. If she flattened it against her skin, they lay at the edge of her areola. If she wore a sturdy bra, nobody would be able to tell.

Victor came over and sat on the bed. He lay back, parallel to her, and folded his arms behind his head. She stroked her fingers over the curves of flesh under his pirate shirt.

“Thank you. I love it.”

He turned his head to make eye contact with her and flashed a flirtatious smile. Sylvia gazed at his bright gray eyes, his plump cheeks and double chin, his shapely lips. If she were to wake up to that face every day for the rest of her life, she wouldn’t have any regrets.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Come with you? Where?”

“Everywhere. Come join my Sideshow. Help me plan acts. Help Vaughn perfect his torture devices.”

Sylvia turned her neck to stare up at the ceiling. “But I live here. I’m a police constable. That’s what I do.”

When she looked over to him, an awkward tension had come upon his face. He blinked and shook his head. Shortly after, he pushed himself over onto his elbows and knees, and he sat over Sylvia and put his hands on her. She closed her eyes and it began to feel as though she was sinking into a dark abyss of sensation, with Victor’s tongue and fingers becoming the only reality in a surreal dream, probing places she’d before have been too embarrassed to consider allowing anyone access.

It was only the memory that her job was in jeopardy and the thought that she ought to go soon because she’d left Max at home, alone, that prevented her from losing herself in Victor’s pleasuring. Pikesley had wanted her to prove the Sideshow was involved in illegal activities, but more and more she wanted to prove him wrong and get some concrete evidence that the Sideshow wasn’t involved in any such business. So much for innocent until proven guilty. That person who’d been poking about in the dungeon must have stolen Victor’s fish. If only Max had been there then to get the thief’s smell. There would be no point taking him there now: the air would have dispersed and the smell would have become completely lost among the scents of everyone else.

“The jar!” Sylvia sat bolt upright.

Victor pulled his face out of her crotch and rolled onto his back. “Jar?”

“That jar with the clamps and electrodes in it, in Vaughn’s dungeon. You remember you said there was someone there, and the someone got away? The lid was off that jar then I put the lid back on it. There might be air from that afternoon trapped inside it, with smells still there.”

“What do you mean, air and smells?”

“You remember when you first met me I had a dog with me? Well that’s what I do. I’m a police dog handler.”

Victor’s mouth broadened into a grin as understanding dawned on him. “And you think your dog can identify the smell of this particular person in the atmosphere that’s been preserved inside the jar?”

Sylvia swung her legs over the end of the bed and reached for her clothes. “Do you think they’ll still be in Vaughn’s dungeon?”

Victor got up off the bed. “Theoretically, so long as your colleagues haven’t been rummaging about too thoroughly.”

The police presence had lessened somewhat as Sylvia and Victor walked back to the tents. In the dungeon, Vaughn sat on a spiky torture throne, eating two slabs of bread with cheese and pickle overflowing between them.

“Woh you wan’?” he said through a mouthful.

Victor moved over into the gloom of one of the walls and began to examine the contents of the shelves there. “We’re looking for a jar with clamps in it.”

Sylvia glanced over at them. “But if you find it, you mustn’t open it. Because the smell will get out and the dog won’t be able to find it.”

Vaughn scratched his head under his leather mask.

“Is this it?” Victor held up what looked like a canopic jar he had taken from a large imitation sarcophagus propped up against a wall.

“No, it looked more medical than Egyptian.”

Vaughn stooped and picked something up from off the floor behind the racks. “This what you’re looking for?”

“Yes, that’s it!” Sylvia said. “Don’t open it!”

Vaughn tilted the jar, holding it up. “You’re in luck. I couldn’t find this before, or I would have opened it. Looks like it fell off the table.”

Sylvia took the jar. “Thanks!” she called back over her shoulder as she made for the stairs.

“Explanation to follow,” Victor added as he made after her.

* * * *

Sylvia pulled up in the private car park allocated to the apartments where she lived. Trees surrounding the square offered some shade from the unrelenting sun, and shed a constant confetti of blossom onto the cars parked below.

Victor got out of the car. He gazed up at the Victorian edifice. Once the property of someone rich, the big house had been divided into multiple smaller dwellings. The whole place was owned by the landlord, a short Muslim gentleman with a shrewd eye for business. “So, this is where you live?”

Sylvia nodded. “Would you mind not wearing your pirate hat in the lobby?”

Victor chuckled. He put the hat down on the passenger seat of Sylvia’s car. “Shame I forgot my cutlass. So which is yours?”

Sylvia pointed to the bay windows of her awkward-shaped sitting room on the ground floor. The glass was marred with damp smudges all around the window, in an area about a foot from the sill and two feet up from that. Max stood there looking out at them, his tail waving behind him.

“Go round to the front,” she suggested.

Victor walked ahead, carrying the jar. Sylvia followed, enjoying how his butt moved and his thighs brushed together in his tight trousers. She hadn’t brought a beau to this place for a long time. Not since when the world had looked brighter and it had seemed anything was possible.

As they approached the door, a loud woof and a thump of paws hitting the other side of the door greeted them. Max squeezed through the gap as soon as Sylvia opened the door. He jumped up and licked madly at her hands as she synced herself to him.

Victor held up the jar once they were inside with the door shut behind them.

Sylvia looked at it, then back at Max who was still bouncing. “We only get one shot at this. Let’s wait until he’s calmed down and got over the excitement of us just coming home.”

Sylvia showed Victor to the living room. It was immediately apparent to her that he wouldn’t fit into the very small wooden-framed armchairs she’d picked up from a secondhand furniture shops some years back, so she offered him the place she normally occupied on the two-seat sofa instead.

Max wiped his nose against Victor’s knees while Sylvia made drinks in the kitchen. When she returned, the dog had seated himself in front of Victor and was having his ears rubbed. Sylvia took one of the chairs, glad to learn that Victor got on with dogs. Probably it would never have worked out had he turned out to be more of a cat person.

She watched him furtively as he drank. A sideshow freak in a pirate costume whose bottom nearly took up both cushions on the sofa in her house. And the same freak had that morning given her the most intense orgasm she’d ever had, and that all just made it surreal. He sat with his knees apart, his belly spilling over his belt between his thighs. When he leaned forward and set down his glass on the coffee table, he rested both his hands palm-down on his knees. The posture was reminiscent of a Sumo wrestler girding himself for a match: strong, confident, his weight giving him undeniable presence.

Sylvia couldn’t stop looking at him, and a rush of contradictory urges came over her. She wanted to rip his clothes off and torment him with unbearable pleasure, explore every inch of that abundant physique and, at the same time, she wanted him dominating her, every sensation at the mercy of that calm, assertive air of power he had to him, his thick, deft fingers driving her wild, unable to resist.

Max, apparently unperturbed by the maelstrom of bleedback he must be receiving through her interface, curled himself up on the floor space between the sofa and Sylvia’s armchair.

“I think he’s okay now,” said Sylvia. “Let’s try this.”

Victor got the jar ready while Sylvia positioned the dog in front of her chair. “Max,
sit
. Good lad.
Wait
.”

At a nod from Sylvia, Victor jacked the lid open and pushed the jar over Max’s muzzle.

“Max,
smell it
.”

Max’s nose twitched inside the jar. The generic odor of people was the first thing that hit Sylvia through his interface. Then his recognition of the signature of her own scent, then somebody else–that was Victor–and finally two other separate smells, one of them stale and barely rising above the concentration of the background smells. Max recognized one of them, and his memory of the dungeon a few nights earlier rushed back. That was Vaughn. He had no recognition of the other one. All Sylvia could tell from him was that it had come from a male Caucasian who most likely wasn’t vegetarian.

“He can smell someone,” Sylvia said after waiting a few more minutes to see if he would analyze the smells any more. “It’s not anyone he recognizes though.”

Victor took the jar away from the dog’s nose and jangled the clamps idly in the bottom of it. “Were you expecting someone?”

“I don’t know.” Sylvia laid a hand on the back of Max’s neck. “I suppose I kind of hoped it would be Pikesley who’d been in there.”

“It’s not anyone you know? You’re sure this Pikesley is involved in it?”

Sylvia didn’t speak for several seconds. “It all fits together. It just seems too obvious, now I see it, for it not to be him.” There were banks at the police station, where records of known offenders’ DNA and fingerprints were kept, and phials containing samples of their sweat. A match to the signature Max had detected might be found there, but there were so many of them it would be next to impossible to identify a single one without more evidence to narrow it down. And, besides, if Pikesley was involved with this, it was likely the person who stole Victor’s fish jewelry was someone he’d hired to do it, and he’d be a fool to hire a known criminal.

“Do you have any proof that he’s involved? Anything you could use as leverage?”

Sylvia shook her head. “It’s not just that at any rate. It’s getting him on his own in order to apply the leverage. Where I work, that’s his domain. He’s safe there. He’ll have people on his side, who have accepted his bribes, or maybe who bribed him. Things like this–they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Pikesley will be sitting on the top of a whole pyramid of corruption, and while that’s supporting him it’d be madness to try anything. Unless...”

“Unless what?”

“It’s Friday, right?”

“It is indeed.”

“Every Friday night, Pikesley goes to the red-light district. I’ve seen his car. The traffic cops pretend they don’t see it. That’s our chance to get him alone.”

* * * *

So that evening, Sylvia found herself sitting in the middle of the back seat of Vaughn’s Jeep. Victor sat on her right, still wearing his pirate outfit. Max sat smartly on the seat on her other side, tongue lolling and making the car smell rather distinctly of dog. Seated beside Vaughn in the passenger seat was one of the snake-charmer ladies, wearing fishnet stockings, a leather miniskirt and a scarlet Lycra boob tube.

The sodium streetlamps cast a sickly yellow hue upon stone of the cluttered Victorian facades of Highfields. Leicester sweltered in the clammy grip of an airless summer evening. Cool air blasted from the car’s air-conditioning vents as Vaughn steered over the iron bridge crossing the railway and turned into a side-road off Sparkenhoe Street.