When the lights went dark and the Ringmaster stepped into the spotlight on a platform next to the red velvet curtains, all suspicion of cheap thrills melted into the shadows.
This wasn’t the Cirque du Soleil, with dozens of trained tumblers engaging in high-budget, death-defying acts. This also wasn’t Joe Blow’s Circus. The Cirque du Soleil was a story with many players. Arcanium’s ring was intended to be far more intimate, with the seven-row wooden bleachers in a round, broken only by the curtain that separated the audience from the entertainment.
The Ringmaster was resplendent in his lavish red and gold regalia, devilish beneath the curl of his dramatic eyebrows and the frame of the rest of his elaborate facial hair.
“Welcome, ladies and gentleman. Welcome to darkness and depravity, beauty shrouded in mystery, the grotesque and the macabre, the graceful and the grave. Welcome, my friends, to Arcanium. What you see here tonight, you might have seen it before. But you have never seen it quite…like…this.”
At that moment, the center of the curtain parted, lifted, to allow a line of Arcanium oddities to walk out or be wheeled out on platforms by more blank-faced circus staff. Here, the blank faces and black clothing made sense. They were stage crew. They weren’t there for the audience’s attention.
“Feast your eyes and indulge your senses upon these strange twists of fate, these abnormal marvels that Mother Nature has borne upon this earth. You will find that here in Arcanium, normal is overrated.”
The audience hummed with restrained laughter. Some of it sounded uncomfortable to Caroline. She didn’t blame them. There was something arresting about staring at such oddities on blatant display. In their tents on Oddity Row, it seemed different. They had been more like dioramas and animatronic dolls than performers, like passing through a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum instead of staring at flesh-and-blood people. It afforded the same distance as photographs.
Here, they were all together, facing the audience with their oddities in full and unrepentant view, but not in the flattering shade and golden light of their tents that added to the unreality. The lights were bright in the ring—unforgiving, exposing every curve, wrinkle, bulge, hair, crack and crevice of the weird and wonderful bodies to the audience.
The only person from Oddity Row that Caroline could tell wasn’t in the ring was the Bearded Lady. Now that Caroline thought about it, she remembered that the placard for her had called her Kitty. She must be who Madoc had meant when he’d said Kitty would take care of making her fit in.
She probably knew a lot about how to do hair. A lot of the long-haired women featured in the ring certainly looked well-coiffed.
For instance, the two women standing back to back—their light brown hair had been expertly braided together behind their backs. They both wore the same pink satin dresses and identical smiles. It took Caroline a few glances to determine that not only were the young women identical twins, but they were back to back and their hair twined together because the dresses were also attached at the waist, where the twins were obviously conjoined.
And a few oddities away, a tall but slim African-American woman with black tattoos on her exposed skin featured smooth, dyed blonde hair intricately braided around her head. The braiding suggested a kind of young innocence, which was belied by the skintight latex catsuit that was as flexible as she was.
Caroline winced when the woman bent over backward and peeked out from between her own legs, smiling as she twisted her arms around and stroked her hands down her legs. Caroline’s back stiffened in protest, but she was still fascinated by the contortionist as she continued to bend down to the floor and arrange her body in increasingly less plausible but undeniably suggestive positions.
After their initial ensemble display, the circle of oddities pulled back toward the edges of the ring. The lights narrowed to the center. The strongman and the snake charmer stepped into the glow, their amazing bodies set off in sharp relief—the snake charmer with her hourglass figure and the strongman with his rippling muscles. The snake charmer wore a small ball python around her neck and not much more than the skimpiest leather bikini. She sat on the strongman’s shoulders, hardly a challenge for him. He held her knees, his smile warm as the snake charmer ran her heels over his chest.
The glittering eyes of the rest of the audience held undeniable hunger—some for him, some for her, but all the same hunger, wet lips, barely blinking. As she returned her attention to the pair, Caroline knew that she was probably no different. She couldn’t help it, nor did she want to. The strongman was damn delicious and he wasn’t her boss. Her skin tingled watching those muscles move under the light.
“I introduce to you our wonders from the Middle East,” the Ringmaster declared, “our very own Heracles and the strongest man on Earth—the great Lord Mikhail. Accompanying him, his consort and companion, the sinuous, sensuous snake charmer—Lady Sasha. As you have no doubt discovered, she has definitely charmed his snake.”
This time the laughter from the audience was less polite. The bulge in the front of Lord Mikhail’s leather pants didn’t appear more than slightly erect, but it was a bulge nonetheless, and there wasn’t much opportunity for concealment in those tight trousers and under the determined glare of the spotlights.
It took all Caroline’s mental fortitude to look away instead of fantasizing about Lady Sasha being kind enough to undo that tight placket on Lord Mikhail’s poor, confined cock so that she could get a better look and better fodder for her imagination. Not that much was left to it with either performer.
“But can he charm hers?” the Ringmaster asked before the music began.
A non-ironic arabesque emanated from the speakers. The audience sucked the air out of the room as they watched, riveted.
True, Lady Sasha wasn’t a challenge to Lord Mikhail when it came to strength, but she was in the realm of grace and balance as she stood on his shoulders then on his head with one bare foot. He made it look effortless, as did she, but Caroline remembered when she used to stand on her father’s shoulders in the pool when she was much smaller. It was harder than it looked, for both parties.
Caroline reminded herself that these people weren’t just circus oddities, they were performers—legitimate and skilled performers apparently far better than their humble surroundings would suggest. And all those surroundings fell away when Lady Sasha stood on her hands on Lord Mikhail’s arms outstretched in front of him. He didn’t even tremble.
As the music built, Lord Mikhail eased his way down to his knees without jostling his load, and Lady Sasha slowly spread her legs in an upside-down split.
It was no wonder Caroline didn’t notice the gigantic boa constrictor in the ring until it had already curled around Lord Mikhail’s slightly parted knees. His arms had to be cramping, but he showed no sign. He fixed his eyes on Lady Sasha as she walked her hands up his arms back to his shoulders once more, her legs still spread.
When she reached his shoulders, Lord Mikhail lowered his arms again. Caroline was glad that she was sitting down when he stroked his thighs, caressing his palms on either side of the bulge in his leather pants—God, that man was packing, seriously—and up the ‘V’ of his hips, over his abdomen and chest, to eventually wrap his fingers around Lady Sasha’s hands. He grimaced for the first time as the boa constrictor began to climb him like a large tree.
Late-night animal channel binges had taught her that these snakes were mostly dense muscle and thus heavy. But more than that, they were strong. Constrictors this size didn’t usually kill by asphyxiation—the victim often died from the crushing before they died from lack of oxygen. It had to be exerting an insane amount of pressure on Lord Mikhail’s body.
Caroline was on the edge of her seat, pressing her thighs tightly together, her denim shorts uncomfortable against the swell of arousal there. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from how the snake caressed Lord Mikhail’s muscles, with its own undulating under the scales. The constrictor reached Lord Mikhail’s neck and wrappe
d around. The middle of its body was bigger than that which it now encircled. Caroline’s nipples hardened against her thin bra, protruding against her shirt, so tight they were almost painful. Her breath came in a short, harsh gasps.
The constrictor’s head nudged Lord Mikhail’s face, against his high cheekbones, his brow, through the thick black hair. It drew the rest of its body onto Lord Mikhail’s, tightening, tightening, tightening until Lord Mikhail grunted….
Then Lady Sasha brought her legs together and crooned with the music, bending her legs down until she could stand on Lord Mikhail’s shoulders again on either side of the constrictor’s body.
She beckoned with arms and fingers, like snakes themselves in the air. The serpent raised its head in the air above Lord Mikhail before loosening its body enough for Caroline to let her own breath out. Caroline pressed her hand against her chest in relief, resisting the urge to palm her breast and soothe her aching nipples. Not in public.
She had scruples, but she’d already learned first-hand how much people thought they got away with in public in the few hours she’d been running the carousel. No one paid attention to the engineer. Caroline had seen hands in very inappropriate places all day, all the dirty deeds angled toward her because the people involved hadn’t wanted anyone on the outside to see. Caroline inwardly thanked the staff that cleaned the carousel, because if they weren’t going to do it, Caroline would have become the circus Cinderella and resolved to do it herself.
She could have looked away, of course. But sometimes a girl couldn’t help but look at the forbidden fruit. This performance now was no exception.
Swaying to the serpent’s rhythm, Lady Sasha accepted the boa as it climbed up her leg and around her waist away from Lord Mikhail. When it reached her torso, she cradled its head with her hand and pressed a delicate kiss between its eyes as the arabesque came to a conclusion. Lord Mikhail knelt once again and bowed like a slave to allow Lady Sasha to step off him without jostling the snake. It couldn’t have been easy for her to hold it on her body either, but she raised her free hand to wave at the audience as peacefully as if the constrictor was simply embracing her, not holding her down. Lord Mikhail, too, waved at the crowd with both hands.
The applause wasn’t quite thunderous. Caroline suspected that if couples were so bold on the carousel, there was nothing to stop them from groping in the dark. And that performance had been… Whew. There probably weren’t enough unoccupied hands to clap. Caroline could hear some of the moist, fleshy sounds that suggested what those hands were occupied with, but she forced herself to focus instead on the Ringmaster as the Lord and Lady left the ring.
“Extraordinary, are they not? The jewels in Arcanium’s jagged crown,” the Ringmaster declared as lights illuminated the whole ring once more.
Five oddities moved to the center for an unsettling interlude following the snake charmer and strongman’s sensual performance. Faced away from Caroline were a pair of people who were as different as they could possibly be—a man so large that the fat almost flowed away from him in folds where he sat on a love seat and a woman so skinny Caroline could practically count her vertebrae from all the way up in the bleachers. The pairing disturbed her, but Caroline figured both of them knew what they were doing and probably weren’t hurting themselves doing it. She couldn’t think of any reason why a person would abuse himself or herself just to be a part of a circus, of all places. Reality television, maybe, but a dying breed of entertainment like an old-fashioned circus?
The conjoined twins also took center stage, waving at the audience as a lion—an honest-to-goodness lion, with a mane and everything—came into the ring through the curtain behind them. Caroline had thought that animal performances had gone out of style, but apparently Arcanium hadn’t got the memo.
The lion carried two people who looked like their legs had been cut out from under them. The man held onto the lion’s man and balanced the woman, who didn’t have arms either. The Ringmaster introduced them as Carlo and Christina, the circus’s intriguing, resourceful Human Torsos. Caroline’s arms and legs tingled in a bad way, just looking at the empty places where their limbs would usually be. Her fingers twitched, as though to reassure her they were still there.
And for the oddity right in front of her section, Caroline couldn’t help but clap her hand over her mouth. She’d already known about extremely fat and skinny people, people without limbs and conjoined twins. People sometimes thought they were monstrous or just plain unpleasant to look at, but they were still outliers of ordinary life, not too far outside the realm of normal. Caroline had also seen a one-eyed man before—as in, a man who had lost an eye.
But Caroline had never seen an actual Cyclops before. She hadn’t known they existed beyond those jars showing off birth defects, with fetuses floating in formaldehyde. She leaned in, semi-horrified, as though she’d see the trick of it if she looked closely enough. But there were no visible seams of prosthetics or makeup. The giant eye in the middle of his head rolled in its socket at the people gawping back at him.
It blinked. Caroline literally jumped in her seat.
Most of the people in the ring tried to look happy to be there. The Cyclops was the only one so far who seemed unhappy in the spotlight—and not just because it had to be bright in his one eye. Even more than the fat man or the skinny woman, Caroline was taken aback by the grotesquerie of the single large eye over the prominent bridge of his nose. How did a man like him come to exist? Not just exist, but look…otherwise normal, not like those aforementioned science experiments? Here he was, a grown man large as life, healthy, strong, real, with that ever-staring, unavoidable eye.
She was suddenly so very glad she was ordinary.
It took character, strength and bravery to be a public oddity. Caroline didn’t have those things, and she didn’t want them, not if that was what it took to get them.
The rest of the evening followed a similar pattern, feats of beauty and strength followed by introductions to other oddities. In spite of her repulsion from a few of them—the Lizard Man, the mermaid, the Rotting Man—she mostly enjoyed herself, particularly the performances. She could watch those forever. The two men doing their acrobatic act in the air restimulated all the places watching Lord Mikhail had awakened—especially when she noticed that, unlike Lord Mikhail, these two men did get quite aroused as their bodies moved over each other. She also quite enjoyed the tumbling trio act—consisting of a pale man with long black hair, the contortionist and the male Human Torso—as well as the high wire and magic act between the fortune teller and his assistant.
That had been a surprise for Caroline. Madoc hadn’t said anything about his role in the ring. But there was no mistaking the exhibitionist sensuality he and Maya expressed together, just as sexy as the aerialists and Lord Mikhail and Lady Sasha. The intensity they’d shared in the privacy of Madoc’s fortune teller tent became magnified in the ring, but no less sincere. Caroline had never witnessed anything quite like it—as though in performing, they exposed the singular intimacy of their relationship rather than any old magician putting his beautiful assistant in the usual kind of danger. The whole thing seemed an exercise in foreplay rather than role-play.
The evening’s performances ended on another up-note, resuming a more burlesque tone. The clowns tumbled in, the happy and sad partners playing it raunchy while the angry monster clown played purely for laughs.
Watching them was what Caroline imagined an acid trip would be like, but she still laughed hard enough that her stomach hurt by the end of it. Caroline liked the sad clown, with her mohawk, septum piercing, black corset bodice and orange petticoat under her skirt—the living manifestation of a punk Halloween doll. She was actually a good tumbler. It was easy to overlook that in the midst of the crude physical comedy.
As the sad clown and happy clown held onto each other and somersaulted out of the ring as one entity, Caroline had pretty much decided that the sad clown was her spirit animal.
Her legs wer
e a little shaky as she stood, and it was only then that she realized just how much those performances had aroused her.
At least I’ll have some privacy when I get back to my carousel cabin.
She wetted and bit her lip. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d been this horny. She was a red-blooded female, for Pete’s sake, but it had never been to the point of distraction.
Wow. And I have to hang out with these people for a whole year.
There was a lot to get used to. She assumed both her revulsion and her arousal would fade with time. Everything would stop seeming so incredible when she knew how everything worked beyond the impossible illusions, when the abnormal became the new normal. Familiarity didn’t have to breed contempt. It just had to take the edge off, right?
“How did you like our little show?” Madoc asked, appearing behind her. She hadn’t heard him come up. True, the audience was talking and laughing as they left the big top, and it was dark outside except for a few lights to illuminate the way to the parking lot. But she thought she’d have felt the displacement of air, at least.
“I think it’s amazing. Takes a little getting used to when you don’t know what to expect, but it definitely sticks with you,” Caroline said.
That was the polite way to say her skin was still humming and she didn’t know what to think about some of the oddities, so she really hoped he wasn’t actually psychic.
“If you’ll follow me, the Ringmaster has your contract. How would you like payment? Cash, check or direct deposit? We pay biweekly,” Madoc said.
“Which is more convenient?”
“How kind of you to ask, understanding that we are a bit unconventional,” Madoc said. “We get a regular influx of cash, but I imagine cash would be more difficult for you to manage. We’ve never done direct deposit before, actually. We’ve never had to. Check is our usual method of payment, but we don’t stop for bank runs very often…”
“I have a deposit app on my phone. Check should work fine,” Caroline said.
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