Free Story Friday: Alive on the inside
Oct. 9th, 2015 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdThis is the Ten-in-One show from Alive on the Inside. The book itself is erotic horror. Buy Link
Step up, step up, all the acts are real, both here and in the late-night adult show.
The show began. Lisa watched, shifting uncomfortably as a very good looking black man wearing evening tails and a van dyke beard with handle-bar mustache came out on stage. He smiled over the audience.
“I am Marvello, Master of Illusion,” he announced. “I do, however, require an assistant.” At that cue, two roustabouts wheeled an elaborate Egyptian mummy case onto the stage. Marvello threw it open to reveal a half-unwrapped desiccated mummy, its flesh black on visible bones and its teeth bared in a rictus. The audience predictably recoiled.
“Hannah, darling? Can you hear me?” he called.
From all around the tent came a sepulchral woman’s voice. “I hear you, Marvello.”
“I need you.” Something flickered in the mummy case. “Across the years I call to you, beckoning you from your long sleep to my aid,” he intoned, as the mummy swelled with life, now clearly female and draped in the artful wrappings. “Come to me, my wife of all eternity.” With that, he stepped to the mummy case and extended his hand into it, helping Hannah, now dressed in the wrappings, death mask and headpiece, step out of it.
She took a quick bow and ducked backstage to change into an abbreviated form of the evening tails that Marvello wore. She wore heels and net stockings that came to the high, French-cut legs of her body suit. Her van dyke and handle-bar mustache were as immaculate as his.
Lisa looked more and more uncomfortable with each illusion, until a little scream escaped her at the guillotine trick. She clutched Nick as the blade rattled home. At the end, Hannah and Marvello circled the audience selling autographed pitch-cards of themselves for a quarter and a small vanishing box magic trick for seventy-five cents. Nick offered, but Lisa didn’t want either thing. Nick got the card of Hannah suspended across the points of three swords.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he whispered and wrapped a comforting arm around her. It didn’t help. She screamed again as Nagina, the Punjab Snake Goddess slithered down the main aisle, her cobra’s tail flicking against the bleachers, her wings fanning a little as she moved. The little black snakelings in her hair writhed and hissed.
Lisa buried her face in Nick’s shoulder through the duration of the snake-charming act. Nick watched avidly, trying to figure out how Nagina managed to move in that costume. Lisa looked up again when the music changed from the Indian pipes to a Big Band sound. Nick stroked her hair as she shuddered at the tip of the snake’s tail vanishing behind the curtains.
“I think you’ll like this part, Lisa,” Nick whispered.
A man almost as tall as the tent pushed a dollhouse as tall as a normal man onto the stage. He pulled a pair of white gloves, one of which had a top hat sewn to it, onto his trashcan-lid-sized hands.
The house opened to show the tiny woman they had met earlier getting dressed. She was buckling the last strap of her dancing shoes. The man knocked on the door of her house and she opened it. The hand, wearing the top hat, stood in the door. She hugged it. “Oh, Elijah, are we going dancing?” She tucked her arm into his thumb.
“Of course, my dear.” He walked his fingers across the platform to a small stage. She climbed it and he put his arm through the curtains. The band played and Elijah sang in a great rumbling bass. “Heaven. I’m in Heaven. And my heart is beating so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek, When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.”
As he sang the old Irving Berlin tune, Tabitha and his hand went through the classic Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance routine. For an encore, they did “Smoke gets in your Eyes.”
Lisa applauded wildly. They took their bows and Tabitha smiled at the crowd. “I send my husband to heaven by dancing with him. If you’d like to know how to go to heaven, we have the road map right here. The World’s Smallest Bible, only seventy-five cents, comes with its own magnifying glass and for an extra
quarter I’ll inscribe it to you.”
They circulated through the audience, Tabitha standing on one of her husband’s massive palms, with a stack of tiny Bibles on the other. Nick held up his dollar. Elijah took it and Tabitha asked, “What name?”
“Lisa,” he said. “Lisa Fleming.”
The little woman handed down the book and Nick took it. On the presentation page it read, “Presented to Lisa Fleming this thirty-first day of August, Anno Domini Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five by Elijah Grant, the Carolina Giant and Tabitha Grant, His One Cubit Wife.” He passed it to Lisa and they both thanked
the couple.
Lisa jumped a little at the next act. Nick had to admit that Wolfgang was a startling sight, covered with the long brown hair that grew from every follicle and writhing around in a straight jacket. The wolf-boy lifted his head and howled.
“Good evening, folks,” he said, his Germanic accent turning it almost to “goot.” He thrashed a bit. “I am Wolfgang. You know, it’s just that phase of the moon.” He gave a chuckle that was something too close to a growl for Nick’s comfort. “It makes my colleagues here feel safer to have me…restrained.” He chuckled again, the sound of small animal bones snapping beneath a predator’s jaws, and shrugged out of the straight jacket.
The crowd gasped as he charged to the edge of the stage, only to divert course at the last instant and go to the baby grand piano that Elijah wheeled out. He sat down and played Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” A collective laugh of relief went up.
“My parents named me Wolfgang, for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But when I came out like this… Mutti got rug burn giving birth and Papa wanted to organize an angry mob. I scampered away from home at three weeks old.” The crowd laughed again.
“I have a lot of practice escaping,” he said as Hannah came out in her top hat and tails and handcuffed him. She helped him step into a trunk. “They keep trying to lock me up.” The end of the sentence came out muffled, because Hannah drew a black silk bag over his head and tied a rope around its neck.
Then Hannah locked Wolfgang in the trunk. She stood atop the trunk and raised a black silk curtain. When the curtain fell two seconds later, it was Wolfgang who caught it.
“But it never works,” he finished. He unlocked the trunk and opened the bag to show Hannah, dressed in a red spangled leotard, handcuffed inside. He freed her hands and kissed her cheek, then favored them with Mozart’s Piano Sonata 11, “Nocturne,” before taking his bow and leaving the stage to sell small folders with his
picture in one side and his sheet music in the other. Nick handed over fifty cents and Wolfgang autographed it for Lisa.
He was replaced by a tiny Chinese girl, barely five feet tall, her black hair in a tight knot on her head. A goldfish bowl, full of swimming goldfish, rested atop her hair. She wore a gold bodysuit with gold wrist and ankle bracelets. Very carefully, she lay on the floor of the stage, then rose up to balance on her forearms.
Nick watched as she brought petite bare feet up to her head and picked up the goldfish bowl without spilling any or disturbing the fish. With a look of complete concentration, she set the fish on the floor in front of her face and planted her feet flat on the stage in front of her shoulders.
The crowd watched, rapt as she went through contortions almost impossible for anyone with a normal spine. She finished her act by placing her bottom on her head, her legs forward in front of her and balancing on her chin on a rotating, filled wineglass. She made two complete circuits and then gracefully brought her feet forward until she stood on them, glass in hand. She toasted the audience and drank the wine before taking a bow and almost dancing off the stage.
She circulated through the crowd, selling silver spoons with the handle in the shape of a Chinese fish and a small inset of her picture as she lifted the goldfish bowl. When Nick bought one, she pointed to the Chinese characters on the bowl. “The maker signs for me.”
“That was worth seeing,” Lisa said, staring at the picture in the handle as the stage dimmed again. Nick agreed. He didn’t tell her the girl was so flexible that she could lick herself and did during the adult show.
The twins were next. Alice and Dinah wore pretty green dresses and stood demurely on the stage, their shared leg directly in the center, half-facing each other and holding hands. They smiled, introduced themselves and nodded to Wolfgang, whose piano had been moved to the side of the stage.
He played “Evening Prayer” from the opera Hansel and Gretel, a duet for soprano and mezzo-soprano. Alice sang Hansel’s part and Dinah, Gretel’s. Their voices twined together, weaving the old song in and out and soaring to the end. Lisa applauded wildly, loving the performance. The twins gave her an extra sweet smile as they autographed their folder with picture and sheet music.
Jene left Nick confused and Lisa shaking her head. The hermaphrodite wore a one-shouldered scarlet leotard, the strap over the right shoulder to support Jean’s breast. Gene’s lower body was clearly visible through the clingy material. Jene came out, spinning balls of fire on strings. They did it over and under legs, over their face while bending backward until Nick worried Gene would set his half-mustache and beard on fire.
“Wow,” Lisa whispered.
Then, they ate the fire, taking a flaming skewer into their mouth, only to spit the flames back out in a blaze, igniting a candelabrum set near the edge of the stage. For the finale, they swallowed a flaming sword.
The plastic glow balls on a string, to practice twirling before moving on to fire, were autographed in two different handwritings. Gene Carlisle had the lefty’s cramped back-slant, while Jean Carlisle had rounded loops.
They cleared for the final act. Nick tried to rise, wanting to get Lisa out so she would not be exposed to the filth he knew was coming, but his knees refused to work. He could do nothing but watch as the roustabouts set up the apparatus and wheeled out Torturo on his bed of nails. Nick tried not to watch. Failing miserably in that endeavor, he tried to reduce it to something similar to all the other acts they’d seen this evening. But Lisa’s soft sigh as he stood up and stripped off the tank top of the old gym suit drew Nick’s eyes back in time to see Torturo eat the razor blades. Next to him, Lisa hid her face again, either repulsed or too aroused
to watch more.
Nick watched with sick fascination and was horrified when he felt himself getting hard in his slacks. He told himself it was Lisa and the way they’d been all over each other all day. They hadn’t been well behaved at all. But deep down he knew that was as much a lie as his “I love you” had been. It was the man on the stage, now
thrusting a spike into his nose, that had him aroused.
Lisa looked up in time to see him bite the head off the chicken. Nick caught her as she fainted and held her. He didn’t know what else to do. Torturo winked as he guzzled the blood and threw the dead bird to a handler.
His eyes remained on Nick as he attached the clips to his nipple rings and hoisted the cinderblock. The audience gave a collective shudder. He thanked them and offered pitch-cards of himself for sale. One was from the act, the other just a head and torso shot. Nick bought two copies of each.
The Pain King didn’t even ask his name as he signed the first set. “Put her head between her knees. That will help,” he suggested, as he signed the ones for Lisa. He gave Nick a smile. “You know, you left your hat behind last night. Why don’t you come by my train car and pick it up in a few minutes?”
The crowd had thinned out, making room for the next show so there were few bystanders to listen to Nick stutter at the proposition. He somehow knew if they went to Torturo’s train car, neither of them would leave a virgin. Lisa stirred in his arms, distracting him from the places his mind was leaping to. He couldn’t think about that, about kissing Torturo and Lisa both, of watching the Pain King make love to his fiancée and then—
Lisa looked up to see Torturo smiling down at her and gave a little scream that jarred Nick back to reality. Nick cuddled her.
“You horrible, horrible man. Get a real job, why don’t you? One where you don’t abuse animals or yourself.” She stood up, pulling at Nick, shrill with anger in her fear and horror.
“My dear, this is a very real job. I work a thirteen-hour day, far longer than most men. If you don’t believe me, you could try it. I can do the piercings for you right now.”
The smile, doubtlessly meant to be charming, made Nick’s blood run cold. His cock twitched at the thought of Lisa under the needle. But, in his mind’s eye, her faced morphed into his own and the treacherous brute positively jumped. He could only stare as Torturo ducked in and kissed Lisa’s slack mouth, pressing deep
and open-mouthed like the kisses he’d seen in movies, before he’d stopped going.
Lisa jerked away. “You had no right. I’d never…” She slapped him. “That was Nick’s wedding kiss, you wicked, wicked man!”
She burst into tears and fled the Ten-in-One tent. Nick followed, Torturo’s laugh ringing in his ears.
Step up, step up, all the acts are real, both here and in the late-night adult show.
The show began. Lisa watched, shifting uncomfortably as a very good looking black man wearing evening tails and a van dyke beard with handle-bar mustache came out on stage. He smiled over the audience.
“I am Marvello, Master of Illusion,” he announced. “I do, however, require an assistant.” At that cue, two roustabouts wheeled an elaborate Egyptian mummy case onto the stage. Marvello threw it open to reveal a half-unwrapped desiccated mummy, its flesh black on visible bones and its teeth bared in a rictus. The audience predictably recoiled.
“Hannah, darling? Can you hear me?” he called.
From all around the tent came a sepulchral woman’s voice. “I hear you, Marvello.”
“I need you.” Something flickered in the mummy case. “Across the years I call to you, beckoning you from your long sleep to my aid,” he intoned, as the mummy swelled with life, now clearly female and draped in the artful wrappings. “Come to me, my wife of all eternity.” With that, he stepped to the mummy case and extended his hand into it, helping Hannah, now dressed in the wrappings, death mask and headpiece, step out of it.
She took a quick bow and ducked backstage to change into an abbreviated form of the evening tails that Marvello wore. She wore heels and net stockings that came to the high, French-cut legs of her body suit. Her van dyke and handle-bar mustache were as immaculate as his.
Lisa looked more and more uncomfortable with each illusion, until a little scream escaped her at the guillotine trick. She clutched Nick as the blade rattled home. At the end, Hannah and Marvello circled the audience selling autographed pitch-cards of themselves for a quarter and a small vanishing box magic trick for seventy-five cents. Nick offered, but Lisa didn’t want either thing. Nick got the card of Hannah suspended across the points of three swords.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he whispered and wrapped a comforting arm around her. It didn’t help. She screamed again as Nagina, the Punjab Snake Goddess slithered down the main aisle, her cobra’s tail flicking against the bleachers, her wings fanning a little as she moved. The little black snakelings in her hair writhed and hissed.
Lisa buried her face in Nick’s shoulder through the duration of the snake-charming act. Nick watched avidly, trying to figure out how Nagina managed to move in that costume. Lisa looked up again when the music changed from the Indian pipes to a Big Band sound. Nick stroked her hair as she shuddered at the tip of the snake’s tail vanishing behind the curtains.
“I think you’ll like this part, Lisa,” Nick whispered.
A man almost as tall as the tent pushed a dollhouse as tall as a normal man onto the stage. He pulled a pair of white gloves, one of which had a top hat sewn to it, onto his trashcan-lid-sized hands.
The house opened to show the tiny woman they had met earlier getting dressed. She was buckling the last strap of her dancing shoes. The man knocked on the door of her house and she opened it. The hand, wearing the top hat, stood in the door. She hugged it. “Oh, Elijah, are we going dancing?” She tucked her arm into his thumb.
“Of course, my dear.” He walked his fingers across the platform to a small stage. She climbed it and he put his arm through the curtains. The band played and Elijah sang in a great rumbling bass. “Heaven. I’m in Heaven. And my heart is beating so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek, When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.”
As he sang the old Irving Berlin tune, Tabitha and his hand went through the classic Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance routine. For an encore, they did “Smoke gets in your Eyes.”
Lisa applauded wildly. They took their bows and Tabitha smiled at the crowd. “I send my husband to heaven by dancing with him. If you’d like to know how to go to heaven, we have the road map right here. The World’s Smallest Bible, only seventy-five cents, comes with its own magnifying glass and for an extra
quarter I’ll inscribe it to you.”
They circulated through the audience, Tabitha standing on one of her husband’s massive palms, with a stack of tiny Bibles on the other. Nick held up his dollar. Elijah took it and Tabitha asked, “What name?”
“Lisa,” he said. “Lisa Fleming.”
The little woman handed down the book and Nick took it. On the presentation page it read, “Presented to Lisa Fleming this thirty-first day of August, Anno Domini Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five by Elijah Grant, the Carolina Giant and Tabitha Grant, His One Cubit Wife.” He passed it to Lisa and they both thanked
the couple.
Lisa jumped a little at the next act. Nick had to admit that Wolfgang was a startling sight, covered with the long brown hair that grew from every follicle and writhing around in a straight jacket. The wolf-boy lifted his head and howled.
“Good evening, folks,” he said, his Germanic accent turning it almost to “goot.” He thrashed a bit. “I am Wolfgang. You know, it’s just that phase of the moon.” He gave a chuckle that was something too close to a growl for Nick’s comfort. “It makes my colleagues here feel safer to have me…restrained.” He chuckled again, the sound of small animal bones snapping beneath a predator’s jaws, and shrugged out of the straight jacket.
The crowd gasped as he charged to the edge of the stage, only to divert course at the last instant and go to the baby grand piano that Elijah wheeled out. He sat down and played Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” A collective laugh of relief went up.
“My parents named me Wolfgang, for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But when I came out like this… Mutti got rug burn giving birth and Papa wanted to organize an angry mob. I scampered away from home at three weeks old.” The crowd laughed again.
“I have a lot of practice escaping,” he said as Hannah came out in her top hat and tails and handcuffed him. She helped him step into a trunk. “They keep trying to lock me up.” The end of the sentence came out muffled, because Hannah drew a black silk bag over his head and tied a rope around its neck.
Then Hannah locked Wolfgang in the trunk. She stood atop the trunk and raised a black silk curtain. When the curtain fell two seconds later, it was Wolfgang who caught it.
“But it never works,” he finished. He unlocked the trunk and opened the bag to show Hannah, dressed in a red spangled leotard, handcuffed inside. He freed her hands and kissed her cheek, then favored them with Mozart’s Piano Sonata 11, “Nocturne,” before taking his bow and leaving the stage to sell small folders with his
picture in one side and his sheet music in the other. Nick handed over fifty cents and Wolfgang autographed it for Lisa.
He was replaced by a tiny Chinese girl, barely five feet tall, her black hair in a tight knot on her head. A goldfish bowl, full of swimming goldfish, rested atop her hair. She wore a gold bodysuit with gold wrist and ankle bracelets. Very carefully, she lay on the floor of the stage, then rose up to balance on her forearms.
Nick watched as she brought petite bare feet up to her head and picked up the goldfish bowl without spilling any or disturbing the fish. With a look of complete concentration, she set the fish on the floor in front of her face and planted her feet flat on the stage in front of her shoulders.
The crowd watched, rapt as she went through contortions almost impossible for anyone with a normal spine. She finished her act by placing her bottom on her head, her legs forward in front of her and balancing on her chin on a rotating, filled wineglass. She made two complete circuits and then gracefully brought her feet forward until she stood on them, glass in hand. She toasted the audience and drank the wine before taking a bow and almost dancing off the stage.
She circulated through the crowd, selling silver spoons with the handle in the shape of a Chinese fish and a small inset of her picture as she lifted the goldfish bowl. When Nick bought one, she pointed to the Chinese characters on the bowl. “The maker signs for me.”
“That was worth seeing,” Lisa said, staring at the picture in the handle as the stage dimmed again. Nick agreed. He didn’t tell her the girl was so flexible that she could lick herself and did during the adult show.
The twins were next. Alice and Dinah wore pretty green dresses and stood demurely on the stage, their shared leg directly in the center, half-facing each other and holding hands. They smiled, introduced themselves and nodded to Wolfgang, whose piano had been moved to the side of the stage.
He played “Evening Prayer” from the opera Hansel and Gretel, a duet for soprano and mezzo-soprano. Alice sang Hansel’s part and Dinah, Gretel’s. Their voices twined together, weaving the old song in and out and soaring to the end. Lisa applauded wildly, loving the performance. The twins gave her an extra sweet smile as they autographed their folder with picture and sheet music.
Jene left Nick confused and Lisa shaking her head. The hermaphrodite wore a one-shouldered scarlet leotard, the strap over the right shoulder to support Jean’s breast. Gene’s lower body was clearly visible through the clingy material. Jene came out, spinning balls of fire on strings. They did it over and under legs, over their face while bending backward until Nick worried Gene would set his half-mustache and beard on fire.
“Wow,” Lisa whispered.
Then, they ate the fire, taking a flaming skewer into their mouth, only to spit the flames back out in a blaze, igniting a candelabrum set near the edge of the stage. For the finale, they swallowed a flaming sword.
The plastic glow balls on a string, to practice twirling before moving on to fire, were autographed in two different handwritings. Gene Carlisle had the lefty’s cramped back-slant, while Jean Carlisle had rounded loops.
They cleared for the final act. Nick tried to rise, wanting to get Lisa out so she would not be exposed to the filth he knew was coming, but his knees refused to work. He could do nothing but watch as the roustabouts set up the apparatus and wheeled out Torturo on his bed of nails. Nick tried not to watch. Failing miserably in that endeavor, he tried to reduce it to something similar to all the other acts they’d seen this evening. But Lisa’s soft sigh as he stood up and stripped off the tank top of the old gym suit drew Nick’s eyes back in time to see Torturo eat the razor blades. Next to him, Lisa hid her face again, either repulsed or too aroused
to watch more.
Nick watched with sick fascination and was horrified when he felt himself getting hard in his slacks. He told himself it was Lisa and the way they’d been all over each other all day. They hadn’t been well behaved at all. But deep down he knew that was as much a lie as his “I love you” had been. It was the man on the stage, now
thrusting a spike into his nose, that had him aroused.
Lisa looked up in time to see him bite the head off the chicken. Nick caught her as she fainted and held her. He didn’t know what else to do. Torturo winked as he guzzled the blood and threw the dead bird to a handler.
His eyes remained on Nick as he attached the clips to his nipple rings and hoisted the cinderblock. The audience gave a collective shudder. He thanked them and offered pitch-cards of himself for sale. One was from the act, the other just a head and torso shot. Nick bought two copies of each.
The Pain King didn’t even ask his name as he signed the first set. “Put her head between her knees. That will help,” he suggested, as he signed the ones for Lisa. He gave Nick a smile. “You know, you left your hat behind last night. Why don’t you come by my train car and pick it up in a few minutes?”
The crowd had thinned out, making room for the next show so there were few bystanders to listen to Nick stutter at the proposition. He somehow knew if they went to Torturo’s train car, neither of them would leave a virgin. Lisa stirred in his arms, distracting him from the places his mind was leaping to. He couldn’t think about that, about kissing Torturo and Lisa both, of watching the Pain King make love to his fiancée and then—
Lisa looked up to see Torturo smiling down at her and gave a little scream that jarred Nick back to reality. Nick cuddled her.
“You horrible, horrible man. Get a real job, why don’t you? One where you don’t abuse animals or yourself.” She stood up, pulling at Nick, shrill with anger in her fear and horror.
“My dear, this is a very real job. I work a thirteen-hour day, far longer than most men. If you don’t believe me, you could try it. I can do the piercings for you right now.”
The smile, doubtlessly meant to be charming, made Nick’s blood run cold. His cock twitched at the thought of Lisa under the needle. But, in his mind’s eye, her faced morphed into his own and the treacherous brute positively jumped. He could only stare as Torturo ducked in and kissed Lisa’s slack mouth, pressing deep
and open-mouthed like the kisses he’d seen in movies, before he’d stopped going.
Lisa jerked away. “You had no right. I’d never…” She slapped him. “That was Nick’s wedding kiss, you wicked, wicked man!”
She burst into tears and fled the Ten-in-One tent. Nick followed, Torturo’s laugh ringing in his ears.
