Chapter Six

 

 

 

Bell deigned to use the bench opposite her this time instead of sitting on the table like a barbarian, which was usually his preference.

“It’s a weekday. Aren’t you supposed to leave me the fuck alone until the haunted funhouse opens again on Friday?” Elizabeth rejected all impulse to be polite to the man keeping her captive. The only drawback was that he seemed to like it.

“I’ve been thinking of ways to draw more guests to Arcanium, to bring the bizarre into more people’s lives in places they don’t expect to encounter it.”

“Good for you. I’d like to finish my breakfast in peace. That would require my not seeing your face.”

Bell clasped his hands as he leaned closer. “I noticed you’re asking for bean and potato burritos these days.”

“Yes, I’m back to being vegan and drunk, thanks to you. Go away.”

“My truly arcane oddities don’t have many opportunities to move among the rest of the population.”

“Because you trap them here, and if they step outside the circus’s borders, they experience a terrible, extremely painful punishment? Might be the reason? Maybe?”

“Precisely,” he replied. “Kitty is my best advertisement, since she comes and goes as she pleases and makes no effort to conceal her oddity. Most of my demons don’t play well with humans on their own, and they prefer to stay here. I want more of my oddities to reach beyond our borders, even if they are trapped here. You’re perfect to show off Arcanium’s strange beauty while also functioning within a larger curated display.”

“No.” She was going to get even thinner if Bell insisted on interrupting her breakfast-slash-lunch with another brilliantly awful idea.

“Come to the red tent between the fortune teller tent and Oddity Row. I want you in one of the leather pieces to show off the work of art you are. If you like, you can even pick from a selection of wigs, as long as you keep your back exposed.”

“No.”

“Did I give you any indication that these were requests?” He sighed. “If I have to force you to do everything, I will, but I imagine it’ll grow tiresome for both of us.”

“I’m fine with that.”

“If you insist.”

He sent her to Kitty’s tent, where Kitty displayed a narrow selection of black leatherwear for her to choose from. Elizabeth still had the costume pieces Kitty had brought to her caravan, but Bell apparently lacked the patience to send her all the way back there every time he had to force her to do what he wanted.

When she refused to choose, Bell selected the most revealing bikini set and a long, black wig with electric blue tips that reminded Elizabeth of what she’d looked like before she’d shaved her head for Dez. It only made her hate him more.

He compelled her to do her usual makeup then drew her out into the Row. The way she moved when he forced her really was eerily like a spider, one foot at a time instead of mimicking the two-legged way of walking. If he could have, he probably would have dropped her torso onto an actual giant spider’s abdomen and been done with it. But the hook of Arcanium was ‘human oddities’, and anyone who saw her looking too much like a spider would assume there was mechanical engineering involved. It was more Arcanium for her to appear completely human and completely weird rather than the product of robotic genius.

Walking outside Kitty’s tent in a leather string bikini that didn’t manage to cover the partial mandala that Dez had inked above her labia like a perverted Renaissance halo, she thought the absolutely worst thing about this would be for someone to recognize her, even one of the cast members. It was only a matter of time if Bell insisted on exposing her.

He led her like an unleashed pet to a red velvet tent, which was quite different from the rough, tan, all-weather canvas used through the rest of Arcanium. The Oddity Row tents all had red velvet curtains for the display, the same used to separate the ring from backstage, but it had never been used to form an entire tent. The red tent was about three times the size of those on Oddity Row. Four stakes around the tent helped provide a canvas canopy to protect it from the elements.

“A curated display,” he’d said. It belatedly occurred to her what a themed tent with her as the centerpiece would have to be, but before she could resist harder, Bell pulled her between the closed curtains and turned on the lamps.

When Elizabeth had taken the Bishop children by the creepy-crawly exhibit, she’d stayed outside the tent, but she’d glimpsed about two tables’ worth of terrariums. Elizabeth hadn’t gone in, and she’d kept her attention firmly upon Todd’s back. It was bad enough that there were spiders and other crawly things in the wild.

Bell had collected many more crawlies since then and arranged far more professional displays for them—small terrariums for the creatures that preferred to be solitary, large terrariums for those that didn’t mind sharing space, detailed and doubtlessly educational descriptions of each one attached to the corner. Shadowboxes of moths, butterflies and iridescent beetles, including a few that had been altered in Arcanium’s steampunk style, lined the curtains behind the displays.

She made every effort to back herself out of the tent, but her strength had nothing on Bell’s power. He kept her there with him, although he didn’t force her closer to the spiders, scorpions, beetles, roaches and other vermin, some of which she wasn’t sure were legally allowed in a small-time circus like Arcanium. Bell probably had his ways around that. He had ways around everything. Despite how ready he was to dispense consequences on everyone else, he didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word as it pertained to him.

“I’ve collected the largest, prettiest, most dangerous of whatever you can think of that gives people gooseflesh,” Bell said. “There’s just one more piece I need for my collection, something no one else has.”

Bell swept his hands in front of her. A Plexiglas box like a coffin appeared on a low platform where there had been nothing before. He slowly stepped around it. The metal latch flipped open, and the lid swung up.

“Be my Snow White, Spider, and climb in.”

The glass had little holes in the sides and top, too small for most of the creatures in the tent to crawl through—including her. There was nothing there to hold her down, but she bet making the glass shatterproof had been the first thing he’d thought of when he’d created the coffin.

“Why do you even need people when you can just wave your hand and make whatever you want? You wouldn’t have to hurt anyone. The whole thing could be a flea circus. No one would ever have to know.”

“I’d know.” He clicked his blunt nails against the edge of the open coffin. “You’re a beautiful woman, as much a work of art as any of the wings on the walls. You’re meant to be protected while shown off.”

“I’ve had enough of being shown off. If I wanted to be shown off, do you think I would have covered myself from head to toe with clothes rather than reveal to everyone I’m covered head to toe in tattoos? You’re just as bad as him. And don’t you dare pretend you don’t know who I’m talking about.”

“Your artist made it clear what he wanted of you. You may think I want the same things, but I don’t.” He crooked his finger. She staggered another few steps closer to him and the coffin. “Don’t compare me to that exploitative garden parasite. I’m my own despicable self, Lizzie.”

“Aw, did I hurt the poor jinni’s feelings?”

He stared into her eyes without blinking, tempering the intensity with a soft smile at whatever he found there. “You’re going to think I’m punishing you for that, but I’m not. I’d already planned this. Into the box, Elizabeth. Eventually, the entire multi-legged empire will be yours, but for now, I’m still the director of this little exhibit.”

“You can take every single one of these multi-legged monstrosities and shove them right up your—”

“Into the box.”

She climbed in. Its dimensions weren’t perfect for a coffin. He’d made sure to give her enough room for her extra limbs and for her to prop herself up on her many elbows without her head reaching where the lid would be.

“I realize you’re mildly claustrophobic, which was why I provided such big windows on such a small RV and why I need you to see all the holes provided. You won’t suffocate, and I would never bury you alive.”

“Small consolations, Bell.”

“Yes, quite small, considering what I’m about to do.”

He subtly arranged her with his mind rather than his hands, posing her legs to add dimension, resting her prime arms over her belly while the secondary set helped cushion her head, her secondary fingers tangled through the hair that made up the wig.

There was a small black pillow built into the design of the coffin to keep her neck level, not for comfort. Nothing about the coffin was comfortable, but neither was it particularly uncomfortable—for which she wouldn’t thank Bell, considering he was the one putting her in this thing.

He disappeared from her line of sight, and she couldn’t move her head to follow where he went. “I want you to know I do this with the best of intentions to pave my way. You won’t be able to scream, move without my permission or brush them off. You don’t need to. They can’t hurt you, Lizzie. You are completely safe from even the slightest danger, down to the most minor skin irritation.”

“Whatever the fuck you’re planning to do, don’t you fucking dare…”

She knew what was coming before he came back into her line of sight with a large plastic tub in his hands. The plastic tub also had small holes in it, so that whatever lived on the inside could breathe much better than she could right now.

He brought the tub to her feet rather than her face, which was the only reason she didn’t die on the spot, but once again, she couldn’t show gratitude for that little mercy when he was about to pour spiders on her—definitely more than one, and large enough to make a dull thump when their abdomens hit the side of the tub as he tipped it over.

Sharona had liked to scare her with spider memes she’d picked up around social media. The part of Elizabeth’s mind that was calmly in shock flipped through those images until she determined these particular spiders were probably of the Australian huntsman variety, scurrying up the sides of the coffin and along her legs with unnatural speed. No effort to flick them off or flail succeeded in making her move—not even a twitch.

The open lid above her eased down, and the latch flipped closed. Bell slid a fancy brass padlock through the latch, ensuring that she couldn’t escape and that nothing from the outside could get in.

Then he knelt before the coffin, allowing her to turn her head as one of the spiders crawled up her stomach. Each prick of its feet was like the beeping of a bomb, because they told her how much closer to her face it was.

“Spiders usually have no allegiance, less inclined to bond than the snakes Lady Sasha keeps with her. But there isn’t a spider in the world now who would betray itself to bite you. Calm your breathing. You’re perfectly safe.”

He kept using that word as though he had any earthly idea what it meant.

“You are the queen of everything in this tent—barring your humble regent, of course.” He saluted her, then stood.

Two spider legs tapped her chin.

She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t gone insane yet. Bell had slowed her breathing, paralyzed her, but her mind still raced with every single alarm she had. Yet the tent was quiet, almost serene, with only the sound of little legs on glass, dirt and skin, unbearably loud to her hypersensitive ears.

“The sooner you realize your fear does you no favors, Lizzie, the sooner you can accept your place in Arcanium with the dignity everyone sees but you refuse to believe is there. You can hardly be blamed for not realizing what you are. Holding yourself back has always protected you in the past. But that was your artist’s world. That was your father’s world. This is mine, and it’ll do so much more for you than theirs, if you’ll let it.”

He backed away from the coffin. “You’ll be released at seven o’clock. Until then, my dear.”

The bastard passed through the curtains just as the spider crawled onto her face. Her head hurt from the deafening screams she couldn’t make.

No matter how their long legs made her want to twitch, wrench away, squish every single last one of their furry, alien bodies, she couldn’t move. She remained an artfully arranged statue whose chest and stomach rose and fell like clockwork. She could close her eyes, but not knowing what was coming seemed worse.

Then the spider on her face moved over her eyes, and knowing what was coming seemed worse than not knowing, because now she could see the spider’s ungodly long legs and its hairy body and patterned abdomen. Its leg span had to be at least eight inches. Bell wouldn’t have put in anything but the biggest he could find. If he’d literally put in the biggest huntsman ever, there would be one with over a foot leg span in the coffin with her right now.

Without Bell, she would have lost complete control over her bodily functions and not even been ashamed at this point. But she stayed outwardly calm as the spider moved into her hair. Whenever her skin started to itch—whether from the spider legs moving over her or the spiders’ hair or simply an anxiety response—it dissipated without a trace, not the slightest tickle.

Now that the chaos had settled, some huntsmen settled next to her while others explored their new home, probably looking for things to eat that weren’t the size of an eight-limbed woman or for places to hide on said eight-limbed woman. Spiders usually wanted one or the other, like most animals walking on God’s green earth.

Her rational mind sided with peaceful shock, an oasis in the chaotic whirlwind that was her shut-in panic attack.

The spiders weren’t going to hurt her while she was so still, even if Bell hadn’t made the spiders placid. Spiders in general were solitary creatures rarely dangerous to humans. Even the more venomous spiders sometimes had trouble breaking through the thick skin of human beings, and blisters and inflammation attributed to spider bites were often staph infections instead. Ecologically, they were one of the many predators of troublesome insects, and they themselves were prey to other creatures up the food chain. They were useful and necessary.

Elizabeth knew this.

None of her knowledge mattered.

Her vision blurred, narrowed, grayed as though clouded with cobwebs, but Bell wouldn’t grant her unconsciousness.

The curtains opened. To her ever-increasing terror, she wasn’t in Arcanium anymore. And all these people in the middle of a motherfucking shopping mall were looking right at her.

Little kids she would never have wanted to look at her body, although they saw women like her all the time on billboards and in television commercials and magazine advertisements.

Grown men whom she’d tirelessly concealed her body from all this time, by choice, for her own tenuous protection.

Women who looked down on her for selling herself out to the gazes of others, for allowing these tiny monsters to roam her body in the name of the almighty dollar. Whatever she was getting paid, it should never have been enough.

But despite any disgust, disregard or judgment, curiosity drove them all forward.

She couldn’t cover herself. Couldn’t hide. Couldn’t escape.

Elizabeth closed her eyes. It didn’t go away when she opened them. People peered into the coffin, spoke about her as though she couldn’t hear them through the holes in the glass, stared right into her eyes. Yet they couldn’t see the fear. They couldn’t see her begging them to free her. All they could see were the spiders, the bikini, the tattoos—these terrible, amazing things meant to distract them.

“Do you see that honeycomb under the bees? Reminds me of those memes about holes in people’s skin where bugs peek out. Gross.”

“How long do you think it took her to get all those tattoos?”

“Are those arms and legs real? I can’t tell. They look so real.”

“I can’t see where they’ve been attached. Shouldn’t there be, like, a lump where the harness is? Holy Christ, they’re moving! Is this real life?”

“So, do you think she was raised around spiders, or do you think she just gets a shit-ton of money to do this?”

“It’s like Fear Factor or something. Would you do it?”

“No way. You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to shut myself into a locked box with that many giant spiders crawling all over me. How many are there, anyway?”

“I think there’s twelve. Even dozen. Yeesh. It feels like they’re crawling on me.”

“What kind are they? They don’t look like tarantulas.”

“No, those over there are tarantulas. Holy shit, that’s one big-ass tarantula. There are babies smaller than this thing.”

“These are those crazy big spiders they have in Australia or Iraq or something, right?”

“She looks so serene. Think she’s drugged?”

“She’s looking at us. Don’t look drugged to me.”

“But crazy.”

“She’s definitely that. But look at how tattooed she is. She was already crazy before she got in the box.”

“You know what would be really weird? If she were drugged up with some kind of paralytic and locked in that box with a fuck-ton of spiders, and she’s trying to tell us to help her right now, but it’s not working. And we’re talking about it and shit.”

“A little too meta for right after lunch, Daniel.”

“Come see the butterflies.”

Bell had put his red tent right in the middle of people who were the ruler by which normal was measured, enticing them with the gross and arcane in one iridescent, freak-out gesture. They gazed upon her body, marveled at her uncommon courage and uncommon anatomy, speculated about her sexual experience, questioned her parentage, shuddered not in commiseration but disgust—the woman that she was secondary to the spectacle.

Bell was right. It was nothing like what Dez had done to her. It was worse, more dehumanizing and objectifying. Even the rational side of her brain was fading now, the cacophony of her panic shrinking it to Lilliputian proportions. She collapsed deeper and deeper into herself like a dying star, sweat trapped in her pores and tears trapped in their ducts. Eventually, her eyelids stopped wanting to blink—they moved by necessity only without the remotest consciousness or emotional state to move them. Her lungs were under Bell’s control, but her heart thudded against her ribs as though to protest the speed of her breathing.

Just give out. She didn’t need her lungs anymore. She didn’t need her heart. She could die here and no one would know. Bell would keep her blinking until he brought her back to Arcanium. Then he could make her a permanent addition to the haunted funhouse, his lifelike puppet—not much different from what he was already doing, this mad taxidermist creating fantastic creations from the limbs of living. But living was a relative term. She’d be fine in a coma—or as an unthinking zombie. As long as her consciousness, her soul, no longer needed to be here. As long as the spiders couldn’t creep over it and take a juicy bite every time she moved. As long as Bell didn’t have to stick his tongue in and wriggle.

At one point, one of the spiders hid itself under her hair while two others settled on her face. The rest crawled around the playground of her arms and legs, preferring the shelter they created but stimulated enough to keep moving while being gawked at by all these people.

Maybe the spiders didn’t have a choice in the matter either.

That little nugget of empathy did nothing to make up for their proximity. Nothing would be enough for that.

This was her punishment for everything—for being born, disrespecting her mother and fathers, running away from home, yielding herself to the control of an evil man, running back home under false pretenses, wearing the guise of piety to cover up her shame, lying by omission so often her soul was like Swiss cheese, bringing the kids to Arcanium, wishing for more in her life when she should have been content enough with its blessings, not stabbing Bell in the eye every time she got the chance, not fighting back now.

You’re pathetic, Lizzie. Not pitiful. Pathetic.

Not until the mall’s skylights had gone dark, when the employees in shops around her covered their carts or pulled down cage doors to lock up for the night, did the curtains close—no one looking at her, no one milling among the insect and arachnid collection Bell had set up, no one there to save her.

He was going to leave her in there. He was going to leave her in there until Friday, just to imprison her in her spiderweb once again. Bell had no intention of allowing her respite or relief. He’d wielded the worst of his weapons by telling her he would free her, by asking her to trust him. She should have known none of that was true, that he would pull it all out from under her when she was just starting to believe him—not believing that he had the best intentions, but that her phobias were entirely irrational, that she was safe, that she would be able to breathe on her own again without fearing a spider would crawl into her mouth and lay eggs in some ungodly place.

The padlock remained locked. The latch remained in place. And in the quiet darkness, the huntsmen were scurrying about again, their large bodies surprisingly agile.

But she could move. Slowly. As though Bell knew that if he let her have her full faculties, she would crush the spiders.

Her scream was nothing but a whimper as she struck at the glass lid. His Snow White indeed, choking on her own apple. Every time she hit the lid, it sent the spiders scurrying away from the lid—onto her.

Just like she wasn’t sure whether eyes opened or closed was worse, she wasn’t sure whether being paralyzed or able to move was worse. Because she still couldn’t get out, but now the spiders responded to her movement.

The lights and the spiders’ heat lamps dimmed by more than half. She shivered. The spiders scuttled along with the shivers as though riding a wave.

A shadow entered. He undid the lock to the latch, then lifted the lid.

“Slowly,” he said. “You need to move slowly.”

It didn’t matter what he said. She wanted out, and if out meant stepping into a puddle of hot lava, she still would have done it as quickly as possible. But it also didn’t matter what he said because Bell’s magic on her kept her from exiting the coffin in any way that would hurt the spiders in her haste. She moved as though through molasses.

She clutched at his dark, furry forearms when he offered himself to help her from the coffin. He drew her out one leg at a time. The huntsmen scurried down her legs as though the coffin lid were still there, blocking them from leaving the coffin until they were alone along the sides of the glass, poking their little legs through the holes like prisoners begging her for their freedom as well. Then they faded away, appearing in an empty terrarium at the back of the tent where there’d been nothing before.

“You’re all right. You’re perfectly safe. No more spiders.”

“Shut up. Just shut up!” She hit his chest without any strength. All the freaking out that had built up over the course of the afternoon and evening let out all at once, but each one of her eight limbs had been sapped of strength to fuel the fireworks erupting in her brain. She punched him in the chest, stomach, arms, the lift of his wings behind his shoulders, his face when she could stand to look up at it—his soft gargoyle’s face.

“Why you? Why does it have to be you when he finishes with me?” Elizabeth shoved him back against one of the poles holding the tent up. “Why are you always here? Goddammit, why, you creepy fucker?”

The Creature grabbed her primary wrists like lined leather shackles—firm but without pain, despite her fighting against his hold. She could still hit him, but with her primary arms in the way, his face was safer, and she could look up into his red eyes, which seemed to reflect the velvet that surrounded her in this lush mausoleum.

“I volunteered.”

“Why couldn’t Bell come himself so I could claw his eyes out?” She leaned back onto her secondary legs the way Bell had shown her, hoping she could kick at the Creature like a kangaroo standing on its tail, but she didn’t have the strength or the balance. The Creature crowded her back against the coffin, now free of spiders but still open and still dangerous in its own right.

“I imagine that is an excellent reason not to come himself.” He closed his eyes to inhale, released her to touch her wig, heedless of the added fist for battering his ribs. Despite being a creature of flesh and blood, nothing fazed him as he brought his slightly flared nostrils to her neck, where he had smelled her before in the rain.

“Get off me. Get the hell off me!” Punching wasn’t working. She tried scratching next, but his skin was tough, hide masquerading as human skin.

“I’m not going to hurt you. This will help.” He slid his fingers under the edge of her wig to slide it along her bare scalp then discard it in the coffin. At her uncovering, he breathed in more deeply, pleased by the scent released. “Let me take it. Give me your fear, and I will take it from you.”

“It doesn’t go away. God, everyone’s so fucking helpful. Everyone thinks it’s simply hilarious when a grown woman becomes a little girl in front of everybody just because something scares her almost to death. They think the more they expose her, the fear will go away. Well, that’s not how this fucking works! It never goes away. If it went away, I wouldn’t keep coming right back to this hell, God punishing me over and over. I wouldn’t be here.”

Quality product or not, she was pretty sure her makeup was a mess, but the Creature didn’t appear concerned about the ink her tears ferried down her cheeks and onto his fur.

His arms were immovable around her. Fur soft, muscles hard, skin yielding but tough, he was a beast rather than a man. He burned against her bare skin.

“I can take it away. Let me feed, Elizabeth. I’ll feast upon your fear and leave the plate clean behind. I’ve done it before.” He dragged his mouth over her neck, up the side of her head. “This is why I follow you. You have all this fear. To have you so close … It’s intoxicating. Let me taste it again.”

She wailed into his shoulder, the curl of her fingers to scratch him seeking instead to dig into something, to find something to hold—his hips, his ribs, his back.

As she melted into his embrace, no strength to fight anymore, he parted his lips to inhale, his breath hot and the edges of his teeth sharp. But as before when he’d stopped her from escaping through the Arcanium gates, he didn’t bite down, didn’t even use those sharp teeth to threaten. All he did was move over her—like an open-mouthed kiss, but something more primal, something as simple as consumption.

His warmth seeped into her, heat against the winter that barely bit at her skin anymore. He smoothed his hands down her back, then up her neck to cradle her skull, breathing her in like a dying man gasping for breath. Fiber by fiber, her muscles relaxed.

“Do you even know?” he whispered against her neck. “Do you know how you call to me? You practically beg.”

Elizabeth didn’t know how a Creature fed just by breathing, or why a Creature like him needed teeth like that if he didn’t use them. But the more he drank her in, the calmer she became. Her thoughts slowed, no longer racing in never-ending circles. She clung to them, because her thoughts were hers and he shouldn’t be able to steal them, but they slipped through her fingers, losing their power without her death grip upon them.

Every time some other creature in the tent moved enough to make a sound, panic rushed back into the empty spaces, but not as violently as before. Her rational mind could take up more of the space that fear vacated.

The spiders were locked away, as were the centipedes, scorpions and hissing cockroaches. If Bell hadn’t been done with her, he would have come to free her himself to get a front-row seat for her expression when he forced her to do something else for his entertainment.

Fear and recriminations had made her excruciatingly present in the coffin, second by second. With the Creature siphoning from her, she became present in another way, able to experience reality without her senses devolving into cacophony. Instead, they became oddly focused. The bugs in the tent distracted her, but not enough to detract from the much softer brush of his fur against her bare skin, the places where their legs interlocked and she could feel his skin and firm press of muscle. Despite extra limbs, she was still half his size. And he had his own extra limbs, didn’t he? Those furled leathery wings draped down his back and legs to the ground, where the tips were flexible enough to bend—the train to his anatomical cloak.

His hands on her.

She’d had hands on her before. Bell was a handsy man. She wondered whether he even realized he did it, since he kept claiming he wouldn’t touch her then followed it up with proprietary contact. Perhaps he meant he wouldn’t touch her sexually, but his possessiveness carried an intimacy just as disquieting.

Before Bell, her congregation had laid hands on her to pray over the state of her soul when she’d returned and whenever someone in the community had wanted to pray for her during the Call to Prayer. Physical contact was common but controlled among Petrosian saints. They didn’t touch anywhere that could be construed as sexual, which meant they pressed the tips of their fingers to arms, shoulders, upper back, hands, nothing more.

Her clothing discouraged contact. Lately, the only hands she’d had to contend with had been from the Bishop children. Tiny, grabby hands from the baby and toddler, pokes and pulling from Todd, withdrawal from Sharona.

It had been so long. So long since she had been seen, and being seen reminded her why she’d chosen to never be seen again. But it had also been so long since she’d really been touched. She’d thought Dez had poisoned that, too, that to have the Creature’s hands on her would trigger memories of tenderness so twisted with manipulation that she still had trouble untangling them.

But the Creature’s hands on her weren’t like Dez’s at all. They were larger, broader, hotter, somehow rested on her art differently. She drew her nails along his back, but not to tear. He was so close to her, almost kissing, almost embracing, his legs against hers but his hips away. He was doing everything he was supposed to, giving her what he promised but not taking anything he hadn’t asked for.

As he breathed in whatever scent of fear fed him, the scent from his skin was that of smoke—not cigarette smoke or hickory smoke, but lightning smoke on the bark of scorched trees. Musk, the combination of fur over skin. And the scent of flesh that she’d forgotten. Not just skin, meat, but the scent of a man in the places where it was strongest, most undiluted and distinguishable—where sweat and dirt hadn’t reached him, where he was clean and aroused. The scent not just of flesh, but of the flesh, the fruit that had been forbidden because it was exactly this tempting.

She didn’t know why she did it. She couldn’t use the Creature’s excuse and claim that his scent drew her to him. It wasn’t as simple as that. She was a woman accustomed to resisting temptation, to resisting almost everything. And for God’s sake, she had just emerged from a day’s worth of humiliation and panic attacks. She was still surrounded with the source of her deepest, most irrational fears, mere plates of glass and Bell’s whim between her and them. It should have been the last thing on her mind.

Yet it buzzed under her skin, strongest where he touched her, where he moved those hands over her, and she brought her mouth to his neck where his scent burned strongest.

At the first touch of her tongue along the line of his throat, he stilled, his breathing gone silent, until all she could hear was the scraping and scurrying of insects and arachnids and the hiss of the Madagascar cockroaches in response to some unknown stimulus.

That cooled what madness had fallen upon her, or at least she thought it did. But the moment her hair stood on end in response to the images that the sounds conjured in her mind, he curled his fingers into muscle, releasing a breath only to drink it back in again with the resurrected fear, nuzzling closer once more.

“That… That isn’t just fear I taste anymore, little Spider.”

She wrenched her mouth away from his neck, turning her head away, but to one direction was the red curtain and to the other direction were the spiders, and his body stayed strong against her, moving with her when she shuffled around the coffin. However, he pulled away in apparent concern at her withdrawal.

“No.” Elizabeth shook her head, braced herself on the edge of a table until the movement of the hissing cockroaches within caught her eye. She jerked her hand away as though they’d been crawling on her instead of their mossy terrain.

“Your fear rises again. What is it you fear from me? Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t hurt you. And I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of you.”

When she tried to turn away from him, she got a face-full of pins through the bodies of butterflies in one of the shadowboxes. Her own reflection spooked her. For God’s sake, where were the edges of the curtains? The whole tent seemed to be curtains with no end. The Creature had entered through them, but no matter how she pawed at the velvet, it wouldn’t open for her. Maybe it wasn’t meant to open for her. Maybe she was going to be trapped in here forever.

“You wouldn’t look like that if you weren’t made to hurt,” she said as she searched. “You’re a predator. You have the claws and teeth of a predator. You have the muscle mass of a predator. Even if you aren’t a demon, what use are a predator’s tools without predatory behavior? You’re still a monster.”

“I feed on fear, not on flesh or blood or bone. I don’t know what I am or where I come from, but although I can eat if it appeals to me, my only nourishment is fear. The way I look inspires that which I consume. When people see me, they react out of instinct. They become prey. But that’s for people who do not know I’m harmless. Why run from me when it is you who invited me, who invites me even now?”

“I’m not inviting you with my fear. The stench of fear should be telling you to stay the fuck away.” After the cockroaches came the giant millipedes. The redheaded centipedes. A giant Goliath birdeater with a godforsaken leg span of a frying pan. A camel spider. A wolf spider carrying tiny nightmare babies on its back. A banana spider. The brown recluse. The black widow. She stubbed her toe on the platform that held the huntsman spiders she’d just escaped.

He slid his hand over her shoulder. He didn’t grab her, but his touch electrified her skin into gooseflesh. “What did I do? What did I do that made what wasn’t fear become fear once more?”

When she didn’t pull away from him again, he slid his other hand over her other shoulder. Perhaps he believed that her shudder still came from fear. Her secondary arms flailed as both sets struggled to find an anchor in the platforms and tables around her without touching anything close to creepy. There was nothing that matched that criteria, and her handle on her secondary limbs still wasn’t iron. Her secondary knuckles hit terrariums on either side of her, almost knocking the black widow’s container off.

“If you let me calm you again, you won’t terrify yourself so.”

“I just want out. Please let me out.”

“I am not holding you prisoner.”

The Creature ran his thumbs up each side of her spine in a deep massage that had her raising her shoulders. Her sister Ruth had always said Elizabeth was one big knot no one could ever hope to untangle. Dez had said the same thing whenever he’d tried to work the kinks out of her back and shoulders.

“You’re too afraid to see the way out. Please, Elizabeth, allow me to help you. I was helping before I scared you. What did I do?”

Elizabeth forced herself to stop moving, because if she flailed again, she might not be so lucky with the smaller recluse and widow containers, not to mention the harmless but revolting glass farm that contained nothing less than plain, old American cockroaches. She’d hate to knock that one over. Worse to her than the ant farm.

“Your hands,” she said.

He removed his hands from her shoulders, holding them up as though to prove he no longer touched her in case she didn’t realize it for herself.

She carefully turned around so that her secondary knees wouldn’t knock the platform or table. “That’s not what I meant. I…”

She felt like fear held every last one of her reins. But fear wouldn’t draw her to the Creature, wouldn’t slide her palms up his chest, his neck, to take his face between them.

“Don’t,” she whispered. Her fingers trembled against his cheeks even as she guided him down to bring his mouth near hers, as though inviting him to taste her fear elsewhere. “Don’t,” she said again, then kissed him.

It was as though someone else was in control of her body, in control of her body’s reaction, although this was nothing like how she felt when Bell took over her will. A perfect stranger brought her body flush against his. A perfect stranger gasped from the flood of feelings she’d dammed up so many years ago, feelings she’d intended to relinquish for the rest of her life, that she’d thought were relegated only to the moments before she woke from dreams and couldn’t be held accountable.

She didn’t know whether this was even something that the Creature did—at least until he wrapped an arm around her waist and parted his lips to taste her in a far more substantial way.

He manipulated them around to grasp the edge of one of the tables, and he shoved her back against it as he urged her own lips to part.

Had she thought him more like a beast than a man, a mere imitation or sexless hybrid? All at once, he became a man against her hips, his erection lifting under the loincloth with unnatural swiftness in response to her tongue meeting his. He was no carving, no facsimile. He was more man than she’d had in a very long time—his cock against her hip, his mouth against hers to drink in her kiss, his hand branding a path up the length of her spine.

Her head fell back as he rolled his hips against hers, rubbing his erection along her skin with nothing but the loincloth in his way. He kissed down her neck, taking time to taste more than her fear all the way down to the hollow of her throat.

She brought her hands behind his head to guide him lower, but she shook her head. “Don’t. God, don’t.”

The Creature raised himself up again, perplexed.

Elizabeth spun out of his arms, slamming her hands onto the table when she inevitably tangled her legs. She got an eyeful of the giant tarantula, the Goliath birdeater. Odds were, it was just bewildered by the giants rocking its world, but she couldn’t shake the notion it watched them. It stared with oddly guileless eyes, showed no sign of aggression. Even so, she felt captivated by them, ice chasing the heat until she didn’t know what she was feeling.

Only that her secondary arms reached for the Creature and pulled him close against her from behind. He hesitated, but encouraged by the insistence of her fingers digging under his ribs and the spreading of her secondary legs to accommodate him, he drank fear from her neck before taking the flesh between his teeth. With his hot tongue, he soothed the dents that the sharp tips had created. An undignified moan escaped her and she struck the table with a fist, but she moved back against him where his cock was trapped against her ass.

She brought one of those huge, hot hands to her breast, over the leather, then pushed it underneath.

Skin on skin on skin on skin… It was all too much after so long of nothing at all. She wanted him to touch her everywhere she’d covered, everywhere she’d protected herself, everywhere all those prickly spider legs had crawled over her. Elizabeth was neither innocent nor ignorant, yet the way the Creature touched her, it was as though she was experiencing it for the first time all over again—and her first times had been wonderful and frightening enough on their own.

They rocked against each other as though there was nothing between their hips. Elizabeth could practically feel his cock inside her. The memory of Dez taking her and her present, achingly intense desire to be taken combined in a volatile mixture that alone nearly made her come.

The redheaded centipede reared up, wriggling its little legs. Elizabeth nearly slipped off the table face-first into the Goliath birdeater’s terrarium.

“No.” It was little more than a murmur, but Elizabeth brought her primary hands to the sides of her head, shaking. One of her secondary legs curled around the Creature’s, and her secondary hands kept hold of his waist at the same time Elizabeth tried to stumble back to the front of the red tent. The hissing of the Madagascar cockroaches intensified the closer she came.

“Elizabeth!” This time the Creature wasn’t tender. He grabbed her by the back of the neck then pushed her against the end of the table, irritating the cockroaches even more. He maneuvered out of the way of her secondary limbs, which had obviously mutinied from the rest of her—or else their priorities were clearer.

“Let me go,” she whispered. Her bikini top was now askew, her right nipple exposed, flushed, tight. She couldn’t stop looking beyond the monstrosity of his initial appearance—the breadth of his shoulders and chest, the demigod-like arms, the prominent tent under his loincloth. She didn’t have to see his cock to discern what it would look like, so thin was the material of his covering and so intimidating his erection.

“I’ve tried to let you go when you tell me to, but you keep denying me.” His frustration was plain, though his claws were gentle over her cheek. “I am not like the jinni. I don’t keep prisoners. I am not human, but I am close enough that I believe I’m right in being confused. Your scent… You taste aroused…and afraid. Arousal almost tastes like fear, but I can tell the difference. Arousal and fear come off you in waves, one following the other. You won’t let me take all the fear because you become aroused, but when you submit to arousal, the fear rises once more. I don’t understand what you need from me. I don’t understand what you want.”

Elizabeth shook her head, leaning into his touch. “Don’t. Please, don’t touch me.” Tears followed the previous paths carved down her face.

But when he stepped back—a perfect respect of her wishes, something utterly foreign to her—she snagged his loincloth to yank him back in.

Scratches and whispers and hisses filled the dim red tent.

In another life, her nightmares had also been filled with the click of a camera and the light of a video camera. He had turned what she’d thought was love into something artificial, commodified, something that could be bought and sold and that she could never escape without completely hiding herself.

Still he had called it love. Still her body had responded to him with the lust he had cultivated. She could have left at any time, bruises be damned, and eventually she had. Dez hadn’t followed her. He’d pierced in his poison, woven the thread of himself into her until she could never truly leave, never forget how he had nurtured her fear and lust into the choking vines that the Creature tasted in her.

“Spider.” His name for her was a groan, because she shifted her grip on his loincloth to take his erection in hand through the fabric. He was big, bigger than the ones Dez had convinced her to take, and the very idea of it inside her was terrifying. Yet she brought him to her thigh.

“Don’t.” She brought his hand back to her uncovered breast. She closed her eyes and forced herself to say what tasted so bitter to her tongue, tasted of submission—and with submission, humiliation that compounded upon all the humiliations that had come before. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop touching me. No matter what I do. Put your hands on me, all over me. Please.”

Her plea devolved into a moan, because he made short work of the ties to the leather top. He dipped down to kiss the top of her breast where she’d been leading him, her nipple hard from proximity rather than ministration, but the Creature didn’t leave her abandoned for long. His sharp teeth caught it, tortured it until she struggled just to breathe, her breast quivering from her gasps. Then he crowded her against the table again and surrounded her nipple with his excruciatingly hot mouth.

It had never been like this, not during the most adventurous and fearless of her experimentation with Dez in the early years, when she’d put his bed through the paces and could never seem to get enough. Her body had sung for him, but in Arcanium, it screamed.

He lifted his head, refusing to relinquish her nipple, but as soon as he had to, he yielded it in favor of her mouth, which he caught with the same voracious appetite he’d shown for her fear. For a creature who claimed to be unsure of what he was in relation to the world, he certainly seemed to know what he wanted from her. Then again, she’d been out of the game for over ten years, and here she was, lifting his loincloth and taking his cock in hand as though she was still the newly adult, sexually frustrated girl she’d been when Dez had found her.

She cried out when his teeth caught her lips. She could hardly throw stones when she met his tongue with her own sharp teeth—though he responded with a groan and a strong thrust into her hand.

Every time they rocked against the table, the metal joints squeaked, the terrariums thunked together and the cockroaches hissed. She spread her secondary legs to straddle the table. It didn’t give her much leverage, but it anchored them a little. She wouldn’t yield a single one of her hands from touching him with the same frantic need with which he touched her. Any time the sound of the crawlies in the room penetrated the lust haze in her brain, he drank it away with his kiss, somehow becoming hotter the more he took.

Surrounded by all the things that terrified her, fear etched into her skin, everything she was doing right now the result of still-undefined fear, she was a bottomless resource, a gourmand’s dream.

“I will not stop,” the Creature swore into her mouth.

He pushed her bikini bottoms down. She’d never had much in the way of hips, and once the leather passed the top part of her thighs, it slid down on their own. Then he twisted something at his own hip that left him without his loincloth.

He drank her, tasted her, kissed her, dragged his lips and teeth over her skin in a combination of fear-feeding and affection until it was indistinguishable. He moved down over the exposed heart, over the skeleton cameo on the mourning corset, over the mandala. He forced her thighs apart, nuzzling the spider and the teeth scars in turn before running his tongue from her slit up to her clit. Elizabeth shook her head, but she pushed down on his to keep him there, and she grasped at the arch of his opened wings with her secondary hands.

“I don’t know what you’re still afraid of, but keep giving it to me if you’re willing, Spider.” His mouth—pulling, sucking, licking, circling, teasing, torturing—became relentless. He caressed her thighs, mapped her musculature with his palms, then moved up to the secondary legs, where she discovered the inner thighs there were as sensitive as the prime set, despite the fact they led nowhere as interesting as where his mouth had her nearly melting down the side of the table.

Then he stopped. He’d promised not to stop. When he stopped, she stopped feeling and started thinking, and that was when the whole mess of her head returned, stronger than ever.

He raised his red eyes to hers. They were as inscrutable as they were opaque, which was perhaps why he exaggerated his expressions like the gargoyle he often seemed to be. But his expression now gave her nothing. For a moment, she was afraid he would stay that way, that he would stand and leave, or stand and simply fuck her before leaving, and she still wouldn’t find a way out of this tent.

Then he slithered his tongue between her folds to dip into her cunt. He hummed in appreciation at what he sampled, which couldn’t have been insignificant. As he stood, he unsettled her grip. Somehow, he seemed even taller after kneeling, and she felt even more vulnerable, especially with his cock thick and hard against her belly. She was almost positive it had grown since she’d stroked him.

“If you need further preparation, Spider, you’ll have to stretch yourself. I can spare you most of the effects of size, but not like the demons, and I cannot prevent these from doing their damage.” He raised his fingers, splaying them to display the claws—thick, sharp, unretractable and not something a woman wanted inside her.

“You mean…like this?” Elizabeth brought her prime hands between her legs. She caught her clit hard between the knuckles of her fingers, making herself whine. Then she slid her left hand back to sink two fingers into her cunt.

She didn’t like him watching her rather than just doing it himself. Watching rubbed her all the wrong ways, like Bell displaying her in the coffin, like him having her strip in the ring. She’d been forced into mass exhibitionism under false pretenses before, poisoning what had been a pleasurable pastime until then. The old feelings hadn’t gone away, despite years of protecting herself from the gaze of others.

The Creature’s gaze was just as lascivious, just as intense and just as invasive, though she knew she shouldn’t compare his intentions. Yet, as deeply as she despised a voyeur, his blood-red eyes upon her roused all the shivers of his touch, and as she tested the places inside her that hadn’t been stretched by so much as a doctor all this time, she couldn’t help but imagine that her fingers were his instead, and she added a third to approximate two of his. Lubrication wasn’t a problem. She’d thought her long, self-imposed dry spell would have been more of an issue. Instead, her cunt seemed to clutch at her fingers, and the more intently the Creature watched her fuck herself, the more aroused she became and the more she wanted him inside her.

“I don’t need this.” Elizabeth withdrew from her cunt, though she continued to squeeze her clit and its hood, keeping the arousal there throbbing and keen.

The Creature took her shiny fingers between his teeth, sucked his way down to take what he hadn’t been able to gather for himself. “No. From the way you taste, I don’t think you need that at all.”

He took both prime wrists and forced her hands onto the table. Once released, her clit pulsed with her racing heartbeat, and the change in angle made her hips snap forward on their new hinge. Elizabeth’s secondary elbows struck the hissing cockroach terrarium. She reacted automatically with a sinking rush of fear that she’d toppled it over.

The Creature desperately grabbed her by the back of the neck and held the base of his cock to position himself. Once the head pressed against her cunt, he let himself go and grasped her thigh instead, keeping her steady as he entered her, hard and deep.

God, it should have hurt. She would have welcomed pain, because maybe it would have made her think clearly for once in this whole mixed-up encounter. But in the name of all that was unholy, it didn’t. He filled her in ways she didn’t know it was possible to be filled, stretched her beyond the limits of what she’d ever thought could be pleasurable, yet she hooked her legs around him, yielding him the last of her control and urging him for more.

She’d never been fond of the noises she made during sex, although everyone else had seemed to like them. But pleasure pummeled her from every side, a global series of sensations, battle upon battle that she’d never won once they’d started. Her cries and moans could have been ones of pleasure, but also of pain. She could no more stop them than she could prevent herself from reacting to intimate contact.

Those noises rather than the insectile now filled the small tent. But the Creature didn’t let them dominate the room for long. He continued to make the table creak, to the point Elizabeth almost feared it would break. And he breathed in her cries with the urgent gasps of his feeding before smothering them with a kiss, combining his moans with hers so she wouldn’t be undignified alone.

He fed like a beast and fucked like one, too. She’d had men lose control with her before, although Dez had never been one of them. But the Creature didn’t lose control. He yielded to instinct, feasting on her and kissing her with a growl on the edge of his groans. His cock entered her with tireless rhythm. It could have been impersonal, cold. But with his body under the influence of instinct, he devoted every last bit of attention upon her. His kiss was terrible in its intention, as much a possession and invasion as his cock.

Elizabeth lost her breath again, but this time not from panic. The tent spun as though it was the carousel, and she was riding the gargoyle—or perhaps he was riding her. At this point, she wasn’t sure who was taking whom.

She couldn’t keep herself from touching him anymore—the monster of him, the man of him, in every inch. The thick muscles of his thighs and ass were powerful like the rest of him. She clutched at them, digging her fingers and fingernails in with the knowledge it couldn’t hurt him, but that didn’t stop her from trying, urging him faster, harder. Her prime thighs would bruise under the ink from the jut of his hipbones striking them, and her secondary thighs trembled trying to keep herself steady on the table. But God, she wished he’d never stop, that the pleasure could keep climbing like this, tightening in her abdomen, her cunt, in a spiral up her spine, and even into her mind, all her lusts conspiring together at the Creature’s physical command.

The orgasm took what little breath she had left. An orgasm that hit this hard usually fell off quickly, but whatever allowed him to take her without pain also seemed to keep him rubbing the ridge of the head over her spot again and again, jolting pleasure through her until her moans grated with animalistic growls of her own. She jerked her hips to meet him, pushing herself with her secondary arms and pulling with the primes.

The Creature clutched the back of her neck as though she were a kitten, sheathed himself within her as deep as he could go. All of him stilled, except for his cock, which heated like iron and jerked with his own climax. Her cunt fluttered, clenched around him as her orgasm finally crested then calmed into aftershocks.

Their stillness more than him fucking her made her aware of just how big he was within her, how he stretched her entrance. In the aftermath, she was almost fascinated by the sensation, improbable and impossible as it was.

He lifted her from the table, keeping his cock inside her, and stepped backward until he reached the curtain. With his wing, he pulled it back from the center, where she’d struggled to find an edge and found nothing but more velvet.

The weight of the extra limbs made her heavier over his cock than she’d anticipated, straining her cunt even more around the base. And she looked down at him this way, still gasping for breath as she met his eyes too close. Then he lifted her from him, forcing her to release the hold of all eight of her limbs.

It seemed a corollary to how completely he filled her—without him, she felt emptier than she ever had after sex. The high was always so high, the low always so low. No one had ever been able to stop the crash that followed when they left her empty like this, vulnerable, utterly raw.

And without him feeding on her, distracting, the contents of the tent returned to her as soon as she turned around to pick up what passed for clothing in Arcanium. Turning around put her face-to-face with the fucking hissing cockroaches, who were still agitated at the earthquake the two giants had caused. Their hissing became deafening to her ears.

She couldn’t convince herself to go closer to the dusty leather to bend over and pick it up, even though she knew that the top of the terrarium was still latched and they weren’t going to escape and attack her for being a disturbance. On the contrary, they’d congregated on the other side of the terrarium to escape the source of the earthquake.

“There’s never an end to it for you, is there? Already, new fear comes off you like mist.” The Creature stroked along the moths emerging from her skull. “Does it not exhaust you?”

Elizabeth straightened. It took all her remaining, trembling energy to stand. The crash was like a weight, aided by her revulsion for the little monsters around her. Nothing was left from whatever respite the Creature had given, not even an echo of pleasure, not when he wasn’t touching her.

“Little Spider, have you not yet learned that you don’t have to run?”

He tried to come up behind her, but she jerked her shoulder away and edged around him, gaze fixed upon where the curtain had swung after he’d released it. The world of Arcanium showed between the edges.

Elizabeth darted between them and out into Oddity Row. She was naked again, but she wasn’t going back for that leather as long as there were roaches anywhere close to it.

She didn’t have to run? Where could she run to? She just had to get away.

Away from what, though? Her head was a mess, muddied, confused, jumpy and with a profound sense of déjà vu—except it wasn’t from something in the past so much as a sense that this was her future. Everything was wrong. Everything that thrilled her, everything that frightened her, everything was wrong. She was hollow, not just empty, though her hands and feet were unbearably heavy.

“Elizabeth, wait…”

“Go to hell!” She didn’t look back. She didn’t think she could bear his confusion on top of her own, nor any hurt she might have caused more effectively with her words than her hands.

She didn’t even know which direction she was going. Everything looked the same to her any direction she went. Oddity Row wasn’t this big. She should have been able to keep going one direction and walk out of it, but she kept weaving in and out to avoid being seen and couldn’t stop coming back to the red tent. The Creature had since disappeared. Perhaps he had taken her suggestion. In Arcanium, hell was never too far away.

But that particular hell she could navigate by. She started looking for the dark, looming figure of the haunted funhouse. This would be the only time she would approach it with relief, but she was too worn out to chide herself for that. All she needed was a north.

Once she’d made it to the stairway leading up to the funhouse entrance, Elizabeth collapsed on the steps. God knew how many shoes had turned the white-painted wood gray or what had been on those shoes, but she’d been crawled on by spiders all afternoon and evening, then fucked by a monster. If cleanliness was next to godliness, the devil could take her.

She could never do things by halves. There had never been a middle ground between piety and partying. She’d broken almost all the laws that Petrosians followed, as well as a few she’d given herself. She was lost, a haunted funhouse the closest she came to home. She could go to her RV, take a shower, sleep in a bed, but she couldn’t convince herself to leave, least of all make herself comfortable. As long as the spiders stayed away from her tonight, the steps would do, with splinters threatening her secondary flanks and step edges digging into her back. If Bell wanted her back in that tent, he could pry her frozen body from these damn stairs. He could and he might, but the important thing was that he’d have to.