Goodfellow and Mills

On Wednesday morning Danny rolled out of bed and padded down to the kitchen, made coffee and fed Curry, then sat down naked in front of his laptop and opened up the folder to look at the photos from yesterday again.

Nothing had changed. The sequence of pictures from the barn began and ended the way he thought they should, but there in the middle were almost three dozen photos showing him being fucked by the carny, an event that he simply could not recall having ever happened. And, he realized, if that was him bent over the feed trough, who was taking the pictures? Zooming in and out, changing the angles? It was impossible.

It was also very erotic. Danny had begun to develop an erection paging through the scene. "Crap. I'm turned on watching myself? Talk about narcissistic." He closed the files with a sigh of perplexity and sat back in his chair thinking, stroking his half-hard dick idly.

He would have to go back, his commission was for the entire duration of the carnival. What if something else strange happened? He needed a wingman, somebody to back him up, to help him separate fact from fantasy. Somebody sturdy, calm, hard to spook. He picked up the phone.

"Josh? Danny here. What do you mean you didn't expect to hear from me? I'm wounded. I've been thinking about you." He glanced down at his dick, which had come erect at the sound of the farmer's voice. "Well, okay, parts of me have been thinking about you. Listen, I need a favor." He listened, grinning, while Josh spoke. "That, too, but I need a different favor first. Have you been to the Goodfellow & Mills carnival yet? Well now's your chance. I'll buy your ticket. All you have to do is hang with me for the day while I wander around taking pictures. No, that's it, that's all I need." Joshua spoke, and Danny laughed. "Okay, that's not all I need, but it's what I need for a few hours today. Can you get away from the farm for part of the afternoon? Excellent! Meet me for lunch at Tito's Tacos and then we'll go be entertained." He laughed again. "Oh, yeah. You can name your price afterwards."

The two men met at Tito's Tacos at noon, an old-fashioned taqueria a block and a half from Danny's studio. Joshua was dressed in his usual jeans and white t-shirt, with leather work shoes, while Danny was in his work uniform of cargo shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt, this one white with yellow tropical flowers. His camera and the small amount of gear that he needed with it were in a waxed-canvas shoulder bag.

"So what's the story, Dan?" Josh was munching his way through a plateful of vegetarian tacos -- avocado, some sort of plant-based crumbles, lettuce, tomato, lots of cheese. Asking questions between bites.

"I don't think there is a story," Danny told him. He was eating ground beef tostadas, although at a much more leisurely pace. "Something weird happened yesterday while I was shooting out there, and I'd like to have a second pair of eyes this time."

"Something weird? Tell me more."

Danny thought about it for a moment, and then decided that honesty was the best policy. He told him about the carny and the pictures he shot, and then about the pictures he discovered.

Joshua was startled enough to stop eating for a moment. "No shit. That's both creepy and extremely hot, simultaneously, and I'm not a person who usually mixes those two things." He chomped down half a taco, thinking. "That's why you want me to tag along, right? Because you're afraid it might happen again?" He grinned. "Or because you're hoping it will?"

"Don't know," Danny replied honestly. "Are you still okay with hanging out with me today?"

Joshua's wide, handsome face lit up with mischief.

"Wild horses, my friend. I'm all over this."

For an hour, Danny and Joshua idled through the midway, Danny snapping photos here and there, just watching their fellow citizens unwinding for an afternoon.

"Have you noticed the barkers?" Joshua asked as they approached the entrance to the Tunnel of Love, which purported to "lay bare the secrets of the human heart." "They're all really consistent."

"What do you mean?"

"They're perfect," Josh explained. "Their clothes, their grooming, their accents. Nothing is out of character. No FitBits or iPhones peeking out, no synthetic fabrics in their clothes. Even the slang they use is from the days when our grandparents were sneaking into places like this."

They paused to look at the man working the podium in front of the Tunnel of Love and Danny saw what Josh was talking about. These were outstanding actors.

"Step up, gentlemen!" the barker called out, spotting Joshua and Danny. "The Tunnel of Love leads through a landscape of the heart, where your dreams are laid bare."

Joshua grinned and took Danny by the elbow. "C'mon, man. We have to do this."

"What?"

"It'll be fun! I've seen your bare everything else, why not your heart?"

"Two please," Danny told the barker, looking at Joshua as though he wasn't quite sure who he was.

The Tunnel of Love featured a small car running on tracks that disappeared into the dark maw of the tent. There was room for six people in the car. Danny and Joshua climbed aboard and settled into the hard wooden seats at the back of the car.

"I can't believe you talked me into this," Danny muttered.

"Hey, it's on tracks, so the ride'll be smooth. You ought to be able to get some interesting shots." Joshua put his hand on Danny's knee and slid it up to his thigh, rucking up the leg of his shorts.

"Down boy. We're on duty."

In front of them were a man and a woman bearing the indefinable stamp of one of the fundamentalist churches across the tracks. The woman was wearing a shapeless dress in a particularly unbecoming shade of powder-blue, with long, tired-looking hair bound up in a loose bun. Her face would have been quite pretty except for an expression that somehow combined bovine complacency with an aggressive superiority. She wore no makeup. Her partner was a stocky, hard-looking dark man, his face humorless, even angry, his mouth mean.

Another couple climbed into the front two seats, a tall, thin man of about sixty and a woman maybe ten years younger. These two were a study in contrasts: The man was easily six-three, but lean as a whippet, the muscles on his forearms stretching like wires from wrist to elbow, and his droll, mobile face as fleshless as a mummy's. The woman with him was only about five-two, all pneumatic curves and pillows, her dark hair cut in a bob that came to points at her jawline, focusing attention on her lush lips and ready smile.

Danny didn't know any of the fellow passengers, but as they sat waiting for the car to move, he gave them all names: The dour man would be Elmer and his prissy bride was Sharon. The tall, thin man was Nick and his effervescent partner was Nora.

Something buzzed in the depths of the tent, and the car gave a lurch, then eased into glacial motion.

The car crept through a curtain of hanging canvas strips, eliciting giggles from Nora, then entered a pitch-dark throat. The track seemed to wind through a long curve and Danny guessed that they were traveling around the edge of the tent. After a minute or so a pink glow became evident and a billowing cloud the color of flesh came into view, long gauzy panels of fabric being blown by a breeze from inside.

There was an odor carried on that breeze that made the hairs on Danny's arms and legs rise. It was sweet, like honey, but also salty. There was a metallic tang, like the smell of fresh blood, and a smell of animals, and a sweaty smell, musky but human.

Danny began to get an erection.

The car continued around another few degrees of curve to pass through another of the gauzy clouds, this one in shades of pink and red.

The peculiar scent was growing stronger, and Danny felt Joshua stirring uncomfortably in his seat. The angry man half rose, shook his trousers down, then sat back down.

Another cloud appeared, this one in cream and pink. Joshua chuckled and Danny glanced over to see him trying to shift his erection into a more comfortable position inside his jeans. The curvy woman in the front seat was fanning herself and laughing, murmuring to her partner.

The train crept forward, pressing into the translucent cloud, and the smell grew more insistent. Danny could taste semen in the air, and blood, and the musk behind a man's testicles on a hot day, and sweat, and saliva, the taste of his own spit on a man's cock, of his own spunk conveyed from tongue to tongue in a post-blowjob kiss.

The train slowed as they entered a dim space, lit with an indirect pink-gold light. The bedraggled grass of the fairground had been covered with hay and sawdust. A heart-shaped platform, waist high, stood in an empty space about fifteen feet across. The platform was covered in pink canvas, and scattered with cushions of various sizes. Great swags of translucent fabric swept overhead, rippling in the breeze from an unseen fan. The colors were the pink of the inside of a woman's vulva, the blue of the veins running along a man's thigh, the red of an engorged penis.

Danny suddenly found that he could not breathe, that his clothes were strangling him, and he struggled out of his shorts and shirt as the train eased to a standstill.

By the time the train had completely stopped, Elmer the angry man was naked and clutching at Nora, trying to drag her from the seat in front of him. Nick vaulted out of the car, shedding clothes as he moved, his enormous penis bouncing. Sharon had stripped off her sack of a dress to reveal a white body, surprisingly athletic, with small, high breasts and wide hips. She climbed out of the car and tugged at Joshua, tearing at his clothes, pulling him out onto the sawdust.

Danny was blind with lust. The platform was dripping with some sort of clear oil, and by the time Danny had pulled the thin man up onto the slimy surface and offered himself to him, both men were slippery and gleaming.

Danny groaned as the skinny man fed that big dick up his ass, ramming him so that he rocked forward on his elbows. To his left Sharon was on her hands and knees as Joshua sodomized her vigorously, while voluptuous Nora writhed in front of her, legs wide, Sharon's face buried in her crotch. Hard hands took hold of Danny's face and angry Elmer jammed a stubby, fat dick into his mouth.

There was still some part of Danny's consciousness that was observing events with astonishment, but that was a tiny, dark corner, the only bit that hadn't been completely taken over by the utterly overwhelming lust. He squirmed, impaled on the skinny man's big dick, and he moaned around the angry man's stubby one.

In what seemed to Danny like all too short a time, the skinny man ejaculated, all in a crash, without warning. He pulled away, his dick glossy and dribbling, and scrambled over to where Joshua was grunting and thrusting into the pale woman beneath him. He shoved Joshua, flipping him away from the woman and onto his back then he pushed Joshua's legs up until his knees were almost to his ears and drove his dick into the young farmer's pink hole. The angry man scuttled around behind Danny and rammed his spit-slick cock into Danny's willing flesh, pounding that fat fireplug dick into him wildly, growling like an animal.

One by one, each of them climaxed, changed partners, climaxed again. Danny fucked Joshua and the angry man, who bucked and squirmed and, when Danny was done, demanded the same treatment from Joshua and the skinny man, then Joshua fucked Danny while he tongued one of the women to orgasm again and again.

At some point, Danny found himself lying atop the skinny man, lazily sliding his greasy dick in and out of that bony backside while Joshua squatted astraddle the man's shoulders, presenting his dick for Danny to suck. There were tastes of everyone in the group on Joshua's slowly softening flesh, and the complicated smell and musk and salt of Joshua's skin filled Danny's consciousness just as Joshua's penis filled his mouth.

Gradually something changed in the air, a new scent intruded into the fog of musk, a smell of pine sawdust and burning paper, and Danny's body reacted to the frantic activity of the last -- Minutes? Hours? Days? -- with a slowly increasing lassitude. He ejaculated into the skinny man almost as an afterthought then settled, still embedded, onto the hard, sweaty back.

As one, the four men and two women slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep.

A buzzer sounded, and the car gave a lurch and continued on its way. Danny looked over at Joshua who looked back at him perplexed.

"Roll through some curtains, smell some funny smells, look at a bed, then roll on," Joshua complained. "Not much to it."

"Wait. You don't...Did we not just...?" Danny stammered, trying to organize his thoughts. He was clean and dry, fully dressed. His memories of the insanity on the heart-shaped platform were muddled and vague, as if they had happened at some point long in the past.

Joshua laid his hand on Danny's thigh, stroked up to his crotch, then took his hand away with a chuckle.

"Something about that smell," he commented, "it had me thinking all sorts of what our old preacher used to call 'impure thoughts'. Speaking of which, Mom wanted me to invite you out to the farm for dinner. It'll just be you and me and Joe and Toni and Mom. I'll take you out for a tour of the hayloft afterwards. You can help me come to grips with my impure thoughts. Some of those thoughts are very, very impure, and may take some serious wrestling to get them out of my system."

Danny grinned, giving his head a tiny shake."Wait. Did we not just...? Oh, hell, I'm just stoned on whatever that is they were piping into that place. I'd love to come out and see your hay. Do you have bales or rolls?"

"Bales, of course. You can't screw on top of a roll. You back gets all bent out of whack."

The car passed through another series of gauze barriers, accompanied by snatches of music, lavish string orchestrations of "I only have eyes for you" and "Fly me to the moon". By the time the car emerged from the tunnel into the hazy afternoon light, Danny recalled what had happened -- or what he had imagined happened -- from a distance, as though it were something he had read, or a scene from a video he had seen long before.

As they all climbed out of the little vehicle, the angry man looked for a moment at each of the other men with an expression of baffled outrage and then the three couples scattered to resume their ordinary lives.