The Erotic Carnival

Welcome, reader, to the Erotic Carnival!

What you are about to embark upon is an erotic epic... and while it's not written in dactylic hexameter like the tales of Homer or Virgil, it will ultimately meet most of the other standard criteria to qualify as an epic of its own sort. There will be surprising and enticing journeys in the present, past, and future. There will be heroes, heroines, monsters, magic, mayhem, love, loss, laughter, and a looooooooot of sex.

If you are embarking on this journey with us as it is published chapter by chapter, thank you for both your excitement and your patience. If you are discovering this later and coming back here to the opening chapter, thank you and enjoy! Hopefully there will be quite a bit to binge by then!

This narrative is the result of a significant amount of collaboration, planning, research, prewriting, and revision. It has been a delight to construct. We have come to love the characters who will unfold for you in the subsequent story, and we hope to do them justice in exploring their adventures and achievements with you. To be fair, they seem to have found us as much as we found them, and it is only right that we share them.

The Erotic Carnival is slated to be a multi-book narrative, with at least ten chapters per book. It is a single continuous saga. Each book continues the story concluded by its predecessor. In constructing this experience, we have tried diligently to flesh out characters who, even in fantastical circumstances, feel realistic and relatable. The character arcs are not haphazard, and the end of the story has been planned from the beginning. As of the publication of this first chapter, work has begun on content for at least nine books, and that number will probably expand as the latter half of the overall narrative is fleshed out.

This is a labor of love and we hope that, in sharing it with you, your own experiences and paradigms will be infused with a bit more light and love. We could all use the gifts of community, acceptance, and understanding that our characters will discover in the chapters that follow.

Without further ado, then, please step through the page into...

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THE EROTIC CARNIVAL - BOOK 01, CHAPTER 01: "AIDEN AND ZOE"

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Aiden Fletcher was an orphan. Everyone told him so: the state, the local municipal government of the city of Arrowhead, and the foster care system that he was aging out of now that he had turned eighteen.

Even the foster family that he had most recently left had made it painfully clear that he didn't belong; not there, not anywhere. It was just as well. He didn't want to be there either. Or anywhere, really.

Aiden wasn't a small kid: a few inches over six feet, and with a lean muscular frame that he owed both to a lack of regular meals and to the high school swim team that he'd joined in order to stay on campus as long as he could each day. It was far better to be in the pool at six in the morning, and to not get out until six at night, than to go back to his most recent disastrous foster experience.

His foster mother had been kind enough. Overly meek, downtrodden, trapped in a life she'd never really wanted, but unwilling to make the hard decisions to get to anything better, a generation earlier she might never have changed out of a cheap nightgown and curlers. A bevy of kids of her own, she took on foster children to make ends meet. Her husband wanted the money. He didn't want the extra mouths. He especially didn't want any challenges to his authority... or to the abuse he meted out with it.

Aiden had, almost inexplicably, stood up to his abusive foster father one night not long ago. The old man had been drunk on rage and cheap beer, as usual. Something about dinner, or the untidiness of the small house, or the lack of sex from his cowed wife had grated on his last nerve that evening. Letting his wrath fly at the frazzled woman slaving over an old stove, he'd struck her with an open right hand.

It hadn't been the first time the man had hit his wife, but Aiden's sense of delayed justice, or some innate desire to protect, had propelled him from his seat in defense of his foster mother. He'd thrown himself between the cowering woman and the monstrous man preparing to throw a second hand at her head.

That probably hadn't been Aiden's best idea. The man was unaccustomed to being challenged, but he certainly wasn't going to back down from some kid just shy of being legal. Perhaps if Aiden had come out swinging, things would have gone differently. As it was, Aiden had merely managed to piss the old man off.

The nearest thing at hand had been the hot pan on the old stove. Aiden's foster father had grabbed its handle and swung it with a snarl, backhanded, across Aiden's jaw.

Aiden remembered hitting the floor. He remembered the screaming of his foster mother and the younger children in the house. He remembered the man refusing any attempts to take Aiden to a hospital or to bring him medical attention beyond ice from the freezer. Somehow Aiden's jawbone hadn't broken, but he did now have a long scar along the right line of his chin. The pan had been black hot when it struck him there.

Aiden didn't go to school the next day, or the days after. Oh, he left the house. He had no intention of staying there any longer than he had to, but instead of having to answer for his new facial markings to peers who would gawk or to teachers who wouldn't be able to really help him, he'd wandered around town, his favorite hoodie pulled over his sandy brown hair and low over his face.

He'd taken the city bus as far as it would go to the central terminus. He'd walked the river trail that meandered through the long waterside park downtown. He'd hidden in certain corners of the public library, pretending to be earnestly studying large-type books on sea creatures or viking raids. He'd nursed cheap cups of coffee at the Fair Oaks Cafe on Green Street, or at The Lion's Den, a hole-in-the-wall diner on Broadway that attracted a rough crowd after dark. At least no one bothered him there when he was ditching school and trying not to go home.

Eventually some school administrator wised up to his truancy, and that had led to an unpleasant meeting with assistant principals and social workers where it was decided, on his behalf, that the most important thing was to get Aiden his diploma and graduate him out of the foster care system. He spent most of the meeting hiding his jaw under his hand, pretending to be more bored than upset with the whole process. He'd be eighteen in just a few days and, with high school ending, he wouldn't be their problem much longer.

And so it was that in late June, Aiden packed what little he personally owned into a backpack and, taking leave of the foster family that was glad to see the back of him for disturbing their dysfunctional peace, walked the few blocks to the bus route on Broadway with an address in hand for a halfway house on the other side of the city: a place he could crash with a few of the other undesirables of the municipality until he could be comfortably forgotten into regrettable statistics and local law enforcement's semi-perpetual purview.

The new eighteen-year old celebrated his being kicked to the curb of the world by wearing into exile his favorite charcoal-gray hoodie, a worn but comfortable t-shirt, a pair of jeans a bit too large for him, and red sneakers he'd been gifted by a Christmas charity six months before.

The number sixty-nine bus rolled up after dark, about fifteen minutes later than the schedule posted to the bus bench dictated. It wheezed to a stop in front of Aiden. Both its front and back doors opened simultaneously like a pair of creaky jaws. Someone got off the back as Aiden stepped on, hefting his backpack and presenting his bus pass to the driver: a middle-aged black woman in a gray-and-navy uniform who sized Aiden up with a glance and, seeing him slouch-shouldered and passive, scanned his pass and let him board.

The bus wasn't busy. Behind the driver sat an old lady with a shawl, flanked by two grocery bags. Across from her, a man in a mechanic's coverall nodded off, leaning against the window. Two seats back of him, a harried-looking mother tried to keep her kid seated. There was a portly man with a battered briefcase, an older gentleman with vacant eyes under a shaved head, and two women wearing mandil aprons chatting in Spanish. In the row behind the backdoor, someone slight of frame drowned in an oversized hooded sweatshirt, elbows on knees, face turned down to the bus floor.

Aiden took a seat across from the rear door of the bus, slid next to the window, and set his backpack down next to him. The tired vehicle slowly picked up speed and lumbered down the boulevard.

The now eighteen-year-old boy watched absentmindedly out the window. Indifferent lights and intermittent darkness slowly rolled by as on a blurry reel that he could barely be bothered to pay attention to. Streets, lights, benches, businesses. Whatever. It was all the same to him.

He was going from nowhere to nowhere, and the places in between barely registered. His green eyes saw, but barely read, large neon signs in the dark marking a wholesale grocer, or an oil change and lube garage, or a late-night taco stand "Taqueria Papantla" with a long line of people waiting to sample authentic antojitos.

The bus passed a large white chapel marked "Church Of The Waking Crusade" next to a gaudy gentlemen's club called "The Quivering Clam," decked out in pink neon and sporting the image of a naked blonde in a clam shell covering her bits with her hands. He vaguely wondered whether the strip club had decided to troll the church by locating here, or if the church was trying to save the nudie bar's patrons from vice. Aiden vaguely thought the naked clam lady image was both gaudy and somehow familiar. Probably something he was supposed to have paid attention to in school, but repurposed for a strip joint. The world was weird.

Not that it mattered. He'd been pushed through education without gleaning much from it. Aiden was never going to afford college, even if he had any inclination of what to do with his life, which he didn't. The local university, he knew, was up half a mile to the left from this section of Broadway, if he'd cared to disembark and walk uphill from the riverside boulevards and their rougher neighborhoods. He'd never felt inclined, but he knew that some of the cafes and bars in that direction catered to the college crowd. Even here on Broadway a few of the businesses were university-oriented, like the Second Bennett Bookstore the bus was passing: warm leather furniture and rows of bookcases just inside a tall glass storefront. As the bus slowed at the intersection there, Aiden caught a glimpse of the distant and educated people inside: a man hunched over a bookcase, a couple sitting on a couch by the window, the shape of a beautiful black-haired girl shelving hardbacks. He rubbernecked a bit to catch a better glimpse of her, but the bus had trudged on, and he gave up. Not that it mattered.

The bus plodded up the wide avenue, past people who had purpose, people who had people. Aiden, though, was alone in the world, loose and unmoored. He had nothing going for him and, other than the unfamiliar cross-town address in his hand, nowhere to go. No one knew him. No one cared. No one would ever care.

"Aiden," something whispered.

The boy stirred slightly, took his eyes off the window. No one around him seemed to have moved. The two apron-clad women kept speaking in Spanish. The skinny thing in the hoodie behind and to his right still had its face hidden, staring at the floor. Looking toward the front of the bus, Aiden made eye contact with the driver in the large circular rear-view mirror. He tried his best to seem unimportant and nonthreatening. She looked at him for a long second, and then turned back to watching the road.

That was weird. What had said his name? The bus creaked in strange ways, perhaps.

He settled back to staring out the window. The bus was passing the Lion's Den diner he'd hidden from school at a few times. It looked different in the dark. He could see through its few windows as the bus passed. Low light. Two people, a big black guy and a dark-haired woman, were sitting in one of the front booths. Aiden rolled his eyes. They weren't in uniform, but they looked like cops.

"Aiden," his name was whispered again. Louder this time. A girl's voice.

He looked around. The driver was staring intently in the rear-view mirror now, as the bus slowed for the next stop. But her eyes weren't quite on him. Not this time. Rather they were fixed behind him and to his right. He turned his head to look. Behind the rear door of the bus, the petite figure had sat up and pulled the hood off its face.

It was a girl. And she was staring at him.

Not just some girl, though. She was almost otherworldly. She had bright blue hair in a cute pixie cut that reminded him for some reason of the petals of a cool thistle or ice-rose about to open. Her skin seemed ethereally soft and pale. Almost shimmery. Like she sparkled somehow. She had a small mouth with blue lips. Aiden squinted. He didn't think it was lipstick. The girl's lips just seemed inherently blue.

But the stranger's most shocking feature was her eyes. They were blue. Not the kind of blue one sees in human eyes. Royal blue. A blue like they'd been dyed. And it wasn't just the irises that were blue. What should have been the whites of her eyes were also blue, but a slightly lighter shade, giving some distinction between the irises and the rest of the eyeball, but nothing like Aiden had ever seen on another human being.

She glanced toward the front of the bus and then back at him. "Aiden Fletcher?" She seemed agitated. Nervous. Scared.

He turned his whole torso to face her, looking at her over his backpack and the back of the seat. He felt confused. He was certain he had never seen this girl in his entire life. He would have remembered. Those eyes would have haunted him.

"Do I know you?"

"No," her eyes darted again to the front of the bus. "But I need your help." Her accent was strange, Aiden thought. British? Irish?

The bus came to a stop. The front and back doors both opened. No one was disembarking, but someone was getting on. That seemed so much less important to Aiden than the fact that this stranger with the inhuman blue eyes knew him somehow.

He stammered. "Are you in trouble?"

"Yes. It's bad."

"How do you know...."

But those blue-on-blue eyes suddenly darted to her feet again and her sweater's hood was thrown over her blue hair. At first, Aiden wondered if he'd offended her somehow, but she didn't seem to be avoiding him so much as....

The bus pulled away from the curb and slowly picked up speed heading up Broadway. Aiden could see out the closed rear doors, someone sleeping on the bus bench. Sleeping? The pose seemed a little wrong for that, but the bus was soon too far away for him to ascertain. Something felt off. Aiden turned his eyes back toward the front of the bus. The hairs on his neck immediately stood up.

A man swayed in the aisle just shy of the driver. The standing passenger had obviously just boarded the bus at that most recent stop. Tall. An ankle-length and buttoned army-surplus greatcoat draped a lean frame. Ratty hair hung over a gruff and patch-bearded face, into the collar and over the shoulders. That face was turned toward the floor.

Something was off, Aiden could tell. He got the impression that this most recent bus passenger was more an "it" than a "he." That didn't seem right. Even thinking that didn't seem right.

It took a step down the aisle. Its head turned slightly to the left, and then it took another step. The head turned slightly to the right, and then it took another step. Shuffle, shuffle.

The hanging hair below its face retracted just a little bit each time the head turned. Again, with each step, the man's head tilted and... now Aiden could see. The man was... sniffing. Not as though with a cold. Like it was... smelling for something. Or someone.

The passengers closest to the front of the bus recoiled from the strange man as it slowly made its way past them, seeming to test each person's scent. The passenger with the briefcase clutched it to his chest. The mother held her child protectively and scowled at the sniffing man. The two women conversing in Spanish went silent. Shuffle, shuffle.

But the tall man in the long coat kept slowly walking down the aisle, sniffing, sniffing. Aiden glanced at the man's slowly proceeding feet. It wore no shoes. Its nails were long and black, not with polish, but with dirt. The same seemed true of the man's hands, extending almost without any movement at all, but limp and lanky, from the sleeves of the army coat. The hands were dark and dirty, the nails long.

The odd new bus rider passed the bald man. He passed the women speaking Spanish. There were several seats available if it had wanted to sit down, but the ominous sniffing stranger kept shuffling toward Aiden and the blue-eyed girl who knew Aiden's name. The nervous kid knew the basic rule: don't make eye contact with weirdos in public places. Especially, he thought, really big weirdos in confined spaces like a moving city bus. Just ignore.

But the shuffling stopped just in front of Aiden. Sniff.

Just ignore. Don't make eye contact. The sniffing, though. Aiden could practically feel the menacing man's breath on his skin. Sniff.

He couldn't help himself. It was just too damn awkward. Aiden looked up at the stranger sniffing him.

Closer up, the stranger looked even more menacing than it had from the front of the bus. Its eyes were both a sickly yellow and bloodshot. When it sniffed, its furry lips curled up a bit, revealing disturbingly sharp teeth. The hair that fell from its head or grew from its chin and cheeks was thick and stringy, almost like the matted fur of a long-haired dog. The surplus-coated creature looked feral. It definitely gave off an air of violent unpredictability.

Yet its demeanor in the moment carried an air of some confusion. Sniff. Sniff. Aiden averted his gaze. Sniff. Sniff. Aiden glanced back up. The stranger was still regarding him. Just leave me alone, Aiden tried to silently scream.

Sniff.

With a ferocious suddenness, the tall yellow-eyed stranger wheeled with bared teeth on the blue-eyed girl. Its eyes blazed. With impossible quickness it leapt at her with extended hands and curled claws. With alacrity just as impossible, she was up out of her seat and pressed into the rear doors of the moving bus. The feral stranger smashed into the seat where she'd been sitting, face down, just a second before.

"What the fuck?" shouted Aiden. The bus erupted in screams from the other passengers.

The next few moments all happened in rapid succession, and yet for Aiden they seemed to almost move in slow-motion. The blue-eyed girl in the oversized clothes shoved the rear doors of the moving bus open. She couldn't possibly be thinking of....

She turned to look at Aiden before jumping. For half a second, she considered him with a plaintive look, as though those blue-on-blue eyes could communicate "I need your help!" without words. In that same half second, the feral stranger whirled on dirty hands and feet on the seat that it'd smashed into, like an animal on four legs, and snarled viciously at the girl. Its muscles tensed. It made ready to pounce on her in the doorway.

Aiden could never after really explain why - perhaps he hadn't learned his lesson from the violent encounter with his foster father and the hot pan, perhaps he was angry about that encounter and needed to do something to fight back against it retroactively, perhaps he was half-smitten by the blue-on-blue request of assistance in a moment of supreme need, perhaps he was just an idiot who didn't think things through - but Aiden snatched up his backpack from the seat next to him and swung it as hard as he could into the face of the snarling shoeless man.