The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

First Night at the Fairground

Carnival lights. Bright and swirling. Carnival sounds, spreading out and growing more distinct through the summer sky. The night had brought little relief from the heat of day, and scarcely a single leaf rustled in the stillness. The carnival however was all activity and buzz as Mike and I approached the county fairground. Mike drove us in his pick-up truck. He pulled into an empty space by the grassy verge and turned the key in the ignition. The deep rumble of the truck’s engine ceased. Mike pulled the parking break with a creak. I noticed how the carnival lights passed over his forearms.

The sound of us shutting the truck’s doors punctuated the sound of laughter from a group of guys with their girlfriends somewhere ahead of us heading to the fairground entrance. Mike and I started toward the entrance too.

“Craig’s on his way,” I said to Mike. “He’s too cool for the Beast,” an observation that drew a grin from Mike. “The Beast” was the nickname the guys on the football team had given Mike’s pick-up. He’d bought the thing last summer before football pre-season practices had begun, and the association quickly formed between the rugged-faced linebacker with blondish-red shaggy hair and the beat-up, faded red truck. Practically as if on cue, we heard the sound of Craig’s motor bike approach, as he did a short skid, stopping in front of us.

“Yo. Go park that thing and meet us at the entrance,” Mike told Craig.

Raising the visor on his helmet to show a broad smile, Craig affirmed, “Aye aye, Sir,” and dismounted and walked away with the bike. Mike and I sauntered to the entrance to the fairground, where people were still arriving as others were leaving. We stood out of the way to wait for Craig.

Summer after senior year. Hot. Languid. And now, in late July, the awareness grew of imminent departures. What precisely the future held in store was less important to three eighteen-year-old guys than the open, expectant promise of the future itself. My best buddies, Mike and Craig, had been tight with me all through high school. The pattern each year repeated. We were practically bonded at the hip late in summer for football practice and through November till the last game of the season. We’d see less of one another after football season, because Mike played basketball in the winter, Craig didn’t do a winter sport, and, me, I was a wrestler. We didn’t see as much of one another in the spring, either, because Mike played baseball, Craig had an evening part-time job, and I focused on the weight room to get stronger for the season ahead. Now it was summer again. And we three were tight again, like every summer, except that, this summer, we knew departures approached.

Mike had signed up for Navy enlistment and was due to leave town in a few weeks. Craig got a place in a trade school, where classes would start the week after Mike left town. And I had a scholarship—wrestling—at a college on the other side of the state. I would be leaving town just after Mike and Craig. Craig was now walking toward us where we stood at the entrance to the fairground. “Bout time, man!” Mike said toward Craig. Craig now stood with us. “That’s okay, Craig. We know you like straddling that thing.” Craig made a face at Mike and presented a middle finger to him.

“Yep. Missing it already,” Craig said with deadpan humor, going along with Mike’s jest. It wasn’t the first time Mike had suggested that Craig likes humping his motorcycle seat. It was a running joke. “Nah,” Craig continued. “It’s just that I don’t wanna break the mood with you and Skeeter. I know it’s tough on you guys when you don’t get your alone time, especially on a romantic night like this.”

It was a game with us guys always to look for an open door for another jest or innuendo. Judging Craig had opened the door, I took the opportunity and chimed in. “Definitely. And Craig knows all about ‘alone time’ when it comes to his sex life. And no: a motor bike doesn’t count as a girlfriend…”

“Even though we don’t doubt your loyalty to her,” Mike completed my sentence.

“Fuck you, Skeet. Fuck you, Mike,” Craig replied. Turning from us now to face the fairground entrance, Craig resumed with restored good nature and fresh energy: “So what are we standing here for? Let’s go!” The ritual of guy-on-guy put-downs had run its course, and the three of us proceeded, side by side, through the entrance and into the fairground.

Summer Days and Carnival Rides

The summer had been a dreamy, long vacation between finishing one thing and starting something new. Sure, there was the occasional nervous expectation. What would college be like? I figured it would be a lot tougher than high school. Tougher classes. Tougher wrestling practices. Was I really good enough for the wrestling team at State U.? And what about, like, you know, girls and stuff? I hadn’t had a girlfriend in high school. Cuz, like, it’s real busy, and, I dunno. I’m kinda shy, actually. Would I fit in the right way at college and find somebody to, you know, do it with? These thoughts, though, were not too heavy, and they came and went, like summer clouds caught on a breeze and swept away.

Mostly, that summer it really was just open blue sky. Swimming at the lake at the state park. Grabbing a burrito at the burrito bar downtown. Hanging out with other guys from the football team and drinking together after somebody scored some cold beers.

On really hot days, or on the odd day when it rained, we’d play video games at Craig’s place with Mike in the cool of the basement and mindful of our language if Craig’s mom happened to come down on the way to the laundry room. Did it ever occur to us, that our sudden shift into politeness and away from sex talk was pretty obvious to anybody coming into our space? You don’t need to have heard precisely what three teenage boys were saying, or what they were doing, when their raucous voices and animated bodies suddenly turn to prim and quiet and stillness: you can be pretty sure that, whatever they were up to, it wasn’t fit for a family dinner table.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hello, Mrs. Sanders.”

“Can we help you with that?”

Just us boys here, Ma’am. Skeeter, Mike, and your son, Craig. Looking at trade school course brochures and next fall’s college stuff. At your service, Mrs. Sanders.

Yeah, sure! Good thing those times we were scoping out porn on the widescreen monitor down there nobody dropped in on us. Guess we were lucky that way.

Not that we ever did anything bad. Or anything sexy. And not that doing something sexy would have been bad. Actually, I’d found myself thinking that it would have been pretty good if the three of us had some sort of fun that way. I didn’t exactly know how that would happen. Or what exactly fun like that would be. It’s just that the handful of times we ended up watching porn on that big monitor, it was, like, kinda natural to think about doing something. You know: just something. Cuz, after all, a guy gets that feeling, and, yeah: he’s gotta do something about it. Even if not right there on the spot with his buddies. He’s gotta do something about it, at some point or other, though. I would get kinda turned on thinking about that, and even more so, after I was back home alone. The porn those times definitely gave me stuff to think about!

At the fairground, by contrast, we could just hang loose. It was just us three guys, last year’s starting varsity football stars, scoping out the attractions at the carnival that had come to town for those two hot summer weeks.

It was the first night of the carnival, and so it was pretty crowded. We’d gotten there late, because Mike had had a late afternoon shift at his summer job. He wanted to clock in as many hours as he could to save up money before starting his Navy enlistment. So it was getting past 10.30 pm, and we noticed the crowd starting to thin in our first 15 minutes or so at the fairground.

We did the roller coaster when the line there was almost gone. We did that thing where you slam a hammer on a pad to try to get a little shuttle to rise up and hit a bell on the top of a slide, and it never quite gets there. We saw this guy with a snake collection. We each got a hotdog, mine with extra onions, Mike’s with all this cheese, and Craig’s slobbered with chili. It was just before midnight now. The fairground wasn’t totally quiet, but less than half the crowd remained and they were mostly drifting toward the exit. Carnival workers were closing up their displays, and some of the clean-up crew were loitering around at the ready to start sweeping up the place once everyone had cleared out.

We kept strolling around, too cool to be leaving just because people were leaving, but also not sure what there was left to do. When, unexpectedly, there was a voice. It was a man’s voice, deep and aimed right at us.

“If I’m not mistaken, I see three men looking for their future.”

A Strange Invitation

Craig was the first of us to turn toward the voice. Mike and I paused and turned as well. The man whom we’d all turned to face stood some ten or twelve paces from us. He wore a dark suit, out of place for the heat of late July, yet he appeared cool and at ease. It was hard not to look closer too. He didn’t have a drop of sweat on his face. Having drawn our gaze, the man continued: “Good evening, gentlemen. I am Master Mezmer, and this behind me is my humble establishment.”

We looked dubiously at one another, at the weird guy in the dark suit, and, behind him, at a large tent with a sign in front of it. The sign read in large print over a stylized likeness of the man: “MASTER MEZMER’S WORLD OF WONDERS.”

Below the likeness, smaller print said, “Enter and behold the wonders of your future self!”

“So,” asked Craig in a tone halfway between sarcasm and curiosity, “what’s the ‘World of Wonders’?”

“Young man,” said the guy in the suit, whom we figured must be Master Mezmer, “it’s a place as wide as your imagination and as small as the space through that opening.” He gestured, a touch theatrically, to the entrance to the tent. A curtain hung right inside the entrance and blocked the view to the deeper reaches of the tent. Craig was looking now at the entrance, his lips slightly parted.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike asked. Mike was the quickest of us to push back when he sensed bullshit. He wasn’t aggressive about it, but he made clear he thought the man’s answer about the ‘World of Wonders’ didn’t tell us anything useful.

“And what do we have to pay to go in and see?” I asked.

“You are curious, yes?” the man said to me. He’d taken a few steps closer and now looked me directly in the eye.

“Umm, I dunno. Maybe,” I replied, a bit surprised and even dazed for some reason by his stare. Breaking his gaze from me, the man turned to Mike.

“You ask what wonders await you. What awaits is what is behind the curtain and that’s what you do not know and why you wonder what your mind wonders it awaits.” The man spoke fast and rhythmically. He seemed to hold Mike’s attention as he said the words, and, finishing, made another somewhat theatrical gesture and snapped his fingers. Mike blinked. The three of us were quiet now.

“I sense three men whose agreement is starting to agree with the invitation to come and see all that lies within.”

“Yeah. I think I’m up for it,” I said.

“Okay. If Skeeter’s down, so am I,” said Craig.

As if shaking off a daze, Mike hesitated, but then agreed. “Okay.” The man looked pleased but unsurprised. “The fairground may be closing, gentlemen,” the man in black resumed, “but the night is young.” With a gesture to the entrance to the tent, he bid us: “Enter.”

Into the World of Wonders

Passing through the entrance to Master Mezmer’s tent, we then passed through the curtain just behind it. The fabric of the curtain brushed my left shoulder, which was exposed in the tank top I wore. Craig and Mike were right behind me. The moment we entered the tent, the air seemed much cooler, and there was a faint scent. The scent was of something spicey or even pungent but too faint to place a name on. It wasn’t unpleasant. The tent was thickly carpeted inside. Plush cushions lay in a row in front of a sort of stage. The man spoke.

“Gentlemen, please.” He meant for us to sit on the cushions. After walking around for most of the last hour and a half or so, that sounded fine. But my mind shifted a bit to the question I’d asked outside the tent. So before sitting I asked:

“Um, Sir. You didn’t say what the ticket price is.”

The man paused as if interrupted by a thought of his own, and approached me. Putting his left hand on my right shoulder, he looked me in the eye again. “You and your friends are top-flight men. I have some new ideas for my show, and you will do me a service by watching and giving your full attention.”

Oddly enough, his answer seemed perfectly to satisfy my concern. Nothing about it didn’t make sense.

“Now be seated.”

When he said those last words—“Now be seated”—he said them in a slightly different tone. A shade of command was in it. The tone caught me a little by surprise. I sat.

The cushion beneath me was deep and comfortable. Craig was now seated to my right, Mike to Craig’s right. It almost had the feeling like we were in Craig’s basement hanging out to watch something on the big monitor, maybe, even, like those occasions when we scoped out some porn. Except there was no sense of concern that somebody might walk in on us. It felt like it was okay to relax.

The man stepped onto the stage. The lights changed. And then the show began.

With a flourish, as if from behind his back, the man produced a tall cylinder, a tube of frosted glass. The thing was maybe a foot from top to bottom. It glowed from inside and had vapor pouring from its mouth at the top down its sides. It was like dry ice or something in there. I tried to figure out where he’d had the thing hidden, and how he snatched it so fast from wherever it had been hidden. I couldn’t see anything behind the man like a table or a cabinet on which the strange, glowing tube might have been resting.

“So is he, like, a magician?” Craig whispered to me. The man heard the query and looked at Craig.

“It will be for you to say whether what you are about to see is ‘magic’—or something else. For now, however, I simply bring cool refreshment”

“That… The stuff inside it… It’s for us to drink?” I asked, looking at the white cylinder in the black-clad man’s hand. Master Mezmer answered: “It is indeed for you. But you will not drink it. Not with your lips at any rate. You will drink it… with your mind… Just look at the cylinder. Look at the flow from within, as the fog climbs down its sides. Down deeper, rolling down the sides.”

Curious now at this weird thing the guy was holding, I did just as he said. I looked at it. I think Craig and Mike were doing the same. Like I might have mentioned, the moment we’d entered the tent, the air felt cooler and a bit different from outside. As I fixed my eyes onto the glowing, foggy cylinder, the air around me felt cooler still. It was now very comfortable, a relief after the hot day and still-hot night.

“The cool refreshes and fills your mind. The cool enmeshes and soon you’ll find… an easier rest in this special place.”

I found myself staring now at the thing. It really felt cooler by the second.

“Embrace the heavy feeling as the slumber gains… Soon the cold is stealing to open, ready brains.”

These weird rhyme sentences almost made me laugh, and I looked drowsily to my right to see Craig’s reaction and Mike’s. They just sat staring. I looked back. The man now had stepped down from the stage. He was right in front of me again. And that cylinder too. He was holding it up over me, toward me. Like he was offering it to me. Or me to it. He tilted the cylinder in my direction. What the fuck? was the thought my thoughts were trying to form but couldn’t. I just followed the motion with my eyes, as the man tipped the cylinder. Its glowing fog-like contents poured over its mouth. They made a slow, swirly stream. Down from the mouth, right down toward my head. Lower and lower. Closer and closer. Slow and yet unstoppable. The instant it looked like that glowing fog would touch my forehead, I felt my eyes role up into their sockets, and all was blackness.