The Barrymore Gryme Contest

Disclaimer: the following story is a purely fictional account. Any relationship to any real person living or dead is coincidental. The narrative contains non-consensual torture and death. It is intended for mature readers who wish to view such material, and for whom it is legal to do so. The author in no way condones or promotes such acts in real life.

Copyright © 2006 by POW. For spam prevention, an animal name has been added to the author’s e-mail address. Remove the animal name to get the actual address: POWauthor zebra at yahoo dot com. This story may be freely copied and distributed so long as it is copied in its entirety, unchanged, including the author credit information and disclaimer. Other POW stories are available at https://powauthor.wordpress.com. The author welcomes feedback.

---

Marty opened the e-mail from HotLethr, one of the cyber-buddies he occasionally exchanged online bondage fantasies with.

“Check out this contest!” it read. “You gotta enter, you’d be awesome, man! Nobody makes up hotter scenes than you. It’s right there in your town. Wish I could be there to hear what you come up with.”

A link followed. Marty checked it out. The web page told of a contest that was to be held in conjunction with the annual North American Leather World convention, in San Francisco three weeks away. The Barrymore Gryme Contest was looking for erotic S&M scenes. In the words of the web site, “we want to hear your deepest, darkest, most sadistic fantasies.” Contestants would present their entries on stage to a panel of judges, who would choose a winner. The top prize was $1,000.

Well, when it came to setting up a scene, Marty was good, and he knew it. He wasn’t much to look at in person – pale, scrawny, and short, with complexion problems that had plagued him since he was a teenager. He was the embodiment of the word “geek”. Among his peers in Palo Alto and the larger Silicon Valley area, no one found his appearance remarkable. But the gay world is obsessed with physical perfection, and in the bars in San Francisco, he was about as welcome as a hemorrhoid. After a few disastrous trips to the Castro district, he quickly learned to stop going where he wasn’t welcome.

It was a shame, because behind the thick glasses was a very impressive mind. Marty was a master at creating S&M scenarios. If he could have been judged solely on his bondage inventiveness, he would have been one of the most sought-after doms in the city. But with his 110-pound physique and his nasal voice, he just didn’t fit the image most subs wanted in a master. Fortunately, the internet provided a welcome outlet for his creativity. On the net, as the old saw goes, no one knows you’re a dog.

The idea of climbing up on stage in all of his unimpressive physical glory was intimidating. The prize money was nothing – a thousand dollars was a mere rounding error to the venture capitalists Marty dealt with. But the idea of finally being recognized in person for something he was truly talented at was a powerful lure.

Marty sent an e-mail to the address given on the web site, asking for information on how to enter.

---

“Who is Barrymore Gryme, anyway?” Marty asked the guy next to him.

“The fuck should I know?” the man snarled in reply before moving away.

There were nine of them in the contest, all milling around backstage, waiting to be called to make their presentations. Eight of them were built like the stud-god that Marty’s online correspondents wanted him to be. Each was a solid wall of muscle. Their arms were larger around than Marty’s thighs. They paraded around bare-chested or in snug sleeveless tops, with tight leather pants that accentuated enormous bulges at the crotch. Muscles bulged and curled like snakes every time they moved.

The whole convention was pretty much like that. The North American Leather World halls were filled with powerful, sexy men, all wearing leather in some form. The testosterone was so thick Marty felt he could scrape it off the walls. Everywhere he went, taller, stronger men elbowed him aside or, worse, made to walk through him as though he didn’t exist. On more than one occasion, he was peremptorily addressed as “boy”. It was a crying shame, he thought, to be a sadist trapped in a masochist’s body.

Naturally, none of the other contestants wanted to talk to Marty. Who would want to associate with a squid like him? Marty took it in stride. It was nothing new, after all. He was confident that when the time came, his presentation would blow their steroid-fogged minds.

Their handler came into the backstage waiting area. “We’re almost ready to go,” he said. “Remember the rules: you have ten minutes to make your presentation. Within that time, describe the deepest, darkest, most sadistic fantasy you can. And since this is fantasy we’re talking about, you can ignore the ‘safe, sane, and consensual’ crap that you hear everywhere else at this convention. The Barrymore Gryme contest is for only the most hard-core sadists, so during your presentations, you can let it all out. No limits. Whoever the judges like best goes home with a thousand bucks. Everyone clear?”

There was a chorus of “hell, yeah”s and “fuckin’ A”s, along with one soft “very.”

The order for their presentations had been chosen by random draw. Marty had pulled the last slot, which pleased him greatly. He was sure that the scene he had spent the last three weeks crafting would blow away everything that came before like dry leaves in a windstorm.

Marty stood like a blade of grass among eight tree trunks as they all waited for their turns.

---

First up was a guy called Bolt. He took the stage and squinted into the bright lights. From his position behind the other seven men, Marty could dimly make out the panel of judges occupying the front row of seats in the auditorium. Behind them sat another dozen or so men, presumably there to watch the show.

“Awright, see, I got this guy tied to a table, right?” Bolt said. “Only the table tilts, an’ he’s up on a angle. I got his arms behind him, under the table, yeah? An’ they’re tied so fuckin’ tight he can’t move an inch, gnome sane? An’ his legs, I got them tied down, too.

“An’ I got his head strapped down, too, hard, real hard. He wants a move his head, an’ he tries, but no fuckin’ way, gnome sane?

“An’, an’ here’s where it gets good, I come at him an’ I stand over his face an’ I got a spoon in my hand. An’ he’s thinkin’ a spoon? The fuck you gonna do with a spoon? Only I bring it down close to his eye, see, an’ he starts a figger out what I’m gonna do with that spoon, an’ he starts shoutin’ an’ screamin’ an’ all. Only he can’t! Fuckin’! Move!” Bolt punched the air with his fist at each word.

It was hard for Marty to follow all of what Bolt was saying. His phrasing was – how to put it? – not exactly the Queen’s English, though it certainly was picturesque. Only after hearing the phrase “gnome sane?” for the third time did Marty figure out it meant “know what I’m saying?”.

Bolt went on to describe how he would torture his victim. The eyes would come out, and he would leave them dangling down on the victim’s cheeks. He made such a point of how this would utterly disorient the victim for all that would follow that Marty began to wonder if he somehow had first-hand knowledge on the topic. The thought of someone indulging one of these fantasies for real churned his stomach a bit, but he reassured himself that it was all just fiction.

By the time Bolt’s ten minutes had expired, his victim had lost several body parts in rather ghastly ways. Eyes, ears, tongue, nipples, cock, and balls had all been removed, with a lot of pain inflicted in the process. Bolt clearly wanted to continue his story, but the judges were very firm that each contestant stick to his allotted time, and the handler gently but firmly escorted him backstage.

Next up was Gunner. He spent nine minutes and fifty seconds describing, in intimate detail, what he would do to his victim’s genitals. His focus on the particulars was impressive. After restraining his victim, he would deliver a dose of a cock-stiffening drug like Viagra, then wrap a cord around the base of the man’s cock and balls to ensure that his dick stayed nice and firm throughout the proceedings.

Then came punctures, and piercings, and burnings with cigarettes. Abrasions and weights, pulls and twists, bites and shocks, floggings and acids and blades. Gunner kept a careful eye on the clock, speaking in such a low voice that the whole crowd had to strain to hear him. By the time his talk was finished, the victim’s balls were dangling free through his open scrotum and his penis had been sliced cleanly in half, lengthwise, right down the center of the shaft, leaving two hemi-penes curling away to either side.

Ten seconds before his time was up, he completely changed his character and began to speak in a loud, clear voice. “Then, when I’m finally bored with him, BLAM! A cop-killer bullet right through his neck. Thank you,” he said, then turned and left the stage.

---

As time went on, it became clear to Marty that he had no real competition here. The tortures the other guys described were intense, yes, and horrifying in their imaginative depravity. But they were all over so quickly. No one could survive more than a few hours of what these guys dreamed up. Worse, it was all just physical pain.

Marty’s scene, on the other hand, would not end after a paltry few hours. No, his victim would last for weeks, if not months, suffering all the while. And the torment would not be merely physical, but mental as well.

One of Marty’s favorite things to do was dream up ways to force a man to torture himself. The variations were endless. One involved needles and fingernails. Marty would explain to the victim that either he could insert a needle under his own fingernail, all the way up to the root, or Marty would insert three of them if he failed to do it himself.

Marty loved to imagine the ways the victim would react. Would he have the willpower to cause his own pain? Or would he crumble, and subject himself to three times the agony? And would he learn from his mistakes, so that the next time around he might find the strength to hurt himself, knowing it would save him from worse torment? Marty relished the delicious possibilities.

He would inflict his tortures slowly, methodically, laboring with loving tenderness over each slice of the blade, each tightening of the rope, each touch of the hot iron. His victim would moan and scream and shriek as Marty played with him, responding to Marty’s touch the way a violin sings for a virtuoso player. And when he could scream no longer, he would make the “unh, unh, unh” sound that men make when they are brought past the point of endurance.

Day after day, week after week, Marty would tease the man with hope, offering him the chance to escape his agony only to bring that hope crashing down time and again. His victim would think “if only I hold still enough, if only I endure long enough, if only I behave exactly right, he’ll stop hurting me, he’ll let me go.” But of course Marty would never let him go, though he would keep his victim hoping for it right up until the very, very end.

It would be hard to pack the whole scene into a ten-minute speech, but Marty had prepared carefully, choosing concise words for maximum effect. The other contestants had no chance, no chance at all.

Marty waited patiently for his moment.

---

Contestant #8, a man named Reckless, had just finished his monologue, in which he had peeled every single square inch of skin off his victim. When it was all gone, he turned him loose to try to escape, delighting in his pitiable attempts to try to carry his weight on the skinless soles of his feet. Reckless had gotten so worked up as he described his scene that he was sweating and panting as he walked offstage. He was greeted with slaps on the back and whistles.

Marty tried to sidle past the crowd to reach the stage for his turn, but his soft “pardon me”s were lost in the clamor and he was jostled and bumped the whole way through the mass of men.

“Fuckin’ awesome, man,” Kohl said, punching Reckless in the arm and incidentally bringing his heel down on Marty’s instep.

“Poetry, fuckin’ poetry,” said Bolt. “You know what that was? That was beauty, gnome sane? Beauty.”

Beauty.

Barrymore Gryme.

In a sudden flash, Marty remembered where he knew the name from. Beauty was a novel by S. Tepper. Marty had read it a few years earlier and enjoyed it very much; its environmentalist themes resonated with his own beliefs. And Barrymore Gryme was a character in that novel. He was a writer of horror fiction, specializing in stories with themes of torture and sex. In the novel, Barry died and was sent to Hell, where he was…

Oh, shit.

The handler was calling Marty’s name, beckoning him up to the stage, but Marty was frozen in place. This changed everything. There was no way he could go up on stage now and give his presentation now.

The handler was coming toward him. He backed away slowly, but bumped into the immovable wall of muscle behind him and could retreat no further. He felt like a trapped animal, blindly seeking an escape that didn’t exist.

The handler was grabbing his arm, forcing him up to center stage. The overhead lights were hot and blindingly bright. Marty stood helplessly, rooted to the spot as though the beams of light were pinning him in place. Through the glare, he could just make out the silhouettes of the panel of judges and the men behind them, all staring at him and waiting for him to begin.

He had no idea what to say.

The silence dragged on. Fabric whispered and rustled as fidgety members of the audience shifted in their seats. Finally one of the judges prompted “Contestant #9, you are here to describe your deepest, darkest, most sadistic fantasy?”

Then, as though a switch had been turned on in his head, Marty suddenly knew exactly what he needed to do. It was as if a path of solid ground had spontaneously emerged from the depths of a murky swamp. He actually smiled as the adrenalin washed away and his confidence returned.

He began to speak.

“My deepest, darkest, most sadistic fantasy,” he said, “is…”

And he told them.

---

The nine contestants were gathered together on the stage. Each of them had his arms stretched up over his head, with his wrists chained to a beam running the length of the stage. Some of the “total tops” in the group were not too happy about being on the receiving end of the restraints, but word came that no prize would be awarded until all the contestants were in place, and so they grudgingly allowed the chains.

Eight massive, muscular torsos glistened under the hot stage lights. Eight pairs of powerful arms stretched up over eight sweaty heads to eight pairs of silver manacles. Eight crotch pouches bulged beneath eight pairs of skin-tight pants.

One lone figure at the end of the row stood up on his toes because his body was too short to reach the chains flat-footed.

One of the judges paced at one side of the stage. He began to speak as he walked. “Gentlemen, I congratulate you all on a job well done. Each of you described a very hot, very sadistic fantasy scenario, and you can all be proud of your contributions.

“I know you’re all eager to hear who the winner is, but please indulge me for a moment. Our panel of judges found you all to be very talented, and it was extremely difficult for us to decide on a winner. I don’t want to single any of you out prematurely, but I can tell you that there were quite a few erections among our panel members throughout the evening as we listened to your various stories. You’re all very inventive, very creative, and no matter what happens here tonight, you can all be proud of the job you did.”

The spokesman stopped his pacing and stood directly in front of the row of contestants, facing them, although his voice carried throughout the hall.

“In fact, the judges had such a difficult time choosing among you that we decided to alter the rules of the contest a bit. We thought, they’re all so good, why limit ourselves to just one winner? They all deserve a prize, so let’s give it to them. So, gentlemen, congratulations: you’re all winners here tonight.”

The contestants looked around at each other, a bit confused by this development. One was about to say something when the spokesman continued.

“AND,” he said, “we made one other slight alteration. In light of the number of winners, each with his own very creative and original story, it seems insulting to give each of you the same thousand dollars. It would be like giving a trophy to every kid on every T-ball team in the league. What’s the point? Why try to excel, as you men have, if your reward is not something special, something different, something uniquely yours that sets you apart from the rest? Well, we bore that in mind as we came up with the new prize for tonight’s winners.

“Instead of a thousand dollars, each of you will receive your own, personalized reward: you get to live your own fantasy.”

One or two of them got it right away. It took the others a few moments more, but soon, all eight were shouting in protest and twisting in their chains. The chains held firm, of course, so they were helpless as the rest of the judges and the spectators came up on the stage. One by one, each victim was brought down and manhandled over to his own section of the room, where he was tied down or strung up or put in whatever position was necessary for the fulfillment of his own specific fantasy.

By the time they reached Marty at the end of the row, the air was filled with the sound of screams and the smell of blood and burning flesh. No team of men was needed for Marty; only the spokesman came to release him from his chains.

“How did you know?” the spokesman asked as Marty rubbed his wrists.

“I recognized the name. Barrymore Gryme. Just barely in time, too,” Marty answered.

“Well, do you want to stick around and watch? Maybe help out?”

Marty looked around the room. Bolt’s eyes had been scooped from their sockets and were hanging down against his cheeks. It was hard to tell from his screaming whether this was as disorienting as he had claimed it would be, but Marty gave him the benefit of the doubt and figured it was.

Gunner’s engorged and bloodied genitals were smoking from the cigarettes that were being pressed to them, while Reckless was being strapped down in preparation for the first slice of his dermectomy. Kohl was suspended in an inverted spread-eagle, with a gag in his mouth and a meat cleaver at his throat. Marty recalled that his fantasy was one of the gorier ones. Kohl was probably appreciating that fact just now, in that for him it would be over relatively quickly.

It was all a bit overwhelming for Marty, who tended to think in terms of a more intimate setting, with just one carefully-tended victim getting all his attention. He said as much to the spokesman, adding “I think I need some time to work up to it.”

The spokesman nodded, then shook Marty’s hand and said “We’ll be in touch.”

Marty walked out through the darkened backstage area, the noise and smell receding as he went. He was still shaking a bit from the fate he had narrowly escaped. He would certainly not have wanted to be on the receiving end of the fantasy he had prepared. Nor, obviously, had any of the other contestants.

Of course, he reflected, they had only themselves to blame. Any one of them could have had the same insight that Marty had. In hindsight, it was clear that the reference to “Barrymore Gryme”, an obscure character who was tortured by ways of his own invention, was just one of many clues. Other hints were there for careful eyes to see. It was the other eight men’s tough break that they didn’t notice. Otherwise, they might have told the judges what Marty did.

That their deepest, darkest, most sadistic fantasy was…

… to be a judge at next year’s Barrymore Gryme contest.