Nightfall

Delilah threw the holy water at the haunted machine. Arcing as it traveled, the blessed water landed on the keyboard with a pitter-patter sound. Delilah held her breath, waiting for the presence inside the laptop to leave, to put the world back to the way it was before. The water flowed underneath the keyboard, soaking the various small components. The screen flickered and died, no longer showing anything, yet the laptop still possessed its red glow, now simply lacking the green.

Which meant her laptop was still possessed.

Which meant she was still stuck in whatever nightmare this was.

Which meant she would need to spend two hundred dollars to get it repaired whenever she got it exorcized.

Which meant she would be skipping meals that week.

Which meant she had to go through whatever nightmare this was.

The laptop pulsed in front of her, that sickening red glow that had gone from purely sinister to just mocking her. When she hit it with the holy water, it shorted the motherboard in the laptop, meaning she was really on her own with this one. Maybe it was time to actually go to the ER like her responsible brain suggested. Get fitted for a nice new jacket with long sleeves and get a room so plush the walls and ceilings—

Instead, she found herself looking over at the window.

Her reflection in the window caught her attention. She looked the same—same messy bun, same outfit, same dark circles under her eyes from thesis stress—but the glass showed two versions of her, slightly out of sync. One blinked when the other didn't. One was frightened when the other was intrigued. She went back to her closet, stripping the vestments of the day for some evening wear. She grabbed her jacket. Her keys. The sensible part of her brain—the part that paid rent and filed taxes and knew that magic wasn't real—screamed that she should stay inside, call the police, do anything but follow the path she was staring down. She kept the hoodie, but added the fishnets under a pair of black jean shorts, and, well, she only had one pair of shoes. Her hands ran around the "choker," and in a dissociative moment, clasped it around her neck.

Delilah approached the window like it might bite her. Jerry had finished raking leaves, the piles safely deposited into the compost pile so that their rotting bodies might feed the next generation of plant life. Jerry himself was sipping on a nice hot beverage, content in the domestic ignorance his unblinking belief in the American dream provided for him. She was jealous, and not just the normal jealousy she had over his house, car, full pantry, etc. But jealousy wasn't going to help where she was going. Stepping into the air, she got in her beater car and started over to the now-no-longer-vacant lot on the other side of town, where the carnival had planted itself like roses in the graveyard. She drove in silence. There was a part of her, a part that had been sleeping until this moment, that remembered, in the way dreams are remembered, the weight of chains and the surrender of will. The part that had always known, deep down, that there were doors in the world that only opened for those who weren't afraid to bleed.

Where there had been a chain-link fence and a "No Trespassing" sign, there was now an open gate wrought from black iron, twisted into shapes that might have been vines or might have been reaching hands, leading into a parking lot already filled with cars. Yet somehow it still looked like, out of almost nine hundred and ninety-nine spots, there was room for one more near the front.

The path beyond the iron threshold was lit with jack-o'-lanterns that burned with cold blue flame. Delilah could hear music clearly now, without the noises of the so-called normal world—calliope and bass drum, something that should have been cheerful but instead sounded like a heartbeat heard through a stethoscope. Like being inside something vast and hungry that had mistaken her for something else.

The sky was darkening faster than it should. The sun, which had been bright autumn gold moments ago, now bled toward violet and bruised purple. The "October feeling" she'd noticed earlier had intensified into something almost tactile—the air tasted like candy corn and graveyard dirt, like the moment before a thunderstorm when electricity made your hair stand on end.

She walked toward the gate.

The gate was surrounded by banners that looked like they were painted by the famous fetish artist John Willie. Women bound and twisted into erotic shapes. Buttocks marked with whips, paddles, and crops, while others featured every position in the Kama Sutra, all held aloft in sheets of crimson fabric. Reaching the ticket booth, Delilah felt her eyes go wide as she beheld the ticket taker: the woman at the booth wasn't sitting in the stool provided, but hung down from some part of the ceiling Delilah couldn't see. She was bald, naked save for a golden fishnet bodysuit, and had her body tattooed to match snake scales.

"Admisssssion for one?" the snake woman hissed.

Delilah let her eyes wander around. There were few single people, but they were there, along with a coupled pair of every sexual orientation imaginable. The air was hot and humid, but not in an oppressive way; jackets and coats were shed like serpent skin. Delilah watched in muted awe as the crowd went half-naked into the carnival grounds.

"Yes, please," Delilah squeaked out like a cornered mouse.

Twelve dollars and ninety-eight cents slid over the counter, with two cents going back.

Once the money was accepted, Delilah moved forward. Ahead, the trees parted like curtains, and through them, she could see the striped tents rising against the bruised sky, their peaks crowned with weather vanes that spun without wind. Surrounding the big top were numerous rides like roller coasters,bumper cars, and a ferris wheel along with many smaller tents. The midway, choked with games and vendors, opened to her like the mouth of the big bad wolf.

The Carnival of Dark Delights had been waiting for her, and now opened to her with such very big teeth.