The All-Seeing Madame Pyrrha and the Ponygirls

The chaos of the midway hit her like a wall of sound.

Behind her, the tent flaps sealed shut with a vault-door-like thump. The only things that escaped were the muffled "we can rebuild him, we have the technology" bleeding through the canvas and the sound of a very large man and a very large woman enjoying themselves without a care in the world. The sign out front promised three more shows that night.

Delilah wasn't staying for one more second.

She wanted to go home. Home to her tiny box apartment where you took two steps from the kitchenette and bumped straight into the bed, and the radiator clanked like a dying man, the uncomplicated poverty of her old life. She started walking back the way she came, following the straight path in reverse, and she kept walking and walking and walking—

And the gate never came.

"Okay. I know I'm going the right direction," she said, and started hunting for landmarks. She found a sign pole instead, buried under a fan of arrows, each one pointing off to a ride, an attraction, a vendor, and finally—at the top, curved like a lupine smirk—THE BIG TOP. Just reading it made her insides twist hard enough to consider vomiting.

She looked around at the throngs, at the couples and the nudity and the people going from one carnal event to another, and wondered how a carnival this flagrantly, aggressively sexual hadn't gotten the cops called on it already. Surely somebody's overly intrusive parents had questions. Surely someone from the town had looked up from the TV long enough to file a noise complaint.

But the police weren't coming. Not tonight. Not ever.

Delilah kept walking.

That was when she saw them.

At first she thought they were dogs. She wished they were dogs—dogs are fun and uncomplicated—and she hadn't recalled seeing any animals on the fairgrounds, not even rats, which seemed to be a staple of carnivals and circuses. Then she thought they were deer. Then she stopped thinking and just watched, because the answer was somehow just to turn her brain off and watch the madness unfold.

Two women trotted down the midway, harnessed to a small chariot, and—delightfully, absurdly—they were wearing running shoes. Delilah had half-expected hoof boots to match the rest of their outfits. Instead: silver and gold latex bodysuits, thighs oiled to reduce friction, tails plugged in with the swishing little sway of ponygirls who knew exactly how good they looked. Their poster, she remembered now. The Stable. Featuring Pony Girls Sol and Luna, Trained to Perfection. Sol in gold. Luna in silver. Both of them gleaming under the orange lantern light like something sculpted like a pair of Galateas from an equine-themed Pygmalion.

The crack of a whip and the scent of brimstone pushed them forward, and the chariot rolled past—carrying a passenger. Not just any passenger, Delilah noted. A woman who looked like the high priestess of an ancient Sumerian fire demon—beautiful and terrifying in the same breath.

The clairvoyant, Delilah realized. Madame Pyrrha, who held the odd combination of fire-eater and fortune teller. Those things didn't go together, yet the Madame seemed to blend them not only in her personal life but somehow in her aesthetic. Her primary marker was a jeweled headband that formed a third eye just above her brow. Instead of long flowing robes, she wore a tight body suit with many, many golden adornments.

She followed.

The chariot the girls pulled led to a wagon, surrounded by massive torches and a small "yard" with patio furniture that reminded a casual viewer of a waiting room. But it wasn't a wagon so much as a house—a little wheeled cottage with lace curtains and a shingled roof and a brass chimney that smoked a bright sparkling pink. Inside, it was worse. Maximalist in every direction: mile-high armchairs in orange velvet that looked like nightmares you could nap in, shelves of candles and cards and bones, a bed shaped like a lava bubble, and at the center, on a table of black volcanic glass, a crystal ball.

Delilah felt extremely cold. Colder than a house this warm should have allowed. Colder than the tent. Colder, somehow, than the fortune teller's stare.

The chair grabbed her.

Cuffs sprang from nowhere—ankles first, then wrists—and locked her down into the orange velvet before she'd even tried sitting down.

"My, my," Madame Pyrrha said, breathless, delighted. "Aren't you a delicious little thing." She drew a whip from her hip like it was lipstick. Delilah considered herself genre savvy, and was aware that this was probably a trap, but she wasn't getting out on her own power, so maybe assistance from the great beyond was what she needed. "I just need to find the exit," Delilah said, now getting nervous. She pulled on her restraints fruitlessly, trying to work the crease between the two pieces of metal that held her to the chair. Pyrrha was pretending she wasn't enjoying watching the little raccoon-like girl squirm.

"Wait—let's talk about this," Delilah said.

She'd said it the moment she'd realized the Madame was peeling her clothes off. But it wasn't to be; in fact, Madame Pyrrha seemed to take a personal glee in ripping Delilah's panties into tiny shreds of midnight fabric. Earlier that month, somewhere between last year's finals and the line for coffee, she'd told a stranger that fortune-telling was nothing more than a scam. Cheap theater for lonely people. And now there was a woman who had her pinned to a chair, in a house full of fire, holding a whip. Who happened to be a fortune teller. "Hmmmm. I could. Usually I offer the curious wanderer a little taste. The light of knowledge sending them fleeing back into the dark." And she didn't seem all that interested in charity.

Karma seemed to have it out for Delilah.

She had options, and she made Delilah aware of each of them, laid out like a menu. The whip, her favorite. The paddle, a classic. The crop—reserved, ordinarily, for the stables. "But you," Pyrrha said, running the leather of the crop down Delilah's arm, "you get the whole course."

The flames in the fireplace leaned toward her. The cold didn't lift. And the crystal ball, black as a pupil, watched. The whip came down on Delilah's pale titflesh with a cracking sound so clear and crisp that Sol and Luna, waiting outside, jumped. The leather cord left a delicious red stripe on her skin. The fortune teller pulled her arm back and cracked the whip against Delilah's skin, creating more lovely stripes. The chair suddenly morphed into something different, powers from the great beyond turning the chair into a frame that left her even more vulnerable. Pyrrha traded the whip for the paddle. Delilah paused, waiting for a strike on her as-yet-untouched backside. "I see you had some fun already," tapping the dried seed on Delilah's thighs. "Fuck off, bitch," Delilah cursed, her defiance earning only further strikes and a cackle from the fortune teller. Then something inside Delilah changed: pain synthesised into pleasure. Her already-used cunt started to burn with shameful arousal.

Delilah felt her body tighten. Her head swam with confusing, humiliating arousal. Her cunt dripped like a broken well, and the sadistic soothsayer—smiling like a wildfire, like the thing the fire itself feared—caught the evidence on two fingers and painted it across Delilah's lips.

Delilah shivered, caught somewhere between horror and hunger.

"You came to me looking for the exit, thinking my profession was a lie," Pyrrha murmured, working the crop in slow stripes down her back, "so let me be honest."

She turned the crystal ball. It clouded, cleared, and Delilah saw herself in it—smaller, collared, and fine. Different. The ball showed her the humiliating things the carnival would do to her, and the shameful things she would come to do, willingly, gladly, begging. It showed her bonfires in October and cookouts in July, hosted by Carl and Natasha, where she'd eat with her knees under the same table as the bear of a man and the farm girl who'd already had her. It showed her evenings curled small in the Ringmaster's lap, his hand in her hair, his teeth nowhere near her throat for once. It showed her nights in the cuddle pile with the clown slaves, collared and content, someone else's heartbeat under her ear.

Hard work as well. But work that satisfied. Performance and applause, and a whole carnival wrapped around her like a coat.

"None of this is a cage," Pyrrha whispered against her ear, teasing her backdoor with slick fingers while the vibration on her clit dragged her closer and closer. "It's a chorus. You only think you want to be alone."

Delilah broke apart.

She came so hard she convulsed, arching off the orange velvet frame, and something dark ran down her cheeks—not tears exactly, or not only tears, something thick and black as ink, as if the crystal ball had been leaking into her eyes. But as Delilah was gasping for air, the fortune teller pulled her hand back and brought the crop down on Delilah's slit one more time. A parting gift for Delilah both physically and mentally, as both women saw the cuntslime fly into the air. Pyrrha didn't need to say anything; Delilah's body spoke for her.

And then, before she'd finished gasping for air, the cuffs clicked open, and she was moving. Sprinting like a lost deer in the woods as the cackling of Madame Pyrrha torched the silent air of the room. In her mad dash, Delilah abandoned all sense of modesty and the clothes she had walked into the room with, not that the outfit was any concern of hers at the moment. She would come back for those later. Fleeing into the pumpkin-colored lights of the carnival streets, where she looked more like one of the clowns than any of the guests that had made that trip past the gates.

She remembered the chariot, and to her benefit, Sol and Luna were still attached, waiting for their next passenger—which Delilah made sure was herself. Going off what she had absorbed from cultural osmosis, she cracked the reins like a cowboy in an old western movie. Sol and Luna responded and began speeding away from the cottage on wheels.

She was naked, collared, reins in both hands, the cold of rushing wind across her skin like a blade drawn flat. This was a madness not even the drunkest Halloween would draw out of her. Sol and Luna were harnessed ahead of her, muscles rolling, breath fogging, and they took each turn with the precision of women who had done this a thousand times. Delilah had driven a chariot for exactly one minute and was doing a terrible job, slapping the reins liberally to hide it. Delilah snapped in each direction, pushing the girls down each walkway, not caring about signs or pedestrians, only looking for an exit that would not come.

The girls were flagging. She felt it through the reins—the drag in their stride—and she urged them on anyway, because the future was inching forward behind her like water running downhill, and if she stopped moving it might catch her. Sol gasped. Luna's shoulders burned. They passed the food tent at a dead sprint.

Delilah wrapped the reins and hauled, and the chariot shuddered to a stop.

Silence. Steam rising off two pairs of shoulders. The smell of popcorn and coffee filling the air.

Before they moved on, Sol and Luna turned their heads and looked at her. Not the way horses look. The way people do when they know something about you you don't and have decided to be polite about it.

They knew.

Delilah had a very bad feeling about what, exactly, they knew.