The Clowning Achievement

The big top rose in towers of many colors, in ways that could only be described as non-Euclidean and eldritch.

The central bulwark of wood and fabric she'd been placed in front of climbed so high she could see neither clouds nor moon. Delilah looked left, then turned her head right—the carnival surrounded her on all sides. Yet for the first time since she'd passed through the gate, it felt distant. Even the echoes were muted.

She peered into the gaping maw that made up the entrance. Past the flap, the inside was pure darkness: wide and deep and cold as the ocean. Her naked form shivered, her thighs glistened. At what she perceived as dead center hung a pinprick of light, falling from somewhere high. And at that singular point sat a very familiar man at a small table, drinking an espresso.

"Bastard!" Delilah cried, and anger pushed her into the darkness at a dead run.

Her mind raced with vengeful visions. Any distant observer would have been unsure how such a small naked woman planned to enact violence on a man who was taller, older, and stronger than her, but Delilah was keen on trying. Her aggressive charge could only elicit a shrug from the resting Ringmaster.

"I've been called worse," he sighed, setting the cup down.

Delilah ran, fist clenched, every intent bent on making contact with his smug, fanged face.

Virgil didn't dodge. He didn't brace. He simply received her—and it was like running full tilt into a warm wall that had decided to be polite about it. The air left her in a wheeze. For one bright second she thought she'd actually landed the hit; then his hand closed around her wrist, and she understood she had hit him the way weather hits a mountain. He let her momentum spend itself against him, held her there while she scrabbled, and then—with a patience that was somehow more insulting than any shove—lowered her, one hand at her back, and set her down on the sawdust.

The impact with the floor came anyway, because Delilah did not stop fighting gravity just because someone had been gentle with her.

"Now that you have gotten that out of your system," Virgil said calmly, "let's talk."

He waited for her to regain her senses, briefly wondering if perhaps he'd hit her too hard. But as she rose off the ground, the concern concluded itself. Delilah bounced back surprisingly quickly.

His grin widened and went lupine, a wolf watching its meal growl and snap, while Delilah stayed furious but stopped trying to inflict violence.

She still had points she wanted to make. She wanted him to hear them.

"I've been violated," she spat. "Humiliated. Objectified."

Virgil rolled his eyes. "And?" He ran his gaze down her body, taking in the changes she hadn't bothered to hide—the peaked breasts, the wanting slit. She could stand and face him roughly eye to eye, but she'd chosen to stay kneeling: thighs splayed, chest forward, desire dripping into the sawdust. "Seems you enjoyed your night so far." He took a step forward. She crawled backward. "A bit more foreplay than climax, perhaps—seeing as you're oh so tense, my dear."

Delilah's eyes flared with the defiance of someone who knew she was being told the truth and intended to cling to her position anyway. "I wanted to leave," she spat.

"Then the gate would have been right there waiting for you."

He pointed. And out of the fog, past the big top's entranceway, appeared the very same gate she'd come in through, now sitting mere steps from the tent's mouth. The moon hung in the same waxing position, low over the parking lot. It was so close. One short jog, and this whole night became a bad memory for a therapist she'd never be able to afford.

And yet, as it waited, her legs did not move. Her knees stayed pressed to the hard floor.

Delilah pursed her lips. The Ringmaster waited for her next remark, and when none came, he took his own turn.

"Let me ask you something, my dear." He let the silence work for him. "Did you feel in danger at any point tonight? Not frightened. Not surprised. In danger."

She thought about it.

The midway, yes—but it had surprised her more than anything, with its creativity and its sheer sexual energy. If she'd turned around then, it would have been nothing more than a strange night. It was with the strongman couple that she'd gone from observer to participant—but Carl and Natasha had never hurt her. They'd thrown her in the air exactly once, and caught her. She should have been afraid when the Madame walked her through every whip and crop and paddle in the tent—and then there was that asshole Vaati, throwing bowling balls at her head—but none of them had ever landed. She wasn't even sure the balls had been solid matter when they left his hands.

Delilah, still finding some spark in her, tried limply to mount a defense. "But," she said. "But—"

The words died in her throat.

She knelt there, processing it the way he'd laid it out for her. And something heavy inside her—something she hadn't known she was carrying—lifted.

"So what happens now?" she asked.

The Ringmaster clipped a leash to her collar and pulled her up with a gentle, undeniable force.

"Now," he said, "we bring out what was hiding inside."

Lightning flashed overhead. The lamps above came to life one at a time, illuminating the crowd, which seemed to materialize with the light, their cheers and jeers filling the empty air like the tent had been full all along.

Dragged to the stage was a massive dark pumpkin, humming with macabre malice, carved into a sinister jester's face, glowing a powerful, unearthly—and to Delilah, distinctly familiar—shade of green.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Virgil announced, "tonight, I would like to present to you our clowning achievement."

The monstrous gourd roared to life from its leafy base and many viney tendrils flew out, wrapping themselves around Delilah's body and hoisting her into the air. From the center, one long, thick tendril sprouted from the jack-o'-lantern's head and started wiggling upwards.

Grinding and churning, as it climbed, the tendril pushed its massive, leafy green girth into Delilah's hole. "Truly rare a moment as this, to welcome a new member of the carnival," finding Delilah's accommodating pussy waiting and eager. It plunges its tendril deep inside and begins pumping.

Tears of relief rolled down her cheeks with each monumental thrust as the pumpkin kept an unrelenting pace. She groaned, jerking violently forward, then back—the thing so powerful it tossed her around like a rag doll. Desire warming her body with each thrust, pent-up excitement from the second act paying off in the third.

The crowd watched with rapt attention as the massive, leafy cock aggressively ravaged her hole without emotion, without pause, without mercy—fucked her before them, over and over and over again, until she stopped counting, stopped thinking, stopped being a girl who wanted to leave because she was afraid of the feelings the carnival created in her, and became someone who could feel without restraint.

She came, finally, screaming something that was almost his name. The crowd roared. The pumpkin dimmed to an ember-green glow. Delilah's arms and legs were uncoiled from the vines. She started falling sideways, released from the gourd's retreating tentacles—boneless, weightless—the sawdust floor rushing up to meet her.

And hands caught her.

Molly's first—small and quick and already babbling, "gotcha gotcha gotcha," the way you'd catch a dropped kitten. Then a broad arm across her back, warm and hairy as a coat, and Carl's low rumble above her: "There she is." A hand cupped the back of her head, calloused and gentle, and Natasha's twang arrived close to her ear: "Easy now, sweetie pie. We got you." Then the cold ones. Pyrrha's fingers, ice at her wrist and ankle, sure as cuffs. Two more pairs of hands, slim and strong, taking her weight from below—Sol on one side, Luna on the other—still breathing hard from a night of hard work, a faint buzzing coming from their tails. And Vaati, of course, was there too, for moral support, pinching her chin between two bony fingers and tilting her face toward the light like he was appraising an antique vase. "Hm," he said. "Still needs work." Then, quieter, almost kind: "But the eyes are good." Delilah hung there, held by all of them, and tried to find the floor. There wasn't one. There was only the warmth of being carried.

Being handled. Being passed from hand to hand like something found. But the hands knew her. Every single one had already touched her tonight, in one way or another, and none of them had ever hurt her. They carried her the way you carry something you intend to keep.

She lifted her head, and found the last set of eyes in the ring.

Virgil stood waiting at the center, coat gone, sleeves rolled, fangs tucked behind a smile that was almost soft. He was the ringmaster, and that would be what she called him from now on.

He opened his arms.

And Delilah, held up by a circus, reached back.

"That's it, my dear," he murmured as she folded into him, as the crowd's cheer went up like a tide and Molly whooped and Carl clapped his hands once, hard enough to shake dust from the rigging. "Welcome home."

Somewhere behind her, the pumpkin exhaled its last green breath and went dark.

Epilogue

One year later.

Sebastian had almost stopped looking.

That was the thing about it, he'd decided: you could only keep looking for so long before the looking became a habit, and habits become furniture, and then one day you stop moving the couch. He'd asked around for months. He'd checked the school, the crazy landlord, her old professors, even her neighbors. Nobody remembered or had ever heard of Delilah Crowley. Not the name, not the face, not the apartment where he'd stood and watched the many moments of Delilah's life play out.

Eventually he'd told himself it was a dream he'd had once. A very good, very strange dream that smelled like caramel corn and ended in silence.

And then, the second October really started in earnest, when the leaves turned red and the air was cold enough for a hot apple cider. The invitation arrived.

It came on a Tuesday, under his door, though the mailroom was on the first floor and nobody slid things under these doors. Heavy paper. Leathery, almost. He knew what it was before he turned it over.

THE CARNIVAL OF DARK DELIGHTS.

He'd seen this exact flyer a year ago. Plastered on every wall on campus and in every shop in town. Yet when November arrived on the calendar, it felt like they practically evaporated. Except this one was different. This one was addressed—and stranger still, it was addressed to his grandparents' farm, which he had only given to one other person in the United States. Which confused him until he looked at the bottom of the flyer. In the corner, in a small, familiar handwriting—the same style he'd read on his phone for months—someone had written:

Sebastian,

It's me. It's been a year and I owe you an explanation, but the short version is: I'm fine. Better than fine. You should come by.

Bring no one. Admission's on me.

—D.

He turned the flyer over. On the back, in ink that shifted when he wasn't looking directly at it, was the line:

Admission: your inhibitions. And a modest fee of $12.95.

Sebastian stood in his kitchen for a long moment, phone in one hand, flyer in the other, and felt something in his chest go cold and certain.

He drove out to the field where a friend of his had taken a step into the fog, and the carnival was there—there the whole time, probably, there the way it had always been there, there the way it would be there next October. Braziers lit. Calliope playing, slow and deliberate, each note a caress followed by a sting. And at the gate, in a collar and little else, black eyeliner sharp as a blade, a woman stood waiting. She smiled at him like she'd never left. Like she'd only stepped out an hour ago and meant to come back.

"Hey," Delilah said. "You took your time."