The calliope music now played only in his mind as he eased the fabric apart and slipped a leg inside. Then he was turning the knob and stepping inside the trailer of The Three-Breasted Woman!
He worried she would hear the legs of his jeans rub together, or his heart beating. It pounded so hard he could feel the blood pumping like angry surf in his ears. But nothing stirred in the silent, dark space. His eyes were already adjusted to the thickness of the night. Outside, at least, there was starlight. Here, there was only blackness. He stepped forward, and a clatter rang out. Something had fallen over.
Ramsey dropped to a crouch and listened. If she was here, he must have woken her. And if the barker was nearby…
Seconds passed, then minutes. He barely dared to breathe. But no one came. Presently he could make out the shadows of a cot in the far corner, and square shapes on either side of him. Boxes and trunks. He moved quietly, careful not to step on the pieces he’d knocked to the ground.
On his fourth step, he found her cot. And her.
He could still barely see in the darkness, but her skin seemed to lighten the room on its own near where she lay. She was nude, and lying on her back. Ramsey stifled a gasp as he saw the third breast, uncovered, lolling below her normal bosom. It was almost as if she had a second stomach. Or a huge tumor. With a pink cap. The rest of her torso was marked by a handful of other, undeveloped breasts. He could see the reverse pocks of unrisen nipples dotting her ribcage.
The barker hadn’t lied. His own
hands
hadn’t lied.
It was sick. Perverse. A bit sad. But she had three full teats.
And two wide open eyes.
“I won’t hurt you,” he whispered.
She didn’t respond.
He touched her hand.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Still she lay there. Looking at him. Eyes open. Lips tight.
“I felt bad after seeing you in the show,” he explained. “I wondered how you could let them do this to you. Then I thought, ‘maybe she’s drugged, or a prisoner.’ I had to come see you when no one else was around. I had to make sure you were all right.”
Her lips seemed to move but she did not speak. Her hand, however, gripped his own.
“Are you okay?” he asked again.
She lifted her free hand and gripped his shoulder. Then she pulled him closer. Ramsey put his ear to her lips, thinking she was going to whisper some secret.
Instead, her hand went to his head, and pressed his face lower. He smelled the faint hint of lilac on her skin and the tang of sweat-salt. And then his lips were brushing across the silk of nipples. One and two…and three. She guided him like a bee to each, stopping him briefly at each cone to sip and then pressing him on, a perfect circle of silken flesh to sample and taste. He hadn’t even meant to open his mouth but suddenly Ramsey realized he’d not only opened it, he was suckling.
He struggled to pull back, and looked up at her eyes. All he saw were contented slits of lids, her mouth trembling and purring in a satisfied O. Her fingers wrestled in his hair, twining like playful snakes, and then pulled him close again. He was drowning in her subtle scent, thirsting for the taste of her skin again. It was dark and close, and everything in the world seemed to come back to her. He couldn’t struggle. Why would he want to?
He woke at dawn and disentangled himself from the warm nest of her arms and legs. His left arm was numb, buried beneath her head.
“Hey,” he murmured, trying to pull himself away.
Her eyes opened. In the light, he could see they were pale, and green as sea foam. They seemed bottomless.
“I came here last night to talk to you,” he began, but her hand stopped his lips. She sat up quickly, her eyes darting side to side.
“I worried…” he said, but her fingers trapped his lips, and with a jolt, she pushed him upright. Pins and needles began pricking his arm as she nabbed his clothes from the floor with calculated attacks. In a flash, he was cradling his jeans and shirt with his good arm, and she was pacing in the far corner of the trailer, near the door leading to the tented passageway to the freak show stage. He took the hint and dressed.
He had to sit on her cot to pull his shoes on. The tingling in his arm still burned, but he shook it out, and forced his fingers to work on his laces. Before he was finished, a hand gripped his arm and pulled him upright. She faced him, chest jutting proud and strange. Her lips met his for just a moment, and then she pushed him out the door. Sensing her urgency, he hurried to the hole in the outer tent that he’d found the night before. He fell through, landing on the other side on his knees. Behind him he heard a good reason for her haste.
“Yvette?” It was the barker.
He crept away from the tent, slipping from one just-waking attraction to the next, until he’d made his way to the edge of the circus. The sun was burning orange on the horizon as he started back down the road to home. His body was satisfied. And sore.
And he’d left her exactly as he’d found her. Well, not exactly. But he hadn’t rescued her.
She was with him throughout the day. With every shadow that fell across his person, he felt her gaze on him. With every touch—of a comb, of a chair, of a doorknob—he felt the cool balm of her flesh against his. When he drank from a can from the vending machine, he tasted, just beyond the sparkle of carbonation, the sweetness of her breasts.
When he got off work, he didn’t go home.
He went straight to the circus.
««—»»
“Is she a freak of nature? Is she the next stage of evolution?” The barker grinned and winked. Imagine if she was your mother…or your girlfriend.”
Ramsey stayed at the back of the tent, but still the barker’s gaze seemed to find him. Those black eyes lingered on his as the barker continued his patter.
“She is everything you’ve dreamed of,” he said, pausing to twirl one end of his mustache, “And then some…”
Ramsey slipped back outside and waited behind the tent, hoping that tonight, he’d be able to talk to her. He heard the clapping from Yvette’s last show of the night, and the burbling murmur of the men filing out and back to the main venues of the circus. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Got a thing for our little Yvette, do ya?” The barker’s teeth gleamed against the growing gloom of night.
“She took care of you last night, don’t you think that’s enough?”
Ramsey started, and his captor laughed.
“You think I don’t know everything that goes on in her tent? I can’t afford to let anything happen to my star attraction.”
With that, the barker pushed him forward, steering him towards her tent. “I let her take care of her needs. But don’t get the wrong idea.”
The man gripped him by both arms and stuck a reddened, wrinkling face close to his own. “She doesn’t need you.”
They pushed through the loose canvas and Ramsey entered the tent of the three-breasted woman for the second time. She had removed the costume from her performance and sat, as if waiting for him, naked on her cot.
The barker shoved him forward, and Ramsey fell to his knees at her feet.
He looked up at her, hoping for a sign. Hoping for a word. Something. “Are you okay?” he asked for the third time that day.
She twisted her lips up, showing her teeth in a hungry grin. And hissed.
He jumped back, and looked at the barker. “What did you do to her?”
The barker laughed, and patted his head like a dog.
“Nothing, I assure you. The question is, what did you do to her?”
She stood slowly, moving toward them in a feral crouch.
“Nothing,” Ramsey cried, backpedaling until his shoulders were hemmed in by the barker’s thighs. The woman moved closer, green eyes glowing in the fading light. He was suddenly reminded of the glare of the lioness in the Big Top’s animal taming act.
“I’d say you two did a little business last night,” the barker laughed, seemingly unconcerned by the strange behavior of his attraction. “I’d say you took advantage of the poor girl.”
“She forced you into her bed, did she?”
“Not forced,” Ramsey said.
“Hmmm.”
Yvette hissed again and launched herself at Ramsey, nails raking at his face. He felt her breath an inch away, hot against his neck. He threw his arms up to protect himself from her attack and heard something snap in the air next to his ear. The crack of a whip.
The barker was holding a long strap, and Yvette retreated to the bed.
“Can it,” the barker said, dropping his exaggerated crowd-pleasing demeanor. He suddenly sounded like a tired cab driver. “You had to see and now you have. She’s done with you. She only uses men once and if you’re lucky…she doesn’t touch you again.”
“How did you make her this way; what have you done to her?” Ramsey protested. The barker just shook his head.
“We didn’t make her any way, and we did nothing to her. She came to
us
when she was just a girl. We give her a home and food and a way to find mates. We take her away before anyone asks too many questions. And if you did what she wanted last night, my guess is, at our next town we’ll be billing her as the four-breasted woman.”
On the bed, Yvette began to growl.
“Come on, you’d better not stay here anymore.”
Ramsey backed away from the cot, his eyes drawn to the three heavy teats hanging from the woman’s torso.
When they got outside, Ramsey pulled the barker to a stop before they reached the midway.
“What did you mean about her becoming a four-breasted woman?”
The barker grinned.
“When she mates, and conceives, she grows a new tit. I’ve seen her with as many as eight! A few weeks ago, she was as flat as a boy—we had no freak show at all. Thank god for that kid in Albany. You’d be surprised at how hard it is to find her a guy that sticks around for a night. They all come out to see the freak, but do you think any of them
want
her? ’Course, some of them want her a little too much and wear out their welcome with her…then I’ve got to clean up and we’ve got to leave town in a hurry.”
He stared knowingly at Ramsey, who shivered at the implication.
“She has kids?” he asked, after a moment.
“Kids, litters… call ’em what you want.”
The barker pushed him towards a mob of people congregating around a juggler in green leotards and a red jester’s cap outside the Big Top.
“But… where are they? What happened to them?”
“Where do you think we get the tightrope walkers and animal trainers? Not to mention all those twisted tots for the formaldehyde jars of the freak show display.”
With a slap on the back and a throaty laugh, the barker suddenly left him, and disappeared into the crowd.
Laughter and screams rang out all around him, as children ran past with sticky pink cotton candy, parents chasing after them. By the Big Top, teenage girls giggled in groups and flaunted their midriffs for the boys slouching against the painted canvas. Ramsey stood lost in the middle of it all.
His heart ached to go back, to ask her if it was really true. Would he be a father? His belly froze at the thought. He wasn’t ready. He’d never meant… After a moment, he found himself swept along with the crowd, moving towards the fairground exit. It was closing time.
He could still taste the ghost of the velvet smooth crush of her skin against his lips. The smell of lilac in her hair. But as he moved away from her tent, he could also hear the angry snarl of her teeth at his neck.
There was a lump in his throat that felt thicker than all the lumps of caramel the vendors were selling at the fairground gates. Ramsey let the crowd carry him towards home. He brushed a finger softly across his lips and didn’t look back.
— | — | —
After the fifth step, it was mundane.
Ah…but getting to the fifth step. That was the trick. That was what it was all about. The crowds below, they thought the tough part was in the center, once the safety net was removed. “Oh, such danger,” the ringmaster would cry. “Such daring-do.”
Such malarky, Reind thought. Once you were moving, in the groove, you didn’t
need
a net. The difficult part was in placing one step in front of the other when leaving behind the wooden platform. The first step was like a switch between stepping on sandpaper and high-gloss ice—with a slight movement, his foot left behind the immobile, grainy plywood to slip down a quivering, thin decline of twined, worn fibers. It was stepping through the door from plane cargo bay to open, unparachuted air. That step was the first trick. And the second, bringing your anchor with you.
The hardest was the step after the first. That’s where you gained or lost your balance. That’s where it became a walk or a fall. After the second step, there was no going back. You didn’t turn around on the highwire.