Teufelsrad
by Joseph Hirsch
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
They were driving through a rare flat portion of Lower Bavaria, the jagged-peaked mountains nowhere in sight, replaced now by furrowed crop rows at the roadsides. The fields were mostly the low stubble of some as-yet-to-bloom grain—wheat perhaps—otherwise empty except for a scarecrow gibbeted to a wooden scaffold. Rather than sporting a pumpkin for a head as on a traditional American scarecrow, this one was topped by the skull of some long-dead ram. Its horns were gnarled and contorted, its eyeholes empty, its bone pure white, as if flensed of flesh by maggots then bleached by the sun.
“Look at that,” Kayla said, suppressing a shudder.
Greta, still wearing her bright smile, looked where her friend had pointed, took in the effigy, and continued smiling. “It’s an Icelandic bighorn,” she said, before returning her eyes to the road ahead. “Originally native to Scandinavia, but bred throughout much of Europe.”
“You don’t find it just a little bit creepy?” Kayla asked, tucking an errant strand of green-dyed hair behind her ear.
“Not at all,” Greta said, shrugging once in the face of the strange totem before pressing down on the gas a little more.
“And you’re sure you understood what that old Oma back there was telling you?” Kayla turned and pointed through the rear window, back in the direction of that small Esso station where they’d stopped to chat with some locals. The woman in question’s attire had been strange, a peasant blouse and a babushka headwrap more fit for a gypsy from a previous century. “I know your German is good, but—”
“Ganz ruhig,” Greta said, adding “Just chill” before Kayla could demand a translation. “The old woman most assuredly said this is the village where the carnival game of the Teufelsrad originated. I believe her, despite what American showman and impresario George Tilyou claimed with his patented ‘Human Roulette Wheel.’” Just mention of the man’s name almost caused Greta’s lip to curl, coming as close as she might to sneering. “But seeing is believing, and I want to see for myself before I write my final paper.”
“I hope you’re right,” Kayla said. “I know this trip is on the university’s dime, but it still feels like a waste of gas going this far off the beaten path if it ends up being for no reason.”
“I have a feeling that our time here is going to be well-spent.” Greta took a deep breath, chest heaving, causing her decolletage—already bunched in the straightjacketed corset of her dirndl—to swell.
Kayla cast a glance at the cleavage (almost impossible to miss) pressing from the low neckline of the bodice and shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re wearing the Swiss Miss getup.”
“It’s traditional German Tracht,” Greta said. “And it’s Bavarian, not Swiss or Swiss German.”
Kayla held up her hands in mock-surrender. “I guess I’ll defer to you. You are, after all, the one going for her degree in German Studies.”
“You sure you don’t want to get ‘dirndled’ up yourself?”
Kayla snorted, said, “This whole scene can get ‘dirndled,’ if you want to know the truth.”
“But if you wear that miniskirt—”
“It’s a skater skirt, not a miniskirt.” Kayla lifted the hem, displaying its cut and fabric for Greta, who refused to take her eyes off the road ahead.
“The men watching the Teufelsrad will be able to see up your skirt if you wear that.”
“That’s the point, my dear woman.”
Greta arched a brow and made quizzical eye contact with Kayla in the rearview mirror.
“You’re not the only one here to conduct research,” Kayla said. “I’m here to perform an experiment of my own.”
“What kind of experiment?”
“Why, an experiment in feminist raunch, my young and innocent Fraulein. For you see, the males watching the girls spin round and round the ‘Devil’s Wheel’ might intend to get an eyeful, but they didn’t reckon with my lack of grooming since beginning of winter. And, like Ariel Levy, I don’t believe that I should be forced to adhere to modern beauty standards, and I intend my wintery thatch to be a political statement and a rebuke to the phallocentric gaze. You might wish for the menfolk to assess your own potential as a broodmare by judging your birthing hips and your—”
“We’re here!” Greta shouted, cutting her off and pointing through the windshield.
The VW Bug entered the town, rollicking bumpily over the cobblestone street. No other cars were in evidence, around them now just fachwerk buildings, sturdy half-timbered crossbeams supporting wattle and daub walls. A handful of the buildings boasted more ornate gingerbread fretwork and gewgaw flourishes, their roofs peaked so they resembled Swiss chalets or Victorian country homes.
Greta’s smile remained as apple-cheeked as before while Kayla leaned down to stare out the windows with the hard-eyed scrutiny of a soldier seeking out snipers. “Doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that nobody’s out on the streets?”
“Nothing strange about it, deary,” Greta said. “They’re all getting ready for the festivities, preparing their costumes, their instruments. Their masks.” She threw the car in park.
Before them was another half-timbered building, distinguished from the others only by a sign fixed to a metal stanchion out front. It was a cartouche-shaped plank engraved with golden letters announcing the establishment as “Das Engelchen Wirtshaus.”
“That means Little Angel Inn,” Greta said, popping the trunk and getting out to fetch their bags, wooden alpine shoes clogging against cobbled pavestones as she went.
They had only been in their attic eyrie room long enough to put their bags down when sounds drew them back down to the street.
“You see?” Greta said, pointing toward the throng now flowing across the cobblestones. “I told you there were people here. They were just getting ready.”
Kayla watched with her now, as the townsfolk—men, women, and children—moved along in a snaking cortege.
The women mostly wore dirndl, similar to Greta, their hair up in braids and beribboned with wisps of crimson grosgrain silk. The men sported tanned lederhosen held up by suspenders sewn with intricate fleury patterns. Some carried pewter bier steins scrimshawed with pastoral scenes and overflowing with foamy brew, while others—two-man crews—lugged giant alpenhorns made from hollowed spruce. All wore peaked Tyrolean caps topped by red bird plumes and sang in voices that boomed and resounded with an oboelike bass.
“It’s like something out of a Heimatfilm,” Greta said, still beaming.
Kayla felt like plugging her ears but held off because she didn’t want to be perceived as the ugly American tourist unwilling to sample local culture.
At last, the main procession passed and was followed by a float tiered like a wedding cake, its edges frilled with bloodred bunting. Atop the staggered tiers perched a papier-mâché effigy of a ram. It stood on two legs, bent-backward and satyr-like, its form held in place by a wireframe that propped it up. A surplice-like gown was draped over its body, packed with straw stuffing to give the impression of heft.
Kayla gawked up at it, her mouth open, having forgotten all about the chantlike dirge of the men with their steins.
“A mascot, presumably,” Greta said.
Fair enough, Kayla thought, but it lacked the cuteness of any mascot she had seen at sporting events. Its eyes—rather than being cartoonish—were empty holes bored in the papier-mâché skull, watchful despite the absence of pupil and iris.
Pushing the float was a retinue of young maidens, dirndled like the others but distinguished by the red masks they wore. The masks appeared to be sculpted of the finest wood—something like blackthorn—chiseled to resemble satyrs wearing wide and satanic smiles. Wending horns grew from the heads, hard and keratinous and clearly purloined from real rams on some previous hunt. Eyebrows were chiseled into spikey chevron shapes, giving the faces a lecherous cast, while the ears were batlike points. The handles of the float that the women gripped were large, elongate brass rails, like the rollers used to furl and open ancient scrolls.
“Come on,” Greta shouted, tugging her friend’s hand and forcing her to follow.
They flowed downhill with the pack, the sounds around them growing louder, the sun growing brighter. Blasts bellowed from the alpenhorns, deep and sonorous booms that sounded like randy lowing from massive beasts in rutting season. Laughter, high and cacophonous, poured from the mouths of the rosy-cheeked girls, mixed with their back and forth banter.
Soon Kayla and Greta were down in the valley with the rest. Before them was a bier tent, its red and white striped sailcloth buckling in a light wind.
Kayla turned a final time, attempting to cast a last look back toward the town that would be waiting for them up the hill when the Teufelsrad ceased spinning. Her view, however, was occluded by the float topped by the empty-eyed ram. The girls pushing the float until now had ceased to shove, leaving their burden to rest before the tent entrance and blocking the path home.
Another tug from Greta and Kayla was inside the tent with her and all the other people of the town.
Around them were crowds of clearly intoxicated men seated on slatted wooden benches and pounding their feet against the dusty boards. The air rumbled with the noise, throbbed, turned Kayla and Greta to human tuning forks as they rattled from the Wagnerian thunder.
“THERE IT IS!” Greta shouted, pointing toward the center of the tent.
Kayla looked.
The wheel was giant and flat, more like a disc, supported by some kind of circular platform, driven by an unseen mechanism, perhaps hydraulic. Its surface was painted a lacquered black, shining like a sacrificial slab of polished obsidian. It spun in circles, the motion spellbinding, hypnotic. Atop the churning wheel sat more than twenty girls, each with her hair up in lustrously knotted plaits. They clustered together in the circle’s center, trying to avoid being thrown free as it spun. All of them sat back to back, nudging each other’s spines in hopes of staying put, bargaining desperately with physics and each other to remain on the wheel. Their smiles said that this endeavor was fun, but the surface mirth could not hide the plain truth: only one could win, and for that to happen, the rest must lose.
The wheel began to speed up, ever so slightly, and the girls dug their heels in. Some minded the hems of their skirts while struggling mightily to hold on, pulling the fabric modestly over bare knees only to have their garments ride up again. Others forewent discretion as a matter of strategy, spreading their legs wide, straddling the surface of the spinning wheel, splayed postures like those of birthing mothers. As a result, all could see up their dresses, the glimpses of sun-bronzed thigh and cotton bloomers eliciting lusty roars from the men in the stands.
Whatever strategy the girls tried, they began spinning free, one by one, flying off the wheel and into the waiting arms of the crowd. The townsfolk in the audience did their best to break the fall of any girls who got ejected, accepting them back into their number with gentle embraces.
“The point is to—”
“I think I got it, Gret,” Kayla said, marching forward in her heavy Doc Marten’s, jaw set and determined, ready to give the boys an eyeful and beat the wheel.
The wheel spun around and around, gyring at a steady pace.
“Mein Gott in Himmel, I already feel dizzy,” Greta said.
“Deal with it,” Kayla said, extending her legs and moving her hands out to her sides, posture resembling that of someone readying to crabwalk. “Get a good gander at the wintry thatch, boys.”
The men could hardly understand her words but could see well enough. One passed his already quaffed stein to a compatriot and used his free hands to cup his mouth. He shouted so his voice carried even over the boom of alpenhorn, the tittering of the girls on the wheel, the clapping of hands.
“What did he say?!” Kayla yelled to Greta.
Greta looked reticent to translate but finally withered under Kayla’s stare. “Du solltest dich rasieren! Or you should shave.”
Kayla looked back to the man in the stands, shouted “Eat me!” and lifted one of her armpits to display another black patch.
The men gathered around the crier all turned to him, pointed and laughed at their Kamderad bested in his exchange with the foreign interloper.
“I wonder who’s running the wheel,” Greta said, craning her neck as she searched around the area for some lever that set the device in motion, controlled its speed and direction.
Kayla, already over the buzz of her minor victory against the men, joined Greta in searching. “Usually with these fair rides they’ve got some meth head carnie working a power switch, but—”
Loud pops erupted, cutting her off, cracking sounds followed by streaks of flaming light that left wild strobing tracers in the air. Several girls shouted, cringed, surprised enough by the sound to relinquish their holds on the wheel’s shining floor, flying free to rejoin the crowd. Only after the noises stopped and the smell of gunpowder and cordite hit the air did the girls realize they had been had.
“Knaller,” Greta said.
“Was?” Kayla asked, nearly exhausting her store of German.
“Böller,” Greta said.
“In English, Brunhilde!”
“Fireworks,” Greta said, resituating her coccyx on the slick surface of the wheel, trying to plant herself firmer. “Just a distraction to get us to let go. The longer we hold on, the more of those they’ll throw at us.”
Slowly the veil of smoke began creeping away, drifting out of the tent through the gap between its canvas and the green lawn, wafting over the float. Once more the crowd was revealed, the barrel-chested men on the benches now singing songs of soused-brotherhood in caterwauling, off-key tones. The womenfolk clapped their hands, performed two-person dances, locking elbows then switching partners just as quickly as they linked up. Their hobnailed alpine shoes beat a steady tattoo on the ground, churning up grass in large muddy clumps.
Through the open flaps of the tent, Kayla could still see the float. But now one of the girls in a red devil mask had ascended to the top tier with a burning torch in hand. She doffed the torch toward the mascot, letting the fire spread to its papier-mâché head. Slowly, the effigy began to burn, tongues of flame dancing over the paper, eating through the sheer silk of the surplice, its fabric going up in gauzy wisps.
“That’s gotta be a fire hazard,” Kayla said. But the blaze appeared contained to the ram, which was slowly becoming an ashen heap, save for some errant straw strands that flowed upward toward the sky.
The rest of the girls in red masks had migrated into the tent and pushed their way forward to the front, forming a barrier between the wheel and the throng. They were close enough that Kaylie could see the chiseled wends of the cheekbones sculpted onto the masks. The detail was masterful, as on the Venetian plague masks of yore, and a trick of light made their surfaces glow so they seemed be made of real living flesh.
The wheel, meanwhile, began moving faster so that Kayla’s stomach tossed and her vision became a blurred pinwheel of lysergic color.
“Shit,” she said, holding back a dry heave.
A voice shouted then, its stentorian timbre so resounding the girls mistook its first notes for another alpenhorn blast.
“Es ist geschehen!” the voice cried. “Das erste Mal in mehr als ein Jahrhundert! Ich spüre es in meinen Gebeinen! Er ist zurück und wieder bereit früchtbar zu werden!”
The crier punctuated his words by ringing a large hickory-handled bell, signaling the hour was at hand. His eyes were spiderwebbed with milky cataracts, diaphanous with glaucoma, the man clearly blind but somehow able to ken via some sense of second sight. He was wizened and hunched, reduced to gnomish, stooped dimensions and appeared to have survived well past his centenary.
Kayla turned to Greta, demanding answers, or at least a faithful translation of the hunchbacked codger’s words. Greta opened her mouth to oblige but was drowned out by a boom, this one louder than all before it.
Steam began to leak from the sides of the wheel, pouring with a hiss followed by a shrieking whistle. It fulminated upward first in tiny pigtail curls, then in rushing gusts like breath from the bowels of some monster with brimstone in its belly.
“I think something’s wrong with the ride,” Kayla said, searching again for that operator, some guy with a ponytail in a gravy-stained wifebeater nursing an unfiltered Camel. But there was still no sign of him, no evidence of any prime mover, unless the very heat of the earth was that mechanism.
Another blast, this one like pressure building from a subduction zone erupting upward in tectonic fury. All the girls went flying free of the wheel, launched into the air and soaring. Kayla moved like a missile directly into the prodigious beer belly of a reveler, knocking him flat. He lay on the ground, groaning once before going silent, unconscious or maybe even dead. His comrades sprang forward, lifted Kayla from atop their downed brother’s body, seizing her in their ham hock fists, restraining her arms while muttering Teutonic oaths of vengeance.
Greta was less fortunate, having flown until she struck a solid tentpole head-first. Immediately her skull fractured, her braincase releasing a compliment of reddish-grey meat onto the grass. She lay there, limp and lifeless, her formerly white bodice soaked purple with her lifeblood.
“Gret!” Kayla shouted, tears flowing down her eyes. She opened her mouth to scream, but one of the men stymied her cries with his sausage link fingers. Kayla bit the digits, but the skin was like rawhide, callused probably from years of hard farm labor. The man let loose a yelp like a dog with its foot caught in a beartrap before releasing his hand and switching his hold to beneath her armpits. He used all his prodigious force and weight to hoist her up before slamming her to the ground.
Two of his partners aided the man in his task, holding Kayla’s squirming body against the damp grass, splaying her limbs, spreading her legs and arms, holding them fast.
“No!”
For the first time since the start of festivities, there was silence, save for the grunts of the men struggling to hold the willful American girl in place. All the celebrants not engaged in pinning her there—male and female—gazed toward the center of the tent again.
Kayla felt her head lifted, another pair of stubby würstchen fingers gripping her beneath the jaw and forcing her to gaze with the others. Where once the wheel sat there was now only a crater, reeking of brimstone, tinged also with a dash of sulfur. Steam continued to pour from the hole, bluish volutes spilling from the still-simmering fumarole.
“What…” she got out no more words, voice gone, breath dedicated solely to inspirating one hyperventilated gasp after another into her burning lungs.
Slowly something began to emerge from the hole, a long shadow backlit by whatever fires burned within the earth.
Horns came first, followed by the head of a ram, the eyes not empty like those of the effigy or that scarecrow in the field, but a glowing depthless jade, living jeweled flame. Its nose was black, leathery, glistening with a greenish drip of mucus that quivered in a gossamer web as the thing snorted. By degrees it revealed the rest of its formidable body, until it stood on two legs, like a man, cloven hooves planted on the grass, churning the soil they clutched.
“What’s happening?” Kayla asked.
The men holding her remained silent, while one of the maidens in the red masks leaned down to her, close enough for Kayla to see the truth. That she had been correct in her perception, that it was no mask at all. “Our Father has found favor with you.” As the girl spoke, her forked tongue spilled from her mouth, leathery and serpentine and speaking a language old as time, a language that persuaded Kayla’s mind with sibilant caresses.
“You should feel honored, for he does not emerge often.”
The ram rippled with muscle, its definition as perfectly chiseled as that of a sculpture fit for an Olympian pediment. And yet it was alive, and not made of stone, its breath a pungent and feculent vapor that turned the tent into a sauna. Keratinous claws stretched from the long and spatulate fingers, which, despite the beast’s brutish aspect, were as graceful as the digits of a concert pianist.
It gave a snort, sending spouts of steaming air through its nostrils. Then, so soon after standing to show its full height, it fell on its belly, and began slithering forward, like an asp making its way through high grasses.
“No…” Kayla struggled, in vain, against the restraining arms.
“Do not fear his touch.”
The ram ceased to slither forward almost as soon as he had begun and lay still on his belly. Then his jaw opened, revealing something more like a proboscis than a tongue. It flailed, a massive and bulbous mace, its two halves bifurcating then rejoining into one uncircumcised member, a bludgeon of a membrum virile, a hellish propagator.
He wagged the tongue, waved it like the weapon it very much was, brandishing it like a knight errant’s spiked morningstar.
Then he pushed himself up from his belly onto all fours, ready to rut, to plant the seed carried in the strange tongue. The tongue grew longer, engorged with blood, speaking to her as if it had a mouth of its own, coaxing her to accept its lapping strokes that would make fertile. Its call was seconded by myriad other voices, the ram’s satyr-faced offspring assuring Kayla that even if she did not survive this mating, it would be worth it. For her child would be immortal, like these girls, forever preserved in the first flush of youth.
Kayla heeded the call, submitted to the beseeching numberless voices, spreading her legs wide. The men charged with holding her sensed the change come over her and relinquished their grips on her limbs.
She writhed, held out her hands, begging the long tongue to wait no longer and come unto her. It obeyed, danced like a cobra obeying a shinai’s charming song. It stopped just before the mons veneris, ready to enter and make fruitful, dancing around the seat of her love, engaging in this ancient and ritualistic act of precoital foreplay.
Kayla, however, could wait no longer, and tugged the tongue, forcing it into her body, arching her back to accommodate its whole length.
The ram, unready for the mortal girl’s insatiability, followed his tongue, moving on all fours, in heat but more enthralled by her estrual hunger than his own appetite.
“More!” she cried, “all of it!” pulling the tongue until she had it in her up the root, and she was gripping the back of the ram’s skull. She caressed his horns, lovingly running her fingers over their chitinous wends, losing herself in their curves sculpted perhaps by Satan himself.
The ram’s head was flush against her womb now, which was overrun with deep secretions that left the beast’s face a slathered and glistening mess, shellacked in love juices. And still Kayla pressed, harder and harder, until the ram, so imposing a demigod until now, began to writhe, squirm like a child drowning.
“He cannot breathe!” one of the waiting retinue of lederhosen-clad men shouted.
It was too late, however. Kayla had the thing’s head clamped fast to her vulva, pressed flush against her. She squeezed her thighs, clapping them to the sides of his skull like cymbals crashing at an orchestral piece’s crescendo, forgetting in her orgasmic throes that even this strange and subterranean creature needed air. Finally the ram’s body went limp as Kayla seized in the spasms of multiple contractions, her spine leaving the grass, back bowing as shudders passed through her and ecstasy pulsed in hot waves.
When she was finished and returned to her senses, she was left to face a strange sight: the many townsfolk standing in somber ranks, looking down at the carcass of their ancient deity. His tongue, so deeply planted in Kayla moments before, had retracted, furled back onto itself into a flaccid roll that now lolled from the dead beast’s mouth.
She suspected, by the waking of some heretofore-dull sixth sense, that he had died before the seed could pass from him to her.
As to how now the satyr-faced sistren would get new siblings—how this nameless town would avoid becoming barren of further supernatural offspring—an answer came in short order.
The old man with his town crier’s bell smiled, showing teeth the color of seed corn, dying lobes of brown and red. He rang his hickory-handled bell again and shouted, “Es ist geschehen. Die Verwandlung. Der König ist tot! Es lebe jetzt die Königin!”
Kayla felt it, pangs worse even than the throes of the childbirth that had been promised to her by that strange tongue then taken away by the same. Her skull hurt, throbbed and raged with a pain beyond the worst migraine. Then her fingers burned, a piercing agony to go with the dull pounding in her skull, something like sharpened bamboo shoots being forced into her nailbeds.
By degrees, then, the horns began to sprout from her skull, contorting into intricately spiraling twists. She looked down at her hands to see her fingers replaced by claws, sharp and shining black.
And the people, so lately mourning for their fallen god, now rejoiced for the birth of their new and risen goddess.
She stood, sprouting tall enough now that her horns grazed the tent roof and her depthless jade eyes were even with the tops of the tentpoles. Rows of breasts hung from her chest and belly, hanging pendulous, bereft of milk now but one day to swell with drink for young sucklings.
She stepped over the carcass of her conquered male lover and toward the warmth of the waiting crater, the pustule on the face of the earth suppurating with warm poisons. Crouching down, she gazed into the black abyss where she would dwell in warm brumation until the day when one riding the wheel won her favor. It could happen next season when the ceremony was held again, or it might happen a millennium from now. One could not rush these things. But when she found one worthy she would she emerge from her hollow in the hot ground and select him to honor her with his seed.
Some faint glimmer of Kayla, hidden deep inside the beast she had become, could only grin at the irony, which was meet and just in its way.
It was time for the demoness to dwell in her rightful place in the earth, time also for men to ride the wheel in hopes of earning Her favor.
Want another gripping story by Joseph Hirsch? Read “Red in Tooth” from Horrific Scribes, June 2025 and “Mama Bear” in Horrific Scribes, August 2025.