Carousel of the Damned

The midway appeared on the edge of town like a whisper dragged along a winter wind. Lights flickered with frost, candy wrappers rustled in the gutters, and the banner that announced “Adventure” trembled as if it knew a secret it couldn’t tell aloud. I didn’t intend to stay; I intended to leave, as one leaves a fever dream. But the carousel—gaunt, carved with a lover’s devotion and a child’s terror—turned its head toward me and invited me in with a creak I mistook for a sigh.

The horses wore eyes too bright and too knowing, their painted smiles a little too wide. Each hoof-tap on the wooden platform sounded like a heartbeat far too loud for a person to bear, and the organ music that followed was a sigh that remembered every wound the body has ever kept hidden. As I found my place on a mare whose saddle was slick with old rain, the world narrowed to a circle of light and shadow, to the iron coil of the chain that held me, and to the sudden, almost polite tremor of the air when the ride began.

“Every ride lasts longer than you think,” the ticket booth whispered, though no one stood there to whisper back. “And every turn steals a memory you never wanted to forget.”

Round after round, the painted world peeled back its varnish and bared the truth beneath. The carousel did not spin you to a place, but through the places you had already left behind: a kitchen where a mother cried softly for a lost child, a classroom where a teacher’s chalk drew lines never meant to be followed, a street where a friend’s last wave froze in time. The horses moved with patient malice, and each glance toward the center of the ring showed a future you had hoped would never arrive—or something worse: your past, remade in the shape of a warning you could not ignore.

Rituals of the Ride

• Do not blink when the music swells; vision grows too eager to run away.
• Do not call out your real name; the carousel has a habit of naming you after your oldest fear.
• Hold tight to nothing but breath; the breath becomes a tether you cannot sever.
• The mirror at the center shows futures, not faces; what you see will require a choice you never planned to make.

When the final chord of the organ faded, the horses slowed as if bowing to a king who would never rise from his throne. I stepped off with legs made of cord and a memory stitched into my skin, a memory that felt almost like a warning. The carnival was already folding itself into the fog, its laughter dragging along the ground like a hungry dog. I knew then that I could never return to the town as it was—nor could the town ever truly forget the night the Damned Carousel learned my name.