Whispers Beneath the Ferris Wheel
The gates were welded shut with winter rust when I returned to the abandoned fairground, a place that once drank laughter and fed it back in echoes. I brought only a notebook and a lighter, nothing to illuminate what the dark promised, only enough to keep my nerves from splintering. The air tasted like old sugar and rain. The ferris wheel, skeletal and patient, leaned like a tired witness over a lawn of broken booths. It was here, in the hush between the carnival's last heartbeat and the first snowfall, that the whispers began to murmur through the night.
At first they came as a draft, a phrase that curled around the back of my neck and settled in the bone. I thought it was the wind; I was wrong. The carousel horses shifted even though the wind did not. The lights that should have been dead flickered with a courtesy that felt almost human. Footsteps echoed not from the ground but from the air, and each step invited me to lean closer to the truth I did not want to see.
“Stay a moment longer,” a voice breathed, soft as frost, “we kept your name in the margins of the tickets.”
I followed the whispers toward the center ring, where the ground wore a map of old footprints and rain. A speaker, torn from some forgotten booth, coughed to life with a sigh that sounded like a child’s gasp. The sound pulled at the edges of my memory—five birthday candles, a whistle, a scream that was laughter once and not anymore. The whispers braided themselves around me, tugging at my sleeves, asking me to listen, to remember what I had chosen to forget.
- rusted iron that rings with the soft clink of distant bells
- a ticket stub dated to a year that never existed
- whorled shadows that pretend to be crowds
- the scent of cotton candy and rain that never dries
- a promise spoken in a chorus of hushed voices: stay
When dawn finally cracked the horizon, I stepped through the gate that I had closed behind me in fear years ago. The fairground exhaled, and the whispers gave way to a cold, patient silence. I walked away with a story that fits on two sides of a page and a weight that remains in the pit of my stomach. Somewhere behind me, the Ferris wheel exhaled again, and I knew that the haunt hadn’t been conquered—it had only learned my name.