Midnight Carousel

The family had lived in that house for just a few months, leaving the youngest daughter behind as they disappeared into the wind.

Her father had bought the rotted townhouse with grand ideas of restoration in the hopes that his wife would finally have a place to dream and dally all day.

Her mother, much beloved but terribly whimsical and imaginative, loved the house at first sight, coaxing her husband wordlessly into purchasing it.

She and her brother were quite impressed with their mother’s taste and their father’s gumption. She would drag her older brother out to play in the gardens and the spacious lawn they had grown familiar to.

Perhaps she should not have.

The house itself was quiet. Nothing amiss or unordinary to speak of.

The barn, however, was a different story.

It was on its last legs, serving more as storage than shelter. It was smaller than most, almost the size of a shack with house-sized doors rather than grand swinging ones. Now mostly unusable, it acted as an attic, a resting place for old trinkets and tools that had long since rusted beyond use.

She loved the barn and would visit it often with her brother. They would create stories about the dust-ridden antiques they found on the haphazard wooden shelves.

One particular day, the daughter made a trip to the barn on her lonesome, far too early in the morning for anyone in the house to be awake.

She sifted through her favorite “toys,” as they had deemed them, before settling on something new, something she had not seen before.

It was a miniature carousel, and despite how worn down it appeared, the young girl discovered that it still functioned if she twisted a knob on its underside.

For a while, she sat in wonder at how elegantly the music sounded coming from something this ancient. It was as if a talented composer had written a lullaby just for her, and she was hearing it now from this tattered, delicate mechanism.

Past the dancing horses, she found herself enamored by the painting that stretched across the inside walls of the carousel. She found what she assumed was the beginning and interpreted the story as she twisted the merry-go-round in her hands.

A boy was gazing longingly up at the sun, only to be approached by a strange figure. The mysterious person took the boy under his wing, and they shared many days and nights together. One night, the figure disappeared, leaving the boy alone. Even still, he had a smile on his face, as if he had lost an old friend.

As if unconsciously tethered to the enchanting roundabout, she hid the carousel from her elder brother, sneaking away to spend time alone with it, feeling comforted by its presence.

Unbeknownst to her, the house that her father had spent months refurbishing had begun to change, and not because he was the one to change it. While she nurtured her obsession, she only existed in a half-space. At night, she would wander around the halls, dancing down the staircases, and then in the morning, the steps would be in splinters. She would hum in the kitchen, moonlight illuminating her cup of midnight tea, and then in the morning, her father would find broken glass littering the floor. She would wait in the attic, still and silent, and then in the morning, they would not be able to find her until she announced her presence at breakfast.

It was an endless cycle, one that her father and his observant eye were shrill enough not to overlook.

Concerned for her well-being, he followed her one night as she tended to the garden, carousel nestled into the grass beside her. While she was unaware, it was watching. It saw her father, and her father saw it, and then nobody saw her father again.

Still, she twisted the dial at the bottom of the carousel and lost herself in the music.

Even as her father’s body fell to the ground just beyond the porch.

Even as she mindlessly rose from the ground and stood hovering over his warm corpse.

Even as she dragged him with impossible strength by one foot into the forest beyond their house.

Even as she walked into their lake, dipping below its surface only to rise once more with nothing in tow.

Even as she drifted back to the house, back to the garden, back to where the carousel was still playing music for her, awaiting her return as she settled once more on the dirt, picking away at weeds.

Her mother awoke the following day to an empty bed. The woman flitted about the house, shouting for her husband, only to find her daughter waiting in the foyer instead, shivering something dreadful and covered in dirt from head to toe.

Her mother’s imperviousness, however, led her to believe that her daughter had been sleepwalking again, a common occurrence over the past couple of weeks.

Frantic over her father’s disappearance, her mother fled into town to ask about his whereabouts, leaving her in the care of her brother.

Her brother, most intelligent for his age and incredibly attuned to her every move, had already gathered something was amiss in this awful house of theirs. He would be a fool not to see it.

She was none the wiser, everything was always foggy and hazy these days. Fearful about her memory loss, she deigned never to speak a word of it to anyone. Feeling incompetent and on the verge of collapse, she turned to the one thing that had brought her solace.

Her brother kept a watchful eye on her until their mother returned, hair frizzled and eyes focused on somewhere else, somewhere they could not see or reach.

It was under the glow of the moon, after her brother had passed out from fatigue, that she reached for the carousel now tucked beneath her bed. The music played and she fell asleep, as well.

Except it was awake, and it wanted to play.

This time, it compelled her to go to another corner of their estate, underneath a particularly large Cypress tree.

This time, it brought a rope.

When she came to her senses, she was once again standing in the center of the foyer, feet muddy and hands rubbed raw.

Her brother found her like that, frightened at the rashes on her hands.

When she found out her mother was gone, too, she wept in her brother’s arms, feeling weak and heartbroken.

Alone, she never left her brother’s side. They stayed like this for a few days, confused and afraid but safe in each other’s company.

It was then that she decided to show her brother the carousel.

But as was the case with her parents, the boy only saw it, with its mangled arms draped over her frail body. He stared as it stared back, and then he was gone just like the others, and all she could do was stare with wild eyes, truly seeing for the first time.

But this was not the first. It was the final time, and the comfort she had become accustomed to turned into something else. She heard a voice ask if she wanted to stay safe forever, safe with it, and she didn’t have the heart in her to disagree, not when she thought it had been protecting her all of this time.

Then it took her brother’s body in her hands and dragged him to the third and final corner of their now desolate land, laying him to rest in a field of white lilies. It gazed, transfixed on his body, and smiled with her lips, wide and unnerving.

When they found the girl, she was standing alone in the foyer, smiling at nothing in particular.

Once upon a time, a boy was protected by the light.

One day, a figure approached the boy and persuaded him to visit it at night. It was lonely, you see, and the night was the only time it could make friends.

Confused but persuaded, they spent most of their evenings together. As their connection grew, the entity dragged him farther and farther from the light until even during the day, it was dark in the boy’s mind. The boy, ever naïve and foolish, accepted this strange individual, losing himself to his own childlike innocence.

The demon nestled itself inside the boy, leaving him in eternal darkness, now free to walk the earth in the daylight once again.