The Twisted Carousel
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Doctor, Doctor
has recently floated plans of leaving her position as an American literature professor to pursue her love of music. That by itself wouldn’t really be news worthy of this esteemed periodical were it not for speculation that her new-found interest in rock and roll seems to stem from being possessed by the ghost of a British rocker. We remain quite skeptical. In fact, we categorically deny this claim. However, we are forced to admit that her cover of Simply Irresistible is really quite good.Dr. Penry writes Enchanted in America.
American Ninja
describes herself as being a ninja emeritus. Nice work if you can get it. That emeritus part makes it particularly attractive; however, there is growing concern that Jenn may pick up her sai and throwing stars once more to enact venegeance on those who have sparked her ire.Violence is never the answer. Maybe it’s time for an intervention? Perhaps some counseling? Maybe grab a Snickers and get over that hangry feeling.
Jenn writes Zuko’s Musings.
Scoop Reports: The Twisted Carousel
Calling Wild Horse, Texas a town is a bit of an overstatement. There might be forty people living in this area, but they’re scattered across the miles like stars on a desolate night. In my profession, the privilege to cherry-pick my destinations is a luxury I can’t afford. This time the story led to a humble ranch nestled in the unforgiving landscape one finds off I-10 in West Texas.
“You Scoop?” an old man in denim overalls asked as I walked up to the front porch.
“That’s me!” I replied with an enthusiasm I didn’t feel.
He chewed contemplatively at his bottom lip before yielding a nod. Then, opened the screen door with an aged creak and motioned me inside. “Well,” he said, his voice as dry as the Texas heat, “might as well come on in, I reckon.”
“On the phone you mentioned you had a haunted toy?”
“In here,” he said and walked into the next room.
I followed him through the doorway and stepped into a room frozen in the 1960’s. The kitchen table stood like a monument to meals past. Its Formica top worn, but resilient. Four chairs, their vinyl covers a testament to an era of practicality over opulence, huddled around it. The place was a memorial to modest feasts and quiet evenings.
In the center of the table, sat a toy carousel. I’m no father, and the bachelor’s blood runs thick in my veins, but even I could tell how a plaything of this caliber could fill a child with a sense of wonder.
It was a miniature world of painted horses and gilded poles, frozen in an endless chase. Each equine figure, finely etched with a sense of life only made possible by the craftsman’s passion. The colors, once vibrant, had faded into a nostalgic patina, a silent reminder of the countless tiny hands that had spun it into life.
“Bought it for my grandson. Got it at an estate sale just down the road. Family moved out here from Iowa. They’d barely finished unpacking when all of’em ended up dying. Big news ‘round these parts. Gas leak. Entire family passed in their sleep. Sad business.”
“And you think the carousel somehow caused that?”
The man gave me an exasperated look. “No. A gas leak caused that.”
“My apologies. Can you tell me exactly why you think this toy is haunted?”
“I gave it to my grandson for his birthday. Just turned four. That same night, he woke up screaming from a nightmare. Not a big deal. Kids have bad dreams, but he started having them all the time. Even started dozing off in the middle of the day and then wakin’ up in tears.
“The part that tipped his parents off that it was the carousel was because one night they were in his bedroom trying to get him to calm down and go to sleep when the thing turns on all by itself. Starts playing this spooky music and spinnin’ faster and faster. And as the parents watch the little horses, zebras, lions, and all those animals… they changed. Don’t quite know how to describe it, but they turned into monsters.”
“What did your grandson do while this was happening?”
“That’s the thing. He was in… oh, I don’t know. Like a trance. He was staring straight at that thing, but he wasn’t really there anymore. Know what I mean?” He pushed back from the table and said, “I won’t even keep it in the house with me. I brought it up here because you were coming, but I want no part of it.”
“Because of what happened to your grandson?”
“No. On the cause of what happened to me.”
I looked at the carousel sitting on the table. On its surface, it was nothing more than an ordinary plaything, but the pallor on the man’s face spoke of the horrors it had inflicted upon him. “Can you tell me about it?”
“The parents gave the carousel back to me because the boy was just too scared. That first night I left it in here on the table and went to bed like normal. At 3:27 in the morning, I woke up. Music was playing. My bedroom door was open, and I could see all the way to the kitchen table where that thing sat. It was spinning around like someone had wound it up, but ain’t no one lives here but me. My missus died fourteen years back.
“I tried to get up. Get out of bed and shut that thing off. Throw it out of the house or something to get it to be quiet, but I couldn’t move. Then, I heard this distorted laughter. A child’s laughter, but twisted and vulgar sounding in some way.
“As I laid there in bed, unable to move, I saw the elongated shadow of my grandson. Light from the clock on the oven cast him in hues of green. I watched that shadow get closer and closer. The laughter became increasingly manic. Until finally, he stood silhouetted in the door to my bedroom. He was just a three-foot-tall shadow standing there, but I knew it couldn’t be him. Not really. The voice was his though. And it said, ‘Come play with me, papaw. Come play.’
“Just then, a car passed by and its headlights flooded the room with light. In those pale beams I saw a nightmare made to look like my little Timmy. It was some dead thing. The flesh had turned sallow, and a maggot crawled around one of the sunken eyes. As the car navigated the turn in the road, that creature—that thing—laughed and repeated, ‘Come play!’ but this time it sounded like a demand.
“I tried to jump up. I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t move and then just as suddenly as it had started, the music stopped… and I was free again. Well, I don’t mind telling you that I grabbed that thing up and I’ve kept it in the shed out back until you arrived just now. I tried keeping it in the barn, but it spooked the animals too much.”
“And you want me to write about this?”
“You can write about it if you like, but I’ve heard that you can help a fella deal with problems like this. That’s true, ain’t it?”
“I’ve helped people with similar issues in the past. And my experiences have taught me it’s best if these items are quarantined. I know a person who can handle this for us.”
He pushed the carousel toward me. “Good. Take it. Get it away from me. I never want to see it again!”
The carousel tried to lull me to sleep several times on my trip across Texas. Finally, I’d had enough of the random melodies it would start playing at sporadic times so I stopped into Walmart and picked up an insulated cooler and several of the heaviest blankets I could find.
Once I was back at the van, I wrapped the carousel in the blankets and placed it inside the cooler. Then, I shoved all remaining blankets around the edges to help further dampen the sound. After that was done, I closed the lid, and locked the latch. The rest of the drive was nice and quiet.
I shifted the van into park and picked up my cell phone. Bessie’s number was on speed dial. She answered after the first ring. “I’m stopping by.”
“Callin’ from U-Save, aren’t ya? Well, I’ll be here,” she said and hung up. No goodbye. Same old Bessie. She knew my habits too well, but I wasn’t going to let that stop from enjoying a pepperoni roll.
The microwave dinged. I pushed the handle in and the door popped open releasing a tantalizing draft of heat infused with the seductive scent of instant gratification. The only thing that stood between me and that melted pepper jack was the business of paying for the thing.
I placed it on the counter and asked the cashier to give me a carton of Pall Malls. Personally, I can’t stand the coffin nails, but for my purposes they were more than just tobacco sticks; they’re gilded currency, a key that would grease the gears of my next transaction.
She was already on the front porch when my tires crunched into the gravel parking lot of the family store. The red glow of her cigarette would flare to life with each inhale. It made her silhouette stand out in the gathering gloom of twilight.
I took in the changes they’d made. A fresh coat of paint, a few new plants, and the big Maple had been removed. That gave them a beautiful view of the Cherry River in the background.
The changes were subtle, but if you knew where to look and how to understand what you were seeing, you could tell that there was money in this business. They were doing well. The shop’s bay windows were lined with time-worn relics on proud display. Each piece had a story etched into its bones and each window had little alarm sensors placed in its frame. Looking deeper into the store you could see the faint glow of red LED lights showing where cameras had been set up, but those were the ones they wanted you to see.
Every genuine antique shop has its secrets, and this one was no different. The beautiful façade of nostalgia and antiquity was merely a mask—a carefully woven tapestry to shroud the shop’s true nature. Behind the polished mahogany counters and tall shelves laden with relics of the past, was the store’s real business. A clandestine repository for objects touched by the malignant whisper of the supernatural.
Cursed artifacts, they were the stuff of legends and horror stories, had their final stop here. The store was a purgatory of sorts, a final destination for items ensnared by dark magic and ill omens.
For this, she waited my coming.
“And then, he gave it to me,” I said as I finished my story and leaned back into the plain wooden chair. The heat from the potbelly stove felt good, but her coffee felt better. She liked to keep the stove burning all the time regardless of the season. Publicly, she said it was so her coffee would stay warm, but those of us her knew her understood it was because the heat helped ease the pain of the swollen joints from the arthritis that twisted her fingers.
Bessie looked at the still closed cooler I’d laid out on her countertop but didn’t touch it. “Well, I guess we can find room for it downstairs.”
She nodded to a mountain of a man who had been quieting sitting in a chair next to a padlocked door. The man leaned a small baseball bat against the wall so he could stand up and fish through his pockets. After a moment, he produced a key and unlocked the door.
She looked back over her shoulder at me and said, “You bring payment?”
“Do I still get the family discount?” I asked as I held up the carton of Pall Malls.
“Eh, it’ll do,” she said with a grunt and then opened the door. I followed her into the residential part of the house.
I hadn’t been back here since I was nine years old. All of the furniture right down to the massive RCA console TV were exactly as I remembered them. I expected Buck to come running through here at any moment waving a cap pistol or swinging a stick through the air as if it were a sword.
I followed her through the living room and into her dining room. At least that had been the original purpose of this room. For Bessie, it was a smoking room and it showed. Decades of accumulated cigarette smoke had stained the walls a faint yellow. Thankfully, she didn’t pause, but kept walking through her small kitchen and finally to the back stairs.
The stairs were wooden and corkscrewed around at the halfway point. They ended at a heavy wooden door that separated the cellar from the rest of the house. She unlocked it and swung it outward revealing yet another door. This one was solid iron. It opened to a square room whose walls were lined with shelves and cases. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of arcane objects filled these shelves.
I wondered where she’d place the carousel, but she ignored all of the items and took me deeper into the cellar than I’d ever been. We stepped through a low door and into a small room. The room contained only a single object. A massive chest of drawers.
She pulled a key from somewhere in the folds of her blouse and unlocked one of the doors on the front of the chest to reveal several drawers of varying sizes. The inside of the door was decorated with hundreds of glyphs. Each drawer had a symbol carved into the dark wood and then inlaid with gold. She fiddled with her ring of keys and unlocked one of the larger drawers and opened it. “Set the carousel inside.”
I opened the cooler, pulled out the blankets, and finally unwrapped the carousel. Once it was free, I began to hand it to her, but she stopped me with a glare. “Sammy, you know I don’t touch those things,” she snapped.
“Sorry, Bessie.” I felt myself blushing like a small child. “I forgot the rules.”
“Well, you best remember. Forgetting is dangerous.”
I nodded and stepped up next to her. The smell of cigarette smoke was overwhelming. I held my breath and placed the carousel into the drawer. She pushed the drawer closed and locked it and then closed and locked the cabinet door.
“Is Buck around?” I asked as she locked the heavy wooden door to the cellar.
“Be back in a week. He’s out in Kentucky. A family is getting ready to sell their property and asked him to sift through years of clutter stashed in the barn. It’s human nature, that itch to turn a fast buck on something that’s worthless.”
“But you guys seem to be doing well enough. It keeps the lights on for ya.”
“Does it though?” Bessie asked. She gave me a wink and nodded to the cellar door. “Does it?”
Letters to the Editor
This section of the newsletter is devoted to reports that have been submitted by our massive army of Citizen Journalists. Not content to allow society to continue its heedless descent into anarchy, these eagle-eyed observers have chosen to take a stand and document the strange, the wondrous, and the nefarious forces who work against order. This is the section where I share their words with you.
Feline Revenge Plots
writes:My next door neighbor took my cat. He told me without actually telling me. You know how psychopaths like to brag. How they like to dig deeper into your wounds.
I think he took Obi Wan Kenobi (the name of my cat) because his wife is jealous of me and my extraordinarily beautiful teenage daughter. We both turned down her husband. Gross. No wonder she has major depressive disorder and sever social anxiety.
How can I get revenge without getting caught?
Dear God, help me.
💛💚💜❤🧡💙
So, I prayed and meditated and guess who I got a vision from? My cat! my buddy, my inspiration and my the son of BB. He was basically my grandson in feline form.
His spirit came to teach me how to get revenge on the spirit level.
Did you know that all disease is created on a spiritual level? It manifests through the psyche or soul which is our mind and seeps into the body like water being absorbed by a sponge.
From the Editor:
Don’t mess with cats. That animal might be small and helpless, but their owners hold grudges and sometimes act upon them.
Where’s Daddy?
writes: So I’m driving home on 35. I stop at Lenson’s for gas. I get back on 35, hit my exit, take the side road to home where Angelica and my kids live. Just as I pull in I see a funny light in the sky. After, it’s a blank.
I’m going again; tell me if I forget anything. I’m driving home, I hit my exit, take the side road-
What do you mean, gas? I didn’t-
Well, anyway, I get home to Angelica and my kid.
What?
I only have one. I was there, I should know. I-
Oh no.
Again. Driving. 35. Home. Angelica.
What kids?
I never-
Angie who?
Oh no.
Where-
flash
From the Editor:
Is a person still considered an absentee father if they were abducted?
Regardless, if you happen to know Angie you might want to check on her and the kids to make sure they are all right. Maybe give them a couple of bucks to help pay the rent as it doesn’t seem like Michael’s going to make it back in time.
Good luck to you, Michael, and we hope you’re able to find your way home from wherever you now happen to be.
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Oh, man, now I totally want to know what happens next!
The carousel reminds me of a talking grill toy I had when I was a kid. Not because it was cursed, but because it wouldn't shut the fuck up and there were attempts to get rid of the sound by burying it in blankets.