Supernatural Noir

You wouldn’t think something so simple could be so scary.

She passes beside the dispenser for the rings. A dull one sits in the socket at the end of the arm, though no one has filled the hopper. In the moment it takes for January to reclaim her composure, she cranes her head to see around the bigger horses rising and falling between her and the outside. She hopes for a glimpse of Martin or Jeff, but what she sees confounds her.

The carousel shelter is full of people once again. And not EMTs. These are people dressed as if they stepped out of the illustrations in a book on the sinking of the Titanic. The women wear tunics over long skirts, or shirtwaist blouses that give them a pigeon-breasted look. The men wear suits of gray and black woolen, cut curiously large. The children run in pinafores or short pants, the girls’ hair in ringlets and the boys’ parted razor straight and slicked. It looks like something out of a sepia-toned print.

The gray filly tosses her wire-slick mane and whi

She tosses her head, fighting the bit. January finds herself rocking in time to the ragged gait, the muscle memory from long-ago riding lessons finding her balance and telling her to relax her arms and unclench her hands.

The filly calms, her ears flicked back as if listening. Alongside the carousel, a tall, rangy teenaged girl in a gray dress and high-heeled ankle boots runs skipping until January hears somebody call after her, chastising her as a hoyden and naming her—January.

“January?” January says, thinking suddenly, this is all a dream, I don’t care how detailed. But the filly’s ears flick, and the warm, grassy scent of her hide floats up as she shakes out her streaked silver mane. The filly bends her neck into an arc tight as a bow, lipping January’s knee, and January says the name again.

This time, the filly tosses her head yes.

“We’re namesakes.”

Another yes.

The animals all seem alive now. She can hear their noises, the trumpet of the elephant, the whi

The filly’s staggering fills her with remorse, though the truncated foreleg works as if it were really ru

A filly who does just that thing when they pass the dispenser again, snapping sideways with rolling eyes as if she means to grab the ring in her teeth. The pole restrains her, and she doesn’t come within three feet.

They pass the girl again, and this time January sees the man behind her. Hand in his pocket, fist clenched around something. The girl turns, a jerk of her head as startled as if somebody touched her shoulder, as if the pressure of his eyes hurt. She turns toward the doors, moving away, and like a viewer at a horror movie January wants to call after her—don’t go outside, don’t go through the door.

But the carousel carries her away again, and now she can’t make out the sound of the Wurlitzer at all. It’s lost under the cries of the animals, unless it’s become them.

The next time she comes around, she stands in the stirrups—wincing at her ankle, at the filly’s uneven gait—and reaches for the base-metal ring. Her fingers hook; she feels the tug; the ring pops free.

If she hoped it would be that simple, she is quickly disappointed. If anything, the carousel accelerates, a faster churning now. The neighs grow wilder. Something grazes her knee—a snap from the gray mare impaled beside her crippled filly. The filly snakes her head around and snaps back, and January leans as far to the outside as the stirrups allow.

Now there’s competition. Figures shimmer into the saddles of the elephant and the other ponies, but only on the inside ring. The carousel opposes her, her and the other January. Other fingers grope for rings, snap up one and then another, but they are all dull.

The cacophony persists. The carousel spins faster. The world wheels madly on.

From outside, she hears a single gunshot. Beneath her, the other January shies—but none of the people in the carousel shelter seem to hear.

She sets herself this time, leans out, her left foot solidly in the stirrup though her twisted ankle twinges. She braces with her right foot, aware that she’s reaching out too far and the mare might snap again. But there’s a brass ring in that dispenser somewhere, and if she doesn’t collect it, she doesn’t know how she’s getting off this carousel alive. The faces alongside are a blur now, the stained-glass seasons a colorful smear.

As they come up on the dispenser, she reaches over the filly’s neck. The cold ring brushes her fingertips. She snatches, sees bright metal, grabs again. Something sharp stabs up her right leg, pain like slamming it in a car door. It hauls, pulling her off balance, but she palms the ring she has already and her fingers hook the glittering circle of the next.

Momentum carries her forward, the ring snagged on her fingertips begi

January closes her hand before she loses the brass ring.

Silence falls, so sudden and hollow it makes her wonder briefly if she has been struck deaf. The carousel glides, slowing now.

——

Once the human element—motive, culpability, perception—enters the equation, it’s no longer so simple to trace a sequence of causality, to say—mechanistically, with confidence—here is the inciting event, and here is what caused that, and here is what caused that again.

We will never know why the finger pulls the trigger, even when it is our finger that tightens on yielding metal, our hand that jumps with the buck of the gun. We can speculate, but will never know.

It’s possible that her death was inevitable from the moment he followed her—tall and plain and smarting—from the shelter of the carousel, into the night where she died.

——

January limps away from the filly, the brass ring clutched in her palm. She has to twist and sidle to move between the animals, frozen now in contortions with reaching claws and gnashing teeth. Blood wells thick and artificial looking down her calf through the torn tights, skidding and squishing inside her Mary Jane.

Martin is waiting to catch her when she falls off the platform. The EMTs are there, gathered around Jeff, who is propped on his elbows telling jokes. The carousel operator sits beside him, head down, her hands pressed over her eyes.

Martin says to the EMTs, “I don’t know what happened. We were helping to clean up after the party, and the thing just turned itself on.”

January sits down gratefully on the plastic chair they bring. She extends her leg through the tear in her skirt. The EMT looks at it and clucks. “You’ll want to come to the ER.”

“Are the police on the way?”

The EMT nods, her blond ponytail bobbing. “They should be here in five minutes. Do you want to file a complaint?”

The carousel operator moans.

“No,” January says. “I want to report a murder. From about a hundred years ago.”