The Midnight Carousel
Episode 3: Wooden Horses
Clinging desperately to the brass pole, Julian looked around the rotating circle and realized with mounting terror that he was no longer alone on the platform. Every wooden horse now carried a rider—not living people, but skeletal figures draped in tattered nineteenth-century carnival garments, their flesh dried and grey like old parchment. They sat rigidly in their saddles, their skeletal fingers locked around the reins as the horses rose and fell in mechanical synchronization. The figure on the horse directly across from him turned its skull slowly toward him, revealing hollow eye sockets and a jagged, stitched smile across its jawbone.
The Spinning Platform
Julian tried to leap off the moving platform, but as his feet left the wooden boards, an invisible barrier of compressed air shoved him backward onto the saddle of the white stallion. The safety strap buckled itself around his waist automatically, locking him securely to the horse as the carousel accelerated to a terrifying velocity. The calliope music reached a deafening crescendo, screaming like a dying jet engine while the wooden horses began to shed their painted wood in favor of real, rotting flesh and coarse horsehair. The scent of popcorn and cotton candy dissolved into the cloying, sickening stench of an open mass grave.