Text Calliope - A Story

[Philip Ellwell 5,487]

Just a short story I wrote. Rated PG-13 for scary junk, and a minor blood mention

 

This story is based on this image:

 

 

It was the calliope that brought him up to the attic in the first place: the loud, racy, slightly off center calliope, like the time Sissy took him to the state fair..only this time it came from the attic, a place he was expressely forbidden to enter. 
He held Winnie close, the old bear dustily trailed a leg behind him, as he went up the steps to the loud noise, the calliope's rusty siren call making him move against his fear, as he pushed open the large door, unlocked despite Sissy locking it carefully before. 
Giggling echoing in the room as he pushed inside, and coloured lights flashed across the walls and junk gathered within, the mirror the cause, it seemed, the large mirror Daddy said had come from a carnival's funhouse, the mirror he was told never to touch or see. 
The noise grew, and the calliope beckond him, a rattling of rollar coaster wheels, neighing of horses, and the smell of sweat and sawdust drawing him to the mirrors cold surface, fingers reaching out to touch the smooth glass, behind which the carnival frolicked under lightning filled skies. 
The clown came too fast for him to back away, and a rough hand smeared with grease paint and blood reached for him, as he back away from the mirror in shock, the calliope screaming at an increased rate, screams coming from behind the glass, the clown oozing blood as it smiled. 
He ran, he ran and never looked back, as the calliope jangled into a blood chilling halt.


Daddy spanked him for breaking the mirror, and Mommy fussed over him for imagined wounds from the blood on the glass shards. It wasn't his.

He found out whose it was that night, as his window opened on a gentle breeze scented with grease and horse manure, and the laughter of children and the screaming of adults wafted on the wind, the calliope's mournful cry flickering on the night's darkness...