The Carousel at Umber Street

The night the power went out, I was in the middle of a dream where I was drowning in honey. My eyes snapped open to the hum of the city cutting its breath, and the digital clock on my nightstand was a black void. It was 3:33 AM. That’s when the baby started crying.

Our building, the crumbling brownstone on Umber Street, housed four families. The ground floor was a laundromat that smelled of bleach and despair, the second floor was the Alvarados, a gentle family with a newborn, and the fourth floor was Mr. Greeves, a retired watchmaker who never spoke. We lived on the third floor, my mother and I, in a cramped two-bedroom that always smelled of her lavender sachets and my old books.

That night, the crying wasn’t the usual hungry or wet kind. It was a jagged, rhythmic wail that seemed to pulse with the flicker of the streetlights outside. My mother, a light sleeper, was already at my door, her face pale under the glow of a flashlight. ‘It’s the Alvarado baby,’ she whispered, but her eyes said something else. She clutched an old music box, a carousel that played a tinny, off-key lullaby. She’d had it since I was a child, and it only ever played when she was anxious.

The crying stopped abruptly. In the silence that followed, we heard a new sound: the slow, dragging scrape of footsteps on the floor above. But no one lived above us except the water tank on the roof. My mother’s grip tightened on the music box. ‘It’s not him,’ she said, meaning my friend Elias, who had jumped from this very rooftop three years ago. I had found his glasses, neatly folded, on the ledge. I never saw his face. The city had done a good job of cleaning up the body before I got home.

The footsteps moved to the ceiling above my bedroom, then stopped directly over my desk. A child’s voice, soft and muffled, began to hum the same lullaby the music box played. My mother gasped and dropped the box. It clattered to the floor, the lid sprang open, and the tiny wooden carousel horses began to rotate, their painted eyes glinting in the flashlight beam.

I picked it up. The horses were moving in reverse. A piece of paper was folded where the cylinder should be. It was a receipt from a flower shop dated yesterday, and on the back, in my deceased friend’s handwriting, was a single line: ‘The carousel never stops for the ones it loves.’

My mother began to weep silently. She confessed, her voice cracking, that she had played that music box to Elias when he was a baby, when she babysat him thirty years ago. She blamed herself for his death, for not seeing the signs. But now, she said, the music box was ringing like a telephone. It always did when someone was about to die.

A thud from the floor above shook the dust from the ceiling. The humming stopped. A baby’s cry resumed, but this time it was coming from inside the music box. The tiny horses were galloping, their wooden hooves clicking against the metal base. The lullaby had slowed to a dirge.

I looked at the window. Through the grime, I could see the silhouette of a figure on the rooftop across the street, arms outstretched, as if standing on a ledge. I knew that posture. It was the same one Elias had been in, according to witnesses. The figure turned its head, and in the dim light, I saw my own face.

My mother screamed. The music box snapped shut, and the sound of a body hitting the pavement echoed from outside. My mother fainted. I stood there, my breath fogging the window, watching the figure vanish as a police siren wailed in the distance.

I never told her what I saw. I buried the music box in the basement, beneath a pile of old tires. But tonight, as I write this, I can hear the faint tinkling of a carousel, and the soft padding of footsteps on the ceiling above my new apartment. The baby is crying again. And I know, with a dread that curdles my blood, that some lullabies are not meant to soothe. They are meant to summon.

The carousel at Umber Street has found a new home. And it is waiting for its next rider.