The Ferris Wheel Ticket

My name is Alice, and this is the story of how the carnival came to town and never really left. My partner, Sam, and I had been together since we were sixteen, childhood sweethearts who grew up in the same sleepy suburb of Oakhaven. We married young, right after college, and our first home was a tiny bungalow near the old railway tracks. Everything was perfect, or so we thought, until the summer of 2018 when I lost the baby at seventeen weeks.

We named her Lily, after the flowers Sam brought me every anniversary. The loss hit us hard. We grieved, we held each other, and slowly, the world started to move again. But grief has a way of leaving cracks, and into those cracks, something slipped in.

It started a few months later, in October. I was alone in the house, folding laundry, when I heard the bell of an ice cream truck—an old, tinny chime, like from a vintage music box. But it was autumn, and no ice cream trucks ran in Oakhaven. I looked out the window, but the street was empty. Then, from the hallway, I heard a child’s laugh—a bright, bubbling sound, like the giggle of a toddler. I froze. Sam wouldn’t be home for another hour.

I called his name, but the house was silent. Then the giggles again, followed by the patter of tiny bare feet on the hardwood floor. I crept to the hallway, my heart hammering. At the end of the hall, near the door to the spare room we’d planned as the nursery, a small kaleidoscope of colours—like a spinning toy—danced in the air, then vanished. I was terrified, but I couldn’t tell Sam. He was already so fragile.

That night, I barely slept. The next day, when Sam came home, he looked pale. He asked me if I’d heard anything, and my blood ran cold. He described the same thing: a child’s laughter, footsteps, and a faint, sweet smell of cotton candy. He’d heard it at his workshop, a metal shed at the back of our property, where he tinkered with old clocks. We both heard it, at different times, in different places. It was as if our grief had become a presence.

And then, we started seeing her. It happened one evening as we were watching TV. A flicker in the corner of my eye, and there she was—a little girl, maybe three years old, with a bob of dark hair and a dress that looked like a patchwork of faded flowers. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a small stuffed rabbit. She smiled at me and said, ‘Mummy, play with me?’ I gasped, and she vanished. Sam saw her too, later, in the garden. He said she looked at him and whispered, ‘Daddy, I’m hungry.’

We were losing our minds. But we weren’t. We both saw the same girl, clear as day, while other people saw nothing. She’d appear to me in the house, to Sam in his workshop, and sometimes she’d just be there, in the car, her tiny hand on the dashboard. She called us Mummy and Daddy, and we knew, we felt it, that she was Lily. Somehow, she had come back, but not quite right.

Things escalated. She started to take on a more solid form. The air would grow cold when she appeared, and we’d smell that cotton candy again, but now it was cloying, sickly. She began to leave physical traces—a tiny, muddy footprint on the kitchen floor, a small, red thread from her dress caught in the doorframe. But what terrified me most was when she started moving things. She’d knock over a glass, and it would shatter on the floor, just to get our attention. Once, I woke up to find my locket, which I never took off, lying on the nightstand, open. Inside was a picture of Lily’s ultrasound.

We couldn’t sleep. We couldn’t work. We were prisoners in our own home, waiting for her next appearance. We talked about it constantly, in hushed whispers, trying to understand. Was she a ghost? A figment of our shared delusion? A demon wearing our daughter’s face? Each theory only made it worse.

Then, one night in November, I heard the ice cream truck again, but this time, it was closer. I followed the sound to the backyard, and there, under the old oak tree, was a small, vintage carnival ride—a tiny Ferris wheel, no bigger than a car, its lights flickering in the dim. And she was there, sitting in one of the gondolas, her legs swinging. She looked up at me and said, ‘Mummy, ride with me.’

I was frozen, but Sam came up behind me and took my hand. We approached the ride, and as we got closer, I saw that the Ferris wheel was not made of wood and steel, but of old bones and rusted bits of machinery, and the gondolas were like skeletal hands. The smell of cotton candy was overpowering. She giggled, and it sounded like the hiss of a snake.

Suddenly, the Ferris wheel began to turn, slowly, groaning. The girl vanished, and the ride stopped. At each gondola, a small figure now sat—all of them looked like Lily, but their faces were shifting, melting, morphing between the face of a child and something ancient, something hungry. And on the ground, scattered around the base of the ride, were tickets. Tickets for the carnival. And on each ticket, in my own handwriting, was a date—the date of my miscarriage, and the date of the day I first saw her. And in Sam’s handwriting, the date of his first sighting, and a date in the future, just three days away.

I looked at Sam, and his eyes were wide with terror. ‘We have to leave,’ he whispered. But the Ferris wheel, cursed or not, had already chosen its next riders. As we turned to run, I heard a voice behind us, no longer childish, but dripping with malice: ‘You can’t leave me, Daddy. You brought me here.’

And since that night, the Ferris wheel has stood in our backyard, even when we packed our bags and tried to flee. It follows us. We moved across town, and one morning, it was there, in our new backyard. We’ve stopped running. Every night, at 3 AM, it starts to turn, and we hear her laughter. And we know, on the ticket’s date, we’ll be on that ride, with her, forever.