Sasha always enjoys watching the traveling funfairs leave town: rides being carefully folded down, candy wrappers littering the ground, and a sort of quiet to the world. She comes for that, and only for that. Her classmates always say they hate the funfair to leave, but Sasha, she’s always liked it.
Maybe it’s because she feels like she understands it better. She’s not quite old enough to get to go with just her classmates, no adults in sight…well, to be more accurate, her classmates aren’t quite old enough that their parents will let them go without adult supervision…and it’s more fun when you’re not alone to actually go into the funfair—to try the games of chance, to ride the rides, to buy the sticky stale treats, and to laugh or clap at the occasional performer. The funfair during the day, and even late into the evening, is a place for family, a place for community. A place that seems permanent even when you know it’s just set up in a field or a community lot, that it wasn’t there three days ago and won’t be here next week.
But after the last ride has been stopped, after the last coconut has been shied, after the last sugar has been spun, the whole front comes down. The families, the overtired children and the happy young couples and the nostalgic old folks, all head back to their homes and cars, and it’s just the staff, the crew that no one really notices while things are actually happening. The lights go off and the oil stops frying, and everything is taken apart and packed away, and the caravan quietly moves away, on to the next town, the next adventure. It’s a whole different thing then, almost like a different world, a side of things most people don’t get to see and maybe don’t care to. But Sasha is always there to watch.
She’s never seen one go up. They always come late in the night—which makes sense, since they’ve probably come after breaking down two towns over—and are fully assembled by the time anyone knows they’ve arrived. When you’re little, they’re like Christmas presents or Easter eggs or quarters from the Tooth Fairy, something that maybe you go to bed anticipating if you know it’s coming but are still surprised and delighted to find has magically appeared when you wake up in the morning.
Sasha’s eleven, or near enough to it that she calls herself eleven anyway, and she still might believe that if it weren’t for the fact that she’s been watching them come down since she was seven and knows that what goes down must come up.
She feels an odd sort of kinship with the funfairs. After all, she knows what it’s like to have to pack everything she owns up in a short span of time, bundle out into the night, go somewhere new, and set up like she’s always been there. To not have time or money for repairs. To keep smiling and nodding and welcoming people in and not ever, ever, ever let them see what it costs you every day to be untethered, unrooted, unbound by any one place. Pretend it’s normal. Pretend it doesn’t bother you. Thank you for coming. Nice to see you. Thank you for letting me be here. Keep smiling. Keep smiling. Just keep smiling.
She’s been in the system for six years now, more of her life than she’s spent out of it, and in that time she’s been moved thirteen times, mostly in and out of the Sunnydene Children’s Home as foster families take her in, change circumstances, and send her back. Right now she’s in, her last family having abruptly packed up and left the country when the father got an unexpected promotion and transfer to Spain. The family before that sent her back to the Home because they were going on a cruise that they booked so long ago we didn’t have room for you, dear (she still wonders why they applied to foster if they knew they would be going out of town), and the one before that traded her in for a cute baby they could lie to and say had been born to them.
Sasha’s long ago given up on there being any Mister or Missus Right coming for her. She’ll be in the system until she ages out and then be on her own, and honestly, she’s fine with that. She is. She can still remember her parents, anyway, albeit in kind of a fuzzy way, and she doesn’t want new ones. She also doesn’t want to wind up getting “adopted” just to work on a farm or as a child-minder or whatever, especially since that will mean she can’t get away when she’s old enough to leave school. If she even gets to go to school. Certainly she won’t get to go past sixteen, and she’ll be under the thumb of the people who pay for the rights to her forever.
You read too many books, a voice in the back of her head says, and Sasha has to admit that that’s probably not wrong. She does read a lot, at least when she’s at the Home, and they don’t have a big library. She’s probably read everything in it six times at this point. And a lot of them do, by coincidence or design, feature orphans in at least a small way. Most of the orphans seem to get out and into loving homes eventually, but it’s the before part that’s rough, and besides that, she’s not stupid enough to believe she’s the main character or anything. She’ll be lucky if she’s not the character that dies in chapter one to show just how high the stakes are.
Truthfully, she likes being at the Home better, even without the possibility of a life of slavery. Like the funfair, the foster homes feel…temporary. Well, it’s in the word foster, she guesses, but still, it’s not just her presence there but the homes and families themselves. Like it’s all a fragile facade that’s going to pop like a soap bubble the second somebody breathes on it. And it’s so easy to break those facades sometimes. After all, she’s the one who got herself put back in when she’d been with the Hendersons, and she did it on purpose, reminding Mrs. Henderson three or four times a day that she wasn’t her mother and sassing Mr. Henderson with Daddy said I can be whatever I want to be, and she managed to get the Smithington-Wythes to send her back too. The Chisholmes were a close call—she’d heard them talking about how fast they could push the adoption through so they could maybe bring her with them after all—and she won’t lie, she was tempted, especially because Mrs. Chisholme had been teaching Sasha a lot about the computer Sally wasn’t interested in, but in the end she got rid of them by saying she’ll still be there when they get back, which is probably true. She really can do anything she wants, and right now she wants to be at the Home. It’s like what she imagines winter quarters for a traveling funfair must be—someplace you still know isn’t forever, but at least is someplace you know will be there for a little while. It might be about the farthest thing possible from sunny, but it’s got a certainty you can cut your teeth on that she hasn’t had since the accident.
Not that there’s a lot of consistency at the Home, she muses, fingers curling around the temporary fence as the last of the guests trickle out the gates, or at least not in the people. Matron’s been there longer than Sasha has, probably since the Home opened, and there’s usually at least one familiar assistant when she inevitably rotates back in, but there’s never the same children for more than a few weeks, three months at best. Matron says Sasha is the only child she’s had come back from foster care since they started fostering children out, and once or twice she’s joked—at least Sasha thinks she’s joking—that if this had been thirty years ago she’d have sent Sasha to Mr. Fielding, whoever that is. But she always welcomes her with open arms, and Sasha tries her hardest to convince her not to send her away again.
She hasn’t found the right words yet, but she’s working on it.
There—the last person must have just left. Sasha perks up as the lights on the Tilt-a-Whirl shut off. She hasn’t seen this funfair before, but they all tend to operate more or less the same—a half-dozen or so rides, a midway with two games for every food stall, one tent with some kind of sideshow or entertainment, maybe a pony ride if it’s really fancy, which this one isn’t—and shut down the same way, too. And she knows that the first ride to shut off its lights is always, always, always the one hardest to see from the entrance, and the last ride to shut off its lights is always, always, always the wheel. And there’s always a wheel, too. It’s not a funfair without candy floss and a coconut shy and a wheel.
Sasha likes the wheels best. If she goes to the funfairs at all, and when she’s at the Home Matron will sometimes slip her a bit of pocket money and shoo her out the door when the other children aren’t looking, she almost always spends all her tickets on rides on the wheel. Sometimes they’re tiny and jerky and hardly worth the price of admission, sometimes they’re creaky and slow and make you wonder if they’ll actually get you off the ground, but most of the time they’re something else entirely. Sasha likes it best when the cars—she’s learned recently they’re actually called gondolas—are big enough to hold three or four people. She’ll watch the lines until she sees someone uncertain or afraid, or a small group with an odd number of people that won’t all fit in one gondola, and then she’ll insinuate herself in line with them and act nervous or offer to fill out an empty space or pretend annoyance at a theoretical group of people that won’t go on it with her for whatever reason, anything to get the chance to ride with someone. Earlier this week she managed it by twirling a lock of hair around her finger and simpering at a group of teenage boys, which she’s really too young to be doing but had the desired effect. She can ride the same wheel five, six times with different people each time and get a completely different experience and perspective just based on who’s sitting next to her. She likes it best of all after dark, but it’s plenty fun in the daylight, too.
This one is one of the prettiest. Usually they have colored lights on the spokes and the tracks holding the gondolas, lights that change colors and flash while it spins, but this one’s lights are pure white, and not just in the usual places; there are ropes of lights strung between the spokes, glittering with their own lights, and they only really seem to move when the wheel is still, spreading from the top like the dew drops in the Nutcracker segment of Fantasia, which is Sasha’s second-favorite part of that movie (her very favorite is the last sequence, with the ghosts and the demon and the church bells at the end). Sasha rode it about fifteen times in a row just today and she’s still sorry she didn’t ride it more.
“Hello there, little girl!”
Sasha almost falls off the fence. Standing a few feet away is a dark shape she at first can’t make out clearly—it’s just a shadow in front of the wheel. Then it moves just enough that it catches the light, and she sees the smiling figure of the man who stood at the gate with a bamboo cane, greeting and welcoming everyone into the funfair. He’s tall, very tall, and the silk top hat on his head makes him even taller. She can make out his eyes even in the dark—they’re a very pale blue, almost white, and they glitter like the lights on the wheel behind him.
“Sorry,” she says automatically, letting go of the fence. She’s been caught by funfair workers before, usually the rough maintenance men who fix and dismantle the rides, and she knows the drill—you can’t be here, push off, beat it before I call the cops, or once, get the dog. This is her sign to take herself off, sharpish, and head back for the Home, preferably before someone follows her there and complains to Matron. Matron is pretty easygoing about such things, but depending on how late it is and who actually answers the door she might be in for a whack over the knuckles with a ruler, or worse.
But the man simply shakes his head. “Oh, no, no need to be sorry! You were here to look, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” Most kids get told not to talk to strangers—it’s certainly been drummed into them at school enough—but the rules for orphans, especially orphans in a children’s home, tend to be a little looser, and Sasha almost feels like she knows him, anyway. “But I’m just looking from over here. I’m not going to come in.”
The man considers Sasha for a moment. “Would you like to?”
“What?” Sasha says, taken aback.
The man gestures behind him. “I bet you’ve never seen a funfair with nobody in it. I could give you a tour, behind the scenes, as it were. And we could use an extra pair of hands to help take things down.”
Bad idea, says a voice in the back of her head, and Sasha knows it’s right…or would be under most circumstances. But, well, Matron knows where she is, and she’s pretty loud, so if she screams, someone will hear her. And she can definitely convince anyone she needs to to let her go.
“We can even pay you,” the man adds, patting his pocket. “We always keep a bit on hand for…last-minute assistance. What do you say?”
You say no and you go home, the voice, or a voice anyway, whispers in the back of her mind. And Sasha knows she should, but she also really, really wants to know what funfairs look like from the inside right before they go down. Curiosity killed the cat.
Satisfaction brought him back, Sasha sasses back at her brain. “Okay. Sure.”
The man’s teeth flash white in the darkness. “Then come on over.”
The temporary chain link fence is still sturdy enough that it supports her weight as she climbs it, swings over the top, and drops to the ground. She smiles up at the man. “I’m Sasha, by the way.”
The man’s grin, somehow, widens. “You can call me Mister Seymour.” He spreads his arms wide, and the way he stands, he seems to be wearing the wheel as a cape. “Welcome to my Wondrous Entertainment Ballyhoo!”
Christ, Sasha, the voice in the back of her mind hisses.
Mentally, Sasha sticks out her tongue. It’s not like she’s never considered running away to join the circus. What kid hasn’t? So, really, if she ends up bundled in a box and forced to be an act in the sideshow or whatever, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But she trusts Mister Seymour. After all, he’s not being…sickly sweet, or condescending. Except for calling her little girl, and she’s old enough not to mind that even though she doesn’t consider herself little, he’s treated her like a regular adult. She isn’t worried, not really.
Mister Seymour leads her into the funfair. “Let’s start here. This is the Tilt-a-Whirl…do you know about their history?”
“No, not really.” Sasha gives him her most innocent smile. “Tell me about it.”
It’s a ploy she’s used more than once to try and get out of a chore or punishment. Get the adult off on a tangent, take all their time up in the story, and usually whatever it is is done or forgotten by the time they’re done. Mister Seymour seems to fall quite unknowingly into her little trap, launching into a description of the invention of the carnival ride. It is actually pretty interesting, but it also means he walks past it without asking her to help dismantle the components. He does the same with the House of Mirrors and the Tunnel of Love.
“I’m surprised you have both,” she says, pausing briefly to study the heart-shaped boat sitting slightly sideways as the water drains out of the shallow trough around the track. “Most traveling funfairs only have one or the other.”
Mister Seymour tilts his head at her. “Ah, are you a connoisseur of such things?”
Sasha shrugs modestly. “I always like to watch them come down. I know what it’s like to have to pack up in a hurry.”
“Ah, yes, the life of the transient and the temporary. Do you ever come when we’re open?”
“Of course.” Not as often as she comes to watch it go down, of course, but she does attend. “I usually just ride the wheels, though. That’s my favorite part.”
“The Great Wheel is one of the finest rides ever devised,” Mister Seymour agrees gravely. “What do you think of ours?”
“It’s the best one I’ve ever ridden,” Sasha answers with equal gravity, and she’s only exaggerating a little.
“Well, then.” Mister Seymour’s teeth flash in another white, white grin. “Have I got a task for you.”
Is it always like this? The voice in the back of her mind sounds…not curious. It doesn’t feel like Sasha’s own mind. It almost sounds sad. Anyway, she’s not sure what it’s asking about, either. She certainly doesn’t know what the back end of a funfair is usually like, not from this side of the fence anyway.
Yeah, the voice, or maybe a different voice—Sasha doesn’t usually hear voices, but it almost sounds like her thoughts are arguing with each other—seems to murmur. Hold on. It’s probably about to get so much worse.
Mister Seymour leads Sasha over to the base of the wheel, which is just past a ride she doesn’t remember the name of, with four cars arranged in a circle at the end of two arms that apparently spin around each other. It’s still lit up, the lights twinkling and flowing along the lines and circles. Unlike all the others, which have workers busily bustling around like ants to clean and disassemble and pack away, the wheel is completely unattended. The levers on the control box are firmly in the OFF position, though. Sasha has to admit she’s a little disappointed; she was hoping to get an extra ride. She doesn’t normally like going up on her own, but she doesn’t think she’d mind, just this once.
Reaching past Sasha to the control box, Mister Seymour seizes a key and turns it, then plucks it out. The lights on the wheel go out, leaving them with only the work lights around them to illuminate the area. He flips it through his long, slender fingers before holding it up to Sasha and putting it in his pocket. “The Wheel is now locked in place. It will not move. It is as safe as it can be.”
“Oh. Good?” Sasha looks longingly up at the lights. The wheel towers overhead. Even this late at night, she could probably see the lights of the Home from the top…
“It is excellent,” Mister Seymour says gravely. “This way it won’t move underneath you while you climb.”
Sasha starts and looks at Mister Seymour. “Wait, what?”
“I need someone to untangle the lights from the spokes of the Wheel,” Mister Seymour tells her. He points up to the top. “It’s easiest if you start from the top and work your way down. And it’s safest if you climb up, rather than trying to climb out of the gondola when it reaches the apex. But if you’d prefer…”
Sasha hesitates. He’s right, it probably is safer to do it that way—to scale the wheel like scaffolding, to carefully untangle the lights as she goes down, to focus solely on the task. To not defeat a safety mechanism and clamber over the edge of a probably wildly swinging gondola and hope to find a safe, secure place to put her feet.
But nothing good in life is ever easy, and she’ll probably be far less tired if she doesn’t have to climb up and down with her arms full of lights.
“Actually,” she says sweetly, “I would prefer, thanks just the same. I don’t know if I can pull myself up those big gaps all on my own.”
Mister Seymour sweeps off his top hat in a deep bow. “Very well. Your wish is my command, my lady.” He takes the key from his pocket, places it back in the slot on the control box, and goes over to lift the bar on the bottommost gondola.
Sasha comes over and accepts his hand—he’s wearing gloves, she notes for the first time, white silk ones—and steps into the car. Once he’s satisfied that she’s seated properly, he lowers the lap bar, then steps back over to the control box and turns the key.
“Going up,” he says.
The wheel moves smoothly, not in fitful jerks like a lot of the ones traveling funfairs have. It doesn’t creak, either; in fact, it’s almost whisper-silent. Sasha grips the bar excitedly and stares out over the landscape as she slowly rises above the darkened carnival, higher and higher into the air, closer to the stars. Soon she can see the lights of the town, and it doesn’t take her long to pick out the Sunnydene Children’s Home. The lights are still on, too, which means it isn’t too late. It’s hard to tell how late it is once the sun goes down really, but if most of the lights are still on then she won’t be in too much trouble for being late getting back.
It’s cold, though. Not surprising, it’s almost the end of October and about halfway between fall and winter, but Sasha still shivers and huddles into her jumper as the wheel continues to rise. At least it’s a clear night. A half moon hangs in the sky, almost directly over her head. Pity about the lights, the stars would probably be really pretty otherwise.
As the thought enters her head, the wheel stops at the top, and with a soft thunk, the lights go out.
Okay. The stars are pretty, but Sasha realizes it’s way darker up here than it was on the ground, so she’s going to have a little bit of trouble. She’s about to call down to Mister Seymour and ask him to turn the lights back on when she realizes that him having turned the key—thereby locking the wheel in place for her safety—is what also turned the lights off. Also, she probably shouldn’t undo the lights if they’re actively lit.
So. Time to get creative.
The first thing Sasha has to do is figure out how to lift the bar, preferably without rocking the gondola too much. That turns out to be easy enough. Mister Seymour didn’t lock the bar all the way down, so it only takes her a second to find the mechanism and force it open. That done, she carefully moves to the edge of the gondola and—perhaps unwisely—looks down.
It’s…very dark. She can’t see the ground from here. And was the wheel always this high, or does it just seem like that because it’s so dark?
For a moment, she stops and looks back out over the town. This…this is what she wanted, isn’t it? She wanted one more ride. She wanted to be up here. She wanted—wants—to see the world from the top of the wheel. She asked for this, and she laid all the groundwork. This is exactly what she was trying for.
Isn’t it?
Be careful what you wish for, the voice in her head whispers, and Sasha realizes it’s right.
Well. She has two choices. She can stay up here forever, or at least until someone folds up the wheel with her inside it, or she can try to do the job she didn’t really want to do but pretended she would so she could get up here.
When she puts it that way…
Sasha lifts one foot, puts it very, very carefully on the step, grips the lap bar over her head, and shifts her weight onto the step. Unsurprisingly, the gondola sways and tips dangerously. Sasha clings desperately to the lap bar, trying to keep her balance.
And fails. Miserably.
The violent swing of the gondola, combined with a sudden gust of wind, jerks the bar from her hands, and suddenly she’s falling into the dark open air. Sasha doesn’t even really have time to scream before rational thought, or what little she has left anyway, takes hold. The lights. Even if she misses the struts, and really that shouldn’t be easy to do, she can surely grab one of the ropes of lights, and at least slow her fall…
She reaches out desperately, makes contact with something, grabs. It’s surprisingly sticky, but at least it means she’s able to hold on. She clings tightly, realizes it’s the lights after all, she did it…and now her hands are stuck, and now her jumper is stuck, and she swings forward and bumps into another row of the lights and now her legs are stuck, too, and this is an absolute goddamn mess (Sasha figures she’s allowed to swear, at least in the privacy of her own mind, at least for right now), but at least she’s not falling. She closes her eyes for a moment and breathes deeply, trying to calm herself down so she can be about the business of both freeing herself from the stickiness and getting the lights unhooked. Probably they’re so sticky because of whatever is keeping them attached to the wheel…
She opens her eyes and tries to move, but her hands won’t come free no matter what she does. She pulls and twists, but only succeeds in—somehow—twisting the wires and ropes around, so she’s now tangled in them and facing the opposite direction and…
Wait. Is that someone coming towards her?
Of course. Of course, Mister Seymour must have seen her get stuck, he must be coming to help untangle her. But it’s still quite dark up here, he won’t be able to see her properly. She’ll have to help…
“Mister Seymour?” she calls, and if her voice sounds higher than normal, that’s her own affair. “I’m up here!”
He hears her, obviously, because he pauses, then starts coming towards her. He’s climbing remarkably smoothly, not in jerky motions like she would expect, almost like he’s just casually crawling up the surface of the wheel. It makes sense if he does this a lot, she supposes, and part of her feels guilty because she’s supposed to be helping and here he’s having to climb up here anyway…
He seems…bigger than she remembers. And the light must be playing tricks on her, because for just a moment, the shadow that passes over the center of the wheel has too many limbs—two extra arms. And two extra legs. It must be the light from below…
“Mister Seymour?” Sasha calls again, her voice shaking a little.
Mister Seymour doesn’t pause this time. He keeps coming towards her, closer and closer, and he is bigger, it maybe isn’t just the light playing tricks on her, and he’s somehow not getting stuck on the ropes as he passes over them without slowing, and his elbows—his elbows shouldn’t stick out that far, and that is not how knees are supposed to bend and—
He lifts his head and looks at her, and his white, white smile with teeth far too sharp glint in the dark, and so do his eyes—all eight of his eyes, glowing red in the darkness. Sasha knows that is going to be the last thing she ever sees, and she screams—
“Sasha! Sasha, wake up at once!”
Sasha sits bolt upright and screams in the face of the person bending over her, who leaps back and collides with her bed. She can’t make it out clearly, she’s not wearing her glasses, and as she tries to reach for them she discovers her arms are still caught and—and reason takes hold. Her bed. Not the metal frame of the wheel, but her bed in the dormitory at the Sunnydene Children’s Home, which means…
“Matron?” Sasha chokes out.
“Yes, child, it’s me, I’m here.” Matron, or the blurry shape that is probably Matron, kneels down in front of her. “Here, let me help you get untangled, and we can have some cocoa and calm you down.” As she works, she raises her voice. “It’s all right, children, Sasha just had a harmless little nightmare. You can all go back to sleep now.”
Sasha takes a deep breath, then another. Of course. Of course, it was just a nightmare. She’s been reading too many of the wrong kind of books and she’s overtired herself watching the funfair come down. That has to be it. It wouldn’t make any sense otherwise. They wouldn’t need to climb the wheel to untangle the lights when they could just rotate it manually and dismantle it from the ground, and they must have specialized equipment to take it apart, and they would never recruit a child. And people simply don’t turn into giant spiders and climb after children, no matter what the stories say. It’s just a nightmare. None of it happened.
She’s safe.
“There.” Matron untangles the thin sheet that’s got wrapped around Sasha somehow and sets it aside, then slides Sasha’s glasses onto her face. The world comes into focus and there’s no wheel, no spider-person, no top hat, only Matron’s long crooked nose and gold-rimmed spectacles and nightcap. She pats Sasha’s cheek and speaks quietly. “I’ll go make the cocoa. You may come down and meet me in the kitchen once you’ve washed your hands. You must not have cleaned them properly before you went to bed, look. They’re all sticky.”