Selected Short Stories of Ray Bradbury: The Black Ferris

The carnival had come to town like an October wind, like a dark bat flying over the cold lake, bones rattling in the night, mourning, sighing, whispering up the tents in the dark rain.

The carnival lay by the sounding lake with nobody buying tickets from the flaky black booths, nobody hoping to get the salted hams from the whining roulette wheels, and none of the thin-fat freaks on the big platforms.

At eight o'clock perhaps, ghastly lights would flash on, voices would shout, music would go out over the lake.

The black Ferris wheel rose like an immense light-bulbed constellation against the cloudy sky, silent.

The hunchback blindly, fumbling, locked Mr. Cooger into a black seat and sent him whirling up into the ominous twilight sky.

Outside, it began to rain, despondently, irrevocably, forever and ever.

"Sh!" said Hank, cloaked in wet mystery.

"I'm scared," said Peter, frankly wailing. "I'm cold and hungry and I don't know what this's all about."

"Don't you see, three weeks ago the carnival came. And about the same time this little ole orphan shows up at Mrs. Foley's. And Mrs. Foley's son died a long time ago one night one winter, and she's never been the same, so here's this little ole orphan boy who butters her all around."

"We got to warn you about something, it's about that boy come to live with you, that orphan?"

Standing there in the pink light, his hand made into a menacing fist, was the little orphan boy.

That way nobody'll get suspicious of him.

And he'll be walking around, all disguised as the carnival man.

Peter arrived at Mrs. Foley's house at about nine-thirty, sneezing, lost in a vast raincoat and mariner's cap. He stood like a small water hydrant on the street, mourning softly over his fate.

In about ten minutes a small figure emerged from the house, bearing a large paper sack filled with some enormous loot or other.

They gave chase through the chestnut trees, but the orphan boy was swift, up the hill, through the night streets of town, down past the rail yards, past the factories, to the midway of the deserted carnival.

"Yah!" mocked the orphan boy, darting away, no more than a shadow ahead, now.

The Ferris wheel was going up and up into the sky, a big nebula of stars caught on the dark earth and turning forward and forward, instead of backward, and there sat Joseph Pikes in a green painted bucket-seat, laughing up and around and down and up and around and down at little old Hank standing there

The midway was deserted because of the rain.

And Joseph Pikes rode up into the cloudy sky and came down and each time he went around he was a year older, his laughing changed, grew deep, his face changed, the bones of it, the mean eyes of it, the wild hair of it, sitting there is the green bucket seat whirling, whirling swiftly, laughing into the bleak heavens where now and again a last split of lightning showed itself.

When he put his hand on the brake, Hank ran in and slammed the tent spike against the fingers, mashing them.

"Stop, stop the wheel!" cried Joseph Pikes-Mr. Cooger flung up in a stormy cold sky in the bubbled constellation of whirl and rush and wind.

"Stop, stop the wheel!" cried Mr. Cooger, a man, a different man and voice this time, coming around in panic, going up into the roaring hissing sky of the Ferris wheel.

He started in on the brake mechanism, hitting it, jamming it, putting hunks of metal in it, tying it with rope, now and again hitting at the crawling weeping dwarf.

Now the carnival was ablaze with sudden light.

Hank felt himself jerked into the air with oaths and beatings rained on him.

Terrible faces leered and gaped at him.

The Ferris wheel stood whining and stretching in the wind.

The policeman turned and the carnival people turned and the fisherman turned and they all looked at the occupant in the black painted seat at the bottom of the ride.

The wind touched and moved the black wooden seat in a gentle rocking rhythm, crooning over the occupant in the dim carnival light.