“Nothing’s for sure,” Gran’s mother said. “So we’ll hold tight for the time being. Are you going to be a cat all night? I don’t care, but I’d like it to be consistent.”
“Meow,” Maisie said.
After that, they ate in silence. In the past, when there was bad news in the house, bad news that Gran’s mother denied was bad news, she was careful to make lively conversation. Often she’d play a game where she would ask Gran and Maisie which animal they’d rather keep as a pet.
“Okay, Komodo dragon or capybara?” she would ask.
“Capybara!” Maisie would say, though she could never remember what a capybara was.
“Okay, capybara or star-nosed mole?” their mother would say.
“Star-nose mole!” Maisie would say, though she had no idea what a star-nosed mole was, or quite how to say its name.
“Okay, star-nosed mole or mudskipper?”
The game could go on like that for an hour. Gran’s mother had studied zoology in college, so she knew thousands of animals off the top of her head—and specialized in the strangest members of the animal kingdom.
But tonight she was quiet and ate little. Gran watched her mouth moving, though she said nothing. It was as if she was having some long silent dialogue with herself.
After dinner she said she was tired, and she wheeled herself into her bedroom and reclined on the bed, staring at a picture on the opposite wall. It was a watercolor of a rowboat on stilts by the shore.
Gran, unsure what else to do, sat at the edge of his mother’s bed and thought about rubbing her feet. Hadn’t she once said she liked that? But he didn’t know how to do it, and she might not want that kind of thing at a time like this. So he sat with his hands in his lap.
Maisie crawled to their mother’s bedside and meowed. Their mother reached down and petted Maisie on the head. Maisie purred, then said, “Fartmouth.”
“Don’t say that,” their mother said.
“Meow,” Maisie said.
“That’s better.”
It was still light outside, so Gran had an idea.
“Let’s do Tidal Wave. I’ll push.”
“Meow!” Maisie said.
Back when they lived near the ocean, after school and before Gran’s father would get home from work, they would walk to the beach and along the paved promenade, Gran and Maisie pushing their mother in her chair. They would go faster than usual, so they called it Tidal Wave.
The hills in Carousel were different. These were real. Their mother had to keep her hands on the brakes, and Gran didn’t have to push much at all—it was more a matter of braking strategically. Gran jumped onto the back, and his mother gasped, and Maisie squealed, and the three of them barreled down the street like a runaway train. It was slightly dangerous and definitely unwise, but it put them all in a good mood, and Gran loved the feeling that he was driving, that he could control almost two hundred pounds of machine and human caterwauling down the road.
It was the happiest Gran had seen his mom in weeks.
In the morning, the house was strangely silent. Usually Gran was the last one awake, but on this day, when he got up, he heard nothing. The sun was well above the purple hills on the other side of the valley, and his clock said 7:20, but no one stirred.
He went to his parents’ room, where he found his mother in bed, Maisie curled into her arms and looking very much like the cat she pretended to be.
“I’m not feeling well,” Gran’s mother said. “Can you get Maisie ready for school? You know what to do.”
Gran took Maisie into the kitchen, poured her cereal and added milk, and cut an apple and orange they could share. He made her lunch, then got her dressed and brushed her teeth. Gran was putting on Maisie’s shoes in the front room when he heard his mother’s voice from the bedroom.
“Come say goodbye,” she said.
They went into the bedroom to find her as they’d last seen her. She hadn’t moved. She reached out and touched their cheeks with the backs of her long fingers. “Be sweet today,” she said.
The second they stepped out of the house and closed the door, Maisie said, “I need stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Gran asked.
“Poster board, markers, a ruler, and glue,” she said. She’d been afraid to tell their mother, for fear of upsetting her.
“Okay,” Gran said, reaching into his pockets for money. He found $6.21. “If we hurry, we can run to the store before school starts.”
They ran down the hill and to the grocery store. They bought all Maisie needed, and Gran figured they could take a shortcut back up the hill and over to Carousel Elementary. From the window in their bedroom, he’d seen a stretch of woods extending directly from the shopping area to the school.
But when they got to the woods, there was a chain-link fence blocking the path.
“Look, it’s that lady again,” Maisie said. Hung from the fence was a YES ON PROPOSITIONS P&S sign, bearing the warm, smiling face of Phyllis Feeley.
“This way,” Gran said, and they worked their way around the closed park, with Gran always keeping his eye on the rising sun to the east. The park was dense with trees and foliage, and as they walked they could hear the scurrying of squirrels and birds in the thicket. Then the park grew less dense, and finally the greenery gave way to a wide expanse, with a lake in the middle of it.
“Is that a swimming pool?” Maisie asked.
Gran was trying to figure it out. It was an enormous rectangle, bigger than any swimming pool he’d ever seen, and it was half full of dull-colored water. Around the edges were tangles of steel cable, and strewn about were a few fallen doors and what looked like the remnants of a giant sign.
“It says CAT! See?” Maisie said, now holding the fence and bouncing on her tiptoes. As far as Gran could remember, this was the first time Maisie had recognized a word on her own. No wonder that word was CAT.
A gust of wind came down the hill and pushed the water across the pool and toward its northern side, and when the water moved, it revealed strange shapes in the pool. Gran squinted. Could that be the head of a horse?
“Ew!” Maisie squealed.
“It’s not real,” Gran said, though he couldn’t be sure. What he was sure of was that there was a horse’s face rising up from the surface of the water, as if struggling to breathe.
But it wasn’t moving. It couldn’t be real. Or alive. It was some kind of toy, like the rides in front of grocery stores.
“It’s just an old toy,” Gran said. “Let’s go.”
“Sounds like you found the old factory, Grant,” the Duke said at lunch. They were in his office, and the Duke had somehow found a sandwich bigger than the one Gran had seen him eat before. This one was as big as the Duke’s leg. “You do know why this town is called Carousel, don’t you?”
Gran hadn’t ever thought of it. “I know the word carousel, but…”
The Duke’s eyes were wide and white. “You don’t know anything about this place, do you?”
Gran shrugged. The Duke paused, and Gran was sure the Duke was about to sigh in a way that would make Gran feel ignorant. But instead, the Duke smiled benevolently.
“That’s why I laughed when you said the thing about merry-go-rounds. I thought you knew, buddy! This town used to be the foremost maker of carousels in the world. Carousels might have been invented in Europe, but they were improved in America. And they were perfected here.”
“So the town made tons of carousels and sold ’em?”
“No. Not tons. Making a carousel takes time. At its height, the Catalan Carousel Company built about ten a year. And that took two hundred people, working full-time. But those carousels were beautiful. We sold them all over the world. We even shipped one to Turkey! Wait, look.”
The Duke ambled over to a file cabinet, opened a drawer, and rifled through it. He pulled out a folder and opened it. He looked down and smiled. His eyes welled.
“This was the last one we built,” he said, handing the fo
lder to Gran.
The folder contained a dozen photos, most of them in black-and-white, of a carousel in various stages of construction. Men working on the complicated gears and engine that made the carousel turn. Women and men carving and painting the horses, zebras and giraffes that rose and fell as the carousel turned. Finally, there was a picture of a hundred or so people surrounding the finished carousel. It stood in front of a stately white structure with columns and a golden dome on top. It looked familiar to Gran. He’d seen this building, he was sure, though it looked different now.
“That’s City Hall,” the Duke said. “Not that you’d recognize it anymore. But back then it was something. And in front of it, we built our most magnificent carousel.”
“Where’d it go?”
“The City Hall one? No, we couldn’t save that one. But before it…” The Duke trailed off. “While it was standing, though, people came from Europe to see it. I once met a man who didn’t speak a word of English. But he’d come over on the Queen Elizabeth, then took a train from Boston all the way here. Got off, took a dozen pictures, and got back on the train. I think he was from Finland.”
Gran looked closely at the picture with all the workers surrounding the newly christened carousel. Right in front, with his hand on the head of a bucking horse, was a very young and very short man who looked a lot like the Duke.
“That’s me!” the Duke roared. “Good eye!”
“You worked there?” Gran asked.
“Of course I did. Everyone did. Everyone in town had something to do with the business. There were carpenters, engineers, glassmakers, painters, welders, truck drivers, foremen, shipping clerks, secretaries. And then there were the carvers. I was a carver.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does carver mean?” The Duke’s eyes were round and alarmed. “It means I carved things, Grant! I carved the animals. The molding. The poles.”
“Out of wood?”
The Duke’s eyes went from wide to wider. “Of course from wood! What else would it be?”
Gran thought of the animals he liked to mold from clay. Was that carving? He wasn’t sure.
The Duke’s eyes closed. “Well, later on, sure, they were made of plastic and aluminum. They started just using molds, and they all looked the same. But that wasn’t what the Catalan Carousel Company did. Here, every carousel was one of a kind. Every horse, every animal, every pole, every saddle. Everything, one of a kind. You’ll never see two of any Catalan animal anywhere in the world. Look at this,” he said, and pointed to the horse he was standing next to in the photograph, the one rearing. “Know what that’s called?”
“A horse?”
The Duke laughed. “Of course it’s a horse. But this one is special. First of all, all the animals on the outside of a carousel platform were on what was called the Outside Row. They were always the fanciest, because they were the most visible. And the right side of any animal was called the Romance Side, and they were the most decorative for the same reason—they were the most visible. So you’re seeing the Romance Side of the Outside Row. But then on top of all that, this was what was called the Lead Horse.
“This one’s name was Gussie. The Lead Horse was the most elaborate, the most carefully made. Gussie here was also a Stargazer, which means she’s got her nose pointing to the heavens. She was my favorite of all the horses I carved.”
“So what happened?”
“To Gussie? She was on the City Hall carousel when…”
“When what?”
“Anyway. After a while, no one wanted carousels anymore.”
“Why?”
“Roller coasters, for one thing. There was a time when carousels were the roller coasters. They were considered pretty wild. People used to get sick on ’em. A lot of people thought, No, too crazy for me!” The Duke laughed loudly about that. “Then roller coasters came along, and carousels were seen as too tame. So the orders dropped off, and pretty soon the factory had to let most of its workers go. It was a sad time, Grant. Then one night, as the town slept, we heard a loud commotion down by the factory, and in the morning we found everything had been swallowed up. The earth under the factory just collapsed, and the entire factory fell in. It was such a mess, and during a wet winter. Rain and snow fell overnight—too much to handle. Nothing was salvageable. That was that.”
“So you started working at the school?” Gran asked.
“Eventually, yes,” the Duke said. “I was too old to ride horses, and no one wanted me to carve them. I was lucky to get this job. But lots of people weren’t so lucky. They’d come from all over the world to make carousels, and suddenly no one in the world wanted them.”
On Friday, Catalina was back in school, but Gran had no chance to talk to her. She’d arrived late to class again, spent fifteen minutes getting her yellow slip, and returned just before the period ended. When the bell rang, she was gone like a ghost.
That afternoon, Gran was committed to finding out where it was she went every day after school. He’d done his homework during lunch so he could leave his rollerbag in his locker. He wanted to be unencumbered and agile as he set off after her.
Outside, the wind swirled and changed direction and kicked up dirt. Branches fell from trees, birds scattered in all directions. The sky was an unhappy blue.
From the foyer, Gran watched Catalina burst out of the school and down the steps, across the street, and into the woods. She was moving quicker than she ever had before.
Without his rollerbag, though, Gran kept up without difficulty. In fact, because it was so dark that afternoon and there was so much chaos all around, he followed closer, knowing he would not be noticed amid the noise of the wind and leaves and falling branches. His eyes watered in the cold air. His nose wrinkled at the smell of wet earth.
As Catalina crossed the first valley, he found himself creeping up behind her, no more than fifty yards away. He was startled by a crash in the thicket nearby. A giant deer leapt out and across the path. Then another. And another. They were all enormous, gray, smelling of animal sweat. His mother had promised he’d see deer here, but he hadn’t expected them to be so near, and so capable of crushing him underhoof. But they had no interest in crushing him underhoof. They were gone in a blink.
When they were gone, Gran gathered himself and located Catalina again. She was still striding quickly, now a few hundred yards ahead. He could see the sleeves of her flannel shirt billowing behind her. Occasionally, as she cut across a path, he could see her eyes, squinting and fierce as she strode.
A crack sounded behind him and he turned to find that a large branch had fallen a few feet away; had he been even a few steps slower, it would have flattened him. He turned back to the path and saw that Catalina had stopped and was looking directly at him. The sound of the falling branch had drawn her attention. Gran froze and his stomach dropped into his right shoe. But when he looked closer, he saw that she wasn’t, in fact, looking at him. She was looking in his direction, but her stare was vague, focused on something beyond him or above him.
She turned quickly, and continued on.
Gran followed. He decided he didn’t care if she knew he was following her. It had been a week since she’d spoken to him behind the school, and now he was beyond caring about being polite or timid.
He ran toward her.
Her back was turned and she was striding purposefully, about to round the bend where she had disappeared before. But this time Gran was running. His eyes watered, his legs ached, but his arms continued to pump, and he saw her grow closer in his sights. Now he saw her obsidian hair, how it shone just as brightly on this dark afternoon as it did on sunny days.
And then he saw something in her hand. It was metallic, shining brightly in the sun. It could be a knife, he thought. Or it could be a pen.
But then again, it didn’t look like either of those things. It was silver, and curved, and what it looked most like was a handle. A handle without a door.
He ran closer.
He found himself no more than twenty feet away from her, and twenty feet away from the hill behind which she had last disappeared. He saw then that it was indeed a handle: it could be nothing else. It was an ornate silver handle, bent like a sliver of moon. It was the kind of handle that might have opened a medieval castle door. He sped up, seeing that she was about to turn the corner.
But he wasn’t fast enough. She disappeared behind the hill, and when he rounded the bend, he saw no sign of her. Again she had disappeared.
But this time, he saw something.
Right there, on the side of the hill, was an opening. A straight four-foot-high crack, about two inches wide. It was the kind of crack you see when a door is open, but only slightly. He crouched down to look inside, and when he put his eye to the crack, he saw what seemed to be a tunnel with Christmas lights strung along one side. The tunnel led to a wide cavern aglow with amber light. And descending down the tunnel and into the cavern was Catalina Catalan.
Then a sudden swirl of wind gusted from behind Gran, and the crack in the hillside closed with a thump.
He jumped back. His heart pinballed.
Something had just happened, something very odd. Humans are good at knowing when something very unusual has happened, and when these things happen, we need a moment to get our minds around these happenings. Gran had just seen a doorway to a hill, and then had seen this doorway close and disappear. There could be no mistake about it. He was standing before a high hill, in front of a vertical wall, and there had been a door there moments before.
Okay, Gran thought. Okay.
You may be reading this, thinking that what Gran should have done at that moment was to turn and run, because this all was too weird and too dangerous for a twelve-year-old boy.