Pale Horse, No Rider

Pale Horse,  No Rider

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”  -Revelation 6:8







         There’s something wrong with the horse on the carousel.  At first glance it’s more or less like all the others, albeit in worse repair.  The paint is peeling off in twisting curls like pencil shavings.  Small cracks and dents mar its surface.  It hangs off its pole at an angle as though it is trying its hardest to escape its calliope prison. 

         The wrongness isn’t limited to these things.  The pale horse just LOOKS wrong, somehow.  It’s hard to put your finger on, but it’s there.  Something about the black eyes and long flowing mane, so much like fire.  Something about the open mouth full of  square teeth,  ready not to tear with sharp edges but to crush.  Something about the forelegs raised high in the air,  muscles tensed into spun steel cables.

These are features all the carousel ponies share, but on this one it’s different.  The others welcome with friendly smiles.  The pale horse grins with madness.    Where the rest look dull and brainless through their coal eyes, the pale horse hides a malevolent darkness threatening to pour out.  Instead of rearing up from some unseen threat, the pale horse appears to be bringing its powerful haunches up to bring back down upon an unsuspecting skull. 

         The air around the carnival is alive with children laughing, barkers barking, games blaring, music playing.  All that noise stops dead at the pale horse., absorbed inside, never to be seen again. 

         Or maybe repelled. 

         The carousel is far from abandoned.  Weekends are the busiest time for this local carnival,  the children grow impatient waiting their turns on the ride.  Two minutes of speed and laughter,  a long wait for parents to gather their children and new children to hop on, then a few more minutes of joy. 

         The pale horse rides alone on most of these journeys.  The occasional brave child or odd adult will ride him, but for the most part people can sense that where this horse rides, they don’t want to go. 

         The ride operators swear that the pale horse has gotten bigger since the merry-go-round was built back in ’09.  They would know; they are a tight-knit group,  there since the beginning.  They also refuse to touch the horse.  They help kids on and off as needed, always careful to not let their hands touch the plaster beast.  They clean it off with a hose, never by hand.  No one has bothered to patch up the horse.  Not that they have the funds or manpower to repair a broken horse anyway. 

         No one mentions the sick kids or the strange outbursts.  The vomit is not unexpected, although usually reserved for the more intense rides like the Whirly-bird.  It isn’t always vomit.  Some kids just appear….drained.    Always after riding Pale Horse.  One time a young girl passed out and fell right off the horse before the ride even started.  Thank God her parent was there to catch her.  The last thing the carnival needed was a lawsuit. 

         The outbursts were more disturbing.  One father rode Pale Horse with his son.  The boy was perfectly fine, but Dad was pale as a ghost afterwards.  He scooped his son into his arms and practically ran out of the carnival,  yelling some-thing about Revelation and horsemen chasing him.  A teenage girl, riding Pale Horse on a dare,  laughed with her friends before the ride.  Upon stepping off the horse, she violently and unexpectedly ripped a chunk of hair off a friend’s head and ate it like hay.    People looked on in shock as she let loose a whinny that could be heard over the roar of the crowd and games.  Her friend held a hand to her bleeding head and screamed obscenities at her. 

         The girl smiled and tried very hard to stomp her girlfriend to death. 

         Thankfully the insane girl was restrained before trampling her victim.  She was arrested, but quickly returned to her old self.  She broke down in tears over what she had done (and nearly done).  People wrote it off as a case of temporary insanity.  The girl was an honor student attempting to get into Harvard.  She was under a tremendous amount of pressure, and had never so much as thrown a punch

before that night.  People snapped all the time, this instance was almost boring. 

         It was a cool summer night in the year of our Lord 2012.  The carnival was bustling with people eager to forget the heat of the day.  The beer was cold, the air was crisp, the skirts were short, and life was good.  The merry-go-round was packed with kids too young for the other rides and older kids who mocked the “baby ride” but still dared their friends to ride the nasty-looking pale horse. 

         The operator stopped the ride, and made his rounds to assist any kids who

needed help getting down.  He ignored the calliope music which remained a near-constant soundtrack to his thoughts.  He absent-mindedly grabbed a ten-year-old under the arms and placed him on the dirt, nodding in response to the boy’s barely mumbled “thanks”.  Kid had nearly fallen asleep on the damn horse.  Why did kids ride the slow rides if they were so fucking bored by them?

         He glanced at the Pale Horse, then looked to the next in line for stragglers.  Something flashed in his peripheral vision that made him look again. 

         There was something stuck to the Pale Horse. 

         At first he thought it was just a piece of the kid’s pants that had ripped off.  As he moved in closer, he saw redness around the edges of the ragged white patch.  Realization dawned on him. 

         It was a piece of skin.  A big one, about the size of a softball.  It clung to the horse as though glued in place. 

         He wanted to turn back to check on the kid.  Little guy must’ve been bleeding like a stuck pig, missing that much skin.  Before he could,  Pale Horse’s midsection bulged outward several inches.  The painted hide of the beast creaked and groaned, since it wasn’t designed to move in that fashion.    Suddenly, the midsection retracted, and the skin was gone. 

         “Jesus Christ…..”

         He had to get everyone away from this thing.  He wished he had a megaphone or a PA system handy,  a way to get a lot of people listening quickly.  Lacking that, he decided cutting the power and telling the customers the ride had malfunctioned would do in a pinch.  His supervisor would shit a brick, but he wasn’t paid enough to deal with crazy shit like this anyway. 

         Lost in thought, he didn’t notice the teenager climbing onto Pale Horse until it was too late. 

         “Hey, kid, get offa that….”

         The guy screamed so loud the operator thought his eardrums might burst.  He swatted at his legs desperately, as if he’d just discovered they were on fire. 

         His eyes pleaded with the operator to help him, sweet Jesus HELP ME. 

         The operator had no idea what to do.  The kid seemed to be in immense pain, but from what?  He saw no wounds or injury. 

         The kid pushed off the horse with his hands, but his ass remained in the saddle.  He was stuck. 

         The operator reached for the kid’s arm to help pull him free…..

         …..and that’s when the kid’s skin slid off. 

         All of it. 

         He watched in horror, his outstretched arm trembling.  There was a wet tearing sound as the flesh beneath his forehead tore.  Blood splashed the horse and the operator.  It was hot and sticky and smelled of copper.  His skin peeled off his skull, slid down his back, and draped the horse like a coat. 

         To the operator, it was like watching someone unzip a suitcase full of organs. 

The boy’s skin was sucked into Pale Horse slowly while the poor bastard continued to scream and scream.    Then his insides came out,  slimy and steaming in the cool air.  They landed haphazardly all over and around Pale Horse, table scraps from a particularly sloppy cannibal diner.    After what felt like an eternity, but in reality couldn’t have been more than a minute,  all that remained was the boy’s skeleton, caked in blood and viscera. 

         That wasn’t the worst part.  The worst part wasn’t even the panic that now filled the air, the mingled screams and weeping, the customers puking at what they were witnessing, or the approaching sirens.  (How anyone had had the presence of mind to call for help, he’d never know.)

         No, the worst part was that the kid was still alive. 

         Alive-ish, anyway. 

         The kid had no eyes, no brain, no vital organs.  His blood lay congealing in puddles all over the steel floor of the carousel.  He had no muscles to move, no lungs to breathe with.  Everything but the skeleton had sloughed out or had been pulled into the Pale Horse. 

         The skeleton which now turned and grinned at him. 

         Pale Horse huffed. 

         It was still just an amusement park ride, but it was changing now.  Paint was chipping off,  small pieces at first, but now larger chunks were being shed.  Underneath was not fur, but a skeletal frame. 

         Like horse, like rider. 

         The horse beneath the plaster, the real horse, was struggling against its prison.  It thrashed and whinnied, and the noise it produced was made of insanity and pain. 

         The pole holding it in place cracked clean in half.  It was at least a foot thick, and had survived hurricanes. 

         The living skeleton grabbed a woman as she attempted to flee too close to the merry-go-round.  At his touch her flesh began to bubble and melt. 

         She cried out to God and the skeleton laughed. 

         The operator ran.  His mind raced almost as fast as his legs.  With the horrifying lucidity of a man recovering from a blackout to discover a bloody ax in hand, he understood everything. 

        The drained kids.

        The strange outbursts.

        The horse fed off its riders.  Their energy, their soul,  whatever you wanted to call it.  It gathered its strength.  It waited patiently.  It even warned them about what it was and what it wanted.  It warned them with visions and demonstrations of its appetite for suffering.

Not many rode him, but two minutes of life over years added up quick.  And once it had fed enough, all it needed was a rider. 

         Now it had one. 

         Death. 

         He ran. 

         No man outran Death. 

         Damned if he wasn’t going to try.