Page 63 of The Midnight Carousel

The fire crackles. Paralysed by helplessness, Maisie is rooted to the spot.

Arnold appears moments later with the servants and a couple of the Ride Jocks returning from their day off.

Then Mrs Papadopoulos arrives in her cart.

There’s a collective gasp followed by stunned silence. No one knows what to do.

We can’t just stand here . Picking up Milo, Maisie races to the entrance of Silver Kingdom with the others in tow.

Her heart is pounding, but there’s no time to let fear get the better of her, because someone needs to do something.

Flames as tall as a man encircle the carousel, pitching black smoke upwards.

‘Find the Randolphs,’ she orders Clara, Lucy and Peggy Mae. ‘And Eric, call for the fire trucks.’ She spots Arnold, Robert and the two Ride Jocks immobilized nearby. ‘You lot, fetch some buckets from the shed and start throwing water on the fire.’

While the servants scatter in different directions, Maisie takes Milo by the hand and, closely followed by Mrs Papadopoulos, enters the big house.

It’s gloomier than she remembers, as if everything is shrouded in sadness.

The familiar smell of cigar smoke tinged with rosemary is replaced by the bitter odour of boiled cabbage; a pile of torn newspapers nests under the console table; and a bundle of Nancy’s pretty clothes has been heaped at the bottom of the stairs, as though someone hurled the contents of her wardrobe from the second floor.

Maisie leads Milo and Mrs Papadopoulos upstairs into Maisie’s old bedroom.

It’s disconcerting to find the room preserved like a museum, everything exactly as she left it.

Her hairbrush sits on the dressing table; a stocking is draped over the chair as if she was always expected to return.

There’s the lipstick she usually wore and a copy of Vogue next to it; a large vase containing brown stalks that were once lilies; and a snow globe of Chicago, which she gives her son to play with as she sits him on the bed.

Milo sucks his thumb, calmer now, as he watches his mother join Mrs Papadopoulos at the window.

From this height, she can tell that the fire has been raging for some time– the canopy is alight, the flag is gone, and the metal platform is the only thing separating the wooden horses from the ring of flames that surround the carousel. Maisie can’t bear to watch it burn.

‘Can you stay with Milo, please?’ she begs of Mrs Papadopoulos, who agrees, seeming to take everything in her stride.

Maisie races back downstairs, finds two buckets in the back kitchen and runs across the garden and down to the lake’s shore.

Filling the buckets with water, Maisie grimaces as she struggles to clamber up the slope.

With a determined push, she makes it. Didn’t she drag cockles across Canvey Island when she was just a child?

She meets Eric running the other way.

‘The fire trucks won’t be here for another thirty minutes,’ he gasps as they pass.

Thirty minutes will be too late. Her muscles fighting, Maisie keeps up her pace. She almost feels sorry for the carousel: damaged by James a few days ago, and now this.

Arnold and Robert push past on their way back to the lake to fill up their containers. As Maisie weaves through the other attractions, she begins to cough. Smoke, rising in columns in every direction, is filling her lungs.

As Maisie reaches the doughnut stand, she is almost forced back by the heat.

Stronger than a furnace, it forms a dome around the carousel.

This close, the flames are fiercer than she first realized, licking like the tongues of hungry wolves, and Maisie would run from them if she couldn’t now see that the horses are in danger.

A chunk of the burning canopy has crashed on to the platform, spitting sparks outwards.

Two horses are already charred, and flames are eating away at the hooves of the three in the row behind.

There’s a loud groan as the platform begins to buckle.

Over by the controls, metal is melting, returning to its molten state.

Maisie’s eyes are drawn to the caramel-coloured horse inside its casing. Flames reflecting off its coat ripple as if the horse is in motion. She catches its eye. The gold flecks glitter. It seems to be looking back at her, but she cannot decipher its expression .

As another chunk of canopy breaks off, events seem to move in slow motion.

The vibration sends a shockwave outwards, and Maisie is propelled backwards.

With a roar, a wall of flames barrels towards the cabinet.

The glass cracks. A jagged pattern spreads and then shards of glass are slicing the air. The horse is free.

Maisie stumbles forward again, as though pulled by some sort of magnetic force. She needs to get to the horse, to ride it, the feeling as vital as breathing. Only a rough shove startles her from her daze.

‘Get out of here,’ a voice shouts, barely audible above the fury of the inferno.

It takes a second to recognize the sooty face as belonging to Madame Rose.

Without acknowledging the fortune-teller, Maisie’s eyes are pulled back to the horse: flames ravage the tail and haunches.

A leg snaps off. Golds and blues and reds turn black and disintegrate into ash.

The eyes are last. Watching its own destruction, the creature is finally gone.

‘Out,’ Madame Rose screams and this time Maisie obeys.

She looks back over her shoulder as she runs, bewitched by the remnants of the carousel silhouetted against the orange sky.

Flames are spreading foot by foot, like a wine spill to engulf anything in their way.

Small fires have popped up everywhere now.

The helter-skelter is ablaze. The pier. Even the roof of Essex Cottage.

Maisie is pushing her legs faster, gasping, desperate to get to Milo and evacuate Fairweather House when she lets out a cry as an apparition emerges.

It took almost half a decade for her prayers to be answered, but appearing from within the smoke, through the ash that falls upon everything like black snow, is Laurent .