After dinner I closeted myself in Alistair’s study. With a bit of hunting, I found the book about carousels on one of the shelves.
It was titled Garosello, the Little Battle of the Animals. There was a photo of a classic prancing horse on the cover. I’d always loved carousels, so I took a few minutes to skim through some of the history the author had provided.
The rotating rides actually evolved out of medieval jousts. In 12th-century Europe, there were games in which the knights would ride around in a circle and lob glass balls filled with perfume to each other. If a knight missed his catch, the ball would break and release the smell of the perfume, which implied an embarrassing lack of skill. The games were called “garosello”, as in ‘little battle’, and when the culture of chivalry and knightly sports waned, someone came up with the idea of turning the event into a ride to be enjoyed by all.
There was a chapter devoted entirely to the amazing animals and imaginative bench seats. It took many hours of work to turn a precise drawing of the animal, whether real or mythical depending on the carousel’s theme, into a finished piece, painted, varnished and often decorated with jewels.
Some carousels had names, and this was where I found one of Alistair’s paper flags: the one in Llithfaen was called ‘Cleito’s Menagerie’. I followed his other marked spots:
- Our carousel was designed and built in 1872 by a man named Gustav Kreuz. He hailed from the village of Hoxel in the municipality of Morbach in Germany. ‘Morbach’ rang a bell, but I had to look it up on the internet to place it. There was a somewhat famous story about a werewolf having been killed there; a shrine at the edge of the town of Wittlich held a candle that always burned, for it ever went out the werewolf would return. Curious, but just an interesting legend. As a young man Kreuz moved to Essen, a prominent industrial centre, to apprentice with his uncle Karl, a veteran carousel manufacturer.
- Karl was contacted in 1871 by a mysterious philanthropist who ordered the commission of a fantastical carousel for a small town in Ontario, Canada, which the Kreuz family had never heard of. Gustav, being an adventurous young man, travelled across the ocean to meet with the client and see where the carousel would be located – to ‘understand the atmosphere’ of the site, as it was put to Gustav. The client had several ideas for the creatures to be made, but according to the book’s author, Gustav was inspired by the strange tales of the area and came up with the finishing touches.
I noted that the name of the client wasn’t mentioned, but at the bottom of the page Alistair had made a notation, “client = Enoch Quance?” There was the trustee’s name again. It would make some sense, as Quance clearly had a fair amount of wealth, but his name kept popping up all over the stranger parts of our town. It was increasingly suspicious.
- Gustav was given very specific instructions about installing the carousel: the exact location (to the millimetre) in the park along the waterfront, the very date it had to be finished by, and even the time of day, i.e. no later than sunset on October 30th of that year. The installation was overseen by the client and a group of ‘assistants’, one of whom purportedly chanted some kind of spell as the final screws were put in place. The author stressed that this was hearsay only, but to me it was significant in light of what had happened at the festival.
This was all fascinating, but it deviated considerably from Alistair’s main interest, the ancient civilization of Atlantis.
The carousel’s name kept bouncing around my head, though. I couldn’t place Cleito. Peter would have known right off the top of his head. Back to the internet I went.
It turned out that Cleito was a mortal woman who Poseidon fell in love with at one point, in and among his prolific list of willing and not-so-willing lovers. She might have been an obscure footnote in mythology if Poseidon hadn’t wanted to protect her so vehemently that he build rings of land and water around the island she lived on, and their first son, Atlas, became the ruler of the kingdom so created. It was called Atlantis.
There was the missing connection, and it chilled me. I needed to talk to Domitian!
Excerpt from Into the Forbidden Fire, Book 2 in the Chaos Roads Trilogy.
I’ve loved carousels since I was a child, after we moved from northern Ontario to southern Ontario and I discovered a carousel practically at my back door. I visit them whenever we come across one in our travels, and so I had to put one in my fictional town of Llithfaen, although that one is a little stranger than most, as you’ll discover when you read Book 2.
When I discovered that there was a vintage amusement park in New York State just a couple hours’ drive from us, with a carousel, I knew we had to go and see it. And then I learned that there was much more to the story.
But I’ve been working so hard on editing photos and keyboarding the story that my right shoulder has given out. I don’t want to struggle through and thus rush this post, so stay tuned next week for Part 1 of the main post, followed by Part 2 the following week. It’s a great story 🙂