THE CAROUSEL

Famed real estate magnate, Ethan Crosse, is envied by his colleagues and feared by his rivals.  He's about to sign a deal with the Mayor that will be the crowning glory of his career, yet by day's end, memories of a nightmarish tragedy as a teen will have provoked an apocalyptic confrontation in the Mayor’s office that results in a self-imposed reversal of fortune.

His adolescent experience’s meaning and the significance of the deal with the Mayor are revealed during his morning limo commute via flash backs.  Ethan recalls hell hounds chasing him into a giant Ferris Wheel that eerily re-animates, terrifying his teenage friends as it spins wildly to the top and free-falls.  He remembers climbing “The Typhoon” and being terror-struck by phantom coasters that nearly blow them over the railings.

Young Ethan splits from his friends to roam the midway alone, experiencing the park as if it were alive.  The deserted “Happyland” bombards Ethan with sights and sounds from its past in a dreamlike collage of sensations that send him reeling from one apparition to another. 

He is sickened by a ghostly Bundtist rally in an old pavilion and flees, staggering into a funhouse pervaded by Nazi occult. He is snared in its evil maze, lost and terrified deep within its bowels. Young Ethan escapes the haunted “Geisthaus”, to see his friends on an ancient, mystical carousel, operated by a hooded satanic figure that spins the sinister ride out of control. When it eventually stops, he discovers his friends morphed into withered old men who wander into the darkness.

The hooded man beckons Ethan to take his turn.  Ethan runs for his life, barely escaping the wild dogs that had returned for new prey.  His friends are discovered the next day, some partly devoured by the dogs, others diminished to a helpless state, unable to explain their transmutation.  The ancient ones all die within weeks, except for Pee Wee, who Ethan visits faithfully in a nursing home. Hoary and old, Pee Wee can’t fathom his age, pleading for his parents to reclaim their forsaken son.  They don’t recognize the old man insisting to be their child and Pee Wee dies alone.

In a return to the present we learn that Ethan had torn down Happyland years ago, raising his first condos on its unholy plot to obliterate the past. 

Why does a man, admired for his elegance and strength, regress to over-the-top satirical rants, adolescent mischief and violence, on what is usually a dull commute?  In a tailored suit, for the biggest meeting of his life, why does Ethan have a football romp with a former NFL quarterback?  Why does Ethan stand through the sunroof of his limo to burlesque a bible-thumping sermon to a stunned crowd waiting for a bus?  Why does he sink into a cynical, off-kilter rant at a pretentious coffeehouse that outrages its staff?

Perhaps it was reliving that fateful evening that induced a transformation that dismantled Ethan's stone façade as a businessman and began his resurrection as a human being.