Ring a ring a Rosie
Pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down!
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Grace,
I am severely sick and might die soon. Sell the house and whatever happens, don't come home.
Elisabeth Hencook,
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My grandmother, Elisabeth Hencook, lives in London and was a weird old woman. A very grumpy and mean woman who likes to talks to herself. This is one of the reasons why we don't visit her often. We rarely visit her cause she doesn't like it, and it's a long flight from California to London.
Her obsession with her room is scary. Won't let anyone near it. She has this weird foot long plaque of names hanging in front of her door that runs half a meter long. I asked mom once who the names were for but mom said she doesn't know.
Before her death, she sent a letter to my mom telling her to sell the ancestral house and never go back. But even with my grandmother's letter, we booked a flight to London and flew all the way to take care of the burial.
After the burial, Mom and I cleaned out Gran's room. There were load of antiques and an old locked cabinet with piles of plaques inside. The plaques had names of people but none of which Mom was acquainted with. We didn't know what to do with them so we gathered them in a box and placed it in the attic, along with the other boxes of old things we collected around the house.
Dad had to go back to California first cause he had some work to do so it was just me and mom who cleaned the house and took care of the rest of the things that needed to be done. I didn't have classes since it's summer vacation, but I don't like staying there cause something feels off for some reason.
Three days later, there was a knock on the door. I went to see if it was Dad who came back cause we don't know a lot of people around the area. When the door opened, a blond lady in a gray shirt and blue pants stood in front of me wearing my mother's face. She was with two kids, a girl around twelve and a young boy I assume to be around ten.
Mom who was cutting sausages from the kitchen came to see who it was, still carrying one of the sausages she was cutting. When they locked gazes, Mom dropped the sausages and ran to the lady crying and they locked in a warm embrace.
I didn't know Mom had a twin sister. It turned out that her twin ran away from home after their father died. She said, back when she was still a kid, she and Gran would have frequent fights and her dad was the only person who could calm her mom down when she went crazy and started threatening everyone out of the house.
I met Mom's twin sister, Rebecca. She has two kids. Ellie the oldest, and Tophie the youngest. They stayed for a week. Ellie and Tophie are cute and sweet. I look after them all the time while Mom and Rebecca are catching up on things.
One day, Tophie caught a cold. He stopped playing and had to lay in bed for two days. Then he started having fever, cough, and rashes everywhere. Until there were big lumps on his neck and legs, so we took him to see a doctor. The Doctor said it was nothing serious and was just a common symptom of allergy. Tophie was prescribed some medication and was approved to be treated at home.
A day after returning home, Mom and Rebecca needed to get groceries so I was left to babysit my cousins. I went to Tophies room and found him covered with his blanket shivering. When I shook off his blanket, what presented me was a blooded kid. His eyes were blood-red and blood was oozing out of every hole n his face. Before I could react, he said in a weak voice.
"ge... me.... da.... ankee.. lease... "
Before he could finish his sentence, he threw up more blood, dyeing the mattress red, and more blood was oozing out from his ears. He started shaking like some kind of seizure for what felt like hours. When he finally stopped moving, I realized that my knees were shaking too. Nailed next to his bed, I was unsure of what to do.
His sister Ellie came inside the room and when she saw Tophie bathed in blood, she screamed at the top of her lungs. This brought me back to my senses and tugged Ellie along to the kitchen where I took out my phone and called Mom.
The house started to smell of dead mouse for some reason. When the ambulance came to take Tophie, his toes, and fingers had gangrene and looked like rotting flesh.
I was left at home with Ellie while Mom and Rebecca took care of Tophie at the hospital for the whole day. Ellie didn't want to leave my side so she tagged along while I was cleaning Tophie's bed full of blood stains.
She found a pretty black handkerchief on Tophie's bed, and cried. Said she'd keep it while Tophie's at the hospital. Since a lot of things happened, we decided to sleep early. There were only three rooms, and Ellie decided to take Mom's room cause the room she shared with Tophie was a mess. As usual, I slept in Gran's room.
I was dozing off until I suddenly heard whispers inside the old closet fronting the bed. Doing my best not to mind it, I scrolled thru reels on my phone while waiting to fall asleep. It didn't even take a minute before the whispers started again, louder this time. I got chills from the whispers and turn on the light but when when I tried to switch it on, the lights wont lit. Ready to jump on my feet and run, I took my phone out and turned the door knob slowly, making sure no noise is made. The lights went back and the whispers vanished. Instead of relief, i got more scared. Afraid of what would happen if the lights won't turn on again.
Suddenly for some unknown reason, when my curiosity got the best of me, I switched the lights off, and the voices came back but it was no longer a whisper. It was talking in a loud voice, almost a shout. That's when the words became clearer and I realized it wasn't talking but was singing a rhyme.
Ring a ring a Rosie,
Body full of posies;
Come and make haste!
Hide before it's too late.
Before your found!
Ring around the Rosie,
A bottle full of posie,
Come here, I give you
Hurry! Hurry!
All the souls in town,
The singing from the old cabinet came back but louder this time like it was mad at me for not hearing it the first few times.
Ring around a Rosie
This evil thing, it knows me
Take this boy and grant
A healing crown.
Ring around the Rosie
What do you suppose we
can do to find the hanky
before we drown?
I mastered the courage to open the closet door. Little did I know that it would be the worst decision of my life.
In the count of three.
1....
2...
3...
I opened the closet door and all the voices went dead silent.
There was no one inside the closet.
Instead, I found the plaques of names we kept in a box that's supposed to be in the attic.
Maybe Mom decided to move it back?
I took a closer look, and a very weird plaque caught my eyes. It was different from the rest, it looked new and sparkling clean, compared to the rest of the plaque which was old and dusty.
I grabbed the plaque and I couldn't believe my eyes.
The name written on it is Christopher Smith with today's date engraved on the right side of the name. It's Tophie's full name. My phone rang for the first time in three days. With a weeping voice, she said, "Tophie's gone".
I thought to myself, what kind of sick joke is this?