Ring Around the Rosies

“Look, Dad, I won’t put you in a nursing home or anything if you said you just lost your balance on the ladder. You won’t lose face.”

“Son, I didn’t lose my balance. The darn thing was pushed!”

I sighed. This was conversation had been going around in circles ever since I started talking to my dad about the accident. He was restoring an old house that had been on his property to rent out. After the honeymoon period of being retired was over, he became bored like a child out of school for the summer and looked for ways of getting himself into trouble, or at least amusing himself. And get into trouble he did. A few days ago I received a call from the emergency room from my mother saying that Dad hurt himself real bad falling off the ladder while restoring. Now he was back home in bed with both legs broken. I considered it my duty to come over and help out while he recovered.

“Okay, fine Dad. The ladder was pushed,” I said as I got up and paced my annoyance out. “I’m going to go over now and rip out the rest of the walls in that room and then see what else I can do.”

“NO!” he grabbed my sleeve. “You stay out of that house! It is evil!”

“Dad, you were the one that told me it wasn’t haunted when I was little, remember? Tommy told me about the two sets of triplets that died of cholera in that house a hundred years ago and that they still haunted the place and I refused to go anywhere near that house. You were the one that told me there was no such things as a ghost, let alone six.”

“Six,” he muttered. “Evil number.”

“You rest now and I’ll come see you later.”
I could tell his pain medications were kicking in as he muttered, “Yes. Rest.”

I walked out of the room and put on my jacket to leave. I thought I’d grab an apple to eat on my walk over to the other house and stopped by the kitchen. “Hey, Mom, I’m off,” I said in passing when I saw my mother in there.

“James, maybe you shouldn’t go over there,” she said hesitantly.

I rolled my eyes. “Not you, too, Mom!”

“I’ve always had a strange feeling about that place, and after this . . .” her voice trailed off.

I opened the door and said, “I’ll be fine, Mom.”
It was a short walk to the other house and I wasn’t quite finished with my apple when I got there. I walked around inside as I munched the last few bites and looked at all the work to be done. It seemed like an impossible task, but it would occupy my dad for a while. I found the room he had been working in based on the ladder on the floor and the toolbox. I threw my apple core out a broken window and went over to the toolbox for a hammer. When I opened it up, it was empty. I squatted there for a while looking into the empty toolbox wondering where all the tools went. I glanced around the room again and in a dark corner I saw them all stacked neatly against the wall so that the base was touching the floor and the tool part was against the wall. I was even more confused, but I decided when the paramedics came in, they moved the tools out of the way. Still, why would all the tools be out of the box and why would they be stacked so neatly?

I grabbed a hammer and got to work on the wall. My mind soon got into the work and for several hours there was nothing but me and the wall. When I pulled the last piece off and threw it into the center of the room, I stood up and rocked on my heels looking at my work. Not bad. Not bad at all.
I was debating cleaning up the mess or starting on another wall when I heard something from the next room. A giggle? When I was younger, this place was a hangout for a lot of kids in the area. The girls liked to play house and the boys liked to use it for headquarters, although I don’t think we were ever sure for what.

I poked my head into the next room to see what the kid or kids were up to, but the room was empty. Oh, well, I must have just heard the house creak or something. I was about to turn back and get to work again when something caught my eye. The entire house was drab with age and even the most interesting colors were muted. What I saw was the bright red from the top of the core of apple sitting in the exact middle of the room. The whiteness of the flesh had turned a little brown in areas, but I could see that it was still fresh. I walked over to the window where I had thrown my core, but there was nothing on the ground where it should have fallen. Before I could analyze too deeply, I heard another noise from the other room. It was clearer and I definitely heard it. It was the voices of young girls singing a familiar song. I listened closely to the childhood chant and recognized it as “Ring Around the Rosies”. There was a noise of the girls plopping down after, “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down” and then the singing started up again.

I smiled when the idea came into my head that some neighborhood girls were playing a trick on me with the apple and the tools. I walked slowly across the room and hoped the floor wouldn’t creak. They were in the middle of the song when I jumped through the doorway with my arms out crying, “BOO!”

There was no one there.