The world was grey and rainy that day. Businesspeople with umbrellas were weaving their way across the empty street, on their lunch break, trying to find a place to eat. As the young woman passed, she noticed a few children playing jump rope on the sidewalk in front of a large Victorian-style house.
"Ring around the rosies, pocketful of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down..." they sang, over and over in an odd repetitive trance-like melody. They leaped up and down, 2 boys and a girl, singing their song, ignoring the adults walking past them on all sides. Water splashed up from the ever-filling puddles.
Worried for their safety, the young woman went up to them, holding her umbrella high against the thundering rain.. "You may want to play jump rope in the yard," she said, crouching down so she was at their eye level and pointing. 'Don't want to get run over, do you?"
The children glanced at her with glassy eyes, still singing their song, but slower and more deliberately. She stood up, smoothing out her suit, and then crouched back down again and saying, "Are you children okay? You seem awfully out of it."
The children said nothing to her, only repeated their rhyme, the rain dripping off their soaking hair and clothes.They didn't even seem to hear her.
"A pocket full of posies," they sang, "Ashes, ashes-"
Something exploded behind them, in the house. A fire whipped to life, fueled by the old wood, extending towards the dreary sky. The crowd of people went into a panic, but the children paid no mind.
"We all fall down."
The house crumbled, and screams coupled with the sound of snapping wood and splintering metal. As the house's window glass exploded forward, shrieks from the crowd rose up. The rain did nothing to stop the fire, and people whipped their umbrellas down to shield them from the glass, but it ripped through, warranting yells of pain and profanity.
The woman glanced up quickly, desperate to get the children away. She reached out her hands and turned her back to the demolishing house, but the boys and the girl didn't budge. They were still singing, this time another song, which was one verse: "The reaper, he calls, the people, they fall."
The house fell all the way forward as sirens echoed in everyone's minds.
Later, after the police had gotten to the scene, they had found most of the crowd dead, including the young woman. They didn't find the children, but they did find their jumprope and lifted DNA samples off of it. The results came back.
The DNA told them they were the Muader triplets, children who had been long dead, since the Black Death.
Hello! Not that scary, I'm terrible at these stories. So, the rhyme I included is actually from the Black Death period, the people who "fall" in the last verse had died from the Plague. So, sorta like another "ASHLYN" style story. Hope you liked it. ;)
