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Mystery of the Scythe

In a lone park in the small town of Greensburrow lies a peculiar sight: A lone scythe lodged into the ground amidst some glowing cracks with not a single blade of grass around it. However, when a kid mysteriously dies after touching, it's up to the Greensburrow Police Dept. to uncover the mystery of the scythe, lest there be more death.

By Jeremiah EllisonPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
5

In a lone park in the small rural town of Greensburrow, there lies an unusual sight. A lone scythe lodged in the ground in the center of several glowing cracks not a single blade of grass around it. Nobody knows where this scythe came from and people generally tend to avoid it because of various rumors regarding it. One day, two children run into the park and approach the scythe.

They stop in front of it. No grass was in sight and the scythe exudes an ominous aura. One of the kids say, “I’ll bet you $5 that you can’t touch that scythe.”

“Bet,” says the other kid before running closer to the scythe.

Despite all the warnings the rumors state to stay away from the scythe, the kids throw all caution to the wind as the one kid who betted he could touch it lays his hand on it. Sudden pain fills his entire body as he lets out an unearthly scream. The other kid watches in horror as his best friend screams in agony until it suddenly stops as his fingers slip from the scythe causing him to fall. The other kid runs to his best friend and puts his hand on the now cold body of his friend, trying to shake him awake tears in his eyes.

“Wake up. Please. Wake up! WAKE UP!”

His plea is not heard by the corpse or if it has no response comes. The kid runs. He runs and he runs until he arrives at the police station, his tears never ending. It doesn’t take long before the police and an ambulance arrive at the scene. The paramedics rush over to the child but confirm the worst. The child is no longer of this world.

The police chief, Harry Johnson with gray hair and green eyes in a blue police uniform, puts his hand on his hat and asks the other kid, “And you said this happened right when he put his hands on the scythe?”

The kid in tears over the loss of his best friend sobs, “Yes. He touched it and died. It’s all my fault. I dared him to touch it. I didn’t think this would happen.”

Johnson puts his hand on the crying kid’s shoulders and reassures him, “You couldn’t have known any of those rumors were true. I myself didn’t believe them but respected them regardless. Now why don’t you go over there to Officer Clay? She’ll get in contact with your mom so she can pick you up.”

The kid wipes his arm across his face and simply says, “Ok,” before heading off.

A guy in a white shirt with black hair and yellow eyes walks up to Johnson. Johnson asks him, “Do you really believe the scythe is the cause of all this?”

A bunch of officers run past them and the person next to him states in a gruff voice, “I don’t know. I heard the rumors about it myself and just to be on the safe side, I sent some detectives to investigate said rumors, but it’s too early to jump to conclusions. The eyewitness account seems to lean more into the supernatural than any scientific explanation damaging its credibility in my eyes. Keeping in mind that it is a child who gave the report, their perception of the event may be warped from the trauma.”

“Well Harris, I would like to think that maybe the children are just more willing to accept the supernatural than us adults. At the same time, I agree that we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. Conduct the investigation with your usual precision,” states Johnson.

“On it,” says Harris moving towards the crime scene.

Days pass as the police department go through every avenue, every possible scientific explanation until one day as one of the detectives was getting up he accidentally grabs the scythe to give himself a boost up only to let out an unearthly scream thanks to his momentary lapse in judgement. Despite the fact that his hands were gloved, he continued screaming as several officers separate him from the scythe only for him to go limp in their hands, his death assured.

Everyone near the scythe backs away from it slowly. Harris grabs his cell phone and asks, “Do I got permission to call the lab over at Cellulose?”

Johnson nods and says, “Granted.”

Harris makes the call and in a couple of hours a helicopter flies above the park. A rope ladder descends from the side and a scientist with blonde hair and green eyes descends the ladder with a cage of lab rats in one hand. A couple of officers go and guide the helicopter in for a landing. The scientist hears a rattle in the cage that resides in his hand as he walks over to Johnson and Harris. He looks at the cage and sees the lab rats all on the same side of the cage away from the scythe trying to flee. The scientist puts down the cage and takes a notepad and pencil out of his pocket and jots something down. Afterwards, he introduces himself.

“Hello, I’m Brandon Elric from Cellulose Labs.”

He shakes their hands and quickly states, “I was informed of your situation by a…Mr. Harris?”

Harris raises his hand and says, “That would be me.”

“Ah, fantastic. I need all your data regarding every little detail about this case including the rumors around this peculiar object. I need to know exactly what you found, series of events leading up to it, etc. If we are to crack this case of insta-death, we need all available data on hand?”

“Insta-death? Is that what we’re calling it?” asks Johnson surprised at the new made-up terminology.

The scientist instantly rebukes, “If you got a better name for it, I would love to hear it. Otherwise, we will refer to this phenomenon as Insta-Death. Now, that data.”

Harris leads the scientist over to the temporary workstation they had set up in order to brief him on the matter. Johnson looks over at the scythe as more scientists are unloading equipment off the helicopter. “Mother of God, have we unleashed something terrible?” wonders Johnson.

A little bit later in the police’s temporary workstation Elric seeks to confirm, “So just to make sure this data is accurate. A majority of the rumors talk about the scythe being cursed and that’s it’s previous owner was a warrior who sought to end everything.”

“Yes, that’s correct, but we’re having trouble identifying the timeframe these rumors originated from. Any other questions regarding the matter at hand?” asks Harris.

Elric discusses the notes he took during the briefing with Harris making sure all his data is accurate and once it is confirmed. He nods and gets to work. The first thing he does is make sure all the equipment is properly set up. After a few hours once their equipment was properly set up and ready to go, he prepares for the initial test putting on his gloves.

Elric asks, “You got any inmates on death row we could use for the experiment?”

“I’m not letting any of my prisoners near that thing,” replies Johnson.

Elric says putting on goggles, “Fair enough.”

He gets out a pair of tongs and extracts one of the panicked lab rats from the cage. The other ones quickly try to run out of the cage but Elric closes it before they could escape. Elric approaches the scythe carefully with the lab rat squirming in the tongs and places the lab rat on the scythe. It lets out a horrifying shriek before it croaks. He then grabs the dead lab rat once more with the tongs and walks away from the scythe. He goes over to one of the stations made by the Cellulose scientists and places it on the desk. Elric grabs a syringe and takes a sample of the rat’s blood and places a drop of it on a microscope slide before yelling, “Allison, I want an autopsy on this rat stat.” A young woman with yellow hair tied into a huge bun on the back of her head with big glasses and green eyes runs over there. She confirms, “On it” as she takes the rat with the tongs and runs back to her workstation to cut it open. Another scientist yells, “Give me a hair of that rat before you dissect it.” She complies and gives the third scientist, a black man in his 40s who has medium sized glasses, brown eyes, and neat black hair a strand of hair from the dead rat. Allison goes back to her workstation and gets out a scalpel to cut open the rat. Their initial findings yielded no results, and they repeated the experiment until they only had one rat left. The only thing they could find was that the “death” signal in their brain was unceremoniously activated with no possible provocation. Allison took one of the rats to a scanner to see if it would have better luck than her.

It found something. A small lone rogue particle that activated the death signals in the cells of the body causing them to cease function and begin decay at an accelerated rate.

Johnson said what everyone was thinking, “That’s our cause of death? One lone spark?”

Elric rebutted, “It’s a particle sir, not a spark. But I am rather curious. We can only find evidence of the one particle in each of them. There should be many more by all scientific accounts. I am simply flabbergasted by the sheer lack of them. At the very least, this might explain why its transmitted through touch rather than being airborne. We need to take this scythe back to the lab for further analysis.

“I would love to let you take it but how do you suppose we move it?” asks Johnson.

“Are there any telekinetics in your force? Since the Death Particle is transmitted via touch, a telekinetic could theoretically move it into a containment unit, which we just so happened to bring with us,” suggests Elric.

Johnson looks at him sternly, “You intended to take that scythe all along didn’t you?”

“Of course we did. We can’t leave it here,” states Elric as the black scientist puts his hand on Elric’s shoulder and shakes his head. He walks over to Johnson and offers to shake his hand. “My name is Hugh Jackson, and I apologize for my colleague’s attitude.”

Johnson shakes his hand and says, “Pleasure to meet you.”

“As my colleague was trying to say, it’s too dangerous to just leave this thing lying around. We believe that it will be much better secured at Cellulose Labs where we can keep it out of the hands of the public and invent a vaccine for the Death Particle as my colleague called it.”

“Well, when you put it like that. Sorry, it just seemed rather suspicious that you were so well prepared for the possibility,” replies Johnson.

Jackson states sympathetically, “That’s alright. This thing has got me freaked out too.”

Johnson then states, “While I don’t have any telekinetics in the force, there is one who lives nearby.”

He turns around and yells, “Clay, get Gordon Jabberjaw here stat! We need his telekinesis. Tell him we’ll pay him for his troubles.”

Clay salutes and hops in the police car and grabs Mr. Jabberjaw, who agrees to help. Upon arrival, he fires up his ability causing the scythe to shake causing everybody to watch in anticipation. The scientists got out a glass case and open it up. The scythe comes out of the ground causing the cracks to increase in size a little bit. He makes it float into the case which automatically closes once it’s inside. Elric takes it back to the helicopter yelling, “Everyone pack up, we’re done here.”

Everyone from Cellulose Labs starts packing up their equipment back on the helicopter. It takes a few hours but once everything was loaded up, the helicopter lifted off and flew away.

Johnson says, “I guess this case is closed.”

“Yeah, good riddance too. I hope we never see that thing again.”

In the helicopter Elric says to Hugh, “Call our sponsor and inform them that we got possession of the scythe and send them the notes on our research of it thus far. They will be thrilled to learn of our findings.”

Short Story
5

About the Creator

Jeremiah Ellison

Hello, my name is Jeremiah Ellison and I'm here to post content that I hope you will like. I mainly specialize in Sci-fi, action, and apparently psychological horror as of recently. I hope you enjoy my content.

Linktree: linktr.ee/Pokemiah

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Outstanding

Excellent work. Looking forward to reading more!

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  1. Compelling and original writing

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    Original narrative & well developed characters

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Comments (2)

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  • Jeremiah Ellison (Author)2 years ago

    For those interested, there is another story of mine that goes along with this one. Here's the link to it: https://vocal.media/fiction/the-unnatural-murder

  • Oh wow, this was so suspenseful! Fantastic story and I loved it! Is there a part 2 to this?

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