LJ Idol Week 24: Topic 2 of 2: Tool Box
The first thing everyone noticed was Mr. Bradley Whittingham of Marigold Drive running haphazardly down Main Street, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“My tool box was stolen! My tool box of stolen!”
This, of course, set off a chain reaction of horror and alarm, because nothing was ever stolen from anyone in the good town of Olliville, where everyone knew everyone and everything and everything everyone did.
“The bright red one that shined so much you could see your reflection in it?” Loretta Van Pickle of Cactus Way asked with a gasp.
“It’s gone!” wailed Mr. Bradley Whittingham.
“That’s what you get for buying stuff at that Home Deeee-Pot,” croaked out Mr. James Mayhem of Olive Drive, who always looked like he was two seconds away from death’s door. He shook his head at the shame someone brought on the town for not buying strictly local. “No one’s ever thought to steal my rusty old toolbox. I’ve been hauling it around for sixty years and you can barely even open it anymore!” He said that last part like it was his proudest accomplishment ever.
The rest of the town, though, did not share Mr. James Mayhem’s outlook and instead spent the entirety of the day discussing this truly horrendous happening while casting suspicious looks at their neighbors at the same time.
But by the next morning, Mr. Bradley Whittingham and his toolbox were forgotten, because before breakfast had even finished, Mr. Kyle Webberford was racing through town in a panic, unable to find his precious hammer he too had bought up the road last month at the swanky new Home Depot.
“How am I supposed to build little Byron his treehouse?” he wailed to anyone who would listen, as if borrowing a hammer from someone else would be just treasonous to the tree’s new development.
The townspeople were sufficiently outraged.
“Someone is stealing from us!” shrieked Violet Olsen of Rose Petal Avenue. “Everyone lock up your stuff!”
That night, everyone did lock up their stuff, some of them for the first time in their lives because there had never been any reason to before. But on this night, no one in the little town of Olliville went to bed without every single nail and screwdriver and bottle of nail polish in perfect place.
It didn’t matter, though. Misty Meadow of Magnolia Lane woke up to find her measuring tape gone, and by the time the coffee was brewed at the little restaurant up the road, the whole town knew.
“We are under attack!” Misty sobbed, and everyone nodded in agreement and looked appropriately aghast as they questioned everyone, even the person who slept beside them all night, as to their whereabouts of every minute of every day for the past three days.
“Maybe someone just likes tools?” Loretta DeNittle mused later that afternoon, seeming inclined to perhaps let the tool-lover off the hook. She wondered aloud if maybe they lived in the woods beyond the town, building themselves the only home they could afford.
This may have been a scenario other people could have gotten behind if it weren’t for what happened later that night.
Just before dinner, as Mr. Bradley Whittingham of Marigold Drive was getting dressed in his finest clothes for supper down at the pub, he got distracted thinking about the person who dared steal his tool box and what they might be doing with it and ventured too close to the stairs, tripped over the hem of his pants he was still trying to put on and went crashing down, breaking a leg.
“The thief tried to kill me!” Mr. Bradley Whittingham of Marigold Drive screamed as his neighbors rushed him to the town doctor.
That, of course, made no rational sense, but an hour later, the whole town believed the thief had shown back up and tried to murder Mr. Bradley Whittingham in his very own home.
The next morning Mr. Kyle Webberford was hit on the head by a falling piece of lumber from his unfinished treehouse, and the story about the thief turned murderer grew so large that by the time Misty Meadow of Magnolia Lane fell headfirst off her bike when a tire unexpectedly blew out, everyone in town was sure the tool box thief was around the corner just waiting to kill them all in their sleep.
It didn’t help that more tools were stolen and more bad luck befallen and pretty soon the townspeople of Olliville, who had lived in the perfect town all their perfect lives, were sure they had been cursed by an evil witch.
This is what little Maybeth Maripold of Rose Petal Avenue, whose house was next door to that of Violet Olsen, had heard her father discussing with that very neighbor before she was sent off to bed and tucked in carefully one night about three weeks after this whole thing had started.
It was no surprise then that when little Maybeth Maripold woke up hours later - when her house and the rest of Olliville were dark and silent - and she looked over the edge of her bed to see a creature that seemed to be made of shadows holding a box that gleamed so brightly it was almost like looking into a mirror that she instantly thought it was an evil witch coming to finish her off.
Little Maybeth Maripold started to scream, but the shadow creature held up something that resembled a hand and little Maybeth Maripold froze in her bed.
“It is not me!” said a voice that sounded like neither man nor woman. “I am not the witch! I am saving you all! If I have one of your possessions, I can protect you from the real threat.”
Little Maybeth Maripold thought that seemed fair. After all, her father had always taught her to believe the best in people.
“If you take my stuff, will I be hurt?” she asked the shadow creature.
“You will be hurt more if I don’t,” the shadow creature said.
Little Maybeth Maripold had more questions, because she was known for being a very inquisitive girl, and in the morning, as soon as the first streaks of sun appeared in the sky, the little girl raced from her bedroom to the room of her father, gleefully telling him tales of a shadow creature protecting the town from a witch and a buried treasure and a teddy bear she had given it that would save her life.
Little Maybeth Maripold’s father was horrified. He rushed his daughter to a doctor, explaining in terror how the murdering thief must have brainwashed her somehow.
“No, it’s true!” Little Maybeth Maripold shrieked. “The shadow creature is good!” But no one would believe her.
It did give the townspeople of Olliville an idea, though. That night, everyone in town locked themselves into their own bedrooms with all of their worldly possessions. In the middle of each of their rooms, they put hard wooden chairs that were impossible to sleep on because of how uncomfortable they were, and on these chairs they sat. And they waited.
Sure enough, the shadow creature with the gleaming tool box appeared, and Mr. James Mayhem of Olive Drive did not wait to hear any explanations before casting the spell of his ancestors, summoning the magic no one else knew about to entrap the shadow creature right there in his home.
“It is you!” the shadow creature gasped as it struggled in the magical bonds it was now caught in.
“It is me,” Mr. James Mayhem of Olive Drive with a sinister grin that he normally only practiced on himself in the mirror. “And thanks to you, no one will ever suspect. Not that they would have anyway. But now they will be dead long before they figure it out.”
Outside of the window, Mr. James Mayhem of Olive Drive could see specks of light from the other townspeople guarding their homes. In a few hours, he would head down to the restaurant for breakfast and complain to anyone who would listen about staying up all night long for no darn good reason.
But first, he told the now-incapacitated shadow creature, he had his next victim to find.
This was written for Week 24 of therealljidol. This week, we were given two topics and had to write entries on both. To read other people's works, please go here. We are down to the Top 13, so if you would like to vote, voting is here!