Games Creatures Play

  It was a ball, true, but not a baseball—this was a sphere of sizzling plasma. It closed the sixty feet in a fraction of a second and smacked into the catcher’s mitt with the sound of a thunderbolt striking a tree. But it also went through the catcher and shattered the glass of the seafood refrigerator. Bags of shrimp exploded out, trailing smoke and arcs of green slime.

  The catcher threw the ball back to the pitcher. Wait a minute . . . they were playing catch? According to the newspaper article, the pitcher had murdered the catcher, then turned the gun on himself. They seemed to be getting along awfully well, considering . . . that seemed odd. Real odd.

  The pitcher reared back again and delivered. I heard that thunderclap—more glass shattered, more frozen seafood scattered across the floor. A steaming scallop hit the tile floor and rolled toward us, flopping flat just a foot away. The ethereal energy had cooked it up real nice. It smelled delicious.

  Bo licked his lips. “Pa,” he said, “five-second rule—you think that scallop is still good?”

  “Don’t eat it,” I said. “That’s an order.”

  Bo sighed. Not the insubordinate sigh of Luke, but rather a forlorn sigh of a lost opportunity.

  “Yes, Pa.”

  Sometimes I wonder if my boy has all his gears working proper.

  The ghosts suddenly blinked out, there one second, gone the next. Was that it? The damage reports of years past had been much worse.

  I stood. I listened. Then I heard the thunderclap—they were two aisles over, in the pasta section.

  The ghosts looked like nice enough fellows, or had been in the past, but a job was a job. Just because they were dead didn’t excuse excessive property damage, and it certainly didn’t excuse them hurting people.

  “Bo,” I said, “we need to watch some more, but you be ready for action.”

  He slid his big hand into his big coat and brought out his silver baseball bat. “I’m ready, Pa.”

  I reached into my pocket and came out with my fingers laced through the polished silver of Old Glory. The colored rhinestones embedded in it glimmered under the fluorescent lights. It’s costume jewelry, of course, but that’s the kind of stuff my wife likes to magic up with her spells. One shot from Old Glory would put a ghost down; if the silver didn’t get them, my wife’s spells would.

  “We’ll give them a chance to move along on their own,” I said. “From the looks of things, though, these two can’t process anything new.”

  I quietly headed for the pasta aisle, and my son followed.

  • • •

  The pitch looked high and outside. The catcher reached up and caught it, but like before, the ball hissed through his glove and smashed into the aisle, sending boxes of Raisin Bran and Cheerios flying to clatter on the tile floor.

  Bo leaned close to me.

  “Full count,” he said quietly. “A strike here closes out the inning.”

  Bo thought they were playing a game, just without batters, fielders, or even a field. Every few pitches, the pitcher turned and looked behind him, as if following the arc of a flying or bouncing ball. The ghosts had been at it for several minutes. Some pitches were strikes, some were balls.

  By Bo’s count, we were in the bottom of the fourth. The ghosts had changed locations several times, tearing up the produce department after they’d ruined just about every box of spaghetti Safeway had to offer.

  They seemed to be reliving a game. Could that have something to do with the haunting?

  I thumbed the button again. “Luke, what was the score of the morning game of the doubleheader?”

  I heard his fingers clattering. “Seals won five to one . . . Carlisle pitched a two-hitter with nine strikeouts.”

  “Did Francis Haupberg play?”

  “Checking the box score . . . yeah, he did. Says the starting catcher was hurt. Haupberg went one-for-five, had a single for an RBI.”

  Two men, both dead from a sudden act of violence, both living out the last game they’d ever played. I had to get to the bottom of their deaths. I had to get them to understand that it was time to let go and move to the next plane. If I couldn’t do that, I had to clear them out—no matter what their tragic circumstances, the dead can’t be allowed to hurt the living.

  “Luke,” I said, “tell your mother to get in here.”

  • • •

  Top of the sixth. I’d seen all there was to see—time to get this over with.

  I turned to my right, to the hair-sprayed vision of loveliness that was the mother of my children.

  “Honey Buns,” I said, “you ready?”

  Betty Lou nodded. “Sure am, Sugar Pie.”

  She adjusted her denim purse on her hip. It’s more like the size of a potato sack than a purse, really; you could carry a toddler in that thing. From it, she pulled out a bracelet made of pale pink and baby blue plastic beads, and a black-and-yellow-rhinestone-encrusted bee-shaped brooch that even the most white-trash gramma would call hideous. The air around both of the pieces shimmered. She also wore a pair of necklaces, three sets of earrings, and the standard set of head-thwacking, fake-gold rings that my children knew oh-so-well.

  I told Bo to stay back, to let his mother and me handle this. If you thought Luke was offended, that was nothing—Bo looked like someone had kicked his puppy to death. Bo is a brawler; if we’d been up against ghouls or goblins, I’d have taken him in first, but I had a feeling this situation required both power and subtlety. For that, I needed my wife.

  I had Old Glory on my right hand. With my left, I drew a little toy that does me well in these situations. It’s a modified ballistic knife. Spring-loaded, that baby can fire a razor-sharp blade out at sixty feet per second. The Russian special forces used them a few years back. Truth is they aren’t that great a weapon and are accurate barely outside the range where you could just as easy reach out and stab someone, but that’s if you want to cut something—we use it to deliver magical talismans. In this case, I’d mounted a Point of Van Kessel on the end. It’s a little cross with a ruby center, made by a monk that lived back in the 1600s. We got a good deal on a half dozen of them from a monster stomper that went out of business.

  The knife is a great weapon against ghosts, because nine times out of ten they simply ’vaporate if the point goes through them. The weapon doesn’t do shit to something solid, like a vamper or a mummy, but against the intangibles it’s plenty un-deadly.

  I kept the blade flat against my left thigh. I walked into the cereal aisle. I would have stepped around the fallen boxes if there’d been room, but they covered the floor—my Red Wing boots crunched on cardboard as I walked.

  “Fellas,” I said loud enough to get their attention, “we gotta have us a little talk.”

  Ever see that movie The Fantastic Four? That Human Torch guy, the one who catches fire all of a sudden? That’s what it’s like surprising a ghost. Like I said, if you don’t bug them, for the most part they keep replaying that scene that matters so much to them. But interrupt them? Confront them? Then they’re like a spooked cat, fluffing all up to scare the bejeezus out of you. Only instead of puffed fur, they channel a healthy dose of paranormal energy.

  Both ghosts flamed up, rose up, and swole up, swirling with vapor and roiling like storm clouds. Their eyes got all big and blazing and orange, the kind of thing that would make the uninitiated drop a brown steamer right in their drawers.

  As you might have guessed, I ain’t uninitiated.

  “I like baseball as much as the next guy,” I said, “but you boys got to go.”

  The catcher’s head extended toward me, a floating orb stretching away from the body, supported by a horizontal column of green fire. It opened a toothy maw and roared.

  Maybe I should have raised the knife and buried the Point of Van Kessel in that nightmare, but I paused—the catcher was the one that got murdered, and none of this was his
fault, probably—and that cost me.

  The catcher moved to his left, putting himself between me and the pitcher. Not only were they playing nicely together, but the murder victim was protecting his murderer?

  Betty Lou took a step back. “Hunter, I think that news story was wrong.”

  Like a goddamn rookie, I turned to look at her, and when I did I got smacked with a supernatch fist that launched me into the Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. I hit hard and fell to the floor. I was up on my hands and knees in time to see Betty Lou throw that cheap bee brooch on the ground below the catcher—the brooch sprayed up blinding white energy that drove the ghost back.

  Then I saw the pitcher: his legs were once again solid, and his knee was high up at his chest. I didn’t even have time to shout out a warning before he delivered a fastball of energy that hit my beloved dead in the chest.

  Betty Lou cried out and sank to her knees. I ignored my hurting body and stood, but I heard something coming from behind me. I turned in time to see twenty-foot-long snakes made of living baguettes shooting across the tile floor, kicking up boxes of Honey Bunches of Oats in their wake. Before I could turn to run, the bread-snakes wrapped around my ankles and lifted me into the air like a strung-up pig.

  I still had the silver knuckles, but the knife was no longer in my hand. It lay somewhere on the floor, hidden among crumbled pictures of Tony the Tiger.

  Another bread-snake slithered through the sea of cereal and looped around Betty Lou’s ankles. Before she knew what was happening, she was dangling upside down right next to me.

  The catcher thrummed with a hateful light. Reds and yellows pulsed deep in his monstery ghost-chest.

  Betty Lou looked at me.

  “Hunter, honey,” she said, “I think we’re in an awful lot of trouble.”

  The two ghosts came closer. The catcher spoke, spoke in a voice that sounded all too human.

  “You found out about us,” he said. “You found out . . .”

  Ethereal hands reached out for us as the ghostly bodies drifted closer, two pinstriped spirits ready to do us in. If they got near enough, I’d do some damage with Old Glory. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the plastic bracelet on Betty Lou’s wrist start to glow a whitish-blue. Without speaking a word, we knew how it would go down: the catcher was mine, she’d take the pitcher.

  And then a mountain of a young man stepped in front of us.

  “Y’all just back off!” Bo hollered in his deep voice.

  The ghosts stopped cold. They stared. But they weren’t staring at Bo, they were staring at his weapon—staring at his silver baseball bat.

  The pitcher smiled a hellish smile.

  “A new batter,” he said wistfully. “Frankie . . . eighty years . . . a new batter.”

  I felt a wave of panic. I opened my mouth to speak, but the catcher made a quick gesture with his hand and I found my mouth overfilled with cereal. Trix had never tasted so bitter.

  “Bo!” Betty Lou screamed. “Don’t—”

  A stream of granola poured into her mouth before she could get out another syllable.

  The catcher floated toward Bo.

  “Hey batter-batter,” the catcher said. “Let’s make a bet . . . one at-bat, if you get a hit, we’ll let you all go.”

  I chewed and spit as fast as I could, but I couldn’t get through enough to make a peep.

  Bo stood tall, stood brave. He stared back at the catcher.

  “And if I don’t get a hit?”

  The catcher’s Cheshire smile showed long, shimmering teeth.

  “Then you get to stay here with us, batter-batter,” he said. “You stay forever.”

  Bo glanced back at me. I shook my head no, but even as I did I saw that look in his eyes; he thought he could save the day and prove himself to me. One son is black, the other is white, but the two might as well have been goddamn Siamese twins joined at the brain.

  Bo looked at the ghosties.

  “I call the strikes,” he said. “I won’t lie. And if it’s a walk, I win.”

  That Cheshire smile widened even wider than the ghost’s head, a floating thing that could have been an evil spirit all by itself.

  “Batter up,” the catcher said.

  • • •

  If we got out of this, I’d yell at Bo. I couldn’t rightly tan his hide anymore, mostly because I wasn’t sure I could take him in a fair fight. The boy is just that big and strong. But yell? That I could do.

  Do later—for now, he needed nothing but confidence from me. I didn’t want my idiot child to become a goddamn ghost at the haunted Safeway.

  “Come on, son,” I said. “Keep your eye on the ball!”

  We’d moved to the canned goods aisle, as yet unblemished by these vandalous spirits.

  Bo stood at the end of the aisle closest to the front door. He had that silver bat up on his shoulder. His feet were near a glowing home plate. Around that plate, a batter’s box chalked out in Lucky Charms. Squatting behind it, the ghostly form of one Francis Haupberg.

  At the other end of the aisle, standing on a pitcher’s mound made of Fruity Pebbles and Chex Mix, stood John “The Cannon” Carlisle.

  Betty Lou and I stood a bit behind the catcher. Rather, I stood, she hung—the ghosts seemed to know who the real danger was to them, and they weren’t about to let her walk free. They’d taken away her big ol’ denim purse. They also seemed to sense that if they held her in a precarious position, I wouldn’t do anything to risk her safety.

  These ghosts . . . they really understood how a man in love acts when his wife’s in danger . . .

  I cheered my son on. Betty Lou just cried and cried. Part of that was the fear for her son, and part of it was from some overflow of emotion. She felt bad for the two ghosts, but she still couldn’t figure out exactly why.

  On the pitcher’s mound, John Carlisle leaned forward. Haupberg must have flashed a signal, because Carlisle shook it off.

  Bo’s fingers flexed on his silver bat.

  It was too late to stop this; Bo had already agreed to the terms. My son’s fate now rested squarely—and literally—in his own hands.

  Carlisle nodded; he’d got the signal he wanted. He stood straight, then wound up and launched a crackling phantasm fastball, a green comet that shot forward so fast I could barely see it. Bo swung hard; the bat had barely come forward before the sizzling heater smacked into the catcher’s mitt with a splash of emerald fire. Bo’s silver bat hit nothing but empty air.

  Strike one.

  Bo stepped out of the batter’s box. He turned and looked back at me.

  “Jesus, Pa,” he said in a breath. “Did you clock that?”

  Sometimes that boy asks the dumbest questions. “Sure, son . . . oh, wait, I left my paranormal radar gun in my other pants.”

  The catcher tossed the ball back to the pitcher.

  Bo licked his lips.

  “Pa, I’ve hit eighty-mile-an-hour fastballs. I’m pretty sure that thing was over a hundred.”

  I grabbed my John Deere ball cap and threw it down on the floor. I’m not sure if that’s what you’re supposed to do in those situations, but I’ve seen baseball managers do that move a hundred times, and, well . . . this was kind of like baseball.

  “Y’all are cheating!” I screamed at the ghosties. “No way you threw a hundred miles an hour in real life!”

  The two spirits looked at me, hollow eyes burning with orange flame. I could see through the eyes of the pitcher, see right out the hole in the back of his head where a bullet had once exited.

  Francis Haupberg stood. “John threw faster in real life,” he said.

  “Is that so?” I kicked my hat for good measure. “Well, then, what speed was he clocked at?”

  The catcher stared at me, then looked down the aisle to the pitcher standing on his mound of breakfast cereal. Th
e ghost of John Carlisle shrugged.

  I heard a burst of static in my headset . . . the damn thing was still working.

  “They wouldn’t know, Pa,” Luke said. “The first use of a radar gun was in 1938, to clock pitcher Bob Feller. John Carlisle was killed in 1933. From what I can find, Carlisle was rumored to have the fastest pitch on the West Coast, majors or minors.”

  Well, wasn’t that just peachy?

  Haupberg squatted down behind the plate, slapped his glove three times, then held it up to John Carlisle. Bo got a mean look on his face. He adjusted his pants, then stepped back into the Lucky Charms box. He was going to get a hit. He had to get a hit.

  Carlisle wound up and delivered. The ball came screaming in, high and inside. I could almost read Bo’s thoughts in that fraction of a second when a batter has to decide to swing or stand pat—Bo stood pat, actually flinched a little on account of the ball coming straight for his face. A few feet shy of the plate, the ball suddenly arced down in a cartoonishly exaggerated path. Francis didn’t even have to move his glove; the ball slammed into it, dead center over the plate.

  Curveball. Strike two.

  Bo stepped out of the box. Now he looked scared.

  A curve like that, a heater of over a hundred miles an hour, and what appeared to be total control and accuracy? In the modern era, any team would have paid him ten million a year, easy.

  The catcher held up a pair of semitransparent fingers. “That’s two strikes,” he said. “Three strikes, and you’re out.”

  I swallowed. Not my boy . . . not my son . . .

  Bo shouldered the bat and puffed up his big chest. “Don’t worry, Pa,” he said. “I got this.”

  He stepped into the batter’s box once again. The catcher squatted down, started flashing signals down at his crotch where we couldn’t see. The pitcher shook his head once, twice . . .

  Then Bo stepped back, out of the box. He stood straight. He extended his arm, pointed his finger up and to the right.

  I sighed—Bo was calling his shot. Sometimes, that boy’s ego writes checks his ability can’t cash.

  The pitcher ghost smiled.