Games Creatures Play

by Charlaine Harris

  Bo thumped his chest in exaggerated bravado.

  “Fastball,” he said. “I dare you. You ain’t getting that cheese by me, meat.”

  I shook my head. My son watched too many damned movies.

  John Carlisle held his glove to his chest, gathered himself. Bo squatted down, oversized body moving with spooky athleticism for a man of his dimensions.

  The pitcher raised his right knee high, wound up, and then his arm whipped forward so fast I could see the bones inside. Bo started his swing before the ball left the pitcher’s hand. The pitch started out high and slightly outside: a home run ball. Bo went after it. I thought he was going to knock it out of the park (so to speak) but as his bat came around, the ball suddenly broke down and in, dropping from six feet above the ground to just an inch above it when it smacked into the catcher’s mitt in another splash of green fire, well under Bo’s powerful swing.

  A slider.

  John Carlisle had been a lefty with a nasty curve, a hundred-plus fastball, and a slider? He wouldn’t have been worth ten million a year . . . he would have been worth twenty million.

  All of that was beside the point, of course, on account of my oldest son had just gambled away his immortal soul.

  Baguette-snakes shot across the floor, tangled around Bo’s ankles, and lifted him high. Next thing I knew, I was again hanging upside down, not that far from my wife, who was in the same state.

  When I think of all the things my family and I have faced down over the years, well, I’m not exaggerating when I say it seemed damn hard to believe our end would come not from a demon, not from a vampire, not from a werewolf or even from a rabid unicorn—we were going to die at the hands of a pair of baseball-playing ghosts.

  The catcher stood in front of Bo. The ghost looked toward the haunted Safeway’s front door, and then he pointed, pointed at the green Coinstar machine.

  The ghost was calling his shot.

  “Uh-oh,” Bo said.

  The bread-snake tossed him as if he weighed fifty pounds instead of two hundred fifty. His big body slammed into the Coinstar machine, smashing plastic and bending metal. Bo fell to the floor, motionless.

  The ghost of Francis Haupberg floated upward. His legs evaporated, turning into a stormy swirl of blue and green vapor.

  Haupberg stared down at me.

  “The batter is out,” he said. “Now, you die.”

  I reached out a hand to my wife, and she reached hers out to me.

  She looked at me in a strange way. Her upside-down eyes narrowed, like she was on the edge of figuring out a puzzle. Then her eyes widened with realization. She turned to the ghost of Francis Haupberg.

  “All this rage and betrayal and hate and anguish, it wasn’t because of some woman,” she said. “You two weren’t just teammates . . . you were lovers.”

  • • •

  Betty Lou’s words stopped the ghosts cold. They shimmered. Shimmered and shrank. The terrifying visages seemed to vanish, replaced by two men wearing loose pinstripe uniforms with the word SEALS in a curve across the chest, black old-time baseball hats with a white S on top of a white F.

  Lovers? But . . . they were baseball players. That couldn’t be right . . . could it?

  Betty’s lower lip quivered. Tears ran up her forehead, into hair that didn’t move a lick thanks to the aforementioned hair spray.

  “Tell me,” Betty Lou said to them. “I can feel the hurt, the pain. Tell me, I need to know what you went through.”

  The ghost of John Carlisle spoke.

  “They wanted me to go to New York,” he said. “But they wouldn’t take Francis.”

  Francis spit a glob of glowing green onto the tile floor. The glob dissolved into nothing.

  “I tried to get John to go by himself,” he said. “It was the Yankees, you know? But John . . . he wouldn’t do the right thing.”

  John Carlisle shook his head, a simple expression with a simple, clear meaning: The right thing was to stay with you.

  I still couldn’t get over it. Gay?

  “Not sure I get it,” I said. “I mean . . . you two . . . together?”

  Betty Lou’s head snapped to face me.

  “Hunter Jake Hunterson! Don’t tell me my husband is a closet homophobe!”

  Me? A homophobe?

  “Come on now, Betty Lou. You know me better than that.”

  “Do I? You’re surprised two people could love each other so much they’d stay stuck to the mortal coil just to be near each other? Or are you just surprised that two men could love each other that much?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, because she was right: I was surprised. The effeminate fellas I’d seen around San Francisco, holding hands and whatnot, well, I had no problem with that . . . but these were men, these were professional athletes.

  I wanted to get the focus off me and back on the task at hand.

  “What kept you in San Francisco?” I asked Francis. “Why didn’t you go to New York with John?”

  Both ghosts looked away. I’d struck a nerve. I immediately understood: at a time when baseball was king, the New York Yankees courted John Carlisle. They had not courted Francis Haupberg. Francis couldn’t even break into the starting lineup of the minor league San Francisco Seals, let alone sign on with the Yanks. Pride: it was pride that kept Francis from following John to New York.

  Maybe he was gay, but he was still a man; gay or straight, a man’s pride can destroy all sorts of wonderful things.

  “I should have gone,” Francis said quietly. “Maybe it would have been okay if DiMaggio hadn’t got hurt. Then the Seals owners would have got a hundred thousand dollars for him, would have made their money, but with DiMaggio hurt the Yanks only offered twenty-five grand for him—that meant my John was the team’s big payday. When John wouldn’t go to the Yankees, because of me, well, a silent partner in the Seals started to sniff around.”

  Francis was already dead, but this admission was killing him, tearing apart what soul might remain.

  Betty Lou cried silently. She could feel their pain. Me? I could see it, plain as day. My own tears weren’t that far behind.

  “Louis Lima,” I said. “He was the silent partner?”

  Francis started punching a fist into his glove, over and over.

  Carlisle answered the question.

  “Yeah, Lima,” he said. Carlisle looked so real, so human. He was just a kid, or had been, twenty-five years old with the world opening up to give him a dream life. That dream had vanished in an afternoon between the halves of a doubleheader.

  “The team owners had borrowed a lot of money to build the stadium,” he said. “Some from the banks, and some from the mob. Lima was supposed to get half of what the Yankees paid for me and DiMaggio. Joe got hurt, so Lima lost money there. Then when I wouldn’t leave without Francis, Lima got mad.”

  Francis kept punching his fist into his catcher’s mitt. “They watched us. They found out about us. Once they did, well . . . they acted like I was worthless. An animal. I was this . . . this thing that kept them from making their money off John.”

  He finally looked up, looked me in the eyes. The pain there, the anguish: it wasn’t his fault, but that didn’t matter—he knew his stubborn pride had cost him everything, cost them both everything.

  “I was disposable,” Francis said. “Lima’s boys roughed me up, told me to leave. I wouldn’t. Then . . . then it got worse.”

  John Carlisle looked deflated. It was hard to believe that moments earlier he’d been a cauldron of whirling supernatural energy.

  “They shot Francis,” he said. “I was supposed to meet Francis at the stadium between games. Usually the place cleaned out between games. The stadium . . . it was our place. We knew people were watching our apartments. We thought at the stadium . . .”

  He didn’t need to finish. Two people i
n love, wanting to be intimate, in a place that encompassed their whole lives together. That was their crime? Nobody deserved to have that taken away. Nobody.

  “Francis got there first,” John said, his voice quiet. “Lima shot him, left the body for me to find. It was supposed to be a message—go to New York, or else. But when I saw Francis there . . . I couldn’t imagine life without him. I picked up the gun and I . . . I . . .”

  John looked down. All of his energy had fled. He was just a young man, destroyed by heartbreak. Eighty years after pulling that trigger, he still couldn’t quite say the words of what he’d done.

  Green light flickered around Francis. He was getting angry.

  “I got that bastard Lima,” he said. “He found out the hard way that I wasn’t going to move on; not even death could make me move on. I didn’t know what had happened, just that I couldn’t leave the stadium, and that I could do things. I strangled him with dirty gym towels. He found out about us, and I got him.”

  Found out about us. That was the same line he’d used when he’d seemed ready to do away with Betty Lou and me. It wasn’t that we’d found out about them being ghosts, it was a key phrase from the violence that had ended their lives: You found out we were gay.

  More green energy. Francis seemed caught between desolate pain and pure rage.

  “We just wanted to play baseball,” he said. His eyes starting bubbling with black fire. “That, and be together, but we couldn’t do both. It wasn’t . . . men don’t do that. Not ballplayers, anyway.”

  I felt a wash of guilt. It was almost as if he’d read my mind.

  It suddenly saddened me to realize that while so much had changed in the last eighty years, some things stayed the same. I couldn’t think of one openly gay pro baseball player. Or football player, or hockey player. Considering that the people with the smarts think one out of ten guys bat for the other team (forgive me, I had to work that analogy in here somewhere), professional sports seems to be an oddly hetero-male-only fraternity. That, of course, doesn’t add up; there have to be gay pro athletes, but even in these modern times they don’t feel comfortable coming out. Eight decades later, and maybe there were pros suffering the same potential judgment that wound up costing John and Francis their lives.

  “I’m awful sorry for you both,” I said. “What happened to y’all, it ain’t right.”

  Francis Haupberg’s face shifted into something other than human.

  “We just wanted to be together,” he said. “Now we’re stuck here, forever. And you . . . you found out about us.”

  That was it, and we knew it. Betty Lou squeezed my hand.

  “At least Luke and Sunshine will be okay,” she said. There was fear in her voice, sure, but she’d mastered it. She knew we were going to die, but she’d face it like the warrior that she was.

  That was my Betty Lou, my Valkyrie. I didn’t want to die, but the two of us going together . . . maybe that was for the best, because I’m not sure one could live without the other.

  Carlisle’s legs turned to blue smoke. He floated up. His pinstripes morphed into waving, biting worms. His eyes glowed with the heat of a volcano. A geyser of steam sprayed out of a hole in the back of his head.

  The two ghosts approached.

  I squeezed Betty Lou’s hand.

  “Love ya,” I said.

  She nodded. “I love you too, Hunter. You’re my one true thing. If there is another side, I know I’ll see you there.”

  Damn that woman, always had to one-up me in the eloquence department.

  The ghosts came closer, burning with hate, living storm clouds thrumming with held-back lightning. I smelled the dirt and fresh-cut grass of the ball field where they’d spent their happiest days.

  Betty Lou closed her eyes. I kept mine open—always wondered what my last minutes would look like, and I wasn’t going to miss them.

  I heard the store’s front doors slide open. Betty Lou’s eyes snapped open as we both looked to the entrance, a matched feeling of dread in our souls that far outweighed the fear of death.

  Luke walked in. My skinny boy, my fourteen-year-old son, strode right into the store.

  The two ghosts instantly moved toward him.

  Luke should have turned and run, but instead he walked right up to them.

  “I can help you,” he said to the ghosts. “You both need to listen to me.”

  • • •

  The two spirits swelled and pulsed. They flashed with red, yellow, and orange light, spinning with visible rage and fury over the lives that had been stolen from them. Maybe they were good men once upon a time, but now they were uncontrollable and violent, ready to strike out at anything or anyone.

  I shouted at my son: “Luke, get your ass out of here! Your mother and I have this!”

  Luke rolled his eyes. “That why you’re hanging upside down, Pa?”

  The ghosts closed in on Luke. The Safeway’s lights dimmed and flickered as they drew more energy from the air around them—they were going to tear my son apart.

  Then Luke held up a piece of printer paper, waved it like it mattered.

  “I heard your story over my Pa’s radio,” Luke said. “If you mean what you said about each other, I can perform a wedding ceremony, right now. You can’t get your lives back, but you’d be together. Really together.”

  The two ghosts stopped cold, just inches from Luke. As usual, Francis Haupberg did the talking.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “You can’t marry us . . . it’s not legal.”

  Luke smiled. In the face of that horror, he actually smiled.

  “You’re wrong, sir,” he said. “Prop Eight was overturned in the Supreme Court.”

  The ghosts turned their glowing heads to look at each other, then back to Luke.

  “Prop Eight?” Francis said. “What is that?”

  “The law that blocked same-sex marriage,” Luke said. “It happened after y’all died.”

  Can ghosts look confused? Well, those two did.

  “Blocked it,” Francis said. “But it wasn’t legal to start with.”

  “Same-sex marriage became legal in June 2008,” Luke said.

  Carlisle’s ghostly hand scratched at his ghostly head.

  “And that was Prop Eight. It made gay marriage legal?”

  “No, Prop Eight made it illegal again,” Luke said. “Five months later.”

  Carlisle started to pulse purple. “So it wasn’t legal, then it was, then it wasn’t?”

  Luke nodded as if it all made perfect sense. “And now it is. Do you guys want to jibber-jabber all damn night or do you want to get married?”

  The ghosts again flashed angry colors. I tried to move my feet, but I couldn’t; paranormal-charged baguette ankle cuffs are a lot tougher than you’d think.

  Any normal kid would have been pissing in his pants at the sight of two oversized, infuriated ghosts, but Luke was no normal kid. He’d been around the family business since the day he was born. He’d joined in missions at the tender age of ten, ’vaporated his first supernatch at just eleven when a family of wereboars raided our house in Slayerville. He’d been there and done that: Luke stared down those ghosts like a schoolkid who knows how to box stares down a puffed-up bully.

  And then, I saw why Luke was so calm. Near the store entrance, by the ruined green Coinstar machine, my thirteen-year-old baby daughter, Sunshine Hunterson, stood over Bo’s big, unconscious body. She had a bow in her hand, drawstring back at her ear, a Point of Van Kessel–tipped shaft pointed right at the ghost of Francis Haupberg.

  Francis Haupberg didn’t notice her. Neither did John Carlisle. Haupberg floated closer to Luke.

  “We’d need a priest,” Francis said. “You’re too young to be a priest.”

  Luke waggled the piece of paper. “I’m newly ordained by the Universal Life Church Monastery.”
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br />   Betty Lou shook her head. “Luke! Don’t lie to them, you’ll only make it worse.”

  I wasn’t sure how much worse things could get, but I kept my trap shut.

  Luke sighed and rolled his eyes. “I’m not lying, Ma. I’m ordained. I just did it in the car five minutes ago, on the Internet.”

  “The Internet,” Francis said. “What’s that, a place on Fisherman’s Wharf?”

  Luke started laughing. I wanted to throttle that boy, throttle him out of pure fear—he had no idea what he was facing. Maybe he wasn’t as brave as I thought, but rather far more stupid than I’d guessed. If these ghosts took him, I’d lose him forever.

  “The Internet is a new thing,” he said. His normal, smart-ass expression faded; for once my boy looked serious. He looked . . . empathetic. He looked like his mother looks when she’s listening to someone vent about their troubles.

  “You guys got a bad deal,” Luke said. “The world is a different place now. There’s still a lot of hate, sure, but you’ll get no hate from me, no hate from my family. It’s been eight decades—you can finally be together the way you always wanted to be.”

  The two ghosts pulsed and flashed. One moment their faces looked normal, the next they looked like blazing skulls, the next twisted masks of pain and fury, but through it all I could see their eyes. Even for the supernatch, the windows are the eyes to the soul.

  And those souls wanted to believe.

  John Carlisle’s flame faded away. He floated down. Once again, he looked like a normal man dressed in a ball cap and a soft, pinstriped uniform.

  “Francis,” he said, “let’s do it.”

  The Francis ghost flamed brighter, flamed higher, and in that moment I was sure I’d lost my child.

  “He’s lying,” Francis said. “It’s a trick, John! He’s going to trick us and make us move on, and I won’t move on without you!”

  John stepped between the ghost of his lover and my son. He reached up into the green flames, put his hand on the flaming arm.

  “Francis, please stop,” John said. “Please.”

  Francis stared down for a few moments. Then he nodded, and his flames faded out. He floated to the ground. He reached up to the hand on his arm, interlocked fingers. Holding hands, the two ballplayers turned to face Luke.