“I know another thing about that day,” the man said, turning his eyes down to the beer in front of him, “that ball was never supposed to be hit. Smith was supposed to strike out. It was the pitch that did it, that damn dropping curve.”
As if talking to himself, or to his beer, the man added, “Why couldn’t he have just thrown the fastball?”
Ted decided to ignore the odd mumbling and stick to the point. “The ball is signed by a lot of people who believe what they saw as well,” he said. “The doctor who pronounced Rabinowicz dead signed it, a guy named James Bradshaw, and he was there as well. The catcher, Sherman, signed it. There can’t be much doubt, unless you’re accusing one of them of faking the ball? Why would they do that?”
“There’s a lot more to it than that, son,” the old guy said. He downed his beer, signaled the bartender for another, and went on.
“There was a lot of money riding on that game. In those days, almost nothing happened without some money laid down, and the people who bet that money didn’t like to lose, especially when the stakes were high. Rabinowicz was supposed to win easily, but it didn’t work out that way. That meant the people with money needed a backup plan. What I’m trying to tell you here is, that backup plan was Kevin ‘Knock it to Heaven’ Smith. He brought the count to full with the bases loaded, but he wasn’t supposed to hit the last pitch. He was supposed to swing from his heels, miss, and never say a word.”
The old guy turned away for a moment, and took a long pull at his beer before speaking again. “It isn’t a pretty picture, young man. There were men back then who didn’t live by any rules but their own, and the police were picky on who they backed, and who they backed off of. I’d like to tell you that the mom, apple pie, and baseball myth is gospel, but it just isn’t so.”
“He was going to throw the game?” Ted asked dubiously. “How in hell would you know that? And what happened? I mean, I can understand if he was supposed to win the game, and missed, how that could happen, but how the hell do you accidentally hit a line drive straight down the gut?”
“I told you,” the old man said, turning to meet Ted’s gaze, “it was the pitch. It came in high and inside, and then it dropped. Kevin Smith saw that ball and he swung straight down the middle of the plate. It should have been a clean miss. That kind of swing always looks good from the stands, strong follow through and the slap of cowhide when that ball hits the catcher’s glove is unmistakable, even from the top seat in the bleachers. An ending with finality. A closed book. Except—”
“Except the ball dropped and he hit it?” Ted’s words were formed as a question, but the inflection was tainted with something more. This old guy didn’t seem to be making up stories, and for the life of him, Ted couldn’t see an advantage to be gained by doing so. Ted wasn’t even paying for the beer.
“Exactly. The ball dipped and shot in over the plate. Smith couldn’t have missed that ball if he’d tried; it was like it dove for the bat. Fate. Kismet. Call it what you want, that ball should have hit leather, and instead it hit Jeb Rabinowicz.”
“And killed him instantly,” Ted added, finishing his beer. “This is all interesting, fascinating, to tell you the truth,” he said, readying to rise and head on home. “But it’s getting pretty late, and I still don’t see it disproving the authenticity of the ball in my showroom.”
“Just a few more minutes, son. Humor an old man, if nothing else. I’ll buy you one more beer, and if I haven’t convinced you by the time it’s gone, I won’t bother you again.”
Ted hesitated. He really wanted to get home and get a good night’s sleep, but so far this hadn’t been such a bad evening, and at the very least he’d walk away with a new story tucked away in his memory.
“Okay,” he agreed, sitting back down. “One more beer, and I promise not to guzzle.”
The old man smiled, just for a second, and Ted caught a twinkle in his eye that looked like it had winked at him from very far away. Years, he thought suddenly. That had been across time, not distance.
“It isn’t a question of whether Smith killed Rabinowicz that day,” the man went on. “It isn’t a question of whether the ball is marked with resin, blood, dirt, or catsup, for that matter. It’s a matter of possibilities. That ball you have can’t be the ball that killed Jeb, because this one is.”
The old man slid his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a baseball, carefully wrapped in plastic. It was easily as old as the one in the case they’d left behind. There were a few smudges on the white, cowhide surface. Ted leaned closer and saw that there were also three signatures on it, and one smeared, dark splotch. That was the biggest difference between the two balls, he saw. The ball he had, back in the glass case, had a dark, rusty smudge. This ball had something clotted on its surface, like a scab. It looked eerily like the ball itself had been cut, bled, and healed. Ted reached out as if to touch the bag, then pulled back at the last second. It had an unclean aspect to it, and even though they were indoors, he felt a sudden chill.
Ted glanced at the old man and the man returned his gaze evenly.
“Go ahead, son,” the man said. “You can check it out. I’d be careful if you open the bag, it’s easy to smudge a ball this old.”
Feeling silly for having pulled back the first time, Ted took the ball in its plastic wrapping and turned it over in his hand, inspecting it with careful skepticism. Cosmetically, it resembled the other ball a great deal. The signatures were the same—Kevin Smith, the catcher, Randy Sherman, and the doctor, James Bradshaw, whose signature was impossible to make out if you didn’t already know whose it was. That same scrawling chicken scratch graced the bottom of the death certificate. Ted had studied it a thousand times, and he couldn’t tell this signature from the one in his show room. His gaze kept sliding back to the raised, clot-like smudge, the one difference. He wanted to scoff. He wanted to toss the ball back to the old guy, laugh, and tell him it was a good fake. But something about this ball felt...right. Or wrong. Maybe that was it. The ball felt somehow more the way he expected a death ball to feel, if such a feeling could be defined.
“Tell me why you brought me this,” Ted said at last. “Tell me how you came to own it, why I should believe you. For God’s sake, that other ball has been authenticated for more than fifty-five years. Bradshaw first owned it. He died young, heart attack I think it was, and the ball passed to his son, who sold it at auction. The next owner was a big-time collector out of Los Angeles. He paid two hundred grand for it at that first auction and put it in his collection. He was robbed soon after that, over a million dollars in signed cards and memorabilia were taken. He was shot and killed during the robbery. Somehow, they overlooked this ball and the associated paperwork—or maybe they couldn’t figure out how to unlock the safe. In any case, it went back to auction just last year. The new owner consigned it to my auction house. We expect it to sell for over a million and a half, what with the crossover of baseball and morbid death collectors involved. Now you walk in with this in your pocket and tell me it’s all a lie? Why?”
“That ball you have isn’t the one from the first auction,” the old man said, studying the beer in his hands. “The ball was not left behind by the thieves in Los Angeles, it was stolen and replaced with the one you have. This is the ball they took.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then the man continued. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”
“Who are you,” Ted asked, scooting his seat farther back and staring at the old man. The ball rested on the table between them.
“That isn’t important,” the man replied in a very tired voice that, for the first time, showed the age he had mentioned. “What is important is that the ball you have isn’t cursed. No one will die if they give you a million dollars for it, and no one will ever know. No one but you.”
Ted gulped his beer and slammed the glass down on the table. “You’re crazy,” he said, rising. “Certifiable.”
“You know I’m telling the truth,” the man
said, glancing up. “I’ve had that ball with me ever since it was stolen. It hasn’t killed me, like I thought it might. I figured if I got my hands on it, I could put an end to the curse—to the death—and find my own way out at the same time.”
“Who are you?” Ted whispered.
“My name is Smith,” the old man said softly. “Kevin Smith. I should never have agreed to throw that game. I should never have signed that ball. After Jeb died, like it was a souvenir instead of the cause of a man’s death. Now it’s taken others, and I’m a very tired old man. I don’t have the strength to carry the secret, or the curse any farther.
“I burned the bat. I scattered the ashes of it over home plate in the stadium where Jeb died. I intend to do the same with the ball. It will be the last thing I do. I’m going to put an end to it, once and for all.”
“But why are you telling me?” Ted asked again. “Why now? Why me?”
“I didn’t intend to tell a soul,” Smith sighed. “When you came up to me earlier and I saw the gleam in your eye as you looked at that other ball, I knew I had to tell someone. I had to explain why, and how, and to let you know that it isn’t a trophy. It isn’t a thing to be collected and polished and revered.”
He held up the ball and shook it in Ted’s face. “It’s a cursed, black reminder of something that should never have happened. If I ever had a soul, it’s bound up in this leather ball, and I signed the contract over the blood. You sell your ball, and you keep my secret. The world will forget both soon enough; it’s the way of things.”
“But...” Ted had a million questions. If this was really Kevin Smith, there were so many stories, so many things the man had seen, and known, and done. But it was too late. By the time Ted had his thoughts even half straight, the old ballplayer had picked up the ball, turned, and wound his way through the bar toward the street beyond.
Ted dropped a bill on the table, since neither of them had paid yet, not even looking back to see how much of a tip he’d left. He rushed toward the street, but as his hand touched the door handle, the air was split with a screech so loud and violent that he pulled back and let the door close. There was a crash, screams, the shrill sound of rending metal. He pushed through the door.
He took in the scene in seconds. A delivery truck was canted over on one side. It had plowed into two parked cars, and streams of gasoline poured into the street. It was impossible to tell which tank had been punctured, but the smell of fuel was strong. Ted ignored it and raced ahead. He saw Smith sprawled under the fender of the truck, face down in the asphalt. The old man lay in a pool of gas and blood, one hand outstretched before him, as if he were reaching for something. Ted looked ahead, and there, still safely in its plastic wrapper and beyond the reach of the gas, the ball lay wedged against the curb.
There was nothing to be done for Smith. The man was crushed. His neck was twisted at an extreme angle that brought his face into plain view from where Ted stood, and blood trickled from between his lips. He was gone. Ted sprinted to the curb and picked up the ball. He ignored the scent of the gasoline, ignored the screams of others as they saw what had happened and yelled at him to move, to hide, to get out of the way.
Ted stared at the ball. The brown smudge had shifted. He looked more closely, and in that instant, his own scream was born, catching in the back of his throat and constricting over the sound before he could force it to life. The clot had been knocked free. Inside the bag, as he held it up near his face, the tear in the ball had begun to ooze dark, red blood.
Ted flung it away, as if he’d touched a corpse.
An explosion rocked the street. Ted lurched toward the door to the bar, heedlessly slamming into the metal and glass frame. He felt his flesh shredding as the glass shattered around him. Then he was rolling to the floor of the bar, among a jumble of running feet and screaming voices.
Sometime in the moments that followed, he was noticed, and towels were wrapped around his arms. Sirens—and people—wailed in the background. He closed his eyes...
...and was there.
He stood, facing the mound with a bat dangling limp in his hand. Sweat trickled down his neck—or was it blood? On the field before him, a man lay sprawled in the dirt, one arm flung up and over his face, his limbs at crazy angles. Around him, the crowd roared—in terror or approval, he couldn’t say. Then, slowly, the man on the mound moved. At first it seemed his arm just fell free of his face, but a second later the man planted his palm firmly in the dirt and lifted his head groggily. Then, with an unbelievable effort, he rose to his knees, and then his feet. Without looking up, the man brushed off his pants, straightened his shoulders, and placed a hand behind his neck, rotating it to snap everything back into shape.
Then, glancing up and raising his finger to the bill of his cap, Jeb Rabinowicz winked at him and turned, walking into a mist that had risen slowly from the grass at his back. In seconds the man was gone, and then an unnatural darkness began to fall. In that darkness Ted heard the distant slap of cowhide on oiled leather. The roar of the crowd returned, and then faded...and faded...and...
Ted was lifted carefully, and slid onto a rolling gurney. A young paramedic with curly hair and wide eyes leaned over him, gently shaking his shoulder. The young man held Ted’s wallet, and was calling his name. Ted smiled and opened his dry, parched lips. He spoke so softly that only the boy heard him. “Strike three,” he said, simply. Then he relaxed and let the darkness carry him away.
David Niall Wilson has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction since the mid-eighties. An ordained minister, once President of the Horror Writer’s Association and recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for poetry and short fiction, as well as being nominated for long fiction and non-fiction, his novels include Maelstrom, The Mote in Andrea’s Eye, Deep Blue, the Grails Covenant Trilogy, Star Trek Voyager: Chrysalis, Except You Go Through Shadow, This is My Blood, Ancient Eyes and the supernatural mystery novel Vintage Soul, Volume I of the DeChance Chronicles. He has over 150 short stories published in five collections, the most recent of which were Defining Moments published in 2007 by WFC Award winning Sarob Press, and the currently available Ennui & Other States of Madness, from Dark Regions Press. His work has appeared in and is due out in various anthologies and magazines. David lives and loves with Patricia Lee Macomber in the historic William R. White House in Hertford, NC with their children, Billy, Stephanie, and Katie, David’s mother Jean, and occasionally his boys Zach and Zane.
You can find out about what’s new, read about the author’s life, dreams, and a lot of other things at www.davidniallwilson.com.
ON A HELLISH ROAD
A Conversation with William Ollie
by Michelle Howarth
It doesn’t happen very often, but every now and then a new writer arrives on the scene with a story that turns heads, makes waves, and sets itself apart from all the rest. And this is precisely what William Ollie’s fantastic debut novel has achieved.
The Damned—bound in a beautiful hardback cover and boasting several illustrations throughout which cap it off to perfection—is a hair-raising horror thriller, relentless from beginning to end. It’s no wonder Ollie is quickly making his mark in the genre. Tongues are wagging, people are talking, and for the first time, with his second novel, KillerCon, on the brink of release, the man is here to discuss his success.
• • •
MH: A warm welcome, William, thank you for taking the time out to chat with us. How are things with yourself at the moment?
WO: Thank you, Michelle. Doing good, and you?
MH: Great thanks. These must be exciting times for you?
WO: This has been a pretty exciting year for me. Exciting with the acceptance of my first novel, the glowing comments it’s received from various people, then having two more novels contracted. I’m pretty happy about it.
MH: As you should be. How long have you been writing before this wave of success?
WO: I started writing in 2002, so that w
ould be seven years.
MH: Have you written previous novels, anything planned for them?
WO: I have seven other novels, including the sequel to The Damned, titled Damned If You Do. Hopefully they’ll all see print some day.
MH: Damned If You Do is a very cool title, and if it’s anything like the The Damned it’s sure to create some waves. When The Damned became available earlier this year, it erupted onto the scene amidst a minefield of phrases such as: “The Damned is truly one of the best novels by a first time author that I’ve ever read” (Bloodletting Press’ Larry Roberts) and “William Ollie’s blood-stained vision of Hell on Earth makes for one of the most memorable debuts in years” (Bryan Smith, author of Queen of Blood and The Freakshow). What do you think made this story such an outstanding piece of work?
WO: Those are some nice comments, aren’t they? I think one of the things that makes The Damned stand out is the originality of story line as to how good old Scott ends up where he ends up, and what he finds waiting for him when he gets there. I think it’s pretty original, anyway. The fact that the conflict starts on page one and escalates with each subsequent chapter doesn’t hurt either.
MH: I definitely agree with that. As for the protagonist, Scott, tell us a little about him. I have heard it said that Scott himself is quite an evil character, is this how you see him?
WO: I disagree that Scott is an evil person, just an average ordinary guy with foibles and flaws, caught up in the madness that has enveloped the world around him, someone who finds himself faced with a situation where it’s either kill or be killed. I can’t really think of anything he did that would be considered evil...fool-hearted maybe, with the opening scene.
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