Dark Screams, Volume 8

  He gave a signal to Mr. Seagull, who had resumed his treelike stillness just off the square, to the leg side of the far stumps. I have no idea what signal Mr. Seagull gave. But suddenly, Frankie Violet was hunched in position, taking a few practice strokes that looked nothing whatsoever like baseball swings. His elbow came up stiff and straight, the bat seeming to lever out of his legs as though unfolding from his tibia, coming to rest directly in front of his face, straight up and down. He looked less like an athlete than he did a parrying swordsman.

  Also, he had his helmet tipped up on his head, unstrapped.

  “Is that safe?” I said, gesturing down.

  “Not at all,” said Blue Shirt happily. “He should not be doing that. Oh, he is wonderful.”

  As if on cue, Frankie flung the helmet aside, just as the yellow-team bowler took his mark, held up the ball, and lumbered forward.

  Maybe, sometime in your life, you’ve been around an exceptional athlete on their day. Some star high school basketball player you watched go around the world, side of the arc, swish, halfway around, swish, top of the key, swish.

  This was not like that.

  It was more like watching one of those automaton clocks. Something so regular, so predictable, it almost ceased to inspire wonder, became sheer, joyous spectacle. The first bowled ball swung wide, nowhere near the stumps. It probably shouldn’t have counted as an official ball. But Frankie pounced sideways—glided, really—and barely seemed to swing. The ball shot off his bat on a dead line, almost took the head off the nearest slip fielder, then kept rising. I thought it might make the right-field stands. But I underestimated the rise. It soared straight over the stands, over the roof, and into the night.

  Blue Shirt leapt to his feet, along with everyone else not wearing a fur coat. Frankie just stood with his bat by his side, watching Mr. Seagull raise his arms, signaling six runs. Only when Mr. Seagull lowered his arms did Frankie glance over his shoulder, toward Blue Shirt and me. “Howzat?” he called, and winked. He actually winked.

  The next ball traveled five hundred feet at least, straight down the ground to dead center, out of the stadium and into the desert.

  “That should not even be possible,” Blue Shirt chortled. “It is not physically possible to hit a cricket ball that far.”

  “You’re going to run out of balls,” I said.

  This seemed to faze him not one bit.

  The third ball came right back at us, like a foul in baseball, except this was in play, and intentional, and left the stadium even more quickly than the first two. I’d just surfaced from ducking behind the table, and Blue Shirt was standing and clapping, and Frankie was positively waggling out there, waving his batting partner, the older Pakistani woman, out to the middle of the square to dance, when I realized the danger.

  I really did think this, I swear. Ridiculous, impossible as it should have seemed. But it was as though I’d dreamed what was coming.

  Part of it anyway. The least important part, as it turned out but still.

  “Hey. Blue,” I called, as the fans on the third-base side whistled and laughed and shouted their amazement, and Frankie twirled the laughing, dark-haired woman back into position and swaggered to his spot, woofing good-naturedly at Mr. Seagull, at the blue-team bowler, at Mathilde and the cheering team, who really were cheering, now. His grin was a glowing, sideways C-moon in the dead center of the diamond in the whistling San Bernardino night. Even the Destroyer seemed to be leaning forward out there, his hands on the bleacher bench in front of him. I could see his long, dusky fingers, winking with rings, and his forearms sliding from the sleeves of his fur coat. They looked thin, coated in dust where the light crossed them.

  “Blue!” I snapped.

  Finally, he looked up, just as Frankie swung again, sent a fourth ball soaring out of the Fault down the right field line this time. His shirt, his smile, his very skin seemed to bubble with his glee.

  “Tell me, Mr. Sifuentes. Have you ever seen anything like it? I was watching on television, I was just a boy, when Frankie Violet got his one chance to play at Eden—”

  “Blue. Tell him not to pull.”

  He didn’t understand. Of course he didn’t. But to his credit—again—he proved so much more alert, sensitive to signals, than he seemed. “Mr. Sifuentes? What do you—”

  “Don’t let him pull. I don’t want him to hit any of the—”

  The sound of that last ball on Frankie’s bat…like a shotgun blast. Like a coffin lid slamming.

  Everyone stopped dancing, laughing, yelling. Even Frankie looked startled, just stood by his stumps with his bat across his chest like a sword he’d ripped through someone. I don’t think even he tracked the ball. It left the stadium too quickly, hurtling right over the heads of the third-base fans, over the roof. Toward the parking lot.

  I almost imagined I could see its trajectory, its heat trail hanging near that one buzzing, nearly functioning light tower. Like a meteor, that thing flew.

  Like a guided missile.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t even have time to make a wish or formulate a prayer, for whatever good that reportedly really does do, sometimes, for the connected or the practiced or the lucky. The sound of smashing windshield was almost anticlimactic at this distance. Barely as loud as a bottle being dropped.

  Then came a breath, a silence that lasted long enough to let me think that what I’d heard had been a bottle being dropped.

  But what came next was even worse than I’d imagined. I’d expected swearing, shouted threats, maybe even a shot or two fired into the side of the stadium.

  Instead—like a snippet of a dream, that dream every single resident of San Bernardino has, sooner or later—I heard the wave coming. Heard the whole gang out there, probably both gangs, however many members there were, pouring wordlessly across the lot toward the tunnel.

  So many.

  I had a lone action-man moment, spun for one crazy second around the booth in search of the lever I’d suddenly decided must actually exist, that would spring the secret motors I’d just decided must be buried under the Fault and swing the mechanized gates it didn’t actually have shut in all those furious faces.

  “Shit,” I murmured, as that sound—it really was one sound, like a gust of Santa Ana wind—barreled into the tunnel, then split into separate sounds, a hundred individual slapping footsteps. Blue was on his feet and moving now, too. Not up into the booth with me, but down toward the tunnel mouth, his hands waving back and forth. Even then, I couldn’t help being impressed. He was moving at the problem, not away; either that or he was going to ask all our parking-lot friends to pay the six-dollar admission. Either way, I kind of loved him, right at the last.

  Then all those punk-ass fuckbags erupted into the light, pouring through the stands and over the baked grass like angry ants from a demolished mound. The fans on the third-base side were screaming, scrambling away over the bleachers with three thugs chasing them. At least one of those assholes had a knife in his mouth, and what popped, absurdly, into my head was Israel Hands chasing young Jim ’awkins up the mast of the Hispaniola in my father’s favorite novel, the one he’d read to me five times when I was a kid before he gave up fighting his addictions and fled. On the field, players were either scattering toward the far, outfield walls or dropping and covering, as though this were an earthquake drill. Or an earthquake. All except Frankie Violet, who remained frozen in his follow-through in front of his stumps, like a Frankie Violet statue gazing off into the night.

  “Blue, get out of there!” I was shouting, and somehow, not fifteen feet from a fuckball who was already lifting a revolver into his face, Blue heard me. And he looked up but not at me. And he stopped where he was, gazing past the melee toward the shadows along the left-field line. And right as the lights flared way too bright—right when it all really started—I heard him one last time, clear as if he’d been whispering in my ear.

  “Oh, Father,” he said. “What have you done?”

  Whi
ch means that he saw, too. Right at the last. Blue, and me, and Frankie Violet, and no one else. Because afterward, thinking back—the way I am always, every waking and most sleeping moments of whatever’s left of my life, thinking back—I realized that was exactly where Frankie had been looking, too.

  I got just a glimpse, in that single flare of light: of the Destroyer’s attendants scattering, diving under the nearest seats for cover as the Destroyer stood and shed the fur; of that dusty, scaled body unfolding—sprouting—like a yucca stalk shooting up in time lapse, already dead even as it bloomed, long and emaciated and segmented like a skeleton, but oozing something thick, like sap, as its wings and its mouth unhinged, clicked open. Right as the lights went, I saw that thing lift from its seat, launch out of the bleachers, sweep up Blue without even looking at him.

  Dark slammed down, and the shooting and the real screaming started.

  The cops blamed the thugs, of course. And not without reason, after all. Even though the only people who actually got wounded were two punks who accidentally shot each other in the momentary maelstrom of shrieking and whistling and shredding right after the lights went. And the only ones who got dead were Blue Shirt and Frankie Violet, and the only way the cops even knew that was by DNA-testing the strips of flesh scraped off the cricket mat and out of the grass.

  I did tell them what I’d seen. Knowing what they’d say. They said it, and sent me home with Blue’s last words—“Oh, Father, what have you done?”—ringing in my head, and my long-lost friend Enrico’s father surfacing in my dreams, reenacting the night he’d finally climbed out of his chair long enough to silence Enrico’s baby sister once and for all. Weirdly, I didn’t dream of my own father. Just woke up, for months afterward, wondering where he was. Whether he was still alive somewhere. The pirate addict bastard.

  And when I realized I couldn’t just let it go, I tried the police once more. I sent them a typed report, which included the research I’d done at the library where Mathilde had once worked. That night at the Fault had rattled her plenty, too, and so it wasn’t hard to get her to come back to the library to help me navigate the digital resources. It didn’t take us long to dig up the actual name of Mr. Fur. The Destroyer. That turns out to be A. D. P. Mankad. A middling cricketer, at best, as Blue had said. All of two test matches played. In 1933.

  1933. Eighty-four years ago.

  There are occasional mentions of him throughout the pages of Wisden’s Cricketing Almanac, the annual bible of the sport, which we finally accessed through the library at Cal State–San Bernardino. Particularly during the late 1960s and early 1970s, his name appears almost yearly in some context or other. But the only picture I could find is actually in this past year’s edition. Suddenly, there he is in his fur, his dark hair capturing the light his snake-necklace refracts, in the legendary Long Room at Lord’s, London’s self-proclaimed and almost entirely undisputed home of cricket, in the company of a half-dozen similarly Marks-&-Spencer’d men in blazers, receiving some sort of plaque in recognition of “decades of service and unwavering commitment to maintaining the traditions and codes of conduct that have always defined the sport, even as it enters a new, global epoch.” His face is wrinkleless, his dark eyes expressionless. If Wisden’s caption told you he was forty, you’d have your doubts. If it said he was twenty-five, you wouldn’t. If it suggested he felt honored by the plaque, or the billionaires in the tie-less sportswear bestowing it upon him, you’d have laughed in its face.

  And if you didn’t know fuck-all—as I didn’t, and don’t, really—about world cricket’s painful, ongoing transition from Last Great Colonialist Export to Last-to-the-Table Careening Global Sports Consortium, and if you weren’t one of the forty or so people at the Fault that night, and so had no inkling about how that man (or whatever he is) really came by his nickname, you might almost feel sorry for him.

  What was it Blue had said about him? “Entire boards of directors disappeared…whole leagues wiped out…”

  I did search the entire remaining eleven-hundred-plus pages of the 2015 Cricketers’ Almanac. Of Blue Shirt, and America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket, and the late Frankie Violet, there is no mention.

  About the Editors

  RICHARD CHIZMAR is the founder and publisher/editor of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than a dozen anthologies, including The Best of Cemetery Dance, The Earth Strikes Back, Night Visions 10, October Dreams (with Robert Morrish), and the Shivers series.

  richardchizmar.com

  Facebook.com/​richardchizmar

  Twitter: @RichardChizmar

  BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN is the managing editor of Cemetery Dance Publications and the author of several novels and novellas, along with four short-story collections, including an ebook-only exclusive that hit #1 on Amazon.com in the United States, the UK, Germany, Spain, and France in the short-story categories.

  brianjamesfreeman.com

  Facebook.com/​BrianJamesFreeman

  Twitter: @BrianFreeman

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