by E. C. Bell
Joanne answered. With a sneer, of course. “The living are stupid,” she said. “We won’t have a problem. Just go back and do your job.”
I looked at Mr. Kelly and Mr. Middleton, beseechingly, but got nothing but a shrug from either of them.
“Fine,” I said. “But you watch. She’ll see you, and then your stupid plan will fall apart. Seriously.”
“I doubt it,” Joanne replied, and then turned away from me. So I clambered my way down the bleachers to Marie.
“I’m back,” I said, rather unnecessarily, as I plunked myself down beside her. I sat on her right side hoping it would keep her from looking at the far left side of the bleachers. “It should be starting soon.”
She was still focused on Miriam’s pitching. “I think I have her figured out,” she said, distantly.
“She’s just warming up,” I said. “She’s different in the game. You’ll see.”
“Maybe,” Marie murmured. She watched Miriam’s last two throws, then leaned back and frowned up at the sky. “Maybe.”
I didn’t say anything, content for the moment to have her looking anywhere but at the other end of the bleachers. Miriam’s team, the Blues, took the field, and Miriam took her time cleaning up the pitcher’s rubber, which meant that she very carefully kicked dirt all over it. Made it harder for the umps to tell if her back foot was actually touching the rubber when she pushed off for her pitch. Classic Miriam trick. Then the rest of the team gathered around her, and every one of them touched her glove hand. No one touched her pitching hand. No one would dare.
“Why does she do that?” Marie asked.
“Do what?”
“Keep her pitching hand away from everyone like that?”
“Oh.” I glanced at Marie. “You saw that, huh?”
“Well yeah. What’s her deal? Is it a good luck thing?”
I shrugged. “She licks her fingers before every pitch,” I said. “She doesn’t want the germs, or something.”
Marie snorted. “That ball is rolling around in the frigging dirt,” she said. “It’s filthy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But hey, it’s her deal.”
“Hmm.” Marie looked like she was tucking that bit of information away, and it was my turn to snort laughter.
“Don’t think you’ll throw her off by grabbing her hand,” I said. “She’ll just go wash up, and then she’ll make your life hell for the rest of the game.”
“Oh,” Marie said, but she didn’t look like she believed me. Hey whatever, chick. It’s your funeral.
The game started, and I tried colour commentating to give Marie background on the players and reasons they were playing the way they were. I was all ready to explain the rules to her—just to make sure she was up to speed—but she shushed me.
“I just want to watch for a while,” she said.
I shut my mouth even though that was the last thing I wanted to do. Chatting was my way of “becoming her friend” so she’d stick around after the living were gone. Also, I wanted to keep her from noticing the rest of my people as they crowded under the bleachers. It was getting darker by the moment, even with the lights, and their glow was getting really bright.
I got more and more uncomfortable as the innings went on, but Marie didn’t notice anything. She just watched the game in silence.
I was blowing it. So, I decided to talk to her about her play. Just to get the conversation started.
“You want some pointers for right field?” I said. “You looked kinda lost out there. Know what I mean?”
I felt her stiffen, and then she slowly turned toward me. “I haven’t played in a while,” she said. “That’s all.”
I was going to say something like, “Oh yeah, I know, but I can give you some stuff to work on,” but that didn’t happen because she looked past me and frowned.
“What the hell is that?” she asked.
I turned to see what she’d seen.
It was the rest. The ones who were supposed to stay carefully hidden under the bleachers. It appeared that they’d decided that watching the game was much more important than staying out of Marie’s line of sight. They’d lined up along the right field fence, and even though the huge lights washed the fence in light, they could still be seen.
The ones who’d decided to park themselves a bit further back on the grass lit up the darkened area like beacons. They wavered and glowed as they leaned toward each other, talking. Worse than that, I could see other spirits coming toward the diamond from the opposite side. Wavering lights, meandering their way over.
They were everywhere.
I tried to keep up the façade that everything was hunky dory. “What?” I said, knowing I sounded like an idiot. “I don’t see anything.”
Marie pointed past me to the left field fence. “Are those what I think they are?” she asked.
I followed her finger and looked out at all the dead idiots who had decided not to follow Joanne’s ridiculous plan.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, weakly.
“Shit,” Marie said. Her face tightened, and she grabbed her belongings and stood. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Oh,” I said, trying desperately to save the situation. “You mean the dead.”
“Yes,” she said. “I mean the dead.” She glanced over my shoulder again and looked horrified. “How many of them are there?”
“Two teams,” I said. “We have enough for two teams.”
That brought her up short. “Teams?” she asked, then shook her head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. I’m out of here.”
She headed for the bottom of the bleachers, and I looked over at Joanne and shrugged. Joanne didn’t take that particularly well.
“You idiot!” she yelled at me. “You absolute idiot!” Then she turned to the left field fence and bellowed, “She’s getting away!”
I looked over the end of the bleachers and watched Marie stomping her way to her car, the dead hot on her heels. If she didn’t hurry, she wasn’t going to make it to safety. And for a second, I felt quite sorry for her.
I really did.
Marie:
Exorcisms and Poltergeists
I PELTED AROUND the right end of the bleachers toward the gate, preparing to throw myself into James’s car and get the hell out of there as quickly as I could.
There were ghosts everywhere. And they were all streaming out of Diamond Two after me.
“Crap!” I cried, and tried to scramble away from them. I tripped and almost fell, but managed to regain my footing and ran as fast as I could for the car.
I pulled the keys from my pocket and jangled through them as I ran. Why oh why did James have so many keys? I finally found the car key and held it like a weapon as I flew the final few feet to the car. But, before I could get the key in the lock the first of the ghosts caught up to me, and I was quickly surrounded.
I was ready to lose my mind—I’d never had so many ghosts all together in one spot before—but I realized they had stopped in a rough circle around me.
“So, go ahead.” I recognized Karen’s voice and glared at her. She ignored me, though, and concentrated on the two old men who’d arrived. “Do it if you’re going to.”
That didn’t sound good.
“Thanks a ton,” I said. She had the decency to look embarrassed.
“It’s nothing personal,” she muttered. “Just protecting our turf.”
“Quit talking to her!” the angry ghost cried. “Get her!”
And then, she ran at me, into me, and I had to endure some bad moments as she flailed around. But in her anger, I could feel fear, and I stopped my attempts to get her out of my space.
“Why are you so scared?” I asked.
“Get her!” the angry scared ghost said again, but I noticed that none of the other ghosts had moved. Only the angry one had stepped into me. I figured I could handle one.
“Tell me,” I said. “Why are you so afraid?”
A latecomer jogged up to us,
and accidentally stepped into my space. For a crazy second I had two of them in me. One angry and afraid, the other more confused than anything else.
In fact, despite the confusion, the second ghost felt normal. Which confused and disconcerted me more than the fear and anger of the first. I’d never run into a ghost whose emotions and reactions seemed healthy. What the hell was going on?
“Get out of me!” I yelled.
“Oh, sorry,” the second ghost said, and obligingly took a step away.
“What are you doing, Lisa?” The angry ghost who was still flailing around in my space stopped and stepped away from me, which was a relief. “Get back in there with me!”
“But she doesn’t like it,” Lisa said.
“Of course she doesn’t like it!” the angry ghost said. “That’s the whole point!”
“I’m not going to,” Lisa said, fairly stubbornly, I thought. “It’s not nice.”
“To hell with you and your being nice!” the angry ghost shrieked. She stepped back into me, and her anger quotient had jumped up a ton. My chest suddenly felt hot, and it was hard to breathe. I could have kicked myself. My mother had taught me how to keep ghosts from invading my space, but I’d been so overwhelmed I hadn’t even tried using the defence she had helped me come up with. All I had to do was think of wings of steel—like in the ancient Batfink cartoon—but I couldn’t do it with the ghost in my space. I just had to deal with her until she stepped away. Luckily for me, it was still only her.
The rest of them stood in a rough circle around us, staring, and for a second I wondered what it looked like to them. Could they see the angry ghost inside me, flailing around like an idiot?
“Stop that,” Karen finally said. “Joanne, just stop. We aren’t going to help you hurt her.”
That brought me up. I hadn’t thought about them trying to hurt me. Aggravate me to death maybe, but not hurt me.
That many ghosts could have caused me some emotional damage if enough of them were truly angry spirits, and they certainly would have made my next visit to the shrink interesting, but even though Joanne was angry and afraid she was not the worst ghost I’d dealt with. Not by a long shot. And she was not a poltergeist. Of that, I was sure.
“You can’t hurt me,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was telling the absolute truth but figured that it was close enough for this bunch. “Now, step out here so we can talk like two—”
“Human beings?” one of the ghosts asked. “Too late, I’d say.”
A couple of the ghosts tittered nervous laughter, and Joanne’s anger quotient went up. A ton.
“All you can do is joke?” she screamed. “This is not a joke! She’ll destroy us!”
She stepped out of me, and the heat of her anger quickly faded.
“I’m not going to destroy you,” I said. “Why do you think that?”
“Well, you can see us,” one of the old men standing to one side said. I nodded. He had me there.
“She’ll exorcise us!” Joanne screamed. “We talked about this!”
Exorcising? Seriously?
“I don’t do exorcising,” I said. “Honestly.”
“Sure,” Joanne said. “She says that now. But watch. Someday, she’ll just start exorcising all of us, and there won’t be a thing we can do about it. We gotta get her out of here!” She turned to a tall, thin ghost with a high, tight ponytail. “Come on, Rita,” she said. “Do something to her. Hurt her!”
“I—I don’t know if I can do that,” Rita said. She tugged at her ponytail, looking uncomfortable. “It was just a teacup, before. She’s so big.”
“Do it!” Joanne cried, and then whimpered as though she was about to break into tears. “You promised me. You promised us all.”
Rita gave her ponytail one more tug and took a step toward me.
“Leave me alone, Rita,” I said. I thought about wings of steel, like my mother taught me, to keep her from entering my space the way Joanne had. Hoped it would be enough to stop her.
“I’m sorry,” Rita said, and put a tentative hand to my arm.
For a second, I thought I could feel something touching me, then her hand slid through my arm and out.
“How did you do that?” I asked. “How did you touch me?”
“I’m not sure,” Rita said. She sounded winded, like she’d run a mile, and she slowly slid to the ground. “I moved a tea cup once—”
I stared at her. My first official poltergeist. “That’s cool,” I finally said.
“Thank you,” she muttered, looking completely exhausted.
“Is that it? Is that all you got?” Joanne looked disgusted and turned away from Rita, who was still lying on the ground by James’s car. A couple of other ghosts squatted on the ground beside her, offering her whispered words of encouragement.
“Don’t listen to Joanne,” one of them said. “She’s just jealous.”
“Jealous of that?” Joanne spat. “That was pathetic. You’ve done nothing.” She whirled, glaring at the ghosts who had encircled her and me. “None of you have done anything. And you promised.”
“Joanne, let it go.” Karen spoke, and I noticed that the rest of the ghosts’ lights wavered. Then, as one, they all took a step back, widening the circle around Joanne and me appreciably. “This isn’t going to work.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“They were afraid,” Karen said to me. “When I told them about you.”
“Why?” I asked. It struck me as funny that ghosts would be afraid of me, but I tried to keep any hint of a smile from my face. I didn’t need to upset them further.
“Because we just want to be left alone,” Karen said. “We figured if you realized we were here you’d do something to make us go away. That exorcising thing. And we can’t have that. We just want to be left alone. You know?”
“Well, that’s all I want, too,” I said.
“Really?” Rita asked. She’d pulled herself up to sitting, and gave her ponytail a quick tug to tighten it. “You wouldn’t lie to us, would you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not lying. I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me.”
“Now, Missy, you have to understand that we like to watch the early games,” one of the old guys said. “We are not giving up on them just because you can see us.”
“The early games?” I asked.
“He means the living games,” the other old guy said. “The ones just before our games.”
“Your games?”
Both of the old guys looked at me like I was being thick. Which, I guess, I was. Hadn’t Karen said something about there being enough ghosts for two teams?
“You play softball,” I said.
“Yeah,” Karen said. “We play softball.”
“You’re telling her our secrets!” Joanne yelled, then burst into tears. “She’ll ruin us all!”
“She said she wouldn’t,” one of the old guys said. “And she doesn’t look like a liar to me.”
The rest of the ghosts nodded, muttering softly. Joanne pushed through them and ran across the parking lot, her iridescent tears pattering to the ground around her. She disappeared when she hit the road, and we all watched her tears slowly disappear.
“She’ll be back,” one of them, I think it was Rita, said. “Won’t she?”
“She better come back,” another ghost said. “She’s catching for me tonight.”
The circle around me broke up into clumps of ghosts, standing close together, as if for comfort. They all stared at me, silently. Like they were waiting for me to say something.
So, I blurted out the first thing that popped into my head. “How do you play without equipment?”
“Oh!” Rita again, looking very much recovered from her poltergeist experiment. “It’s easy!”
She started talking, and then others chimed in, and they stepped closer to me, all wanting to tell me how they played softball without equipment, and without the ability to pick up or move anything corporeal, past a tea cup. Their proximit
y was making me a bit uncomfortable—but the most interesting thing was, I felt no anger or fear or anything close to disturbed from them.
“One at a time, please,” I said, taking a big step away from all of them. “I can’t understand you.”
“Maybe you need to watch,” Karen said.
They all stopped talking and stared at her. “Are you sure you want that, Karen?” one of the old guys finally asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” Karen said and turned to me. “You doing anything tonight?”
I stared at Karen, my mouth open. The last thing in the world I ever thought I would have been doing after playing softball was watching the dead play softball. But here I was with an invitation.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said, and put the keys to James’s car back in my pocket.
“Good,” Karen said.
As one, the ghosts turned to the diamond.
“We gotta see how Miriam does in her game,” Rita said. “We got a pool. We figure she’ll strike out everybody this season.”
“Everybody?” I scoffed. “I don’t think so. She looks hittable.”
“You haven’t seen her in a game,” Karen said. She took a few steps toward the diamond, then turned back to me. “So, you coming or what?” she asked.
“Right behind you,” I said, and pulled my phone from my pocket.
Time to call Jasmine to let her know I’d be late. And James to let him know I was going to get his car back to him a few hours later than we’d planned because I had two more ball games to watch. A live one, and then a dead one.
Good grief.
Karen:
The Post-Swarming Talk
I DIDN’T QUITE know how Marie was going to be after the attempted swarming, but she seemed to have taken it all with a great deal of good humour.
I watched as she talked for a few minutes on her little mobile telephone and went up to her when she pulled her keys out of her pocket.
“You going?” I asked, surprised that I felt a little let down.
“Just going to get a coffee,” she said. She was as good as her word and came back a few minutes later carrying three paper cups. She stopped beside Miriam Kendel’s parents and handed each of them a cup.