Midnight, Moonlight

Midnight, Moonlight

“Midnight, Moonlight

Hope I see a ghost tonight!”

Rhyme from a child’s game.

Hank James put another fistful of sunflower seeds into his mouth. He tucked the half-empty bag into his jeans pocket and hooked his fingers back into the wire mesh of the chain link fence behind home plate. This time, he was not at the HooseCows’ stadium, but was at a small town ballpark in Waverly, Iowa. Most of the ballpark looked plain but had been taken care of. The poles that held up the backstop seemed older and were more worn than everything else, as if they had stood there through several changes in fencing material.

Hank was watching a small group of children playing in the night, but no parents were worrying about these kids. These kids had died many years ago; Hank still didn’t know how. These kids were haunting his life, off the field sometimes, on the field most of the time. The only two people he knew who saw the ghostly children were he and Mickey Danz, and he was pretty sure Mickey Danz was most of the way crazy. Now, standing alone in an empty ballpark at four in the morning, watching ghosts trot around the infield, he had to wonder how close to crazy he had come.

If only everything was going as well off the field as it was going on the field. He was hitting at least a home run a game, and his fielding felt effortless and had remained error-free. When  he was at the plate, he felt patient, like he knew what each pitch was going to be. As long as the eerily effective Alan Carpenter wasn’t on the mound, he was hitting the ball like he belonged back in the big leagues. He even had a biggest fan: a tan, athletic guy who was always quoting numbers to Hank that Hank had never considered, telling Hank he was going back to the top of bigs, and then getting Hank to sign one more old baseball card.

The ghosts kids — there were five of them — could clearly see him. They walked about the infield, kicking at the dirt here and there with screwed-up expressions of concentration on their young faces. He could finally see what the red markings were on their shirts. Each child had a name written on the front of their shirt in what looked like lipstick. A first and a last name in most cases, but in one case there was just a first name and a question mark. When they stopped and stood next to each other, never seeming to actually talk, they would turn and look at him. When they did this, he felt as if a cold wind had whipped across the small of his back, even though the night was deadly still.

Hank spit out a sunflower shell and considered, for the hundredth time, walking out to greet the children. There was nothing stopping him from stepping right out to the pitcher’s mound, like a coach about to make a change. He couldn’t do it, though. Couldn’t even bring himself to say “hello.” He just stood behind the fence and marveled at what he was actually seeing, surprised that the directions Mickey Danz had given him brought him to the right place. Mickey had been tracking the ghost children for a while, and had found out they stayed here some nights back during a time when his teammates were still willing to loan him cars.

Hank had no business being out here, especially considering that he had some real flesh and blood problems that were more pressing. He was pretty sure John Todd had poisoned “Bunk” Edwards chewing tobacco, even if the coroner had ruled it death by natural causes, citing “Bunk’s” unhealthy lifestyle as an accelerant. The HooseCows held a moment of silence for the relief pitcher at that morning’s game, and Hank was pretty sure he caught John Todd giggling to himself. The pitcher nearly turned to whisper to the man standing next to him, then composed himself and returned to looking like the normal guy Hank had been friends with just days earlier. He wanted to tell Coach Nickles about what he had seen, and to suggest he had a new suspect in the Leigh Palmer murder, but he couldn’t. John Todd was Taylor Nickles’ pride and joy. Todd was a washed up pitcher Nickles had resurrected and brought back to earth to throw strikes and get outs. Todd wasn’t like a son to Nickles; it went so much deeper than that.

Unable to sleep, Hank had torn himself from bed to see if Mickey Danz’s claims that the ghosts would take the field at this particular ballpark, hidden from public view behind a golf course. Hank had already seen them several times at other locations, but it had never actually occurred to him that the ghosts would really be there. Now, he had no idea what to do.

As if sensing his confusion, the smallest of the boys walked toward the fence. Hank tried to stand tall, and he put his feet flat on the ground. His right hand started twitching like a bird caught in wire, and he grabbed down on the fence to keep it from moving. When the ghost child had almost reached him, he immediately spit out all of his sunflower seeds, fearing it would seem rude if he kept spitting while they talked.

But the boy didn’t talk. The ghost looked absent of emotion, just tired and somehow distant. The boy’s face was distorted somehow, as if it had been fixed and stuffed together with something pale that threatened to burst the seams. In a timeless gesture, the child raised up his ballcap and pushed his hands through his hair. Then, he pointed back over his shoulder at the pitcher’s mound.

Behind him, the other boys were standing on the pitcher’s mound and facing him. Slowly, they were fading away. It was like watching shimmers of heat above a highway go out of existence when the car got too close. Hank looked back to the boy closest to him, who had just enough time to meet his gaze before he drained completely out of existence.

Hank’s first two steps toward the mound were lurching and awkward, but by the third step he could feel himself walking with his baseball strut. As he neared the mound, he began to walk more carefully. The ghost had not just been walking around the field. They had somehow been able to scratch a message into the dirt. Angrily, he realized he had walked across one section of writing and ruined the ghosts’ hard work. The rest of the writing, from what he could decipher, was chilling.

“HE KEEPS DEAD BODY UNDER SECTION . . .”, with the number having been erased by his careless feet.

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