“James, you big baby,” Judy says, patting my head. I brush her off and smooth out my hair. She laughs. “Don’t freak out. Jesus.”
“I’ll be the ghost,” Paul says.
“So how do you play?” Henry asks again.
“I’ll go hide while you explain it to him,” Paul says, and without waiting to see if we all agree, he jumps off the porch, dashes around the corner of the cabin, and is gone.
Marcy explains the rules to Henry. “Paul hides while we count, then we all try and make it around the cabin without getting touched by the ghost. You can go any direction, but you have to make a complete trip. No going halfway and backtracking, unless it’s to start around the other side. The porch is Base. Anyone the ghost touches stays behind to help in the next round. The next round, you now have more people hiding wherever they want around the house. You never know when someone’s going to jump out at you! We go until everyone’s been touched. Last one touched is the winner.”
Henry shrugs. “Sounds easy.”
I shake my head wearily but keep my mouth shut. I don’t want them to know any more than they already do how dead-set I am against this, because they’ll tease me about it, like they did when we were kids.
I was in third grade when my parents were killed in that car accident. They’d had too much to drink, my dad especially, and he swerved into the oncoming traffic. I played the game for the first time four weeks later with my friends.
Playing the game as a kid, engulfed in the darkness, I felt so terribly alone, even with my friends around. I missed my parents. The rest of the gang never showed much sympathy about it, pushing me to play the game, making fun of my reluctance. We’ve all outgrown those cruel childhood days, but why do I feel like they’ve returned? I always hated playing the damn game as a kid, and I hate the idea of playing it as an adult even more, here in unfamiliar territory, with my parents even further away in my memory.
Now, in a singsong voice, Marcy starts the chant, and everyone but me joins in.
“One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock midnight, HOPE TO SEE THE GHOST TONIGHT!”
We scatter, jogging toward the corners of the cabin.
Vickie leads a pack toward the right side, but I set off counterclockwise, keeping the cabin on my left. I follow Scott, because he’s the slowest, and if we flush Paul out of hiding, he’s likely to go after Scott, and I can sneak by. Judy and Dusty are ahead of us—even better—and the rest have disappeared around the other side of the house.
Once I round the corner of the cabin, darkness surrounds me like a blanket. I slow to a walk. The crunch of footsteps on twigs and pine cones, and the dim outline of the cabin on my left, keeps me headed in the right direction on a path between the cabin and the looming trees. The shadows of Scott, Judy, and Dusty trudge up the slight hill leading to the back, and instinctively I veer toward the cabin, staying close to the wall.
Someone screams from the other side of the cabin. It’s Vickie’s high pitched yell, no question about it. I run to the next corner, then frantically search for Paul’s position. I hope I can get by while he’s busy with Vickie and the others.
Black shapes run toward me, and I freeze.
Jesus. I can’t tell who’s who, whether or not these are the others, or if one of them is Paul. I crouch, poised to take off into the woods, or even backtrack and run all the way around the other direction. Doing that would be risky. Longer, because I’d have to keep going around the other way. More of a chance for Paul to catch me, and I’d be stranded out here, just him and me with the others safe on Base.
“He’s behind us somewhere!” Marcy yells, and she runs by me with a whoop, because she knows she’s made it—she’s going to get to Base without being tagged. Three others pass by and I still haven’t moved. Stupid.
I run. Speed might just get me through this round.
Go.
The wall of the cabin brushes my left side all the way around. I hear the sounds of pursuit, and I don’t know if it’s Paul, or others trying to keep up with me, hoping to follow on my coattails and avoid being caught.
“Damn it, who is that?” I yell over my shoulder.
“Shut up and run, James me boy.” It’s Dusty. “We’re dead meat if you don’t hurry your ass!”
I smile, concentrate on rounding the last corner, and there’s Base, a bunch of the gang already on the porch, a couple of others rounding the far corner at the same time.
I reach the porch and turn to look behind me. Dusty and Judy make a big show of pouncing on the porch and yelling, “Safe!”
We’re all panting, and we wait for possible stragglers to come in. Scott lumbers in last minute, and we take inventory of those on base. Only Vickie is missing.
“Not bad, Henry,” Dan says. “Your inaugural run, and you made it around without being caught.”
Henry doesn’t say anything, but his hands are shaking, trembling like an alcoholic at his first A.A. meeting.
“So who even saw Paul?” I ask. Heads turn toward me in unison. Their faces show they don’t understand what I mean, so I pick out Marcy from the crowd. “You ran by me,” I say. “You said he was behind you, right?”
“Sure,” she says. “Right.” She looks down, then away toward the left corner. “Okay, so I didn’t see him, but it was him, I’m positive. Huffing and puffing, grunting like an idiot. You know Paul.” She squeaks a smile. “He can be a real animal sometimes.”
I turn to Dusty.
“Don’t look at me,” Dusty says. “I didn’t see him; I was too busy running behind you.”
“I didn’t see him either,” Scott says, still breathing hard.
“C’mon, let’s start counting,” Judy says. “Paul and Vickie are probably getting restless out there.”
Then why aren’t they yelling out? Egging us on? What’s the hold up, guys? Let’s go, let’s go!
The chant begins. “One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock . . .”
Once again, I don’t participate in the chant. I’m looking at Henry, who’s looking warily toward one corner of the cabin, mumbling the words half-heartedly.
“. . . twelve o’clock midnight, HOPE TO SEE THE GHOST TONIGHT!”
The best offense is defense in this game, so everyone hangs back, almost crouching toward opposite corners, hoping someone else will go first. Sometimes a ghost will ambush you right around the first corner, so everyone swings wide to get a good angle of escape. I take the same route as last time, along with Dan and Judy.
Again, it starts on the other side of the house.
I hear a muffled shout—it sounds like Dusty—and a short piercing scream, which has to be Marcy. Dan takes off running, but I listen to the sounds from the other side.
“James,” Judy whispers harshly, making me jump. “What’re you going to do?”
Cheat. Go back to Base and stay there. I say, “Let’s go,” and we jog around the corner and up the hill to the back.
“Was it Paul or Vickie tagged them, you think?” Judy asks.
I hazard a guess. “Paul. Sweet Vickie would hardly cause that much commotion.”
No more shouts come from the opposite side of the cabin. I expect to find Vickie waiting around the back, but no, she isn’t there when I turn the corner. I don’t see anyone else, either, not for sure—I want to look for them and reassure myself, but I can’t find anyone—even though, staring into the night, I’m convinced I see movement in the forest.
The vision spurs me on, and I run ahead of Judy, once again staying close to the cabin. I’m not familiar with the woods around me, I tell myself, but I realize I’m just plain scared of going anywhere but straight ahead.
Another sha
dow coalesces in the woods, wraith-like, standing there stock still, and I wonder who it is. Paul or Vickie? Someone they’ve already caught, waiting it out? Someone just tagged, who can’t participate until the next round?
Or is it something else?
A chill runs through me, as if someone has just run a knuckle down the spine of my back. Looking behind me doesn’t help, because now I can’t see Judy at all, and I’m alone. Alone. I’m shivering uncontrollably.
The wind eddies around the cabin, and now I smell smoke from the dying fire, and there’s another odor, sickly sweet. My imagination desperately tries to place it. Did someone fart? Maybe it’s someone’s cologne. Or—
A dead animal in the woods, the scent of hot blood mixing with the humus of the forest floor.
In my mind, I see my dad at my first T-ball game. He’s the umpire, and supposedly impartial, but he’s behind the plate, crouching a little, waving me in from third base. As I run toward home, he crouches lower, smiling. “You can make it, James, you can make it!”
The memory fades, and I sprint toward the last corner. I think of Dad as a ghost now, a comforting presence, pushing me past the unknown. The wind whistles in my ears, but it doesn’t block out the sounds behind me: the clomping of footsteps and gasps of wheezing breath.
“Who’s following?” I yell, which is the same thing I said the first round, at almost the same spot Dusty told me to move my ass.
No one answers, but the breathing sounds different now. It could be someone’s breath catching, maybe, but to me it sounds like a snarl.
God, I want to take a quick look over my shoulder, see who it is. It might be Judy after all, though I can’t imagine she’s kept up with me. Dan or Dusty, maybe. If that’s the case, I’m safe; I’ll just kept running and we’ll all make it to Base. If not—
If it’s Paul or Vicky, I decide at this point to thank the stars and join them out in the woods. But I don’t stop, I fly. I leave whoever—or whatever—it is behind me.
The final corner.
Henry and Marcy are on Base, and I sigh, relieved. I force myself to slow to a jog, trying to look nonchalant as I step onto the wooden porch.
“About time,” Marcy says.
“Shut up,” I say. “I made it, didn’t I?”
“Barely.”
I don’t care. “Are we all that made it?”
“Looks like.”
I glance at Henry. “You have any problems?”
Henry is shaking visibly from head to toe. I mean, I’ve heard people say that before, as a general description, but this is for real. It’s as if he’s suffering from a bout of hypothermia.
“Henry?” Marcy asks. “What’s wrong?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
I look at my hands and swear. They’re shaking too.
Marcy sees it. “Oh Christ.”
“Look,” I say. “Who did you see on your way around? Paul? Vickie? Scott? Who?”
“Je-sus, lighten up,” she says, but a hint of something crosses her face before she looks away. She pulls at something stuck in her hair. “Cobweb,” she explains. “I ran into the trees to avoid—someone—and I ran into a fucking cobweb.”
“You don’t know who you saw,” I say. “You don’t know.”
“I don’t know,” she repeats. “It was one of them. Christ, James, it’s too fucking dark to see anyone.”
“Henry?” I ask again.
“I don’t know either,” he whispers.
I don’t believe him. I mutter an oath under my breath, turn to Marcy again. “You screamed. I heard you from the other side of the cabin.”
“Oh. Yeah. Someone ambushed Dusty and me—you know, scared the shit out of us. Couldn’t just jump out, oh no. They had to growl and carry on. Dusty fell. I kept going.”
“So who was it?”
“Goddamn it, I don’t know!”
“They’re waiting,” Henry says softly.
I look at him, momentarily confused. Waiting? Who’s waiting?
He glances up, and a new determination is there, set in the hard line of his jaw. He isn’t shaking so bad anymore. “They’re waiting for us,” he says again, and unbelievably, he starts the chant in a soft monotone. “One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock—c’mon you guys—four o’clock, five o’clock . . .”
Marcy joins in. “Six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight o’clock . . .”
I still refuse to say the chant, even when Marcy punches me lightly in the ribs. I will never say that goddamn thing again.
Then it’s eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock midnight, Hope to See the Ghost Tonight. No exclamation mark. Marcy and Henry don’t shout the final words. If I’d been standing at the corner of the cabin, I wouldn’t have heard a single word.
Marcy and Henry run in opposite directions. It was a lucky choice twice before, so I head the same way as the first two rounds, counterclockwise, following Henry. I turn left around the first corner and nearly fall, but I catch myself and look up to track Henry. Only—
He is already out of sight.
Shit. I stop. Already?
I grit my teeth. Look out into the trees. The swaying limbs look like skeletal arms, the dense foliage like rotting flesh. I see movement, not from the wind, but from bodies, converging on me.
There are too many. Oh god, there are just too many, and I’m by myself on this side of the house.
I continue on at a walk, trying to find an opening. A half dozen shapes are poised to strike, waiting like demons at the entrance of Hades. Where is Marcy? Did Henry get by? I imagine the shapes doing more than tagging me: ripping at my flesh like dogs; lapping at my spilled blood like mindless vampires; I close my eyes a moment to rid myself of the image. There is no way I’m going to get around. I’m going to get tagged, I’m going to get—
I turn and race back to Base. I decide to try the other way around. No one is at the porch or anywhere on this side of the house as I pass by and go around to the other side of the cabin. My heart’s thudding in my chest, and I press my hand against my sternum. Going around this way, in the opposite direction, the path toward the back of the cabin is almost unrecognizable. New territory.
The shapes are here too. They could be human—Jesus, they probably are—I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking. I run forward anyway, determined to slip by.
Miraculously, I do.
They follow me. Whoever’s behind me as I dash around the back, they’re doing their best to unnerve me, panting heavily, growling deep in their throats.
Laughter erupts behind me, and alongside the path, out in the trees, short unsympathetic cackles set my teeth on edge. Several shapes await me at the final corner, but I don’t stop. I barrel down on them, determined to bowl them over and cause them a little pain in return for my capture.
My eyes are good, for God’s sake. I should be able to see who they are when I get close enough, but I’m distracted by a sliver of space between them and the cabin. I juke left, then slip to the right and round the corner. Something slashes at my arm as I go by, and I cry out, momentarily stunned, but no one says “tag!” I might’ve caught an exposed nail or piece of metal on the cabin’s siding. Maybe.
I don’t stop. The porch light flares like an airport beacon, and no one else is there. I close in, and I have the most desirable urge to slide, my dad behind home plate, encouraging me to run faster to avoid the infielder’s throw. “You can make it, James, you can make it!”
I arrive standing. Dad isn’t there. Mom isn’t in the stands cheering. They’re both gone. Gone a long time, something horrible and avoidable taking them away from me.
When my feet hit the porch, I turn and look back in the direction I came from, because suddenly I feel Base isn’t all that safe.
No one has followed m
e. The shapes from the corner are gone. There’s blood on my arm. Fuck. It’s a deep cut.
I crouch, sit down on my haunches, and look out over the lake. As blood dribbles down my arm, I glance back every few seconds to the opposite corners of the cabin. The moonpath to the other side of the lake has nearly vanished, overgrown with the rising waves, choked out by darkness. I’m shivering; I can’t stop; my eyes swell with tears. Whether it’s from the stinging wind or not, I can’t tell, but I know the gnawing at my insides is real: fear through and through. I can’t explain what I’ve seen and heard the last time around the cabin.
I’m alone, but that isn’t so unusual. I’ve been alone a long time. I can’t remember the voices of my parents; they aren’t anywhere inside me. My friends are gone too. They went so far as to invite me out to this nostalgic, annoying tradition, and now they’re adrift somewhere in the night, stolen from me. As far as I’m concerned, only the demons of loneliness and the ghosts of abandonment are out here.
I hate this game, I hate this game, I hate this game.
My knees pop when I straighten. We checked the screen door earlier, but I pull on it anyway, hoping to coax it open with a sudden rush of adrenaline and muscle. I’m not at all sure I even want to get inside. Maybe it’s worse in there. The screen door jumps off the latch, swings wide, then falls off the hinges. A heavy oak door still blocks my way, though, and the knob doesn’t budge when I try to turn it. I lean into the door, trying to bury my head into the wood; maybe I can will my body to pass through it, like a ghost. All I manage to do is smear blood on the door.
I’m done with this game. I won’t play any longer.
“Guys?” I turn away from the door. “Hey!” I yell. Then I yell as loud as I dare. “Guys, you out there? Fine. Game’s over. Allee, allee, oxen free!”
No one answers me. The wind picks up in defiance.
Toward the head of the lake, lightning spreads itself across the horizon like a sheet waving in the breeze; raindrops patter like little feet on the porch roof.
I don’t move from my spot. I refuse to move. I stand there, staring at the lake for fifteen minutes. No one comes back. No one shouts, C’mon, James, you big baby, it’s just us out here. No one chides, You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you?
Seasons Between Us Page 10
