kribble…
At first it came almost as a whisper.
A word nearly silent, drifting from under currents of a solid sleep so low she didn’t register it as a word at all, so low that at first it seemed nothing but a rhythm in itself … kribble … soft and slow, steady as a heartbeat.
Eventually, Heidi Hickman opened her eyes and sat up.
She was in the bedroom compartment of the network of underground offices she had been using as her “hideout’” for the past two seasons, its intertwining hallways and office spaces once filled with bustling anti-Russian agents and book-tweedeling nerds intent on ballistic curves and time-to-launch psychologies. The place’s history as a secret government bomb shelter—until it was abandoned in the mid-60s—had given it a stodgy aura when she first moved in. Now, however, at least a few of the more interesting rooms had taken on a new tone—filled with communications technology whose power would have made those nerdy nerds cry, and filled with charts and graphs of such advanced baseball metrics that Bill James and his acolytes would have fallen to their knees. She’d painted it, too. Much of it, anyway. And she’d wired it up and worked on the whole Feng Shui of the place. Her bedroom, for example, was a perfect square with a ceiling fan rotating silently above her. The bed itself, king sized, was placed centrally so that the airflow slid across the sheets in a way that made a pleasant touch on her arms. Low light luminesced from phosphor lights at each corner. The sounds of instrumental music she liked to sleep to was still being piped in through a series of bud-speakers placed to provide perfect acoustics.
kribble…
The word came again, just loud enough to mix into the lower frequencies of the clipped electric cello played by Mayori Makin—a twelve-year-old prodigy who had recently made press by going on tour with Mikki Manning.
Or had it?
Had Heidi actually heard the word, or … she was so tired. She needed this sleep as badly as she’d needed any sleep in her life. Her brain could be playing tricks.
She took a breath and ran her hand through her hair. It needed a cut, but there just hadn’t been time. The team had been on the road for most of the last month, culminating in a horrible four-day stint in Louisville—as if a four-day stint in Louisville could be anything else but horrible. At least she’d been able to catch up with Kate during the swing through Portland. Life as an “Advanced Scout” was turning out to be as interesting as GM Ron Collins had promised.
Working mostly off the grid for the past six months, Heidi/Hellscape had been putting the pieces together and coming up with a scheme so grand and so devious that even she was having a hard time believing it. But she had mostly eliminated the impossible, so per the great Sherlock the rest, however improbable, had to be the truth.
She was so close, though. So close. She felt the solution in her veins, but couldn’t seem to get it to coalesce into something firm.
“What time is it?” she said out loud.
The time is three-twenty-six, the room responded.
kribble …
Yes. Maybe she was just going insane.
She stood up and shifted her nightshirt. It was early, but she knew she wasn’t going to get to sleep again, so she took a deep breath and donned clothes for the day—black this time, the Hellscape leotards felt right today, and a T-Shirt that Triple-Axe had given her that came adorned with a My Chemical Romance logo—then padded back into the kitchen to make up a bowl of cereal. As the dry food rattled into the bowl, she let her mind drift to the problem that had been filling her brain ever since last October when the Bleed Nine Fan club had contacted her blind.
Every team had a plan.
She had known that even in the beginning.
That’s how it all started, after all. She’d handed a reporter Vinnie Vitale’s stupid little BLUEPRINT, and then she was out of a job. But she had them all now. Yellow Springs had hired her to trace down rumors of a series of such documents—The Master Plan, the Right Wind, the Circle of What the Hell ever—she had them all. Even Louisville’s plan, which was code named “The Deadbeat’s Guide to a Bald-faced Three-Peat,” and Brooklyn’s tomb which was titled “The Slizz Directive.” She’d printed each of them out, and now they were sitting on the middle of her table where she’d left them—the soggy rag of a guide for Mexico City’s staff, the “High Ceiling” manifesto out of Edmonton, even the one-sheeter from Wichita that just read “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrg!”
As the coffee machine gurgled, she sat down to eat.
She’d been up all night reading these plans. Been up all night for the past several days. Marker boards that lined the walls were full of her scribbles. There was something here. Odd similarities that she at first chalked up to the basic rantings of lunatic baseball managers simply trying to win with a shared pool of talent.
kribble.
The word came almost as if it was centered from within the pile of papers.
No. That wasn’t right.
It came again … kribble … not from the papers this time, but from the dark passageway beyond the papers—the one hallway blocked by the door that Heidi had left closed even back in the first days of her residence here because … well … to be honest—and since she was alone here, she had every reason to just be honest with herself—the feel of the place gave her the willies. It was a cold passage, which she assumed was because it sloped immediately downward toward the core of the Earth. “Final Bunker.” The sign on that door had read. “Last Safe Island.” When she’d first found it, the door had been barricaded with a series of security locks that had been in various stages of disrepair. It had taken her two days to break them all, two days that made her feel like she was Howard Carter unlocking King Tut’s Tomb. But even though that feeling had faded once she made it inside to find nothing more arcane than a passageway down to a series of elevators that lead again even farther into the core of the Earth, she always felt a draft coming up from it.
Hence the closed door now.
kribble …
The line drawn from her eyes to the stack of plans made a perfect compass to the door. The word … kribble … said again … brought the hair up off her arms. Images flashed through her mind. Dark figures in underground garage security tapes, a dance floor, Ron Collins sitting in his office and cursing … again … the swing of Lucas McNeill’s bat and the sound of baseball on lumber, late nights in cities, her father laughing as a bobble head tilted this way and that. Somewhere in there she felt breath warm and comforting on her neck.
Which startled her back to the moment at hand.
The door.
Absently, she put her hand onto the stack of papers, feeling a weird kind of power stir inside her.
The door gave a convulsion.
It's all in my mind, she thought. All in my mind. She stood, though, grabbing the phone she’d put on the edge of the counter, and lifting a screwdriver from a drawer, Heidi Hickman, known by many only as Hellscape, left her cereal behind and strode to the doorway.
Flipping locks and twisting knobs, she opened the portal and stepped into the dark hallway beyond.
- - - - -
The passageway grew colder as she descended, so cold the hard flooring seemed to burn against her bare feet as they padded down and down and down. The light from her phone was harsh against the walls. There was no power here. No reason to light the passage that lead further downward.
This is where the president would have gone, she thought as she traversed the corridor.
Where the pasty-faced men wearing their Strangelove military uniforms and gold braid would have strode downward to let the soil of the Earth’s crust save them from the fate of incineration their failures had subjected the rest of the world to. The soles of their shoes would echo in the enclosed space. Maybe one would cough or clear his throat. That would be appropriate at least. Tension was high inside her even today some hundred years after the fact. God forbid one of them would crack a joke.
The elevators were the only way down, except, of course, there was no power, and even if there was, they weren’t to be trusted after all these years.
Hellscape had seen the compartment before, though. She understood its construction.
A few minutes later, the compartment’s floor had been peeled back to reveal a dark shaft falling into the bowels of the Earth. Hellscape slipped through the space, grabbed a cable, and began to shimmy downward. It was like an old diving show she’d once seen—men wearing bulbous suits to combat the pressures of deep ocean sliding down a guidewire into the darkness of the ocean—nothing around them but black water, the glow of head lamps, and the single black line of a cable that led down to their doom.
She followed it, her heart beating with a reserved calm that let her know she was working, that let her know she was living. Heidi Hickman wasn’t meant for a desk job. Her hands gripped the cable hand over hand, her feet looed around the line as she descended the shaft.
KRIBBLE the sound came again, this time firmly and with enough depth that it made her chest vibrate in uncomfortable ways. KRIBBLE.
An hour later.
Or was it minutes? Or days?
The floor appeared in the range of her light. The cable loop hung in an arc maybe twenty feet from her destination. Arms burning, Hellscape took a deep breath and launched herself from the cable, dropping in a summersault to land cat-like on the ground.
It was warmer here. The air dense enough it seemed to catch in her throat.
KRIBBLE
The elevator doors before her shook with power from the sound. KRIBBLE … KRIBBLE … KRIBBLE.
Pressing her fingers into the space between the doors, Hellscape pulled them apart.
The room here glowed with an eerie blue undertone that seemed to emanate from everywhere at once—bright enough to almost see, dim enough to almost not. The odor was dry, but acrid enough that bile fought to come up her throat. Skeletons. Men seated at what might have been command centers, uniforms rotting. Not military though. No. They wore baseball uniforms. Carried bats instead of machine guns, their chests adorned with not medals, but logos, some of long-dead teams that she wouldn’t have remembered if it weren’t for her father’s love of the game.
KRIBBLE!!!!
A voice shrieked.
KRIBBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One of the skeletons stood and swung its mighty bat. Hellscape ducked just in time, and rolled away. Another skeleton gave a motion like a whirlwind and a musty baseball flew wide. Jon Reed she thought. or Sixto Hernandez. Others began to stir, and Hellscape realized there were too many to avoid for long. Far too many, and Reed-arms or not, even Carlos Garcia hit a curveball every now and then. A glance at the door she’d come in through showed retreat wasn’t an option, either.
A bat whirred overhead.
A glove, leather rotted, scratched against her leg. The sound of teeth clattering, and a moaning that sounded like batterbatterbatterbatterbatterbatter-swing! came. There was a smell here now. A sudden, overpowering aroma of fish dead on the dock. Haddock or swordfish or … maybe … Tuna?
She saw it then. The mound, rising up from the middle of the room like a swampy burial ground of ancient horror, a glistening pile of vile ugliness equal parts green and scarlet and black and brown, flaring with putric golden jets that sparked in the darkness.
KRIBBLE!!!!!!!!
She watched as it grew, watched as it expanded in wet glops and blurping gasses, bubbling up from inside with a slickness that made every atom in her body feel repulsed.
KRIBBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The creature made its final size, and for an instant the room came to a standstill.
She understood now.
Understood it all. The world. This creature. The reason for its home. The Plans. Yes, the plans. All of them. She understood now the manifestation of how they all fell together, how they were all touched by the same dark fingers.
She stood straight, then, understanding her true mission, looked the beast squarely in its muck.
“All Hoot,” she said, shoulders back.
kribble Kribble KRibble KRIbble KRIBBLE
The beast sang.
“Crebel,’ Hellscape said, now realizing that she hadn’t been hearing kribble at all, but instead. “You’re Avery Crebel, too.”
Hoot! Hoot! Hootie Hoot! The beast nearly danced in its monologing delight at the idea of being able to reveal itself to her—for indeed this thing before her, this glistening piece of sewage held together with hate and despair and fundamental evilness was the essence of Al Hoot, who was the nom de plume of one Avery Crebel.
“This is all your doing. The curse. Yellow Springs. You’ve cursed them so they can’t win in October.”
Hoot! Hoot! Hootie Hoot!
As the truth was revealed, the beast gave one big bellowing command (“Tank!”) and with that the skeletal remains went into a dervish of action. Hellscape leapt and rolled, avoiding a rotten fruit basket that flew at her and seemed somehow familiar, slipping under a high heater, bounced past a bending fielder who was trying to catch her. She slid under an old desk to avoid a tag. A somersault over another skeleton saved her again. Her movement was a steady run, a choreographed dance. She was running out of time, but each step of her ballet drew her closer to the beast in the middle of the room that was Al Hoot.
A wave of power came from Hoot, and a bat swung at her head, the logo looping around like a missile on a guided path toward her skull—a Loserville Slugger for crying out loud—the name Luis Baca burned into the barrel.
Hellscape reached her hand up and caught it.
A new power built in her and for an instant she flashed again on her father playing with the Bo Jordan bobblehead, and once again she felt the warm breath on her neck, the heat of body contact that she knew would be coming from the love of her life. As the aged ash of the bat hit her skin, she heard the power chords from Mikki manning’s You’ve Got This ripping through her mind. She grabbed the bat out of the skeleton’s grip, and with a beautiful double flip and a twist, launched herself, bat-first and screaming a call to her father, into the vile source of the Yellow Springs curse.
Falling into it was like diving into hot lava. She twisted, flailing the bat right and left, up and then down into the heart of the beast.
A wave knocked her back, a tendril from Hoot nearly managed to rip the weapon from her hands, but, perhaps it was luck of that the pine tar on the handle grew three times right then, she managed to hold onto the bat handle and bring the barrel down once again into the meat of the beast’s being.
Crebel!! the thing wailed, its voice grating with pain. Crebel!! Crebel!!
Feeling new freedom, Hellscape smashed her way through the gunk and goo that the curse of Al Hoot had been binding her with.
Hoot! the curse howled.
Hoot… it croaked again, fading now.
The bat fell again.
Hootie hoot…
- - - - -
Her breathing was the only thing that broke the silence.
She was on her hands and knees in the dark. Panting. The bangs of her hair dangled down over her face. The bat handle was still in one hand, the wood of the barrel smoldering with acid coils that wafted into the air before disappearing as surely as the beast had.
When she was able, she stood and surveyed the damage.
The room looked like it had been ransacked. Like it had seen the epic battle that Heidi Hickman, nee Hellscape knew she’d been through. But otherwise, nothing was amiss.
There were no broken skeletons here.
No bats or balls.
No indication of the foul swamp thing that was—or had been—Al Hoot.
She dropped the bat and felt satisfaction at its wooden thunk against the floor.
It was gone. The curse broken.
Would the Nine win the Landis this year? She shrugged, then she laughed as she heard her father’s voice and felt the power of what it means to have a family in the words he’d always said to her: “It’s baseball, my favorite little girl in the whole world. Anything can happen.”
She wiped a tear from her eye then and turned back to the elevator shaft.
Looking up, she saw the dark loop of the coil up above. Luckily, the old concrete blocks that formed the shaft were rough and somewhat cracked. It would be a hard climb up, but she would make it. And when she got back to her quarters, Heidi would go through the plans of every team once again. She knew what the score was now, and she had a report to file.
First, though, she had to get up to that elevator cable.
“I love you dad,” she whispered. Then she pressed fingertips into grooves in the wall and began to climb.
