Halloween Treat

Enjoy the haunted short story “Billy’s Nightmare“ by Brad Huestis as a special Halloween treat!

Cold sweat, shivers, and pulse racing. Am I finally losing it? Is the weird Plant Hall mix of red bricks and copper minarets raising bloody Baghdad memories from the darkest corners of my mind?

In her small VA office, Valeri listens calmly. “We all fear the unknown,” she says. “The next time you jolt awake, write down everything.”

I jolt awake at midnight. Shaking and clammy, I switch on my lamp and scribble notes. I work up the courage to read them in the morning. “Circus Tent, Dancing Girls, Baseball, 4/4/19.” At lunch, eating cold cafeteria spaghetti, I look at my notes and hazily recall the tent. Men and boys wear coats and ties, women and girls are in full length dresses. They are all agitated, near riot. My mind jumps to the next confused scene. Flappers shake and twirl, and put on a shimmering show for a room full of cigar chomping men. But it’s the third vision, the one of the fat man swinging a heavy bat, which disturbs me most. Between bites, it dawns on me—these are not my demons. Mine are snipers, roadside bombs, and fallen comrades. These weird new hauntings aren’t mine, but the dread, insomnia, and night sweats own me.

My God, who in their right mind fears fat baseball players and sexy dancing girls?

I walk like a Zombie across campus to share my notes with Valeri. She listens wide-eyed. “Come with me,” she says. As we walk, she explains, “Our campus had a prior lives. As a grand winter hotel, it hosted the likes of Queen of England and Stephan Crane. During the Spanish-American war is housed Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. Babe Ruth signed his first contract here.” We stop and she points a brass marker in front of the College of Business. “He and his teammates played on the Plant Field ballpark there.”

I step up to the marker. “Babe’s Longest Homer” it reads, and explains that Ruth hit a superhuman 587 foot homer on April 4, 1919, and in front of 4,300 screaming fans he presented his home run ball to the evangelist, Billy Sunday.

I rush back to my room to search the internet. Ruth was an outstanding left-handed pitcher for the Red Sox. After he hit his supernatural homer, they traded him to the Yankees where he became a superstar slugging outfielder. He won four Championships over the next fifteen seasons and the Curse of the Bambino fell on Boston for trading Ruth.

Are my night terrors connected to the curse? But, Boston broke that damned curse by winning the World Series in 2004. Damn it, what can it be?

That night a wild-eyed man once again invades my dreams and jolts me awake. Vivid fragments of nightmarish scenes flash in my mind. The same wild-eyed man, now in a black three-piece suit, yells about hell and damnation. Then the scene blurs. Still in the same suit, he stands on a pitcher’s mound and throws a fastball over home plate. Thousands cheer. Why do I shiver in fear for him?

Babe Ruth steps to the plate. He hits his inhuman 587 foot blast. Watching the ball sail away, the horror of it overwhelms me. A grinning Ruth hands his home run ball to the stunned man in a black suit. His wild-eyed fear sends an icy shudder through me. Stone-faced, he accepts the cursed ball. Turning away from Ruth, he doesn’t share any of the crowd’s giddy glee.

In the bathroom I stare into my wild, red-rimmed eyes. I pray for these hauntings to end. I search the internet and find Billy Sunday. He quit pro baseball and by 1910 was America’s most famous evangelist. He held revivals across the U.S.A. And was in Tampa when Ruth hit his monster homer. I look up Ruth and Tampa. Ruth was a spring training regular in the Sapphire Room, nicknamed the Sure-fire Room for its infamous prohibition era debauchery. Armed with this knowledge, I calmly drift back to sleep and wait for Billy.

He comes and forces me to witness his world in excruciating detail. He and Ruth sit in the Sure-fire Room, drinking cocktails and flirting with flappers. Ruth jumps up on a table and cajoles Sunday to join him. Sunday leads everyone in a prayer to the Baseball gods. Gathering enthusiasm and volume, he tears into his pagan sermon. The drunken congregation greedily receives his frenzied oratory and goes wild when he knights Ruth with the fat home run hitting bat. The lights blink, their table tips, and they both fall into the hungry arms of the gyrating worshipers. I wake as the blasphemous sermon ends. I feel a tortured presence. Sunday stands, clutching Ruth’s home run ball. For the first time, his tortured eyes turn to me.

I jump up and yell, “What do you want from me?”

Billy falls to his knees and spreads his hands Christ-like. “It was just a profane joke,” he sighs, bowing his head. “I repented, I did, but his unholy exploits didn’t stop.”

I stand place the palm of my hand on the crown of his head. “I understand.”

Heaving a ghostly sigh he vanishes, leaving Ruth’s one hundred year old baseball behind.