The Mystery of the Phantom Ballplayer (3)

That night, I dreamt of phantoms.

Two and a half meters tall (curved horns emanating from their heads made up the half meter) and red-faced, they held wooden baseball bats instead of the archetypical pitchforks. Distorted by blue haze, the whole tableau was vaguely reminiscent of an image generated by that voguish AI website.

Their distinct manner of speech, low incomprehensible groans, continued to echo in my ears even after I woke up. It continued even as Kazami and I made our way up to the New Wave Mystery Society’s clubroom at the ringing of the last bell. As I stood outside the door, Kazami turned to me and began to speak.

“I wonder how she solved the mystery.”

“If she solved the mystery.”

My reply was tinged with bitterness, evidence that the ignominy of last night still grated on my nerves. Kazami, however, did not seem to be listening. He tiddled his fingers, and it seemed to me that he was attempting to formulate a solution of his own.

I slid the door open. As usual, Haruhi was sitting at her anointed place at the head of the long table. “You’re late,” she said.

“What!” it was Kazami who hollered, and he did so with almost comedic incredulity. “But we came up here as soon as class ended!”

I rolled my eyes. “Obviously, she expected us to skip class,”

“Why not?” Haruhi replied. “That’s what I did.”

“Oh? Why’s that?” I asked.

“I had to make sure I was right,” she said, before hitting me with what could only be termed a verbal uppercut, “I always do my due diligence unlike some people.”

That one stung, I had to admit.

“And besides, there’s no harm in cutting class every once in a while,” Haruhi continued. “I got my friends from the Shinsengumi to help, and the half-day seemed to do wonders for them.”

Did the life of the very fictional Sherlock Holmes overlap with the tumultuous half dozen years in which the ill-fated and historical Shinsengumi were active? Another mystery, I thought, but also the beginning of what would undoubtedly be a very compelling Sherlockian pastiche.

“And?” I asked dubiously, expelling the irrelevant thoughts from my mind. “Did you manage to confirm your theory?”

“I can say, with 100% certainty, that my solution was correct,” she grinned.

Kazami whistled. “Well, let’s hear it then, Tsukishima.”

The great detective consulted her wristwatch, which sported a Pokomaru-kun design on the strap, and then stood up. “There’s still some time before the phantoms come out, but we can wait somewhere else.”

Haruhi then led us to the field where we could see members of the baseball beginning to warm up. “You have practice today, Kazami?” I asked him.

“Huh? Oh yeah, but I wanted to hear Tsukishima’s solution. I didn’t think it’d take long…” he grimaced when one of the players noticed us; shyly, he turned his face away.

“Go and join them,” Haruhi chimed in. “The phantoms won’t come out until after the sun sets anyway.”

That was all the encouragement that Kazami needed, and he immediately sprinted off in the direction of the changing rooms. Haruhi and I, on the other hand, slowly made our way to the stands in the outfield; near the end of practice, and as we diligently observed the outfielders stretching, she turned to me and spoke.

“You know, Watson, I suspected your friend at first.”

“Kazami? Why?”

“He was fishy. Do you remember when he ran up to the clubroom yesterday?”

“Yes, of course I remember.”

“When I questioned him, he said that it had been about twenty minutes since he heard the sounds on the baseball field.”

“What’s fishy about that…?”

“If you run, and we know he did run because he was out of breath when he arrived, you should be able to reach our clubroom in less than ten minutes.”

“You have to factor in the time it takes to find the room. After all, he didn’t know what room we were in.”

“He came from the baseball field, which our clubroom overlooks. From his position, he would have easily seen the light on and come to our floor immediately. But that’s not the issue here.”

“Then what’s the issue?”

“He knew where you were, and he was looking for you.”

She stated it matter-of-factly, with no change in tone or inflection. Even her expression remained stolid. There was a silence, only slightly awkward, as I processed this information. Kazami had been looking for me yesterday? How could our meeting have been anything more than a mere coincidence…?

“Recall his words when he burst through the door, Watson,” Haruhi continued. “He said ‘Are you here, Tanizaki?’. You might argue he saw you through the door’s small window but remember your sitting position relative to the doorway. He would barely have caught a glimpse of your side profile.”

I must have dismissed it at the time, but that was certainly how Kazami had made his entrance yesterday – he had immediately and explicitly said my name even though there was no way he could have known I was in that room.

“What do you make of that?” I asked immediately.

She shrugged. “At the very least, it has nothing to do with this mystery. If I had to venture a guess… he probably ran into somebody who told him where you were.”

“I never told anybody I was joining the New Wave Mystery Society. I mean, there wasn’t any time for that!”

The circumstances of my joining the club were still fresh in the mind.

“In any case, he was fishy, but not guilty. Now, let’s go and meet our phantoms,” she stood up when she noticed that the players had finished warming down and were heading back toward the changing rooms.

In order to give Kazami ample time to freshen up, Haruhi and I purposely slackened our pace and took the long route around the perimeter of the field. Dusk had yet to fully set in, and the waning sunlight still did an adequate job of illuminating our surroundings. It made for a picturesque setting, but we strolled in scenic silence.

By the time we reached the changing rooms, only Kazami remained – his hair was still wet, and rather than changing back into his school uniform, he donned a beige tracksuit, which I recognised as standard issue for Kamijousaki High.

“If you’re ready, then let’s head to the bullpen area.”

***

Much like last night, the bullpen area was deserted. The summer season had already begun, and with it came heat and humidity, but the cool night breeze was enough to elicit a meagre shiver from Haruhi. In the distance, the lights of Zeiko Stadium could be seen.

“The minor league season is starting tonight. A night game,” Kazami filled me in. “Some of the guys were eager to go. Maybe I’ll join them later.”

My witty reply caught in my throat when I realised that we had been joined by three other individuals; looking back, I could see that the door leading to the passageway, the one we had come from, was shut. The new arrivals had come through the other door – the one that led into the sports complex.

The three ‘phantoms’ seemed surprised to see us, but not particularly alarmed. All three of them were decked out in pinstripe baseball jerseys, but the emblem was unrecognisable to me. The fact that they lacked caps and mitts made them look more like models than ballplayers.

“S-S-S-Shigeyuki Fujioka?!”

Beside me, I could hear Kazami spluttering. Even in the dim, I could make out the features of Kamijousaki High’s living legend. This was certainly the man whose visage and achievements decorated the wall of the passageway we had explored the previous night.

“Oh, there were still people around?” Shigeyuki greeted us with a curt nod.

“These are your phantoms,” Haruhi turned to us, smiling.

Slowly, she began to explain the urban legend to the trio, who seemed to hang onto every word with bated breath; at the conclusion of Haruhi’s recital, Shigeyuki began to laugh and the two men standing behind him began to nudge each other, their feature also spread out in broad grins.

“Did you hear that, Carlos? They think you’re a demon because your Japanese is so poor!”

“Hey! I’m getting a lot better, OK?”

Their speech was marred by hesitancy, and jerky enunciation highlighted that they were not native speakers; suddenly, it became obvious to me what Haruhi’s friend had mistaken for glossolalia a few nights prior. But how could she have deduced it from the paltry clues we had been given?

“If you read the Kamijousaki-zaka, then you might know that the new sports complex includes batting cages. That’s where the noises have been coming from,” she explained.

“We do a little bit of fielding too,” Shigeyuki Fujioka interjected, which explained the variety of other sounds which could be heard.

“But wait,” I cut in, “how can the sound be heard so clearly? I don’t see any windows – this entire building seems pretty soundproof to me.”

“Maybe you can’t see them because it’s dark, but there are windows up there,” she pointed upwards. “The lights aren’t on though, because the batting cages are on the opposite side of the building. It’s one of the things I checked this morning.”

“And there are windows on that side of the building too?” I asked.

“Bingo.” Haruhi clapped her hands. “If we were standing on the road between the baseball field and Zeiko Stadium, then it becomes very obvious. The sounds are a lot louder there, and you can see the lights from the windows.”

Shigeyuki Fujioka must have procured special permission to use the new sports complex from the principal. If I recalled correctly, Kazami told us last night that our senpai was running training camps for young players.

“Basically, the sounds I heard last night were just you guys in the batting cages?” Kazami reflected, his cheeks reddening.

Shigeyuki Fujioka laughed. “I guess nobody expected the unopened sports complex to be in use, huh? But demons? Really, you kids have such imaginations.”

“Hey, that’s right. What about those demons that your friend saw, Tsukishima? And the chloric haze?” Kazami seemed eager to hear the rest of the solution.

“Chthonic,” I corrected him quickly.

She gestured towards Shigeyuki Fujioka’s companions. “I quite imagine it was you two,” she said. “Do you remember meeting a little boy near here the night before last?”

The one known as Carlos stroked his chin contemplatively. “Yes, I remember. Kaisheng’s ugly mug scared him away, probably.”

His friend gave him a quick elbow to the ribs. “Are you sure it wasn’t you? Or maybe Danio?” Kaisheng turned to Haruhi and added sheepishly. “There were maybe five or six of us. We were – er, you know, having a break. In the dugouts.”

“What language do you guys use to communicate?”

“Oh, we’ve got guys from all over the shop,” Carlos drawled. “Sometimes I’ll say something in Spanish and get a reply in English. Kaisheng and I spent some time in the minors in this country, so we can just talk in Japanese…”

“There’s your tongues,” she smiled at us. “Shota was confused by the hodgepodge of languages being spoken. Don’t forget that our one witness is in elementary school.”

“What about the haze?”

Haruhi shot an apologetic look towards Kaisheng and Carlos as she produced something from her blazer pockets. “The haze was a special effect, of sorts, caused by these,” she held the thing up high.

The packet of cigarettes we had found yesterday.

“This ‘El Tesoro Del Pirata’ brand is Dominican, so it uses a different tobacco strain and additives to Japanese cigarettes. This affects the taste and smell, you know? Shota probably misidentified the cigarette smoke as sulphur hence the hellish imagery. Oh, and by the way…”

Having already solved the mystery of the phantom ballplayers, Haruhi launched into an explanation on the differences between sidestream smoke and mainstream smoke; the brunt of this, however, was drowned out by the squawks of Shigeyuki Fujioka who had begun to lecture his two young charges on the ill-effects of cigarette smoke on the body.