A cold wind with icy tendrils swirled around me. Hugging myself for warmth I stumbled on, trying to stay close to Hugo Malchev, a vague ghostly figure that disappeared then reappeared through the grey misty fog.
‘How much further?’ I gasped, shivering.
A bird swooped down on us and I saw Malchev duck. It squawked and flew on. I looked up into the grey sky but could see nothing. All around us were grey and black trees, stunted and bent; their weird twisted shapes like grotesque creatures.
‘Don’t speak to anyone,’ Malchev called, not turning. I wondered what he meant. Who would there be to speak to?
And then I heard it. The unmistakable sound of bat on ball. It came from away to the left. There was a cricket match happening.
‘Who’s playing?’ I asked. It wasn’t really the weather for a game of cricket, but I was dying to see some green grass. Malchev didn’t reply.
Straining every sinew in my body to hear another cricket sound I pressed on, head down, following Malchev’s steps along the beaten path. And then the smell hit me. It reminded me of Chennai, when I took Rahul there, only ten times worse. It was putrid. I gasped as I felt the stench enter my mouth. My throat tightened.
‘Keep moving,’ Malchev ordered.
Coughing and gasping, I plunged on. The fog had got thicker and I wasn’t aware that Malchev had stopped until I bumped into him.
‘Over there,’ he said.
I followed his arm. Between two gnarly, blackened trees I could just make out the shape of an oval. The mist in that area was thinner. Weird-looking creatures stood about in groups.
‘The eternal cricket match,’ Malchev whispered. I looked at him; even he appeared spooked by the place. ‘Not somewhere you want to linger for too long. Let us hope your friends are still alive. Stay close.’
He set off quickly. I could hear a dull murmuring noise, which became louder as we made our way over a small rise and then down a worn path to the oval itself. I gasped. The figures standing around were the most frightening people I’d ever seen—if they were in fact people. They wore long robes and capes, which made their features hard to distinguish, but as we passed, I caught glimpses of torn, mangled, decaying faces, the flesh grimacing and twisted. I thought of the guy I’d rescued from being crushed by a train near the MCG. Were these creatures time travellers who had died away from their own time? And were their bodies now decaying slowly? Was this where I’d have ended up if I’d died in the truck? A half-human, half-ghost creature whose punishment was to be stuck at a cricket match that never ended?
I stopped, frozen in terror. Suddenly the creatures were moving towards me. I gagged, my hand involuntarily covering my mouth as they swarmed around me.
‘Malchev!’ I cried.
There was the sound of bat on ball again, and suddenly a chink of light appeared between the hooded creatures. I darted through, and saw Malchev striding back towards me.
‘I told you to stay close,’ he hissed.
‘Who are they?’ I asked, not daring to turn back to look.
‘Cricket watchers,’ he snapped. ‘That’s all you need to know.’
I looked out to the oval. The two umpires, wearing long black gowns and white hats, were discussing something mid-pitch. ‘Are they real?’ I whispered, nodding towards them.
‘They are spirits. This is the eternal game. As long as this match is playing, cricket will be played in the real world.’
The players were faint, ghost-like images, tall and dreamy. The game appeared to be playing in slow motion.
‘Where are we?’ I had my doubts that we were still even on planet Earth. ‘How long have they been playing?’
‘As long as cricket has been played,’ Malchev replied, then suddenly held up a hand. I followed his gaze.
‘It’s Georgie and Jay!’ I cried. Through the haze I could make out two small kids huddled together beneath an old wooden scorebox.
‘Shut up,’ Malchev scolded, glancing around. Some of the players and one of the umpires had turned to look at us. He squatted, turning away from the game, dragging me down with him. ‘Head down,’ he whispered. ‘You interfere with this game and you interfere with cricket.’
We stayed there a few moments. I stole a couple of glances at the players. They were dressed like real cricketers, with heavy white jumpers and old-fashioned caps. Their whites were more a yellowy-cream colour. Some of them had big moustaches and long beards.
‘Are they players from the first Wisden?’ I asked.
‘No one knows. I’ve heard that each player is a mixture of the cricketing talent and the character of all the dead cricketers in the world. When the game pauses, that means another cricketer has died, and their spirit is absorbed into one of the players on the oval there.’
It was the most Hugo Malchev had ever spoken, and I was surprised by the softness of his voice. He caught me staring at him.
‘I was a cricketer once and a great lover of the game,’ he said. ‘But someone tried to take that privilege away from me. When I sat dying in the Sanctum, I vowed that if I got out alive that person would pay dearly for their crime.’
I turned back to the game. The cricketers shimmied and swayed in the mist, finally settling down as a bowler trundled in from a few paces to bowl a ball. Someone clapped his hands. The ball was delivered and pushed gently back down the wicket by the batter.
‘What’s the score?’ I whispered as Malchev slowly got to his feet.
‘You don’t want to know,’ he answered, hauling me up.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Knowing the score is like knowing the time of your death. It could be 9 for 343 in the second innings, with only one wicket to fall before the game ends.’
‘So?’
‘When this game ends, so does the game of cricket as we know it. Once I am the ultimate Cricket Lord, I will ensure that never happens.’
‘I can help you,’ I said desperately.
Malchev looked at me and smiled. ‘Oh no, Toby Jones,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You are of no use to me. You have helped me enough. That’s the only reason I’m here trying to find your friends.’
There was a shout from the oval. Terrified, I looked at the umpire. What if this was the end of the game? The umpire shook his head. The bowler smiled and walked slowly back to the top of his run.
We raced around to the far side of the oval. ‘Georgie?’ I cried, rushing towards her.
She looked up sleepily, nodded and then collapsed. Jay was lying next to her. There were a few spectators standing nearby, eyeing them warily.
‘Guys, I’m here!’ I said loudly.
Malchev was looking about, his eyes darting from one curious onlooker to the next. ‘Someone has kept the watchers away from your friends,’ he muttered under his breath.
I hauled Georgie to her feet. ‘C’mon, Georgie. We’re going home.’ She fell into me, all her weight against me. Staggering back, I grabbed her shoulders and held her away from me. I turned around to ask Malchev to help, but he had gone.
The shrouded figures moved towards us. Lowering Georgie to the ground carefully, I called out softly, ‘Jay.’ He stirred briefly. The shadows moved in closer. ‘Grab my hands, quick, and hold on tight,’ I ordered.
What wonders abound, dear boy, don’t fear
These shimmering pages, never clear.
The coldness pressed in close, smothering me with icy dampness. And then, suddenly, we were back inside the Sanctum. I repeated the lines. When I opened my eyes I saw Jimbo, his back to us, staring out of the window.
‘Jimbo!’ I gasped, suddenly feeling the warmth of the room surging through me.
‘Hey, Toby! You missed the best game. Hey, you guys OK?’
‘I’ve missed the whole game?’ I asked, surprised. Surely we’d only been gone twenty minutes or so?
‘I assume you left pretty well straightaway around lunchtime,’ Jimbo said. ‘Well, it’s now just after six. Rahul’s already gone home.’
I turned to look at the others. They were pale and shivering, but smiling.
‘Boy, are we glad to see you, Jimbo Temple,’ Georgie said, slowly getting to her feet. ‘Where’s the nearest shower before I freeze to death?’ she asked.
After a series of phone calls to organise for the guys to stay on later, Jimbo and I left to scrounge some food.
By the time we got back, Georgie and Jay were looking better; still a bit frightened, but definitely less pale.
I told them all as much of my conversation with Hugo Malchev as I could remember, as we devoured the hamburgers, toasted sandwiches, sausage rolls and cans of drink Jimbo and I had brought back.
After an hour of eating and talking, there were still plenty of questions to answer.
‘Priority one is surely Jim, but where is he?’ Georgie said, leaning back against the bedhead and closing her eyes.
I looked at my watch. We were supposed to be meeting her mum outside Gate 1 at nine o’clock. We still had forty minutes left together.
‘I’d like to know where that spooky swamp place was you sent us, Toby,’ Jay said.
I glared at Jay. ‘I didn’t send you there.’
‘Then who did?’
‘As if Toby would send us to that place,’ Georgie said. ‘It must have been that Hugo Malchev guy. Then he gets the guilts and comes and rescues us.’
‘No, it was both of us,’ I said slowly. ‘I lost you in the travel back. Malchev was pulling me away from you. I reckon you ended up travelling in time without me and got lost. Maybe the swamp’s where you go if you’re disconnected during the travel.’
‘Or if you’re a dead cricketer?’ Jimbo looked at me doubtfully.
‘Well, that’s what Malchev said.’
We all turned to look at Georgie. She’d opened her eyes again and was leaning forward. ‘There’s a Test match coming up, isn’t there? An Ashes Test match?’
‘Yeah. Boxing Day. What of it?’ Jay said.
‘Well, if this Hugo Malchev wants to keep on being the Cricket Lord, won’t he need to be in that Sanctum room at the start of the Test match? You know, to be voted in?’
‘But there’s no one to vote him in,’ Jimbo said. ‘They’re all dead.’
‘All except Jim,’ I said. ‘That’s Malchev’s plan. He’s going to convince Jim that by appointing him as the new Cricket Lord, Jim will be saving my life.’
Jimbo interrupted the silence that followed.
‘That’s two Ashes Tests we’ve got to worry about.’ He took a long swig from his can.
‘We?’ I asked.
‘That’s what I said. You’ve had other things on your mind, but I checked the team on the board.’ He was grinning at me.
‘I made it into the Australian side?’ I raced over to him.
‘Yeah, well, don’t kiss me or anything.’
After some high-fives and hugs, Ally brought us back to reality.
‘So, Jim’s disappeared, Malchev has the scorecard and is killing off all the Cricket Lords, Phillip Smale thinks you’re dead, and you’ve just come back from some sort of cricket hell with ghosts and creepy weirdos. If it hadn’t been for the tall albino guy, you’d probably be dead now.’ Ally’s bottom lip was trembling. She stood up. ‘I’ve had enough. I’m out of here. Toby, if I see you again, it’ll be on a cricket field. Nowhere else, OK?’
I nodded, wondering if I’d just lost a friend.
‘Yeah, I’m sort of with Ally on this one,’ Jay said, shaking his head. Jay would never have the guts to make the decision himself, but he was good at following. I didn’t say anything.
‘Georgie, you coming?’ Ally asked from the door.
‘Yep, hang on.’
‘I’ll walk you down,’ Jimbo said, and led the others out of the room.
‘You won’t lose me that quickly,’ Georgie said, taking my hand and smiling. We looked at each other.
‘What am I going to do?’ I asked.
‘What you always do, Toby. Come up with a stupid plan and somehow make it through.’
We both laughed. With Georgie still holding my hand, we ran out into the corridor.
‘Are you with me?’ I whispered.
She squeezed my hand. ‘I’ve always been with you. And right now I’m closer than ever. Come on!’