Illustrations by Victoria Assanelli
Guest art by Alison Berry
Episode 2: Of Ghosts & Pizza
At night the city could be confused for a starry sky, but that was only when it was seen from high above. There was just one spot in the city that afforded such a view, and Hana had only gone there about two times at night in her lifetime, but the memory of it was deeply impressed upon her. She remembered it like this: where it was not black the city was covered with blue and white lights, some running through the city in dotted veins, and here and there were blinking red lights. When she looked to the left of this view she saw the main river that ran through the middle of the city. Across one bridge went the commuter train like an electric caterpillar, and across the other bridge went the moving lights of people driving home. The sky itself was a dark blue fading into black, and there was not a star to be seen.
From street level the buildings were far more prominent, with large apartment buildings coloured blue or grey and many of them lit with yellow. Houses built on hills towered over the winding roads, along which green taxis took tired businessmen home, their headlights splashing trees with colour. In the more quiet areas, which the commuter train passed by like any other part of the city, it was not uncommon to find sizeable fields and wooded areas coexisting with apartment complexes.
It was in this latter area that Hana, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, stepped out of the striped glass doors of a variety store with her father and entered into the warm night air. In her hand she carried a plastic bag that contained a small bottle of pop for her to share with Henri, as his parents never drank any carbonated beverages and so never kept any at their apartment. She thought of her gifts of pop as an integral part of their friendship.
Hana walked with her father along the street, so small that there was no sidewalk, which forced them to walk on the road itself and be particularly careful about looking both ways before crossing it. From across the road they headed down a side street that led to Henri’s apartment building. His building was built on top of a hill, so they had to ascend a set of cement steps to reach the path that led to the main entrance. The hill was steep and covered in brightly-lit grass, and the tall streetlamps offered welcoming light to those who walked underneath them.
Near the top of the hill, on a cement plateau in front of a large tree, was a bench where a group of young teenagers sat and stood and chatted. Hana recognised some of them as the elder siblings of her classmates and waved at them as she passed.
Finally they made it inside the building and buzzed up Henri’s apartment.
‘Hello?’ they heard a distorted voice say.
‘I’m here,’ Hana said, and then the main door clicked open for her.
‘It’s time for us to go our separate ways now, Hana,’ her father told her as she held open the door. ‘I have some business to attend to nearby.’ ‘You mean karaoke?’
Her father nodded, kissed her forehead and then left the building after telling her not to stay up too late. She tried to tell him the same as the door closed behind him.
Hana climbed the stairs since she considered elevators boring. On her way to Henri’s floor she crossed paths with Henri’s neighbour, a middle-aged woman who rode around on a motorcycle. Hana greeted her and then climbed one more flight before reaching Henri’s floor. Luckily he only lived on the fifth floor of the building.
The door to his apartment opened before she even had a chance to knock.
‘Hello, Hana,’ Henri’s father said. ‘I was just heading out to pick up a pizza.’
‘Really?’ She hoped that she could share in it but felt it would be too impolite to ask.
‘Yeah, it’s the perfect fuel for these night time gaming sessions,’ he told her, and that was when she noticed he was wearing the hat he wore whenever he played videogames. Hana was crestfallen – or, in this case, crustfallen – but tried not to show it. ‘Is your dad driving you back home tonight?’
‘My mom is,’ she told him, and he nodded, undoubtedly relieved that he did not have to drive her himself. The more time he had with his videogame the better, she knew, since his wife only let him play for an allotted amount of time each week.
‘Henri!’ he called into the apartment as he slipped out. ‘Hana’s here!’ Then he looked at Hana and smiled. ‘See you soon,’ he said.
The door shut behind her and, as always, she found herself in awe of the size of Henri’s apartment, which seemed to be even bigger than James’ entire house. Henri came down the hall and greeted her in the living room.
‘I see you brought . . . the pop,’ Henri noted, his eyes drawn to the plastic bag.
‘Yessir I did,’ Hana said, lifting the bag for his inspection. ‘Your dad needs pizza for fuel and we need caffeine. Are you ready to rock some homework?’
At this last question they laughed. It was Friday night and they had no intention of doing anything even remotely school-related, having done as much homework as they could that afternoon. That was what Hana said, anyway, but in reality she tended to save everything for the last minute. Henri, on the other hand, really did have the rest of the weekend to himself, much to Hana’s perpetual jealousy.
‘So what should we do?’ Hana asked.
‘First we’re going to open that pop and pour it into glasses,’ Henri said. ‘Then we’re going to wait out my dad’s last half hour with his videogame and commandeer the tv.’
‘Can we commandeer his pizza as well?’
‘Of course. It’s all part of the plan for a successful Friday night.’
‘I never imagined tv would ever be successful for anything,’ Hana said. Sometimes she resented television for preventing her family from actually doing things together, things like playing board games or card games or just about anything, really.
‘There’s a special on ghosts tonight,’ Henri told her.
Hana looked at him with an affected smile. ‘I didn’t know you were interested in ghosts, Henri,’ she said.
Henri shrugged. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being interested in things,’ he told her.
‘Time for that pop.’
She brought the pop into the kitchen and poured them two glasses, having gone to Henri’s apartment often enough to know where everything was. The bubbles tickled her nose as she took her first acidic sip.
Henri took a few gulps. ‘This is some excellent pop,’ he said.
They sat in the living room where his father’s videogame was paused on the tv screen. His mother came in and greeted Hana with an enthusiastic smile, and then she offered to put on some music for them to listen to while they waited. Hana agreed, not realising that the music Henri’s mother had in mind was a recorder solo from an old concert.
‘Have you ever heard anything like this before?’ Henri’s mother asked, closing her eyes and moving her head to the music.
Hana immediately thought of Kohlrabi but shook her head. ‘I haven’t,’ she said.
‘Henri told us you’re becoming quite good,’ Henri’s mother related. ‘I hope you’ll play for us sometime. I always thought of the recorder as being one of the most underrated instruments, along with the melodica. There’s a lot of potential waiting for a serious player.’
‘I’ll try not to disappoint you,’ Hana said nervously, glancing at Henri from behind her glass of pop.
He made a motion with his hands that said she had nothing to worry about.
‘So what are you guys getting up to tonight?’ his mother asked.
‘Secretly waiting for that pizza,’ Hana answered.
Henri’s mother laughed. ‘Don’t worry; it’s for everybody,’ she said.
Both Hana and her stomach cried out in joy. She thanked Henri’s mother but Henri’s mother told Hana to thank her husband instead. ‘It was his idea,’ she explained. ‘Anyway, I doubt you guys are going to spend the entire night just eating pizza.’
‘I would if I could,’ Hana answered honestly.
‘We’re going to watch a documentary on ghosts,’ Henri told his mother.
‘Ah, so you plan on giving yourselves nightmares.’
‘I’m not afraid of ghosts!’ Hana protested. ‘Ghosts are harmless. Zombies are what you have to watch out for.’
Henri’s mother smiled. ‘If it does start to get scary, though, you should probably turn it off. I wouldn’t want your parents getting upset about it.’
‘My parents rent monster movies every night,’ Hana told her. ‘They won’t get upset.’
Henri’s mother excused herself as she had paperwork to do in her office. Henri’s apartment was the only apartment Hana had heard of with a personal office in it.
When his mother left, Henri switched out the concert recording for a collection of pop songs. They listened to the music together until his father came home with the pizza. Henri’s father spun the box playfully on the tips of his fingers as he entered the apartment and then set it in the middle of the living room table. While he went to get plates and paper towels for everyone, Henri opened the lid so that he and Hana could salivate at what was underneath: the pizza was an extra extra large that contained a day’s worth of vegetables and meats in its toppings, and Hana thought it the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
She wiped away a tear of joy before taking her first bite. Henri’s mother rejoined them for the pizza, and by the time they were all finished Henri’s father had run out of game time. He reluctantly relinquished the tv and went off to read in his bedroom, followed by his wife who still had some paperwork to get through.
‘It sucks that some adults still have to do homework even when they’re out of school,’ Hana noted. ‘I guess school haunts some people for the rest of their lives.’
‘Speaking of haunting,’ Henri said, and he flipped through the channels until he found their program. They had tuned in right when the title card went up: THE GREAT GHOSTS OF BASEBALL HISTORY.
‘Ah, I should’ve known,’ Hana said. Henri had been the school’s star baseball player for two years in a row and was usually doing something baseball-related. ‘I guess it’s going to be even less scary than I thought.’
‘We’re not watching it because it’s scary,’ Henri said. ‘We’re watching it because it’s interesting.’
‘You mean we’re watching it because it’s about baseball.’
‘Yes.’
Hana smiled and repositioned herself so that she was sitting on the couch with her legs tucked beneath her. She wanted to be comfortable, but she also wanted to be positioned in such a way that she would not fall asleep if the show turned out to be boring.
The show was not boring, but it was definitely cheesy in its re-enactments of various hauntings. Hana had a hard time finding a chubby, transparent pitcher scary. The most interesting part of the show was when the narrator offered explanations of why the baseball players came back: one suggestion was that they came back to win the games that they had once lost, and another was that they came back to help keep the spirit of baseball alive when interest was at its lowest. The producers of the show used what little facts they had and interviews with fans, players and managers to back up their hypotheses. When the program ended there was an advertisement for baseball cards.
‘Do you think you’d want to be a baseball ghost?’ Hana asked Henri when it was all over.
‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask me in one hundred years.’
‘I guess that’s how you know you’ve made it, though,’ Hana said. ‘When you become a baseball ghost.’
‘What kind of ghost would you be?’
‘One that’d scare people,’ she answered, thinking of Kohlrabi.
Henri flipped through the tv channels with an oversized remote. The remote control had so many buttons that his parents actually had to take a class on it for a week before they could use it. But even though they now knew how to utilise its many functions, they still rarely used more than five or so buttons.
Snippets from television programs, news programs and movies flashed on the screen before Henri finally stopped on footage – shaky, amateur footage – of a red bear moving through a forest. The footage only lasted for about eight seconds, with the great mass of the bear passing behind trees, stopping, looking at the camera and then disappearing further beyond the trees, but it was enough to make Hana sit bolt upright in her seat. She gasped and turned to Henri.
‘That’s the red bear!’ she cried. ‘The telepathic one that hangs around Daniel Druff. Can you rewind it?’
‘I can’t rewind tv,’ he told her.
‘I can’t believe he’s on tv. Why would he let himself be recorded like that? I mean, he’s telepathic, so he should’ve known someone was filming him.’
‘Maybe he wanted to be filmed.’
‘Why? That doesn’t make any sense. Think of all the scientists that would wanna experiment on him and make him into a rug. Stupid bear! What if he blows Daniel Druff’s cover?’
‘It’s been a year since the last time we saw them,’ Henri said. ‘Maybe they just miss the attention.’
Hana, James and Henri had only encountered the red bear and Daniel Druff once together, when the bizarre duo had shown up to help defeat the giant raisin. Daniel Druff was the roboticised remains of the founder of their city and also Hana’s ancestor, and it was from him that Hana inherited her power. The red bear, through a series of strange events, had become Daniel Druff’s companion.
‘I have a bad feeling, Henri,’ Hana confessed. ‘The last time they showed up, something really bad was about to happen. And we don’t know what they did with Scorlax, that horrible alien cat thing that was controlling all the . . . monsters and stuff. Ugh. I tried my best to forget all of this but it’s kind of impossible.’
They watched as a panel of experts discussed the short footage of the bear. One attributed its large size to a trick of perspective and its red fur to the lighting, and another felt the entire bear had been created on a computer. By the end of the segment, most were in agreement that the footage was some kind of hoax, and that at least gave Hana a bit of relief. The news switched to a weather report and Henri turned off the tv.
‘If they’re not doing it to let us know they’re still around, then they could be doing it to let someone else know they’re still around,’ Henri conjectured.
‘You might be right,’ Hana said. ‘I just hope that whatever they’re trying to do works.’
They sat in silence for a moment, and then Henri’s mother came humming into the living room as she passed through it to reach the kitchen. She was humming the recorder music that she had put on earlier. After fidgeting around in the kitchen, she stopped in the living room on her way back to the office, a small plate of vegetables in her hand.
‘You guys are being really quiet,’ she said. ‘How was the tv show?’
‘Frightening,’ Hana answered.
‘Really? I thought you said you’re not afraid of ghosts.’
‘I’m not, but I’m afraid of other things that could come back after going away.’
‘Ah, zombies. Just remember that all of that stuff isn’t real,’ Henri’s mother told her.
‘I know,’ Hana said. ‘I just wish that they’d remember, too.’
Henri’s mother lifted her eyebrow at her and then laughed as she walked away. Henri offered to turn the tv back on but Hana said she would rather go home than watch anything else. Instead they put on some music and danced until they were tired.
She called her mother to have her pick her up, and on the way home her mother asked what she had gotten up to.
‘Pizza, dancing and ghosts,’ Hana said. ‘It’s all part of my plan to have the best dream ever.’
After a period of driving in silence, in which the muted colours of the city lights highlighted the interior of the car at irregular intervals, her mother said something else, a joke she had remembered. But by then Hana had already fallen asleep and was dreaming of something else entirely.
To Be Continued In Episode Three: Brussel Sprouts
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Episode 11
Volume 1