“I liked this one better,” I tell him, “but it ate my ball.” I don’t bother to mention that this is the very lane he insisted didn’t exist.

  “Lousy stupid machine.” He glances back at the counter, where some customers just showed up. “Why don’t you use one of our balls until someone can go back there and check it out?” He gestures to a rack against the wall full of balls, then leaves.

  Usually the racks are filled with scarred, chipped black balls, but on the rack behind lane twenty-five, all the balls are white. I go over to examine them. They look exactly like the ball sitting in the ball stand—exactly like the one that shattered Mia’s ball yesterday, only these are dry. I touch one. It’s smooth, and its surface glistens like a pearl. I roll it over, then roll it over again, and realize something very peculiar about it, and the rest of the balls on the rack.

  None of these balls have finger holes.

  I go tell the lane guy, and he burns me a glare. “You’re a real pain, you know that?” And since he has no more customers waiting for lanes or shoes, he begrudgingly goes around back to look for my ball. In a few moments, I can see glimpses of him through the pins of lane twenty-five, as he pokes around behind the pin-setting mechanism, trying to see where my ball got stuck.

  I wait, and watch. Then suddenly the sweeper bar comes down, and the pins reset themselves.

  “Hey, what the—” I hear the lane man grumble, then a jawful of fresh pins comes down. I hear a brief yelp from behind the machine. Then the pinsetter rises, leaving ten fresh pins, and I can’t see the lane dude anymore.

  I wait. I wait some more, but he doesn’t come back. Soon there’s a line of irritated people at his counter. Suddenly I get scared. I mean really scared—like maybe he’s had a heart attack or something.

  I run to tell the snack bar attendant, who gets the janitor to go look, but he finds nothing. Not a trace.

  I don’t tell them about my missing ball—suddenly it doesn’t seem important. Instead I decide to take the lane guy up on his original offer. I go to the rack of hole-less white balls and shove one into my bowling bag. I can always get holes drilled into it. I leave, but as I stand near the exit, I steal a glance back at lane twenty-five. Its lights go out, leaving it dark again.

  * * *

  When I get home, Mom’s out somewhere with Mia, but Phil is there, lounging on the couch and watching some cop show. Stale cigarette smoke hangs in the air like dirty layers of floating silk.

  “How’s life treatin’ ya, Hank?” he asks.

  “The name’s Marshall,” I remind him. “Like my father.”

  He takes a swig from his beer and glances at my bowling bag. “You know bowling’s not a real sport,” he says. “Throwing a ball down an alley—it’s a no-brainer.”

  “Then you should be real good at it,” I tell him.

  He glares at me, but doesn’t get off the couch. “Someday, kiddo, that wise mouth of yours’ll shoot off one too many times, and someone’ll clean your clock real good.”

  I grit my teeth every time he calls me “kiddo,” but I let it slide like a bad gutter ball. He’s not worth the effort, I tell myself. “Nice talking, Phil,” I say, and go down into the basement.

  Our basement is a cold, dim place where we put things we’ll probably never see again. I find a clean corner for my bowling bag. After today, I don’t know when I’ll want to bowl again. And that pearly-white bowling ball is too heavy for me anyway—it practically ripped my arm off getting it home. I take a long, sorrowful look at my bowling bag before heading upstairs and turning off the light.

  * * *

  The lane guy never turns up. People figure he got bored of his job and moved on. I don’t have my own theory, because if I tried to come up with one, I know I wouldn’t like it. I just go about my business, go about my life, and pretend like it never happened.

  The bowling urge doesn’t return to me for more than a month, but when it comes back, it comes back in full force. Maybe it’s that my arm muscles feel like they need to be used. Maybe it’s that sound of tumbling pins I hear every time I walk past Atomic Lanes that makes me want to bowl again… or maybe, it’s because one of my friends mentioned that there are twenty-seven lanes now and no one can remember the extra ones being built.

  It’s after school on Friday. Mia’s at a friend’s house, which means I can bowl by myself, and I can’t wait! I race into the house—I’ve saved enough money to get the new ball drilled, and even if it’s too heavy, I know I can get used to it. It’s three thirty when I clatter down the rickety basement steps and turn on the light.

  It takes me a few seconds to come to terms with what I see, and it comes to me in stages. First I notice that the floor beneath me isn’t concrete, but wood. And the smell—it’s not dry and musty, but wet and earthy. Suddenly another light comes on to my right, and I hear the soft groaning of some mechanism. I spin around to see…

  … a bowling alley.

  It extends through the edge of our basement, out past the foundation of our house. Past that foundation, I can see tree roots poking through dirt above the alley, and the red, exposed edges of sewer pipes. Someone’s dug a tunnel under our street, just to fit a bowling alley in our basement. But who would have done this? And why?

  Everything that had filled our basement is now pushed back into the far corner. Suddenly I feel light-headed and realize that I’m hyperventilating. I have to sit down, and like any bowling alley, there’s a little row of plastic seats behind the scoring table. I sit down to catch my breath and stare toward the end of the alley, where ten pins wait in silence for a ball to take them down.

  A ball!

  I get up as quickly as I sat down, and search for the hole-less white ball. I leap over boxes and other junk in search of my bowling bag, but everything’s piled so high now, I have to dig through everything just to find it. When I finally do find it, I realize that the bag’s been torn open. I reach inside to get out the pearl bowling ball, but instead I find it cracked in half, its edges jagged and sharp. It’s not at all like Mia’s broken ball—this one is hollow, with a shell only a quarter-inch thick. I run my fingers along its curved surface inside, which is just as smooth and pearly white as the outside. It reminds me of something, but my mind doesn’t make the connection. Not yet.

  That’s when I hear a voice. A deep, disdainful voice. “What the heck is this?!”

  I peer out over the stacks of boxes to see Phil standing beside the ball return, gawking at the underground alley. Quickly I climb over the boxes, trying to keep calm and rational. Trying not to appear as frightened as I really am.

  “Since when is there a bowling alley down here?” he asks.

  I wrinkle my eyebrows and look at him as if there’s something wrong with him. “Haven’t you ever been in our basement before?”

  “No…”

  “It’s always been here,” I lie. “It came with the house.”

  “Humph,” he says, all dismissive. “So if you have this thing in your basement, why do you waste your mother’s money going out to bowl?”

  Phil blows a cloud of smoke into my face, then turns to head back upstairs.

  I don’t know what comes over me then. Or maybe I do know.

  “What’s the matter, Phil? Afraid she won’t leave enough money for you to waste? Because that’s all you do, right? Spend what she makes, and whatever money my dad left us.”

  Phil hears me, stops dead in his tracks, and does a slow about-face. “What did you say?”

  Standing on my new alley, I suddenly feel courage backing up my anger. “You heard what I said. You’re a leech. And one of these days she’s gonna wise up and just peel right off.”

  The fingers of his right hand curl into a fist, and his voice comes out low and guttural, like a growling pit bull. “You’re in deep trouble, little man. You’re gonna get yourself a lesson now.”

  “Go ahead, ‘kiddo,’ teach me a lesson,” I say, figuring maybe after Mom sees the kind of lessons Phil teaches, she’ll throw him out of her life for good.

  He lunges at me, and I reflexively dodge out of his way. His momentum carries him onto the shiny waxed surface of the alley, and suddenly he loses his balance. His feet fly out from under him and he lands on his butt.

  He tries to grab at me, but his momentum is too great, and the alley too slippery. He continues sliding toward the pins, almost seeming to accelerate on his way down the alley. I begin laughing.

  Phil is frothing mad. “Why you… I’m gonna get you, you little—” but he never gets to finish. Instead he bowls right into the pins, taking them all down with a wooden crash. I laugh so hard my sides ache.

  “A strike, Phil!”

  I’d keep on laughing… I could laugh forever… but something happens. Something I could have predicted, if I had had the time to really think things through. If I’d had the time to figure out that the broken white bowling ball didn’t look like a bowling ball at all.

  It looked like an egg.

  Suddenly the sweeper bar drops in front of Phil, blocking my view, and behind it, the heavy pinsetter comes smashing down on him like the jaws of a shark. Phil doesn’t have a chance to say another word, and my own words become choked in my throat. I can’t see everything, but I see enough to know what’s going on. The silver pinsetter slams down again, and again, more powerfully each time. I can feel the ground shake with the force of it. Then finally the pinsetter rises up, and the sweeper bar brushes in, and brushes out, leaving a perfectly clean, pinless lane. Finally the pinsetter descends again, gently this time, depositing ten fresh pins, patiently waiting for a bowler. There’s no sign of Phil anywhere.

  “Phil?” I call, desperately hoping for an answer. “Phil?” But I hear no sound. Only the hollow breathing of the ball return.

  I leave the basement in a daze, not ready to think about it, and not really knowing where I’m going until I get there. Finally I find myself in my mom’s closet. Way in the corner there are a few sets of men’s clothes—my dad’s clothes, because, after all, there are just some things you can’t bear to part with. I get on my knees, and beneath the dangling pairs of pants, I find what I’m looking for. A black leather bag, with my father’s initials stamped on it in gold. They’re my initials too. I reach inside and pull out a marbled red bowling ball, as shiny and smooth as the day it was made. It’s heavy, and my fingers don’t quite fit in the holes, but I could get used to it. I gently remove it from the bag and carry it down into the basement, where the living alley awaits, its pins grinning at me, the way my father grinned at me so many years ago, each time I threw a ball down a lane.

  I stand far back, focus my attention on the pins, and with my father’s ball I begin my approach. My arm swoops down, and the ball kisses the wood without a sound as I release it. I watch as the ball curves to the right, and then, just as it begins to curve back to the headpin, I turn my back and strut to the scoring console, just like my father used to do. I hear the smash of pins, and the heavy clatter as they fly in all directions. I don’t even have to look to know that it’s a strike.

  * * *

  Two months later. It’s a cold, windy day, but that doesn’t matter in my basement.

  “One seventy-eight,” says Mia, reading my final score. “Is that good?”

  “Yeah,” I tell her, “but it could still be better.”

  Mia picks up her new bowling ball from the ball stand. She’s had it for several weeks now and likes it even better than her old one. “Can we play another game?”

  “Tomorrow,” I tell her. “Mom’ll be home soon.”

  “No, she won’t,” says Mia coyly. “Robert’s picking her up at work tonight. They’re going to the theater.”

  As we head up the stairs, I have to smile. Mom missed Phil for about three minutes, and she didn’t really question where he went. She figured he just moved on. Then she met Robert. I don’t mind babysitting Mia when Mom’s out with Robert.

  Mia heads off into her room, and I take a few moments to relax in the living room, almost enjoying the ache in my shoulder I sometimes get after a good day of bowling. We haven’t told Mom about the alley; we only bowl when she’s not home, and we make sure to hide it behind a wall of boxes. Besides, she rarely even goes down there, so it could be many months until she finds it. And when she does? Well, we’ll deal with it then.

  As for the alley—it’s behaved far better than that nasty one in Atomic Lanes. It always returns our balls and never sends them out of the ball return too fast. Like everything else, you get what you give, and we treat it very, very well. Just last week it started producing eggs, but we know what to do with those. After all, Christmas is coming, and we have lots of friends and relatives who bowl. The only problem is feeding it—but I’ve got that one solved too.

  The doorbell rings, and I open the door to a grungy-looking, scowling slacker-dude. He’s nineteen, maybe twenty. “Yeah, I’m looking for Marshall Stewart Jr.,” he says, clutching a torn slip of paper in his hand.

  “That’s me,” I say cheerfully.

  “You?” he sneers. “You put up this ad?”

  “That’s right. Do you have the qualifications for the job?”

  He looks down at his phone. “Let’s see. ‘Seeking lazy individual for the job of a lifetime. Must be difficult to work with, generally disagreeable, and have a bad attitude.’ Funny ad. So, what kind of work is it?”

  “We have a basement bowling alley,” I explain. “We need someone to… uh… service it once a month.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work, man.”

  “Nah, it’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “Cool. But why’d you have it listed under ‘Food Service’?”

  I offer him a shrug as I lead him inside, then I open the basement door. But just before we go down, he reaches into his pocket to pull something out.

  “By the way, I smoke,” he says. Then, without warning, he lights up, takes a drag, and blows the smoke in my face. “You got a problem with that… kiddo?”

  I slowly lead him down the basement stairs. “You know what?” I tell him, and I can’t help but smile. “I think this job is right up your alley.”

  THE LIVING, THE DEAD, AND THE UNDECIDED

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen! The moment you’ve all been waiting for! We bring you something terrifying. Can you hear them? Scrape-scrape-scraping at your door? Can you smell them? Mouths dripping with the unthinkable? Behold! The most terrifying of all acts ever brought to you on any stage… the living dead!”

  —from “Deadliner”

  Dead Letter

  Tomb it may concern, I have, for much too long, suffered from the insults, cruel attacks, and blatant discrimination in your newspaper. One might think that as the only newspaper in the town of Rancid Falls, you would learn to be fair and objective with the items you report. But in fact, in your paper, my kind have been treated with more disrespect than we can stand.

  Haven’t you ever heard the expression “show respect for the dead”? I suppose not! Let me tell you, it makes quite a few of us roll over in our graves—as you can probably tell from that rumbling sound you occasionally hear from the graveyard on the hill.

  Oh sure, you write all these nice, flowery notes the day we go on to our final rest—but the second we try to return from the grave, we are no longer welcome. Suddenly those sweet, flowery things you’ve written become big banner headlines, turning our simple homecomings into horrible events, as if we were criminals.

  For instance: your headline last week read CORPSE TERRORIZES FAMILY. I would hardly call climbing in through a window in the middle of the night and playing Beethoven on the family piano an act of terror. If the woman fainted and the children ran screaming down the street, that’s their problem, don’t you think?

  A week before that, you ran a headline that read HEADLESS WOMAN CARJACKS CADILLAC. As if it had been her intent to steal that car! She was headless—the last thing she wanted was to be behind the wheel—but when that inconsiderate driver ran away in terror, what was a poor headless woman to do? She had to drive the car if she was ever going to make it home.

  What’s so awful about it? Why would you deny a cold, lonely soul the right to slip into their home in the middle of the night and have a nice long talk with their family? Surely you would be thrilled to wake up one night to find your own dear sweet grandmother, whom you haven’t seen for so many years, suddenly there beside your bed, smiling that wise grin of the dead. No doubt she’s often thought of paying you a surprise visit (or at least that’s what she told me).

  The fact that more and more of the dead have been returning home should be a clear indication to you that your newspaper ought to be publishing more articles of interest to the dead. But all you seem to dwell on is how, after we’ve risen, we attack the living, turning them into one of us. Surely you can’t see any harm in that—after all, we’re just doing what creatures do naturally: increasing our numbers. Who are you to deny us that simple right?

  And by the way, we resent the way your newspaper, and others, have referred to us in such insensitive and cold ways. We are not “zombies.” That is a slur. The correct term for describing us is quite simply the “living dead”—and should you continue to refer to us in such unkind and bigoted ways, you will most certainly be hearing from the International Association of Living Dead Persons.

  And now I would like to set the record straight on this business about us eating the brains of the living. Don’t you see how ridiculous that sounds? Why on earth would a person who has risen from the grave want to eat a human brain (no matter how tasty and delectable it might be)? After spending all that time wasting away in the graveyard, don’t you think we might have developed a craving for something better—like maybe a steak, or some Ben & Jerry’s (ice cream—not their brains)? And anyway, I’m sure you’ll agree there are quite a few people out there who could do with having their brains eaten. Oh, there are quite a few brains I personally can think of that would not be missed. And yours is high on my list. In fact, it’s on all our lists. (That is… it would be if we actually did eat brains, and I’m not admitting that we do.)