There are baseball fans, and then there are Cubs fans.

  And then there is Fred, in a league of his own.

  Let’s take a look at his highlight reel.

  ***

  Fred was born in southern Illinois, smack-dab in the middle of a decades-long territorial dispute once known as the Route 66 rivalry. A three hundred mile battleground divided the cities of Chicago and St. Louis, and each Spring, when baseball season started, the competition flared up worse than an infected hemorrhoid.

  This rivalry between the north and the south divided families, turned brother against brother, and pitted father against son. The peace was maintained only by the end of the season, when the Cubs went home empty-handed once again.

  On a blistering hot Summer day, the animosity and hatred spilled over into Fred’s backyard while playing a game of “pickle.”

  Freddy’s father stood under the shade of an oak, tossing the ball to his eldest son, while Freddy ran back and forth, trying to reach the base before the ball. Freddy didn’t quite remember how the conversation began between the bases, but the instant he muttered the words, “The Cubs are my favorite. They’re going to win the World Series,” the trajectory of the baseball changed flight plans, and instead of crossing overhead, struck Freddy in the mouth.

  Fred was laying flat on his back, crying in the grass before the ball landed inches away from his head. His vision blurred in and out of focus as he sat up, tenderly fingering his mashed lips. He probed the inside of his mouth and found broken shards of teeth and an exposed nerve that stung with every breath. He looked at his father, expecting a sudden response of sympathy and guilt, but his old man didn’t budge.

  “Ow, Dad! Don’t throw it so hard!” Fred whimpered through his tears and sputtered chalky bits of broken tooth and crimson saliva.

  Instead, Fred found only the tight-lipped expression his father made when he was building towards anger. Then his father let out a sigh and his chest sank. Fred’s father shook his head in disappointment and went back inside the house without a word. Freddy’s older brother turned and spat on him before following after his father, leaving Fred tear-soaked and bloodstained in the backyard.

  Little did Freddy know that that one statement would send ripples out across the expanse of his life, and eventually escalate into a division that will change the fundamental basics of his existence.

  When Fred’s mother returned from grocery shopping, a yelling match commenced and didn’t stop until the season was over and, once again, the Cubs went home empty-handed. Only then did the harassment from his family end; but still Freddy refused to take down the memorabilia, and his parents resolved themselves to calling in the family priest for an intervention.

  “Freddy, your family has called me here because they’re concerned about you. They’re worried that you might be setting yourself up for a lifetime of failure and disappointment. Your family loves you very much, Freddy. Do you love your family?” Father Iwanicki asked and placed his hand low on Fred’s back.

  “Of course I do,” Freddy said without hesitation.

  “But you love the Cubs, too…” Iwanicki rubbed Fred’s back.

  “Well, yeah, I guess I do,” Fred answered

  “Have you ever thought about not liking the Cubs? They haven’t won a pennant since ’45 or a World Series since 1908. Some say they’re cursed. Have you ever thought about playing for another team?”

  “What other team?” Fred shifted away from the priest, but Iwanicki applied pressure and pulled Fred closer towards him on the couch.

  “Well,” Father Iwanicki looked at Freddy’s family for confirmation, “what about the Cardinals? They’re a good team.”

  Freddy’s family gave a silent affirmation with a nod of their heads.

  “But they’re not the home team. The Cardinals are from Missouri. We’re from Illinois. The Cubs are from Illinois,” Fred tried to reason with his family, but they hung their heads and could not bring themselves to look Freddy in the eye.

  “I know, I know,” Father Iwanicki shrugged off the relevance of geography, “but the Illinois state bird is the Cardinal.”

  “And that means what?” Fred slid away from the priest’s firm hand, uneasy of the tone and logic behind the statement.

  “No need to be a smart-aleck,” Father Iwanicki gave Freddy the infamous smile he used to corral him into the confessional. “We’re just trying to help you. We know this is a difficult time for you. We’re just trying to make you feel-”

  “Gay? I’m not a faggot. I like the Cubs, not sucking cocks-”

  “Freddy!” his mother scolded and clamped her hands over her young daughter’s ears.

  “Okay, okay,” Father Iwanicki waved his hand as if clearing the hostility out of the air or pushing a fart in another direction. “How about another sport altogether? How about football? Who’s your favorite football team, Freddy?” the priest licked his lips with all this talk of full contact.

  Freddy felt the eyes of everyone in the room upon him, felt their judgment and intolerance, felt the priest’s fingers creeping down the back of his pants, pulling at the elastic band of his underwear, and decided the best defense is a good offense. Freddy brushed Father Iwanicki’s hand aside and stood up in the center of the living room.

  “Fuck football,” Freddy said as he looked his father in the eyes.

  Freddy’s father jumped out of his recliner and drove his fist into Freddy’s jaw. Freddy swam in and out of consciousness, dribbling fresh blood and more broken teeth into the palm of his hand.

  “Get out of my house, you little bastard! You’re dead to me!” were the last words his father roared at him.

  Within the hour, Freddy sat at a bus terminal with a mouthful of cotton balls and a brown paper sack filled with the last meal his mother would ever provide for him.

  The bus arrived and drove north towards Chicago and Fred’s destiny.

  ***

  Fast forward to the night of Sunday, April 12th 2009. The bar was empty, except for a few guys having a pre-game drinking binge in celebration of the opening home game—the 95th to be played at Wrigley Field—tomorrow. After a few drinks turned into a few shots, the conversation inevitably gravitated towards what brought them all together in the first place: baseball. More precisely, the Chicago Cubs.

  They sat in a corner booth, pickling their livers in a deluge of alcohol, reminiscing over seasons pasts and prospective futures. They bantered back and forth about the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the good plays and the bad calls early into the next morning. They forgot about their wives and spoke only of their children if they played baseball.

  “So I told Sara, the next time that little bitch does something to you, don’t drop the bat. Run right up on that skank and beat her in the fucking knees,” Kent regaled them with the latest incident from his daughter’s softball team.

  It wasn’t exactly baseball, but it was close enough, and Kent was the only one at the table who had a daughter. Either way, it made him feel included in the group and got some chuckles from the guys. Everyone laughed, except for Fred.

  “Hey, what’s the matter Fred?” Ernest elbowed Fred.

  “I’ve just been doing some thinking is all.” Fred watched the amber beer swish around in the bottle.

  “He means drinking.” James laughed at his own joke.

  “Oh, yeah. Thinking about what?” Kent asked and waved at the bartender for another round of beers.

  “I’ve been thinking about that fucking goat,” Fred said.

  A hush fell over the table as it always did when the topic of the goat surfaced. It was to be avoided at all cost in the company of Fred, due to his insistence that the curse was real. It started off jokingly enough, with Fred supplying ample evidence to support his claim.

  His resilience was charming in its own fashion, but when the season was over and the Cubs did not win the World Series, Fred fell into a deep fit of erratic depression (the guys called it “post-season menopause”), in which he would drown himself in beer and choke down slice after slice of deep dish pizza while immersing himself in research of the season. He would follow up leads, check and recheck stats and figures, cross-reference dates, and piece together what Fred genuinely believed to be an authentic, bona fide conspiracy, at the very least.

  At the very worst, Fred’s theory proposed there was truly such a thing as a curse. He suggested the possibility of a curse was just as likely as a long stretch of bad luck, but as the years went by, the idea of a curse seemed more plausible. He started to believe that a hex was placed on the Cubs franchise. Not all in one day, of course, but slowly, over the accumulation of decades’ worth of failures. Fred was no longer operating in the world of fantasy. He had made the curse real for himself. He wanted to make it real for others, too.

  “Fred, I love you buddy, but seriously, it’s just a gimmick,” James spoke through a mouthful of half-chewed peanuts. “It’s a hoax. Sianis was a businessman and used it to generate publicity, which equals money. He just capitalized on a preexisting market. By that time the Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in almost forty years.”

  “That’s what I’m just beginning to figure out; that maybe the curse is older than people think. Maybe way older.” Fred finished the rest of his beer with a gulp.

  “Shut up and drink that.” Kent put a fresh bottle of beer in front of Fred. “You’re reading too much into it.”

  “You’re right. I’ve been doing a lot reading here recently,” Fred said as he skinned the label off of the beer bottle. “Guys, have you ever heard of a book called the Necronomicon?”

  “The what?” they asked in unison.

  “The Necronomicon. The Book of the Dead.”

  ***

  “Okay, so we’ve all been led to believe that it started on October 6, 1945. Game four of the World Series. Chicago Cubs versus the Detroit Tigers at Wrigley Field, when Sianis put the curse on the Cubs after being thrown out for bringing his stinkin’ ass goat into the ballpark—but that’s not true at all. That’s just the shit they feed to the spectators, because really Sianis was only renewing the curse and obscuring the facts, burying the truth in folk lore.

  “Contrary to popular belief, it all began October 14, 1908. Game five of the World Series. Chicago Cubs win 2-0 over the Detroit Tigers at Bennett Park. The Cubs went all repeat sex offender on the Tigers’ asses right in their hometown for the second time in a row. It was an embarrassment. Hardly anyone watched it. And that’s when these two fucks from Detroit got butthurt real bad and decided to destroy the Cubs dynasty. Forever.

  “Only two people really know what happened out there, and they’re both dead. The details are sketchy, but these guys snuck into the stadium with a can of kerosene and a goat. They summoned an ancient evil god named Shub Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young-”

  “Whoa, Fred. That sounds a little racist.” Ernest checked to see if anyone was overhearing their conversation.

  “Huh?” Fred gave Ernest a look of confusion.

  “Black. Niggurath. With a Thousand Young. You see what I’m getting at?” Ernest kept his voice barely above a whisper, eyes continuing to scan the bar, just in case.

  “No, you asshole. Shub Niggurath is one of the Outer Gods. A primordial evil that preexists humanity and our concepts of prejudice, you fuckwit,” Fred explained.

  “Are you making this hokey shit up as you go, Freddy? Sounds pretty far fucking fetched to me,” James said and belched.

  “James, you got one of them new smart phones?” Fred asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You got access to the internet?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Then why the fuck did you spend so much money on that phone just to bother me with your fucking questions? I’m telling you straight up, right now. You ask me questions, I give you answers, then you dispute me the entire fucking time. If you don’t believe me, shut the fuck up and Google that shit,” Fred snapped.

  “A little cranky today, aren’t we, Freddy?” James leaned back in his chair, studying Fred’s tense body language.

  “Fucking aye right I am. I’m trying to tell you that there is a way to lift the curse, and you’re sitting here acting like you could care less about the Cubs winning the World Series. Who’s side are you on, James?”

  “No need to get hostile, Fred,” Ernest cut in. “We’re all Cubs fans here.”

  “Can I finish then? Great. Anyway, the next day the groundskeepers found their charred bodies on top of home plate. But that’s not all they found…”

  “Let me guess, they found the goat, too. Spooky noises!”

  “Not just one goat—one thousand goats. And that’s not all; they also found this book, this thing called the Necronomicon.”

  “Crock of shit,” Kenton grumbled. “Big smelly crock of shit.”

  “You know, Kent, for someone who thinks 9/11 was a cover up, I figured you’d be a little more open-minded about this.”

  “That was a fucking cover up and you know it.” Kenton hissed, but not too loudly—they might be listening. “That was the work of a secret, clandestine organization hell-bent on the overthrow and destruction of the United States—like Kennedy was talking about before he got assassinated—not a bunch of pissed off goat herders grazing their flock out on Wrigley Field. It’s a little more serious than that. Not just some fucking prank.”

  “Well, at least there hasn’t been an attack since then, but the Cubs still haven’t won a World Series in over-”

  “Hey!” a lone customer called to the bartender. “Could you turn that up? Harry Caray’s on the news.”

  The bartender turns the volume up on the television and all the guys are watching the screen now.

  The giant bronze statue of Harry Caray stands in the background as the anchorman reports the breaking news. A severed goat’s head was found on the statue outside of Wrigley stadium by the police. The investigators were considering the act of animal cruelty a prank, an apparent attempt to break the curse of the goat. Perhaps it was the work of the same culprit who hung an entire skinned goat from the statue three years earlier, but the authorities could only speculate.

  “Prank?” Freddy slammed his bottle on the table. “No. More like a fucking threat. Do you see what’s happening right now? Do you? This is more than just a coincidence. It’s a sign. This bullshit has got to stop.”

  There was a long pause of silence at the table as Ernest, James, and Kenton gawked at Fred.

  Fred had their full attention, and as he talked through the dreary morning, he set the mood for certain doom. The temperature fluttered in the mid-thirties with ten mile per hour winds rolling off of Lake Michigan. The chilly, wet weather added to the ominous tone of failure, and when the game was postponed for more than an hour, all seemed lost.

  “So, you’re suggesting that Sianis didn’t find the goat, but that the goat found him?” James asked.

  “Look at the facts. He immigrates to the U.S. with a couple bucks in his pocket, sells newspapers and shit just to get by, and after prohibition ends, he somehow buys a bar with money he doesn’t have. Then one day a goat falls off the back of a truck and wanders into the bar. He nurses the goat back to health, and even goes as far as renaming the tavern after the animal and starts sporting a goatee. His luck begins to change, and by 1938 the goat is in the newspapers. Sianis starts taking it everywhere, places where it’s obvious goats aren’t allowed, but he doesn’t care. It’s almost as if he were trying to get someone to fuck with the goat.”

  “So what? It was a publicity stunt. The goat was a good luck charm. It worked,” Kent argued.

  “Yeah, it worked real good for Sianis. Too good, if you ask me. What if the goat was more than just a good luck charm? What if it was a familiar—you know, something a vampire or a witch keeps around for protection,” Fred countered.

  “Sianis is a witch? Are we going to need a chupacabra for this?” Ernest asked with a perplexed expression on his face.

  “What? No. It’s a fucking demon! Are you guys even listening to me?” Fred threw his hands in the air.

  “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.” James shrugged his shoulders.

  “Me neither,” Kent agreed, and they clinked bottles together.

  “Fuck me. Let’s try a different approach. Do you guys know Abdul Alhazred? The dude that owns the grocery store around the block?” Fred pushed his ball cap back and wiped sweat from his forehead.

  “The guy everyone calls the ‘Mad Arab?’” Ernest asked.

  “Well, I just call him Al, but yeah, that’s him,” Fred answered, nodding his head.

  “What about him?” James asked.

  “I’ve heard he can find you just about anything you want—for the right price, of course. But rumor has it he’s the go-to guy for shit like this. He’s got connections to some real sinister underworld types.”

  “Shit, Fred. I got connections. Who doesn’t in this town?” Kenton said and took a sip of beer.

  “No. I’m talking some real deep underworld connections. Some fire and brimstone kind of folks.” Fred lowered his voice as he hinted at the dark nature of Alhazred’s business.

  “Like the 700 Club?” Ernest scratched his chin.

  “Think the complete opposite of that.” Fred’s brow darkened.

  “Satanists?” Kenton grimaced as he spoke the word

  “Sure, close enough. Well, I heard he might be able to help me with this, so I went to ask him some questions,” Fred answered.

  “And when you started talking about demon goats, I bet he thought you were bat shit crazy,” Kent said, smiling.

  “No, actually he was very understanding. He said in order to get rid of the curse, the demon must be manifested into a physical form and killed, but we have to do it with a sword. Al was pretty specific. We can’t just use a gun or something. It has to be a steel blade,” Fred stated the facts.

  “I thought gods were immortal,” Ernest said.