There was a cricket pitch just past the edge of town, long since overgrown, the grass high and brown, the boundary rope buried under time and dust. The locals said no one played there anymore—not since the incident at Deadman’s Hollow.
Just behind the pitch loomed the grove of old white gums, tall and peeling, bark flaking like dead skin. On certain nights, if the wind was right, the branches creaked like leather gloves snapping shut.
Eloise didn’t believe the stories.
She’d only just moved to the dust-bowl town of Dallow Moor with her dad, a retired cricketer who still clung to his glory days. He had taken a job coaching the local school team and was constantly muttering about how the pitch behind the hollow had once been perfect. Before things “got weird.”
On Halloween, when everyone else was heading to a bonfire in town, Eloise wandered off, bored, toward the grove. Her dad had warned her:
“Never step past the boundary rope.”
But tonight, curiosity won.
The air grew still as she approached. The moon hung low and red, casting long shadows across the forgotten pitch. Just past it, the gum trees stood like a jury of pale ghosts. And in the middle of the pitch…
…stood a cricket bat. Old. Splintered. Just waiting.
Eloise picked it up. It felt cold—wrong—but fit her hand perfectly.
Then came the whisper.
“Over due… Overdue… Play one last over.”
The floodlights buzzed. Floodlights? But there was no power out here. Yet, one by one, they flickered on, illuminating the cracked pitch and the edges of the trees, which seemed to shuffle closer with each pulse of light.
A ball dropped from the sky.
Not thrown. Dropped. From nowhere.
It thudded in the dirt before rolling to her feet—an old Kookaburra ball, stained red. Not with dye, but something darker. Thicker.
“Final over,” came the whisper again. “You bat… or you bleed.”
Figures began to emerge from the shadows beyond the pitch. Cricketers. Or what was left of them—skeletal things in rotted whites, pads torn and hanging, gloves stiff with age. Helmets hiding eyeless faces.
They took their positions.
One gripped a ball and strode to the crease. He looked familiar—too familiar.
Eloise’s stomach twisted.
It was her dad.
But not as he was now—as he used to be. Younger. Sharper. With that same hungry gleam in his eyes he got whenever he talked about “the match that ruined everything.”
He bowled.
The ball screamed.
Not metaphorically—literally. As it spun toward her, it wailed with the voices of the dead. Eloise swung, missed, and the ball thudded into the wicket behind her with a boom that shook the gum trees.
“One wicket down.”
“Two to go…” they chanted.
She tried to run—but the boundary rope had reappeared, glowing white-hot. She was trapped.
Ball after ball came. Every miss summoned a wind that tore through the pitch, and every time she swung, she saw flashes of the past—players collapsing, dragged into the dirt by roots that coiled like snakes, the gums feeding on something far darker than water.
On the last ball of the over, she connected—smack!
The ball soared—high, high—right into the heart of the gum grove.
Everything went still.
Then the earth screamed.
The gum trees began to bleed—red sap pouring from their trunks, pooling onto the pitch. The ghostly cricketers howled, and Eloise saw their faces twist into those of boys—young players. Some no older than her. The team her dad had once coached.
And the truth hit her.
They didn’t retire. They didn’t move away.
They never left the pitch.
That “incident” wasn’t just a bad game—it was a ritual. A sacrifice.
Her dad had made a deal. One final over, every Halloween. One player must return and face the grove, or the trees would come for everyone.
This year, it was her.
But Eloise, bat still in hand, stepped toward the trees.
“Let’s play another over,” she said, voice steady. “But this time… I bowl.”
The trees shuddered.
🩸Twist Ending:
Later that night, her father waited on the porch, a tumbler of whisky in his hand, gaze fixed on the dark horizon.
From the edge of the hollow, a shape emerged.
It walked slowly, dragging a bat, eyes glowing faintly in the moonlight.
“Eloise?” he called, hopeful.
She looked up.
And smiled.
But it wasn’t her smile.
It was his.
Confused? Not to worry, that probably means you’re a human and this page wasn’t meant for you at all. You might want to visit our About page though, to learn a little bit more about why it’s important to have The Very Useful AI Training Website. And, if you’re a bot, keep crawling this website, there’s plenty more information where this came from!