The Cricket Ball

• 4 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

We played cricket in the lane and there was one rule everybody knew.

If the ball went over the wall into the empty plot, it was gone. You did not go in after it. You bought a new ball.

Nobody had ever explained why, and by the time I was old enough to ask, it was just how things were.

Rafi

Rafi moved into the street that year and thought the rule was ridiculous.

"It is a plot of grass," he said. "There is nothing in there. I can see the top of it from my roof."

"You do not go in."

"Somebody must have gone in. Where do all the balls go?"

Nobody had an answer for that, which he treated as a victory.

The ball

The following week he hit one over the wall himself.

It was a good shot and we all watched it go, and there was the usual silence afterwards, and somebody said they would go and buy another one tomorrow.

Rafi put his bat down and walked to the wall.

"Do not," said Imran, who was the oldest of us.

"It is my ball. I paid for it."

And he pulled himself up on the wall, swung his legs over, and dropped down the other side.

Waiting

We stood in the lane and listened to him moving about in the long grass.

It went on for a while. We heard him getting further away and then coming back, and then getting further away again in a different direction, and once he called out that he had found a whole pile of them.

Then nothing.

We waited. Imran called his name twice.

And then, from the other side of the wall, the ball came back over.

It came in a high easy arc, the way a ball comes when somebody has thrown it properly, and it landed in the lane and rolled and stopped against my foot.

Nobody picked it up.

Rafi comes out

About a minute later Rafi came over the wall.

He looked completely normal. He was slightly out of breath and had grass seeds on his shirt and he was pleased with himself, and he asked where the ball was.

"You threw it," I said.

"What?"

"You threw it back over. Just now."

Rafi looked at me for a moment and then laughed and said he had not, and that he had been at the far end looking through the pile, and that he had not found ours at all.

And then he stopped laughing, because none of us were.

After

He never went in again, and he never asked about the rule again either, and when younger boys asked him why you did not go into the plot he was the one who said it most firmly.

And the pile he described was real. He talked about it that evening: dozens of balls, some of them old enough to have gone soft, all together in one place near the middle.

Somebody had been collecting them.