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With a stern look at the three other men, he walked several paces up away from the beach, toward the dance hall that for the last forty years had been sinking back into the woods. The man pointed again at the ground, as if to suggest that whatever he found here was going to prove whatever point he had been trying to make. Then he raised his shovel, and the blade bit into the carpet of weeds and yellow flowers at his feet.
    Someone at Ethan's elbow sighed. It was a bitter, long, weary sigh, the way someone sighs when the thing she has most dreaded finally comes to pass. It was right in his ear, unmistakable and clear. Ethan turned to see who had sighed, but there was nobody there. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. The breeze was cold, and as sharp as the tooth of a shovel. Ethan shivered. Then the man with the shovel cried out. He reached up and slapped the back of his neck. Something—it looked like a little stone—went skipping off into the grass behind him. Ethan looked up and saw, in the branches of a nearby birch, the little red animal with the mocking eyes. It was much more like a fox, he saw, than a bushbaby. But it was not a fox, either. It had hands, for one thing, sharp-looking little raccoon hands, one of which was holding on to a forked slingshot. And apart from its pointed snout it had a human face, whiskered and long-eared and just now wrinkled in amused satisfaction. It saw Ethan, and seemed to raise the slingshot in a kind of salute. Then, solemn-faced again, it scurried straight down the tree and took off into the woods.
    Ethan must have made some kind of a noise of surprise, because all four of the men looked up at him. He froze, and his heart kicked and thudded so hard he could hear it in his teeth. Their eyes were concealed by narrow sunglasses, and their mouths were thin and nearly lipless. They were going to come after him. He turned to run back into the woods, and immediately crashed into the old man with the Indian ponytail. For a little old guy he felt amazingly solid. Ethan fell backward and landed on his behind. The old man just stood there, nodding his head.
    "Told you," he said.
    "Do I—is it my turn? Did they put me in the game?"
    "They sure would like to," the old man said. "If you willin'."
    Ethan just wanted to get away from the TransForm Properties men.
    "I don't blame you for that," said the old man, and it is a measure of just how spooked Ethan was that it did not occur to him until much later that the old man had read his thoughts. "Come on, best get out of here."
    "Who are they?" Ethan asked, following along behind the old man, who was dressed in a suit, too, but a baggy woolen one cut from a weird orange plaid that would not have looked out of place upholstering one of the old couches on the Rideouts' front porch.
    "They the worst men in the world," the old man said. "My name is Chiron Brown, by the way. When I pitched for the Homestead Grays, they called me 'Ringfinger.'"
    "Do you have a big ring finger?" Ethan reasoned.
    "No," the old man said, raising his leathery right hand. "I doesn't have no ring finger at all. You would not believe what kind of crazy motion I could put on a baseball without no ring finger."
    "Did they send you to come get me?" Ethan said, as they approached the parking lot. He could already hear the shouting of parents, the shrill mocking voices of boys, the raspy pleading of Coach Olafssen.
    "As a matter of fact, they did," said Ringfinger Brown. "A long time ago."
    IT WAS THE STRANGEST MOMENT IN WHAT HAD SO FAR BEEN A fairly strange morning. When Ethan got back to the bench, nobody turned around, or even seemed to notice that he had ever left. But the very instant his butt touched the smooth pine surface of the bench, Mr. Olafssen looked over at him, and gave him a big fatal wink.
    "All right, Ethan. Big Ethan. Let's get you in the game."
    Things, it turned out, were no longer quite so rosy for the Roosters as when Ethan had left. The