The Midnight Games

by Lee, David Neil;

  Different music started playing, some big booming orchestra thing. A whistle blew, the teams started to run. They weren’t wearing helmets or any other gear or padding. I blinked hard against the field lights. What kind of moves were these? Precise and practised, but bizarre. The black and white ranks moved together, then shifted to make points and angles and corners, forming strange, unreadable patterns. It was not football at all, but some kind of weird flash mob or performance art, sending messages best seen from above, messages not to the crowd in the bleachers but to the night sky itself.

  Once again I tried to tackle my beer like a man. I didn’t want to give up, especially having invested six bucks. But the next time I took a sip, I spit it out. “I can’t drink this beer,” I told Dana.

  Dana ignored me, his gaze on the field below. “There’s no ball,” he said.

  I shoved my almost-full cup under the bench. The period, or dance, or ceremony, whatever it was ended and cheerleaders poured out onto the field. Instead of cheering and chanting, the crowd fell dead silent and, as one body, rose to their feet. Dana and I looked at each other. We stood up too.

  Now the competing teams merged in the middle of the field, and through their ranks came four players, carrying between them a long, wrapped bundle on a kind of stretcher. By the time they reached the centre, a huge square of black tarp had been laid out on the turf. From our seats in the upper tiers I could barely make out the network of lines and angles that decorated the black square. But when I squinted at those lines, trying to see them better, my vision seemed to blur. I blinked: what was going on?

  Someone in the crowd began to sing, and gradually more voices joined in.

  “I’m a worker and I wonder

  When I’m gonna hear that call of old

  My old hometown’s goin’ under

  All the furnaces gone cold

  “I’ll be reachin’ out to heaven

  Where cuhthooloo reigns supreme

  When his ancient city’s risen

  I’ll be livin’ in a dream.”

  And as those lines were repeated, other voices sang against them: “Yog-Sauces Yog-Sauces Yog-Sauces.” I didn’t know what the heck the song was about, but the crowd had sung this before. Whatever you call it, the effect when you sing different musical parts against each other like that, it was eerie, but beautiful. “Yog-Sauces Yog-Sauces ...” I started joining in; Dana looked surprised but soon, to keep up appearances, he started moving his mouth in time with the others. I kept repeating my part; it needed work; Yog was no problem, but there was something funny about the way they were pronouncing Sauces. I wasn’t quite getting it right. Did everybody here have a lisp but me?

  “All these years I’ve kept on hopin’

  That a change is in the wind

  And someday soon the sky will open

  To let the old gods rule again.”

  I felt a tingling like an electric shock. I looked around. Where was it coming from? There were no hidden wires. Low clouds, thick and slithery as smoke from an oil fire, roiled around the upper reaches of the stadium and I wondered about lightning.

  Suddenly I heard someone speak into my ear; a voice deep, vibrant and reassuring: I can help you.

  I looked around – there was no one was except Dana. I shivered. Was I having a psychic experience? Was this literally the excitement of the crowd, somehow transmitted through the thickening atmosphere around me, filling me with notions? What was going on? From school assemblies, sporting events and fairs I knew that a crowd was a place where a lot of people get excited over stuff that any one of them, if left on their own, would see was hopelessly dumb. Was that what was happening to me?

  The shrouded stretcher was carried out onto the black square and laid pointing east to west; the performers stepping back so we could all have a good look. Then the cover was whipped off and I gasped.

  On the stretcher lay a naked man. He was one hundred per cent ordinary looking, a pudgy guy in his forties with dark hair and short legs. Blindfolded, his hands and feet bound with duct tape, he shivered and tried to rise, but fell back. I wondered if he had been drugged with something. Numbly I raised my phone and took a few more pictures.

  “What the hell is going on here?” asked Dana. Everyone else just kept on singing. As the chant thundered over the public address system I felt the structure under me shudder as if, in the depths of the stadium, something huge was rising to the music.

  Now a line of men in overalls came shambling out onto the field. Shambling and awkward, because each of them had a heavy barbecue-style propane tank on his back, with a long hose and a nozzle.

  They were carrying tiger torches. I was familiar with these, in a way, because for three or four birthdays, when I was a kid, I had asked my dad for one. Watching road crews softening asphalt, I’d decided that a tiger torch was the closest thing I’d seen to a flame-thrower – which, as I’d learned from watching Them! with my dad, was the best weapon to have in case giant ants appeared. But Dad never got me one.

  Someone on the field was gesturing at them to hurry, and they lit their torches and lined up on either side of the stadium entrance directly below Dana and me. Raising the nozzles before them like heraldic trumpets, they formed an avenue of flame leading to the man on the tarp.

  Above the chant of the audience I could hear a roaring and humming in the air, as if the sleeping sky itself was waking up, rumbling and hungry. The noise grew in volume and when it swelled, the concrete stadium itself began to vibrate. I could still pick out a few of the announcer’s words. “HE’S COMING... HE’S COMING... HE’S COMING.”

  I wondered if the Steely Dan I’d sipped had not just been a crummy beer, or skunky, but if there was something seriously wrong with it. I couldn’t focus my eyes on the glare above that square of black tarp. The air above the spiky symbols and the naked man seemed to glow, like gasses in a fluorescent tube coming alive with an invisible charge. And I could feel an excitement myself, something I’d never felt before, like a voice inside me saying, I can help you, I can save you, and the hell with everyone else, you are a winner. You are a winner and you will overcome. You will overcome and there is a god that will lead you. A god will lead you, and I am that god, and the name of that god...

  On the field below, the line of flames wavered, and suddenly something enormous clattered and shook its way out of the entrance beneath us and moved into the field; something as long as a bus, with bony limbs and feelers waving and shuddering. I blinked to see better, but the light over the stadium was strobing and flickering. The people around us waved and danced like cutup movie frames, and I could see the shape move toward the man on the tarp, lunging and feinting at the line of flames that held it back.

  The performers moved back, and the shape paused. It reared up over the naked man, who was trying frantically to break his bonds and get away, sensing the danger nearby. He began to shout, words I couldn’t make out in the racket around me.

  “... POWER SOURCE,” the voice boomed over the sound system. “AND IF WE JUST TRY A LITTLE BIT HARDER... C’MON, JUST A LITTLE MORE! ... THIS TIME HE’LL COME. THE ENERGIES ARE HERE ... WHEN THE EXANIMATOR FEASTS ON THE ENERGY FROM THIS TWO-FACED COWARD WHO TRIED TO STOP US, THIS TRAITOR, THIS TERRORIST ...”

  The creature pounced and snapped the naked man into its jaws, effortlessly lifting him from the stretcher. He screamed, and for a moment the crowd fell silent, then burst into cheers as the creature turned, carrying its victim – I could now see it had long prickly feelers, or antennae, and two compound eyes like an insect – and surged back through the line of torches and disappeared under the stadium.

  “... IS GONE!!!” The crowd cheered. “AND HIS SUFFERING, HIS SACRIFICE, WILL GIVE US THE ENERGY WE NEED, THE PUSH TO PROSPER, THE WILL TO WIN ...”

  The darkness snarled and rumbled like an earthquake shaking heaven itself. There was a spark of lightning, and like fog before a storm a wall of blue smoke blew across the field. High above us, something black and red and
monstrous tore through the gathering clouds and thrust its way into the halo of spotlights. A cry went up from the crowd, a cry of ecstasy, and shooting from my toes to the crown of my head I felt a shock of fear as if I was teetering on a high roof, at the edge of a deadly fall. I cried out and then reeled back as a vast presence – outlined with luminous globes, writhing against the field’s glow and with the glint of a gleaming hungry eye – took shape before me. I was panting from the excitement, from the thrill of that voice, from the strange urge for glory and triumph that had run through me like a shock, and I shook my head to clear it.

  Then the darkness sparked brilliantly again, before the glow began to diffuse and fade into the night. The tarp on the turf lay in a heap, crumpled and stained with blood.

  CHAPTER 2

  SOMETHING FOLLOWING

  You would probably think Dana was a pathetic character unless you shared a neighbourhood with him. But after he’d been on the street a while, people noticed that he didn’t harass anybody for spare change, that he wasn’t scoping out porch furniture or lawn tools to steal and that he would pay attention if you spoke to him. As my dad liked to say, if you have no money, people don’t respect you, but as the years go by and you still have no money, you get credit just for still being around. Dad was talking about himself, but the same thing applied to Dana.

  Every week, we would see Dana cruising down the street on garbage day, starting in the afternoon when some of our neighbours first put out their trash, then again after supper, when more blue boxes were put out. Finally, he’d go by late in the evening, to catch those people who put out their trash just before bed. Each time, he’d rifle through the blue boxes for bottles and cans, and throw them into a big duffle bag he had slung across his back. He didn’t talk to anyone unless they said, “How ya doin’,” or insisted on cornering him in conversation, so he was pretty much accepted. Although Mrs. Smot, the lady Dad called “Betty Bylaw,” always squinted at him suspiciously, and the odd guy who’d had a bad day would toss an insult.

  I got to know Dana a couple of years ago, when I decided to start running. A few times a week I would get up early – I was self-conscious and didn’t want anyone to see me, so I only did this before the sun was up – and run for a few shadowy kilometres. I would cut through the Prince of Wales’ schoolyard and run around the stadium a few times, or cross Cannon to do laps on the grass around Scott Park if the ground wasn’t all mucky, or even run all the way down to Gage Park and back.

  One morning, in March, still dark, I opened the door and jumped when I saw a shadow move on our front step. It was Dana, with a pocket flashlight hanging around his neck. Our Hamilton Spectator was unfolded on his lap and he was doing the crossword.

  “Jeez.” He started frantically erasing.

  I was still woozy from sleep. Before this, I’d not taken much notice of Dana when I’d see him on the street and, with his scraggly hair and his old clothes, I had simply figured him for one of the street people who are always coming and going. But for a street person, if that’s what he was, he looked pretty clean and he didn’t have that glassy-eyed crackhead look. I stood staring for a minute. Then, since it was my front porch after all, I did my best to take charge.

  “Do you do this every morning?”

  “Sorry, man.” He’d finished erasing. “Yeah, I just do them lightly, with this.” He held up a mechanical pencil. “Then I erase ’em good.”

  “What a weird thing to do.”

  He scooped up his duffle bag from the porch. “You surprised me today.” And then our paper was back sitting on the porch, neatly folded with the elastic band around it, the same way I always found it, and Dana was gone.

  “Now that I think about it,” I told my dad later, “sometimes I’ve wondered why there are eraser shavings in the GO section.”

  “Who does this guy think he is?” Dad asked.

  “Dad, it’s not as if you or I even do the crossword.”

  “We pay for that darn paper.”

  Shortly afterwards I started taking the crosswords page of the GO section, once I’d finished reading the comics, and leaving it under the green box on the porch. After that, every morning when I opened the front door, the page from the previous day was gone. From that point on, Dana and I were in some way friends.

  He told me a little bit about life on the streets. “It’s been getting stranger the last couple of years.”

  To me, it seemed like a life of adventure: Dana lived from hand to mouth, carrying all his possessions in a leather satchel and a big old canvas backpack, yet for all that he was a free man. In the warm weather he could sleep anywhere, having become highly skilled, so he told me, at making shelters from a plastic tarp strung over branches or old lumber. In the winter he prowled the old industrial district at the north end of the city. He liked it, he said, because so much of it was empty. But it wasn’t as empty as it used to be.

  “Maybe the steelmaking is picking up?” I said. “More traffic?”

  “It’s not that,” Dana said. “At night, up in those territories, you’d swear the world had ended. Nothing but weeds and rust and broken windows. Except for me, even street people don’t go up there; it’s too far away from everything. But it’s not deserted like it used to be. I get a funny feeling, and I hear things. I go there at night, and sometimes I get a glimpse ...” He paused. “Glimpse of what?”

  “Nothing I guess, just shadows, and movement out of the corner of your eye. And I hear things. Last winter, walking along a railroad track I’d walked on a hundred times before, something followed me.”

  “Something?”

  “I dunno, but I could hear it in the bush, just behind me, moving when I moved, stopping when I stopped. Freaked me out.”

  “Maybe just a raccoon or a coyote,” I said. “Anyway, you’re still here.” But now Dana was off in his own world, this other Hamilton I knew nothing about.

  “There’s an old freighter down there – the Sandoval – I’ve been using it for years, off and on, climbing up onto the deck and pulling up my gear with a rope. It’s been sitting there in the harbour so long even the rats have moved out, but I get my candles going and make it snug...”

  “It sounds pretty sweet,” I said. “Maybe some night I could ...”

  “... but then again ... last winter, with the ice thick around the ship, at night I heard something ...”

  “Out on the ice?”

  “No – under the ship. Something that came out of the lake, something big. I could hear its back rubbing against the hull, and all night I could hear water surging, and the ice cracking, with whatever it was doing down there.”

  “So ... what could that be?” I asked. “A carp, or ...?”

  “Nate, I mean huge. When it bobbed against the hull, the whole ship rocked. In the morning I saw where, under the ice, it had come and gone. There was a bloom of mud spreading out into the bay. Something big comes out of the deep part of the lake to tunnel under the city, and it comes at night, and it uses the old freighter for cover.”

  “Jeez ...” I didn’t know what to say, except that Dana, already an unusual friend as friends go, was starting to sound a bit nuts.

  “Something is happening, Nate,” Dana said, and he blinked and was back in the city, the sunlight, the traffic, the present moment. “Things are changing.”

  “Maybe it’s a change for the better,” I said. I know, a lame thing to say. To be honest, I was starting to change my mind about joining Dana, even temporarily, in his vagabond life of freedom and adventure.

  “Whatever it is, I gotta stay out of its way,” Dana said. “Otherwise, one way or another, I know I’m gonna get screwed.”

  CHAPTER 3

  SOMETHING BESTOWED

  I stared down at the chaos on the field. The announcer, himself disappointed by the turn of events – whatever they had been – changed his sales pitch. “... PROUD TO BE A MEMBER OF THE RESURRECTION CHURCH OF THE ANCIENT GODS ... YOUR DEVOTION ... YOUR DONATIONS ... TONIGHT WE
CAME SO CLOSE ... IN JUST A FEW DAYS ...”

  “What just happened?” I asked Dana. I was clicking through the pictures on my cellphone. But the action on the field, the man on the stretcher, the shape in the sky, the creature that had seized its victim and vanished – everything had been too dark and too far away.

  In practical terms, Dana gave me the best answer I could hope for: “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The crowd began to chant again. This time there was a different melody along with the words, a melody I recognized from hearing it spilling over from the games through our neighbourhood late at night. “... the dark clouds come again... from the sky a magic ... our furnaces will blaze... the stars above ... the Great Old Ones draw near...”

  Whatever these ceremonies were all about, whatever was bringing these people together, whatever bizarre nation was coming together here, I guess this was its anthem.

  “Hurry up.” I grabbed my beer from under the bench, and suddenly Dana was leading me down the steps past the cheering crowd. As we approached the landing, I saw a dark figure coming up. Leaning against the steel rails, turning to look up at the bleachers illuminated by the flashing lights from the playing field, was a tall white man, I guess in his late thirties or forties, perfectly dressed in a dark business suit. In the glare of the lights, his eyes glimmered against the silhouette of his face like flares on the dark side of the moon. He looked sharply at Dana as he hurried past and then turned to look at me.

  “Hey,” he said and then louder, “hey, you don’t belong here.” He stepped in front of me and our eyes met. He was an eerily normal-looking guy, with undistinguished features and one of those waxy, too-perfect hairdos you see on politicians and oldtime movie stars.

  “No pictures. Everyone knows that.”

  “’Scuse me.” I tried to go around him.

  “No pictures. You wait right here,” he grabbed my arm and threw me off balance.