The Midnight Games

by Lee, David Neil;

  I poured my beer down the front of his pants.

  “Hey!” Horrified, his grip loosened and I pulled away. Dana’s head appeared in the stairway, hissing at me to hurry and as this guy – Mr. Slick, I thought of him – recoiled from me, his shirt front and pants dripping with cold Steely Dan, I ducked and followed Dana down the concrete stairways dimmed with smoke from the games.

  “Gatecrashers,” I heard Mr. Slick cry out behind us. “Gatecrashers here! I’ve been assaulted!”

  Dana headed for the corner where we’d come in, but I grabbed his arm. I’d seen a familiar face. I rushed up to a guard at the nearest entrance, a girl I’d gone to PoW with, and who I knew from working the concessions. Like me, Kara had started cooking hot dogs, but unlike me, apparently she had moved up in the organization.

  “Nate!” Kara was my age, a tall dark-haired girl a bit on the heavy side. She gave me a big smile. “Didn’t expect you here!”

  “Hey, Kara – look, can we get out this way?”

  “Great ceremony tonight, eh? Big changes coming!” She turned her head, distracted by the shouting behind us. A crowd was gathering around the joint in the fence where Dana had gotten us in; there was no escape that way.

  “Look, Kara, I gotta get home... Can we...”

  “We almost got him through tonight, didn’t we? Jeez, Nate, I thought I heard the Proprietor... did he just call a lockdown?” Kara looked back into the crowd to see what the fuss was about.

  “Thanks, Kara...” I slipped past her and through the gates, Dana right behind me... “You’re the best, awesome ...”

  Out on Balsam Street, we began to circle the stadium to head back to my place. As we came around the front we merged into the crowd pouring from the gates. Now I felt safe.

  “So, Dana,” I said. “What did we just see in there?”

  “That poor bastard on the stretcher.” I had never seen Dana look this upset, but I couldn’t blame him. “Something snatched that guy.”

  “Next time the big one,” came a woman’s voice from the crowd.

  “The next game,” someone else said, “the boss’ll be here, and our troubles’ll be over.”

  “We’ll finally have a goddamn boss who’s on our goddamn side for a goddamn change.”

  “We can’t let them do this,” Dana insisted as we worked through the crowd. He turned and shouted, “ANY BLOOD SPILLED AT IVOR WYNNE – IT BETTER BE FROM FOOTBALL!”

  “Jeez, Dana.” I grabbed his arm. “Let’s just go home. We can call the cops.”

  “And they will do what?”

  I looked around, but no one seemed to have noticed Dana’s outburst. It felt like we were safely lost in the crowd. Figures were spilling out of the stadium into the dark street, but they weren’t pursuing us – just heading home themselves after the latest midnight game.

  Then suddenly he was right in front of us. Someone grabbed me from behind and Mr. Slick put a hand on my shoulder. A hand cold as if the night itself had reached out and stopped me in my tracks.

  “Getcher hands off him,” Dana said. I could see other figures in the crowd, rising to join Mr. Slick. I felt a hand reach into the pocket of my hoodie and grab my phone. I struggled but my arms were pinned. Once again Mr. Slick looked into my eyes.

  “Hey, this is a public street here,” I said. “You got no right to stop me.”

  “I’m the Proprietor,” he said calmly. “And you’re the boy who dumped his beer all over me.”

  “That was an accident,” I lied. Then I lied again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Give me my phone back.”

  “You are just a boy,” the Proprietor said. “I can even see some potential in you. Here ...” Suspicious, I kept my eyes on his face even as I reached out and took the business card he handed me.

  “But you...” he turned to Dana. “We’ve been watching you. You should mind your own business. Here’s a little something.” He handed Dana a slip of folded white paper, like the tickets we photocopy for school events. “It’s your future,” the Proprietor said.

  Dana looked at the Proprietor, took the paper, grabbed me and pulled me away from whoever was hanging onto me.

  “My phone,” I said. I turned to see a darker-skinned man, no taller than me but built like a bulldozer, holding it. He was clicking through my pictures, deleting as he scanned them.

  “There’s nothing here anyway, sir,” he said. “The light was so bad, and this is a real piece a crap.” He made as if he was going to throw my phone over the fence, back onto the stadium asphalt.

  “Hey!” I was ready to grab my phone, no matter what it took, but the Proprietor turned and paused, looking surprised. A bulky figure on an electric scooter had pushed through the crowd, saying something to him that I couldn’t catch.

  “I had to do it,” the Proprietor sounded annoyed. “It’s his future, or a whole world just waiting for us, that’s what’s at stake.” The person on the scooter answered him back, posing questions in a laboured, wheezing voice. I couldn’t hear the words at all, and only caught snatches of the Proprietor’s reply: “... none of your business ... takeover ... don’t need your opinion ... the dritch, it’s a wild animal, it acts of its own free will ...”

  He turned and stomped toward me, sending one last comment back at the person on the scooter. “I don’t want to hear ‘sorcerer,’ the sorcerer is not a factor.” He shook his head in disgust. “Everybody around here thinks my business is their goddamn business.”

  This was obviously my new bud’s number one problem. I would keep that in mind.

  He looked back at me. “Jimmy, give him the phone.” Jimmy tossed it on the pavement in front of me and I scrambled to grab it.

  Not giving us, or anyone else, another glance, the Proprietor and his followers strode off, the crowd parting at their approach. The watchers around us turned away, but a whisper seemed to follow us – “future, future, future...” – as Dana and I threaded our way through the crowd to the open streets. By the time we got to Lottridge we were on our own. I was testing my phone; I could get a dial tone, and the camera still worked. I turned to Dana.

  “Jeez, what in the world ... what was that all about?”

  Dana shook his head. “It’s not like life isn’t strange enough already.”

  “What was that thing? We just saw a guy on a stretcher get served up to some monster.”

  “Unless those were like, you know, projections, or holograms.”

  “No way. It was right there in front of us. A centipede-type thing as big as a dinosaur. It came out from under the stadium. It ate that guy.”

  Dana shrugged. Somewhere behind us, from a crowd heading up toward Barton from the stadium, came a cheer and a snatch of song. “SOMEDAY SOON THE SKY WILL OPEN ...”

  “They had all those torches,” I continued. “You don’t need a wall of fire to control a hologram.”

  “...show business ...” Dana said vaguely.

  “And that voice in my head. I heard a voice in my head. Did you hear that? Telling me I was the greatest, and that together we’d defeat our enemies and rule the world.”

  This seemed to perk Dana up a bit. “Yeah, I heard that too. I didn’t believe it ...”

  “Me neither.”

  “... but it was powerful. You could feel how you could get taken in by something like that.”

  “My dad calls me a natural skeptic,” I boasted.

  “If I believed all the lines people feed me,” Dana said, “I’d be dying, dead or in jail.”

  “I saw something too. Slithering through those clouds, like a snake, but it was huge, and glowing ...”

  “I need to get outta here,” Dana said. “Reboot my brain.”

  I couldn’t help him with that. We were silent for a moment, then I thought of what the Proprietor had handed to Dana. “What’d he pass you?” I asked.

  For a second Dana didn’t seem to understand. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the slip of paper. He unfolded it and spun around to the nearest stree
t light. Dana scratched his chin. “I was hoping he’d slipped me a twenty,” he joked, “but this ...”

  Along the slip of paper someone had drawn a line of stick figures, like some kind of rough cave painting. Within these figures, sharp angles stood out, black and forbidding, against the white paper, pointed and final as the corners of a swastika. They were just symbols, or ancient letters or pictures or something, but when I looked at them I shuddered. Then on impulse, I held up my phone and took a picture.

  “Forty-two hours...” Dana read.

  “You can read this? Is this lettering?”

  “It’s written right there.” He pointed. “Right at the top.” He squinted.

  “I don’t see...” If Dana was reading something there in English, I sure couldn’t see it.

  “It was there a second ago,” Dana held the paper up to his eyes. “‘In memoriam Dana Laschelles allowed forty-two hours.’ I saw it right there. I read it. Just a second ago. Now I don’t see it. Go figure.”

  “Do you mind if I take that?” I asked. “I can search some of this stuff online. Maybe it’s a code.”

  “I saw it right there.” Dana seemed about to give the paper to me, then he shook his head. “I’m gonna hang onto it.” He looked at the streets around us, now empty and dark, as he said, “It’s not yours, Nate. It’s for me.”

  I was headed home to a house that was nothing fancy, but at least the lights worked and the heat was on and the front door locked up with a key. I didn’t know where Dana was staying.

  “Look, Dana, why not crash at my place.”

  In the past, though I knew it might not make my dad happy, I’d asked Dana to come and stay; we had lots of room and he could take a shower, do some laundry. But he’d always refused. The east end, he told me, was full of abandoned buildings. There was always someplace he could get in and make a squat, at least for a while.

  Lately I’d brought the subject up with Dad and he hadn’t been a hundred per cent negative.

  “We’ve got these bedrooms,” he said, “and once he has an address, he can at least get welfare, and probably even a job.” Dad’s eyes had brightened. “We could charge him rent ...”

  I turned to Dana one last time.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to ...?” But we had just passed the abandoned school, and Dana was gone.

  CHAPTER 4

  SOMETHING SCUTTLING

  When I was little, I loved the old Tarzan movies that Dad brought home from his store, with Johnny Weissmuller fighting crocodiles and lions, discovering lost cities and rescuing the good explorers, all while punishing ivory hunters, evil chieftains, criminals and Nazis. In those movies, Tarzan lived high in a jungle plateau called the escarpment.

  I remember how scared I was, when I was about five and heard my mother and a friend plan a hike up the escarpment.

  “D’you think I can bring Nate?”

  “Sure – it’s a long way up, but if he gets tired ...”

  “NO!” I ran away and had to be coaxed out from under the basement stairs. Often as it figured in my dreams, I believed that the escarpment was guarded by great apes who dropped boulders on unwanted explorers. In the movie, the visiting safari had been doomed until Tarzan showed up – and I knew that Tarzan was fiction, even if the escarpment wasn’t.

  My mother explained to me that the escarpment was simply the Niagara Escarpment – that great tree-covered cliff to the south that you can see from everywhere in our neighbourhood, which everyone just calls the Mountain. When I finished at Prince of Wales, my counsellor recommended that I go to a school up on the Mountain that had programs better suited to students like me, who, because they get good marks, are saddled with that godawful label, “gifted.”

  Now I ride the bus up and down the Mountain every school day, eyeing the thick covering of trees, the blasted walls of ancient rock, peering for a glimpse of the secrets behind them. I was always thinking and wondering and never giving up hope that, just behind the boring routines of everyday life, there might be something really interesting.

  My whole neighbourhood was built early in the twentieth century, when the steel industry was booming and people were coming from all over, mostly Europe, for the jobs. My dad tells me the houses around here are cheap; we all have backyards maybe six metres wide and ten deep, fenced off from each other with old pipe and chain-link fences.

  The northeast corner of our yard is a bamboo thicket. My dad said he and my mom had planted a potted bamboo there when I was a baby: “We had no idea it would grow like that.” I didn’t mind; when I was little I would make forts in that bamboo. It is evidently a semi-tropical plant, but it likes it here by the lake, where the air stinks of sulphur and ozone during the long steamy summers. The bamboo grows like an enormous weed; in spring I bring out a stepladder and trim the tops with long-handled clippers to stop them butting into the hydro wires.

  THE MORNING after Dana and I crashed the midnight game, I got out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom. Something fast and furtive was scuttling, whispering around the bathtub, climbing the side and falling, climbing and falling. It was one of the big house centipedes that sometimes fall into the bathtub at night, or slip out of a wall and skitter around the floors, hiding under rugs and inside books. They are fast and gross-looking with their long legs and feelers, but I’ve gotten used to them. They scoot here and scoot there, in fact I looked them up and their Latin name is scutigera. Scutigera coleoptrata.

  Creepy as they might be, I don’t like squishing living things. I took the empty peanut butter jar I kept on my bookshelf, scooped up this creature, popped on the lid and took it out to the backyard. Still in my pyjamas, I took the lid off of the composter and unscrewed the jar. The centipede shivered on the bottom, every part of it alert: its tiny black compound eyes, its feelers, its fifteen pairs of legs trembling and ready to flee me or fight me. It wasn’t happy about leaving our warm house. But the compost heap would offer it new adventures, lots of new little critters to eat; maybe it would even survive the winter.

  “Hey, scooty,” I said. “Here’s to new worlds.”

  I upended the jar and watched the centipede hit a blackened banana peel and skitter off into the muck of onion skins, eggshells and apple cores.

  I looked back at the jar: something still moved, flexing and stretching ambitiously. The centipede had left a leg behind, closing and extending all on its own. But the bug hadn’t seemed to miss it as it happily ran off into the compost. I guess with that many legs, you don’t limp if you lose just one. I blew into the jar to dislodge the leg and shook it, still bending and flexing, away into the grass. A big black-and-white cat tiptoed over and sniffed at it.

  “Don’t think you want to eat that, Pips.” Pips wasn’t our cat; too fat and glossy to be a stray, we figured that he lived somewhere, with somebody, in the neighbourhood. But he liked our backyard. Dad, for whatever reason, started calling him Pips. We didn’t know what his owners called him.

  Before I went back inside, I checked out my amazing bamboo stump. I crouched over it, balancing gingerly so I wouldn’t fall onto my knees in the dirt.

  Bamboo, I knew from experience, puts out underground shoots; a few shoots, pointed as arrowheads, came up in our yard every spring. In fact, Dad had me dig ditches in that corner of the garden and embed hunks of sheet metal in the ground in an (unsuccessful) attempt to stop the runners from snaking under the fences into the neighbours’ yards. Still, every summer the lawnmower slashed hunks of bamboo shoots out of our backyard’s embattled grass.

  Over this past summer, our patch had birthed the Godzilla of all bamboo shoots. I’d found it in August, when it had obviously just broken through the soil – its rounded shape was dirtied with chunks of moist dirt – and it was already as big around as a coffee can. Now, two months later, it was thick as a hydro pole and, when I poked it, felt just as solid. For sure Dad would want me to chop this up and cover it over.

  But I kind of liked this stump. It looked to me like one of
a kind. It obviously had a will of its own; even now, as the fall advanced and everything else was pale and withering, Stumpy was growing and thriving. The weather had been dry lately; I got the garden hose and gave the stump a good dowsing.

  Pips came up next to me and sniffed at it, flicking back and forth his long black tail with its white tip. Even he could tell there was something different about Stumpy. Then something rustled in the weeds, and Pips turned and bounded away.

  I looked up and saw a black shape flickering behind the bamboo that screened our back fence. I walked over to the fence, eyeing the house behind us for movement in the windows. The lady there didn’t like me petting Rocky.

  Rocky jumped up on the fence and thrust his stinky face into mine. He’s a big bony black Lab crossed with something else; maybe Rottweiler, since his head is wide and flattened, like a salamander. He used to bark at us a lot, so one day I told Dad I was going to make Rocky into a project.

  “Take it slow,” Dad had said. “Not just with that dog. Melanie’s got a hell of a temper: don’t get her mad at us, and don’t get yourself bit.”

  “There’s my buddy,” I said, scratching Rocky’s big ugly head. “There’s my big boy.” I reached into a pocket and pulled out a marrow bone I’d scooped from the kitchen. I flicked it into the air and, quick as a frog snapping up a fly, Rocky caught it with a crunch. I flicked him another one, and another, but I was running out of time and soon I headed back inside.

  CHAPTER 5

  SOMETHING BIG

  Early in the morning, when I don’t want to get up, I project myself; or imagine that I do. I picture myself as a set of eyes with no body, flying eyes or a spirit or a disembodied brain or a ghost that hums and hovers and drifts here and there like a hummingbird over every wall and yard and through the streets of this beat-up old city, the only city I know.

  I can launch off the lip of the Mountain, the rock face a hundred metres high that separates the new city from the old – launch so convincingly that, although I’m lying there in bed, I get a rush of vertigo as I fly, flicking leaves from the tops of the trees that anchor the crumbling soil of the cliffs. Then I skip off the roof of a freight car lumbering along the railroad line that follows the foot of the escarpment, and fly up Sherman Street past blocks and blocks of brick houses covered with soot from the few remaining factories that belch out smoke in the dead of night. I soar through the bedrooms of workers – slow to rise, like me, this time of day – the kitchens of hardworking mums slurping Pepsi to get them out the door after their too-short nights Steely Dan and Lakeport on their back porches to get them to sleep at the end of their too-long days. I buzz through the downtown criss-crossed with moving bodies and buses and cars and wheelchairs and electric scooters to the empty houses and warehouses of the north end. They are full of ghosts, my neighbour Ronny tells me, ghosts who worked and sweated and dreamed of something better, but who still ended up ghosts. This is their abode: the crack houses and the dazed women with smeared makeup who stand wobbling on street corners at seven in the morning. I go past the banked flames of the few coke ovens still simmering; past the lineups at the morning food banks; the SUVs and the oversized pickups of the guys with steady jobs and Ticats season tickets. I can zoom past them all quickly, through their yards and windows and kitchens so fast with my imaginary flying eyes because I fly silent and invisible and ...