I HEARD voices and looked up. At the main desk, Meghan was fielding questions from two people. I recognized them from the night at the stadium: a tall, muscular white woman with a buzz cut, and a shorter, pudgy man who looked Indian or South Asian. He was the guy who had grabbed me outside the stadium and messed with my phone. They both wore plain white shirts and dark slacks, like the prowling evangelists who hassle me at bus stops with their pamphlets and Bible stories.
“... not familiar with that title,” Meghan was giving them the same attitude she’d given me. But what would she do next? For a second she glanced at me and I raised my hands and shook my head. Don't put these people onto me!
She turned her eyes back to them. “I’ll look it up for you.”
“You know perfectly well what we want.” The woman began raising her voice. “Where is it? We have a right to that book ...”
Given their buttoned-down appearance, the one who stood out was the woman with the buzz cut. She was really big and she was getting loud. She had pushed past Meghan to the archives door and was pulling on the knob.
“Open this door.”
“I’m calling security,” Meghan said, but the man leaned over and grabbed the phone. Still hiding in the stacks, I pulled out my cellphone.
“Open this door.” Now BuzzCut had pulled a pry bar from her jacket. This was getting too weird for me.
I punched 911 and was immediately put on hold. This was not fast enough.
Meghan looked down at the man holding the phone, Mister FiveByFive.
“Would you stop that? Sir?” Meghan stepped closer to him. That didn’t strike me as a good idea. “Get away from the phone.” He raised his arm to push her away. Then with a loud crack, BuzzCut broke the lock on the archives door. Everyone stopped and looked.
I rolled up the copy of the Necronomicon, jumped to my feet and headed toward the door. As I passed FiveByFive, I gave him a good whack in the rear end with the book he wanted so much.
“Hey! Losers! You are so hopeless.” As I reached the door, I held the book over my head so they could get a good look. Then I waved it at them, the dog-eared pages flapping like owl’s wings. “Pissheads! Lookie lookie!”
For a second everyone looked at me. I turned and ran to the top of the stairs; with the new library set-up, the whole area is windows and natural light, and they could still see me from Local History & Archives.
For a few seconds, at the top of the stairs, I felt great. This was like those moments when I have to talk in class, when suddenly, after all the prep and procrastination, the anxiety drains away and I feel brilliant. Here was I now, brilliant. I had surprised everyone. I was in control. I smiled. I waved.
Then I turned, and standing next to me at the top of the stairs was the Proprietor. At the stadium the other night, when he stopped Dana and me, he’d had an amused little smile on his face practically the whole time, this little I’m-so-above-all-of-this smirk. He wasn’t smiling now. “Give me the book.” He moved between me and the stairs. I wished I was holding a big cup of cold Steely Dan.
“You little...” I felt my magic moment fizzle away. I heard the other two running toward us. The Proprietor grabbed my arm and reached for the Necronomicon. I pulled away, and threw the book over the rail.
The book landed on a broad concrete beam. Surprised, the Proprietor loosened his grip. I pulled away from him and vaulted over the rail, following the Necronomicon. I balanced on the beam – it was really wide, so it was easy – scooped up the book, jammed it in my backpack and zipped it shut.
I looked back at the second floor of the library. The Proprietor’s buddies had joined him. The three of them stood there looking at me.
“Dammit,” the Proprietor said. “Move your lazy asses. I’m not going after him.”
FiveByFive began to climb over the rail. From down the stairs, someone shouted at us. Two security guards had just reached the landing and were coming up the stairs.
“Get back! You!”
I followed the beam to the window, lowered myself over the ledge and dropped. I almost lost my balance when my feet bounced off the rail, but I recovered, hopped onto the landing and scrambled down the stairs to the main floor. I paused and looked back. These people were so stupid.
Then the Proprietor came rocketing down the stairs as fast as I had come, his two buddies right behind him, trailed by the confused security guards. I turned left and ran through both sets of sliding doors, setting off another alarm as I headed into the Jackson Square food court. I sped past the market and the pharmacy’s back door, hoping to lose them in the mall – dodging scooters, school kids and old people with walkers – rounded a corner and shot down the stairs to the underground parking lot.
Hamilton’s downtown is supposedly depressed and needs reviving, but you wouldn’t know it by Jackson Square in the daytime. Up in the mall, it was full of people, and down here in the parking garage, it was full of cars. I don’t know if half the people who come through the mall even know the garage exists; I’d never been down there myself, and I didn’t figure I’d be followed unless some good citizen in the mall, thinking they were helping catch a thief, pointed me out to the three creeps from the library.
But what do you know, as I hunted between the cars for the York Boulevard exit, who should come clattering down the stairs looking every which way for me?
Uh oh – the exit, which I figured would open onto the street, was blocked by a sliding door. Drivers inserted their paid ticket into a machine to open the exit door to get out. With no ticket, the only way out was to walk back upstairs to the mall – the stairs that BuzzCut, FiveByFive and the Proprietor were coming down right this second. They did not look willing to forgive and forget. I heard an engine starting up and ducked behind a black SUV, until I spotted the car. Sure enough, someone in a beat-up old station wagon was getting ready to go.
“He’s down here somewhere,” I heard the Proprietor say.
“Why would he come down here? There’s no way out.”
“’Cause he’s too smart for his own good. Search between the cars. You go that way. And you ...”
This was not good. The driver of the station wagon was idling for what seemed like forever. Come on, buddy! – my life is at stake while you scroll through your iPod or, more likely, rummage through your ABBA cassettes.
Now I was getting scared. Once this car pulled out, there would be no witnesses in the parking garage and I was sure that if these three got their hands on me, they would inflict pain and humiliation.
The station wagon was finally moving. The driver backed out, taking it slow in these narrow spaces, and inched toward the exit arrows. I darted from the SUV to the front of a big family van. But it was so big I couldn’t see if anyone was coming; I dropped to my knees and scuttled to the next car, another SUV. Bit by bit I was getting closer to the exit.
I wished the station wagon would hurry up and as I listened to the grumble of its engine I worried about suffocating on carbon monoxide. Then I realized that the mall must have a pretty good system to circulate air down here, like those movies where the hero finds a ventilation grill, pries it off with their bare hands and escapes the bad guys through amazingly roomy air ducts. I looked around for such a grill. No such luck.
The station wagon was pulling up to the exit. I wanted to bolt, but if I startled the driver they might just stop what they were doing and roll up their windows. I had to wait. I hugged my backpack to my chest and huddled against the SUV.
When I heard a footstep I turned. BuzzCut was standing two metres behind me, looking the other way. She turned to address the others.
“Are we even sure ...?”
As I turned my head to check on the station wagon, BuzzCut saw me and yelled. I crouched there paralyzed; the station wagon driver was just feeding their ticket into the machine. I started to crawl under the SUV but BuzzCut grabbed my ankle. I twisted to break her grip, reached up and grabbed the car’s frame, and pulled myself through. I could hear the other two running af
ter me.
Then the sliding door started to rumble. I leaped to my feet, ran past the hissing Proprietor, past the station wagon and rolled under the door just as it cleared the concrete. I kept running up the ramp to the street, dodging traffic as I crossed to the aboveground parking garage on the corner of MacNab.
I had a plan. Up to level 3, then onto the glass-enclosed walkway between the parking garage and Jackson Square; it would be empty this time of day. From there, I could scope out the street three storeys down, and spy on my hopelessly stupid pursuers. If they looked up, I would have lots of time to wave and laugh, and then make my escape.
Out of breath, I punched the button and waited for the elevator. Around the corner I heard a humming and clattering, and a hissing sound that might have been a curse. Oh no, I thought, and around the corner rolled the woman who had stopped me outside the library.
“You have chosen your side,” she gasped. “That is good. You have the book. If you keep it ...” Hoarse and shuddering, she was a lot more out of breath than I was. For the first time I noticed a transparent tube running up from her clothing and disappearing behind her ear.
“If you let me,” she wheezed, “I will ...”
I didn’t want to “let her” do anything, or even let her anywhere near me. I turned and fled around the corner, hitting the stairs and leaving behind this shambling freak with her odour of garbage and ammonia. I came out on the third floor and warily entered the glass-walled walkway. Below me was the flow of York Boulevard traffic and scattered figures from the men’s shelter, zigzagging through the moving cars to the library and Jackson Square. But I couldn’t see my three pursuers. Those people, I snickered to myself, they’re such losers. Three against one, but here I am. It wasn’t even that hard.
From previous visits I knew that at this time of day, an hour could go by without anyone coming through the walkway. I heard the double doors from Jackson Square squeak open, but I was thinking about my next move. I had the Necronomicon, but what good was it to me? I liked the idea that the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods did not have it, since they seemed to think they needed its help to conjure up the Great Old Ones, but what was I going to do with it?
Echoing my thoughts, beside me a voice said, “Just what good is that book ... to you?” I looked up: the Proprietor was right beside me. I backed away, but bumped into someone on my other side. It was that tall woman, BuzzCut. All three of them were there.
The Proprietor shook his head. “I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got a liking for this boy. I feel like saying ... give us the book, my friend, and we’ll go our separate ways.”
“Give us the book.” FiveByFive ripped my backpack off, and I felt BuzzCut gripping my arms. I threw myself forward, grabbed my bag and pushed toward the parking garage. BuzzCut elbowed me in the side of the head and I stumbled, but I didn’t let go of the backpack. FiveByFive tugged hard, but I wouldn’t move.
“Son, it doesn’t have to be like this,” the Proprietor said.
“Let go of me.” BuzzCut and FiveByFive had now picked me up and, between the two of them, carried me through the doors to the parking garage. Ignoring my struggles, FiveByFive punched the button on the elevator.
“Enough with the stairs,” he said. “I’m out of it.”
“Let’s get him into the van,” the Proprietor said. He eyed the numbers over the elevator. It was at 2. “If anyone asks us about him, say ‘mall security’ and keep going. They’ll ignore anything the kid says.”
The elevator dinged. There was a pause. I waited for someone to relax their grip, just a bit, and then ...
The doors opened. The scooter lady filled the doorway. She clattered and hummed toward us.
The Proprietor swore. “Back,” he said. “Back to the mall.”
I was hauled through the doors onto the walkway, but the scooter lady wasn’t giving up. Bashing through the doors behind us, she stayed right on our tails.
“This is too far,” she wheezed. “You will not without permission beckon Yog-Sothoth. You will not attack the innocent. You will not sacrifice.” We stopped in the middle of the walkway and turned to face her. Meanwhile, FiveByFive had been trying to get my backpack away from me, and I had been resisting.
“You little bastard,” he hissed. “Let go.” He pulled, and even though he was only tugging with one arm, he was too strong for me. I knew I couldn’t resist him much longer. He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. With a click, a gleaming blade leapt into his hand.
“Jimmy, put that away,” the Proprietor said. “Clare, hold onto him tight.” But Jimmy reached forward and slashed at my hands. I tried to recoil, but Clare and Jimmy were too strong. I let go of my backpack, and it was flung to the floor.
“NO!” shouted the woman on the scooter. Suddenly something happened to her; the listless figure on the chair rose up and billowed out and burst forth in the narrow walkway. Clare was thrown to one side, and I was knocked off my feet as something as thick and sinuous as a firehose whipped back and forth through the passage. The Proprietor fled to the doors at the end. From my place on the battered floor of the walkway, I looked up at Jimmy. Something dark and glistening was wrapped around his body – he struggled for breath and looked down at me with bulging, pleading eyes. And another glistening shape like a python was whipping through the air around him, grabbing the knife. And above me was the scooter lady. Her clothes had slipped from her shoulder, showing dark, scaly skin, and the things that held Jimmy and the knife were tentacles. The scooter lady had tentacles.
“You will raise no weapon,” she hissed, and the dark tentacle stretched like a slingshot – stretched far further than I imagined a living arm could stretch – and hammered the knife so deeply into the ceiling that the glass rattled in the walkway walls. Then it reached down and I felt the arm curl around me and, with infinite softness and strength, glowing from within with a superhuman furnace-like heat, lift me to my feet.
“Proprietor.” The woman’s tentacles began to withdraw. The Proprietor, heading back toward Jackson Square, stopped in his tracks. The other tentacle dropped Jimmy to the floor; he moaned, but the Proprietor simply stepped over him to approach us.
“You are way out of line here, Interlocutor.” The woman, or creature, ignored him, withdrawing one tentacle and using the other to fold and tuck her clothes back into place. In a few moments she appeared, tattered and sick and obese as she seemed, to be a human woman, gesturing with normal arms in billowing clothes and frayed gloves.
“We are going about our business. This is procedure. It’s your job to judge and negotiate and liaise, not to intercede. You are supposed to facilitate the coming together of worlds. You can’t ‘will not’ this and ‘will not’ that. And how dare you attack ...”
Wheezing with the effort she had just made, the Interlocutor looked up at him with contempt. “You will not use weapons. Never in my presence.”
“Jimmy was just cutting the strap, he didn’t hurt him ...”
“Uh, actually ...” I held up my left hand. It had a slash across the top of it where Jimmy had cut the strap and me both at once. I groped through my pockets for a tissue or an old paper napkin. “Any of you people got a band-aid?”
The Interlocutor ignored me. Whoever or whatever she – or he, or it – was, she was good and mad. “You will not prey on the innocent. When you prey on the innocent, you make victims, and you breed hatred, and you make war. You, Proprietor, you and your people ... there are boundaries.”
“We are using due process here ... and look at this kid ... what about him overstepping the boundaries? He just stole an important book from the library, a book that’s meant to be a public resource. And he stole it.”
“He is no kid. He is never a kid again!” The Interlocutor spat out the words with contempt. She rolled forward and before I could get out of the way, put her gloved hand, or what passed for a hand, on my shoulder. “You have drawn him into your conspiracies. You dare to raise weapons in my
presence. Raise weapons against a young one. Now he is not a child, because you have broken the boundaries. From this moment, I am putting my hand on him.”
In fact, I wished she would take her hand off me. As it lay on my shoulder I imagined the pulsing and surging tentacle, grey and lined with tiny black suckers, separated from my skin only by the threadbare fabric of this creature’s disguise.
“From this moment,” she repeated, “he is under my protection.”
Although staying safely out of range, the Proprietor was defiant. He snarled a tough-guy line I remembered from movies: “You don’t know who you’re messing with.”
“Go,” said the Interlocutor. She wheezed, and I felt a tremble go through the limb on my shoulder. The tube running up her neck swelled and throbbed. I wondered about her health situation. Perhaps she had an illness – or, it occurred to me, perhaps for such a strange creature, the air we breathed was the wrong kind of air.
“We’re outta here. We don’t need the book, and we don’t need you. You can’t protect anyone from anything.” The Proprietor turned to go. “You haven’t heard the last of me.” He and I had obviously watched a lot of the same movies. I waited for him to tell us we’d made ourselves a powerful enemy.
When the Interlocutor had gone into action, Clare had been pushed aside, and wisely had decided to stay aside. Now she got slowly to her feet. I broke away from the Interlocutor and scooped up my backpack. The Proprietor and his henchmen, or henchpersons, headed back toward Jackson Square; Jimmy wistfully looking up at his knife, way out of reach. I looked up at it too – it was stuck into the ceiling so deeply that the entire blade was buried and some of the handle too. The cleaning staff would be scratching their heads over this one.
The Interlocutor turned toward the elevator. After I hooked my backpack over my shoulder on its one good strap, I saw that a swath of her voluminous skirt was torn and dragging behind her. I picked it up and helped her to tuck it in.
“Why do they call you the Interlocutor?”
“They call themselves the followers of Cthulhu – they claim to worship him at their Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods. When you went to the ceremony, you heard them invoke his name.” In her raspy voice, she pronounced Cthulhu differently than any I had heard so far. “There are forces who want to build a real ... road ... overpass ...” She waved her gloved hands in the air.
The Midnight Games Page 6