The Midnight Games

by Lee, David Neil;

  “Bridge?” I suggested.

  “Yes, bridge ... bridge, a two-way going. So when there is, someday, a stable continuum threshold, we can have ... relationships, diplomatic relationships. As an Interlocutor it is not for me to take sides. Everyone is to consult me.” She shook her bulky head. “But the cult – they are renegades.”

  The elevator arrived and I held the door while the Interlocutor got in.

  The Interlocutor’s bizarre aroma filled the elevator and I groped for questions. This thing, or person, was really something else. “What,” I asked, “is a continuum threshold?”

  The elevator reached the bottom. When the door slid open an old man and his daughter moved to get in, but quickly skittered over to one side to make room for the Interlocutor and me. We passed them and went out into the street. A cold wind blew from the west and suddenly I felt drained and exhausted.

  “A bridge between what, and what?” I asked.

  “The northern volcanic desert of R’lyhnygoth. But the threshold is weak ...”

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  “Rest,” she said. “You will have more to do. However, I must keep moving.” The Interlocutor turned to head toward the men’s shelter. “I am a renegade too, now.

  “Pay close attention to your dreams,” she continued. “Cthulhu, if he has awakened, will work through dreams. And as Yog-Sothoth approaches, some will see him in dreams. And if he is allowed to enter this world, there will be no more dreams.” She gestured at the buildings and people around us. “All nightmare.”

  She rolled away down York Boulevard. I walked over to James and while I waited for a bus that would take me home, checked each way to make sure the Proprietor and his friends weren’t sneaking up on me. I had my bus pass; sometimes I walk home for the exercise, but I’d spent enough time today being fast on my feet. As I waited I checked my backpack to make sure the Necronomicon was still there.

  CHAPTER 10

  SOMETHING ROCKY

  I don’t like getting cuts, but I do like pouring hydrogen peroxide on cuts and watching it foam up. Science in action. As it foams up, horrible infectious bacteria are having the oxygen stripped away from them until they die. At least that’s how I understand it; my dad told me that my mother explained this to him and to me, when I was very young, so it is one of our few bits of shared family lore.

  The cut went right across my hand but it wasn’t deep. Like the Proprietor had said, Jimmy had only been trying to cut the strap. But you have to be careful with knives. When I was twelve and distributed flyers from my old wagon, I thought a guy had been following me one night, and I told Dad I figured I should carry a knife. I expected him to applaud this as a manly decision, a rite of passage, but instead he swore at me.

  “Don’t be stupid! If some low-life tries to mess with you, run!”

  “But ...”

  “Knives are for opening envelopes and boxes, and cutting string, and cleaning your nails with. If you want to carry a weapon, join the army.” Like I said, I was twelve at the time.

  “But ...”

  “Run. Run home and tell me, or phone the cops.” The next time I went out to deliver flyers, he put a sledgehammer in my wagon, “for self-defence.” It was so heavy that even with two hands I could barely drag it out and leave it on the lawn. This was the sort of thing Dad considered hilarious.

  My next birthday, he gave me a knife with a pinky-sized blade and a host of equally tiny accessories. At Christmas I got a cellphone; a 7-Eleven pay-as-you-go cellphone, but it was my first and I was proud. When I got my first stadium gig, I gave up the flyer delivery job. Considering my financial situation, I often wished I still had it.

  After I’d cleaned the cut with peroxide, I painted it with antibiotic ointment, rolled up some gauze and stuck it on with band-aids. Very professional-looking, I thought.

  Sweaty from all this running around, I stripped off my jacket and hoodie and poured a glass of iced tea from the jug in the refrigerator. I flopped on the couch and stared at the TV, but didn’t turn it on.

  Should I have pulled this prank with the Necronomicon? It had only gotten me more tangled up with these creepy Resurrection Church people. I didn’t like them one bit and I could tell the feeling was mutual.

  Then again, the scooter lady had tentacles. She was definitely not from around here. There had to be other worlds involved, worlds I’d never heard of, other races, other species. None of the movies in the science fiction section at Touchdown Video (all of it now in boxes or on shelves all over our house), none of the books I’d ever read included anything quite like the Interlocutor.

  I pulled the Necronomicon out of my backpack and looked through it. Spells, some of them in a language that looked like Latin, some translated into English. At the beginning of the book was a two-line epigraph:

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.

  I wrinkled my nose. Yuck. Was this what I was risking my life for, my freedom, my valuable rear end? Some rotten poetry? If that wasn’t bad enough, the book seemed to be linked with some kind of death-worshipping or devil-worshipping cult that, lame as its ideas might be, seemed to be capable of impossible stunts like conjuring storm clouds and summoning huge centipede-type monsters into a football stadium. A cult led by some plastic-looking white guy who was annoyingly self-assured and commanded muscular thugs. Plus, the scooter lady had tentacles. Thank god none of these people, or things, knew my name or where I lived.

  There was a knock on the front door.

  The venetian blinds over the living-room window were closed and I peeked out. A cab pulled away from in front of the house. There was some middle-aged dude on the porch; thin brown hair high up on his pale forehead, wide-set eyes and a pinched, worried-looking mouth. He was wearing an old-fashioned looking suit, and a shirt and tie like a motivational speaker or a school principal.

  No way I was answering the door. This guy had Resurrection Church written all over him. I know we shouldn’t go by appearances, but if I opened the door I would get sucked back into this scary and screwed up new world I’d stumbled into when I snuck into the stadium. I peeked again. This guy looked like he was an expert on screwy old books, spoke dead languages better than he spoke English and thought human sacrifice was okay if agreed to by a show of hands.

  The Resurrection Church had found me after all. I worried that when Dad got back from work, they would find him too – but it was me they wanted. I needed to get away.

  As soon as the man in the suit gave up and turned away from our front door, I rushed upstairs and emptied out my backpack. Then I refilled it with stuff I figured I would absolutely need: laptop, flashlight, matches, toothbrush, et cetera. This was the emergency stash I kept in my dresser. If school, home and Hamilton ever got too much for me, I had intended to amass enough spare change to, if necessary, buy a bus ticket to someplace far away and exotic, or at least on the fringes of civilization: San Francisco, Guadalajara, Whitehorse. I counted my stash: six toonies. Well, twelve bucks is better than nothing. Downstairs, I filled a bottle with water, threw some granola bars into the backpack’s side pocket and put on my hoodie and jacket.

  I peeked through the blinds again. The man on the porch was now out on the sidewalk. He looked up and down the street; he looked at our house; he looked at his wristwatch; then, producing a cellphone that he stared at as if some hideous parasite had attached itself to his hand, he started gingerly keying in a number.

  My phone started to ring. Was this a coincidence, or did this guy have my number? I was tempted to answer it and ask what was up. But then I thought of the goons at the library and the crowd of people in front of the stadium the other night. How many people were tied up with the Resurrection Church? Once this guy knew I was in the house, he might show up on my porch with an army. I sat still, feeling trapped and peeking outside from time to time until, looking exasperated, the man in the suit headed down the street and was gone.


  I made sure the front door was locked, headed through the kitchen and slipped out the back door, locking it behind me. Our back yard was empty. At the far end, through the screen of bamboo fronds, I could see Rocky’s hopeful black face poking through the chain-link fence. I suppressed a quick impulse to go back in the house for some marrow bones, and headed up the narrow lane between our house and the neighbour’s.

  I came around the corner of our porch to see an enormous black SUV coming down the street, the kind of car my dad always says sarcastic things about.

  “Here we are, running out of fossil fuels,” Dad likes to point out, “and the cars are getting bigger and bigger.”

  Personally, I hated cars – maybe because I blamed them for killing my mother, I don’t really know – so I am no expert on the subject, but eventually I saw what he meant. Walking through downtown as night fell, lately I was seeing more and more of these enormous vehicles. Dodge Rams cruising James Street on Friday nights; Ridgelines big enough for six, a solitary driver slowing to check out the teenage girls on their way to weekend parties; or any one of those destroyer-like SUVs, their model names jumbled images of nature and conquest – Expedition, Terrain, Sequoia, Armada, Yukon – as if their sole purpose was to speed their drivers away to wilderness strongholds in the advent of an apocalypse.

  But for all that, I might not have paid any attention to the huge black Escalade that pulled up across the street from my house, if the door hadn’t opened and Kara, the girl from the stadium, hadn’t climbed out of it. She spoke to someone inside, pointed at my house, smiled and started down the street, swinging her school backpack over her shoulder – she lived just a few streets away.

  Kara, jeez. We’d had our differences years ago – in grade five she got me called to the principal’s office by telling the teacher that I’d had a knife in my backpack – but now we were older and I thought we’d put that behind us. We got along okay when we worked the stadium concessions at football games. I felt betrayed.

  As the Escalade idled in the street, BuzzCut and FiveByFive – oops, I mean Clare and Jimmy – emerged. I headed out to the sidewalk to run down the street, but coming up from the corner was the geeky-looking guy in the suit. He spotted me, broke into a hopeful smile and raised his hand.

  I headed back down the narrow laneway between our house and the neighbour’s, but Jimmy, moving with unexpected speed, was already on the porch beside me. He lunged down to grab my backpack but I was too fast. Jimmy came over the rail and hit the ground behind me, and I charged through our gate and across our backyard, then leapt through the bamboo leaves, hooking my legs over the half-concealed chain-link fence. The bamboo scrabbled at my pack, and I had to tug the cut strap off a snag, then I was into Melanie’s yard and Rocky was leaping up, trying to lick my face.

  “Attaboy,” I said, one hand petting that big froggy head as I crossed the yard, the other hand reaching out to hit the gate latch. In a second I was tugging at the unfamiliar hardware and opening the gate. I leaned down and gave Rocky one last scratch behind the ears.

  “See ya later, bud.” I heard the sound of a body crashing through the leaves and over the fence behind us. Then I was through the gate, latching it behind me as Rocky snarled and rushed to meet the intruder. “That’s my Rocky,” I said to myself, as a howl of pain came from Jimmy. Then I was out in the street and running east toward the stadium.

  “Help,” I heard a frightened voice call out behind me. “No! Getoffa me! Help!” For a moment I felt sorry for Jimmy. Dork he may be, but this wasn’t really his fault. He just hadn’t put in the time making friends with Rocky.

  CHAPTER 11

  SOMEONE EXILED

  With Jimmy hollering behind me, I ran out onto Rosemont and up Barnesdale. Stopping to catch my breath, I saw the Escalade nose around the corner, so I ducked into the lane that ran behind the storefronts to Lottridge, ran through the Big Bee parking lot, then crossed Barton to the Tim Hortons. From inside, I could see the street better than anyone outside could see me.

  I bought some Timbits and ate one or two while I waited. No one came looking for me. Keeping off the street as much as I could, I cut through the car wash and the FreshCo parking lot and headed down Gage, turning east on Primrose to pass the abandoned textile factory. Before I got to Belview Park, I came to a rundown-looking duplex, its sagging porch freshly painted blue and white. This was Sam’s house.

  I knocked on the door. Through its window I could see Sam’s sister Mehri; she saw me and called to her brother. I waved to her and tried the door. It was locked, but Mehri unlatched it and let me in.

  “Oh boy,” she said, “Timbits.”

  Mehri smiled and her face kind of lit up. I tried to smile back, but just made a pathetic whimpering sound and coughed to clear my throat. Mehri has big dark eyes and when she smiles her face, framed by soft black hair, seems to open up and ... the overall effect is hard to describe. She has a gracefully arched nose – aquiline I would call it, having learned that word from the novel Dracula, where Dracula is described as having an aquiline nose. How is this relevant? Well, it makes him distinguished-looking, and he is also (you know this if you’ve read Dracula) from the East – as was Mehri, but I shouldn’t go on and on about this, because at this point the connections start to get fuzzy. Once, in a rare moment alone with Mehri, trying to be hip and urbane, I tried to explain them to her – Dracula, the East, aquilinity – and, well, it had just ended in an uncomfortable silence.

  Anyway, just about anything Mehri does with her face seems very profound to me. Sometimes I have to look away.

  “So, Nate, do you want to come in?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I mean, yes, thanks, of course.” Since the Dracula conversation, Mehri looks at me with this little smile, like she’s waiting for the next hilarious goofy thing her brother’s Anglo friend is going to say. Sam clattered down the stairs.

  “Nate. Timbits. Awesome.”

  “Everybody seems to like them,” I said weakly.

  “I’m just making supper, Nate,” Sam’s mother said. “Would you like to have some rice with us?”

  “Uhh, actually, Mrs. Shirazi ... I dunno...” Actually, I was so hungry I was afraid I’d eat everything. As usual, Sam’s mother insisted. “Some rice” turned out to be a spiced chicken stew thingy called khoresh, which we scooped up with a flatbread that I already knew as lavash.

  Sam and I had gotten to know each other in grade eight when we were paired up for a class project. He and his family were new to the country and Sam’s English was minimal. I began to help him out after class. I didn’t have many friends myself, and my father and I did not make up much of a family, but it was hard to feel sorry for myself when I saw the Shirazis, fresh from Iran and starting from scratch in everything they did, from saying good morning in English to finding jobs.

  “I am a master of many skills,” Mr. Shirazi had said to me once. “Writer and newspaper reporter, I can run a variety of web- and sheet-fed offset printing presses, and I can service PCs and I have a master’s degree in Persian literature from the University of Tehran. But at the moment, I am driving a taxicab.”

  Sam turned out to be smart and motivated, and he helped me feel smart and motivated too. Being new to everything in Hamilton, Sam was something of an outsider, and I tended to be a loner also. Maybe it was too many days at the library looking up books on dinosaurs and science and astronomy (lately also art, ancient and modern, especially drawing), film, Charles Dickens, you name it ... too many black-and-white Universal horror movies, I don’t know. Anyway, I had spent a lot of time at his house, and I was thinking I might ask to stay the night.

  Before we did the dishes, I checked the time and phoned Dad. He was home from work and asked me what the hell was going on.

  “There’s some guys in a big black SUV; I swear to god they’re staking the place out. I went and knocked on their window and they told me they were waiting for a buddy. I asked ’em who their buddy was and said I was calling the
cops and they just laughed. It was kind of a beefy-looking guy and a woman – real big lady with a sort of rakish haircut.”

  “Dad, watch out for those people.” I was parroting back exactly what he had said to me last night.

  “I called the cops on ’em. But that was an hour ago and no one’s shown up.”

  “Don’t let them in the house.”

  “Of course not. Nate – where are you and what are you doing?” He was relieved to hear that I was at the Shirazis.

  “Sam and I are working on an essay for school ...”

  “On a Saturday night?”

  “I’m getting my butt in gear, like you always tell me I should. I’m going to stay over.”

  Dad didn’t complain. “That’s what you need,” he said. “People around you. A real family. Give me a call in the morning.”

  Chances are I could have stayed. But for some reason I didn’t even ask. Since the night at the stadium, I was starting to feel more and more like some kind of creep magnet. Who knows, if this Yog-Sothoth/Cthulhu/Old Ones stuff was true, maybe the Resurrection Church was homing in on me through some kind of paranormal force; eventually it would come round to the Shirazis too. That was the last thing this family needed; Sam had told me a little bit about what they had been through before they left Iran.

  Then I figured out the perfect place to spend the night, where no one would find me. Genius, pure genius.

  A nineties-vintage Toyota RAV4 pulled into the driveway and Sam’s dad came out along with his oldest sister, Hamideh. I greeted them and said I had to go, but before I left, I pulled out the Necronomicon. “Mr. Shirazi,” I asked, “have you ever heard of this thing?”