The Midnight Games

by Lee, David Neil;

  I looked up and down the street. On the left, down the block the Rivas family clustered around their van, dressed as if they were coming back from church. A few houses to the right, Mrs. Smot was crouched in her front yard with scissors, trimming the last of her summer lawn. Nowhere could I see lurking vehicles, angry thugs or extraterrestrial supermonsters.

  As I pulled out my keys a white business card fell onto the porch. I picked it up and let myself in. I carefully locked the door behind me, went into the living room and sank onto the couch.

  I looked at the card.

  RESURRECTION CHURCH

  OF THE ANCIENT GODS

  – A CHANGE IS COMING –

  99 MARKLE AVENUE

  This was the card the Proprietor had given me at the stadium. A change is coming. Strangely enough, it echoed what Dana had said about his nights in the abandoned freighter, hearing something brush up against the hull in the dead of night. “Something big comes out of the deep part of the lake, to tunnel under the city ... something is happening ... things are changing.”

  And those road workers I’d talked to – they seemed to think that something scary was going on under the city streets.

  And that woman in the scooter, who was not really a woman or, for that matter, a creature of any recognizable gender or species. Yes, she existed; I had seen her and touched her and she had spoken to me. A change was coming, for sure.

  Dana sensed it wasn’t a change that meant better times. “One way or another, I’m gonna get screwed,” he’d said.

  I took off my jacket, went into the kitchen and looked out at the backyard. Pips the cat was nosing around the garden. There was a rustle of movement in the bamboo, another cat or a squirrel. To all appearances, front and back, life on Somerset Avenue was dead calm.

  I dropped back onto the living room couch and tried to picture the city’s shores. I had never been far into the industrial lands. For one thing, lots of it was fenced and barricaded: keep out. But why were the Great Old Ones coming back here – why Hamilton? Why the beat-up old east end? Was it all the people here who were needy and desperate, feeling ripped off by hard times? I settled into the couch and let my mind wander, scanned the city in my mind’s eye. I went through our neighbourhood, expecting to soar over the industrial district and then out over the lake – over to the other side and beyond, to Toronto and then the country and then the world – but this afternoon, something was wrong. In the north end I flew out over an abyss, and suddenly my imaginary wings could find no purchase in the empty air. I was plummeting while something huge and dark curled over me like a tsunami, and I heard the words from the midnight ceremony echo in my brain – Yog-Sothoth – along with weird unpronounceable syllables, something like “fahengluey midlewuh’naf cthulhu erlieh wugah-naggled fuhtagen.” I turned in my sleep, and woke up to a sound like an angry buzz that rose to a frightened screech. Groggily, I blinked and stretched. What was all that? I looked at my phone. It was mid-afternoon.

  Dad would be home soon. It was up to me to start cooking. First, I’d do a few chores to wake up.

  I went into the backyard and filled up the watering can. In a few weeks, it would start to get cold enough that, anticipating the first frost, we would drain the hose and shut off the faucet, but for now the water was still running.

  Rocky clattered into the fence as soon as I’d come outside, so I put down the can and went to go see him. As I fed Rocky a marrow bone and scratched his head I relaxed a little bit. Out here, things were normal. I looked around for Pips, but he was gone. A rusty hoe leaned in the corner of the yard – I had been meaning to bring it in since August. A few knobbly tomatoes still bobbed in the neglected vegetable garden. Nothing here could behead anybody or, as far I knew, even wanted to; nothing here had tentacles; et cetera. Rocky was still getting fed and put out in the yard – maybe when all this stuff blew over, I would go around the corner and down Rosemont, knock on Melanie’s door, apologize for the creep who’d chased me into her backyard and ask her if I could take him for a walk.

  I patted Rocky one last time and went to water the overgrown bamboo stump. But it was gone.

  Where Stumpy had been, there was a ragged hole in the garden, as if an abyss had opened up under Stumpy and it had simply fallen away.

  I dropped to my knees and reached my arm into the hole. I felt nothing but damp, cold space: I waved my arm around and hit solid earth on every side. I pulled my arm out. This was a serious hole. Part of what the road worker implied was a wave of sinkholes in lower Hamilton. His exact words, in fact, had been, “Like there’s something big down there, and it wants to come up.”

  I went into the kitchen and scanned the cluttered counter. I picked up an old flashlight, clicked it on and off to check that it still gave off a flickering yellow light. But what was this?

  There was blood on the flashlight. It had come from me. There was dirt on my sleeves, along with the blood, from when I’d knelt on the grass and reached far into the hole, and there were more smears on my pants, along with wisps of black and white fur.

  I yelped and ran upstairs to the bathroom. There was a centipede in the bathtub. I yelled in anger and stomped at it, but it dodged, skittering to one side and desperately trying to climb the tub’s sheer sides. I tried to smash it with my fist but it evaded me again. I looked at the smear of cat blood my sleeve had left on the old scratched enamel. Then I took a few deep breaths, went into my bedroom, got the peanut butter jar, scooped up the wiggly bug and screwed shut the lid.

  I emptied my pockets onto the floor, took off my hoodie, jumped into the bathtub and turned on the shower. The water soaked through my clothes and ran down the drain, pink and murky. I pulled the hoodie in with me, and I didn’t strip off all my clothes until the water started to run clear. I scrubbed my hands until they stung. The room filled with steam. I turned off the water and squeegeed my skin with my hands, searching for the slightest leftover stain or wisp of black fur.

  Wrapping myself in a towel, I took everything down to the washing machine in the basement. I dripped extra detergent on all the darker spots and put my clothes in the wash.

  I shivered as I looked out at the backyard. Dammit, wasn’t anything the way it seemed anymore?

  I got dressed and headed back out to the garden. I spread a garbage bag in front of the hole and knelt on it. Rocky came up and pressed against the fence, eager to see what I was doing. I shone the flashlight into the hole. This time I was careful not to touch the sides.

  It was deep all right, round and wide as Stumpy had been. It sloped sharply under the bamboo patch, its bottom stained with blood and tufts of Pips’ fur. I tried to recreate events. A sinkhole opens up, Stumpy gets pulled underground, Pips comes over to investigate and in a few seconds he too gets sucked down into the depths. I shone the light again. That hole went seriously down – in fact it wasn’t just a hole, it was a tunnel. How far did it go?

  Watching me from the fence, Rocky whimpered with excitement. He was obviously thinking that he was in the wrong place -all the action was over in my yard.

  At the farthest flicker of the flashlight, I saw movement. Something glistened across the tunnel, and then vanished to the left. So there was a cross-tunnel, and down there, something was digging. And digging and digging and digging. Digging under the streets, so that sinkholes were “popping up” everywhere. “Like there’s something big down there, and it wants to come up.” Digging under Ivor Wynne, and erupting out of the stadium’s guts to seize that poor guy on the stretcher and drag him off to god knows where. Hiding itself in the night and the earth and the waters of Lake Ontario. Dana had prided himself on not being afraid of the dangers that lurked in the city at night, but even his voice had trembled when he described what he’d heard from his hiding place on the Sandoval: “Something big comes out of the deep part of the lake. To tunnel under the city.”

  Rocky dropped down onto all fours and started sniffing around his muddy garden. He growled.

  “This is j
ust great,” I muttered out loud, leaning over the hole. “Of all the bamboo patches and backyards in all of Hamilton, Ontario, it has to come up ...”

  Rocky barked twice. Something exploded out of the dirt and tackled him. He snarled, and then yelped as the thing tightened its hold and tried to pull him into the ground. I ran to the fence. Rocky was snared by green-jointed limbs that had erupted out of a hole like the one I’d just been peering into. His eyes were scared; he snarled as he sank his teeth into a green limb.

  Grabbing the hoe from the corner, I jumped over the fence between our backyards, hooked it around one of the green limbs and pulled.

  And got a good look at what had killed Pips and now was after Rocky. This thing hadn’t sucked down the bamboo stump; it was the bamboo stump, or some creature that I had watered and talked to for months, treating it like a weird pet, when it was actually what Lovecraft had called a dritch. The stump was part of a long, segmented body that extended back into the ground. The branches around it, that had lengthened and thickened over the months, were legs bristly and jointed like a spider’s. A row of stubs that I’d thought were about to sprout leaves were now glistening eyes, and the thing was shoving its length out of the soil to get two dripping pincers into Rocky.

  Tugging with a rusty hoe on the segmented limb that trapped Rocky was doing no good. This dritch thing was strong. So I raised the hoe and smashed it in the head, denting its horny surface but not drawing any blood, or whatever flowed through its veins if it had veins. Rocky’s growls had become hoarse grinding sounds as the thing’s limbs crushed the life out of him. I jammed the hoe into its mandibled mouth and pushed with all my strength. The dritch didn’t like that. It shuddered and out of its mouth came a sound like a busted lawn mower. HRUGAKAKKAGARRHHHH! and it pushed back.

  I dug my heels into the battered grass. Turning its attention to me, its grip loosened and Rocky pulled himself away, panting and gasping. The dritch lunged at me, and I pushed back. I might as well have been trying to push away a bulldozer. It spat out the hoe and surged forward, knocking me onto my back. Its limbs closed around me. I grabbed at one but couldn’t stop it from tightening. I felt the limb shudder; Rocky had bitten into its end and was tugging on it, snarling. I tried to raise my legs to kick but everything was pinned down. I could feel the cold, muddy yard under me and above me ... I looked right into Stumpy’s face. Its pincers dripped greenish liquid onto my shirt. If I can just free a hand, I thought, I could punch one of its nasty cold compound eyes, punch it right off its head.

  And then something made the dritch turn back toward the bamboo patch, and I was freed from its weight. With Rocky barking and growling and snapping, but keeping his distance, feinting for a quick snap then jerking away before it could grab him, the thing turned and headed back toward the fence. I pushed myself to my knees, and as the creature headed back down into its hole, I staggered after it and kicked at the cluster of limbs and feelers or antennae or whatever they were that ringed its rear end, and then it was gone. Rocky jumped up and licked me.

  “Hey, Rock,” I said, “we whacked its sorry ass. It won’t want to deal with us again ...”

  “GET THE HELL OUT OF MY YARD!”

  A stout, red-faced woman in a billowy dress came out of the back door and headed toward us. Her frazzled brown hair was tied back in a ponytail and her pink, rabbit-eared slippers tick-tocked toward us over the muddy lawn. I gestured toward the hole.

  “WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE TO MY YARD – LOOK AT THAT MESS – WHATCHA DONE TO MY DOG, YOU BASTARD –”

  Rocky stopped jumping up on me and jumped up on Melanie, clearly (1) glad to be alive and (2) glad to see his owner and me getting on so well.

  I looked at Melanie and shrugged.

  “Melanie, believe it or not, it was some kinda monster, and ...” I backed up as she stomped up and shouted into my face.

  “– DON’T NEED YER PERVY FRIENDS CHASIN’ THROUGH MY YARD AND GETTIN’ BIT. YA GO PLAY SOMEPLACE ELSE, YA LITTLE SHIT, AND STAY THE HELL OUTTA –”

  I turned and, though aching in my knees and back, looked around for the hoe. It was gone.

  “I SAID GET THE HELL OUTTA –”

  “I can’t find my hoe,” I said weakly.

  “DON’T CALL ME A HO, YOU SUNUVA –”

  Not only had the dritch tried to eat Rocky, not only had it just about killed me, not only had it zippered back into the ground, leaving me holding the bag for the mess in Melanie’s backyard, to add insult to injury it had made off with my hoe. As I jumped over the fence, leaving Melanie to fuss and fret over the pet she usually shoved out into the yard and forgot about, I said goodbye to my chances of becoming her dog-walking best buddy. I headed into the house with no illusions about whether I was beating a cowardly retreat. Oh well, I could always count on a hero’s welcome from Rocky.

  “­AND DONTCHA COME BACK, CALL ME A HO WILLYA, YA LITTLE PRICK. AND YOU STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM MY DOG!”

  CHAPTER 17

  SECRET HISTORIES

  That was it for me. Life was just getting too scary. I took another shower with my clothes on. This time it hurt, because I had scrapes and bruises all over my body from my battle, if I could call it that, with the dritch. I ached all over. And I was running out of clean clothes.

  Why didn’t Stumpy kill me? The thing was as strong as a grizzly bear. Whacking it with the hoe hadn’t made so much as a dent. If it was hungry, having eaten Pips and made a grab for Rocky, for sure it would have found me delicious. I pulled my first set of clothes back out of the dryer, the dark stains left by cat blood hardly noticeable, and threw in the outfit that had just taken a beating in Melanie’s yard. Screw this. I was getting nowhere and doing nobody any good. Maybe I had just saved Rocky from getting eaten, but even if I liked Rocky and didn’t want him to get eaten, that didn’t mean that I should get eaten, did it? It was time to concentrate on stuff that would do me some good.

  For that matter, since when was it up to me to stop the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods from bringing whatsisface, Yog-Sothoth, and the rest of these Great Old Ones ­ extraterrestrial supermonsters with names like vanity licence plates ­ from their world into ours? Why me?

  I had a long list of priorities of my own: for example, both Dad and I need to make more money. I need to keep getting good marks, so that when I graduate in a few years, I can get scholarships and go somewhere, anywhere besides here. I need to figure out some way to ask Mehri out to a movie or something without barfing from nerves, or making her brother laugh at me, or getting in trouble with her father, who had just offered me some kind of help if I was going to have the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods pitted against me. “Don’t ever think you’re alone in this,” Mr. Shirazi had said. That was a laugh – so far the only help I’d had was from my awesome running-away talents (though Meghan and her scarf had been useful). I continued my list of needs.

  Getting in better shape – if I was going to keep getting assaulted by bad guys, I should learn karate or something. That brought me back to the money question.

  But I made a resolution: I wasn’t going to be attacked by bad guys anymore anyway, because I was opting out of the whole midnight games / Resurrection Church / Proprietor / Interlocutor mess. I would fill in the hole in our bamboo patch ... make a little popsicle-stick cross to mark Pips’ last stand. And then I would do my best to forget the whole thing. Winter was coming and when spring arrived I would break the news to Dad that we needed a new hoe.

  Then I had a thought. For months I had been innocently watering Stumpy, thinking it was some kind of outsider bamboo shoot. Then one day, it had gone and eaten my favourite cat buddy. But it had given up on attacking me.

  Could it be that it had recognized me?

  WITH AN eye on the clock, I boiled some noodles and rummaged around for ingredients. “I am declaring the continuum threshold,” I said to myself, “discontinuumed.”

  When Dad got home he cast a skeptical eye at the walnut pesto I had made, usin
g a lot of substitute ingredients to recreate a dish I’d had at the Shirazis. He made dubious remarks about its taste, colour, nutritional value and cultural pedigree. But when he sat down to eat supper, he devoured forkfuls with enthusiasm.

  “How did things go,” he asked between mouthfuls, “with your meeting downtown today?”

  “Very interesting.”

  As I tried to figure out a non-upsetting way of getting Dad up to date, the doorbell rang and I went and peeked through the curtains. The man who called himself H. P. Lovecraft was standing on our porch shifting from foot to foot and looking nervously into the distance. I sighed and held the door for him as he came in toting a backpack, a shoulder bag and a large suitcase. I helped him pile his stuff in the living room. He set it down with a sigh of relief and looked around in surprise. I was used to this reaction from visitors.

  “Tapes,” observed Lovecraft. “Not the discs – those are more modern, aren’t they?”

  Every available inch of wall space in our living room is covered with shelving holding thousands of VHS tapes, ordered alphabetically by title.

  “They had to go somewhere,” Dad said. “I should have sold them when I had the chance, before everyone realized that the days of VHS were gone for good. Now, they’re about the only legacy I have to leave to the boy. This old house, and about a million hours of old movies.”

  I introduced Lovecraft. “Dad, this is Howard – he’s kind of an anti–Resurrection Church guy.”

  I was trying to keep things simple, but I failed. Dad, at first glad to meet an anti–Resurrection Church guy – “anyone who’s an enemy of those SOBs is a friend of mine” – became suspicious when Howard admitted that he was a proxy H. P. Lovecraft who had another name entirely. However, Dad offered him a chair, and Lovecraft gave us some background.