The Midnight Games

by Lee, David Neil;

  CHAPTER 21

  TRICKADRITCH

  Black as it was, I saw bright spots in front of my eyes, and when I tried to stand, the spots and the whole dark universe behind them whirled and spun. I fell to my knees and vomited onto the dirt floor. They’ve given me some kind of disease, I thought. Then I crawled a few feet into the darkness and collapsed.

  When I opened my eyes next, they were starting to get used to the dark. I raised my head and, although it ached, I wasn’t so dizzy. I groped around and my hand found a step. It rattled when I leaned on it. From up where I thought the door should be, I could hear nothing; not a voice or a creaking floorboard. Either everyone had left awfully fast, or I had been on the floor longer than I thought. I was sure cold. I tried to pull myself up off the floor. It wasn’t easy; I hurt all over where I’d been punched and kicked as part of my welcome to the Resurrection Church.

  I looked up at the door. Now I could see a razor-thin line of light around the frame. It seemed an awfully long way away. There was no other light in the basement except a dim patch of bluish luminescence against one wall, like a pile of dirt full of glowing worms. The stairs felt broad and dusty, made of the big thick timbers they used back in the old days. But it was cold down in this basement and I hugged myself and tried to get warmer. I could use some resurrecting myself, I thought. In a minute I would try to stand up.

  I reviewed my options. I had no idea how long I’d been lying there. Upstairs, for all I knew, everyone was gone.

  “Trick a dritch,” the Proprietor had said. I had learned a lot in a short time. Great serpent – why did that phrase stick in my head? Because it sounded like Raphe Therpens, which it turns out, was the Proprietor’s actual name. I had learned they had done something bad to the Interlocutor, beat her up or killed her maybe. And there was a dritch involved.

  But the basement was still and silent. Nothing came bounding, drooling and snarling out of the darkness. More lies and fantasies from the Church. I closed my eyes. Then out of the dark I heard something: a wet flopping sound like a beached whale struggling to get back to the water. I opened my eyes and, accustomed to the darkness, the blue luminescence looked brighter. As I watched it moved, and from it came a dripping, shuddering sound like a lung collapsing. But it was a sound that made sense to me: “Nate ... Silva ...”

  Feeling sore all over, I got to my feet, groping ahead for hidden obstacles. But the basement had an empty sound. Its ceiling seemed pretty high, and there was not so much as a cobweb. Occasionally my shoes brushed against rocks or chunks of earth.

  The Interlocutor leaned back against the wall. Much of the clothing that swaddled her had been torn away, leaving expanses of pale, pebbled skin. Below her short, humanoid arms, I saw her lumpy body was framed by four enormous tentacles that lay draped around her, like the necks of a defeated hydra. In the twilight glow of the creature’s luminescence, a gout of blood oozed from a wound in her upper left tentacle, near the shoulder.

  “What have they done to you?”

  “They have entered that country where negotiation means to betray and to kill. I came here alone. I hoped we could speak, before it was too late ... but there were so many of them. That human whose knife I took ... he is so angry ...”

  While she spoke I took off my hoodie and the shirt I was wearing under it, shivering as I stripped. “This is all I got,” I apologized. I folded the shirt and, leaning over the Interlocutor, tied it around her tentacle – which was so thick, there was barely enough shirt left for me to make a knot – in an attempt to bind the wound and stop that awful-looking gore from seeping out of it.

  When I was done I was shivering, and got my shirt and hoodie back on as fast as I could. The Interlocutor saw me shiver.

  “You lay still so long, I feared your death,” she said. “Lean against me.”

  Even half a metre away, I could feel the heat that radiated from her along with that sickly blue glow.

  “We’ve got to get out of here and get you help,” I said. “Look, it probably means you’ll get exposed to the public. People will have to find out. But you’re cut and beaten. There must be something that a doctor can do, a human doctor.”

  “I cannot be looked at ... no exposure!” She shook her head. “There are made ... provisions. If we can reach my chair.”

  “I saw your chair. It’s wrecked.”

  “Something hides there.” She told me where to find it on the chair. “Help is waiting for me to summon. They were so excited, the people here. They moved fast, with anger. There is an alarm for help, but they were on me so fast.”

  “Like, a panic button?”

  “If pressed, help will come quickly. There is people, mostly people, they are a squad to help me, a team. But ... the violence came so fast. They wanted my blood. But then the dritch emerged, it surprised them.”

  “Where’d the dritch go?”

  “Its burrow is there.” She gestured weakly. She gasped and fought to take her next breath. In the dim light, even in her weakened condition, her tentacles would not stop moving: they squirmed to keep her balanced, they made gross, boggy intestinal noises, they throbbed and squelched.

  “I don’t understand anything,” I said. “What are you anyway? Why did you come here?”

  The Interlocutor leaned forward and sniffed the air between us. “For a young one, you have been very close to death. Do you think that you have any hope if it has gone this far – if they can summon the Hounds? Do you think their victory can be avoided?” She sucked in air slowly and painfully, as if the body I saw before me was a poorly made machine.

  “What are you?” I repeated.

  “I am a border creature.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “There is another of us here. Soon, the dritch will return.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I will kick its ass. It will be the second dritch I have vanquished today.”

  The Interlocutor made a sort of low whistling sound, like someone burping into a clarinet. I think she was laughing.

  “We are born to live in these border countries... Between these things called races, between these things called faiths, between these things called ideas, these things called worlds ... we are border creatures.”

  “So ... ‘we’ meaning you, and who else?”

  “Even the Great Old Ones have their rules, a higher power to which they must answer.”

  As always, trying to get information out of the Interlocutor was like trying to read a book upside down. “You mean a government ... or a god?”

  As I asked, I stared at the Interlocutor, fascinated. Flabby and smelling of burned chemicals, she no longer made me uneasy, even with those huge tentacles roiling and throbbing under her body, probing and seeking as if with a mind of their own. But the Interlocutor was looking at me keenly, with those gleaming, motionless eyes inside the torn mask of her face.

  She looked me in the eye. “You have cultivated your garden,” she said. “Been kind to what surfaces there...”

  “Is this like, a metaphor?”

  “...we are all border creatures, and if you live, and are not killed by the forces you oppose, and if you do not succumb, and join the forces of Yog-Sothoth, and this so-called Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods – if none of this befalls you, Nate Silva, you may find that you are a border creature too.”

  I stood up, feeling a bit less achy and dizzy. “All I know is, we’ve got to get out of this stupid basement.”

  I stepped cautiously over to the stairs and mounted them to check the steel door. I pounded on it and listened. Nothing. The door was heavy and solid and would not move, but there was that line of light around the edge: it had been put in hurriedly. The door was steel, but there might be weaknesses in the frame.

  I went back down the stairs and moved around the floor. This part of the basement didn’t occupy the huge space of the room above it. It was maybe ten metres by twenty. I found a padlocked steel door that felt rusty and dusty and, if anyt
hing, more impregnable than the door at the top of the stairs. I felt rough brick walls and then, raising my hands above my head, I felt a sheet of cardboard. I tore it off, showering my head with dirt, and saw a trickle of daylight through heavy steel mesh. When I’d been thrown down the stairs, I must have passed out, or maybe I’d fallen asleep before I started searching and found the Interlocutor. One way or another, hours had gone by. I pulled on the mesh, but everything in this old building was heavy duty. This was the stuff my dad’s buddies used to bluster about: Hamilton steel, made from the heart! The crap from China just ain't like how we useta make it! I needed a tool: a pry bar or a hunk of pipe, or something, anything.

  But the Church had gone through my pockets, and they wouldn’t have thrown me down here unless they knew there was nothing here that would aid my escape. I continued to creep around the wall’s perimeter. Against the opposite wall, the Interlocutor was silent; I was getting more and more worried about her. There was nothing I could do but keep trying to escape. The dirt floor was so rough; maybe if I groped around it would yield a good-sized brick or chunk of masonry.

  I tripped, and fell into a hole.

  “Jeez!” It was a deep hole too. I fell in up to my waist, and my feet were dangling into an abyss. I pulled myself out.

  “What’s this?” I cried out. “Hey, uh, Interlocutor ... there’s a hole here. Maybe it’s a tunnel.” I turned around to see if I could see the hole in the dim light from the window. “A tunnel that leads ...”

  “Every time the Church ... makes one of the ceremonies you call the midnight games ... contact is made ... something slips through.”

  “You mean, an invasive species?”

  The Interlocutor took a deep breath. “All under the city there are such tunnels. In our tongue there is a word ... as they grow they become so deadly ... the word we use, exanimator...”

  I reached out my hand, and felt something under it. Hard and flat and curved. I picked it up and shook it to see if it was strong enough to use as a pry bar. There was some kind of gunk on one end. As I tested it, I stepped forward and my foot struck a pile of such things.

  “Aha,” I announced. “Found something. They did leave something here, stupid Church losers. I will break us out of here.” I went down on my knees, too distracted to pay attention to the Interlocutor. What were these things anyway? Some long and rounded, none of them evenly ground or lathed to smoothness, some big and heavy, some broken into bits. I felt a round one.

  “Here’s something,” I said. “It feels like a five-pin bowling ball.” I moved my hand and jerked backwards. I got up and tripped over something long and straight.

  I felt it. A long wooden handle, ending in a rusted steel blade ...

  “... which others call ... dritch ...” the Interlocutor continued.

  I recognized this object, even though I couldn’t see it. I’d held it in my hands many times before. At one end, a rusty blade; at the other end, near the tip, a rough spot that I always had to handle gingerly to avoid getting a splinter. It was unmistakably an object that had been pulled out of my hands just hours before. It was our garden hoe. With a shudder I stepped away from the hole I’d stumbled into, and from the pile of unfamiliar objects – on the round one I’d felt hair and eye sockets. I had been rooting around in a pile of human bones.

  “I think I get the point.”

  I found the window and pried at the mesh with the blade of the hoe. Soon, I had raised a corner of it, and tried pulling with my hand, but the mesh was too strong. I kept at it until I had pulled out another of the spikes that bound it to the bricks, then another.

  I poked the handle through the hole I’d made. It hit wood. I rammed at it, and the handle went through the thin, weatherbeaten plywood that covered the window on the outside.

  I peeked through the hole in the plywood, but the glimpse of sunlight was gone. Night had come again. Soon the final ceremony would begin.

  Then I thought: the bottom stair had rattled when I leaned on it. I could see it now. I went and pried at one end. Rusted old spikes groaned and whined, and then one end came up. I pulled up the other end.

  I hauled the timber to the top of the stairs and pounded it against the door. It didn’t budge. I hauled back and pounded it into the edge of the door, and this time I heard the frame crack. Here’s where I could make some progress. Mindful that this racket could attract the dritch back to us, wherever it was in the tunnels that supposedly criss-crossed the city, I did my best to hurry. The end of the timber was splintering; I pounded at the door frame, and the timber split in two. My hands slid along one half. The other half fell to the floor.

  My hands were burning. I dropped the split timber and collapsed on the stairs.

  “I’m making no headway,” I announced to the Interlocutor. “I was almost there, but...”

  The Interlocutor said nothing. I heard her take a deep breath, then her words came out slow and thick as glue. “I hear ... the dritch is returning.”

  Cripes, I thought, some help here ... please! But who am I going to find who can lend a hand with this, who?

  “Well,” I replied. “I guess we did our best. I just need to take a breath here, and I’ll see if I can pry up another one of these steps. The last one filled my hand with splinters. But I almost got through. If I can make another try before the dritch ...”

  “Nate?” It was a familiar voice. “Nate, is that you? Is that you in there?”

  I looked over my shoulder. There were shadows against the light of the door frame. I couldn’t quite believe it. If anyone showed up, I figured it would be Church members, ready to finish us off if the dritch hadn’t already got to us.

  “Sam?” I asked.

  “Nate?”

  “Sam?”

  “Nate?”

  I heard another voice. “Enough, you guys. Look, we can unlatch this thing.” I heard someone struggling with the deadbolt.

  “Meghan?”

  “Nate, we’ll try to get you out. But the latch has been bent. Have you been pounding at the door?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Nice job.”

  I heard another woman’s voice. “Here, use the crowbar.” Something cracked, and the door flew open.

  I walked out, blinking into the light and saw Mehri. She was wearing old running shoes, blue jeans and a crappy-looking winter coat with fake fur around the hood. Now more than ever, she struck me as the best-looking human being ever created.

  I blinked. “You look so great.” Of course, right next to Mehri were Meghan and Sam.

  “Uh, I mean all you guys,” I added weakly. “It’s great to see you.” That was true, after all. They were all wearing functional-looking work clothes and lugging various tools: a crowbar, an axe, a sledgehammer.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Duh,” Sam said. “I looked out the window and saw you going down the railroad tracks? We all went to bed, but when your dad started phoning for you, we put two and two together.”

  “You’ve saved us,” I said, “but we have to hurry.”

  “‘Us’?” asked Sam.

  I looked around. The place was a mess of homemade signs, spilled drinks, overturned chairs and, here and there, a few flowers from the flower stand, which still stood in front of the stage. I stepped past them and looked at the rubble.

  “I just have to warn you,” I said, “that not everyone involved in this ... this whole thing with the Church ... not everyone you’re going to meet is, uh, exactly the kind of person you might expect, uh, to meet.”

  “What’s what supposed to mean?” asked Sam. “Nate, are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m great.”

  Actually, I felt rotten, but my main worry was the Interlocutor, who was getting weaker by the minute. As I talked, I found her scooter in the debris. I righted it, but it wouldn’t power on. Various plastic tubes dripped fluids onto the cluttered floor.

  “This belongs to the Interlocutor. Meghan, you know who s
he is. She’s been beat-up by the Church’s mob,” I explained. “But she told me she has something ... she’s got, like, her own 911 ...”

  On the left-hand side of it, under the seat, I found the metal box that the Interlocutor had described. I found its protective panel and slid it to one side. There was a little plastic spoiler over a black button; I flipped it up and pressed the button.

  “Ouch,” I said. My hands were a mess. I pulled a black splinter from my right forefinger.

  Meanwhile, nothing happened with the mechanism in front of me. No little light went on. I worried that the alarm depended on the chair’s power system, which had been disabled. Then the chair spoke to me.

  “Ensse ... n’hraggi akh menganah ... srrrubi ...?”

  I answered it. “The Interlocutor is injured and she needs help. We are at a place called the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods. It’s an old warehouse at the end of Markle Avenue.” I described how to get there – if they were driving, although for all I knew the Interlocutor’s “team” would arrive by flying saucer. “I think she needs help fast.”

  Meghan reached toward me. “Nate ... give me your hand.”

  I waved my hands impatiently. “We have to get the Interlocutor out of the basement.” I had no idea if it would be any help, but I rolled the scooter to the basement door.

  “You just have to know,” I told them, “that the Interlocutor is not exactly a human being. She’s from someplace else. But she is on our side and we have to help her.” I had a thought. “What time is it anyway?”

  I moaned when I got the answer: it was eight o’clock at night. I had wasted the whole day crawling around a warehouse basement.

  Now I could at least see where I had been. Light flooded in from the open door, and my rescuers had a couple of flashlights. Against one wall I could see the gaping hole where the dritch had entered the day before, evidently bursting through to the main floor, surprising the Church members and causing mayhem. The pile of bones I’d been rooting through were scattered all over the cellar; earlier, when I’d been fumbling in the dark, I thought they were rocks or clods of earth. There were bones of all sizes. I glanced at the scene as I rushed to check on the Interlocutor.