The Midnight Games

by Lee, David Neil;

  “We are here!” some guy shouted from the front entrance. “Come one, come all!”

  My plan was to skirt the edges of the crowd, wait until a group surged through the front entrance, then join the surge and exit the crowd as soon as I got inside the gates. But as I drew closer I saw Clare at the entrance. She would spot me for sure. I moved along until I saw Kara with a group of friends at the next entrance. This was also too big a risk.

  I jogged around to the south end and, sure enough, there was no one around that shadowy corner that Dana had showed me. His silver-painted zip ties were still in place. I sawed at them with the tiny blade of my pocket knife, glad I’d picked it out of the rubble at the Church, until one by one they gave way. I slipped through the gap in the fence.

  There was no one in this part of the stadium yet. The feeling was very different from the previous game. At the snack bar, the friendly bartender from the other night was idly thumbing his smartphone, its frigid glow the only light for several metres around. I made my way to an entrance to the bleachers.

  A tent set up on the field was lit by propane lamps, its translucent sides strobing and flickering with the excited shadows of the cult members within. A cheer went up from the bleachers: the gates had opened and the lower tiers were already filling up; followers were taking their places for the ceremony to come. We are all here – the words echoed and whispered through the crowd, until someone shouted it from high in the stands: “We are all here.” Tonight their lives, all of our lives, would change. It would be a new world.

  All I could think was, I’ve got to find Dad. I ran into the nearest stairway, scanning the face of everyone I could see. Eleven p.m. was not far off.

  I could see the Proprietor going in and out of the tent, and Clare and Jimmy were there too. Nobody was looking my way. In the distance, at the far edge of the stadium, I heard someone shout, “We are all here,” and at that second I felt that pulse in the air, that oscillating sound that made the darkness above the stadium into a living thing, like an engine of destiny and menace and malice.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I snatched it up without looking at the display.

  “Nate.” Lovecraft sounded out of breath. “My friends have arrived, and we’ve transported the prepared storage drum to the stadium.”

  “Is this because you think Dad has gone to the stadium, intending to bring the Hounds of Tindalos down upon the heads of the Resurrection Church, even if it means his own death?”

  “Well ...”

  “Where are you, Howard?” I asked. “You’ve got to tell me where you are.”

  “In the first place, Nate, we can’t have you coming to the stadium. It’s just too dangerous. If –”

  “I’m already inside the stadium. If you’ll tell me where you and the drum are, I will find my father and bring him to you.”

  “How on earth will you do that?”

  “Howard, please tell me where you are.”

  “Why, we’re parked just outside the front entrance – just at the edge of this massive crowd that’s –”

  I hung up, looked at the time again and ran out into the playing field.

  I couldn’t see my father anywhere, and I hoped against hope that he had changed his mind and was seeking Lovecraft out at this very moment. Or that he had found someplace where he would be safe; someplace that was all curves and liquid and whispering leaves and soft angles; the safe place that Evelyn Dick’s husband had sought at Albion Falls, and failed to find.

  Then I saw his face in the dim periphery of the light from the tent. He was watching it, waiting, glancing at his wristwatch. He was not glad to see me, and pulled me back into the shadows so we wouldn’t be noticed.

  “Goddammit, kid.” He had to shout to be heard over the noise of the growing crowd. “Get out of here.”

  “Dad, listen to me. Lovecraft is here. He and his buddies from the Underground have brought the storage drum. All the angles have been smoothed out of it. You can go and get inside – right now.”

  He pointed toward the tent. “We’re just a few yards away from that bastard and his toadies. At the stroke of eleven I’ll run in there. If these so-called Hounds truly do appear, we’ll let the chips fall where they may.”

  “Believe me, Dad,” I pleaded. “They appear. They truly do. You’ll get killed.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. The main thing is, the SOBs who run this show will be right in the middle of it. This has to stop – once and for all.”

  “But you’ll be dead.”

  “Maybe they’ll take out some Church members as well as me. The main thing is, nobody will want to go near the Resurrection Church ever again.”

  “But you’ll be dead. I’ll be an orphan.”

  He shrugged. “You can always go live with your Uncle Don.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” I gestured at the crowd around us. “You haven’t seen what the Hounds do to people. They ripped Dana’s head off. What will they do if you let them loose in a crowd? I know these people have been suckered in by a bad cause, but does that mean they should die? That you need to die?”

  Dad sighed and looked at his watch. “Christ,” he said, “we’re running out of time. Where do I go?”

  The crowd was swelling in size; there were easily twice as many people as at the last ceremony. By now, all pretense of crowd control had been shattered. The gates to the stadium had been thrown open, and Dad and I pushed our way through the excited horde as I led him out into the street.

  A little ways down the block, a small group clustered around an old pickup truck with Pennsylvania licence plates. In the back, lying on its side was the storage drum from our basement.

  “Besides,” I admitted, “I can’t stand Uncle Don.”

  “Nate, Gordon, thank goodness you’re here,” Lovecraft said excitedly. He introduced us to a petite woman in her forties, her long black hair streaked with grey. “Agnes feels our chances for success are excellent.”

  “This is nothing,” Agnes said matter-of-factly. “When the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods set itself up in Ciudad Juárez in 1993, they achieved great power in a very short period of time. In fact, they might have made the breakthrough if not for three factors: a rebellion, led by workers from the maquiladoras, that disrupted the penultimate ceremony; an attack on the Church executives by the Hounds themselves, who had been summoned so often that they had found ways to circumvent the control of the Church; and the protection of the rebellion’s leader from a casting of the runes. Her friends had improvised a defence quite like this one. She concealed herself in it and, at the appointed time, in a cloud of blue smoke, the Hounds disappeared as fast as they appeared. Moments later, she emerged safely.”

  “Agnes is being too modest,” Lovecraft said. “She was the leader of the rebellion. If the Church had their way, she wouldn’t be gracing us –”

  “Howard,” blushed Agnes. She rolled her eyes. “As usual, you are too kind.” She held up two fingers. “I was this close to the so-called god Yog-Sothoth, and I witnessed the sorcerer’s emergence from the world of the Great Old Ones, R’lyhnygoth, into our world.”

  “Ah,” I said. “The sorcerer. So, just who is ...?”

  “But we beat them back.” Agnes turned back to the truck. “And now,” she continued, “we have to get this man into the disangled sanctuary; there isn’t much time. So, Howard, you’re confident that you’ve rounded off every angle?”

  Lovecraft nodded. “It’s a small space, and I worked on it carefully all morning.” The driver got out of the pickup and lowered the tailgate.

  “I hope everything’s okay in there,” he said. “The suspension on this old beater ain’t what it useta be, and some of the potholes in this town ...” He shook his head. Another man began to unclamp the lid of the drum.

  I looked at my phone. The hour was near, for sure. If everything went okay, I would ask Agnes later about the sorcerer. “Thanks for doing this,” I said to Dad.

  He shrugged. “
Thanks for coming to get me, kid.”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” I said, “but I know we can do something, without you going and sacrificing yourself.”

  Actually, that wasn’t completely true. I had no idea how to go about disrupting tonight’s ceremony, with so many people here to beckon and buttress Yog-Sothoth. I was playing this by ear, hoping someone else could come up with an idea.

  The lid of the drum was removed. “Damn,” I heard the driver say, softly. “Like I said, those potholes ...”

  Crumbling plaster spilled out into the truck bed. The inside of the drum was filled with it. The gentle curves that Lovecraft had laboured over were all gone, and the barrel was filled with rubble.

  “Agnes, Howard,” I said, “You guys are the experts. There must be something we can do. Dad ...”

  I looked around. My father was gone.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE HOUNDS

  As I entered the playing field a figure loomed over me. A dark-bearded man with a long curved apparatus slung around his neck, his features concealed by a hooded sweatshirt.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I saw Meghan and the others threading toward us through the growing crowd. “Mr. Shirazi,” I said, “I’m trying to find my father.”

  “Go home,” he said. “My group is here as well, along with members of the Lovecraft Underground. Tonight, the evil one will not get through. But it’s dangerous. Go home – go to my house. Play video games with Sam.”

  “I can’t do that, Mr. Shirazi.” I gestured and he turned. Sam was standing behind him, with Mehri and his other sisters. While Mr. Shirazi let his offspring know that he was not pleased, Meghan approached me, but I shook my head.

  “There’s no time,” I said. “I have to find my dad.” I tore away from them and made my way through the crowd.

  Ahead of me I heard a man shout, but he wasn’t shouting, “WE ARE ALL HERE.” It was my father’s voice, and the crowd parted around him as he held the flickering shapes of the runes over his head, the parchment he had tricked me into giving to him, then replaced with a counterfeit to prevent me from stealing it back.

  “Hey, you bastards,” he yelled. “When you targeted my boy, you messed with the wrong dude. Well, in about –” he checked his watch again “– sixty seconds, you’ll get a chance to see how badass you really are, you so-called Resurrection ...”

  I heard the Proprietor’s voice. I started toward the tent.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” the Proprietor shouted. “Stop him. That’s the only way to protect us from the Hounds. You know what I mean.”

  I totally understood what he meant. The Hounds would not come if their victim was dead.

  Jimmy and two other men erupted from the tent and headed in different directions into the crowd. They were carrying baseball bats.

  My father saw them coming and started weaving through the crowd, getting closer to the tent while keeping as many bodies as he could between him and his pursuers. When I was fifteen metres away, our eyes met. He stopped. The roaring in the sky above grew louder. A blue mist began to rise from the damp grass of the stadium. Around me the shadows moved, as if to dodge the rising of an alien sun.

  “Nate,” Dad yelled, as Clare appeared from the crowd and grabbed his shoulder. He twisted away and ran, gesturing at me to get away. “Far away!”

  I blinked, unable to believe what I was seeing. The blue mist, circling my father’s knees, turned into a spiral of blue smoke that whirled around us, edged in blackness. A void dropped out of the air: a gateway into space-time unimaginably dark and remote. Against that darkness glimmered a whiteness of bone as two fleshless paws emerged, then a blind savage head with teeth like razors, sniffing and seeking this way and that, this way and that, and I shuddered from my head to my toes and prayed that it didn’t catch my scent. Slouching into the cold autumn air – followed by another and another and another – the Hounds of Tindalos emerged onto the field.

  “RUN,” my father shouted.

  And then the Hounds were upon him. The crowd around my father exploded in every direction, leaving Dad alone on the turf, grasping the parchment. Seeing he only had seconds to act, he ran toward the tent. The hound nearest to me turned to follow him.

  Each hound was an intricate jigsaw puzzle of tiny, glowing bones, joined at a thousand sharp angles, and each joint crackled and sparked as it moved sinuously across the dark field.

  Jimmy was in the crowd beside me, frozen in his tracks with his mouth wide open. He dropped his baseball bat and started fumbling at his pants pockets. I threw myself in front of him, grabbed up the bat and ran after the hound. I smashed at its rear haunch, thinking – I guess – to distract it from my dad.

  The hound stopped, and with both hands around the bat I smashed it again. Really hard this time.

  It turned. I might as well have been hammering at the side of a bulldozer. As I jumped out of its way, the hot blast of its talons ripped through my shirt and knocked me to the ground. I rolled to the side and tried to squirm away but the hound pinned my legs and raised its forepaw to strike again. Then it shrieked ... and shrieked again, and turned to defend itself as something struck it from behind.

  “You will go hungry tonight,” a man shouted. In the smoke I saw Mr. Shirazi, his glasses reflecting the snaps of lightning from the roaring sky. He drew back from the hound and raised the Delphic scythe. Its glowing hook struck a burst of sparks from the creature as Mr. Shirazi deflected its pounce with the blade. He struck again, and the hound roared in pain and then the sound died as its snout, and then its talons, and then its chest and haunches and the rest of its body, burst into sparks. The hound’s body shuddered, sparks sizzling between its fiery joints and angles, and in a rolling stink of charcoal and sulphur it burst apart and was gone, leaving behind the smell of apocalypse. I fell back onto the cold grass.

  Mr. Shirazi bent over me. “Nate? Are you all right?”

  “You killed that thing ...” I let him help me up. “Where can I get one of those?” I faced him straight on so that he couldn’t see that my tattered shirt was wet with blood.

  “Head for the stands,” he said. “Hide. Stay out of the way.” He looked up. “Help him,” he said to someone behind me.

  Lovecraft was standing over me. “We’ve got to get to the public address system,” he said. “I need your help.”

  “Howard, do you think it’s over? Look what Mr. Shirazi just did.” I tried to ignore the pain. With luck, all this would be over very soon. “Where’s my dad?”

  “The forces unleashed by the Hounds are making this threshold the strongest one so far. If the ceremony continues, things will only get worse. For one thing, every exanimator in the area will be drawn to –” he gasped. “Nate, you’re bleeding.”

  “What about my father?”

  A loud cracking sound came from the crowd, not far from us. Mr. Shirazi swore in Persian. “Some idiot is shooting off a gun,” he shouted. “Stay down.” And he was gone in the crowd.

  “We can’t stay here. We’ve got to get off the ground,” Lovecraft said. Across the field, another man with a scythe had surprised a hound, and with mechanical shrieks like torn metalwork, like fireworks in reverse its tracery of light shrank and collapsed into a plume of blue smoke. Everywhere in the chaos I could hear screams, voices calling for loved ones, children calling for their parents. I heard the popping of gunshots. The police had shown up from somewhere. Near the tent, a constable fired several shots into a hound; it turned and was on him in a second. I tore my eyes away, searching for my father.

  I pushed away from Lovecraft and weaved through the panicking crowd. I saw a shadow at the end of the field; a man in a dark business suit, running for cover at one of the stadium entrances. It was the Proprietor. Then I stumbled over something soft. I looked down at the body of a Hamilton city cop. In the flashing lights and smoke, I could see he had no head. Numbly I looked around for it, as if reconnecting this poor dude�
��s head with his corpse would make things better. And there, a metre or so beyond his outstretched hand, I saw the gun.

  It was whatever sidearm the police use; a flat automatic pistol of some kind, lying there on the grass like a hunk of obsolete computer hardware. When I bent over to pick it up, the slashes from the hound’s talons pulled open and I felt blood trickling down. That was okay; it didn’t feel very serious and I was sure I had lots of blood to spare. I hefted the gun in my hand; it was heavy. I ignored the sound of Lovecraft calling me, and took off after the Proprietor.

  CHAPTER 25

  SORCERER

  It was dark inside the stadium doorway, and I thought of all the things that might be in that darkness: maybe a dritch had dug its way up from the sewers; or a hound (they would have a hard time hiding in the dark, unless they could turn off the horrible internal burning of their glowing bones); or some darker and nastier version of the Interlocutor, tentacled and hungry, a border creature who had chosen the dark side. But of all those monsters, worst of all was the Proprietor himself: a waxy, control-hungry prick who, so long as he got power and money and influence for himself and his buds, didn’t care what happened to the planet and the rest of us living here.

  “Only in the movies do handguns solve problems,” Dad used to tell me. “In real life, they just make problems worse.” True as this might be, with nothing around me making any sense, I could only think of how much damage and misery the Proprietor caused – with his tricks and his lies and his cult and his midnight games. He was ready to sell out the whole planet, starting with those he considered least important, people like Dana, using them as stepping stones to more and more power, to trample everyone for his own gain, even if it meant being a king in a ruined world. In fact, he should be ashamed to be alive, I thought. Getting rid of him would be a win-win situation. I confess that I was not at my most lucid. I was soaked in blood, it hurt to move and I was feeling kind of nauseous.