Sam took charge of the IV and we made our way down the hall past patients and visitors. I was thinking about how terrific it felt to lean up against Mehri. Her left deltoid, under my cupped hand, felt just great, and so did resting my arm on her shoulders and the back of her neck. Her right arm, which she had curved behind my back with her hand hooked into my hospital gown, was also a perfect fit.
The three of us made small talk as we walked to the end of the hall and back.
“I’m sure glad you guys came,” I said. “Now that I’m starting to think about all this stuff, instead of just sleeping all the time, it’s depressing.”
“I’ve gone past the church a couple of times,” Sam said. “There’s never anyone there.”
“We actually stopped them,” Mehri said. “I think. There have been no more midnight games.”
“It’s really my dad,” I admitted. “I wish he hadn’t done that. Took the runes from me, and led the Hounds to himself.”
Sam said, “I can’t believe what you’re saying.”
“In fact, if I hadn’t gone to that first midnight game, and poked into the cult, none of this would have happened.”
“Nate,” Mehri took a deep breath, “I can’t get my head around everything that’s happened. I didn’t mean to get involved either. I made one or two decisions, and next thing I knew there was no turning back. But we all know that something very bad was happening – with the Proprietor, and the midnight games, and the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods – and that we ruined their plans. We totally messed them up. We might even have saved some innocent people. Maybe a lot of people, because something monstrous was trying to break through – I saw it in the sky, at the ceremony – and somehow, because of what we did, and what your friend Lovecraft did, and the Underground, we helped to stop it.”
“Well...” I had wanted to turn my back on all of this, but Mehri was nudging my interest “there was something else too.”
“Yes, those horrible centipede monsters ... what did they call them?”
“Dritches,” I said. “They called them dritches. But I didn’t mean that.” I told her about the bursts of flame that had repelled Yog-Sothoth, and the airship I had seen erupting from the sky before the continuum threshold had closed. “I saw its name. When the Interlocutor told me that the sorcerer was not a person, but a thing, she didn’t mean it was an alien. Sorcerer is some sort of huge dirigible-airship thing.”
“I saw Yog-Sothoth,” Mehri said. “But I didn’t see anything like what you’re describing.”
“I was really close to it. It flickered into view, and then banked over the stadium and headed north. As it did that, it flickered out of sight. So I think if it had some sort of cloaking technology that was acting up.”
“I didn’t see it,” Sam said. “We were trying to avoid those hounds, not looking at the sky. And of course, help people whenever we could. Sorcerer. What would an airship – crappy twentieth-century technology – have to do with a distant planet, and interdimensional fissures, and Yog-Sothoth, and the Hounds?”
I shrugged, and suddenly I wasn’t faking it. I really did need their help to keep standing. “Jeez, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. All I know is ... I’m going back to bed. And I know that my father is dead.”
Sam and Mehri exchanged looks. “What do you mean?”
I collapsed on the side of the bed. “I looked, but I couldn’t even find his body. The Hounds completely annihilated any trace ... What?” They were staring at me.
“Nate, your father’s not dead. He’s right down the hall.”
“We stopped and said hi to him,” Mehri added, “like, ten minutes ago.”
CHAPTER 28
RESURRECTION
When Sam had said that he and his family had been in the stadium trying to “help people whenever we could,” he thought I knew what he was talking about.
Dad was propped up with tubes in his nose. His chest was bandaged, and he was lying very still, and looking old. But his eyes were lively, and his hands warm as he clasped mine.
“I was so worried about you,” he croaked.
“I wasn’t worried about you, because I thought you had been killed, and was therefore dead.” Dad and I had a big laugh over this as Sam and Mehri eyed us warily. I suppose this says something about where I get my sense of humour.
“When they came at me,” Dad explained, “those hounds, some cop pulled out his weapon and took a shot at them. Well whoever this guy was, he shot me instead.”
“Uh, what an idiot,” I said, inwardly cringing at the memory of my own pathetic gunmanship.
“Not his fault, Nate,” Mehri said. “It turns out that bullets go right through the Hounds of Tindalos.”
“Cut this poor dude some slack,” Dad added. “Ironically, he saved my life. I figure what happened was, the bullet went right through the hound that was about to jump me – so it turned and jumped him. I got hit in the chest and went down like a sack of bricks. Another second, and the hound would have ripped me to pieces.”
“Remember, Nate, everything happened so fast ...” Sam explained.
I said, “It seems like we were there for hours.”
“... the Hounds appeared, then the threshold, then the turf itself opened up beneath our feet and those centipede monsters started popping up everywhere. But once they appeared, the Hounds disappeared almost immediately.”
“That’s because I was dead,” Dad continued.
“What?”
“When I got shot and fell to the ground, my heart stopped. The Hounds were raising hell everywhere else – but when their target died, that’s me, their mission was over. They folded up and disappeared into whatever hellish netherworld they come from. Then I guess your friends showed up.”
Mehri shrugged. “We just stopped the bleeding and did first aid.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Basic CPR. The paramedics showed up like a second later. It was no big deal.”
“It was a big deal for me,” Dad said.
“You guys,” I said.
“You don’t need to ... well, just this once,” said Sam. I gave him a big hug, and then Mehri.
“You would’ve done the same thing,” Sam said. “Jeez, Nate, you don’t have to get all weepy.”
CHAPTER 29
A MESSAGE FROM THE BORDER LANDS
By the way, back in grade five, Kara was right; there was a knife in my backpack. And a fork. The knife was a dinner knife with a round tip and a blunt serrated edge. In case dessert was in order, there was also a spoon.
Fridays when Dad got paid, I would take the bus after school and meet him at the Lime Ridge Mall food court. We would each have the dinner of our choice, only with the added luxury of our own metal utensils instead of the food court’s plastic ones. For me, as I was growing up, this little ritual seemed like haute cuisine and I think Dad enjoyed it too. Okay, okay already, I know it sounds lame, but we thought it was cool.
This was one of the memories that came to me as I lay between the sheets in my own bed, while I tried to will myself to sleep. I hadn’t slept well since coming home from the hospital. Dad was still there, but he would be home soon. When I needed someone to pick me up, I had to call on Meghan. I hadn’t figured out yet if we were friends, or if we just shared some experiences most people didn’t share. She was staying over, sleeping in our spare room; a social worker was due to call tomorrow and Meghan had agreed to pose as my cousin and live-in caretaker.
On the phone, social services had mentioned foster care, a horrifying proposition in which, if Dad turned out to be too disabled, I would go live with some kindly family of complete strangers.
“Why the hell would I want to do that?”
“What you want has nothing to do with it,” Meghan explained. “You’re still a minor, Nate. Legally, social services can’t leave you caring for your father.”
I gave Meghan a list of alternatives – selling the house and using the money to get an apartment and some help for
dad, quitting school and getting a job, intimidating the social worker with empty threats of horrific violence, but Meghan shot them all down.
“I’m glad to pick you up from the hospital,” she said, “and stay over for a day or so, but that’s it. Besides, soon your dad will get home. Your life will be normal.”
NORMAL, SHE said. In fact, I couldn’t claim a genuine night’s sleep since that first midnight game, when Dana and I had seen the dritch burst out of the stadium entrance onto Ivor Wynne’s field. I thought of Dana, his crosswords, the small talk we tossed back and forth when we met on the street, and his life without family or real friends except for people like me. I thought about the Shirazis, forced halfway around the world by the thugs and creeps who push their way into power wherever there is power to be had, and how they had not been beaten down – “you will go hungry tonight,” Mr. Shirazi had said as he put himself in harm’s way to save me, when he had his own children to worry about. I thought about the Interlocutor, who was not allowed to choose sides, but she had done so anyway. I thought about this bizarre new world of creatures pushed across space by need and greed and desire, daring countless cold light years of airless dark to get to our world. The weird thing was, whether I wanted to be or not, I seemed to be part of this new world. “Nate Silva,” the Interlocutor had said, “you may find that you are a border creature too.”
Dad was lucky to be alive, and so was I. We would take things one day at a time. Meanwhile, as long as the Spectator kept coming to the front door, I kept updating my scrapbook of clippings. The last midnight game was shrouded in mystery: at fault was a no-account cult whose headquarters in a derelict chain warehouse was now silent and empty. A riot, and explosion, had damaged the stadium so badly that no more football games would ever be held there. Moreover, all this had happened in the midst of a tremendous thunderstorm that had knocked out power for miles around. The cult’s leader, Raphe Therpens, had fallen, or been blown, or pushed, from the rim of the stadium onto bare asphalt and had suffered permanent injuries.
Today’s sports section had a new article on Ivor Wynne Stadium. The Tragically Hip would play one last concert there, and then it would be demolished, rebuilt and renamed. It would come back bigger and better than ever someday, just like the Ticats, just like the steel industry, just like the city of Hamilton itself. I turned the page and saw an ad for a new condo/office tower to be built downtown. Fifty stories high, it would be the tallest building in the city’s history: “sound and solid as our past; soaring as high as our vision of the future.” I would have passed it by, if my eye hadn’t caught one of the logos in the corner of the page. There it was, among other corporate sponsors.
And the tower’s proud name: Resurrection.
I looked at the ad and sighed. To hell with it: if the Church was making a comeback, someone else could deal with them. Maybe Daredevil, sick of New York’s high rents, would move to Hamilton, or better yet Doctor Strange. I went back to bed and for the first time in days I fell asleep, and didn’t dream of death and blood and monsters; didn’t dream about unearthly tentacles stretching across the bone-cracking cold of interstellar space. I just fell asleep, and I didn’t dream at all, and when I woke up light was coming through the windows. Meghan was gone and I fretted for a moment: the social worker was coming in an hour. Then I saw the text on my phone: gone to Karlik Pastry for cheese buns, back soon. The phone was ringing.
Not my cellphone – the kitchen land line, soon to be discontinued, with Dad on disability and the only incoming calls from cruise vacations and phony public service organizations, and Uncle Don. My cellphone would do me. But still sleepy, I stumbled downstairs, picked up the receiver and heard a woman’s voice.
“Gord?”
“No, it’s not Gord,” I grumbled. “Gord is my father. He is presently indisposed.” It had been ten days now since the final game. Pretty much everyone who knew my dad had come to Hamilton General to see him. Who the hell was this?
“Oh,” the woman gasped. “So it’s true. We’ve had the radio on, but I couldn’t believe it ... but, Nate, this is you? You sound so grown-up!”
The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t conjure a face to go with it. “Who is this?”
“I can’t see you just yet,” the woman said. “It’s complicated. I need to tell your father; I’ve left something there. If you haven’t found it already. There’s a trip I wanted you both to take. I’ve hidden a package ...” She started telling me about the hiding place of this alleged package.
“What trip?” I asked. “Because Dad’s not here; if anyone’s taking a trip, it’ll be me.”
“No not you, honey,” she said. “Not yet. Not ’til you’re older.”
“Up yours, lady. I’m sixteen,” I said. Satisfyingly, she gasped in shock, but what did I care? Clearly, this was some Resurrection Church nutcase trying to get at me for their own screwed-up reasons. I thought of what the Interlocutor had said as she thrust herself between me and those creeps from the Church. “And he is never a kid again.”
“This kid thing is getting old. Who the hell are you to tell me anything?”
She started to tell me who she was, but I cut her off. Now I was getting really mad.
“And another thing. We won, you lost. Comprenez-vous? The Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods is finished and defunct. You stupid loser and liars and pissheads think Yog-Sothoth is coming? Well he’s not ... not on my watch. We had him crying for mercy.”
“Actually,” she said, “that was us.”
“I stopped him once, and I will stop him again. If you keep bugging me, I will hunt down every one of you and I will hurt you. I am Nathan Stefano Silva ...”
“I kn-know you are ...” she stuttered. “I ...”
“... and you have made a big mistake, getting on my bad side. I will find the Sorcerer ...”
“You don’t understand. I was on the Sorcerer...”
“... and I will burn it to the ground and piss on its ashes. Or I will board it like a goddamn pirate, with my pirate friends –” I was really mad, but I was enjoying being mad. “– and take it over, and destroy Cthulhu, and smash Yog-Sothoth, and blow up the bridge between worlds for good, and I will hurt the Resurrection Church so bad, that it will never resurrect. Everything, all the brutal fascist crap you believe in, that will be ashes too for me to piss on.”
“But, Nate!”
“Do not call this number again.”
I slammed the phone down and then knocked it off the counter. It crashed to the floor. I picked it up and pulled the cord out. There was other stuff on the counter – flyers, a cutting board, an old CD player – that I felt like smashing, but I knew I had to calm down.
I could hear Meghan coming back from the bakery. I went out the back door and into the yard where I threw the phone into the bamboo. If there was another dritch growing there, it would have to learn who was boss around here.
Then I flopped down onto the porch step. I sat there and the autumn wind bit hard through my pyjama pants and T-shirt. I shivered, and saw Rocky’s black head stick up eagerly over the fence. A hole gaped in our bamboo patch where the dritch had sprouted and grown. Would it be back? Or had all the dritches, every last one of them, returned to their world? Was Rocky in danger? Maybe he knew more about all this than he could tell me. Anyway, I had the feeling I would find out more, whether I wanted to or not. Maybe when the stars were aligned, or when the worlds came together again, or when forces started up that I couldn’t begin to understand, much less predict.
Meghan came out onto the porch behind me, carrying a bag of cheese buns. “What was that all about?”
“It’s those creeps from the Church,” I said. “They piss me off. They won’t leave us alone. I told them I would kick their asses.” I laughed bitterly. “Hope they don’t take me up on it!”
“Where’s the phone?”
“I dropped it. Yeah, some Resurrection Church clown phoned. They are such losers. One of them phoned, pranking
me. She said –”
Suddenly I was breathless, running out of anger, feeling again that I had just got out of bed and was only half in the real world, still half dreaming.
“– she said that she was my mother.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Mandie at Magicuts for steering me to the story of Evelyn Dick (who, it turns out, lived just a few blocks from my house, in the neighbourhood where the events of this book unfold). Thanks to Beverley Daurio and Maureen Cochrane for reading and responding to the manuscript at crucial junctures. Thanks to Hasti Havari Nasab for her advice on Persian culture. Please bear in mind that whenever I have been given commonsense advice with this book, I have tended to take it wherever I wanted it to go. As a result, any errors of fact, or judgement, that appear in this book are solely the author’s responsibility.
David Neil Lee is the author of the west coast novel Commander Zero, and the non-fiction books The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field, Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz and the international bestseller Chainsaws: A History. He is also a double bassist who performs with poet/musicians such as Gary Barwin and Arthur Bull, and has toured and recorded with Leo Smith, Joe McPhee, as well as the Canadian group the Bill Smith Ensemble. Originally from British Columbia, David has lived with his family in Hamilton, Ontario, since 2002. Visit his website at www.davidneillee.com.
© David Neil Lee, 2015
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1800-893-5777.
Poplar Press is an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers, Ltd.
Cover image & design: Rachel Rosen
The Midnight Games Page 19