The Midnight Games

by Lee, David Neil;

  “Hello, Nate? Excuse us – Mr. Silva!”

  I sat up and blinked and tried to look surprised. What? Me? Sleeping? Everyone had a big laugh.

  “I hope we’re not making too much noise for you, Nate.”

  I mouthed something about being up late, but everyone just groaned at my lameness. It was not first thing in the morning, but 11:15 a.m. and I was not in bed, but slumped over my desk in English class. When it was over I tried to avoid Mr. Delmonico, but he intercepted me.

  “Seriously, Nate,” he said. “You like English. You’ve never nodded off like this. What’s going on?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods?”

  Mr. Delmonico nodded. “Those people? I thought they faded away years ago.”

  “They’re back.”

  He shrugged. “They were one of those little hot-dog cults who get going for a while, rope in a bunch of followers for a few years, and then fade away. Didn’t they make a big fuss down your way a while back, at the stadium? There was a fire, or an explosion ...?”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “But they’re holding ceremonies in the stadium late at night, making a big racket.”

  “You can call the city on them. There’re bylaws about that sort of thing.”

  I hesitated to tell Mr. Delmonico more. I was afraid that if I told him what I’d seen, he would sign me up for drug counselling.

  I yawned. “People claim that they’ve called bylaw, but nobody ever comes.”

  “You can always call the cops,” he said. “I’ll call them myself. I can’t have some fast-talking cult keeping my best students up all night.”

  “I’ve got to get to science class.”

  “The Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods. I really thought they were gone for good.” Mr. Delmonico shook his head. “They were tackier than the Scientologists.”

  I WAS still smarting with embarrassment when I got on the bus after school. I looked glumly out the window as we reached the lip of the Mountain and started down. The few roads, choked with traffic, that led up and down the escarpment were a lot like my life up to this point. On every side was interesting stuff – the fringes of old forests, still supporting raccoons and woodchucks and a thousand species of plants, bugs and other critters; waterfalls; layers of rock that spelled out eons of geological time, all part of that mystery world, the escarpment. But here I was, day after day, riding the bus up and down this same narrow, paved strip, with no time for that other world, bored and wishing and thinking about all the other stuff I might do someday. The adults around me were always talking about having high hopes for the future, but they themselves seemed buried up to their necks in the past, with the classic rock and their Ticats sweaters and their nostalgia for the great days of the steel mills. Different worlds – which world did I belong to?

  I WAS thinking about this when I got off the bus and walked over to the old Prince of Wales Elementary. I took a good look at it. The workmen, gradually taking it to pieces, were gone for the day. Unable to cut through the fenced-off playground, I skirted it by going down to Cannon. There, a small group of city workers in hard hats and fluorescent vests were probing a big sinkhole that had swallowed up half the sidewalk. I leaned over and peered into the darkness.

  “Stay back there, sir!” The “sir” yelled like an insult. A burly guy with black hair curling out from under his hard hat came up to me. “C’mon, kid, get back.”

  “What the heck is this?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They’re popping up all over the place.”

  “But what causes it?”

  “I dunno, we can’t figure it. Usually heavy rain, floods. But we haven’t had anything like that. Could be seismic activity.”

  That could be true; over the summer, once or twice I’d felt the house rock as if a dump truck had run into the front porch; and a few weeks ago in the school cafeteria the light fixtures had trembled, and a ripple had radiated through the surface of my chicken soup.

  “But even regular earth tremors don’t cause this; most of the shock is absorbed through the soil and rocks. This is different –”

  “Maybe it’s a volcano,” I joked.

  “Right,” he nodded. “I saw that movie.” (So had I of course – about a million times.) “Wouldn’t it be our luck? A goddamn volcano in the middle of Hamilton – just when real estate is going up.” He yelled at his buddies. “Kid says it’s a volcano!”

  A few of the guys guffawed and one of them told me to shove it. The burly guy scratched his head. “I dunno about that, man. It’s more like there’s something big down there, and it wants to come up. Maybe it’s some old First Nations’ god that’s pissed off ...” He gestured me away. “But you really got to stay back. No telling what these things will do.”

  I LEFT him and his buddies to their sinkhole and kept on circling the school, taking a close look at the plywood over the ground-floor windows. On the Melrose Avenue side, right under the Reserved sign where the principal used to park her car, I found what I was looking for: a plywood sheet where half the fasteners were screw heads, not nailheads.

  Dana had told me that he did this at abandoned buildings, late at night when no one was around. With a few tools he carried in his duffle bag, he’d pry loose the end of a sheet and pull out the nails. Then he’d go inside, screw in a hook and eye so he could pull the end of the sheet closed against the window, spread out his sleeping bag and stay the night. His favourite sites were buildings recently closed for demolition: “water’s still running, toilets working, I bring the shampoo – it’s like a night at the Sheraton!” Before sunrise he’d rouse himself and leave the way he came, fastening the plywood with screws instead of nails. The following night, he’d be back to unscrew them...

  “... and I’m home for the night – luxury accommodation!” It was those screws that told me that this, for sure, was Dana’s latest squat ... his home until the roof was peeled off and the walls trucked away, until there was no more shelter inside and then he would find another place – coming back to scope out the prospects when a new Prince of Wales Elementary School began to rise to replace the old.

  CHAPTER 6

  SOMETHING ARISES

  My detour past the school had made me late getting home. Dad had been called in for an evening shift, so he’d started supper early. In the morning I had pulled out some noodles, planning to make pesto, since I’d bought sauce and some walnuts (cheaper than pine nuts).

  When I had started school up on the Mountain, I’d been one of three boys who had taken Family Studies. I had the idea I needed to learn more about cooking, since Dad did most of our grocery shopping at Dollarama, and I felt I was missing something. I took the course and got interested in cooking from scratch.

  Also, some of my friends ate food that I thought was really good. At Sam’s house, for example, they fed me dishes with vegetables and grains I had never heard of. Another friend’s dad was good with quick stir-fries. Even Dana, to an enough-already extent, had lectured me about the importance of diet in successful homelessness.

  But today, I was too late. Dad had defaulted to his standard spaghetti with canned meat sauce. He’d started without me, eating quickly with one eye on the clock.

  “Where you been?” he asked me between mouthfuls.

  “I was just over looking at PoW. It’s all boarded up.”

  “That was a good school,” he said. “They did all right by you.”

  I served myself at the stove. “They’ll be back. They’re getting a whole new building.” I did not share Dad’s nostalgia for my elementary school days.

  “Didn’t hear you come in last night,” Dad said.

  I sat down across from him. “Let me ask you.” I rolled up some noodles and watched the strands slide off the fork and droop lazily back to the plate. “Do you know what all this noise is, over at the stadium at night – you know, these midnight games?”

  Dad sighed. “They’ve been making a rack
et lately, haven’t they? More active than they’ve been in a long time.” He gave me an anxious smile. “For years now it’s been the same: they start up, people complain, they get shut down.”

  “So you’ve never been to one yourself?”

  He shook his head. “Never been a sports fan. Besides, I was so busy with the business back then – the last time the midnight games were really going – working ten a.m. to eleven p.m. ...”

  “Of course,” I sighed. Dad had operated Touchdown Video at King and Gage back at the height of the video rentals business. He was doing so well that when my Uncle Don convinced him to invest in a Woodstock start-up – a little company that was making computer desks – he felt he was on the brink of big-time financial success. But the desk business went belly up, and when Touchdown Video had to finish switching over from VHS tapes to DVDs, Dad didn’t have the money to make the change. I’d heard this story many times, and I was hoping I wouldn’t hear it again now.

  “Besides,” he said, “it’s probably some kind of, you know, ethnic thing – I dunno, a soccer club from one of those little African countries. Bet they get a good rate, using the stadium that time of night.” He looked at the clock. “At least with the weather getting cold, soon we’ll be shutting all the windows and won’t hear them.”

  “Dana and I snuck into the game last night.”

  I waited for his reply, hearing in my head everything Dad would say when in an anti-Dana mood, those downtimes when he feared that, instead of broadening my perspective on class struggle, Dana would encourage me to quit school and hit the streets, living out of my backpack and trailing shopping bags and lost toys like so many of the homeless. You did WHAT? Was Dana stoned? You're lucky you didn't get arrested! Is he doing crystal meth? Why does a smart kid like you buddy up with a guy like that?

  But Dad didn’t say anything. There was, in fact, silence. His spaghetti saw its chance and slid silently back onto his plate.

  “The thing is, Dad, it’s not a game at all. It’s some kind of mass ritual thing. We even saw...”

  “Stay away from the midnight games.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Dad. They’re not games...”

  “Nate, I know what they are.” His voice was getting quieter.

  “But you just said...”

  “I lied. If you get mixed up with that Cuhthooloo cult ...”

  I was still getting used to that word, first hearing it chanted by the crowd at the game.

  “Cthoolhu,” I said, experimenting with the sound. Dad thought I was correcting him, which he hated.

  “Thoolhu, Cuhthooloo, for pity’s sake, Nate. They’ve been around for years. They flash lights and blow smoke and talk about bringing back the so-called old gods –” Dad waved his fork in the air as he made scare quotes with his fingers “– but they don’t do anything but suck people in and take their money...”

  “No kidding ...” I started to complain about the price of beer, then thought better of it.

  “... and eventually run them down to nothing and then dump them like trash. They appeal to all the down-and-outs in this town, the people who gave everything they had to the mills, and then got left high and dry when free trade came in and the steelmaking went offshore. The Church tells them that with the Great Old Ones in charge, the furnaces will start up again and they’ll be sittin’ pretty. They’ll all have speedboats and cottages and season tickets ...”

  “Dad, let me just ask you...” I wanted to know what he thought about the human sacrifice we’d seen. Was that just lights and smoke? If Dad knew so much about the Resurrection Church – I was hearing stuff from him I’d never heard – maybe he could set my mind at rest about that. If I could just get a word in edgewise.

  “...and gas will be cheap again, and they won’t have to worry about pollution or global warming and everything will go back like it was in the 1950s. If they just bow down.”

  “So, Dad, let me just ask you ...”

  “Nate, all that is lies, lies set up to suck in weak and scared people – people who are scared because times are hard, they’re poor and getting poorer and they’ll turn to any god or false god or con man or fast talker. You better not have anything to do with that so-called church.”

  “Dad, I’m not joining them. I was curious, but jeez, it looked like someone got killed last night, in some, I dunno, ritual or something.” I described it to him as well as I could. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The sky above the field was vibrating, like it had come to life. And then ...”

  Again, I almost told him about the thing that had clambered out of the bowels of the stadium, snatched that man off the stretcher, and vanished back into the darkness. I mean, it wasn’t something that I would believe, if I hadn’t seen it.

  Even as he raved at me about the Church, Dad kept glancing through the kitchen door, where he could see the clock on the stove. “Look, I’ve got to go to work,” he said. “But first I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told you.”

  He was agitated, but I knew my father would have to get hit by a truck before he’d be late for a shift at the department store. I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure he would be late if I got hit by a truck. I offered to walk him to the bus. By now the sun was low in the sky, leaves changing colour on the few trees left in the neighbourhood. A light haze softened the outline of the distant escarpment. We walked down the street, Dad looking to every side, tilting his head toward me so he wouldn’t have to raise his voice.

  “Your mother... she got so lonely living here... I’m not saying she wasn’t a good mother, she was the best. She thought you were the greatest thing that ever happened. But you know, she was from out west, and she never got used to life here in Hamilton, and she got sucked in by that Church, by their promise of a better world. Though if you ask me, it’d be a world where we’d all be slaves, we’d be fodder, for those monsters. Yog-Sothoth. Cthulhu. Meet the new boss –”

  We turned the corner onto Cannon, and a breeze arose from the south end of the stadium. Low clouds darkened the sun and I shivered and zipped up my hoodie. We watched for the bus to appear and take my father downtown, where he could transfer up to the Mountain.

  “– same as the old boss,” Dad continued, “only worse. But your mom was slipping out to these Church meetings ... at first they were in little rented halls and church basements and off-nights at bars. Then it began – the crowds got bigger, the music started up, the so-called midnight games started up at the stadium. Your mother was excited about this. I was disgusted by the whole thing, but I let her go her own way, hoping she’d get bored and come back to us, but one night she slipped out and didn’t come back.”

  He looked down Cannon Street. Cars came around the curve toward us, varying in shape and colour but perfectly paced in their speed and formation, like a flock of geese. Dad was choosing his words carefully.

  “Then they hit their peak, the games – the last round, ten years ago, before they started up again this summer. I never should have let her go. Somebody brought in some kind of a bomb. That’s what the papers said – an ‘explosion of undetermined origin.’”

  “You always said it was a car accident.”

  “Her, and several other people – seven altogether, the cops told me. There was a lot of ... a lot of damage. They didn’t let me identify her body – it had been a thermal explosive, they said. A lot of the bodies were unrecognizable. They found this.” He took out his keys and shook them until a wedding ring appeared among them, tarnished silver and black with most of the gold burned away.

  “I searched high and low for any evidence about what drew her to the Church, about what she thought she would accomplish. The funny thing is, before she left that last night, she’d wiped her computer. When I booted it up, the hard drive was empty. And there was nothing written down. No names or numbers or addresses. Those bastards wiped her off the face of the earth, and it looked like she’d done her best to help them.”

  I barely remember my moth
er, and over the years I’d gotten pissed off at her for dying so soon, as if she’d just gotten sick of me and left. I knew that wasn’t fair, but Dad’s story brought back all those feelings. My mother sounded self-centred, crazy and wrapped up in herself and the Church.

  “You always said it was a car accident.”

  “Nate, you were so little. And I didn’t really know the whole story anyway.” He shrugged. “Never will know, I guess. I’m sorry.”

  “Why did she delete all the data off her computer? Sounds to me like she was trying to cover something up. Like she meant to take off anyway.”

  “Don’t ever say that,” Dad growled. “If you ask me, she was protecting me and you. Especially you.” Another formation of cars passed and now the bus appeared, grinding its way around the curve from Gage.