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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781928088189 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Poplar Press |
| Publication date: | 10/27/2015 |
| Series: | The Midnight Games , #1 |
| Sold by: | PUBLISHDRIVE KFT |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 212 |
| File size: | 863 KB |
| Age Range: | 12 Years |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
SOMETHING HAPPENS
Here in the east end, it's nothing new to see a rundown European church – Polish, Ukrainian, Italian – suddenly turn Asian, its faded signs freshly painted over in Korean or Vietnamese. Along Barton Street, everything from Satan to cannabis has its house of worship. In this neighbourhood, churches loudly promise everything from cancer cures to "glorious rapture" (better, I guess, than the regular rapture). They are just a few of the many enterprises that explode into life, like aliens from a more cheerful planet, cleaning and painting the empty storefronts, putting up a brave face for months or years, waiting for their offerings to catch on, their sparkly display windows gradually turning dull and dusty, before eventually turning off the lights for good, covering the windows with a fresh set of newspapers and heading home.
The first I saw of the Resurrection Church was graffiti: a few words hovering around a logo that looked different every time I saw it drawn with magic marker or brush or spray can. Sometimes it looked like a math problem, sometimes like some weird musical notation, sometimes like a single staring eye.
THEY RETURN!
Just this past summer, on a hot day down by the railway tracks, I had been searching for praying mantises with my friend Sam Shirazi. We had gone down to the end of Markle Avenue, just off the rarely used train line that curved through our neighbourhood into the north end; a no man's land of belching chimneys (mostly gone cold) and vast catwalked factories and crumbling parking lots. Markle led to an abandoned chain factory in the corner of an empty parking lot ringed by dusty underbrush. Behind it, rusted metal smokestacks from an old incinerator still stood – barely stood, it looked to me, getting rustier every year. But that day, the old brick building was showing some action. There were cars parked there, and a sign over the logo proclaimed this as the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods.
"Funny place for a church," I said.
Sam responded, "There's a guy in there looking at us."
"We're not on their property. We've got every right to be here."
"Now he's talking to that other guy. Let's get out of here."
"Who cares?" I said. "They look like redneck losers."
"Nate. Yeah," Sam replied.
Sam knows more than I do about run-ins with rednecks. I conceded and we headed back down the tracks. My dad's family is Portuguese and my mom, as I recall her, was some kind of blonde, so I look more or less white-bread Canadian. But sometimes Sam gets a hard time from the guys at school who run in gangs and sneer and bully and, when they figure they can get away with it, punch out anyone outside the gang. At first I'd thought it might be both funny and instructive to point out their feeble knowledge of geography, since they call Sam "Paki" even though he and his family are from Iran. In reality, these miniseminars were never appreciated. Now I simply try to avoid such confrontations, though when they happen, I stand by Sam. Of course, Sam's full first name is Osama, which doesn't help.
Anyway, I'd thought no more of the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods. Until tonight.
"HOLD THIS ..." Dana handed me the flashlight. In its uncertain beam I saw him pull out his pocket knife. It wasn't much of a knife, with a rubber handle and a blade about five centimetres long, but this little blade, amazingly, sliced through the solid metal bands that anchored the fence to the fencepost, in this shadowy corner of the chain-link barrier that separated Ivor Wynne Stadium from the city around it.
"Buddy set this up here so he could sneak into Ticats games, he's a big fan. Then a couple weeks ago he asked me – same as you did, Nate – if I knew anything about these midnight games. I didn't know what he was talking about. He said he'd go to one of them and tell me what goes down. But I never saw him again."
"He went into a midnight game, and he didn't come out?"
"Before the game I'd see him every morning buying his smokes at the Big Bee. Every day, seven a.m. like clockwork. Next thing you know, he's gone."
Then Dana showed me his secret. Looking around, he pulled two plastic zip ties out of his jacket. He slipped the bands he had just cut – which weren't metal at all, just zip ties – into a pocket.
"I spray paint 'em silver," he said proudly.
At that moment a roar blossomed from the crowd and the announcer's excited voice – "ON THE WAY, THE GREAT ONE HIMSELF" – blasted from the stadium's sound system. "Go go go quick quick quick," Dana urged me, pushing the fence's lower corner inward and following after I scuttled through. From the shelter of a dumpster we could just see the football field's illuminated east end. Dana gestured at the nearest refreshment booth. "Nate, buy a beer," he whispered. "So we won't look like total moochers. Get an extra cup."
"I can't buy a beer. I'm underage."
"The way I hear it, tonight anything goes. This is a midnight game. I'll meet you back here."
"But ..." I was going to say "... they know me here." Dana had already faded back into the shadows. I worked the stadium concessions during football games in the summer and fall. I have made a lot of hot dogs and been hissed at by a lot of drunks, but I'd picked up a few cooking skills, and probably social skills too.
As it happened, I didn't know the bartender, who wasn't much older than me and looked unsurprised when I materialized out of the shadows in the black pants and hoodie that Dana had recommended and which I usually wear anyway. When I held up one finger he poured a Steely Dan into a plastic cup without asking for ID. I pushed the money toward him. I was only sixteen and didn't look a day older, but Dana had said that at midnight games, anything goes. Well, we would see.
"Could I get an extra cup?" I asked. "My buddy's has got a crack in it." He pulled a cup from a stack.
"Good crowd tonight," I observed.
"More all the time, and we got something real good this week," the bartender said. "Yog-Sauces will be smackin' his lips when he lands here." He turned as a new group of customers approached, laughing and slapping and jostling each other excitedly.
I retreated to find Dana had closed up the gap in the fence, and was waving to me from just inside the nearest entrance, looking out at the lights on the field. He pulled a Steely Dan of his own from his pocket and emptied the can into my offered cup.
"No way I'm buyin' it here," he said. "It's five bucks a beer, isn't it?"
"Six." That six bucks had hurt and I was hoping Dana would at least split it. Actually, I had been hoping this evening would be free of charge. At least now we looked like legitimate paying customers. We started up the stairs to the nearest bleacher, the beer sloshing in its plastic cups.
FOR ALL the noise the midnight games made, with their thunderous announcements and heavy metal music pounding through the neighbourhood, tonight there were no more than a few thousand people here, filling the lower rows of the bleachers, watching the bright lights and the figures running and scattering and feverishly prepping the field below. Dana and I had agreed that, to stay inconspicuous, we would head for the empty upper tiers where we could look down on the crowd and scope out whatever was going on.
My father and I live two blocks away from the stadium, on the other side of my old school, the boarded-up Prince of Wales Elementary that we preferred to call PoW. This was the house I grew up in, an old three-storey brick house that my mom and dad had bought to raise a family, though they'd only managed to produce me before my mother died ten years ago, when I was six.
Since the summer's end, once every week or ten days, the games had been keeping our neighbourhood awake. Everyone on our street was used to Ticat nights, when the blasts of music, the amplified chanting, the flyovers by jet fighters and antique bombers, the blasts of cheering were all tolerable because they were part of our way of life, and because they finished by ten p.m.
I had inherited my father's lack of interest in football, but since I'd turned fifteen, and began to work in the concessions, I'd welcomed the games and even enjoyed the noise and the drunkenness, the anticipation, the bursts of excitement. Like a lot of kids in the neighbourhood it was my first real job where I made real money. Not only did I make some money, but for a few hours a new world opened up, a world different enough from mine to make me happy to clean up the spilled drinks and grease spatters, fill up on leftover fries and hot dogs, and leave the custodians to dim the lights as I left the stadium and went back to everyday life.
But I didn't know anyone who had ever been called to work the midnight games. I could have used the money, but when I called the concession they had nothing for me. "Those are private contracts."
I didn't mind too much; there was something weird about these games, not advertised online or on the radio, unreported on TV or in the sports pages. They started up at midnight, when the streets filled with families and couples and crowds, hollow eyed and obsessed, bickering and swearing and trading lines from songs I'd never heard, as they came from all over the city to converge on the latest Midnight Game.
"The guy at the bar mentioned something called Yog-Sauce," I said, "or Yog-Sauces." I fought for balance as I skidded on a wet spot.
This was another reason to keep going up, and up; the occupied seats were awash in Steely Dan. It turned out I had been alone in my pathetic purchase of a single beer with extra cup. The customers who were arriving as I left had taken trays to handle all the beer they needed, and among the crowd plastic cups slopped Steely Dan across plastic seats. People were noisy and excited: "Get this show on the road," someone yelled.
We passed a baby in its stroller, shrieking and ignored while its mother, a ponytailed woman spilling out of her shirt, screeched at the man in the baseball cap next to her. "I wanna be a cougar. Why? Because cougars are awesome. Because I wanna find a loser like you and chew his leg off!"
"I haddit with you!" he shouted. The baby kept crying. Dana and I, keeping our heads down, trudged up the steps to the upper tiers, our shadowed feet crunching through discarded empties and splashing through puddles. Halfway up the section we started to find empty rows; and finally we sat down on benches above the crowd. I sipped my beer. The benches were damp with dew, or what I hoped was dew, drawn out of the air as the autumn night cooled.
"This beer tastes funny," I observed. Dana was squinting out at the field.
"They done something with the team colours."
"Not that I'm an expert. My dad says that Steely Dan is made from diet ginger ale and rubbing alcohol."
Dana wasn't listening. As music boomed from the speakers I looked down into the glare on the field. Sure enough whoever was playing wasn't wearing the Ticat black and gold. At the west end of the field the team was dressed all in black and at the opposite end, the team was in white. White, I wondered, how do they do it? The grass stains must be hell to get out. I pulled out my phone and clicked a few photos.
Different music started playing, some big booming orchestra thing. A whistle blew, the teams started to run. They weren't wearing helmets or any other gear or padding. I blinked hard against the field lights. What kind of moves were these? Precise and practised, but bizarre. The black and white ranks moved together, then shifted to make points and angles and corners, forming strange, unreadable patterns. It was not football at all, but some kind of weird flash mob or performance art, sending messages best seen from above, messages not to the crowd in the bleachers but to the night sky itself.
Once again I tried to tackle my beer like a man. I didn't want to give up, especially having invested six bucks. But the next time I took a sip, I spit it out. "I can't drink this beer," I told Dana.
Dana ignored me, his gaze on the field below. "There's no ball," he said.
I shoved my almost-full cup under the bench. The period, or dance, or ceremony, whatever it was ended and cheerleaders poured out onto the field. Instead of cheering and chanting, the crowd fell dead silent and, as one body, rose to their feet. Dana and I looked at each other. We stood up too.
Now the competing teams merged in the middle of the field, and through their ranks came four players, carrying between them a long, wrapped bundle on a kind of stretcher. By the time they reached the centre, a huge square of black tarp had been laid out on the turf. From our seats in the upper tiers I could barely make out the network of lines and angles that decorated the black square. But when I squinted at those lines, trying to see them better, my vision seemed to blur. I blinked: what was going on?
Someone in the crowd began to sing, and gradually more voices joined in.
"I'm a worker and I wonder When I'm gonna hear that call of old My old hometown's goin' under All the furnaces gone cold
And as those lines were repeated, other voices sang against them: "Yog-Sauces Yog-Sauces Yog-Sauces." I didn't know what the heck the song was about, but the crowd had sung this before. Whatever you call it, the effect when you sing different musical parts against each other like that, it was eerie, but beautiful. "Yog-Sauces Yog-Sauces ..." I started joining in; Dana looked surprised but soon, to keep up appearances, he started moving his mouth in time with the others. I kept repeating my part; it needed work; Yog was no problem, but there was something funny about the way they were pronouncing Sauces. I wasn't quite getting it right. Did everybody here have a lisp but me?
"All these years I've kept on hopin'
I felt a tingling like an electric shock. I looked around. Where was it coming from? There were no hidden wires. Low clouds, thick and slithery as smoke from an oil fire, roiled around the upper reaches of the stadium and I wondered about lightning.
Suddenly I heard someone speak into my ear; a voice deep, vibrant and reassuring: I can help you.
I looked around – there was no one was except Dana. I shivered. Was I having a psychic experience? Was this literally the excitement of the crowd, somehow transmitted through the thickening atmosphere around me, filling me with notions? What was going on? From school assemblies, sporting events and fairs I knew that a crowd was a place where a lot of people get excited over stuff that any one of them, if left on their own, would see was hopelessly dumb. Was that what was happening to me?
The shrouded stretcher was carried out onto the black square and laid pointing east to west; the performers stepping back so we could all have a good look. Then the cover was whipped off and I gasped.
On the stretcher lay a naked man. He was one hundred per cent ordinary looking, a pudgy guy in his forties with dark hair and short legs. Blindfolded, his hands and feet bound with duct tape, he shivered and tried to rise, but fell back. I wondered if he had been drugged with something. Numbly I raised my phone and took a few more pictures.
"What the hell is going on here?" asked Dana. Everyone else just kept on singing. As the chant thundered over the public address system I felt the structure under me shudder as if, in the depths of the stadium, something huge was rising to the music.
Now a line of men in overalls came shambling out onto the field. Shambling and awkward, because each of them had a heavy barbecue-style propane tank on his back, with a long hose and a nozzle.
They were carrying tiger torches. I was familiar with these, in a way, because for three or four birthdays, when I was a kid, I had asked my dad for one. Watching road crews softening asphalt, I'd decided that a tiger torch was the closest thing I'd seen to a flamethrower – which, as I'd learned from watching Them! with my dad, was the best weapon to have in case giant ants appeared. But Dad never got me one.
Someone on the field was gesturing at them to hurry, and they lit their torches and lined up on either side of the stadium entrance directly below Dana and me. Raising the nozzles before them like heraldic trumpets, they formed an avenue of flame leading to the man on the tarp.
Above the chant of the audience I could hear a roaring and humming in the air, as if the sleeping sky itself was waking up, rumbling and hungry. The noise grew in volume and when it swelled, the concrete stadium itself began to vibrate. I could still pick out a few of the announcer's words. "HE'S COMING ... HE'S COMING ... HE'S COMING."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Midnight Games"
by .
Copyright © 2015 David Neil Lee.
Excerpted by permission of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PART 1,
PROLOGUE,
CHAPTER 1: SOMETHING HAPPENS,
CHAPTER 2: SOMETHING FOLLOWING,
CHAPTER 3: SOMETHING BESTOWED,
CHAPTER 4: SOMETHING SCUTTLING,
CHAPTER 5: SOMETHING BIG,
CHAPTER 6: SOMETHING ARISES,
CHAPTER 7: SOMETHING MALIGN,
CHAPTER 8: SOMETHING DREAMED,
CHAPTER 9: SOMETHING STOLEN,
CHAPTER 10: SOMETHING ROCKY,
CHAPTER 11: SOMEONE EXILED,
CHAPTER 12: SOMETHING IN THE DARK,
PART 2,
CHAPTER 13: ENEMIES OF THE CHURCH,
CHAPTER 14: HPL,
CHAPTER 15: SNATCHED,
CHAPTER 16: INVASIVE SPECIES,
CHAPTER 17: SECRET HISTORIES,
CHAPTER 18: THE DISANGLED SANCTUARY,
CHAPTER 19: EVIE,
CHAPTER 20: THOSE WHO WOULD DESTROY US,
CHAPTER 21: TRICKADRITCH,
CHAPTER 22: THE GHOST TRAIN,
PART 3,
CHAPTER 23: DOOMED,
CHAPTER 24: THE HOUNDS,
CHAPTER 25: SORCERER,
CHAPTER 26: AFTERMATH,
CHAPTER 27: THE SURVIVORS,
CHAPTER 28: RESURRECTION,
CHAPTER 29: A MESSAGE FROM THE BORDER LANDS,
Acknowledgements,
About the Author,
What People are Saying About This
“H. P. has landed in the Hammer! The working-class grit of Hamilton, Ontario, crashes full tilt into the unspeakable gothic dread of Lovecraftian horror in The Midnight Games, and the results are enjoyably weird and wild. Featuring an unlikely assemblage of heroes (possibly including Providence’s favourite son himself), countless Hamilton touchstones and a clever take on Lovecraft that doesn’t shy away from the author’s more troublesome qualities, David Neil Lee’s novel is a very funny and unexpected addition to the Cthulhu mythos and the horror genre.”