The Midnight Games

Chapter 3-2

“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

“I’ll be reachin’ out to heaven

Where cuhthooloo reigns supreme

When his ancient city’s risen

I’ll be livin’ in a dream.”

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’

That a change is in the wind

And someday soon the sky will open

To let the old gods rule again.”

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 n***d 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 flame-thrower – 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.”

I wondered if the Steely Dan I’d sipped had not just been a crummy beer, or skunky, but if there was something seriously wrong with it. I couldn’t focus my eyes on the glare above that square of black tarp. The air above the spiky symbols and the n***d man seemed to glow, like gasses in a fluorescent tube coming alive with an invisible charge. And I could feel an excitement myself, something I’d never felt before, like a voice inside me saying, I can help you, I can save you, and the hell with everyone else, you are a winner. You are a winner and you will overcome. You will overcome and there is a god that will lead you. A god will lead you, and I am that god, and the name of that god...

On the field below, the line of flames wavered, and suddenly something enormous clattered and shook its way out of the entrance beneath us and moved into the field; something as long as a bus, with bony limbs and feelers waving and shuddering. I blinked to see better, but the light over the stadium was strobing and flickering. The people around us waved and danced like cutup movie frames, and I could see the shape move toward the man on the tarp, lunging and feinting at the line of flames that held it back.

The performers moved back, and the shape paused. It reared up over the n***d man, who was trying frantically to break his bonds and get away, sensing the danger nearby. He began to shout, words I couldn’t make out in the racket around me.

“... POWER SOURCE,” the voice boomed over the sound system. “AND IF WE JUST TRY A LITTLE BIT HARDER... C’MON, JUST A LITTLE MORE! ... THIS TIME HE’LL COME. THE ENERGIES ARE HERE ... WHEN THE EXANIMATOR FEASTS ON THE ENERGY FROM THIS TWO-FACED COWARD WHO TRIED TO STOP US, THIS TRAITOR, THIS TERRORIST ...”

The creature pounced and snapped the n***d man into its jaws, effortlessly lifting him from the stretcher. He screamed, and for a moment the crowd fell silent, then burst into cheers as the creature turned, carrying its victim – I could now see it had long prickly feelers, or antennae, and two compound eyes like an insect – and surged back through the line of torches and disappeared under the stadium.

“... IS GONE!!!” The crowd cheered. “AND HIS SUFFERING, HIS SACRIFICE, WILL GIVE US THE ENERGY WE NEED, THE PUSH TO PROSPER, THE WILL TO WIN ...”

The darkness snarled and rumbled like an earthquake shaking heaven itself. There was a spark of lightning, and like fog before a storm a wall of blue smoke blew across the field. High above us, something black and red and monstrous tore through the gathering clouds and thrust its way into the halo of spotlights. A cry went up from the crowd, a cry of ecstasy, and shooting from my toes to the crown of my head I felt a shock of fear as if I was teetering on a high roof, at the edge of a deadly fall. I cried out and then reeled back as a vast presence – outlined with luminous globes, writhing against the field’s glow and with the glint of a gleaming hungry eye – took shape before me. I was panting from the excitement, from the thrill of that voice, from the strange urge for glory and triumph that had run through me like a shock, and I shook my head to clear it.

Then the darkness sparked brilliantly again, before the glow began to diffuse and fade into the night. The tarp on the turf lay in a heap, crumpled and stained with blood.