Demon 4- God Squad 0

by David Dwan

  Something heavy shifted in the room above which made Keeler start. Followed by loud banging and muffled voices.

  “Christ, get a grip!” he told himself. There were three, no four others upstairs he remembered working on the lights and cameras up there.

  That was when he felt something lightly touch his back. He spun around, he was still alone, of course he was alone. Full blown panic was now threatening to overwhelm Keeler as he got an image of that twisted fuck Minx in his mind’s eyes, crawling around the walls in here, hiding in shadows. Maybe even watching him.

  Again he told himself to keep it together, he was alone in here, but still the feeling grew. Minx wasn’t even in the country yet as far as Keeler knew. Davis would wait until only a couple of hours before the show before he wheeled it out. Keeler looked over to one of the boarded up windows and was relieved to see bright sunlight outside. But the feeling didn’t last long.

  That creature had been in this very room, perhaps squatting right where he was now standing. Its residual sickening presence hung heavy in the air around him almost like a physical manifestation of evil and hate.

  He had a horrible thought; just what exactly did anyone really know about that thing? About what real power it did or didn’t have?

  A cold paranoia gripped Keeler now and he looked around the room again. What if it didn’t even need to be physically present to cause its mischief?

  He glanced up at the camera in the top corner of the room and another horrible thought hit him, it was illogical, he knew, but still it felt all too real all of a sudden.

  What if this was the show? What if that bastard Davis had changed the format from wannabe exorcists to hapless crew members?

  Again banging and clattering from upstairs. He looked up at the ceiling. A dark stain was growing close to where the fake light fitting was fixed to the plaster board.

  He tried to think rationally, someone had spilt something in the room above. Probably knocked over a can of touch up paint. Paint that was now dripping through the cracks in the plaster, dripping right at his feet.

  Keeler looked down to where the drops of dark liquid had landed by his boots. He instinctively scuffed it with the toe of his boot and froze.

  If it was paint, then it was red paint.

  Someone, something was scurrying around upstairs in hurried faltering steps.

  Welcome to demon time.

  “Oh, Christ,” Keeler uttered in horror.

  It was in the house, right upstairs in the very room above him. Mister Minx was in the house.

  “Oh, Christ, oh Christ!”

  He frantically looked around for a weapon, anything but all he had was the useless IPad still clutched in his sweat soaked hands.

  The door was close, then it was just a short sprint along the hallway and out into the warm summer air.

  Keeler listened, more banging and shuffling upstairs but it now sounded to have gone through into another of the upstairs rooms. Perhaps onto the landing, perhaps waiting for him at the top of the stairs, ready to leap down on him when he was only feet from safety.

  More blood, for surely that’s what it was hit the bare boards at his feet.

  That monster must have taken the others so quickly they didn’t even have time to cry out. No time to scream, only time to bleed.

  “No,” he tried to clear his head, this was lunacy. He half knew it was all in his head, but the fog of fear clouded his better judgement.

  Fear, deep and primal taking a hold of him. Squeezing out the last drop of rationality from his brain.

  “Christ, Christ.” Keeler willed his leaden feet to move towards the slightly ajar door which led out into the hallway.

  He thought of Max and the others upstairs and got grotesque flashes of their gory ends. Slashed faces, eviscerated bodies.

  He had to get out of here before he was next. He had to get out and get that mother fucker Davis, and Miller who was probably even now moving the remote camera in for a close up of his terror stricken face.

  He looked at the camera by the door. “Fuck you,” he said but not too loudly lest he drew the attention of that unholy creature upstairs.

  Keeler shuffled over to the door as if wading through knee high water and as he reached it he gingerly peered out into the long hallway. The front door was thankfully open at the end but it seemed to him as if even the bright Spanish sunlight feared to shine over the threshold of this house of horrors.

  He opened the door which fair screamed on its hinges, that was a deliberate gag his fear addled brain remembered dully. No need for lame sound effects when you could rig the hinges to grate against one other like that every time the door moved even an inch. Keeler had always thought that had been a nice touch from the set construction team, until now. Now he hated it.

  He edged out into the hallway and was a split second from running screaming towards the door when he heard something step onto the top of the stairs (creaky of course) and then take another two steps down.

  Keeler froze as his already near catatonic brain over-loaded with fear. Minx was coming down the stairs now, slowly step by creaking step. Down to where Keeler was frozen to the spot.

  He was vaguely aware that he was sobbing now and cursed himself for giving Davis and the show exactly what they wanted. Probably in a glorious close up.

  Step by step closer and closer, Keeler couldn’t help but look towards the bottom of the rickety stairs were Minx would appear at any moment. That twisted hateful thing was going to kill him live on the internet.

  “God, help me,” he sobbed and remembered to his shame just how unmoved he had been watching those very same words uttered by what was it? Four priests now? He seemed to remember scoffing at them for clinging to their pathetic faith even as Minx drove them from the house in disgrace.

  But still, as the snot and tears ran down his face, he uttered them again just the same as a twisted shadow reached the bottom of the stairs.

  Max Cramer, Keeler’s assistant appeared at the bottom of the stairs and staggered into the hallway. He was covered in blood and his face was battered and bruised. Cramer looked genuinely surprised to see Keeler standing there.

  He stood for a full ten seconds staring at Keeler with a dazed look on his face before his blank expression finally melted into one of recognition. He smiled and Keeler could see that half his teeth had been knocked out.

  “Max,” Keeler said.

  Cramer nodded and moved falteringly over to where Keeler was still rooted to the spot.

  “Max,” Keeler uttered again. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Cramer stopped just in front of him. “Hello boss,” he lisped through broken teeth.

  “We’ve...”

  “Hell of a day,” Cramer interrupted and raised his right arm.

  John Keeler hadn’t noticed the bloody claw hammer in his colleagues hand until he brought it down hard onto his forehead. Then there was nothing. He was dead after the third blow, but still Max Cramer continued to pound his skull to a bloody pulp counting each hit as he did so. He lost count at twenty.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Say, isn’t that Max Cramer?”

  Jeff Miller was sat at his desk in the stilted prefabricated production hub, deep in concentration going through his camera set up notes for the forthcoming show. So he was only vaguely aware Carol one of the production assistants had spoken.

  “Huh?” He grunted not looking up.

  “What the fuck? Is that going to be part of the show?” She said.

  There was an edge of fear in the woman’s voice that made Miller look up from his notes. She was standing in front of the main monitor which dominated the office.

  “Is what going to be part of the what now?” He said.

  Carol turned away from the monitor to look at him. Miller was surprised to see she had gone ashen. All she could do was gesture mutely to the screen.

  Miller got to his feet and moved over to stand next to her. He followed the gesture to the
screen, and his breath caught in his throat.

  On the screen was a long shot of the house and a figure standing on the front porch. Miller leaned closer to get a better look and then expertly took control of the camera’s remote control system which was on a bank of switches and controls on the desk in front of him.

  He tapped the zoom and the shot closed in on the house and to the figure which now stepped down off the porch and onto the low stage.

  As the camera closed in he heard Carol let out a strangled sob. The noise made the hair stand up on the back of his neck and was the perfect soundtrack to what he was seeing.

  Max Cramer had stopped and was now just standing there. He looked like someone had tipped a bucket of blood over his head he was so drenched in the stuff.

  He had a bloody claw hammer grasped in his right hand which hung limply by his side.

  “Christ’s teeth,” Miller uttered. “What the hell happened in there?”

  Carol cried out behind him and started to fumble in her skirt pocket for her phone. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

  “No!” Miller warned. “Call Davis first.” That was the standard response to anything weird that happened around demon time’s sometimes troubled (cursed maybe?) production.

  “Sure, sure,” Carol replied and hurriedly scrolled through her phone book.

  Miller was transfixed by Cramer’s blank expression, then he had a horrible thought. Weren’t there others in the house? Including Keeler?

  “Shit,” hands working with a practiced efficiency and without taking his eyes off the screen, Miller moved the mouse and clicked on one of the house camera icons.

  The picture flicked to the main downstairs room. Empty. He clicked onto the hall camera and cried out in shock.

  A body was hung, no not hung... He tapped the camera’s control letting it slowly zoom in for a better shot. Crucified to the closed door of the downstairs room. The victims head was little more than a bloody pulp but Miller recognised John Keeler’s trademark lumper jack shirt.

  Someone screamed behind him. But he just couldn’t take his eyes of the screen. Again without really realizing he was doing it, Miller flicked between the other cameras in the house.

  Stairs, empty. Landing, empty but with a splash of what could have been blood on one wall. Back room, bingo. One of the other crew members, Perkins was it? Again the body had been crucified this time to a wall, his head bashed in beyond all recognition.

  “Christ Jeff, that’s enough!” Someone shouted, but the voyeur in him just couldn’t stop.

  Next room, same nightmare. This time the victim was a woman, not that you would have known it from the destroyed face. But Miller knew Bev Rice had been wearing a micky mouse t-shirt today because he remembered ogling her breasts through the tight material earlier. Again she was nailed to a wall arms stretched horizontally from her body.

  “Jesus!” It was Carol again, she sounded close to hysteria. “Please God tell me this is just part of the show!” Another voice, way off, comforting her as best it could.

  ‘Please God tell me this is just part of the show.’ And secretly Jeff Miller wished that it was.

  That was it wasn’t it? Miller tried to remember if there was anyone else in the house. Just in case he gave another click of the mouse. Final room, final victim. Hung on six inch nails through the palms. No head to speak of, a bloody mess. Miller realized he had no idea of the guy’s name. He was new and Miller didn’t remember ever actually speaking to the man.

  A large figure appeared at his side. “Turn this off, Miller.” Thick Russian accent, all authority and threat. Nico Gorodetsky, Davis’ head of security. The Russian put his hand over Miller’s on the mouse. “I said, turn this off.”

  Miller let him pull his hand away but kept looking at the grainy snuff film image on the monitor.

  “And you had better not have been recording this,” Nico added.

  No he hadn’t, but oh how he wished he had.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When the call had come to inform him of the events at the house, Michael Davis had been in a Barcelona hotel room approving the latest ‘Mister Minx’ T-shirts that they would be selling at the show.

  He had been so engrossed in the new designs and the growing potential of the merchandising catalogue that he had forgotten for a moment that Minx was an all too real entity and not just a very marketable special effect.

  Now he was reminded of exactly what the creature was.

  Davis plunged his hands into his trouser pockets and stared at the house. It was just after 2pm but even out in an open field like this with the sun beating down on him. Davis wished he hadn’t left his jacket in the car. That monstrosity in front of him seemed to rob all the heat, and hope for that matter, from its surroundings.

  Nico Gorodetsky was standing next to him. Davis wasn’t a short man but the big Russian was a good head taller than him. Gorodetsky and his team had taken control of the whole debacle with an almost frightening efficiency.

  The bodies had been ‘disposed of’ and Max Cramer was already on his way to a Portuguese hospital that the Russian knew would ask no questions about their new arrival for the right price.

  Any witnesses on the crew had been briefed and Davis had been surprised that none of them had actually quit over the incident. He guessed everyone surrounding this circus of horrors was becoming more and more desensitised to the bizarre and supernatural.

  It would have been easy to believe by the time Davis had arrived that the whole event almost hadn’t happened at all. And if he hadn’t spoken to an alarmingly calm Jeff Miller about what he had witnessed, he might well have half believed the party line they were all now spouting that Max, Keeler and the others had simply quit. After all new crew members popped up and disappeared often here at demon time.

  “You should burn that fucking house, Boss.” Nico said. “Preferably with that thing inside.”

  Davis nodded. “I know, I know.” He replied with a weary resignation. Common sense always had that ring of truth about it, whether you liked it or not.

  He could almost feel the Russian’s eyes on him. “But you won’t,” Nico said. It wasn’t a question or a hope. It was what it was. A fact.

  “Greed is a powerful sin, Nico.” He said and craned his neck up to look at him with a faint smile.

  The Russian had already turned back to the house, always vigilant around it and its sometime occupant. “And also a fatal one,” he said.

  The whole thing had a sickening inevitability about it. A dawning sense of some upcoming self-fulfilling prophecy. Had Minx actually failed in its mission to kill Davis? Or had it simply drawn out the process?

  Davis dismissed the notion, or at least pushed it to the back of his mind, where he kept the events of that night he first crossed paths with the monster and that shadowy Kraut.

  “Did Cramer say anything, afterwards? Say why he did it?”

  “He said the creature was in the walls and had possessed the others, so it could fool the charms and get out into the world. Crucifixion was the only way to stop it.”

  “Christ.”

  “Exactly.” Nico said without a trace of sarcasm.

  “Where’s the little fuck now?” Davis asked.

  “He’s safe, still under lock and key in the box. We have him in a lock up just a couple of miles from here.”

  Safe? It from us or us from it? Davis pondered grimly.

  “And the guards didn’t report anything...” Anything what? Christ get a grip Davis told himself but still he kept rambling. “It didn’t, I don’t know, do anything? Whilst all this was going on?”

  “The monster is asleep, miles away. It didn’t do anything.” The Russian told him.

  “Course not,” Davis said more in hope than conviction. Because the alternative made his bladder twitch.

  “Sir, if I may make a suggestion?” Gorodetsky asked in that polite Russian way of his.

  “Of course, Nico.”

  “Make this the last s
how. Let me burn the house and dispose of the creature.”

  “Then you’d be out of a job,” Davis told him.

  “This job I can do without, boss.”

  “You could quit?”

  “You know I won’t do that. I agreed to keep you safe whilst you were on this strange journey of yours. And I will, so will my boys.”

  Davis turned to Gorodetsky who finally looked down at him. He had heard the Russian and his team were ex Spetsnaz, part of the old soviet special forces. Regardless they were hard as fucking nails. Nico was in his late fifties so was old enough.

  Davis had hired him because he was a fucking tank and a very well respected private security contractor. He had expected a mercenary but what he hadn’t expected was the absolute loyalty that came with the appointment. When this guy signed on, he really signed on.

  “Thank you, Nico.” Davis said with genuine emotion and wondered if this guy was his only true friend in the world.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Can I get you anything else, Father?”

  The young priest didn’t answer so the production assistant stepped out of the hotel room and onto the large balcony where he was sitting at a table reading from his bible. Well the bible that had been provided for him by the production.

  Susan Rodriguez stopped and had to shield her eyes against the bright mid-morning sunlight which was in stark contrast to the cool air-conditioned gloom of the hotel suite. She nearly staggered straight back in again as the wall of heat hit her a second later.

  She was about to speak again but had a sudden feeling she was intruding on the priest who seemed deep in thought or perhaps prayer. Out of his sombre clerical clothing and dressed casually in a linen shirt and canvas trousers one could have easily mistaken him for a tourist.