NINE
So it was settled, the show was scheduled for two weeks’ time. Ross was to meet with one of the shows representatives a full three days before, in a hotel yet to be determined. Where he would be briefed about the show, what to expect and to sign the all-important injury wavers.
Demon time was a full contact show, they told him. But he needn’t worry, they hadn’t lost a contestant yet. But just in case... Besides he would receive ten grand for his participation.
Ross remembered the final image of the vanquished Father Winthorpe as he was wheeled away, babbling incoherently, into a waiting ambulance.
Father Mendez has told him that Winthorpe had turned up in a French hospital the following morning, almost completely comatose from the traumas he had endured. Mendez and his team had taken the fallen priest back to the Vatican as soon as they could and were even now working with him as best they could to bring him back from the very brink of insanity.
For his sake and also so they might glean some clue as to the creature’s weakness’ or its current whereabouts. But judging by the show Ross had witnessed, he didn’t hold out much hope of either.
That left Mendez and his team with a pathetically short time to find something, anything to arm Ross against the creature if it did indeed exist. Or he feared he too would suffer Winthorpe’s fate, live on the internet. An internet that was already buzzing with anticipation at the next edition of demon time.
Time in which Father Shane Ross had never felt so lost, or so alone. Not since those nightmare days of his youth. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on the young priest either. The church had been his saviour back then. The light that had led him out of the darkness of addiction. And as thanks he had devoted his life to it and the betterment of his mind, through psychology, so that he could help heal those other lost souls find peace and understanding of that all too familiar mine field called life.
And yet now he faced his greatest and most potentially damaging challenge precisely because he had walked that chosen path of faith and knowledge over the syringe and needle.
He felt like a pawn in the chess game between Father Mendez and the Devil Himself. A game he felt he was sleep walking through, jumping whenever Mendez told him to do so. Go here, sign this, when he was nothing more than a voice on the end of the telephone. Some off stage puppet master pulling the strings and whistling the tune Ross was to dance to.
A dance that had now taken him from his humble flat in Newcastle to half a world away.
Within hours of officially agreeing to be the next contestant on demon time, Mendez had couriered Ross plane tickets to London, where he had then taken a nonstop flight to Mexico City Airport, where he now found himself, standing daze and confused in the impressively modern building by the luggage carousel waiting for his suitcase to come around.
The structure was an impressive architectural achievement which should have felt open and welcoming, but even in this massive construction of glass and steel Ross felt closed in and oppressed.
The whole situation was getting so surreal that Ross hadn’t even questioned the reason he was being sent thousands of miles from home just a couple of weeks before his show down with the bizarrely named Mister Minx (although why that particular part was any more bizarre than everything that had happened to him this month he didn’t know). He had just nodded, accepted the tickets and packed his bags.
Mendez had done his best explain this new turn of events.
“I know this is hard on you, Shane,” Father Mendez had told him over the phone. He had last spoken to Mendez in Heathrow airport’s departure lounge as he waited for his flight to Mexico to be called for boarding. “But I want you to know you are not alone in this. Even though we cannot physically be with you when you enter that house. We can make sure you have all the help we can give you.”
“You have some way of fighting this thing?” Ross asked. He still couldn’t bring himself to believe such a creature as Mister Minx was even real but Mendez had a tendency to speak like it was common knowledge that it was.
“No,” Mendez relented. “Not as such. But we do have the next best thing. We know the whereabouts of the man who we believe captured the creature. And possibly sold it on to Michael Davis.”
“In Mexico.”
“That’s right, Shane. A small town, about a hundred miles south west of Mexico City. Everything’s arranged.”
Well at least that explained the jet setting, Ross thought as he scanned his fellow travellers waiting in the departure lounge. “And this fella, he can help?” Ross asked.
“It’s not that simple, Shane.” Mendez answered and Ross detected a sickening tone of defeat in the man’s voice. “He, Hauser, that’s his name. We’ve tried to get him on board before. He won’t even return our calls. He’s not what you would call a man of faith, Shane. It’s the exact opposite, I’m afraid. He hates us.”
“So why am I here, Father?” Ross asked, he smiled bitterly. There was an old philosophy joke in there somewhere. But why indeed?
Again the dead air, then after an age. “Cards on the table, Shane.” Mendez said softly, it was disconcerting to hear one normally so self-assured sound almost lost, almost ashamed. “We had hoped we had something you could use, against the creature.” He seemed to be stumbling over his words, which was worrying for a man whom had always seemed so confident of what he was doing and asking Ross to do.
“Had hoped?” Ross asked. He glanced towards the exit, which was only twenty yards or so away. It was as if he had just realised he didn’t actually need to be here. There was nothing to stop him just throwing the phone into a nearby bin and walking away from it all.
After all this wasn’t war, he didn’t have any moral duty to put himself in such harm’s way. He suddenly felt the absurdity of the whole endeavour. Mythical internet demons, clandestine phone calls from some shadowy organisation in the Vatican. Plane tickets to Mexico? Who the hell was he? A Catholic James Bond?
“We had thought...” Mendez continued, less than convincingly. “We actually have something, a relic. For want of a better word, a spell, well it’s a poem actually to exorcize the creature, to send it back to where it was conjured from. But of course that was before we found out you couldn’t take anything in with you. I’m sorry Shane, it all very hard to explain.”
Spells? Conjured? Ross could feel what little grasp on reality he had left slipping away as he stood there. He glanced around to see a bench close by and he made his way over to it on unsteady legs. All the while the gapping doors of the departures lounge exit loomed large out of the corner of his eye. He sat down hard.
“Shane, you still there?”
In body maybe, Ross thought bitterly. “Yeah,” he croaked. “Just about.”
“The truth is, we’ve really cocked this whole thing up,” Mendez confessed. “The poem, our records show if you recite the passage written on it within the vicinity of evil, that evil will be banished back from whence it came. That’s the theory anyway, not that we can now get it passed their security.”
“You aren’t making any sense, Father. Are you telling me you’re talking about magic?”
“I know this all sounds crazy, but you have to remember we are talking about banishing a demon here.” Mendez reminded him, a little too blasé for Ross’ liking.
“If it’s real,” Ross said almost hopefully but reminded himself the thing must surely be just some special effect.
“You’ve seen the case for yourself, Shane. I believe it is, and at the moment we don’t have anything else to use against it.”
“Whatever happened to faith, Father?” Ross snapped back.
“Sometimes,” Mendez said his voice barely above a whisper. “Faith isn’t enough.”