THIRTY-SEVEN
It took Ross a good few seconds to realise he was now flat on his back staring up at the ceiling. He had no recollection of being thrown back but there he was. He sat up gingerly half expecting his entire skeleton to be shattered but apart from the ringing in his ears he seemed unharmed.
He gasped, Minx was still on its knees where it had been, still howling in pain, but Ross himself had been flung back across the room perhaps ten feet or so. He scooped up the chair leg which was close by and dragged himself to his feet.
He staggered across the room to the creature and swung the makeshift bludgeon as hard as he could into Minx’s contorted face. It was as much to silence the thing as to incapacitate it.
Minx’s head snapped back so far from the impact that the back of its head actually hit between its shoulder blades and the demon fell silent. The charm was dislodged and spun away through the air and clattered to the floor boards in the corner of the room where it laid smoking.
Ross hit Minx in the face again, even harder this time and the demon flew back. It hit the ground hard and was about to try to rise when Ross put his foot on its sunken chest and pinned it to the floor. He swung the leg again hitting Minx between the eyes and its face crumpled in on itself. He hit it again and again until there was little left of its features but a bloody mess.
Then he staggered back, panting at the sheer effort of the assault, he felt suddenly repulsed not only at the gory sight but at his own ability to inflict such carnage on another ‘living’ creature.
“Oh, Christ,” he uttered and dropped the leg as if it were white hot. He looked down in horror as Minx began to quiver. Despite its ruined face Ross could hear a nauseating hacking sound as the creature tried to breathe whilst choking on its own viscous blood.
Its body began to convulse now as bloody bile bubbled up through its lips and seeped down its smashed chin.
Then the breath caught in Ross’ throat as a sickening realization hit him. Minx wasn’t choking. It was laughing.
“Jesus, Christ.” Ross said and covered his ears in a vain attempt to block out the sound which was somehow worse than the screaming.
“Bring... Him... To... Me...” Minx gargled.
“What did he just say?” Michael Davis whispered. His throat was so dry it came out in rasping paper thin syllables.
Then there was the longest pause, everyone in the production office was frozen to the spot with fear and indecision. It was Jeff Miller the director who was so intent on getting the next shot who spoke next as he glanced frantically from one monitor to the next.
“Shit, where the fuck did everybody go?”
Davis looked over at the director. “Huh?”
Miller hit a button on his keyboard and a shot of the main stand came up on the monitor. Moments before it had been packed with hundreds of rabid fans. Now it was over half empty.
The crowd were leaving the stands in droves, but this was no ordinary exodus for the exits, quite the opposite. Well over a hundred of them were flooding onto the field, heading for the stage.
“Can I get some fucking crowd control down there for fuck’s sake?” Miller barked into his headset.
Davis felt a sudden jolt of utter terror. ‘I have an army,’ Minx had said.
A dozen stewards in yellow high-viz jackets tried in vain to stop the flow of people but they were swept aside in an instant.
A moment later Nico Gorodetsky came bursting back into the production office. He shut the door behind him and locked it.
“Nico?” Davis said.
The Russian turned and they locked eyes and Davis saw something in them that was far worse even than that creature’s amplified cackle. Fear.
“They’ve gone fucking crazy,” Gorodetsky said. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a pistol.
“This is fucking madness,” Davis told him.
“Exactly,” Gorodetsky replied.
Madness on an industrial scale.
“Keep filming, damn you, keep filming!” Miller screamed into his headset as one my one the cameras down below cut to static as its operator was overwhelmed by the human tide.
Davis laughed despite himself. Laughed at the sheer lunacy of it all.
Suddenly a cry went up as the whole production office shuddered violently on its scaffold foundations. Everyone grabbed a hold of something to stop themselves being flung to the floor and for a moment the whole production office seemed to teeter on the brink of pitching forwards towards the ground.
“What the hell’s going on?” Tiff sobbed. She was clinging desperately to a desk which itself was threatening to slide off through the main observation window.
“They’re trying to bring the whole thing down,” Nico said. “There’s dozens of them down there. It’s the most fucked up thing I ever saw. Christ, I had to fight my way through six of them on the stairs just to get up here. They’ve all gone fucking crazy!”
“It’s Minx!” Tiff shouted. “He’s done this! That twisted fucking thing!” She turned to Davis who was trying desperately to keep his balance. “Kill that monster!!” She screamed all thought of protocol long since gone.
“I can’t,” Davis said softly to himself. Those two words hit him like a freight train. ‘I can’t.’
“That thing,” Tiff said, bracing herself against the desk as the office lurched forwards again, it was like being in the middle of an earthquake. “That thing in your pocket! Put the bastard to sleep.”
Of course, in all the panic Davis had forgotten about the sleep spell. Too little too late?
He was about to take out the box when an unholy shriek came up from the crowd below. Davis froze, had Minx gotten out? He spun around to look out of the now cracked observation window as the whole structure shuddered violently again.
Down below Dex Dexter was being borne aloft the now two hundred strong crowd who were still flooding down onto the field, like a reluctant crowd surfer.
“Help me!” He screamed. His face contorted in terror as the crowd began to tear at his gaudy over-priced clothes.
“Minx, Minx, Minx!” The crowd chanted over and over but whereas before that had been music to Davis’ ears, now it filled him with nothing but dread.
This was as stranger mob of zealots as you could ever hope to find, young and old alike. Young mothers shoulder to shoulder with accountants and bakers. Teenagers and pensioners their faces were all a mask of utter bliss. It was just like Minx had said, none of them knew why, and certainly afterwards none could articulate what had motivated such actions. But in that moment it made perfect sense. All of those months of growing obsession with the strange creature in the house. Of that odd feeling of affinity they had with it, now they knew why.
It just made perfect sense, triggered by an almost physical flicking of a switch in their brains the moment Minx had screamed, fuelled as he was by the charm that was intended to keep him down. Not as it turned out, rise him up and set him free.