The Pope was suddenly awakened from his sleep by something in his dream that had troubled him. He slowly rolled from the bed bringing his old and aching feet to the carpeted floor.
A bright light suddenly appeared at the extreme end of the room and the Hungarian leader of the world's biggest church shaded his old eyes with his hand to avoid losing his sight. The light radiated softly for a few minutes and the old man kept nodding his head until the light slowly dimmed and vanished.
The old man removed his hand from his face. He had gotten the message ministered to his mind by the light and knew the grave danger about to unfold and what he had to do. He got up from his bed and picked up the telephone, placed on the small dresser beside the bed. He dialled a number and waited to be connected.
“Good morning Your Holiness,” a female voice responded from the other end of the connection.
“Good morning my child,” the Holy Father replied slowly.
“How may I be of service to you, Your Holiness?”
“Put me through to Cardinal Dimoutsos at once,” he said.
“Please hold while I connect you,” the lady replied.
A few moments later the voice of the Greek cardinal came through at the other end of the connection. He sounded like he had just woken up from sleep.
“Are we on scrambler?” the Pope asked immediately.
“Yes Your Holiness,” the man at the other end replied. He sounded fully alert realizing this was not a social call. He always set the scrambler on all his calls but for the Pope to specifically ask about it meant something was wrong.
“I wished this day never came,” the Pope said slowly.
“What is it Your Holiness?” the man at the other end inquired, apprehensive of danger.
“The one worse than the Anti-Christ has returned,” the Pope replied.
“But…but that's impossible,” the cardinal now sounded very shocked. “I know he was killed by his cult members. I had somebody who witnessed the whole thing.”
“Yes he was killed,” the Pope replied. “His soul was condemned to Hell for that too I'm sure, but I just got a visit from Archangel Gabriel and he informed me that the one worse than the Anti-Christ has escaped from his prison in Hell and walks among men as we speak.”
“How?…It can't be,” the cardinal was finding it hard to believe what he was hearing. “Nobody has ever escaped from Hell. How is this possible?”
“The book Augustus, the book,” the Pope almost barked. He slowly walked over to his bed and sat down. “The book must have been the key. That's the only way he could have escaped from Hell. His supporters, the ones even Lucifer could not find must have found the chosen one and used him or her to interpret the book and help him escape and now we're in real trouble.”
“We tried to find the book to no avail,” the cardinal said with a small voice. “We also tried to find the chosen one and still couldn't find the person who could interpret that book. God have mercy.”
“This is not the time to dwell on the past,” the Pope said calmly. “We have to find a way to get out of this problem before he carries out his ultimate plan and rains chaos on all of creation.”
“What does the Holy Spirit want done?”
“They haven't said anything yet,” the Pope replied. “I was just informed to get ready for when we may be called upon to fight the ultimate evil.”
“I must inform Ben Yadin immediately,” the cardinal said. “We must get ourselves ready to come against the worst.”
“Do that,” the Pope said. “I will communicate with you if I get any more visitations. God help us in this perilous hour.”
The Pope had the operator dial another number and the voice of the Archbishop of Canterbury came through. The Archbishop had been asleep but was instantly alert when the Pope broke the news to him. They conferred for a while before the conversation came to an end with another troubled man sitting up in England, pondering over the words of the Holy Father and wondering what step to take. Holy Father replaced the handset on the cradle. He sat there for a while then slowly went down on his knees to pray. That was all he could do at the moment.
As the Pope prayed, the Greek cardinal who had jumped up from his bed when the Pope had broken the news to him now got up on his feet, discarding the telephone. He was wearing his nightgown and had wanted to sleep without any disturbance having worked so hard with very little sleep for the past couple of days.
Cardinal Augustus Dimoutsos was in charge of the security around the Vatican which included gathering information and involved some rather clandestine operations when the need for such operations arose. Along with his official position, he was the link to the secret Order of King David, an order formed during the time of King David of Israel to safeguard the book of creation from falling into the wrong hands. The order had grown and had been inculcated into the Roman Catholic Church at the turn of the 18th century after the book had been lost and the order was finding it difficult to raise funds to continue their search for it and protect it. The new members of the order were now chosen from priests who showed a good amount of potential and zeal for the kind of work required by the order and was no longer restricted to Israeli membership as had been the case in the past.
Among this new elite order backed by the Vatican was Ben Yadin. No one knew his background though his Middle Eastern features made Dimoutsos believe he was of Israeli heritage. He was found when he was barely five years old by a priest in a small dirty street in a Spanish town, covered in blood, without any recollection as to what had happened. The priest, who happened to be on an official Vatican assignment, had handed him over to the local priest in the area who made frantic efforts through the police and media to locate his parents but to no avail. Unfolding events in the boy's life had pricked the Vatican priest's interest in the boy and he had brought that to the attention of Dimoutsos's predecessor, who was running the Vatican security as well as coordinating the affairs of the order at that time.
The boy with no name was brought back to Rome to be trained as a priest and later inducted into the elite order for which he had already shown great interest and promise.
Everyone knew there was something dark about that boy. In later years he would develop a flair for performing exorcisms in manners never seen before and those who worked with him confirmed it. He seemed to possess a kind of resistance to mystical and demonic powers. Reports from those who had worked with him on the field always said that the demons about to be exorcised seemed to know him and fear him, and the methods which he used and which he claimed not to understand, were methods no one had ever seen before. Dimoutsos's interest was in Yadin's success rate which was making him the Vatican's most valuable demon hunter and that had prompted Dimoutsos to assign him to stop Karl Finch the first time he had tried to destroy the world.
The members of the cult had done the job before Yadin could get the chance but it seemed the work wasn't over yet. From what his Holiness had told him, things where just about to get even worse. If Karl Finch had managed to escape Hell, only God knew how powerful he had become and what he had learnt there, but then even God may not know. Dimoutsos quickly reprimanded himself for such blasphemous thought.
He hurriedly splashed some cold water on his face then quickly dressed up in one of his rather unique his cassocks. He picked up his Samsung smartphone as he started walking out of his room. The number was already on his speed dial and was picked up at the second ring.
“I must see you immediately,” he said without any formality of greeting.
“I'll be with you shortly,” came the reply.
Dimoutsos slowly ended the call. He knew what lay ahead of him and all mankind with the news he had received. It wasn't going to be easy in the coming weeks and probably months and that was even if they could manage to contain the situation but if they failed, he didn’t want to imagine what would follow.
"God help us."
He reached the courtyard where his driver was already waiting for him in the big black Mercedes Benz. He opened the door and climbed in then gave the driver the location he was going to. He was totally absentminded throughout the drive as his mind was filled with the horrors of what will happen if his worst fear was to become a reality and if he fails. The cost of failure would be too great to pay.
"God help us," he muttered.
“Whisky, come back here,” the small boy called after the big German Shepherd as the dog ran into the bushes with great determination. “Naughty dog, you're not supposed to go in there. Come back right now.”
The dog did not obey his master's order but kept going as if on the trail of something big. The boy gave chase hoping to outrun the dog, but the dog easily made its way through the bushes while the boy was having a hard time getting through.
The boy suddenly heard the dog barking frantically and hurried forward thinking the dog was hurt. In his panic for the dog's safety, he failed to notice his environment or the crumbling tombstones littered around the place.
He saw the dog barking at something on the ground. It didn't look hurt in any way and the boy felt relieved. He started walking closer wondering what must have spooked the dog so badly.
The sight he befell would haunt his dreams for many nights to come. The bloody, mangled half naked body of a woman lay on the ground. Flies had already started to gather around it.
The boy threw up and staggered back falling to the ground in shock. It was then he fully realized where he was.
Struggling and finally managing to get to his feet, the boy stumbled away from the sight, the dog totally forgotten. He wanted to get as far away from the gruesome sight as possible. His shouts was heard by villagers who were going about their daily business.
Some minutes later, a group of locals in the company of two local constables cut their way through the bushes and came to the spot where the dog was still barking. The men instantly recoiled in disgust at the sight they befall. Those with weak stomachs started throwing up. One of the men walked over to the dog and started calming the big German Shepherd down by rubbing the dog's fur until the dog stopped barking.
Some hours later, uniformed and plain clothed detectives and crime scene investigators from Scotland Yard were crawling all over the place trying to deduce what had happened. They had managed to identify the corpse of the woman from the documents in the car found on the road near the bushes as Carol Pike, the top American movie star.
The news had reached some media houses, who kept close relationships with the police, of the horrific murder of an American movie star and the roads were soon filled with vans belonging to these media houses all setting up to get the latest on the murder before going on air with the breaking news.
Across the Atlantic, CNN had already picked up the news through their British bureau and had started showing the details to millions around the world. A helicopter was dispatched with a camera crew to monitor the situation.
A police constable looked around the scene. His interest wasn't on the body of the actress like every other person. His interest was on the hole in the ground. He knew what it meant instantly and quickly walked away from the cemetery. He placed a call to a number in the Vatican as he reached the small rented vehicle where he would remove the stolen uniform. He relayed the bad news to a worried old man on the other end of the line before cutting the connection and drove back to London to board a plane back to the Vatican.
The reason for Carol Pike's presence at that abandoned graveyard in a barely known village in England was something many will never know. Some people however fully understood the implication of the news.
In the United States of America, a worried woman would grab the telephone and start making frantic calls to equally bewildered and frightened people. Her worst nightmare had just awoken to haunt her. The people at the other end of the calls she made also shared the same paralyzing fear she felt as she delivered the news to them.
An old man in the Vatican would almost suffer a heart attack even though he had foreknowledge of the real events that led to the murder, and his English counterpart would rush into his chapel to offer supplications to Heaven. They knew what awaited all mankind with this horrific news. It wasn't going to be easy to overcome this time, if they would even be able to overcome this great evil this time around.
They all had one thing in mind, one dreadful thing they wished they never had to accept.
The Warlock, Karl Finch, was back.
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