Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight

by Randall Boyll

  “Oh, so you’re leaving us,” he said tonelessly. “Maybe going to go out the front door instead of the back? Do you suppose the others did any better than you? Do you suppose the deputy and old Willie and the scrawny guy are snug and safe in that cop car out front?”

  “I don’t even care,” she shouted at him, wild with justifiable hate for the crazy man who had brought all this craziness to Wormwood, a town which Jeryline was beginning to hate more and more as these minutes dragged on.

  Roach and Cordelia limped over, supporting each other like wounded comrades. Roach had some nasty scratches on his face and arms that were starting to puff up like hives; Cordelia’s hairdo had become an explosion of terrible proportions. Irene puffed her way to the huddle, shaking and waxen but looking very determined.

  “They are not taking my house away from me,” she said, smoothing her green pantsuit where it could be smoothed. “I have invested my entire future to making this place work, and if Jesus could cast out demons, so might I thusly be able.” She frowned. “Jeez, do I sound biblical, or what?”

  Brayker seemed to want to smile, then recaptured his stern face and stalked away. Jeryline offered him a mental adios.

  “We can see if the other guys made it,” Roach wheezed. He dabbed at a cut on the side of his neck. “Let’s go out front.”

  Jeryline followed behind the trio, wanting in fact to locate a bottle of premium fire-water, lock herself in one of the bathrooms, and drink her way from now to dawn and the end of this unwanted chapter of her life.

  If it really did end at dawn. Brayker had said something about surviving this night, and all would be okay in the morning. But who the hell was he to know?

  Roach went to the window beside the television, where Dr. Richard Kimball was soundlessly endearing himself to this week’s batch of disturbed yokels. “Can’t hardly see squat,” Roach said after cupping his hands around his eyes and pressing them to the window. “Which car was they gonna be taking?”

  “Supposed to be that asshole deputy’s squad car,” Cordelia murmured. “Is it still out there?” She turned and looked over to where Tupper lay on the floor with a broad halo of blood circling his head. “Poor Parnell. And he was a family man, has a little kid.”

  Roach crouched and shifted as if scanning the Atlantic through a periscope, his breath fogging the glass. “Looks okay,” he said after a second. “Let’s make a dash to my Bug, peel outta here, forget Brayker and his giant key full of blood.”

  Jeryline perked up. “Blood?”

  Roach swiveled his head. “Fucking-A, Jeryline. That glass ball’s got blood in it that’s all old and clotty. Ain’t you never seen real old blood? Never slept on a broken nose?” He frowned stupidly. “Nah, I guess you wouldn’t have. Anyway, let’s roll on outta here.”

  He erected himself and once again surveyed his troops. Jeryline wanted, suddenly and quite desperately, to laugh in his face, maybe scream in his face, maybe cry in his arms. Instead she jammed her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans and decided to fade into the woodwork somewhere, invisible to the demons, invisible to the people, invisible to the world.

  Roach, Cordelia, and Irene, hushed and intent, shuffled to the front door. Roach pressed his ear to the heavily painted wood. His eyebrows moved and twitched, reminding Jeryline of those hairy little caterpillars with eight-hundred legs or so.

  “Clear,” Roach pronounced, straightening. “Time to boogie.”

  He fanned the door open. The weather said hello, flapping their clothes, drenching them in mist and errant rain. All three peered into it.

  “Now!” Roach bellowed, and they charged out.

  It took only a second for the screaming to start.

  7

  The man named Brayker walked up the steps alone.

  He was an ordinary guy who looked to be about thirty, maybe younger. His hair, which had been golden brown when he was small, had turned black over the years, had developed a bit of a curl to it. His eyes were light green, but were usually clouded by sleeplessness; most of the time the whites of those eyes were threaded with bright little twigs of red. He had scars on him, though a great deal of them were not visible on the outside. He did not mean to be a jerk, yet that is what people usually assumed he was; he was not a pushy person yet that is the impression he usually gave. His greatest desire was, like the desire of many other people, just to be left alone to live his life on his own terms.

  All of that had changed forever in a time so far away that even the newest of the newborn babies then were now either dead or doddering around in nursing homes all old and gray and forgetful. There was a war, and war brings madness; he was a soldier, and soldiers bring death. That war was assigned to the trashpile of public memory when Brayker was still young and freshly out of it; that war was now an unimportant detail in the history books of man. But not for the history books of Silas Brayker, the son of Madeline and Cuthbert Adams Brayker, born in a time when horses provided horsepower and electric lights were the playthings of the rich.

  He walked up the steps alone, thinking of these things without wanting to, tired to the point of collapse. The newest cat-and-mouse game with the Salesman had started well over eight days ago in New York, where Brayker had lived in a small Greenwich Village flat on Bleeker Street and worked two jobs to keep from starving or being rained on to death from lack of roof. The Salesman had come to where Brayker worked the night shift, posed as an FBI agent to the shift boss, gotten Brayker hauled into the front office for a quick questioning session, and tried to handcuff him on the spot. Brayker had jumped the shift foreman to get his keys, and escaped into the employee parking lot. The shift boss had a brand new Firebird convertible that had to cost thirty grand if it cost a dollar. And now the car was, of course, a pile of recycling material on New Mexico Highway 47 just outside of Wormwood.

  Brayker got to the stairway landing and walked to the right on the thin green carpet, assuming that this had to be Irene’s favorite color. The first door on the left sported tin letters that identified it as Number Two. Brayker leaned against the doorframe and dug out the ancient key from its pouch, clutched it firmly in his hand, tested the knob with his other hand, and pushed the door open in a swift move.

  Dark inside. Lightning flickered through the jewels of raindrops affixed to the window. Brayker padded in and anointed the casing with a drop of blood from the key, watched the familiar zip-flash of the seal, glanced around again, and went out.

  The rooms on the left were Two and Four and Six; the right-hand side offered One and Three and Five. Number Four smelled odd; at first Brayker froze up, acquainting himself with the odor before moving again: whoever lived here liked to burn incense, he decided. Maybe Jeryline. Harmless enough, though. He let a drop from the orb fall onto the window sill, then backtracked and flipped on the light. Her room was immaculately clean and well-ordered. All four walls were thick with posters of a city he recognized as Paris, as well as other European cities. Brayker shook his head. Wormwood, New Mexico was about as far away from the Continent as you could get. Apparently she had dreams of traveling to exotic places when she was off parole.

  He went out and closed the door. Number Six had to belong to that little Wally guy, Brayker assumed. In the ghostly light, he could see that the walls were hung with post office memorabilia: a poster of the official USPS eagle printed on slick paper, more posters showing various collector’s stamps now available, and at the foot of the bed, samples of variously sized mailing bags and boxes stapled to the walls along with official tags of their prices. Brayker gave a mental shrug—to each his own, eh?—and sealed the window.

  Room Five was the one Irene had assigned to him, though he knew now that he would never sleep in it. He tarried at the window for a bit, looking out at the sodden world. There were roads out there that would take a man anyplace he chose to go; there were jobs to be gotten, apartments to be rented, ten thousand different places to hide for a while. But only a while. In time the Salesman would burs
t back into his life and send him hightailing it down the road again, Brayker the eternal stranger in another strange town.

  He moved on. Cordelia’s room was in shambles; Brayker decided that Roach was into a lot of romp-and-stomp lovemaking. The smell of sweat was still strong here: Roach was a hard worker, too. Brayker sealed the window, trying to remember the last time he had been with a woman in the same bed. Years? Decades? Never?

  Such things were trivial, anyway. He never stayed in one place long enough to make friends of any kind, and even if he did, the Salesman would make sure that everyone he cared for died in some new and inventive fashion. Life on the run was a lonely life, but the only life he knew.

  As he was sealing each separate doorway, he heard shouting going on outside the house. With an internal sigh he hurried down the stairs, taking them three at a time. At the landing he could see that the front door was open, that the noise was just beyond it. He had the key still in his hand; a quick check showed that there was still enough blood inside the orb to do quite a bit of damage.

  At the open door he looked outside. Roach was involved in a wrestling match with one of the Salesman’s uglier associates, this one lumped and warty with a face full of tendrils like a catfish. Cordelia still had her rolling pin and was attempting to clobber the thing into the ground while Irene, a few steps away in the parking area, pounded the windows of Roach’s VW bug with her fists. Apparently Roach had locked it up when he got here, which he inconveniently forgot. Of the three men from the second team, not one was around. Killed and dragged away? Very likely.

  “Get him offa me!” Roach shrieked. “Cordy! Hit him in the eyes!”

  Cordelia shifted, and swung the rolling pin like a bat, her face shiny in the rain, her hair drooping in miscolored strings. This swing sent the rolling pin’s unused handle across the demon’s right eye, tearing it open. White stuff belched out; Cordelia skittered backwards to avoid it.

  The distraction gave Roach enough time to twist away from the creature’s grip. He stumbled directly into Cordelia’s arms. “Keep it away from me!” he shouted, panting like an overworked jogger as he turned her in a half-circle and dropped to his knees behind her. “Cordy, save me!”

  She bent, took his head in her hands, and pressed her lips to his. The demon, now short one eyeball, shambled over and spread its arms, ready to capture them both.

  “Behind you!” Brayker shouted.

  Roach shot to his feet. His eyes were huge, his lips twisted in a leer of terror. As Brayker watched, he shoved Cordelia against the demon and scurried away, slipping and skating on the short stretch of grass between the parking lot and the Mission Inn’s front steps.

  “Give me the gun!” Brayker barked at him.

  Roach staggered past him. “In the grass someplace. Someplace in the grass. Someplace. Someplace . . .”

  He vanished inside. Now Cordelia screamed; Brayker spun to look. The demon with the catfish face and one missing eye returned the look as he held her. All the hate in the world was inside its tiny mind; all the evil things, Brayker supposed, that lurked in the minds of everyone, held in check only by morality and law.

  He shifted the key in his hand as Cordelia let out another whoop. At that instant Wally Enfield, apparently fully revived from his fainting spell charged out of the darkness. Brayker’s jaw dropped; little wet Wally had the deputy’s pistol in his hand. As Wally neared he fired a shot that chopped out a deep gouge in the demon’s head, earning Brayker’s admiration but not doing much to the victim.

  “Go for his eyes,” Brayker shouted.

  Wally skidded on the grass, fell hard on his elbows, rolled once, and rose up with grass and dirt stuck all over his clothes. “I’ll save you!” he cried, and raised the pistol.

  Brayker foresaw a messy death for Cordelia. The gun boomed. The demon was flung backward, pierced expertly through the eye. Thin whipped cream squirted out of its eye and some of it splattered against Wally’s chest. The demon crashed against the side of the building and fell over sideways in the weeds; Wally keeled over like a plank and lay smoking.

  Cordelia staggered over to where he lay, gasping and blowing. “Oh, Wally,” she groaned. “You saved me, and now look at you!”

  He raised his head and uttered a short, warbling scream. Cordelia got her hands under his arms and hoisted him up. Irene gave up on the locked VW and darted over. They began to drag him to the house, wailing and sobbing.

  Brayker put the key away and trotted down the steps to help them. Wally Enfield was not dead; Brayker had tasted the sting of that poison before and survived. As he and the two women were working him up the cement stairs, the Salesman stepped out of the dark.

  “Anything I can do to help?” he said, and smiled.

  Brayker and Cordelia and Irene switched into high gear. Wally got thrown into the Mission Inn and the three were inside a second later.

  “Give me the key,” the Salesman said very nicely as Brayker turned to slam the door. “Please.” He was dressed now in a rain suit of some kind. He climbed the steps but stopped there, glancing at the frame where recent lines of fire had created thin burned lines. “It’s hopeless this time,” he said to Brayker. He stepped closer: they were nearly nose to nose. “I’ll find a way in, you know. You know I’ll find a way in. And then you will surrender the key to me, and go on with your life.”

  Brayker eyed him. Everyone was soaking wet and muddy but no, not the Salesman. He looked, as usual, like a million bucks, give or take. “Let’s do it like this,” Brayker panted. “You come through the doorway here, and I give you the key.” He raised it up. Lightning winked on its silver rivets as a distant branch of yellow fire touched the desert floor. “In other words, Salesman, walk this way.” He performed an exaggerated goose step, then whirled and slammed the door in the Salesman’s face.

  When he turned, Cordelia and Irene were kneeling on the floor pulling Wally’s shirt off. Blotches of seared red skin peeled off with it, and a trace of smoke. “My poor brave Wally,” Cordelia lamented. “He saved my life and now look at him.”

  His eyes fluttered open. “Mommy?” he squeaked.

  Cordelia took his head in her hands. “Mommy’s here, sweetheart. You just rest.”

  Wally passed out again, this time with the hint of a smile on his pinched little face. Brayker detoured past them and into the kitchen, looking for Jeryline. No sign of her. As he pushed back through the swinging door, deputy Martel and Uncle Willie shot through the smashed outer door and immediately tripped over the handful of dead things splayed the floor. “My gun!” Martel squalled, shoving one of the corpses away with both feet before he stood. “That little shit stole my gun! Almost got us kilt!”

  Uncle Willie planted his feet and wobbled upright. “They’s thick out there,” he panted. His breath in Brayker’s face was abominable. “Thicker’n molasses dumped on the shady side of an iceberg. We ain’t got a chance of surviving the night.”

  Martel slapped his empty holster. Brayker had seen the effect before; if you hang around the Salesman long enough, you tend to get foggy and dazed. That was another of his weapons. Full-blown mind control was an even better one, but it took more time. “Did you see Jeryline out there?” Brayker asked them. Both shrugged and shook their heads, looked at each other, shrugged again.

  “I’ll find her,” Brayker said. “But I want you to understand now that there is no way at all to get out of this motel. Not until dawn.”

  Willie looked over Brayker’s shoulder to eye the swinging door. “I’m thinking that you’re right about that,” he murmured, “but don’t be calling this place a motel, not where Irene might hear you. This used to be a church, and now it’s an inn, but it ain’t never been a motel . . . if you value your hide, that is.”

  “Noted,” Brayker said, trying to peer into the darkness and rain beyond the shattered door. “I just wonder if she’s gone outside.”

  “Not Irene,” Willie said. “She’ll stay inside and fight for this place. I’ve seen h
er toss out men twice her size, three times her size. She loves this place too much.”

  Brayker nodded, but he had not meant Irene. Would Jeryline have tried to escape? Or was she the type to hole up in a closet or attic?

  He didn’t think so. “We need to regroup,” he said to the deputy. “We need to stay together, sit tight, wait for dawn.”

  Martel nodded. A sudden scream from the center of the inn, muffled through the wall, froze them for a moment, then sent them into a scramble. As he burst into the parlor area, Brayker took in the sight of Cordelia, hopelessly beyond middle age and jaded by life, beating the living shit out of young Roach. This time she had no rolling pin; this time she had selected a vase.

  “Coward!” she was howling as she dogged him. “Left me out there alone!”

  The vase had remarkable cohesive powers: though she was chasing him around the room and cracking him repeatedly over the head, the glazed porcelain refused to shatter. “Pushed me right into the arms of a monster! And Wally! Little Wally! Saved my ass while you slithered away on your belly like a snake!”

  “Cordy!” Roach was braying as he scuttered here and there with his hands protecting his head. “I had to run! I went in to find the gun!”

  “The fucking gun was still outside where you dropped it while you were shitting in your pants!”

  She clopped him a good one. “How was I supposed to know?” he bawled, tripping over Sheriff Tupper’s cooling carcass and falling to his hands and knees. He rolled onto his back to face her. “I’m no good in emergencies!”

  “You ain’t no good in shit!” she roared, and raised the vase. Roach crossed his arms over his eyes as it descended with all the speed of a meteor.

  “Noooooooo!” he screamed, but it was too late. The vase finally blew apart as it smashed across his head, a geyser of shards and dust and a handful of pennies someone had hidden inside perhaps twenty years ago. Cordelia jerked away from the mess and marched primly over to where Wally Enfield lay.