But those incidents, and dozens like them (most not that juicy), occurred over the space of a decade and were no longer important. The only secret things in Willie’s mind right now were Wally Enfield, currently dead, and the fact that this old inn had been a brand-new, sap-popping wooden church that Irene and a lot of work-release prisoners had converted into a hotel. There were churches left and right in this nation, and mighty few of them were lacking a steeple. Or belltower. Or whatever.
This was the deal: Uncle Willie, prowling his usual aimless route on a rainy night not long ago, happened to amble past the Mission Inn. It was quite late, but Wally Enfield was still up and about. His white Jeep mail-truck was parked dangerously on Irene’s private lawn and he was hauling a big canvas bag out of it. Willie watched as Wally stalked inside on his tippy-toes, eased the front door shut, and stayed gone a good five minutes before reappearing. He dragged another bag across the lawn, up the steps, grunting and cursing under his breath the whole time, and hauled it inside. The third bag he simply tossed onto his shoulder and hiked away with, but this one clanked and rattled.
Willie had been drunk, but not too drunk to wonder. He marched up to the front door, stood there swaying as if clutched in a powerful breeze, decided not to knock, and staggered back down to the lawn. The door opened and Wally Enfield came out lightly as a feather. He turned and sucked in a quick breath when he saw Uncle Willie.
“This is nothing,” he rattled out in very harsh but whispered tones, looking wildly about. “Forget you’re even here.”
“I usually do,” Willie answered.
“Good,” Wally said. “Good night to you, then.”
“Usually do, but not this time,” Uncle Willie said. He was not a mean man or a man given to preying on the oppressed, but he did have to support himself, or at least lay in some food for the coming winter. “I get most forgetful when drinking heavily. Would you know if Irene keeps a stash inside?”
Wally moaned and groaned for a while. Willie felt genuine pity for the little man, but his liver was sounding the gong and without prompt relief might start to function again. Death would ensue.
“Not that I know of.”
“Then a trip to the store might be in order.”
Wally got the picture. Shaking his head, he went hurriedly to the Jeep and met Uncle Willie inside. “Which store?” he groaned dispiritedly.
“Any place that sells eighty-proof.”
Wally turned his head and locked his tired eyes with Willie’s bright and expectant ones. “Old man,” he said, “it is the middle of the night. Everything is closed.”
“Not everything,” Willie said, raising a finger of righteousness. “The Texaco station way out on Highway 47 has beer and wine.”
Wally Enfield rested his forehead on the upper part of the steering wheel. “It’s too late at night. Nobody will sell you anything.”
Uncle Willie had liked this next part because it was so very, very true. “It is too late,” he agreed. “But it only takes a little bit of grease to make the wheels of progress turn.”
Wally cranked his head slowly around. His eyelids were small and uneasy. “Progress turn?”
Uncle Willie had grinned so very big then: “Cashiers make minimum wage. A ten or twenty dollar bill seizes them like a hook in the lips of a fish. I’ll take five bottles of Thunderbird, chilled.”
That had been the essence of it. Wally Enfield had been doing something under heavy secrecy, and Willie had used that discovery to gain five bottles of Thunderbird, a pseudo-wine heavily spiked with chemically produced alcohol. Willie drank as they motored back to the Mission Inn, killing almost an entire bottle, which slid down smoother than ice cream on a hot spoon, despite the ghastly taste. Back at the inn, Wally Enfield parked the Jeep on the gravel where it was supposed to be. “That ends it,” Wally had said, but Uncle Willie had already decided that spending a night in the rain, booze galore or not, should not have to happen to someone who had witnessed a federal crime. Groaning under the burden of his new mission, Wally Enfield guided Uncle Willie up to the square little belfry under the spire, made a mattress of sorts out of the dozens of mail bags stashed there, and left him to his own devices. So, until recently no one had known the first secret—that Wally was stealing the mail—but himself and Uncle Willie, though Wally later came under suspicion at the post office in Junction City, and had got his little ass fired just a few hours ago.
Now, though, there was a problem with secret number two: how to get into the damn steeple. Willie’s memory of that night had foundered upon the shoals of passing time and mucho boozo. Had he left any of that Thunderbird in the steeple? Even a drinker such as he would have had trouble drinking five whole bottles. His mind held no recollection of drinking the rest, of falling asleep, of finding his way down and sneaking out in the morning, though something told him Irene had run him out of the parlor with a flyswatter. Had he taken the unused bottles with him? Or were they still up there along with a thousand stolen letters and a mysterious bag that had clanked when the errant postman carted it up?
He did solidly remember being in Wally’s room on that night. For that reason he was now standing in it again, having elbowed Jeryline out of the way as the search for Danny began. He saw that Wally had been pilfering other items from the post office: big shiny posters on the walls and ceiling that extolled the USPS’s many services, samples of various mailing bags pinned here and there, even several brass plaques naming someone else as employee of the month—John Ferguson, Elroy P. Quirty, James Andrews, Patricia Hall. Uncle Willie mentally rolled his eyes; Wally Enfield was one strange character, or at least had been, now that he was deader than possum pizza cooking on a hot country road.
Willie checked inside the closet, scrutinized the ceiling for a trapdoor of some kind. No luck. He turned in a lurching circle, the pleasure sensors in his sobering brain demanding more alcohol. Thunderchicken might taste like airplane fuel, but it was one hell of a flight and worth fighting for. But how the frig had Wally taken him up to the belfry, if a little old steeple atop a former church could be called that?
Willie crossed to the door, gently turned the lock in the knob, and got down to serious brainwork. It was like this: steeple = up. Up = overhead. Normal means of passage up or overhead = stairs. Somewhere there was a stairway.
He sat on the bed and beat his fists against the sides of his head. Think, Wallace Pickerford Gimley! Kick-start the old brain!
In his despair he looked to the ceiling, as if God might hand down the blueprint of the building. Instead he saw that the late Wally Enfield had tacked almost all the overhead posters in one corner. The effect was quite out of balance, but then, Wally had been that way, too.
The room was graced with only one chair. Willie carried it to the corner, stood on it with visions of fractured bones making him careful, and began unpinning the posters. Immediately he saw a very straight crack in the plaster. He unpinned some more. A foot-long length of dirty white twine uncoiled before his eyes, dangling toward the floor, and he remembered at last.
A pull-down stairway. Wally had kept it hidden under these posters. But why, eh? As if Irene didn’t know of its existence, just as she hadn’t known there was a basement? Impossible. She had been here during the remodeling. Maybe Wally had kept it covered so long she had forgotten. Willie himself had forgotten a few things in his time, har-har.
He levered the stairway down, got off the chair and eased it aside with a foot, and pushed the whole contraption downward until it touched the floor, where it seemed to silently lock somehow.
“Daddy’s coming to get you,” he chortled excitedly. “Hang in there, my little Thunderchickens.”
At the top he stepped up into the belfry, looked around at the humps and angles of mailbags secretively protected from the rain, and nodded.
“Where are you?” he crooned.
Something banged down below. Willie dropped silently to his knees and clawed at the uppermost stair, splitting his thick ye
llow fingernails and getting nowhere in the job of pulling it up.
“Think, Wallace,” he muttered. “Think!”
He thought. On both sides of the top stair some kind of hinged metal straps resembled Erector sets. Willie pawed at them, found a lonely little lever, and pushed it down with his thumb.
The stairway groaned. It began to rise. Willie helped it out as best he could, made sure it shut very softly, and turned again. Rain was drumming on the steeple and dripping off the tidy little eaves, but the belfry was mostly dry. There was no light to speak of, but Uncle Willie did not mind, because this was like Christmas all over again, and Santa had surely left him a present or two.
He crawled a step and began poking and prodding under the bags, grinning, almost faint with the need for a festive holiday beverage.
As it turned out, Santa had been good to him.
Jeryline was in her own room, finding nothing but her lonely bed, her dresser, her closet that held only a few jeans and blouses and underthings, and her posters of Paris. She did not believe Danny had slipped out of her grasp just to hide in another room. He had surely bolted down the stairs to save mommy and daddy, and died in the process. And maybe, she thought, it was better that way. No kid deserves to be an orphan at age eight. Even Jailbait Jerry had had a living parent around to watch her screw up her teenage life.
She went down on her knees to give a glance under the bed. Of course he was not there; she did this just to be able to tell Brayker that she had looked in all possible places. When she wearily rose again, the Salesman’s bright, leering face was two inches from her own, all smiley and happy.
She gasped and fell back on her butt. He was lying on her bed with his elbow propped on the pillow, his head propped on his hand. “Welcome to your life, Jeryline Bascombe,” he said.
She gaped at him. He was wearing a blue uniform with yellow patches on the shoulders, a shiny chrome badge on the chest, a holster with a black revolver stuck in it. “I wanted you to feel right at home,” he said, and sat up.
The room changed somehow. Jeryline looked around with terror thundering in her heart. Iron bars blocked the window now. The door was made of dirty steel, and a toilet adorned one lonely corner.
Prison. Solitary, in fact.
“Don’t scream,” he said. “First listen to what I’ve got to say, then scream if you must. Deal?”
She stumbled to her feet and ran to the door. Cold metal had replaced the knob. She turned and pressed her back to it, reminded so very much of the first time she was beaten senseless by her cellmate.
“Ah, you’re so young,” the Salesman said. “So very much to live for. And yet, where have you wound up? Here, stuck in this house, stuck in this town, when all you want is to get out and be left alone. To go places, to see things.” He looked at one of her posters. “You want Paris, Jeryline?”
She shifted her eyes from side to side, looking for a weapon, any weapon.
“Paris I can give you,” he said. “Look.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. Something touched her shoulder, pricked her skin. She slapped at it. It squawked and was gone.
“So beautiful in the springtime,” the Salesman said.
She opened her eyes. In front of her the Eiffel tower rose into a perfect blue sky. Pigeons flapped and circled while tourists tossed crumbs onto the cobbled street. The Salesman was beside her, dressed now in Bermuda shorts and a straw hat with a huge camera hanging from a strap around his neck. “Give me the good old USA anytime,” he drawled. “We saved their French asses in two world wars and they still hate our guts. That’s the froggies for you.”
He raised the camera and snapped her photo. Instantly she was back in her room, her familiar room, and the Salesman was still sitting on the bed wearing the uniform of a Colorado prison guard. “Aren’t tourists annoying? I can get you to France, even give you the language. Or would you choose this?”
She did not have time even to blink. Harsh white light popped alive in the corner by the closet. Four demons were dismembering and eating a man. They turned with their misshapen lips curling into ugly grins, blood dripping from their teeth, crudely amputated arms and legs in their hands. The man’s abdomen had been slashed open and was empty. Suddenly he jerked his head up and shrieked in agony.
It was Brayker. The scene shut down instantly.
“That is his future,” the Salesman said. “And yours if you follow him.”
She was sweating hard, her hair sticking to her face, her lungs wheezing. “You can’t be in here,” she croaked. “The blood seal . . .”
“Nice of you to take care of it,” he said, and glanced at her feet. She shoved an arm onto the wall for balance and inspected the bottom of her right shoe. Nothing unusual. The tread marks were worn slick by overuse, no late-breaking news in that. She shifted and checked the other one.
Something like a scab was stuck to her heel.
“You’ll be hearing from me again real soon,” he said. “And you can scream now if you want to.”
As she gaped at him his clothing changed. She thought of Bewitched, of Samantha, the fast way she could cast her spells. The Salesman was now wearing shapeless white clothes, sandals, and had a colorful blanket tossed over one shoulder. Best of all, a huge sombrero was parked on his head.
“Adios, amiga,” he said, and was gone.
Muttering, eventually crying, she ripped her Paris posters down from the walls and shredded them between her hands.
17
The search for Danny Long was over in less than two minutes. Brayker found no surprise in the fact that it failed. It was just another notch in the Salesman’s pistol, and he had carved many notches there over the years. Neither Uncle Willie nor Jeryline were back yet, another cause for concern. He went to the door and looked out: still no demons, and no Willie or Jeryline. Just as he was drawing back, the door of Jeryline’s room wafted slowly open and she came out. A rush of relief charged through his veins. With Jeryline dead the whole war was lost.
If she truly were to be the next keeper of the key. For all he knew, it might well be Martel, or even Irene. His duties had come without an instruction manual.
His mind jumped back to his own initiation into the club. It was a moment he wished had never happened. He had not asked for the key and the duties it entailed. He was just a private in the army trying to keep from getting his ass blown off. His commanding officer had been Lieutenant Stephen Harrison, who had found life in the military to be the best way to keep the Salesman away. He had not known he would be shot in the trenches of World War One; he probably had not known who the next keeper of the key would be at all. But Silas Brayker had been there to watch him die.
The assault had failed. It was summertime but the fog was thick and cold. Harrison had caught a bullet just as he and Brayker dived into a shallow, unfinished trench. French flares were wafting down on their little parachutes, creating a fantastic moonscape of shattered trees and cratered earth. Brayker and Harrison were caught between the lines, doomed to wait for the next attack to jump up and rejoin their unit, or to die under the next hail of artillery fire.
In that ungodly light, Harrison had taken the key out of its pouch and begun filling the orb with the blood that was bubbling out of the huge hole in his guts. As he did so he told Brayker the history of the key, of a man in biblical times named Sirach who made the orb and filled it with Christ’s blood. As a last act Harrison had pressed Brayker’s palm against his. If Brayker had doubts about the story, he lost them in a hurry. Intense pain stabbed his hand. Green light shot between the creases of his skin. It was only when Harrison’s strength was gone that his hand fell away at last, and Brayker had inherited the tattoo.
On-the-job training followed swiftly. A huge, curious rustling grew over the battlefield. The flares swung and danced in the sky, pushed by a sudden, unnatural wind. Silhouetted against them were creatures with broad flapping wings and bloated, hideous bodies the size of a very fat man.
> “You’d better run now,” Harrison said. He pulled the pouch out of his uniform and put the key inside, then hooked it over Brayker’s neck. “Run now and never stop.”
Those were his last words. Confused and terrified, Brayker had scrambled out of the hole as the creatures alighted and began to tear Harrison apart. One of them swooped down and fastened its claws into Brayker’s back. A machine gun somewhere chattered, then another. The winged demon fell away and began to flounder about with its wings in shreds. Artillery opened up on both sides. The war kicked back into full swing, and in the chaos Brayker made it back to his own lines.
What a happy ending. Brayker had never been so surprised to be alive. It was only later, during periods of depression as the years ground on, that he wished a bullet or bomb had ended his life that night. He had been nineteen years old, the same age as so many millions of boys on both sides who died in a war that made no sense, and only led to another.
Now Brayker tapped his forehead with his fist, knocking the memories aside, memories he had rehashed thousands of times that brought only grief with no solution. Even with the power of the key he could not change the past, only the future.
People were looking at him. “Uncle Willie’s missing,” he said. “Anybody know why?”
Irene plopped herself down on the bed. “Probably passed out somewhere.”
Brayker shook his head. “He’s not that drunk. Which room is he searching?”
Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight Page 18