Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight

by Randall Boyll

  Eventually he moved on after an unsuccessful search for his shoe. At the side of the building he paused in a deep crouch, his eyes raking the area, checking the town beyond for lights, of which there were a few. He did not stare directly at these, however, having been taught in the army never to look directly at a light in the night because some kind of stuff inside the eyeballs called visual purple was depleted by light. He rose up, feeling well-trained and crafty. Immediately he stepped onto something slick, nearly losing his balance. The aroma of dog shit rose from his remaining shoe. Cursing again, he marched straight for the police cruiser, tired of the whole affair. Clearing a gallon of crumbled glass off the driver’s seat, he dropped himself inside.

  About everything that could be broken was broken. He felt for the keys in the steering column, but they were mysteriously gone. He had been dragged from the car by a monster, of course, but had no memory of pocketing the keys. He felt the seat, looked on the dash, opened the glove box. No keys and no shells.

  He bent down and touched at the floor. Keys jangled. He smiled and fished them up. The car’s key ring held only two keys, the ignition and the trunk. The trunk key was there as it should be, but Martel’s smile became a frown. The head of the ignition key was there, but the bottom part was broken off.

  He cranked to the side and peeked into the keyhole. It was occupied. He tried turning the whole switch but it only moved slightly back and forth. He poked the broken head at it, but no luck. He slumped back against the seat and let his eyes fall shut. The story of his life: from one fuckup to another.

  He opened his eyes. Rain was blowing through the shattered windshield. The moon was a lighter spot in the low ceiling of black clouds. What a night, he thought dismally. What a life.

  “It’s a fucking pig!” someone roared in his left ear. He turned with a gasp. A long-haired hippie was crouched beside the car wearing beads and chains and one of those Tonto headbands. His clothes were tie-dyed monstrosities of purple and pink and green. A burning marijuana joint was hanging from his lips. His eyes, angry and full of hate, gleamed behind the purple lenses of his granny glasses. “Pig!” he shouted in Martel’s face. “Death to pigs!”

  He stuck a revolver against Martel’s nose. It was wet and muddy. It was Martel’s own long-lost police special.

  “Four dead in Ohio,” the hippie snarled at him. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. We’re finally on our own.”

  He fired. The back of Martel’s head blew apart. Gore slashed across the rear window in a meaty spray. He collapsed across the seat.

  The hippie jerked Martel’s body out of the car and dragged it a few feet away, then stood in the rain, changing, always changing. He tore one of the grenades off the field jacket, stepped past Martel with his feet crunching slowly over the gravel, and got into the car. It started right up.

  Irene heard it honk. Her eyebrows arched up with surprise. She pushed through the bat-wing doors, smelling something in the air but not concerned about it, ignoring everything but the front door and what might lay beyond. As she pulled it open, a small hurricane of wind rushed through. Squinting, she peered into the dark.

  The police car was right at the foot of the steps. Her mind suddenly tangled up. Should she really torch the place? No, of course not. Should she tell Martel just to come back in, we’ve gotta find Danny? Or should she just plain leave and see what developed later?

  She decided that her hide was of great value. The only cop here was leaving, so why shouldn’t she? She pulled the door shut and waddled across the small porch, protecting her eyes from the rain, went down the steps, and got into the car, which Martel had conveniently opened for her from the inside.

  “Better buckle up,” he said when her door had slammed shut. His buttons and badges gleamed softly in the dark. “It could be a crazy ride.”

  “With you driving, I’m sure it will be,” she said, and buckled up.

  Martel, a shape in the blackness, handed her a grenade. “Hold onto this, will you? There’s one last thing I want to check.”

  She accepted it and he got out. She shook her head. All of creation was out trying to kill anything that moved and he was ambling away, probably to take a piss on her lawn. She shifted the grenade in her hands, thinking of throwing it out at him just to scare the piss out faster.

  Something was wrong with it. The handle thing was missing. She felt for the pin. It was gone.

  “Jesus!” she whispered, and dropped the grenade between her thighs. She assaulted the buckle of her seat belt. It was stuck, even kind of hot, as if it had been welded shut. She furiously cranked her window down and snatched up the grenade, cocked her arm back to throw, but never finished.

  The exploded remains of the car burned for an hour, despite the rain. By then the Mission Inn was burning as well, leaving a mystery that would never be solved.

  21

  Maybe he was old, and surely he was tired, but Brayker was no fool. As soon as he heard those lightly scampering footsteps tromp down the stairs, he knew that Jeryline was being lured away from him. He got off the bed and slipped to the doorway, his guts tightening, his face hard and determined. Jeryline was just now going down the last few steps, calling to Danny, and Brayker came dangerously close to shouting at her. But he had learned that the best tactic with the Salesman was sometimes to stand back and observe. The Salesman did not care if Jeryline lived or died, now that he owned the key. It was Brayker’s blood that he wanted to see flow, not hers.

  And so Brayker hung back, edging along the wall, then dropping to crawl on his belly to the top of the stairs. It was a dismal fact that he had no weapons left. All that remained was his mind and his courage and the decades of experience that had saved him from uncountable scrapes. He craned his head, squinting into the semidarkness, listening intently.

  He heard a car honk outside. Brayker frowned. In less than five seconds he saw Irene barge through the bat-wing doors and hustle down the hallway that led to the front entrance, appearing quite nervous and distraught. He frowned some more. Things had been going on among the others of which he had no knowledge, but it was unavoidable. Martel was a walking recruiter for the mean green machine and Irene was a bossy space cadet. Together they couldn’t do more than sass each other. What they had in mind this time was a riddle that might never be solved.

  He began to slip down the stairs. Midway down he stopped. Someone had spoken, either Jeryline or Danny. He realized that Irene had passed probably within twenty feet of Jeryline and Danny without seeing, probably thanks to the poor light and Irene’s distress. It was nearly comical: this church of the damned had become a maze where people roamed hither and yon without getting anywhere. If Martel and Irene could finally escape, though, more power to them. He would not hold it against them that they had left Jeryline and him here to die.

  He moved on down to the bottom of the stairway. Two things happened at once as he crouched behind the posts of the handrail. One, Danny spoke again and things in that direction began to thump and pound, as if Jeryline were being beaten. Two, a huge, thundering explosion shot the entire front door, frame, hinges, and all, through the hallway like a flat missile, while numerous panes of glass at the front of the building shattered and belched, sparkling shards across the floor and carpets. The traveling door smashed the front desk to pieces, wobbled on edge, and keeled over like a dead man. The desk started to burn. Dust clouded the air, making it hard to breathe, impossible to see.

  Brayker rested his head on the handrail. Martel and Irene had bought the farm in a spectacular way. If Brayker had been creeping past the hallway just then, the amazing flying door would have killed him as well. Strange how fate worked. If he had not been in the same army battalion as Stephen Harrison, he would never have received the key, never have known about it at all, and been dead of old age now anyway. Go figure the weird workings of the universe.

  He raised his head and crawled through the dust and rubble, using it as a screen, getting splinters of wood gouged into his
hands, and crunching rocks of plaster under his kneecaps. A memory struck: Flanders field, where poppies now grow, and a barrier of barbed wire he had crawled across in the commotion and terror of a huge battle. All of his comrades in that war were dead now. The rest of this night would determine if he would join them at last.

  As the haze began to clear under the gusting of wind through shattered windows, Brayker saw that a pack of demons was staggering around, disoriented by the blast and the dust. Little Danny stood over Jeryline, holding her face to the floor with one hand pressing the back of her neck. He had become mottled and white in the dust; Jeryline’s hair and jeans had turned old and gray. Brayker got to his feet and lunged for her, but a vicious, incredibly strong backhand from Danny sent him smashing into the closet where the basement entrance lay. He recovered and crawled out, raking his hands across broken glass, slipping and squirming in the spilled jelly while a line of blood dripped out his nose and streaks of red and green light swooped across his vision.

  “I don’t know why I do these things,” Danny said, but with a voice that had never belonged to an eight-year-old kid; it was the voice of a demon that had the vocal power to do more than hiss and gobble. He stepped back from Jeryline. She pushed herself up on her hands, shaking, drooling. Danny kicked upward into the middle of her face. It was a terrific blow that lifted her up and off her feet. As she crashed down, Brayker got himself upright. A demon surged up behind him, this one sporting an eye in the middle of its bloated forehead. Brayker turned long enough to jab a finger into that yellow eye; his finger sunk to the last knuckle and thin white fluid shot across his arm, smoking where it ate through his sleeve. The demon dropped like a large wounded fish.

  Jeryline staggered to her feet. The Swiss Army knife was still in her fist. Brayker advanced on Danny, who spun and extended his taloned fingers, his mouth stretching wide into a nasty leer. Brayker feigned a simple punch. Jeryline charged up behind Danny and stabbed the fork into the back of his neck. With a grunt he shambled around in a circle and cuffed her away. She landed on her butt and skidded a few feet.

  “Bitch!” Danny roared.

  Brayker jerked the fork out of Danny’s neck. Four lines of blood squirted briefly. “Run!” Brayker shouted at Jeryline.

  Danny lurched around. Brayker rammed the fork into his right eye and pulled it quickly out. Hot fluid jetted. The smell of hot varnish welled up in the form of thin black puffs of smoke from the floor. Brayker drew back again but a huge demon hand clubbed his arm with the force of a sledge hammer. Both the bones inside his forearm snapped wetly and his arm canted at a grotesque, impossible angle. The Swiss Army knife hit the floor and spun away.

  The demon clamped its huge webbed paws on Brayker’s shoulders and heaved him across the room. He smashed into the remains of the front desk, which were now on fire as well.

  Jeryline was up again, on her hands and knees now, scrabbling for the knife. She got her fingers around it and rose onto her knees.

  “You killed my mommy and daddy,” Danny growled, standing in front of her with his ruined eye still pulsing fluid. “Now I’m killing you!”

  His hand snapped out quick as an angry wasp and captured the knife. He tore it from her and held the bloody tines at the tip of her nose. Brayker sat up groggily, parts of his hair smoldering. As he tried to stand, a slat of wood broke under his weight and he dropped back down, jarring his broken arm. An unwanted scream squirted between his teeth. He moved his hand and felt something different than just wood or chunks of plaster.

  He picked up the unexpected thing and held it before his eyes. A battered old butterfly knife. His battered old butterfly knife that he had not seen since being frisked by Sheriff Tupper so many nightmares ago. He snapped it open, no novice with a knife, and sighted in on Danny.

  It was too far to throw accurately, especially for his left arm. “Hey!” he shouted in desperation. “Kid!”

  Danny’s head popped up. Brayker saw Jeryline go for the hand that held the Swiss Army knife and its ridiculous eating utensil. Brayker scuttered forward across the debris, sighting in again, knowing it would never work.

  Jeryline’s hand flashed up; the knife/fork was in it. Without any heroics, she poked it almost gently into Danny’s other eye. The demon inside Danny Long shrieked. She scurried to the side to avoid the gush of whatever evil thing that had done this to him, to Cordelia, to Uncle Willie.

  Brayker worked himself back on his feet as Danny dropped to the floor. His broken arm was a crushing vise of pain, but it would get even worse as the shock wore off and his body began to fully understand what had been done to it. Jeryline had risen also and was menacing the demons with the Swiss Army knife. They seemed remarkably tamer; Brayker had long ago guessed that since they were products of the same Hell, there was a sort of commonality of mind, like one identical twin feeling the pain of the other. Or some such. At this moment he did not give a damn if the slow, stupid bastards felt better when one or all of them took a well-deserved shit. They were backing off and Jeryline was still alive.

  He motioned to her. “Come on, quick! We have to get back upstairs!”

  She loped toward him. Danny’s kick had left the imprint of the eyelets and shoelaces of his Nikes on her forehead and blood was running from both nostrils, but her nose didn’t seem broken. Together they scrambled over the rubble, coughing in the rising smoke as the fire steadily spread itself. “No, stop,” she panted, pressing the back of her hand to her nose. “If this place keeps burning, we’ll be trapped.”

  “We’re trapped anyway,” he said, grunting against the pain. He stuck the butterfly knife in a pocket and held his arm to his chest to keep the bones from grating against each other. “The key’s gone, everybody’s dead, I fucked up royally this time. You go ahead and run, run as fast as you can, the Salesman doesn’t want you anyway.”

  “Nuh-uh, Brayker. Maybe he doesn’t want me, but I want him. I hated my life in this dump, but it doesn’t mean I hated the people. He killed the only family I had left, maybe the only real one I’ve ever had. So you go, you run.”

  He put on a bit of a smile. “I don’t think so, Englebert.”

  She matched his expression. “Then it’s just you and me, Humperdinck.”

  Now, from ahead: clapping. Brayker and Jeryline looked.

  “Oh, bravo!” the Salesman said, walking down the stairs, slapping his hands slowly, steadily. He was wearing a tuxedo and a top hat. His cumberbund was a wonderful red, his thin gloves neat and white. Around his neck hung a small set of opera glasses on a black cord. The battered old case for the key was tucked under his arm. “Even Shakespeare would be weeping now,” he said. “Such drama, such heroism, such tragedy, such pathos. I am almost literally in tears. Bravo.”

  Jeryline squared her jaw. “You’ve got what you want, you bastard. Now at least be human enough to let us go.”

  “Human?” He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, tipped back his head, and laughed. “Human? Mr. Fracture, would you mind telling the young lady that I do not take kindly to such insults?”

  “He’s not human,” Brayker said. He groaned and dropped slowly to his knees, cradling his arm, grimacing. “Run, Jeryline,” he rasped. “He only wants me.”

  “Wrong,” the Salesman blared. “You, Brayker, are history that will soon be forgotten. Our little Jeryline, on the other hand, seems the perfect person to continue the line of robbers and thugs who have kept my key from me so long. In fact, Brayker, I’m in such a good mood at squelching this line of thieves, that you may go.”

  Brayker widened his eyes. “You’re kidding.”

  He made sweeping motions with his fingers. “Beat it before I change my mind, asshole.”

  Brayker found the strength to wobble upright again. He looked at Jeryline, took a long, quavering breath, and crossed in front of her.

  She watched him with wide eyes. “Silas,” she said, “I can’t do this alone.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, his face twisted with pain. �
�I’m old, Jerry, too old and too tired, Jerry. Forgive me.”

  The Salesman wrinkled his nose. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

  Jeryline made fists. “You bastard!” she cried as he limped away. “You brought all this death here and you can just walk away from it? From me?”

  He said nothing. The Salesman became interested in the ceiling, tapping his foot impatiently.

  “I hate you!” she screamed. “Hate you bad!”

  Brayker said nothing. She turned her attention to the Salesman. “I’ll do whatever you want,” she said in the high, wavering tones of panic. “When I’m cleaned up I’m a real pretty girl, and I know some tricks that’d even make Cordelia blush. I just don’t want to . . . die. Not here, not now.”

  He eyed her, his mouth twitching at the edges. “Whiners,” he said disgustedly. “Want some cheese with that whine?”

  She moved toward him, lifting her feet high to avoid being burned by the spreading patches of flame.

  “Drop that knife!” he demanded.

  She let it fall. Brayker was still making his slow, hunchbacked way to the door. “Hold me,” she said to the Salesman. “Please hold me.”

  He put a finger under her chin, and smiled at her very fatherly. “You are the worst actress I have ever seen,” he said gently, and moved his hand to clamp it around her throat. “But I know you have the soul of a warrior, the spirit of ten men.” He hoisted her up. “Show me who you really are.”

  “I’m a—I’m a—” She could barely push air through her windpipe as he lifted her.

  “A warrior,” he said. “Tell me you are a warrior!”

  She was able to shake her head slowly back and forth. “I’m a—I’m a—diversion!”

  The Salesman’s eyes grew slightly bigger and his head snapped to her right. In that instant, magically, a small knife punched through his eye and embedded itself into the socket with only the slightest bit of sound: metal grating through bone. The butterfly handle bobbed lazily up and down, clicking.