He dropped her and reeled backward. The old case fell from under his arm and thumped on the floor. She snatched it up as he crashed against the wall. “Upstairs!” Brayker shouted as he ran toward her. “It’s the only place we know for sure is sealed!”
She levered herself dazedly back onto her feet, clutching her throat. She took a step and immediately fell again. The case banged on the floor and jumped from her hand. The Salesman jerked the knife out of his eye with a roar of anger and tottered toward the case with both gloved hands tinted an odd orange color by his blood. Brayker dived for it, landed on it, and rolled over with his broken arm flopping in crazy directions.
“MINE!” the Salesman roared, and slashed out with the knife. Brayker blocked it with the case, nearly losing it as the knife sliced through the old leather, trying to push himself away with his feet while still on his back. The Salesman lumbered another step and hacked at him again. This time the shiny blade punched into his stomach just below his ribcage. Brayker gasped. The Salesman raked it downward a few inches, then became tangled in Brayker’s feet. He fell.
Jeryline rose and ran shakily to Brayker. “Oh, God,” she groaned at the widening oval of blood on his shirt. She helped him get to his feet and together they stumbled to the staircase. The Salesman bellowed indecipherable things, strange words in alien tongues. Jeryline lifted Brayker when he fell, pulled on him when his strength was gone, screamed in his face when his eyes tried to fall shut. Out of weapons, out of time, out of hope, she got him to the landing, and dragged him into the room, not even knowing anymore if it was sealed or not.
But at least, she knew, they had the key.
But she also knew that it was empty.
She heard the Salesman start up the stairs.
22
She eased Brayker down on the bed, thinking out of old habit that Irene would kill her for messing up the sheets with all this blood. He lay flat on his back, his broken arm over his chest, his uninjured arm over the gaping slash in his belly. He looked somehow yellow, maybe even green. He seemed to be ageing even as she watched, the skin of his face becoming thin and papery, tightening on the bones of his skull.
The case was still in his left hand. She pulled it away and flipped the crusty old latches that had been made, she had no doubt, more than two thousand years ago. Holding the key up to the light, she looked through the foggy quartz of the orb for a sign that enough blood existed inside to seal at least one more door.
She shook it, slapped it against her palm. Impossible to tell. A shadow blotted the doorway and she looked over. The Salesman stood there, still in high hat and tuxedo. One of his eyes was a crusted slit; the other was large and yellow with a thin pencil-point of a pupil that spoke of many deaths, many crimes.
“You’re going to die, you know,” he said. “And Brayker? Didn’t I show you what would happen to Brayker? Look at him now, and know my power.”
“The only thing powerful about you,” she said, advancing to the doorway, “is your breath.” She shoved the key at his face, making him lurch backward a step. “Sealed or not sealed?” she said. “Shall I pull you through to join me?”
“Give me the key,” he hissed at her. “Give it to me and I will let you live.”
She eyed him incredulously. “You are the biggest fucking liar I have ever met,” she said. “You say one thing and do the other. You promise things, and they never come true.”
“Of course,” he said, touching a gloved finger to his cheek. “That is why I am called the Salesman.”
“Well,” she said, twisting the orb open and grinning at him, “from now on let’s call you dead meat.”
She aimed it in his direction and snapped her hand. A few tiny droplets slipped out of the hole in the orb, two or three of them hitting his face. He squealed and shied away. There was a disappointingly small wisp of smoke here and there, nothing spectacular.
“I’ll burn you out,” he growled. “A key made of iron and quartz don’t burn, Jerry, but human flesh sure as hell does.”
A part of her mind fully expected him to become a bat and fly away. Things were too crazy, everything was unreal. Instead he turned and walked to the stairs, muttering to himself like a disgruntled golfer who’d missed an easy putt. He stepped down and walked out of sight.
Jeryline turned and slumped against the wall. Brayker had been right. Staying in this room is what they all should have done from the beginning. But now, with the fire, even that option was disappearing.
“Jeryline?”
She raised her head. Somehow he had worked himself up to the headboard and was propped against it, looking worse with each passing second. She walked to him on legs that felt bloated and weak. Already a small circle of blood was forming on the threadbare carpet as it dripped from the bedspread with small tapping noises. She sat beside him, not caring about the blood soaking into her jeans. “I scared him off,” she said. “For now, at least.”
“You’re brave,” he said. “You’re just like me—you spit in the bastard’s face and then go someplace alone to wet your pants.”
She laughed a little, but not much. “Is there anything I can do for your, uh, bleeding? To slow it down, I mean?”
He shook his head. Without warning a bright line of blood rolled from the corner of his mouth to his chin. “It’s time,” he said weakly. “You’re ready now.”
She knew, but she did not want to know. He indicated the key in her hand, the stupid, misshapen, king-size key.
“Fill it.”
She whipped her head back and forth. White dust sifted down, her farewell momento of Mission Inn plaster. “Look, Brayker,” she said softly, “I’m not the right person for this. I’m too wild, too irresponsible. And too young.”
“I was nineteen,” he said. “I didn’t want it, either. Give me your hand.”
She frowned. He raised his shattered right arm and held the wrist steady with his left hand. “Your hand,” he said again.
“Aha,” she joked without humor. “Now I get to learn the secret keeper-of-the-key handshake.”
He groaned. “My arm is killing me, but your jokes are worse. Take my hand.”
She took it. It was hot and limp. Sudden pain seared into her palm. Shafts of intense green light dappled the walls. “It’s yours now,” he said, and she pulled away, wagging her hand to cool it, then looked.
The tattoo on his palm had become hers. “But what does it mean?” she cried out. “What does it mean when the stars move? Yours were in a circle and mine are all scattered around.”
“When the stars align again,” he said weakly, “it will be your time to pass the key to someone else. Until then, run and don’t look back.”
“So it is true,” she said. “You said our destinies were the same. You came here, you came here and knew . . .”
“Knew that I’d find you, Jeryline. Knew that my time was up. But still I hoped, you know, hoped that maybe I could walk away from the job, live a few years as a free man, be a beach bum, putter around in my garden, collect stamps, do all the mundane things people do when they have no reason to be afraid. And most of all, the very best of all, get a decent night’s sleep. Just one big eight-hour snooze session.” He closed his eyes, his mouth turned up in a bit of a smile. “To sleep, Jeryline. That would be the best.”
She nodded slightly and glanced at the doorway. “As long as that blood seal holds,” she said, “you can sleep all you want. In the morning I’ll get help, we’ll haul your ass to a hospital, and then discuss this key business and how to get rid of the damn thing, melt it down for scrap, tie it to an atomic bomb, whatever. This is the space age. We’ll nuke that sucker into a big stinking pile of atoms.”
She looked down at him. His smile was still in place. One of his eyes was partially open. She touched his eyelash.
“Not now,” she whispered. “Please, Silas, not now.”
The ghostly drip of his blood onto the carpet faltered and quit. She turned away and dropped her head into her h
ands. The key clunked against her forehead and she almost hurled the thing away with a shout of anger and despair.
Something heavy shifted downstairs; what it could be she had no idea. Though her nose was caked with drying blood the aroma of smoke touched her nostrils, sharp and fresh. The noise repeated itself: burning lumber collapsing? The Salesman standing on a pile of furniture trying to saw a hole in the floor under her feet, like in a cartoon? She raised her head and looked at the key, gripping it fiercely in both hands. “I hate you,” she hissed at it, then checked the position of the orb and pressed it into the thick pool of blood on Brayker’s chest. Slowly, as if as reluctant as she was to continue this ongoing game, it began to fill.
Now she was crawling across the floor toward the stairway. The smoke upstairs had grown to a dense white fog cut by ballooning swirls of more ominous colors, browns and blacks and greens. With her lips sucking air a fraction of an inch above the carpet, she was relying on the fire safety methods taught in elementary school to keep her from choking to death. It was working fairly well. At the head of the stairs, she tensed all her muscles and became a surfboard, riding down the steps on her stomach. At the bottom she became a snake again, concerned with only one thing: escape. No one was left behind to be saved; the whole world waited for her beyond these burning walls.
She had smeared herself heavily with Brayker’s dead blood. The instinct made little sense to her but she had obeyed it anyway. The orb of the key was full to the point of leaking from its primitive seams. The salty stench of blood was a cloud hovering wherever she moved, wherever she breathed, but she welcomed it. Brayker had lived a long, long life before he died, and she was determined never to die young.
She crawled to the space where the front desk had once stood. Oddly, perhaps fatefully, the fire in this area had not done much damage before moving on. She cut to the right where the smoke was thinnest, rising up into a troglodyte posture, coughing into her hand. The bathroom, where she had seen the sign so strangely changed to include ghouls, still advertised its employees-only message. She pushed the door open and found the room free of smoke. With a grateful breath she raised up to her full height. The mirror above the sink caught her eye: a woman made of smeary blood and wild gray hair looked back at her. To her left was the bathtub, to her right the toilet. Above it was a small window with a pane of bumpy green glass. Could she fit through it? She knew now that she could do all manner of extraordinary things.
She was standing on the toilet when the door crashed open so hard the upper hinge broke in two and the whole door bent to the floor. The Salesman tromped over it and laughed at her. For this newest occasion he had manufactured himself a fireman’s rubberized coat and pants and a shiny yellow fireman’s hat with a long plastic bill in the front, and a long plastic bill in the back. He lifted a big white bullhorn to his lips and brayed madly into it.
“May I have your attention please! The premises are on fire. Repeat, the premises are on fire. Everyone on the premises is directed to panic.”
She dug her fingernails under the metal frame of the window and tried to pull it open. Flakes of rust sifted down. She stabbed at the pane with the key but it only ricocheted off; the glass had a wire mesh embedded inside.
“Give us a hug,” the Salesman bawled, and put his arms around her waist.
Immediately he screamed and jumped away, flapping his hands, slapping at his smoking costume. “You slut!” he shouted. “You bloody, bleeding slut!”
He lurched to the bathtub and ripped the shower curtain down with one tremendous yank. Jeryline whipped her head to the left, the right. To the right was only a blank wall made of little blue ceramic tiles that had split and cracked under the weight of years. To her left, the open doorway, where thin drifts of smoke ambled past. She thrust the key out, menaced him with it, knowing that if a camera crew burst in and saw her carefully tiptoeing back and forth on the creaking lid of the toilet like this, she would have to demand that her face be computered out when it was televised.
The Salesman bundled the top and bottom of the shower curtain in his fists to form a parachute of sorts. He whipped it over Jeryline’s head with all the ease of a cowpoke snagging a dogie, and jerked her off balance. She slammed down on the toilet. Her teeth clicked together on the tip of her tongue and she tasted blood, more blood, it seemed the night was filled with blood. He twisted her inside the curtain and manhandled her to the bathtub. Her calves connected with old, cold porcelain and she fell backwards into the tub.
He cranked the water on. The crusty old shower head was filled with flakes of lime and debris but cold water shot out all the same. “First we washa da blood off,” he sang out, “and then we empty da key out.” He took her hand that held the key and maneuvered her fingers across the sides of the orb, forcing it open. Fresh crimson blood seeped out.
“No!” Jeryline screamed, furiously kicking and fighting him. She dragged her captive hand downward and bit into his fingers. He hollered and his grip loosened momentarily. She thought of Brayker, what Silas Brayker would do right now, how he had lived so long on the run with only his stamina and his wits to keep him a step away from surrendering the key.
“Damn you,” the Salesman growled. Water dripped from his hat as he battled her. “Why don’t you people ever just give up?”
She bit his fingers again. He roared. Knowledge, a hint of something that could not have come from her own mind, blossomed tentatively inside her brain. There was a way out of this. There was a way so simple the Salesman would never dream of it, because the Salesman only thought in terms of what he wanted, and the men and women who had dodged him for two thousand years thought in terms of how much he should have to pay. It was a price he would never accept: total surrender.
She mashed her lips to the orb and sucked a huge mouthful of Brayker’s warm blood into her mouth, and clamped her teeth and lips over the secret. She quit struggling. Grunting as he worked, the Salesman used her hand to shield himself from the power of the living key. When he had cleaned it under the spray of water he tore it out of her hand and let her fall away.
He held it up high, beaming with pleasure and pride. “This is totally cool, Jeryline,” he said. “This is like, the best ever.” He grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her out of the tub. “We’re talking major career move here, Jerry. I don’t want you to feel bad for losing the key, though. Follow me.”
He hauled her along as he left the restroom. The broken door scraped painfully under her back. Where the smoke grew thick enough to sting her eyes she was finally able to stand. Chuckling, whooping with joy, the Salesman towed her through the gaping blowhole that had been the front entrance, out across the destruction that had been a porch and a car, and under the soggy black sky.
“Finally!” he roared at the sky. “Ten thousand blind alleys! A million miles on the road. Jerks and idiots and assholes galore! But now it is MINE!”
He eyed Jeryline, panting. “Party time,” he said. “Mind if I slip into something that is more after my own style?”
He raised his hands to the sky. A flash of lightning popped out of the clouds and touched him. For a moment he was engulfed in powdery blue fire. Then chunks of his body split and began to fall away like husks. Jeryline staggered backward a step. Underneath his many sets of clothes, underneath his very skin, was a being of ugly, boiling, orange light.
This new thing stepped close to her. “Tell me now,” he said—and yep, it was the trusty old voice of the Salesman—“looking at me like this, don’t you get a little hot?’’
She offered him a toothful grin. Blood leaked between her teeth. His expression went from sheer glee to sheer horror. “Grglebrgle,’’ she hummed through her nose, and with every bit of her strength spit all of Brayker’s blood in his face.
It would have been disappointing, she later reflected, if he had simply melted like the wicked witch. It would have been disappointing if he had exploded like an overloaded boiler. It would have been disappointing if he had bu
rst apart into a hundred little demons with squeaky voices that bumbled about in terror and then ran away. Instead of those options he chose the one most suiting his personality, the one that told her without doubt that he would be back soon, and that he would be looking for her.
He rolled up like a cheap windowshade. The key dropped in the mud. Distantly, a touch of orange streaked across the sky, a nomad asteroid, she supposed, or the Salesman going back to the center of the cosmos to regroup and make new plans.
Or, she thought with a smile, it was Brayker’s soul, free at last, free to live, free to love, free to sleep, from now until forever.
Epilogue
Four Days Later
Terre Haute, Indiana
The bus station just off Wabash Avenue was a joke, the hard little seats of the waiting area were scratched and gouged and uncomfortable. Jeryline had been waiting for the next connecting bus for longer than anyone should have to wait. She checked her watch, and opened the bus schedule in her hand. She had an aunt in Virginia who would let her stay in her home until she got back on her feet. It wasn’t much of an offer, but the best Jeryline could drum up.
The bus was late. New Mexico was hot, but at least there it was a dry kind of heat. Here, in the armpit of Indiana, it was like living in a sauna. Virginia weather was probably the same, so she told herself she had better get used to it.
Minutes passed. Jeryline thought of the past, thought of the future. Before leaving the burning Mission Inn, she had refilled the orb with Brayker’s cold, jellied blood. It was the hardest thing she had ever been forced to do, but there had been no choice involved. You either does it, she knew, or you doesn’t. And so she did.
Now she stood, restless, trying to shove the memories from her mind, and wandered over to the dirty little water fountain around the corner from the empty gumball machine again, for lack of anything else to do. Warm chlorine mixed with a trace of water squirted feebly out, and she bathed her tongue with it, not daring to swallow and be dead soon.
Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight Page 23