Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight

READY FOR YOUR
DEADTIME STORY?

For decades the famed E.C. Comics and highly rated HBO anthology.
Tales From the Crypt,
has proved killer entertainment for millions of fans with its penchant for macabre humor. Now, the show’s creators—the combined forces behind
The Omen. Back to the Future,
and
Predator
—have united to bring the shock classic and its celebrated Groucho of Gore, the Cryptkeeper, to the big screen.
DEMON KNIGHT
is the first of a terror-filled trio of motion pictures designed to raise the level of goosebumps to new heights.

Good versus Evil . . . a battle that has taken place countless times, over as many millennia, has come to the Mission Hotel. To its five boarders, Brayker is just another lost soul looking for a place to rest. To the Collector, Brayker is the last soldier standing guard over the gates separating hell and earth. Tonight, each and every one of them will learn why hell is much more than just a four letter word.

He Snapped His Head Up and
His Crazy Grin Came Back.

Again lightning stroked the sky and cast harsh light over him. “Ask Brayker why you’re about to die,” he shouted over the following clap of thunder. “Ask Brayker!”

He swept his hand to the side and tipped out a small bit of his blood. It spattered on the gravel and was instantly washed under by the rain.

“Arise, friend,” he intoned as if in prayer.

At that spot in the gravel a strange lump bumped upward with a crunch. Wet rocks tumbled lazily from its peak. Jeryline barely had time to blink before the earth underneath the spot erupted into a geyser of dirt and mud. Some wet, syrupy thing burst up, hurling more dirt and a spray of mucus aside. In that wink of an eye she saw arise, crouched and newborn and blinking stupidly in the rain, a guy in a cheap rubber monster suit.

What the hell?
she wondered.
What the . . .

An
Original
Publication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

TM and © 1995 by Tales From the Crypt Holdings

E.C. Logo and title “Tales From the Crypt” used with permission of William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.

Copyright © 1995 by Tales From the Crypt Holdings and Universal Pictures

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-52696-0

First Pocket Books printing February 1995

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Cover photo by Aaron Rapoport

Printed in the U.S.A.

Blood and Guts on
the Stairs and
Bathroom Floor Too!

by
T. C. Keeper

Imagine that there is a big old house atop a hill. The house is painted all white but the paint is flaking off in big pieces, but it doesn’t matter because it is dark outside anyway and there is no porch light. But lightning flashes now and then so you could see it after all, the flaking paint. Now go inside the house—in your imagination—and imagine there is a pile of clothes in a heap on the floor of a bedroom. The house is so big it has six . . . no,
eight
bedrooms. In your imagination you are in one of them, and there is a big pile of clothes, and now you see they are all bloody. The blood is red—you can tell because the light is on in the bedroom—and man, talk about
red!

Then there is this woman standing there taking off her blouse, which is all bloody from her just having hacked her husband up real bad. In fact, she is in her underwear and feels like taking a nice hot bath after having hacked up her husband so bad. But now the phone rings. She answers by saying Hello into the phone after she picks it up.

It is her lover. That is why she hacked up her husband just before this story started, because she has been having an affair with another dude. She tells her lover now that yes she did it, he is hacked up real bad. Then she says, I am going to take a shower now. So she goes into the bathroom. The house is so big it has ten bathrooms and she goes into the closest one. In the mirror she sees herself and smiles, and her teeth are all bloody like maybe she was
eating
the body or something.

But while she’s in the bathtub her husband is
coming back to life!
He has been hacked up but now his body, which she put in the basement in a barrel of acid, starts moving and wiggling. Blood, guts, intestines, his liver, his lymph nodes, his heart, which has started beating again. So what is left of Walter crawls up the basement steps with the axe that
she
used still sticking out of his skull. The house is so big it has fourteen stairways, and he must crawl up all of them and it takes him a long while.

But she is taking a long bath upstairs, so he has time. Finally he pulls the axe out of his head and opens the door. Amanda doesn’t notice this yet because she has put a washrag over her eyes to get rid of her makeup. So when the door opens and he is there holding the axe, she doesn’t see. Then Walter crawls in and lifts the axe over his head! He has only one arm left so it is hard. He raises it up, up, up! Blood and goop slide down the wooden axe handle. Suddenly Amanda notices! And the axe makes a sound like whoosh, like a subway train, loud like that because her husband is swinging it so hard. It splits her head
real
bad. Blood squirts all over the walls and radiator and sink. Walter says, “Touché” but then Amanda comes back to life! She kills him again, then he kills her, and they do it until they are nothing but slices and pieces like noodles and pasta or dog food. Then her lover comes over and finds them like that, little squiggly pieces that can never die.

The End

Hi, kiddies! Pretty bad, huh? This is your old pal The Crypt Keeper. I wrote that little horror story six months ago, as my first assignment in
The Famous Dead Writer’s Course.
It’s a mail-order correspondence course designed to turn mediocre writers into top-notch frighters. Ever read any books by Clive Darker, Scream Koontz, John Skull, or every bodies’ favorite, Stephen Cringe? That’s how they all learned how to write so well. With the publication of this book I join their ranks—and I’m ranker than
they’ll
ever be! Probably richer now, too!

Yes,
The Famous Dead Writer’s Course
turned a fledgling Edgar Ailing Poe like myself into what I am now, the author of the book you are holding in your hands, paws, claws, talons, whatever. If this book sells enough copies they might make it into a movie, and if they do, your favorite T. C. Keeper will write the screenplay and direct the movie himself. You can bet your life on it—if you still have one after reading this story!

In the next pages you will meet thirteen people who have a very peculiar night ahead of them. Death stalks us all, but tonight Death has chosen especially to stalk a lonesome dot on the map called Wormwood, an already dying town in the parched deserts of New Mexico that will soon find itself in a battle the size of all creation itself. So sit back, fright fans. Make yourselves comfortable, prop up your feet, have a bubbling cup of arsenic or warm blood, and spread these pages wider. My finely-boned writing skills will now take you away to an empty highway in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains, where a bloated full moon hangs in the velvet sky, and the devil himself is about to claw his way to the surface, looking for . . . you!

Hee, hee, hee!

1

F
or Deputy Sheriff Bob Martel, these Saturday night patrols were the only part of his job that made being a cop worthwhile. He had joined the force four years ago after an uneventful stint in the army, into which he had enlisted with the hope of shooting krauts or gooks or Iranians, or who-the-hell-ever Uncle Sam didn’t like at the time. Instead the army assigned him to be an ammunition handler in the artillery, which meant hauling hundred-pound shells out of wooden cases and passing them up the line to the big bang-bang gun. Since there was, to his regret, no war going on at the time, the howitzers shot at dusty hillsides on the Oklahoma prairie, where a big puff of exploded sagebrush was the only reward. How he had hated it. But now, now . . .

Bob Martel was in his element. The night was new and not quite as black as it soon would be, and from his hiding position behind a billboard on this long stretch of New Mexico Highway 47, Bob was in a perfect position to spot speeding cars. There was something in the air above Highway 47, he had decided a couple months ago, that just made people want to floor the gas pedal and see how many mph the speedometer could streak through. There were times when his souped-up patrol car—actually an elderly Ford Galaxy with a bad case of the wheezes—had trouble catching up with the perpetrators of crimes against speeding. (The drivers were perps, as Bob Martel liked to call them.) But the road was a straight shot for eighteen miles and the Ford could generate 160 mph on a stretch like that, so no perp could outrun him in the end.