Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (11 page)

“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 her 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.

“Now I know who my real friends are,” she crooned as she knelt and lifted his head. She turned to Brayker. “Will he be dead soon?” He saw a genuine pair of tears in her eyes. “Did he die for me?”

“Doubt it,” Brayker answered. “It’s sort of like having a car battery explode while you’re jumping it. No worse than that.”

“Explode?” Cordelia whispered in a tone that indicated sudden respect for batteries. “Like bombs?”

Brayker took a breath to reply, but Wally came back to life and sat up on the floor with a quick jerk. “I’ll save you!” he bellowed. “Cordelia! I’ll save you!”

She threw her arms around his head and smothered his face between her flabby breasts. His hair stuck up between them like bent wires. “My redeemer,” she crooned. “And Roach is history now.”

Brayker turned away. The whole entire bunch of funny-farm candidates was accounted for now, except Jeryline. He trotted to the stairway and had a foot on the second step when it occurred to him—why should he give a shit? Why should he work at protecting the lives of these small-town fools when in the end, as always, they would blame him for their misery and send him packing? Once in 1922, in a small town in Indiana—it had some kind of beyond-the-border name like Peru or Cairo or Brazil—he had come near to being lynched, had his hands tied behind his back, and was carried atop a galloping mob to a tree that had not seen a hanging in sixty years, or so the town constable had told him. This was the same constable who put the noose around Brayker’s neck and asked if it was comfy enough. How the man had laughed. How they all had laughed in their ignorance. Brayker had saved their hides, and all they had done to repay him was try to kill him. If not for the fact that he had hidden the key where it would not be found for centuries, perhaps thousands of years, the Salesman would not have plunged into the crowd playing the part of a traveling minister full of righteous fervor, and stopped the lynching like he did. And once again, even at such a young age, war veteran Silas Brayker set out on the road again, key in pouch, heart in throat, destination far away and unknown.

He stepped dispiritedly down from the stairway. This was no new and exciting adventure for him. His beginning days with the key, when he had felt heroic and special, were as dead and dry now as the dust under the pyramids. He was old and tired, he owed nothing to anyone, he had labored and suffered, and the time had come to die. Just to die.

He pressed his hands to his face. Underneath the familiar skin was the skull that had been his since birth, one of the only things on earth he could rightly claim as his own. He outlined his eyes with his fingers, feeling the bony circles there, knowing that in death these empty sockets would last for centuries, perhaps millennia, perhaps be dug up by an archaeologist and declared to be the skull of the missing link between man and apes, found at last in the age of the Jetsons.

To the left of the stairway, past the side of the television, was a small door. Brayker went to it, hoping in a dull way that it was a closet where he could hide himself, sink to his haunches, rest his head on his hands and weep for the life that had been taken from him in 1917. And now it was 1994, or 1995, maybe even 1996—why should he wonder? He would never die a natural death. People tended to worry about cancer, heart disease, strokes, old age—he was not susceptible to any of these. There was only one way he could die—by being killed: lynching, falling off a building, electrocution, a bullet between the eyes, sword through the heart, smoke inhalation, etc., etc., etc. Brayker knew for a fact that he would never die of old age. If it were not so, he would be dead already.

He tested the knob, then pulled open the mystery door. Dusty jars of preserves sat in silent and soldierly rows, peaches, tomatoes, green beans, pears, apple slices, pickles, brown things that might be plums, two jars of stuff that looked like sauerkraut, all of them a testament to summers long gone. Brayker surveyed them, leaning against the hard edge of the door, his face drawn and weary, his eyes clouded with thoughts. Had the ones who’d gone before him suffered this much? Had they forsaken family and friends and love, in exchange for a life one step ahead of disaster, of death? The key could be dated back to Biblical times: this much he knew. Of the rest he knew little, so little as to amount to nothing.

He pushed the door closed, and turned. This former church seemed to have been built a little askew, judging by the slant of the shadows. There was a wayward leaning in the walls here and there, the ceilings seemed not quite horizontal, the whole place gave the appearance of being constructed by well-meaning amateurs. Probably avid churchgoers with more heart than expertise, but the effect was not ugly. Brayker did not know why Wormwood had died. He only knew that he was here, that he could not escape until daylight graced the earth again, and that the people holed up with him would most likely be dead by dawn if he did not rein them in and keep them under his command. It was a job he hated, but one that he had learned to do through years of trial and error.

He knew he must find Jeryline. If she had made it safely off the premises to the empty town or the mudfields beyond the inn, she would be followed, if not on foot, then by air. When the Salesman declared war on Brayker it was always a declaration that spared no one around him. Winston Churchill had once told the English that there was nothing to fear but fear itself, but thousands of people killed in the air raids were testimony to the lie of it all. Brayker could not promise these people that they would survive, for this battle was something far larger than they could ever understand.

So screw it. He could send everyone out the front as a diversion, and escape out the back. Hop into a likely car, hot-wire it and peel out, goodbye and
adios, hasta la vista
baby, splitsville. Would it work? He had tried it before; there was no feeling quite like driving 120 mph in a stolen car and having the Salesman calmly rise up in the rearview mirror to tap you on the shoulder and say boo. He was slick, he was crafty, he was powerful. But Brayker was a little slicker, a little craftier. Powerful not at all, except for what the blood of the key gave him, and that was old and clotted and running out.