Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (17 page)

She was about to avert her gaze when Cordelia’s body began to spasm. Her legs drew up so that her knees were off the floor. Her pelvis began to thrust up and down while the cellulite of her thighs quivered and dimpled. Her breasts heaved with the movement. The deflated tube of her neck began to flop back and forth as if she were alive and whole again, plying her trade.

Jeryline twisted her head away. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed at Brayker. “You knew what was coming.”

He eyed her levelly. “And now you know. Cordelia’s soul belongs to the underworld until we can release her from the Salesman’s lies. And the key to that is in the eyes,
always
in the eyes.”

He looked down. His foot in its weary old shoe was still poised over Cordelia’s remaining eyeball. Jeryline felt sure the other had been obliterated in the shotgun blast, but that didn’t seem to have been enough.

Brayker smashed the eye with a grunt of effort. The thin white fluid Jeryline had already seen coming out of the demons squirted in a solid line to Cordelia’s dresser, splattering it. The varnish began to sizzle.

Cordelia’s straining body relaxed and was still.

Brayker reached a hand to Jeryline’s face and gently lifted her chin. “Death is often a kinder master than life,” he said. “Even a death as awful as this.”

She took a great breath, confused, troubled, unwilling, but not quite ready to hide away again, at least not yet. “Hey, Brayker?” she said when he seemed likely to turn away. “Brayker?”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Hum?”

“You said I’d know what to do with the key. Now I don’t even know where it is.”

He thought for a bit, then rolled his shoulders. “Judging from my experience, I usually find it in the last place I put it.”

“So all that stuff about my destiny, our destiny—it was a crock of shit, right?”

He drew back and studied her face. “If you think it was, then I guess it was,” he said. “Can you be comfortable with that?”

She opened her mouth to say yes, she was more than just comfortable, she was
relieved
to no longer be a participant in whatever weird kind of show this was, that her status as an observer from now on was just fine; instead she felt hungry to know more about the whole crazy thing, the Salesman, the demons, the key, Brayker. Especially Brayker.

“Ask me later,” she said, drawing close. The pandemonium around them, orchestrated by Roach and Martel and Irene and Uncle Willie as they squawked and squalled their shocked amazement to each other, was too boisterous to bear right now. Jeryline scrubbed a hand on her pants and cupped it around Brayker’s ear. “We need to talk, just you and me. Alone.”

She withdrew her hand. “Get the key first,” he said, and motioned toward the headless corpse. “The last place you put it was in Cordelia’s back.”

Jeryline started. How could she have forgotten that? It was not every day you stabbed an acquaintance to death—or
nearly
to death.

“Don’t worry,” Brayker said. “It’s part of the Salesman’s power. If you don’t keep the key on you all the time, you tend to forget.”

She frowned at this bit of news. “So you mean that
you
could toss the key away and forget all about it?”

He nodded, dabbing the shallow cuts on his face with a sleeve.

“So why not just get rid of it, then? Get out of all this craziness, forget it ever happened. Could you?”

“I could,” he said. “But I can’t.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Would the Salesman leave you alone then?”

He nodded.

“So do it. Give him the damn thing.”

He lowered his head and was silent for a moment. Deputy Martel passed behind him and gave Jeryline a look that indicated many things, top of the list being a big no-thanks for having slung a handful of warm puke into his face.

Brayker looked up, then held his right palm out for her to see.

“I know,” she said. “You’ve got a strange tattoo. So?”

He took her elbow and guided her into the hallway, and on down the stairs. Again he held his open hand to her. “See the stars?”

“Yeah. Seven stars in a nice little circle, with a bunch of curlicues and designs inside it.”

“That’s the point,” he said. “When all seven stars form a perfect circle, the Salesman is just a step away from getting all seven keys.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re saying your tattoo can move? And that there are six other keys? This just gets weirder and weirder.”

“Yes on both of those. And the Salesman is here to collect the last key.”

“Moving tattoos,” Jeryline groaned as she tottered to the front desk and leaned against it. “Keys with a ball of blood built in, Wally dead, Cordelia turned into a vampire—”

Brayker was shaking his head. “Not a vampire.”

Jeryline straightened. “Then what?” she nearly shouted. “What do you call a woman that eats her new boyfriend’s face? A man-eating tiger? The Hungry Whore from Hell? Let’s make a movie about it, Mr. Brayker. Let’s call up the bigwigs from the nearest monster movie and tell them we have a fabulous idea for another one, a movie about a tattoo and a key and a guy who calls himself a Salesman. We’ll even star in it, Mr. Brayker. You will play Rhett Butler and I will be Scarlett O’Hara. Have you got a problem with that?”

He eyed her fiercely. “Blowing your stack won’t change things, Miss Jeryline. If the Salesman gets the key this time, there will be nothing left at all except the Salesman and his friends. Whether you like it or not, what we do here, on this night, will either save the universe or doom it.”

She brayed out a short, bitter laugh. “So now we’re fighting for the whole freaking
universe?
In a two-bit desert town nobody ever heard of?”

“That’s just the way it happened to work out this time,” Brayker said. “Last time it was in New York City. Before that, a four-hut Eskimo camp in Alaska. Before that, long before that, I fought him in France.”

Jeryline took a long breath to steady herself. Why was she mad at him so suddenly? Every time she got fed up with this madness, she turned on him. Just like last time, she was mad because he had entered her life uninvited and unwelcome, and had turned it upside down.

She put her hands tiredly to her face, rubbing her eyes. The smell of vomit jumped off one of them and crawled into her nose. “Christ,” she said, dropping her hands, “I’ve got to use the little girls’ room and wash up.”

“You’ll be safe,” he said. “Everything is sealed except the basement.”

She stopped in mid-step. “What basement?”

Brayker pointed. “There’s a trapdoor in that closet. We need to go down, scope it out. The cat keeps showing up, so there’s at least one opening leading into the basement, and one leading up here.”

“I’ll be darned,” she said in casual tones. “A basement. I wonder if Irene knows.”

Brayker shrugged. “She’ll know soon enough. I’ll be back down in a minute, and we’ll get started.”

Jeryline felt very crafty now. “Going to form a search party of sorts?” she asked blithely, as if there existed not the slightest concern that a basement was beneath her feet or not.

He turned long enough to give a quick hint of a smile. “Nope. I’m going back up to get the key.”

“Key?” She pondered a bit before realization struck. “The key,” she moaned. “I forgot about it again.”

“Practice makes it easier,” Brayker said, and went up the stairs. Jeryline thought, but could not be sure, that under his breath he added another line:
And you will have years to practice it.

She scowled, then flapped a hand toward his back as he went up. Phooey on the guy. When this night was over, she was going to jump parole and get the hell out of Wormwood, be a fugitive from justice, and live the life of a hunted, haunted criminal. Wouldn’t that be romantic?

She rolled her eyes at her own inanity, and crossed past the kitchen to get to the downstairs bathroom, which was clean as a dinner plate, as sanitary as Lysol could ever make it, because it was cleaned daily by the resident slave.

At the door she stopped, suddenly puzzled by something. She pressed a finger to her forehead, concentrating. Was it a memory that had intruded on her thoughts? Had she seen something in passing that deserved a closer look?

She stepped back from the bathroom door, wondering. Was this
déjà vu?
Or was there something in the bathroom that her ESP, if she had any, was warning her to avoid?

She scrubbed her cleanest hand down her face. She was tired, she’d just finished puking upstairs, the world was wacko to the bone, and she had every right to gray out once in a while.

She stepped back to the door again, and then she knew. There was a small wooden sign screwed to it that had said, until now,
Employees Only.
She stared at the words, her smelly hand forgotten, everything forgotten but the small wood-burned letters that leaped out at her with a new message:
LITTLE GHOULS ROOM.

Her heart began to pound harder in her chest. Little ghouls room? Wasn’t that supposed to be Little Girls Room? But even worse,
Why had somebody gone to the trouble to change the sign in the first place?

She felt reality begin to fracture. The Salesman, the demons—Brayker was right. The universe was coming apart at the seams . . .

Author’s Interlude

by
T. C. Keeper

Just between me and you, boys and ghouls, I think grumpy old Jeryline needs to look on the bright side. So far Sheriff Tupper is cooling his heels (and all the rest of him) on the floor nearby, Cordelia’s mind is elsewhere, and annoying little Wally just
cheeked
out of the boarding house forever. Also, the Salesman hasn’t shown his face, or his newest set of clothes, for quite some time now. But do you suppose she’s happy? Do you suppose she’s grateful for all the things I’ve done as I write about her?

Not one bit.
The Famous Dead Writer’s Course
warns about letting your characters get out of control, but the Dead Writers never ran up against a woman like Jeryline. Or a man like Brayker. Or anyone else in the book. In fact, neither have I!

It keeps me wondering where I ever dug up such characters.

12

U
ncle Willie, who as a young man went by the name Wallace Pickerford Gimley and was a genteel and respectable investor in the precious metal called silver, wanted, on this scary, windblown night, to know only one thing:

Why the fuck did the whole crew have to be in the basement?

Brayker had led the way by unplugging the trapdoor from its nearly invisible moorings and descending the ladder there. Irene had followed, stunned to learn that her property had more property than she’d thought. Then went that doofy deputy named Marshall or Manfred or Mickey Mouse, something with the letter M involved. Roach, a bit deflated at having blown his former lover’s head off, tromped on down behind the deputy with the shotgun in one hand. Willie had shrugged to himself, thinking there might be an ancient bottle of hooch below, and followed the pack. Jeryline, freshly washed up and looking young and pretty, came down last. Willie knew that her thoughts were miles away, though, because when he accidentally stepped on her foot in the dark, she squeaked out an apology, instead of vice-versa, and Jeryline was not the type of girl to forgive easy.

So here they all stood in a huddle while Brayker, having commandeered the only flashlight Willie had been able to find before all the screaming started, inspected the old, cobwebby walls for holes. Though the Mission Inn seemed stable enough upstairs, seeing these crumbling old foundation bricks made Uncle Willie wonder if the walls might be caving in soon. Down here, things seemed as old and rickety as his own bad self.

Irene grumbled something about having bought this place thinking it sat on a slab, or at least cement blocks. Roach, chugging out body odor like a human diesel engine, stubbed his toe on something and let out a yelp that echoed and was gone. Brayker turned and shined the big orange flashlight: an old wooden yoke that had once held a team of oxen together, its leather straps and reins crumbled and rotten now.

“Coulda broke my neck,” Roach grunted. “Then I could sue.”

Irene, just a shadow behind Brayker’s light, snorted. “You sue me and I’ll nail your balls to the back of your head, dumbass.”

Roach let the subject drop. Jeryline appeared out of the darkness to Willie’s left and snaked an arm through the crook of his elbow like a bride fixing to march down the aisle. Willie turned eighteen shades of red, glad no one could tell in such weak light, and patted her hand.

“This wall’s intact,” Brayker announced. He turned, looking suddenly surprised to see such an audience gathered in the dark for him. “Doesn’t anyone else have a flashlight? Irene? Any more of these?”

“My boarders go to bed at a decent hour,” she blared. “There’s a nightlight in the bathroom, and that’s all a body needs.”

He shined his flashlight into the group, making Willie and Jeryline shield their eyes. “Anybody?” Brayker asked. “We’ve got to find the holes down here, seal them up.”

Irene piped up again. “I got a few dinner candles stuck someplace upstairs. Use them only at Thanksgiving dinner, though, and Christmas.”

“There’s two flashlights in the cruiser,” Martel grunted unhappily.

Brayker pursed his lips, deliberating hard enough that Willie could almost hear the cogs and cams spinning in his brain, then shook his head. “One flashlight will do us.” He trained the light back onto the wall, forming hills and valleys of shadow across the bricks. “We find the holes, seal them, and sweat out the rest of the night. Morning comes, it’s over, it will all seem like a bad dream.”

He moved on. A likely hole near the floor turned out to be a trick of the light when he knelt by it. Uncle Willie felt Jeryline’s hand slowly tighten on his forearm as Brayker moved. Presently Brayker stopped again, and knelt. He had discovered a crack of sorts, and began probing it with his fingers. A severely crumpled red pack of Chesterfields plopped onto the dirt floor.

“Probably older than time itself,” he murmured, and cast a quick glance at Willie and Jeryline before moving on. The shadows thrown by his flashlight changed somehow, and as Willie shuffled along with the crowd he sensed the presence of something drawing close, something large and possibly scary.