Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (18 page)

“This,” Brayker said, “is
definitely
older than time. Take a look.”

They followed the beam of the flashlight as he let it follow the contours of the biggest, fattest furnace Willie had ever been privileged to see. The burning tank of the old coal-eater was a squat round thing as big as a UFO. Huge sheet-metal arms kinked out from it in all upward directions: a gigantic, upside-down octopus coated with decades of dust. Irene let out a humorless ha-ha.

“I’m glad the upstairs furnace is propane gas,” she twittered. “This old beast would cost me a hundred dollars a day, and just look at it!”

Brayker jerked the beam of light away from the furnace and directed it farther on. “Furnaces like this need a coal-room nearby,” he said. “Coal-rooms have an opening for the truck to dump through.”

He walked again. Jeryline disengaged herself from Willie after giving his forearm another squeeze. Buggy thoughts of courting and marriage buzzed through his head, but he chased them away with a mental can of Off, and concentrated on the real issue here: finding enough booze to keep him alive through the night.

“Should be around this corner,” he heard Brayker say. “Around this one, and . . . bingo.”

Uncle Willie did not feel much like applauding. He followed the others into the room Brayker had discovered in all of this crust and must and dust that was Irene’s new basement. There were indeed a few fist-size chunks of coal scattered in the dirt. A splintered old shovel was propped against one wall, having waited for umpteen years to be found and put to use again. Willie felt a fondness for it, poor old thing everyone had forgotten. There was indeed a big square opening high up on the wall, but it had been messily cemented over.

“Right here,” Brayker said as he went into a squat. “I knew there had to be a hole here someplace.” He hunkered down for a look. For reasons known only to rats and cats, a messy little hollow existed in the bricks there. Brayker dropped to his chest and aimed the flashlight over his ear to see inside, ruining Willie’s view, but who in the world really gave a shit?

Brayker shifted. “Looks like a mineshaft. Long and deep.” The hole swallowed most of his voice. “Anybody know anything about mining around here? Where the shafts usually exit?”

No one responded. Irene moved to Uncle Willie and gave him a jab in the ribs with her elbow. “You keep blowing off about being an expert on silver,” she said. “Know anything about the mines?”

He took a breath, touched his bearded chin. He had no memory whatsoever of ever having mentioned the things of his past to her. “I used to know the maps, all of them,” he offered. “This whole town was built above the old mines, hundreds of them. But years have passed, and I am older.”

Brayker got up on his knees and parked the flashlight on the floor. “Doesn’t matter anyway,” he said, and pulled the key from its pouch. “I’ll seal it. That’s all I can do.”

Roach decided to come alive again, right next to Willie’s ear. “I’m for busting that hole bigger and crawling the fuck out of here. Irene, you got a sledgehammer?”

“Nope,” she said. “But I’ve got a pickax.”

Roach raised a triumphant fist. “This party,” he announced, “is just about officially over. Brayker, you can keep that key or ram it up your ass, nobody cares which. We are outta here.”

Brayker stood up fully. “Nobody’s going anywhere,” he said. “We found this opening, and our friends outside probably have too. As soon as we pop up at the end of the tunnel, they’ll be there.”

Roach stepped closer to him. “You know what?” he said hotly. “I have had it with you telling us what to do. If we feel like carving the hole out bigger, we will. And if we feel like breaking out through the mines, we’ll do that, too.”

Roach looked from shadowed face to shadowed face, his lips curled in a classic dictator’s leer. Willie had the distinct feeling that if that old Italian fiend Mussolini had a cousin hiding in America, Roach was it.

“Right?” Roach crowed.

Silence. Irene let out a short cough. Roach’s eyes seized upon her as if she had just snapped out a Fascist salute. “Thank you,” he said. “And since I speak for us all, we see nothing wrong with giving the freaky guy everything he wants, cause all he wants is that stupid antique that’s probably his in the first place.”

Again he grandstanded, propping the shotgun on his shoulder. “Anybody got a problem with that? Brayker?”

Brayker looked up to the beams overhead, where the shadows were starkly lit into thick bands of white and black, adorned with tendrils of cobwebs. “You can go wherever you want to go,” he said slowly. “Any route out of this house is certain death.”

“So you say,” Roach grunted.

Brayker nodded. “So I say. And I have had decades of experience in this. I have seen people die from smaller mistakes.”

“Fine, then,” Roach said. “So that none of us inexperienced fools winds up dying, give me that key. I’ll hand it to the gentleman outside, if he’s still around, and we can forget this night ever happened.”

Brayker shook his head almost sadly. “And forget what the Salesman did to Sheriff Tupper? Forget what he did to Cordelia and Wally? Forget what he’s really here for?”

“Aha!” Roach beamed out a revolting kind of sneer/smile that made Uncle Willie want to kill him on the spot. Not because Roach had bad intentions, though; it was because the greasy little rat looked so damn smug. Uncle Willie had been eighty-sixed out of the Eureka Cafe many a time while soliciting culinary handouts from the patrons, and Roach was always willing to help in the eviction. “So now the truth comes out,” Roach said. “Finally, finally, we are going to hear, from Mr. Brayker’s own two lips, exactly what in the hell is going on.”

Brayker bent and picked up the boxy old flashlight. “Jeryline,” he said, making motions with it, “mind holding this while I seal the hole?”

She touched her throat, looked at the others, then took an uncertain step toward him. Roach jumped in her way, a leaping black scarecrow in the dark. “Jeryline ain’t going to be doing that right now,” he said. “It’s the key in that pouch she’ll be getting, won’t you, Jerry?”

She hesitated, and backed up a step, which Uncle Willie read clearly as:
Leave me out of this, Bozo.

Roach spun to face Brayker. Brayker aimed the shaft of light smack into his face, but Roach didn’t even blink. Uncle Willie sensed a big, messy confrontation coming up; it was a skill every man develops when hanging out in bars a lot. So long as people were in the stage of just yelling at each other, everything was cool. It was when things got quiet that you had to pick up your drink and move out of the way, or lose it and maybe a tooth—or catch a load of buckshot—in the process.

“I outweigh you by thirty pounds,” Roach growled, brandishing the gun and helping Willie breathe a little easier as he looked around for a safer spot: the talking wasn’t over yet. “And I got a shotgun and fifteen years on your age, you old shit.”

Willie, despite his dangerous proximity to being sober enough to die, still cared enough to laugh out loud. If Brayker was an old shit, what the hell was everybody’s favorite uncle, Uncle Willie? Father Time himself? If Willie were forty years younger, by God, he would give this Roach fellow here a lesson in civility, do him some great harm, but for one minor thing.

Even forty years ago, Willie didn’t have enough meat on his skinny bones to punch his way out of a paper bag.

Brayker clicked the flashlight off. Roach’s voice piped up immediately: “You pile of chicken shit! Turn that back on.”

A weak green light glowed feebly to life near Brayker, causing Willie’s face to crease into an instant frown. That flashlight hadn’t put out green light before. Maybe it was one of those military deals with colored filters.

The glow grew strong enough to paint Roach’s face an unhealthy lemon-lime. Brayker appeared as a black silhouette. Willie realized that the light was coming from one of Brayker’s hands, which he was holding up at the level of his head as if to wave a casual bye-bye. This was an even better display than Willie had seen down at the old gas station when the two of them collided: this time Brayker’s feeble glow-in-the-dark tattoo was chasing the darkness before it.

“Seven stars,” Brayker rasped, as if his voice had become full of dust and weariness. “Seven stars in a perfect circle. It doesn’t happen very often.”

He flashed his hand across his audience, piercing Willie’s eyes with seven visual streaks. The basement’s lumpy floor seemed to pitch and heave as Brayker displayed the lantern of his hand, but it was only the basement’s shadows snaking about as if looking for more comfortable positions after so many years in darkness.

“It still don’t mean shit to me,” Roach said. “Irene, go get that pickax of yours. We’ll smash this wall totally plumb down.”

Strangely, Irene bobbed her head in wordless compliance, an unexpected event for a woman of her temperament, Willie knew. She took a dazed step toward the direction of the ladder, tottered to a stop, then spun around.

“Get it your goddamned self, you lazy jerk!”

Willie ceased being puzzled; at least one person here was back to normal. Roach huffed and puffed with indignation, then lumbered off to do as told.

Jeryline moved to take the flashlight from Brayker, whose tattooed hand was losing brilliance, but he shook his head. He snapped his hand open and closed and the green light was gone. He then clicked the flashlight on. “No sense wasting a drop of the blood,” he muttered. “The seal will be broken as soon as Roach starts pecking at it.”

Martel wandered away while drying pieces of mud fell off his clothes, adding dirt to this dirt, which had not seen daylight since the turn of the century or before, by Willie’s humble estimation. He seemed to recall, but could never be sure, that before this former church was built atop the rickety foundation, this had been a gambling hall of some sort, in which many a man met his death for dealing from the bottom of the deck. Could be, then, that on top of all its other woes, the Mission Inn might well be haunted.

Uncle Willie dazedly closed his eyes, rocking on his feet. Who cared about ghosts with all these demons popping up? His alcohol-starved brain was producing crazy thoughts by the bucketful. He opened his eyes and in the simple, stark light saw a man-size bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey with no cap on top.

This was bad news. The DTs were starting to set in and could only be halted by the liberal administration of booze. He licked his lips, his eyes darting nervously over to the dark shape that was Irene. He edged toward her, and cleared his throat. “Say, uh, Miss Irene,” he began haltingly, wishing he had worn a hat so he could wring it between his hands in a gesture of humble despair, “I’m starting to get in a pretty bad way, what with not having had a—”

“Kitchen, under the sink,” she said tonelessly, without even turning to look at him. “Bottle of vodka, almost full. Bring two glasses.”

Willie nearly dropped to his knees. “Madam,” he uttered, “you are a saint among womankind.”

Now she turned. “Better head out before I come back to my senses.”

He turned and bolted into the dark, ran face first into the monstrous furnace, thudded down on his back like a fallen soldier, and sprang up again. His nose was bleeding and both eyes would be black before the hour was up, but he did not care. Again he bolted, re-aiming himself, and tripped over the oxen yoke. He went down face first and cracked his mouth on some protruding metal thing, a rusty bolt, maybe. He jumped up and spat out a tooth, one that had been troubling him lately anyhow. He bolted once more and ran into Deputy Martel who was ambling through the dark. Both went sprawling. Martel cursed him. Willie did not care. He got to his feet and began to search wildly for the ladder. Eventually he located a square of light shining from upstairs, guiding him with its dusty beam. He charged up the ladder, snapping off two of its brittle wooden rungs. Finally aboveboard, he bolted for the kitchen. His hands parted the metal bat-wing doors just as Roach was coming out.
Kang!
He dropped like a sack of bones. Roach stepped over him, laughing.

Willie crawled the last few steps to the sink, located the bottle, and stuck it in his mouth.

Something made him turn. Just outside the smashed doorway stood the Salesman, grinning. He was dressed in a tuxedo. Two gorgeous young blondes in thong bikinis were affixed to him. All three held huge, Mr. Ed-sized martini glasses. The olives were as big as softballs, gloriously green, stuffed with red pimento.

Willie lowered the bottle, his eyes bugging.

“The real party’s out here, Mr. Gimley,” the Salesman said. “And more booze and girls than I can handle.” A load of pink and yellow confetti shot out of the dark, along with spangles and sequins. They floated down to drape the three. Music played outside; somewhere, women laughed. The girls giggled.

Willie pressed a shaking hand to his mouth. These DTs were the worst ones yet, full-color hallucinations, both in his eyes and in his ears.

The Salesman beckoned. “Do join us,” he said. “We’re all waiting for you.”

Willie screwed the bottle back between his lips, slammed his eyes shut, and sucked on it like a frightened baby going after a bottle of warm milk.

“You’ll come, eventually,” the Salesman said without malice. “Nobody
ever
misses one of
my
parties.”

Willie drank and drank.

The Salesman laughed, long and loud.

Willie drank.

13

I
t took Roach and Martel only ten minutes to smash the little hole in the wall into a crater that even Irene, being big-boned and full-figured, could wriggle through. Jeryline had been hanging in the background watching the two work, still immensely troubled by what she had seen on the door of the bathroom. So far the Salesman had not approached her in any personal way, had not singled her out for the kind of treatment he had given Cordelia. But that thing with the bathroom door, that little ghouls room—how much power did the man have? If he could change her perceptions of reality, he possessed all the ammunition he needed to seek her out and destroy her. But the oddest thing was that after she’d used the restroom and come back out, the sign simply said
Employees Only
again. So had she imagined the whole thing? Or was the Salesman capable of driving her slowly insane?