Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (22 page)

“Dangerous, though,” Martel said. “Skilled fighters.”

Roach glanced at him. “You wouldn’t know a skilled fighter if it bit you on the ass.”

Martel glared back. “Don’t you ever be driving drunk, hotshot. This cop will bust you all the way to Jupiter and back.”

Roach took a step toward him. “Say what, flatfoot? Say what?”

Irene jumped up. “Cool it, you dorks. Can’t we get along for one minute together?”

“He started it,” Roach said sullenly. “Robo-Cop here.”

“Robo this one!” Martel shouted, and showed him the finger.

Jeryline waved her arms overhead, snapping her fingers. “Why don’t you two shut the fuck up? The kid is scared off his ass as it is!”

“Screw the kid!” Roach shouted. “If you wasn’t such a chainsaw of a bitch maybe we could—”

Brayker raised the shotgun and blew a chunk out of the ceiling. Shattered bits of plaster rained down, followed by a gout of white dust. A host of wondering eyes looked up, looked at each other, then at Brayker.

He pushed himself away from the wall. “It is very likely,” he said, “that I just shot the last shell out of this gun. If that is the case, it is no longer a gun, it is an umbrella stand. If you people would rather argue than live through the rest of the night, be my guest. Myself, I plan to survive. If I have to blow a couple of stupid motherfuckers out of my way to do it, gun or no gun, I will.”

Spines got straight. Martel examined the floor between his boots. Roach found an interesting spot on the wall and glowered at it, his eyebrows knitted together to form a single furry line that indicated embarrassment and hate.

“Here’s the guts of it,” Brayker went on, satisfied. “The Salesman isn’t dumb like the others. He amassed the intelligence of the old ones, the original demons, and was able to gather up six of the seven keys. Then came the day he learned of the last one, right here on earth. The keeper of the key at the time, a man named Sirach, was under attack by the Salesman and the same things we face just outside this door. Sirach found a way to protect the key. He carved a vial out of pure quartz, and adapted the key so that it became part of it. He traveled by donkey or camel or who knows what to a small country under Roman control, and filled the vial with the blood of a young heir to the throne of Israel as he was being crucified, as his blood dripped down the cross.”

Brayker paused. Only Roach was not interested in this. Irene sat up straighter. “So the blood inside the key, that’s the blood of . . . the blood of . . .”

“Some of it,” Brayker said. “The guardians of the keys through the centuries have refilled it with their own blood, but a trace of the original always remains.”

“The blood of Christ,” Jeryline whispered. “Then it really did happen.”

Brayker bobbed his head. “The man who passed the key to me was named Harrison. We were in France together, World War One. He filled it with his own blood as he lay dying in my arms. He transferred the celestial mark to my hand at the moment of death.”

Uncle Willie, so long silent, raised a hand. “Mr. Brayker,” he said with a great frown, “I’ve seen many miracles on this night, and I do believe your tale. But I was born in the year 1925, and the Great War had been over some seven years by then. My own father was a cook’s apprentice behind the front lines. My question is this: doesn’t that make you, a much younger man, older than me?”

Brayker nodded slightly. “There exists one benefit, or side effect, of being chosen the keeper of the key: you get to live until the time comes to pass the key again. Harrison, the man who passed the key to me, had been born in 1807. He was a hundred and ten years old when he was killed.”

“Shot by a German?” Willie suggested.

“Killed by the Salesman,” Brayker said. “As were all the others before him.”

Silence as they mulled this over. Finally Martel spoke: “Sounds like a poor career choice.”

Brayker smiled with genuine humor. “Some have greatness thrust upon them. Others just plain have bad luck. Meet Silas Brayker.”

“Silas Brayker?” Jeryline said.
“Silas?
You really are old.”

“Thank you.”

“You can win this fight, though,” Martel went on, tapping his chin with a finger. “You’ve got us.”

Roach coughed out an ugly snort of derision. “That’s half his problem,” he said. “He’s got
you
dimwits.”

“Oh, bite it,” Irene snapped. “Mr. Brayker, what happens if the Salesman gets the last key? Will we be affected?”

“Most likely,” Brayker said. “He might want things back the way they used to be. With the power of the seven keys he can undo all creation, and he’d probably start with the earth. This is where the last key has eluded him for so long.”

“That’s it, then,” Uncle Willie said. “We’re all in this for the same thing, and that thing is survival.”

Martel stepped toward the door, where things beyond were thumping and stomping. “That’s been my point all along. I’ve been trained in both military and police tactics, highly trained by experts. The first thing anybody should do under an attack like this is establish a perimeter.”

Roach groaned something unintelligible.

“Deputy,” Brayker said, “I believe our perimeter is pretty well established already. There are six rooms here that are sealed against intrusion. We’re in one of them. And we can’t get out.”

“All the more reason to try. The primary mission of every trapped soldier is to make his way back to his own front line.”

“Which is?”

“The perimeter.”

Roach slapped both hands to his face. “That does it,” he said into his palms. “I would rather be eaten alive than listen to one more word from fucknuts here. Somebody open the door.”

Jeryline looked up at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not. I’m going to cut across the hall no matter what happens, cause I’d sure as hell rather spend the night with Cordelia and Wally’s dead bodies on the floor than one more minute with this ignorant fool.”

Martel bristled. “Yeah? Yeah?”

Roach looked at Brayker. “If you must shoot that thing again,” he said, indicating the shotgun in Brayker’s hand, “at least use it to kill somebody we all know and love.”

He took a step in front of Martel, laughed in his face, and feigned hitting him in the nose with a slow-motion punch. “Dickbrain,” he muttered.

Martel darkened, clenched his lips into a thin angry line, and shoved him away. Roach reeled across the room and crashed backward into Brayker. Both fell across a small chest of drawers, crunching it back into the cheap plywood it had originally been, and went sprawling on the floor. Brayker had enough presence of mind to clamp down hard on the gun so that Roach couldn’t jerk it away. This whole newest confrontation seemed awkward, somehow phony. Brayker would not put it past Roach to invent a scene like this just to get the shotgun.

Roach jumped up immediately, wagged a naughty-boy finger at Martel, and pushed past him without further confrontation. Brayker was helped to his feet by Jeryline and Danny, Brayker feeling the old age in his joints, the bone-deep fatigue in his muscles. Ah, but to give the key away. It would be the start of his retirement, which would be short.

Roach tested the knob, licked his lips, looked back at Brayker. Brayker moved his head slightly back and forth: don’t do it, fool. But Roach did it anyway, whipped it open, eyed the demons pressed at the edge of the blood seal, and plunged into them with a shout. He was even courteous enough to shut the door.

Willie had gone a little pale. “I’ll be damned,” he whispered, his eyes bright and mystified. “The little bastard’s got a spine after all.”

Jeryline, standing beside Brayker with Danny’s hand in hers, looked at him with confusion clouding her eyes. “It’s suicide,” she said in the high, squeaky tones of disbelief. “Isn’t it?”

Brayker was frowning at the door, not quite able to believe what he had just seen. Not long ago he had told Jeryline that a crisis could bring out the good or the bad in people, but had forgotten that it could also bring out the stupidity in some. Roach was a stupider man than Brayker had thought; now he was a stupid dead man.

“That brings the tally to four,” Irene said with her voice hushed. “How can we ever survive the night at this rate?”

“By staying in this room,” Brayker said. “By staying alive through till morning.”

“Sounds like vampire hours,” she said. “Do they all burn up in the sunshine? Sleep in a coffin all day?”

Brayker sensed anger in these words, but that was all right. Anger was a much more useful emotion than fear, and the only emotion that could overpower it. He raised his tattooed palm. “The seven stars are aligned in a circle right now,” he said. “At daybreak they will switch out of alignment if I am still alive.”

“Strange,” Uncle Willie murmured. “Who makes up the rules?”

“I don’t know,” Brayker responded. “But I do know that they exist. The physical universe consists of four known dimensions: length, width, breadth, and time, to boil it down past the basics. All of reality conforms to those requirements. The key is a physical object, and its fourth dimension is time. Even the Salesman must act within that framework.”

Martel was frowning. “You lost me on the last part, Professor.”

Brayker shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter much, Deputy.” He turned to look out the window. “What matters is that the Salesman is out there, and we are safe in here.” Motion caught his eye below. He stepped closer to the window, looking down at the yard at this side of the building, which held no grass at all, just a few forlorn balls of tumbleweed that had dead-ended against a crumbling old fence there. Four, maybe five demons were handling a piece of white cloth, jerking it from hand to misshapen hand, fighting over it like drunken pirates battling over a treasure chest.

Brayker’s jaw tightened. It was Roach’s rag-tag T-shirt.

The bedroom door slammed suddenly. Brayker jerked his head around. Irene was just beginning to rise off the bed. “Danny!” she screamed, pressing her fists to her cheeks. “Come back here!”

Brayker’s heart sank a notch. He had ignored the kid’s only concern here. Now he was off on a private rescue mission to find his parents. He wouldn’t make it down the stairs.

Jeryline was up and charging. She worked the knob and whipped the door open just as Brayker was positioning the shotgun. Martel was behind her, Irene was in front of Brayker. He pushed her aside with the barrel of the gun hard enough to pitch her across the bed. She bounced a few times and sat up.

“Wow,” Jeryline gasped.

The demons were gone. She stepped hesitantly out, looked both ways with her hair swaying to and fro, and looked back at Brayker. “Nothing,” she said. “No demons, no Danny.”

Brayker moved beside her and scanned the hallway: to the right, a dead end adorned with flowery wallpaper; to the left, where the hallway led past two more doors and on across to the top of the stairway, nothing. Brayker’s frown settled in more deeply. These were unusual tactics, if they were tactics at all. If it was a trick to lure them downstairs, it was crude beyond belief. If it was just a ruse to get them out of Room Five, it wouldn’t work.

Depending, though, on where the hell Danny had just gone.

He pulled back in and found Jeryline’s worried eyes. At that moment a door to his left thumped loudly shut. He whirled. All of the doors up here were closed, all of them sealed against anything supernatural, all of them looking snug and secure and untouched.

“I think it came from downstairs,” Jeryline whispered. The other three crowded close behind them, Martel and Willie and Irene, gawkers in a circus that might last until dawn.

Irene elbowed her way forward. “They’re gone. Praise be. But I know the Mission Inn better than anybody, and I tell you that was a paying door.”

Her hair was in Brayker’s nose, smelling sourly of vinegar and recent coloring. “Paying door?”

Jeryline gave him a small shrug. “All the upstairs rooms are paying rooms. The money-makers in this dive.”

“Dive?” Irene stuck her chin out. “The finest lodging between Junction City and Cactus Flowers, I’ll tell you that.”

“The only lodging,” Jeryline grumbled.

Irene glowered. “Consider your work release over with, missy. It’s back to the slammer with you.”

“Thank you,” Jeryline said. “At least I don’t clean toilets there.”

“As if you ever cleaned any
here.”

Martel shoved Irene aside before Jeryline could inflict a fat lip. “We need to expand our perimeter,” he jabbered at Brayker. “It’s the perfect time to retake the rooms, enlarge our front.”

Brayker dragged a hand wearily over his face. “Verdun,” he said in monotone. “The Somme. Flanders. Nobody ever learns.”

“Huh?”

“Famous battles now forgotten,” Brayker said. “Enlarging the front to the tune of millions of lives. Get back behind me before you leave me with no option but to kill you.”

Martel ducked slowly away, looking puzzled.

Uncle Willie’s voice drifted from the rear echelon now. “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians. Why don’t everybody just shut up and let the man think?”

Brayker straightened. He would have a big thank-you waiting for Willie when this ordeal was over. “Okay, everybody, first assignment. There are five of us, and five more rooms. Pick one and go in, look for the kid, turn around, come back. Don’t make it any harder than it needs to be.”

Martel let out a long, windy sigh. “You know,” he said, “if I was in charge I’d sure issue room numbers.”

Brayker stepped into the hallway, alert, watching, ready to fire at anything. “Okay, Deputy,” he said, and turned. “Issue room numbers, and we’ll spread out.”

“Great!” Martel rubbed his hands together, showing a lot of teeth. “Okay now, everybody fall in.”

Lots of eyes looked up at him, looked over to Brayker. Brayker wagged his head while the touch of a smile shaped his mouth. “Let’s just do it,” he said, and all of them hurried away without having fallen in anything at all.

16

W
allace Pickerford Gimley had two secrets in his heart just now. This late in the night these secrets were beginning to bog down inside him like the burdensome weight of precious silver, but it was slowly seeming like a dirty kind of silver. Being the town drunk, he had of course been tossed from this place many a time, which was no secret, but he knew secrets about this place that Irene did not. While it was true that all small, mom-and-pop towns like this one had a town drunk, what was not known in any of them was that the town drunk had his finger on the pulse of society more firmly than anyone else.