Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (26 page)

The Salesman regarded the lines of blood seeping across the floor. “Asshole,” he said and headed upstairs.

19

W
allace Pickerford Gimley had barely settled himself among the mailbags when things got strange again. He had not known that bagged mail could be arranged into such good padding, and was thinking this while eyeing the remaining four inches of Thunderchicken in the bottle, when something soft lightly struck his cheek and caught his attention. He frowned and touched his face, came across something wispy lying across his shoulder, and followed its length down to the floor of the belfry. He picked up the strange object and stuck it under his eyes.

A little roll of thin pink paper. Confetti.

Light burst alive all around him. Music shot out of nowhere, lively tunes from the Forties, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, Big Band numbers he had not heard in decades. Willie sat up straighter and jerked his head around, trying to pinpoint the source, his eyes wide and uneasy.

Something touched his knee. He jerked as if bee-stung, then softened. A beautiful woman in a drab green USO uniform was kneeling on the floor. She flattened both hands on his knee and perched her chin on her knuckles. “Won’t the war ever end?” she asked plaintively, staring out into the night. “The boys have been gone so very long, and I’m so afraid of Hitler.”

He was about to tell her the war had ended fifty years ago and she could shut her yap, when two more women came alive behind him and leaned over to tickle his ears. The scent of perfume rose up to compete with the gusting wind.

“We’ve missed you, Willie,” both of them crooned in unison. “A good man is hard to find.”

He was about to tell them a hard man is better to find, when yet another woman appeared. He nearly dropped his bottle. There was a lot of her and not much that wasn’t covered, save for a wide silver ribbon running from her shoulder to her waist that proclaimed her Miss Nude USA 1995. “Willie!” she cried. “Willie!”

He was trying to think of something to say when someone nudged him. He jerked around and was looking at a waiter wearing a ruffled white shirt and a black bow tie. “Shall I remove that from you, sir?” he asked, indicating the bottle of T-bird with a look of distaste marring his features. “We do have house rules, you know.”

Willie was about to protest, knowing full well that the DTs did all kinds of crazy things to a man but never yet had bought the next drink, when a huge voice blasted out of the air. The waiter snatched the bottle away and vanished.

“Drinks are on
my
tab!” the voice bellowed.

Willie avoided a coronary by concentrating on the direction of the voice: it was the Salesman. He was perched on the roof with a spotlight casting a circle around him, apparently the star of this unusual show. In one hand he held a clarinet. In the other, a microphone. “Willie baby!” he roared, and shot to his feet. How his shiny shoes avoided sliding him down the rain-slick shingles Willie could not imagine, except that in DTs people did all kinds of inventive things.

“Got one for ya, Willie,” he said, grinning and nodding to an audience that did not seem to be there. “There are these two traveling salesmen, see, and their car breaks down out in the middle of nowhere. So they walk to the nearest farmhouse, see, and . . . oh what the hell! What the hell! Salesman jokes! Everybody’s heard ’em! How about this—a horse walks into a bar. The bartender hands it a beer and says, ‘So, why the long face?’ ”

A snare drum snapped offstage. A cymbal was struck and immediately muted.

“I got a million of ’em,” the Salesman howled. “Check this out: did you hear about the Mexican identical twins? You couldn’t tell Juan from the other! Hah! Am I killing you yet?”

Uncle Willie burped, feeling nauseous again.

“Or this: hear about the religious chicken that joined a monastery? He wanted to be a fryer. Get it? Hah!”

The drum got slapped. The cymbal got hit and muted. Willie groaned.

“Hey, waiter!” the Salesman hollered, waving a finger. “Get that man the best in the house. The best! Hear me?”

The waiter made a reappearance, this time holding a chromed bucket of ice with a bottle poking out. “Will this do, sir?” he asked, bending low to show it. “It is the finest liquor we offer.”

Willie pulled it out of the ice. There was no label, no cork, no screw cap, no nothing. He raised it to his nose and took a whiff. It was not Thunderbird. Anything that was not Thunderbird was better than Thunderbird. “Mind if I take a sip?” he asked.

“Take all you want,” the waiter said.

Willie tipped the bottle back. Cool liquid slid down his throat, not quite yet available to his taste buds, the aroma not quite yet in his sinuses, where true liquor tasting sessions were held. He heard the Salesman laugh, heard the snare drum snap and the cymbal crash.

“Wait’ll I tell you the one about the town drunk who finally took his last drink,” the Salesman said, suddenly serious, suddenly as grim as a surgeon stalking down a corridor with bad news for the family. “Just wait until I do.”

Brayker froze in place. “What the hell was that?”

Jeryline stopped and listened. “What was what? What did it sound like?”

He rattled his head. “Like a bomb. Not that loud, but like that.”

She took hold of his arm. They were in the kitchen, where at the open back door dismal streamers of confetti were soaking up the rainwater being pushed inside by the wind. Several dead demons, their ashen corpses blown into unrecognizable dark drifts, marred the floor. Jeryline had not heard anything, but easily believed that Brayker could sense things she couldn’t.

“It came from out there,” Brayker said, motioning backward toward the rest of the house. “I’ll go see.”

She released him. “Okay. I’ll nose around here, check the cabinets. If Danny got scared, he might have hidden in one of them. Heck, I even would.”

He touched his lips, frowning. “You know, we ought to stay together, really. The only thing we have now is the key, and we can’t share it in two different places.”

Jeryline took his arm again, hugged it. “I’m so glad you said that, Silas. I am so sick of being alone.”

He looked at her with his face registering more changes than she could keep track of. Intuition hit her, or maybe just a realization. “You’ve been nothing but Brayker for a long, long time, haven’t you? Not many people nowadays call you Silas.”

He put on a smile. “Sometimes I forget I have that name. But at a time, back when I was young, it was common to use names that aren’t popular now. Kids were named Silas and Mortimer and Poindexter and Englebert Humperdinck and—”

“Don’t bullshit me,” she said.
“Nobody
got named Mortimer.”

“Exposed at last,” he said, and hung his head. “I had my name legally changed from Mortimer to Englebert Humperdinck, but now must operate under the alias of Silas. The name isn’t really Brayker; it’s Fracture.”

She chuckled. “This fatigue is giving us the giggles, Englebert. Let’s go see what your noise was.”

They turned and pushed through the steel bat-wing doors together, smiles evaporating instantly at the sight of Sheriff Tupper’s body. “It was over this way,” he said, aiming her toward the parlor. “Sounded like a . . .”

Jeryline did not scream when she saw what was left of Roach; Brayker was grateful for that. The pile of meat stood no more than eight inches tall with shattered lengths of bone sticking out like birthday candles. His eyes had popped out and rolled a remarkable distance away, almost to the TV—shiny white discs that had been his spine had been squirted about like hockey pucks. Out of his soupy remains two perfectly good arms stuck out.

Jeryline spun and pressed her face into Brayker’s chest. “Jesus,” she whispered, “how could he get like
that?”

“Don’t know for sure,” Brayker said. “Something fell on him, looks like.”

They turned away from the mess. “Danny’s dead,” she said. “I know it for sure now.”

“Yeah. Let’s go back and find the others, hide in the room till daybreak.”

She nodded wordlessly. They plodded up the stairway, no longer touching, their faces drawn. In Brayker’s room were only four walls, a bed, a smashed dresser—no people. “They must be in the attic,” Jeryline said. “But I don’t like how quiet things are. We need to regroup.”

Brayker motioned toward the door. “Martel said there was a stairway in Wally’s old room. We can holler up at them.”

She tweezed his sleeve between two fingers and followed him across the hall, cutting wide in front of her own door and the little bit of Paris inside. In Wally’s room, Brayker led the way up the crude stairway, slowing as he reached the top. He looked back at her.

“This is no attic. It leads up to the belfry.”

“So, anybody up there?”

Uncle Willie’s voice suddenly blared over the top of Brayker’s head, making him jerk back. “We got a whole lot of trouble up here!”

Brayker took the last few steps in one stride. Jeryline trotted up just behind, trying to look past him, seeing only darkness, hearing only the pounding of the rain.

Something made a cracking noise that she could not place. A second later Brayker slammed into her, knocking her against the waist-high guardrail so hard that her face caught a handful of raindrops. She pushed away just as Brayker, a dark shadow, rolled back up onto his feet. Feeble lightning put on a distant, dismal show, but it was enough for her to see. Uncle Willie had a wicked-looking rifle in his hands, which he was holding like a club. His eyes were large and reddish, glowing from the inside.

“No!” she screamed, buckling to her knees. Uncle Willie, gentle, clumsy Uncle Willie, had given himself to the Salesman.

Crack!
Brayker flopped backward with a groan. Jeryline crawled to him and pawed at his chest for the pouch. He sat up. Hot liquid dripped on her wrists. She got her hand around the key and ripped it free, jumped to her feet, and waited for Willie’s next move.

But . . .

She used her free hand to feel the key, baffled. It had changed somehow, was thinner, had prongs sticking out of one end, like a fork with a big heavy handle.

She sensed Willie drawing closer, could dimly make out the tiny red dots of his eyes. He moved suddenly; something heavy whooshed through the air. She ducked, raised up, and attacked him with both hands around the haft of the strange new key. With a grunt she slashed down with it, driving it into the black shape of his face. Glowing white fluid spurted across her arms and chest in a thin spray, burning like acid. Willie howled and dropped the rifle. Brayker loomed at Jeryline’s side and tussled once more with Willie. The old man fell over and performed a rapid flip-flop down the stairs.

“The key,” Brayker panted. “Where are you?”

She guided it into his hands. “Something’s wrong with it. It feels funny.”

“Save that thought,” he said, and thundered down the stairway. Jeryline followed. In the light she could see that Brayker was indeed holding a fork. It had a fat red handle. It was a Swiss Army knife.

A Swiss Army knife.

Uncle Willie was pushing himself upright. His white hair hung in greasy strings. His white beard poked out comically in all directions. Where his right eye had been was a shriveled hole dripping thick brown fluid down his cheek.

He charged at Brayker, who had injuries of his own. The rifle had split his scalp down the middle of his skull and an incredible amount of blood was running out of it, painting his face, painting his neck, staining his shirt with tentacles of shocking crimson. He whipped the Swiss Army knife up and embedded it into Willie’s remaining eye. Hot white matter ejected in a spray, and he collapsed.

“You bastard!” Brayker howled at the ceiling. “Come and fight
me,
you chicken-shit son of a bitch!”

Jeryline wondered if he even knew his key had been replaced with an inferior model. Pale and gaunt with rage, he glanced up at her but did not seem to see her at all. He lurched toward the door. “Wait!” she cried out, and took the remaining steps in two great leaps. She caught up with him and jerked him around to face her. “You can’t fight him with that!” she shouted in his face. “Look at it! It’s nothing but a goddamned
fork!”

He jerked as if to shove her away, his eyes large and glittering. Slowly they cleared a bit; he raised the Swiss Army knife up and shifted his gaze to look at it. A smear of the white stuff was blackening between the tines.

“Ha-ha,” he said in dreadful tones. “Roach did it after all.”

Something clattered downstairs. Jeryline hurriedly pushed him back to his own room, not knowing if the blood seal was any good now, not knowing much of anything, except that to face the Salesman with a glorified fork was suicide.

“Sit and listen to me,” she said. His knees unhinged and he dropped onto the bed. The Swiss Army knife thumped to the floor. “This is your own plan talking here, Brayker. We sit tight until morning. We don’t leave this room even to take a shit. We only have to wait until—oh shit, what time is it?”

He raised an arm and regarded his wrist. “It’s gone,” he said. “Or did I have one on when I got here?”

“We’ll say it’s two thirty, maybe three o’clock. The sun rises about five thirty or six. Two hours to go, three tops.”

Brayker cranked his head up to look at her. “He’s got the key now. Roach took it from me and gave it to him.”

She nixed the idea immediately. “If that’s what happened Roach wouldn’t be dead. Besides, if the Salesman has the key, why hasn’t the world ended? Why would he still be hanging around in Wormwood at all?”

Brayker applied an emotionless grin to his face. “Because he wants me. I have eluded him for about seventy-five years, and I’m not high on his list of favorite people.”

Jeryline went to the head of the bed and snatched up the pillow, shook it out of the pillowcase, and tossed the pillowcase over to him. “Wipe your face off,” she said. “You’ve quit bleeding, but you’re still gruesome.” She went back and began to pace at the foot of the bed, her fingers intertwined behind her back. “Okay, Watson, check this out. The Salesman has it, all he wants now is your hide. Can he cancel a blood seal with the key?”