Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (10 page)

She fell away, her breath screeching up and down in her throat, her eyes as big as silver dollars. The knife was a prop, was only a prop in this movie: she had buried it to the hilt in the middle of the stuntman’s back, yet all he did was straighten up angrily, eye her with his costume’s huge yellow eyes blazing and hateful, then leap at her, still quite alive. She was smashed to the floor on her back and felt long hot teeth snap at the meat of her throat.

She screamed. The time for the director of this movie to shout
Cut!
was long overdue; the stunt people in the gruesome duds had gone insane and taken over the entire production. She pushed her hands against the demon’s slick green chest, levered it upward a bit, and found it amazingly heavy, as if it were full of water. Its drooling jaws clamped open and shut with the furious speed of a ferret attacking a snake, spittle flipping from its elongated teeth in a spray of yellowish foam. The creature smelled like sulfur, like freshly peeled boiled eggs.

Jeryline’s arms weakened, wobbled, failed. The demon seemed to grin a rubbery, lipless
Thank you
as it crushed down on her again. It wrenched its jaws open. She turned her head and groaned, batting weakly at its face with her fists.

It squealed suddenly and its weight was gone from her. She looked up: the thing now had something strange sticking out of one lidless eye. It hopped and bellowed, pawing at it, knocking it aside finally. Jeryline rolled to her hands and knees and saw that Brayker’s butterfly knife was on the floor, its shiny blade dull with something like foamy yellow mustard. Stuntman eye-juice, she decided crazily, and grabbed for it, able to see Brayker running toward her after having thrown it. Clawing in agony, the demon managed to knock the knife across the floor. Jeryline let out another groan, then brightened. By rising to her knees she was able to reach across the creature’s back and work the kitchen knife free from its bony moorings there.

“In the eyes!” Brayker shouted. “You have to get them in the eyes!”

Green fluid was on this knife, your standard monster-blood. As she swung out with it she did not care if the stuff was camel snot or Cordelia’s X-rated guacamole dip that had turned her bedsheets so green. The knife punctured the demon’s remaining eye with a syrupy pop. White fluid squirted out to boil holes into the linoleum of Irene’s kitchen, and several more on the front of Jeryline’s canvas apron. With a squeal of disgust she jumped to her feet, untied it, and ripped it away. The demon went into a mindless, shrieking spasm of sorts a few seconds before it relaxed.

The gun in Roach’s hand popped off a single random shot; Jeryline saw a burst of porcelain chips explode from the kitchen sink. Brayker dived for Roach, who was whooping and howling as he departed. Brayker wrested the pistol from Roach’s hand and shot the eyes out of the two demons dragging him outside. Cordelia, currently going apeshit with the rolling pin, stepped aside long enough for Brayker to kill the last one.

Brayker kicked Roach away from the shattered door, then took out the key and worked the glass bulb open. He shook it at the ruined doorway. Lines of sparkling fire sketched a quick outline, then were gone.

He turned. “Now do you see?” he shouted.
“Now do you see!”

Something wet and gray shot out of the dark behind Brayker. Jeryline uttered a short screech and dropped into a crouch with her arms protecting her head, sure now that this invasion would never end. The creature sailed through the shattered doorway, its claws outstretched, its tail arched and its eyes glowing and insane; it crossed the boundary between inside and outside and burst into a quick, blinding flash of white flame. When it hit the kitchen floor and slid against the wall it was little more than a husk, a drift of oddly shaped ashes.

After a wondering moment, Jeryline rose up again. “That—that liquid stuff. What is it?”

Brayker armed sweat off his face and dug the leather pouch out of his clothes. He shoved the key inside. “Weird science,” he said, approaching her. “What we have to do now is seal everything in this building. All of it. Come on.”

He took hold of her arm. She allowed herself to be carted a few steps, then jerked away. “No,” she said, backing away from him. Although this kitchen had been part of her life for many months it seemed alien and dangerous now, a new prison with new terrors, new inmates, a new breed of guard. “No way, Brayker. I am not part of this scene, I do not have anything to do with you, you can go fight your rubber monkeys without me around.”

“Oh, so you’re leaving us,” he said tonelessly. “Maybe going to go out the front door instead of the back? Do you suppose the others did any better than you? Do you suppose the deputy and old Willie and the scrawny guy are snug and safe in that cop car out front?”

“I don’t even care,” she shouted at him, wild with justifiable hate for the crazy man who had brought all this craziness to Wormwood, a town which Jeryline was beginning to hate more and more as these minutes dragged on.

Roach and Cordelia limped over, supporting each other like wounded comrades. Roach had some nasty scratches on his face and arms that were starting to puff up like hives; Cordelia’s hairdo had become an explosion of terrible proportions. Irene puffed her way to the huddle, shaking and waxen but looking very determined.

“They are not taking my house away from me,” she said, smoothing her green pantsuit where it could be smoothed. “I have invested my entire future to making this place work, and if Jesus could cast out demons, so might I thusly be able.” She frowned. “Jeez, do I sound biblical, or what?”

Brayker seemed to want to smile, then recaptured his stern face and stalked away. Jeryline offered him a mental
adios.

“We can see if the other guys made it,” Roach wheezed. He dabbed at a cut on the side of his neck. “Let’s go out front.”

Jeryline followed behind the trio, wanting in fact to locate a bottle of premium fire-water, lock herself in one of the bathrooms, and drink her way from now to dawn and the end of this unwanted chapter of her life.

If it really
did
end at dawn. Brayker had said something about surviving this night, and all would be okay in the morning. But who the hell was he to know?

Roach went to the window beside the television, where Dr. Richard Kimball was soundlessly endearing himself to this week’s batch of disturbed yokels. “Can’t hardly see squat,” Roach said after cupping his hands around his eyes and pressing them to the window. “Which car was they gonna be taking?”

“Supposed to be that asshole deputy’s squad car,” Cordelia murmured. “Is it still out there?” She turned and looked over to where Tupper lay on the floor with a broad halo of blood circling his head. “Poor Parnell. And he was a family man, has a little kid.”

Roach crouched and shifted as if scanning the Atlantic through a periscope, his breath fogging the glass. “Looks okay,” he said after a second. “Let’s make a dash to my Bug, peel outta here, forget Brayker and his giant key full of blood.”

Jeryline perked up. “Blood?”

Roach swiveled his head. “Fucking-A, Jeryline. That glass ball’s got blood in it that’s all old and clotty. Ain’t you never seen real old blood? Never slept on a broken nose?” He frowned stupidly. “Nah, I guess you wouldn’t have. Anyway, let’s roll on outta here.”

He erected himself and once again surveyed his troops. Jeryline wanted, suddenly and quite desperately, to laugh in his face, maybe scream in his face, maybe cry in his arms. Instead she jammed her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans and decided to fade into the woodwork somewhere, invisible to the demons, invisible to the people, invisible to the world.

Roach, Cordelia, and Irene, hushed and intent, shuffled to the front door. Roach pressed his ear to the heavily painted wood. His eyebrows moved and twitched, reminding Jeryline of those hairy little caterpillars with eight-hundred legs or so.

“Clear,” Roach pronounced, straightening. “Time to boogie.”

He fanned the door open. The weather said hello, flapping their clothes, drenching them in mist and errant rain. All three peered into it.

“Now!”
Roach bellowed, and they charged out.

It took only a second for the screaming to start.

7

T
he man named Brayker walked up the steps alone.

He was an ordinary guy who looked to be about thirty, maybe younger. His hair, which had been golden brown when he was small, had turned black over the years, had developed a bit of a curl to it. His eyes were light green, but were usually clouded by sleeplessness; most of the time the whites of those eyes were threaded with bright little twigs of red. He had scars on him, though a great deal of them were not visible on the outside. He did not mean to be a jerk, yet that is what people usually assumed he was; he was not a pushy person yet that is the impression he usually gave. His greatest desire was, like the desire of many other people, just to be left alone to live his life on his own terms.

All of that had changed forever in a time so far away that even the newest of the newborn babies then were now either dead or doddering around in nursing homes all old and gray and forgetful. There was a war, and war brings madness; he was a soldier, and soldiers bring death. That war was assigned to the trashpile of public memory when Brayker was still young and freshly out of it; that war was now an unimportant detail in the history books of man. But not for the history books of Silas Brayker, the son of Madeline and Cuthbert Adams Brayker, born in a time when horses provided horsepower and electric lights were the playthings of the rich.

He walked up the steps alone, thinking of these things without wanting to, tired to the point of collapse. The newest cat-and-mouse game with the Salesman had started well over eight days ago in New York, where Brayker had lived in a small Greenwich Village flat on Bleeker Street and worked two jobs to keep from starving or being rained on to death from lack of roof. The Salesman had come to where Brayker worked the night shift, posed as an FBI agent to the shift boss, gotten Brayker hauled into the front office for a quick questioning session, and tried to handcuff him on the spot. Brayker had jumped the shift foreman to get his keys, and escaped into the employee parking lot. The shift boss had a brand new Firebird convertible that had to cost thirty grand if it cost a dollar. And now the car was, of course, a pile of recycling material on New Mexico Highway 47 just outside of Wormwood.

Brayker got to the stairway landing and walked to the right on the thin green carpet, assuming that this had to be Irene’s favorite color. The first door on the left sported tin letters that identified it as Number Two. Brayker leaned against the doorframe and dug out the ancient key from its pouch, clutched it firmly in his hand, tested the knob with his other hand, and pushed the door open in a swift move.

Dark inside. Lightning flickered through the jewels of raindrops affixed to the window. Brayker padded in and anointed the casing with a drop of blood from the key, watched the familiar zip-flash of the seal, glanced around again, and went out.

The rooms on the left were Two and Four and Six; the right-hand side offered One and Three and Five. Number Four smelled odd; at first Brayker froze up, acquainting himself with the odor before moving again: whoever lived here liked to burn incense, he decided. Maybe Jeryline. Harmless enough, though. He let a drop from the orb fall onto the window sill, then backtracked and flipped on the light. Her room was immaculately clean and well-ordered. All four walls were thick with posters of a city he recognized as Paris, as well as other European cities. Brayker shook his head. Wormwood, New Mexico was about as far away from the Continent as you could get. Apparently she had dreams of traveling to exotic places when she was off parole.

He went out and closed the door. Number Six had to belong to that little Wally guy, Brayker assumed. In the ghostly light, he could see that the walls were hung with post office memorabilia: a poster of the official USPS eagle printed on slick paper, more posters showing various collector’s stamps now available, and at the foot of the bed, samples of variously sized mailing bags and boxes stapled to the walls along with official tags of their prices. Brayker gave a mental shrug—to each his own, eh?—and sealed the window.

Room Five was the one Irene had assigned to him, though he knew now that he would never sleep in it. He tarried at the window for a bit, looking out at the sodden world. There were roads out there that would take a man anyplace he chose to go; there were jobs to be gotten, apartments to be rented, ten thousand different places to hide for a while. But only a while. In time the Salesman would burst back into his life and send him hightailing it down the road again, Brayker the eternal stranger in another strange town.

He moved on. Cordelia’s room was in shambles; Brayker decided that Roach was into a lot of romp-and-stomp lovemaking. The smell of sweat was still strong here: Roach was a hard worker, too. Brayker sealed the window, trying to remember the last time he had been with a woman in the same bed. Years? Decades? Never?

Such things were trivial, anyway. He never stayed in one place long enough to make friends of any kind, and even if he did, the Salesman would make sure that everyone he cared for died in some new and inventive fashion. Life on the run was a lonely life, but the only life he knew.

As he was sealing each separate doorway, he heard shouting going on outside the house. With an internal sigh he hurried down the stairs, taking them three at a time. At the landing he could see that the front door was open, that the noise was just beyond it. He had the key still in his hand; a quick check showed that there was still enough blood inside the orb to do quite a bit of damage.

At the open door he looked outside. Roach was involved in a wrestling match with one of the Salesman’s uglier associates, this one lumped and warty with a face full of tendrils like a catfish. Cordelia still had her rolling pin and was attempting to clobber the thing into the ground while Irene, a few steps away in the parking area, pounded the windows of Roach’s VW bug with her fists. Apparently Roach had locked it up when he got here, which he inconveniently forgot. Of the three men from the second team, not one was around. Killed and dragged away? Very likely.