Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (16 page)

The nameless victim upstairs was giving fabulous lessons in the vocal arts. Jeryline perked up in spite of herself, concentrating on the noise, an involuntary wave of goose bumps crawling up her spine. Had the monsters gotten inside again? Was everybody dying up there?

Footsteps thumped, hard enough to loosen puffs of dust from the beams overhead. They sounded more like the tromping of people wearing shoes, not at all like the patter of oversized, floppy monster feet. She hesitated, drawing deeply on the cigarette she had used to stab Cleo when the stupid cat scared her, a cigarette that now tasted a lot like burning hair.

More screams.
Inhuman
screams. She deliberated. Had Irene just found that the stove was not clean yet? Had Wally just seen Cordelia naked for the first time? Had Uncle Willie run out of booze, had that ding-dong deputy shot himself in the foot, had Roach just smelled his own armpit? Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of “Mission Inn-possible.”

She decided to find some answers. Her hiding place had been violated, someone was screaming like a moron, her cigarette tasted like violin strings, and she had to go pee. She picked up the candle and stood, the tendons in the backs of her knees complaining slightly at being stretched again, and went to the crude little ladder. She dropped the cigarette in the dirt, and looked up. Bedlam was underway upstairs, perhaps the dying cries and last footsteps of Brayker’s ridiculous demons. The trapdoor was in place again, which made her frown. Cleo was out, Brayker knew where this was, yet he had shut it again. In respect of her privacy? How about this: he had no idea she was down here. All he knew was that Cleo had been on top of the ladder to greet him. Perhaps the jig was not yet up.

She went up the ladder, put a hand above her head, and pushed the door up high enough to see, minding its noise. At floorboard level she saw only that the floor of Irene’s mansion was slightly uneven and held areas of dust. At the distant stairway a set of human legs and feet thumped up and out of sight. No more screaming, though.

Jeryline let the candle fall into the dirt beside the ladder, straightened, and eased the trapdoor to the side. She had become too much of a pessimist, she thought, too ready to give up her secret place. With such screaming going on, everyone would expect her to follow the crowd upstairs. And if they asked where the hell she had been? Hiding somewhere, under the sink or in the linen closet. With all this craziness going on, who wouldn’t?

It seemed plausible. She worked herself out of the rectangle, turned on her knees, and put the door back snugly where it belonged, breathing faster, suddenly desperate not to get caught in this act. When she rose up too fast, the back of her neck scraped against the lowest shelf, making her recoil while putting a whole row of Irene’s preserves in motion like a set of freshly placed bowling pins. Grimacing, she crawled out and pushed the door shut before anything could crash to the floor.

Nothing did. She got to her feet and brushed a light film of sweat from her forehead, dusted her clothes, shook out her hair and finger-combed it back into place. It would be no surprise to her if she looked like walking dogshit, no sleep, no makeup, what could anybody expect? At a hasty jog she crossed into Irene’s absurd entertainment center, passed by the television, the front desk, got to the stairwell, and looked up.

Nothing, nobody, not a sound. She plodded up the steps, seeing at last that Irene was standing in the hallway, Roach was standing in the hallway, Brayker was standing in the hallway—everybody and their dog was clustered in the freaking hallway. She took the last step and waited, frowning, for someone to notice her.

Nobody did. She raised a hand, was about to say how-do, when two things caught her eye that erased the words from her mind.

Brayker was holding a sawed-off shotgun, looking grim and haunted. A shiny line of blood had begun to slide from under the door of Room One, Cordelia’s room, her boudoir where many a man had traveled many a mile to partake of the old scuzzbucket’s charms and delights.

Brayker tested the knob. “Back off,” he hissed, handing out dirty looks. His eyes found Jeryline. They seemed to flare somehow, to change, though she could not tell if the reaction was anger or happiness or hatred.

“Back off, dammit,” he said, and motioned with his head. “Jeryline, you come here with me. Take this.” He dug into his clothes and produced the key, held it up for her to see. She frowned, confused, part of her mind still in the basement where life was slow and easy, and then went to him. “Take it,” he said, and pressed it into her hand. “Cover me.”

She folded her fingers over it, reluctant even to touch it. The glass ball only had a few ugly-looking smatters of blood clinging to the inside. The entire thing felt greasy and warm.

“I don’t know how to use this,” she said, making faces at it. “What am I supposed to do? Throw blood all over the place?”

He shook his head. “You’ll know.”

Before she could react, he twisted the doorknob and kicked the door open. The topmost hinge let out a groan as the jamb shattered there. He took a step inside. Everyone crowded closer.

“He said to back off,” Jeryline heard herself snap at the others. To her surprise they did, giving ground so she could follow Brayker. Even Roach looked small and afraid. The deputy, that Martel guy, was a brown and green Gumby with the glint of permanent depression in his eyes. Irene was glowering at the damage to the door jamb. Uncle Willie had the glazed eyes of a diabetic needing insulin in a very bad way. What a crew, Jeryline thought dismally. What a small, unlikely crew to have assembled here in Wormwood for this dreadful night.

She stepped inside the room. There was a smell in the air, something electrical. Above that, a thin, salty odor like chicken blood. Brayker put his hand to the light switch.

“Damn,” she heard him whisper as soon as he clicked it on. She looked over his shoulder, the key held ready for whatever might come.

Cordelia was sitting in a chair by the window. The thin robe she wore while entertaining gentlemen callers was parted obscenely between the spread of her knees; her face looked as if it had been shoved into a vat of hot blue-green wax. Her eyes seemed to glow with a sullen bluish-red as she grinned hugely at Brayker, and a thick red line of blood oozed between her teeth to drip off her chin. Worst of all, though, worst of all, was Wally.

He was draped across her lap with his hands and feet touching the bloody floor, his face staring upside-down at the ceiling. In death his eyes had not closed. Large chunks of flesh had been bitten out of both cheeks. Jeryline clapped a hand over her mouth and turned, but not before she had seen Cordelia’s blue jaw hinge open; with her tongue she pushed a big white chunk of meat out to plop on Wally’s shredded shirt. A rind of skin on the chunk needed, ever so slightly, a shave.

Jeryline could not help it; she vomited a thick warm blot of supper into her hand. When she looked up, crazy with the need to drop the mess into a toilet and wash her hand, Brayker hoisted the shotgun to his shoulder, and fired.

Boom!
In that instant Cordelia lifted Wally’s corpse up as a shield. Wally’s dead stomach exploded and a large clot of his innards splatted across her leering face. The knobs of his spine gleamed whitely inside the fresh hollow where his guts had been, while tattered ropes of meat and intestine dangled out of the hole like vines crawling out of a flowerpot. She stood in one lightning motion and heaved Wally’s body at Brayker. He staggered back against Jeryline, losing the shotgun. It bounced across the floor, clattering end-for-end while balls of smoke puffed comically out the barrel, and skittered under the bed. Jeryline crashed down on her butt, still able to hold her dripping hand away from herself like a falling drunk trying to save his beer, but losing a lot between her fingers. Brayker squirmed atop her, then rolled away.

Cordelia attacked. Her arms were wired with white streaks of veins beneath the blue skin, her face was gleeful and insane. Brayker tried to move aside but was still tangled in Jeryline’s feet and legs. Cordelia pounced on him and clamped both hands on his shoulders, ripping his shirt. Jeryline shrank away, not wanting to believe that Cordelia’s fingernails, which she always kept painted a slutty red, were now long yellow tiger-talons with little squares of fingernail polish still in place. When she opened her mouth to bite Brayker her teeth were twisted yellow fangs. An image sprang into Jeryline’s mind: the gleaming fossil teeth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

“The key!” Brayker howled as he fought and squirmed.

Jeryline rocked to her feet and looked stupidly at her hands. One was holding a thick pile of puke and the other held the key. At the right side of her vision, deputy Martel blurred across like a green and brown fish. He dropped to all fours, then flat onto his stomach, and wriggled under the bed.

“Jeryline,” Brayker groaned while Cordelia champed and slavered, her fangs less than a foot above his face. “Use the key!”

She raised the hand that held the key. Brayker had said she would know how to use it. So okay, where were the divine instructions for the proper care and handling of an enormous key? At least with a handful of half-digested cube steaks and potatoes she had a good idea where to dispose of it.

The question lost its importance when the deputy wriggled out from under the bed with the shotgun in both hands. By now everyone from the hallway had jammed themselves into the doorway again and stood there awestruck. For a moment Jeryline had the sensation of being an exhibit at a zoo where people pointed and stared through the bars all day.

Martel was shaking with excitement as he rose to his feet. “Get her off of you!” he shouted to Brayker on the floor. “Gimme a clean shot!”

Brayker was too busy guarding his face and neck. Jeryline walked a few steps on her knees, circling Brayker and the evil thing that had been a whore named Cordelia, trying to figure out what to do. Martel shouted things at her, commanded her to move or get shot along with Cordelia, but Jeryline was waiting—perhaps in shock at having seen enough to make her puke, perhaps in the hope that the key really
could
be a powerful weapon in her untrained hands—was waiting for the words of God to command her to use it.

“Goddammit girl,
move!”
Martel howled as he pranced with the shotgun, and stood on one foot long enough to kick Jeryline in the face. Pain drove from her nose into her skull like two white-hot nails up the sinuses. Instinctively, with her eyes mashed shut and gushing tears, she hurled the handful of thick vomit at Martel. With her other hand she lashed out blindly and felt the key connect with something solid: Cordelia’s body. Had to be. The key was wrenched from her hand as Cordelia jerked away in a sudden, huge twitch. She screamed as if being dropped feet first into a leaf mulcher, Jeryline’s mental epitome of pain and the lousiest way to die.

Martel made coughing noises. Jeryline was able to squinch her eyes open a bit. He was beside the bed pawing at his face—ook, the whole evening’s menu was represented there. His muddy boots skidded in a patch of blood and Jeryline-juice, and he boomeranged into the air, all elbows and angles suddenly, and thudded disjointedly down on his back. Again the shotgun clattered away.

“This is bullshit,” she heard Cordelia’s exboyfriend Roach complain. He strutted in and bent for the shotgun, kicking Martel out of the way. Jeryline snapped her eyes over to Cordelia: the key was stuck between her shoulder blades. She had jerked up to her knees and was straining to grasp it, her bony hands clawing, her flabby old-woman’s arms jiggling as she tried to reach the most unreachable spot on the human body. Her face was a ghastly field of blue and green twisted in a contortion of agony.

“Yeah?” Roach suddenly bellowed, making Jeryline cringe away. “You thought you could fuck up
my
reputation in this town?”

She looked up at Roach. He was grinning and sweating.

“My
reputation?
Mine?
Well, here’s what I say to that!”

He fired. The noise was thunder and hate in one loud package. Cordelia’s head burst into a crimson mist while shards of her skull chopped jagged, smoking holes into the opposite wall.

Brayker got to his feet. His face was crisscrossed with scratches, beady with sweat. “I never learn,” he panted, pressing a hand to his face. “Kill first, ask questions later.” He gave Jeryline a hand as she struggled to stand. Something between his feet caught his attention, and she looked down when her balance was okay.

One of Cordelia’s eyeballs was spinning to a lazy stop in a streak of reddish fluid on the floor. Small pink muscles jutted out in a ring around it like tattered wings, the torn remnants of its moorings to the eyesockets of her head. As Jeryline watched in horror, Brayker put his foot over it, ready to crush it, she guessed, like a bug.

“Don’t make me puke again,” she groaned.

“Then don’t look at her body,” he responded.

She looked over to what remained of the woman known to her only as Cordelia no-last-name, the whore in Room One who had wild dreams of true love coming her way, and a belief that some men really did ride on white horses and wear shining armor. She had been blown over onto her back by the blast, splayed on the floor with her neck ending in a sloppy perforation job. For Jeryline it was like seeing standard special effects in a movie, yet was grotesque in this stark reality.

Jeryline glanced up to Brayker. “I didn’t puke,” she said.

His face was tired and drawn. “Look again. Forget what’s gone. See what’s left. Then you’ll understand more.”

She looked, distantly thinking that in France about now, Parisians were enduring morning’s rush-hour traffic, and wouldn’t it be grand to be there instead of here among all this death?

She shoved the fantasy aside. By erecting a mental shield she was able to focus only on Cordelia’s body and forget the missing head. It seemed at first that there lay only the corpse of a woman wearing a sheer blue robe that was splayed open to reveal her entire naked, blue body. Even though Jeryline was no friend of Cordelia’s, the woman deserved some dignity, especially now that the entire remaining crew of the Mission Inn was tromping in.