Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (3 page)

“Are you trying to cut off my daddy’s Bronco handle?”

The shape attempted a reply: “Uhhhhhhh . . .”

“Maybe even steal it?”

The shape stepped closer. Danny scooted backward, ready to holler if murder became part of these odd goings-on.

“I am a lock-checker,” the stranger said. “Yours checks out fine. And say, how would you like a nice shiny quarter, young friend? I bet I’ve got one.”

“Try a dollar,” Danny said.

“A dollar? Well, by golly, I just might have a dollar here someplace.”

He was still coming closer. Danny scooted back until the heels of his scuffed-up cowboy boots caught on the edge of the porch. After that, he knew, only a quick scramble backwards could save him. Rather than waiting for the knife to slash and hack and kill—which always happened in the movies—he rocked up onto his knees, ready to jump.

“There—found one! Look!”

Danny looked. The stranger’s hand was extended toward him in a shaft of moonlight, his finger and thumb tweezing a dollar bill for him to take. On the man’s palm—crooked and hard to see, but very strange anyway—was a birthmark or tattoo of some kind. It appeared to be a circle of little stars. One of them, just beneath a crease in the skin, seemed to glow and pulsate.

“Well?” the stranger said, his voice grating as if he were tired of this game already and anxious to get back to the business at hand. “Do you want the damn thing, or not?”

Danny opted for not. He jumped to his feet and scurried to the door of the cafe. “Dad!” he shouted through the screen door. “Hey, Dad! Someone’s out here stealing your car!”

Nothing happened for a long bit of time. Then a lot of feet began beating their way from inside to outside, accompanied by shouts and squawks.

Danny turned before the herd arrived to burst through the door. Caught in a slanting bar of moonlight, the stranger’s eyes met his. “You just blew it, kid,” he said, then shuffled around and jogged tiredly away. As the screen door popped open to bang against the wall, Danny saw him round the corner of the street, and then he was gone.

“Where?” Homer shouted. “Where’s he at?” He paused in his agitation long enough to confront Danny. “If you’re just crying wolf,” he panted, “get ready to cry for real.”

“No wolf,” Danny shouted back. “He went thataways!”

Homer, Wanda, and Roach looked. There was nothing to look at but gutted buildings that had once been shops and stores. Moonlight twinkled on broken glass in the gutters; a cloud slipped across the face of the moon and everything momentarily went black.

Homer propped his fists on his hips and gave Danny a furious glare. “So help me, Danny,” he growled, “so help me God . . .”

“He was sticking a knife in the door handle. A fold-up knife like Mark Oleson had once. What are they called?”

“Butterfly,” Roach chimed in to say. “Gimme a minute.”

He walked to the Bronco. Danny heard the tinkling of keys and coins. A cigarette lighter snapped to life in a quick yellow flame. Roach studied the handle, then straightened. “Your kid ain’t lyin’,” he called out, and pocketed his lighter again. “The lock’s been pried apart and there’s some paint been chipped off.”

Homer’s face twisted into an angry frown. “Steal my Bronco, eh? Chip my paint, eh?” He turned and stomped back inside, muttering to himself. Wanda followed, trailed by Danny, who was feeling pretty important now. Homer stalked to the cash register and uncovered the telephone, which was stashed under a pile of used towels. He jerked the receiver to his ear, dialed three short numbers, and ground his teeth together while inspecting the ceiling.

Wanda drew Danny closer. “Did you get a good look at him?” she asked in a whisper. “Do you remember anything about him?”

“All of it,” Danny said. “Every bit.”

Homer jerked more erect. “Mavis? Get Sheriff Tupper down to the Eureka right now. Somebody just vandalized my car, tried to steal it, messed it all up, jimmied the lock, you name it. What?”

He frowned, his eyeballs rotated a few times, his lips formed strange positions. “Damn,” he finally said. “Okay, we’ll sit tight until he shows up.”

He slammed the phone down. “Fat-assed bastard anyway. Public servant, my foot.” He picked up a towel and began twisting it in his hands. “Jackie Gleason was more of a public servant than Tupper ever will be, and they’re both just as fat. Danny!”

Danny perked up.

“Go do the restrooms, hose them down with Lysol. And don’t be peeking at the dirty Kotexes in the ladies’ room trash anymore!”

Danny groaned inside. “Dad, I don’t wanna . . .”

“Do it! Now! Git!”

Danny scuttered away, fuming. Here he was, he’d just saved the Bronco from being stolen, just risked getting stabbed doing it, and his reward was to clean up the toilets. He wished, at this moment, that his dad would just plain drop dead.

He would regret this thought for the rest of his life.

It is a law of the West that every town must have a resident Town Drunk. The Town Drunk of Wormwood went by the name of Wallace Pickerford Gimley, a once-genteel old fart who had lost a small fortune in silver-mine investments in 1964 and, rather than commit suicide, decided to stash his brain in a whiskey bottle until the time came to keel over dead from alcohol poisoning, which he expected to happen around 1965. To his surprise, and everyone’s amazement, it was 1995 and he
still
hadn’t died. Rumors about Uncle Willie, as he had come to be known, used to fly thick and fast before the town died. He was actually dead but too pickled to rot. He was once featured in an episode of
Unsolved Mysteries.
He was from an alien planet where the drunks lived for a thousand years. He was really drinking root beer. He was a vampire. He was Elvis.

In reality, he was just an atrocious drunk. Tonight, for no reason at all, he was preparing to bed down under the awning of the soon-to-be-defunct Sinclair gas station just down the street from the Eureka Cafe. For a pillow he had a stuffed bear some kid had tossed into a trash can. For a blanket he had last Sunday’s funny pages. For a midnight snack he had a half-eaten Twinkie and a can of hair spray.

The moon shone down—interrupted by occasional clouds that threatened a thunderstorm soon—as he set to work on the hair spray. It was a battered can of Aqua-Net he had lucked into. Sitting on his funny pages to keep them from escaping into the rising wind, he turned the Aqua-Net upside-down and mashed the button in. A squirt of hair spray hissed out, followed by nothing but the butane and propane propellant. When the gas was depleted he set the can on the macadam, pulled the spray cap off, and pried out the plastic retainer with his pocketknife, which had half a blade left and had come from the bottom of a Dumpster down on Wilder Street by the boarded-up True-Value hardware store.

Now came the fun part. He pocketed his knife and leaned back against the warm cinderblocks of the station, grinning. This was going to be a double-whammy. The taste of the stuff was a mixture of burning plastic and secret chemicals so hideous they probably glowed in the dark. The first whammy was the taste; the second was the effect. The excitement in a venture like this was something only mountain climbers and sky-divers might understand: there was no guarantee of surviving the ordeal; it was man against nature, man against fate. Uncle Willie had been at a hobo convention of sorts in the summer of 1987 where a man known as Fan-Belt tried the stuff once too often. Fan-Belt was widely known throughout the Southwest because of his ingenious panhandling device. Constantly carrying a broken fan belt in his hand, he would accost drivers at stoplights and beg for a dollar or two. The wife and kids are roasting in the car, he would lament, I gotta buy a new fan belt. Rumors about Fan-Belt claimed he was worth almost twenty thousand when he died that day at the hobo convention.

And man, did he ever die happy. Before drinking the stuff he bade farewell to his friends—as tradition dictated—spread his belongings to be divided among them, took off his shoes in case he should kick or thrash and injure someone, and his shirt in case he should puke on it. Sitting Indian-style under a burning New Mexican sun, his beloved railcars casting broad shadows in the background, he purged and pried open his Aqua-Net, offered a toast, took a breath, and tipped it to his lips. He drank it all in six gulps.

His screams caused the other hobos to cover their ears. Water shot from his eyes and his skin grew ghastly pale. He tried to stand, tore out his hair, staggered around a bit with his knuckles dragging the ground like a gorilla, and began to laugh. And laugh.

Someone timed him on a stolen Bulova. He laughed for six minutes—insane, wild, gleeful laughter that infected the whole convention. Soon everyone was laughing. It reminded the former Wallace Pickerford Gimley of the death scene of Mercutio, Romeo’s friend who was laughed at even as he died, mortally pierced through the heart.

The time came that Fan-Belt fell and laughed no more. Silence dropped upon the crowd. All strained forward, hushed and expectant; Fan-Belt’s pallored face was wet with the tears of his former glee. A hobo pushed his way through the crowd and knelt at his side. He touched Fan-Belt’s neck. The hobo turned a twisted, horrified face to the crowd as he stood. He picked up the can of Aqua-Net and held it high for all to see. His voice cracking, he pronounced the dreadful news: Fan-Belt had perished, a martyr to his ideals.

Uncle Willie had stood mute with respect while the others scrambled for his belongings. A single tear stained his cheek.

This is how Uncle Willie remembered it. He also remembered dinner at the White House. Physically hale and hearty, his brain was nevertheless well down the road to ruin.

He was bringing the can to his mouth when brief thunder rolled across the prairie. The wind picked up in a sudden gust.
Trouble tonight,
Willie thought, and a chill worked its way up his spine.
God’s mad about something.

It was when the running black figure of a man burst out of the dark to the right that he dropped his can of Aqua-Net. It was when the man pounded his way toward him on a direct collision course that Uncle Willie struggled to stand. It was when he heard the man’s ragged, labored breathing that he turned and tried to run from the apparition, but it was too late.

The two collided. Uncle Willie uttered a huge squawk as he was thrown against the gas station’s wall. His can of hair spray rattled away while his funny papers ballooned upward and were snatched by the wind. The Twinkie in his pocket would never be the same. The other man spun twice with his arms flapping and careened into the station’s single gas pump. The hose popped out of its cradle and thunked on the pavement, releasing a short belch of gasoline. Uncle Willie groaned, slumped to the ground, tried to rise again, and lost consciousness. The stranger did the same.

Above, new thunder rippled through the black night sky as the moon was overtaken by clouds, and extinguished completely.

3

I
t was nearly eleven-thirty when Sheriff Parnell Tupper finally arrived at the scene of the crash on Highway 47. He had been snug in bed (and pleased to stay there for the rest of his life, thank you) when Mavis called from HQ in Junction City to roust him, demolishing a very nice dream in progress and setting the stage for a lousy night. Something about a fender-bender out near Wormwood, that boarded-up pile of shit that still dared to call itself a town. While his wife snored her usual symphony in B-flat, Tupper had rolled out of bed, propped his considerable bulk on his skinny legs, and staggered to the bathroom to unload a day’s worth of piss. Ever since the wife, Adelia, had decided to go to business school, he had been forced to stay home during the days to babysit Chuckie, the five-year-old rug-rat that Adelia swore he was the father of, but looked suspiciously like the next-door neighbor, red hair and all. Tupper hated night-shift work worse than he hated rattlesnakes, but Adelia knew how to lay down the law. Besides, when she graduated from school she might land a job and he could cut to part-time.

Up and about, he had thought about taking a shower, then said to hell with it. He thought about changing into a fresh uniform, then said to hell with it. He went downstairs and thought about taking Chuckie someplace for a DNA test, but it was too late to find any open labs, so to hell with that too.

In the end he drove through Junction City and caught Highway 47 south. It took some twenty minutes just to get to where Deputy Bob Martel’s cruiser was sitting dead on the road with all its Christmas lights flashing. There was a pall of smoke in the air that smelled bad. Tupper eyed the wreck as he pulled up and stopped.

“Jesus frigging Christ,” he grunted, fetched his official Diamond County flashlight off the floorboard, and got out. Deputy Martel had put orange flares all over the road and was standing just past the wreck waving directions at an approaching car. He looked back and nodded, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder: Look at what I found, boss.

Tupper looked. A thought popped instantly into his head, the memory of seeing the space shuttle explosion live on TV. These two cars had exploded then melted together. Red-hot sheet metal glowed at the base of it. The tires were still burning; pools of steaming glass were hardening on the asphalt, which itself had burned up some. Tupper ducked, squinting. One of the fried license plates indicated New Jersey, a hell of a long way to drive just to die in a crash in New Mexico. He skirted the wreckage. This plate might say New York, might not, since it had curled up like a pretzel.

He went to the nearest car and shined his light inside. He had seen incinerated bodies before but it was never pleasant. Considering the amount of heat still pressing out from the debris, the temperature must have been upward of two-thousand degrees at its peak. But whoever had been inside wouldn’t have minded one bit; these bodies would be found in chunks and pieces that had nothing to do with the fire.

Martel wandered over. “Suppose we ought to call an ambulance?”

Tupper looked at him. Below his mirror sunglasses Martel was grinning like a baboon. He loved this kind of stuff, being the eager beaver and all that. It was probably the closest thing to a war he had ever seen. Tupper had heard all his tales about the artillery. There could never be enough bombs in the world for Bob Martel.