Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (5 page)

“Oh?”

“Yes.” Willie began pointing around. A hint of thunder crawled across the tossing sky as if unsure which way it should go; more lightning erected tiny ladders far out on the prairie beyond the town. “You see that sign? It used to be a grocery store. One block past it is the building that used to be a motel before they re-routed the highway and put us off the beaten track. There you would take a left and look for Mission Street in about six, maybe seven blocks. The street signs have mostly fallen but you can tell Mission Street because . . .”

His voice trailed off. The dark stranger with the weird shiny dot on his palm had hoisted the bottle to his lips in a sudden move and was drinking again. “See here,” Willie snapped. “I offered you a drink in the name of friendship, yet here you stand swilling my liquor like root beer.”

The man lowered the bottle and eyed Willie. “Take me there,” he said.

Willie straightened. “What?”

“Take me there.” He gripped the bottle by the neck and waved it in front of Willie’s face, sloshing its delicate innards. “Take me to your godforsaken hotel. Let me close my eyes and sleep until I die.”

Willie took a backward step. “Sir, you only have to walk nine or ten blocks from where we stand and you will be there.”

“Be
where?”
he shouted, advancing a step. “Where it might be
safe?
Where I can
rest?
Where I do not have to deal with
this
every moment of my life?”

His free hand swung up and stopped a few inches in front of Willie’s face. The one dot of green light pulsated, pulsated, then shifted slightly. It went out.

“And I,” the man said wearily as he dropped his hand and looked at it, “must once again fight unto the death.”

Willie stood mute. This was a lunatic facing him here, a young man carrying a host of demons in his soul. Many hobos finally went senile or insane after years of bad booze and lousy nutrition he knew, but for this poor fellow the time had come far too early. Overdoses of hair spray could well be the culprit.

“Okay,” Willie said, straightening his shoulders. “I will take you to the Mission. They know me there, and you will get a bed.”

With a sudden move of his arm, the man gave up possession of the bottle of whiskey by thumping it against Willie’s chest. “I only ask for one night’s sleep,” he muttered, hanging his head. “One night’s sleep before we all die.”

Willie took the bottle. He put one gnarled hand on the stranger’s shoulder but immediately felt sheepish and let it fall. “Oh, just follow me,” he said. “You got a name I can use?”

“Brayker,” he said. “There’s a Y in it. Brayker with a Y. And for God’s sake, it isn’t Baker. I swear it isn’t Baker. Don’t ever call me Baker.”

“Never have and never will,” Uncle Willie said, and aimed himself toward the abandoned grocery store that would lead to the abandoned motel, which would lead to Mission Street, where the sign that proclaimed its name had long ago fallen down and would never rise again.

They walked. For lack of anything to say, Willie told him tales of his olden days as an investor in silver mines, up to the part where the truth got blurry and the booze took over, but this guy Brayker—and don’t ever call him Baker—didn’t seem to be listening, so when the rain began to drizzle down, Willie decided to shut up and went to work on his last few inches of whiskey.

4

D
anny Long, who had been so proud of himself for stopping the theft of his parent’s Bronco at the Eureka Cafe, was not the only young person dying a slow death in the decayed remains of Wormwood, New Mexico, where everybody left and nobody bothered to come back. The name attached to her probation file identified her as Jeryline A. Bascombe, twenty-year-old white female with a record of many enterprising activities such as robbery, burglary, grand theft auto, and possession of controlled substances, to mention a few. In a big city such a record would have surprised few, but in the tiny towns of the Southwest this kind of behavior was utterly scandalous. Eighteen months in prison had hardened Jeryline a little around the edges, and taught her a lot. Lesson One, don’t trust anybody. Lesson Two, don’t ever,
ever
wind up in prison again. Even if it means being a paid slave at the Mission Inn in Wormwood.

And it amounted to slavery, really. As part of her work release/probation, Jeryline was paid two dollars and thirty cents an hour to be the Mission’s maid, cook, laundry worker, desk clerk, delivery driver, groundskeeper, and cleaning lady. The owner of the Mission Inn was Irene Galvin, who liked hiring WR/P’s because they would work long and hard, too long and too hard, just to stay out of prison. If not for the cheap labor, Jeryline had decided long ago, the Mission Inn would be out of business in a month. Less, even.

One thing that helped keep the Mission alive at all was the fact that the building itself was a defunct Baptist church that Irene Galvin had bought, interest-free on a home-drawn contract, for almost nothing per month. Irene was a shrew and a hag and a bunch of other nasty stuff, but she was cunning. The only people left in the town were the poorest, the ones who had no house to sell, no job to relocate to, no future. They couldn’t afford to move away, didn’t have anyone to rent an apartment from as everything in Wormwood folded, and needed a place to stay until Lady Luck might spirit them away to a better life. A boardinghouse, then. Irene Galvin saw the need for a boardinghouse, bought the church for pennies, had it remodeled in exchange for the carpenter’s room and board for a year, and set up shop. How she had latched onto the idea of using work-release cons as labor, Jeryline would never know. The nearest women’s prison was clear off in Colorado. Perhaps they ran newspaper ads.

Tonight, as life at the Mission Inn was winding towards bedtime, Jeryline was, as ordered, wiping down the big dining table with Lemon Pledge. Irene Galvin had acquired the idea that Lemon Pledge was an antiseptic. Irene Galvin had a lot of blank spaces in her brain, for someone so smart. Jeryline was wearing her usual jeans and cowboy shirt as she worked, and the usual canvas apron Irene made her wear. She was not a bad-looking girl—had been a junior varsity cheerleader in school before kissing
that
whole scene goodbye—but with her yellow hair tied up in a greasy bandana, her face
sans
makeup and shiny with sweat, she looked stooped and middle-aged.

The current house guests were parked in front of the old round-tube color TV Irene had picked up at a yard sale years before. The sound didn’t work anymore but the boarders were used to it. From what Jeryline was picking up as conversation ebbed and flowed in front of the ancient Philco, one of the long-term boarders, screwy little Wally Enfield, had gotten fired today from his post office job in Lost Mesa. This was tragic news both to Wally, and to Irene. If one or two more boarders headed for greener pastures, the Mission Inn would financially wash ashore like a dead mackerel on a beach. Which might mean back to the pokey with Jeryline.

“But Wally,” the only female resident was saying, “how could they fire you? You didn’t
do
anything!”

Wally had sunk himself into a corner of the sofa, and if he sunk himself any lower in his distress, Jeryline thought wickedly, only his shoes would be poking up. “That’s what I told them,” Wally whined. “I don’t know what happened to all that mail. Far as I know, it just disappeared.”

The female resident, whom Jeryline could barely stand, was Cordelia Jackson, the former elementary school teacher who became a prostitute as soon as the school closed its doors. And perhaps long before, it had been said. “It is simply unjust,” she hummed to the demoralized Wally. “A man like you. A man like you!”

Wally covered his face with his hands and spoke through his fingers. “God, it was so humiliating. The postmaster ripped off my name tag right in front of everyone. And then, like it wasn’t bad enough, he took my Mr. Zippy patch and cut it up with scissors.”

“Intolerable,” Cordelia Jackson said in a voice husky with righteousness. “You should have told him to go screw himself. You should have reported him to the Postmaster General. You still could, too.”

It was then that Irene breezed in from inspecting the kitchen Jeryline had just finished scrubbing down. Bulging fatly in all the wrong places in her antiquated green pantsuit, she crossed in front of the television while maneuvering two toothpicks between her lips. “Wally,” she said loudly, “if you’ve got any sense you’ll crawl your ass back there in the morning and beg God above for your job back. People are killing each other for post office jobs. You’ve read the papers.”

“Actually,” Wally said, “those killings were of a different nature.”

“Nature, shmature,” Irene snorted. “Go back to your boss and offer to suck some body parts.”

Cordelia nodded. “It never hurts to grease the wheels.”

Jeryline almost laughed out loud. Bent over while sanitizing the chairs, she managed to package it into a large and sloppy cough.

Cordelia, who had most surely sucked a few body parts since giving up teaching, snapped her head around. “Don’t be laughing at him, Jeryline Jailbait Bascombe. Have you got my sheets washed yet?”

Jeryline raised her head. “Yep, they’re all downstairs. I couldn’t get the stains all the way out, though. The whole mess looks kind of . . . green.”

Cordelia rolled her eyes. “Never again will I work with guacamole, no matter how much he pays me. And Jeryline?”

Jeryline stood erect, hating the smell of the Pledge and quite willing to set the rag on fire if asked. The table too, come to think of it. “Yeah?”

Cordelia smiled one of her phony smiles at her. “I’ve got a date coming here real soon,” she said. “Be a sport and put the sheets on my bed while I freshen up.”

“All in good time,” Jeryline said. “After this I’ve still got the stove to clean.”

Irene, who had plopped her green-suited self on the sofa beside Wally and was going at her teeth with both of her toothpicks, pulled her eyes away from the silent TV long enough to bark a command: “Paying customers are always right, Jeryline. Put the goddamn sheets on Cordelia’s bed before her boyfriend shows up.”

Jeryline allowed her eyes to go out of focus, turning everything inside the Mission Inn to a blur of mismatched colors with the voiceless TV a bright spot of flashing lights just to the right. This place was like a nuthouse most of the time: Cordelia was a cheap whore with visions of Hollywood and its money and scandals, Irene was a cheap boarding-house owner, Wally Enfield was a weasely little shit who had been unjustly and terribly fired from every job he’d ever had. There were four other residents, two of them now missing for three days and assumed in jail again, the other two gone off on some madcap venture prospecting for silver in an area that had been stripped clean of silver and everything else before the turn of the century. They could all show up at any time and demand food. Who would be rousted from bed to cook it? The big J.

Wally Enfield decided now to uproot himself from the sofa and become the rescuer of a damsel in distress. “I will get your sheets for you,” he said regally to Cordelia as he stood. “And, I will put them on your bed.”

Cordelia eyed him. “That’s a sweetheart,” she said uncertainly. “Go ahead and do that, get those sheets.” She looked over to Jeryline. “Isn’t he just sweet? Isn’t he?”

Jeryline finished wiping the last chair and shoved it into place. “Wally,” she announced without much enthusiasm, “you are the sweetest of the sweet. The laundry is in the basement.”

He blushed to the top of his balding little head, and got interested in the tips of his shoes. Cordelia touched a finger to her chin and stared at him while mental gears seemed to be at work behind her eyes. “Isn’t he just the sweetest?” she murmured wonderingly. “Isn’t he?”

Irene, who had been busy picking her teeth with her dual toothpicks, went for a rearward molar while raising a leg to let a short, shrill fart whistle between her legs. “Sweet,” she grunted. “Oh so sweet.”

Wally wandered away, becoming so lobster red with embarrassment that Jeryline feared a tourniquet around his neck might be necessary soon. Cordelia squealed out a twitter of laughter. “Did you ever see such?” she asked, slapping the arm of the couch. “Did you? I should give him a freebie. And you know? If Roach doesn’t show up tonight, I will. You bet I will.”

“Just what little Wally needs,” Irene muttered back. “Getting screwed again.”

A gust of damp air kicked across Jeryline’s shins, followed by the spiritless clanking of the cowbell hanging above the front door. A familiar pile of rags walked in: Uncle Willie. Trailing him was a stranger whose thick black hair had been worked into knots by the wind, whose clothes were dirtier than most, whose face was tight and distrusting. An image sprang instantly into her mind: prison guard. Tough, weary, and sick of it all.

“Well, looka here!” Uncle Willie brayed as the doorspring tried to pull the door shut against the weather. “Gangway, I’m bringing in business!”

Cordelia frowned, eyeing the stranger. “What kind of business?
My
kind of business?”

“Well, actually,” Willie said, “more like Irene’s business. He’s looking for a private room.”

Jeryline watched Irene Galvin push herself off the couch to greet the sight of a new paying customer. “Why, Uncle Willie,” Irene giggled, and stroked his hairy cheek as she rounded past him. “Had I known you would be bringing me some business, I never would have said the things I did. Do forgive me.”

Willie frowned. “What things? What?”

“And how shall I register you?” she asked the man. “Monthly? Yearly? There is no better long-term accomodation in New Mexico than the friendly family here at Mission Inn. Are you new to the area?”

“Just give me a room,” he said. Jeryline noticed a thin crust of dried blood under his nose, as if he had been in a fight and scrubbed at it a lot. He ran a hand through his hair. “A bed, a room, one night, two nights, bill me later.”

Irene Galvin snapped suddenly into her more familiar personality. “I don’t do short-term rents, mister. This is not a motel where you check in and then out. I serve meals here, I have an entertainment center here, and I have to make a profit here in order to survive. One week minimum, paid in advance.”