Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight Read online

  READY FOR YOUR

  DEADTIME STORY?

  For decades the famed E.C. Comics and highly rated HBO anthology. Tales From the Crypt, has proved killer entertainment for millions of fans with its penchant for macabre humor. Now, the show’s creators—the combined forces behind The Omen. Back to the Future, and Predator—have united to bring the shock classic and its celebrated Groucho of Gore, the Cryptkeeper, to the big screen. DEMON KNIGHT is the first of a terror-filled trio of motion pictures designed to raise the level of goosebumps to new heights.

  Good versus Evil . . . a battle that has taken place countless times, over as many millennia, has come to the Mission Hotel. To its five boarders, Brayker is just another lost soul looking for a place to rest. To the Collector, Brayker is the last soldier standing guard over the gates separating hell and earth. Tonight, each and every one of them will learn why hell is much more than just a four letter word.

  He Snapped His Head Up and

  His Crazy Grin Came Back.

  Again lightning stroked the sky and cast harsh light over him. “Ask Brayker why you’re about to die,” he shouted over the following clap of thunder. “Ask Brayker!”

  He swept his hand to the side and tipped out a small bit of his blood. It spattered on the gravel and was instantly washed under by the rain.

  “Arise, friend,” he intoned as if in prayer.

  At that spot in the gravel a strange lump bumped upward with a crunch. Wet rocks tumbled lazily from its peak. Jeryline barely had time to blink before the earth underneath the spot erupted into a geyser of dirt and mud. Some wet, syrupy thing burst up, hurling more dirt and a spray of mucus aside. In that wink of an eye she saw arise, crouched and newborn and blinking stupidly in the rain, a guy in a cheap rubber monster suit.

  What the hell? she wondered. What the . . .

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  TM and © 1995 by Tales From the Crypt Holdings

  E.C. Logo and title “Tales From the Crypt” used with permission of William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.

  Copyright © 1995 by Tales From the Crypt Holdings and Universal Pictures

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-52696-0

  First Pocket Books printing February 1995

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover photo by Aaron Rapoport

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Blood and Guts on

  the Stairs and

  Bathroom Floor Too!

  by

  T. C. Keeper

  Imagine that there is a big old house atop a hill. The house is painted all white but the paint is flaking off in big pieces, but it doesn’t matter because it is dark outside anyway and there is no porch light. But lightning flashes now and then so you could see it after all, the flaking paint. Now go inside the house—in your imagination—and imagine there is a pile of clothes in a heap on the floor of a bedroom. The house is so big it has six . . . no, eight bedrooms. In your imagination you are in one of them, and there is a big pile of clothes, and now you see they are all bloody. The blood is red—you can tell because the light is on in the bedroom—and man, talk about red!

  Then there is this woman standing there taking off her blouse, which is all bloody from her just having hacked her husband up real bad. In fact, she is in her underwear and feels like taking a nice hot bath after having hacked up her husband so bad. But now the phone rings. She answers by saying Hello into the phone after she picks it up.

  It is her lover. That is why she hacked up her husband just before this story started, because she has been having an affair with another dude. She tells her lover now that yes she did it, he is hacked up real bad. Then she says, I am going to take a shower now. So she goes into the bathroom. The house is so big it has ten bathrooms and she goes into the closest one. In the mirror she sees herself and smiles, and her teeth are all bloody like maybe she was eating the body or something.

  But while she’s in the bathtub her husband is coming back to life! He has been hacked up but now his body, which she put in the basement in a barrel of acid, starts moving and wiggling. Blood, guts, intestines, his liver, his lymph nodes, his heart, which has started beating again. So what is left of Walter crawls up the basement steps with the axe that she used still sticking out of his skull. The house is so big it has fourteen stairways, and he must crawl up all of them and it takes him a long while.

  But she is taking a long bath upstairs, so he has time. Finally he pulls the axe out of his head and opens the door. Amanda doesn’t notice this yet because she has put a washrag over her eyes to get rid of her makeup. So when the door opens and he is there holding the axe, she doesn’t see. Then Walter crawls in and lifts the axe over his head! He has only one arm left so it is hard. He raises it up, up, up! Blood and goop slide down the wooden axe handle. Suddenly Amanda notices! And the axe makes a sound like whoosh, like a subway train, loud like that because her husband is swinging it so hard. It splits her head real bad. Blood squirts all over the walls and radiator and sink. Walter says, “Touché” but then Amanda comes back to life! She kills him again, then he kills her, and they do it until they are nothing but slices and pieces like noodles and pasta or dog food. Then her lover comes over and finds them like that, little squiggly pieces that can never die.

  The End

  Hi, kiddies! Pretty bad, huh? This is your old pal The Crypt Keeper. I wrote that little horror story six months ago, as my first assignment in The Famous Dead Writer’s Course. It’s a mail-order correspondence course designed to turn mediocre writers into top-notch frighters. Ever read any books by Clive Darker, Scream Koontz, John Skull, or every bodies’ favorite, Stephen Cringe? That’s how they all learned how to write so well. With the publication of this book I join their ranks—and I’m ranker than they’ll ever be! Probably richer now, too!

  Yes, The Famous Dead Writer’s Course turned a fledgling Edgar Ailing Poe like myself into what I am now, the author of the book you are holding in your hands, paws, claws, talons, whatever. If this book sells enough copies they might make it into a movie, and if they do, your favorite T. C. Keeper will write the screenplay and direct the movie himself. You can bet your life on it—if you still have one after reading this story!

  In the next pages you will meet thirteen people who have a very peculiar night ahead of them. Death stalks us all, but tonight Death has chosen especially to stalk a lonesome dot on the map called Wormwood, an already dying town in the parched deserts of New Mexico that will soon find itself in a battle the size of all creation itself. So sit back, fright fans. Make yourselves comfortable, prop up your feet, have a bubbling cup of arsenic or warm blood, and spread these pages wider. My finely-boned writing skills will now take you away to an empty highway in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains, where a bloated full moon hangs in the velvet sky, and the devil himself is about to claw his way to the surface, looking for . . . you!

  Hee, hee, hee!

  1

  For Deputy Sheriff Bob Martel, these Saturday night patrols were the only part of his job that made being a cop worthwhile. He had joined the force four years ago after an uneventful stint in the army, into which he had enlisted with the hope of shooting krauts or gooks or Iranians, or who-the-hell-ever Uncle Sam didn’t like at the time. Instead the army assigned him to be an ammunition handler in the artillery, wh
ich meant hauling hundred-pound shells out of wooden cases and passing them up the line to the big bang-bang gun. Since there was, to his regret, no war going on at the time, the howitzers shot at dusty hillsides on the Oklahoma prairie, where a big puff of exploded sagebrush was the only reward. How he had hated it. But now, now . . .

  Bob Martel was in his element. The night was new and not quite as black as it soon would be, and from his hiding position behind a billboard on this long stretch of New Mexico Highway 47, Bob was in a perfect position to spot speeding cars. There was something in the air above Highway 47, he had decided a couple months ago, that just made people want to floor the gas pedal and see how many mph the speedometer could streak through. There were times when his souped-up patrol car—actually an elderly Ford Galaxy with a bad case of the wheezes—had trouble catching up with the perpetrators of crimes against speeding. (The drivers were perps, as Bob Martel liked to call them.) But the road was a straight shot for eighteen miles and the Ford could generate 160 mph on a stretch like that, so no perp could outrun him in the end.

  The sun was becoming a memory now as darkness settled in deeper. Sitting in the soft glow of assorted dash lights, his mirror sunglasses reflecting green squares, Bob lifted his deputy’s hat for a moment and scratched at his bushy hair. He dropped it back on his head and checked his watch. Ten-thirty almost, just about time for the teeny-bopper crowd from Lost Mesa to roar out of the hamburger joints there and hightail it to Avery, where half-a-dozen bars rarely checked for ID and the other half-dozen never did. Deputy Martel knew very well that if he had the patience, these same kids would roar from Avery back to Lost Mesa drunk off their asses, and he could hand out DWIs like Christmas candy.

  But he couldn’t wait. His shift ended at midnight tonight, and Sheriff Tupper, the human whale that was Bob’s boss, would take over the reins of duty. This was the part of the job that galled Bob Martel so much: he was young and physically fit, could walk on his freaking knuckles faster and farther than Sheriff Tupper could ever walk on his big flat feet, but the son of a bitch outranked him and got all the choice missions and the choice perps.

  But not tonight.

  It was almost eleven when the first true speeder swooshed past the billboard where Martel was lurking. It was a dark and shiny Pontiac Firebird convertible with the top folded all the way down and the driver’s foot crushed to the floor so hard his heel was digging up asphalt. Deputy Martel, his nerves already humming with anticipation, grinned as his hand jerked to the dashboard and flipped the switch that made his overhead bar of reds, whites, and blues flash on. This guy had to be doing eighty or ninety, a hundred even; he had nearly sucked the Holiday Inn advertisement off the billboard with such speed. He was now demoted from the rank of driver to the rank of perp, and Deputy Martel had every happy intention of catching him and making him regret every inch of this felonious highway misuse.

  Martel slapped his hand to the official key stuck in the column, cranked it, and popped the headlights fully on. He slammed the gearshift from Park into Drive and crunched the gas pedal down, already spinning the steering wheel hard to the right. The phrase “Yee-hah!” leapt out of his mouth. Bouncing up and down on the seat in his brown and yellow uniform, his cop-lights making colored flashes in the dark, he poured on the speed and gave chase.

  He thought.

  It took a second. His elbows stopped flapping and his grin faded into a confused frown. He looked up, he looked down. He looked at the disappearing taillights of the Pontiac, looked at the glowing instrument panel, which made his tight little face look Martian green.

  “Bitch!”

  He cranked the key again, this time listening to hear if the Ford’s motor wanted to start or not. It did, then quit, then ran again. Strange activities took place under the hood, knocks and groans and steamy things that hissed and quit, then hissed again and smelled, to Deputy Martel, like the mentholated steam he’d had to inhale as a child because of asthma.

  “Junkyard pile of shit!” he screamed when everything died again. He pounded the steering wheel with his open hands. “Run, bitch, run! The perp is halfway to Albuquerque already! Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeze?”

  Chugga-chugga-chugga. Boom-rattle-die.

  He could have wept.

  Until the next car roared past. The Holiday Inn sign seemed to suck inward as the noise came; when the black Cadillac shot past with a breathy roar the sign puffed out and wobbled on its posts, threatening to fall over. Deputy Martel hauled in a wondering breath while the car’s taillights painted thin red streaks across the lenses of his sunglasses. Major perps here, folks. Someone needed a ticket in a very bad way.

  Martel was reaching to try the key again when the Firebird’s wheels locked up and it went into a long, tire-burning skid. The headlights lurched into view, were replaced by the taillights as the car spun, then came into view again, filtered through dense blue tire-smoke. It screamed to a stop, blocking both lanes of the highway.

  Martel bleated and groaned as the old Ford’s engine cranked and cranked without coming fully to life. He watched in helpless fascination as the black Cadillac bore down on the Firebird, its headlights piercing the night in two jittering cones that winked and flashed off the Firebird’s dusty hide. Rather than slowing, the Cadillac seemed to be speeding up, probably going better than eighty now, maybe ninety.

  Martel’s police cruiser jumped to sudden life. He smashed the shift lever down with his fist and gave the old Ford a big new dent under the gas pedal. Tires spun and cooked as two huge founts of gravel and dirt shot from the wheels to clatter against the Holiday Inn sign. Fishtailing crazily, Martel found the road and gave chase. He saw the door of the Firebird hinge open. He saw the barrel of some kind of gun, a rifle maybe, that a dark figure levered upward. Flame popped out of it once, twice. The windshield of the Cadillac imploded yet still it gained speed. Martel thought—but could not be sure at this insane pace—that he saw the dark figure leap from the open Firebird and somersault away from it, down into the ditch beside the road. At perhaps one hundred miles per hour now, the Cadillac closed the last few yards. The head of the driver was very visible in Martel’s headlights, a driver making no move to slow down or swerve or do anything to avoid a collision.

  The two cars met. The explosion as they were welded to each other was huge and bright, making Martel cross his arms over his eyes and reminding him very much of the artillery range at Fort Sill, where he had humped bombs for so long. The noise was gigantic, a tremendous kawhoom! that nearly blew his hat off his head. He mashed both feet onto the brake pedal and sent the Ford into a long, loping curve that nearly ended in the ditch. Burning junk and drops of molten metal rained down, cracking his windshield and utterly ruining the wax job he had given the Ford not a week ago with his own elbow grease.

  It did not concern him for long. White and yellow flames geysered into the black sky, lighting the entire area and throwing long, twisting shadows across the desert floor and its collection of sagebrush. He grabbed for the radio mike, missed it, tried again.

  “Mavis? You there?”

  He waited. Mavis Dornberry was not famous for staying awake during the night shift.

  “Mavis! Come in, dammit!”

  The radio crackled. Her tired voice came through as grumpy and lifeless as a yawn: “Yeah, Bob, what now?”

  “Get Sheriff Tupper. Get him fast. There’s been a humongo car crash out here on forty-seven just outside of town.”

  “Bag the perp yet?” she asked with infinite sarcasm.

  Martel noticed that his hands were shaking. Hell, all of him was shaking. “Cut the crap, Mavis, I’m not in the mood for it. Rattle Tupper’s chain and get his big fat ass out here now. Got me?”

  “You’re got,” she replied nastily. “Out.”

  Martel swung his door open and stepped out, covering the top of his head with his arms, wary of the ashes and debris that were still pattering down. The heat from the burning cars kept him at a respectful distance. He looked over to
the ditch where he thought the man had landed after piling out of the Firebird, but it was a long strip of burning gasoline no one could have survived. Besides, the explosion alone probably did him in; no one could have been within fifty yards without getting his arms and legs blown off by the concussion.

  He skirted the wreck. Acrid smoke burned his nostrils, smelling mostly of fried paint and cooked foam rubber. Doubtless the guy in the Cadillac was in there deader than dogshit and burning like a torch, but he decided that the drunken bastard probably deserved it. Both of them did, for speeding like that.

  He stepped back to the cruiser, which was now idling quite nicely with no hint at having been asleep on duty. Scowling, he launched a flat-footed kick at the passenger door that left a respectable dimple in the aging sheet metal. See if he would ever wax the renegade son of a bitch again.

  Something tapped his shoulder then. He brushed quickly at it, cringing in case it was something on fire.

  It was. The tall man standing behind him had wisps of smoke drifting from tattered holes in his suit. Part of his hair was smoldering. His face was streaked with soot and his tie had been burnt all the way up to the knot at his neck.

  “Yeeks!” Martel exclaimed, for lack of anything better.

  “Pardon me,” the man said. “Did you happen to see which way that other fellow went?”

  “Hubba,” Martel informed him stupidly. “Dubba-hubba.”

  “Please try to think,” the burning man said. “I simply must find him.”

  Martel raised an arm and pointed to the wreckage. “Dat.”

  “East? That way?”

  He nodded, shook his head, nodded again. At any moment now, he assumed, he would wake up and find he had dozed off behind the Holiday Inn sign.

  “Very well,” the man said. He primly flicked a fallen ash off the back of his hand. Martel saw a very nice gold watch around his wrist. The glass crystal was milky white from having melted recently. In the other hand he held a small leather case that looked just as bad. The man sketched a brief salute. “You’ve been too kind, and I am very sorry about the mess.”