Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight Read online

  Tupper cursed softly. “Deputy, take Mr. Brayker here out to the car.”

  Martel moved to take control of Brayker, who began to twist and struggle as Tupper started to put the key in its case. “Don’t do it!” he shouted. “You don’t know what will happen, what’s at stake!”

  “He’s simply insane,” the Salesman said. “This is obviously the receptacle for the artifact, and I am obviously its owner.”

  Jeryline strode out of the kitchen with the phone in her hand. “Mavis has a line through to the crime-net computer, but the only Brayker they show was a petty thief who died four years ago.”

  Tupper scowled. “Wouldn’t you know? Okay, Bob, get his ass to the car. As far as we know he has no priors, but attempted auto theft is a good start.” He turned to the Salesman and extended the key. “Here it is.”

  “You can’t give him that,” Brayker howled. “He’s not who he says he is!”

  The Salesman had taken a step backward. “Well?” Tupper demanded. “You want it, or not?”

  “Just place it in the case for me.”

  Tupper narrowed his eyes. “What, you can’t touch it? Maybe you don’t want your fingerprints on it?”

  “That’s absurd, Sheriff.”

  “Then take it. You can wipe the prints off later.”

  He hesitated.

  “Jeryline,” Tupper said, “keep Mavis on the line. Salesman, let’s see some identification.”

  The Salesman looked from face to face, grinning limply. “Are you mad, Sheriff? You think that I’m—”

  “I don’t think nothing, yet,” Tupper interrupted. “But if you think I’m mad now, just keep on stalling.”

  The Salesman’s grin vanished. “Very well.” He snapped the case shut and set it on the floor. “The time for stalling is over.”

  Jeryline was just lifting the phone to her ear again to tell Mavis to get ready for more info, when the Salesman straightened and his right fist shot out toward Tupper in an instantaneous, whipping blur. It was in that millisecond that Jeryline realized, with the speed of sudden, unvoiced recognition, that Brayker was indeed a part of her destiny, of the destinies of everyone present at the Mission Inn on this howling night. The Salesman’s fist clove Tupper’s face in half, passed on through his brain, and with a hideous squelching noise, exploded out of the back of his head. Blood and clots of matter sprayed in a sudden wash across Brayker and Deputy Martel. Cordelia and Irene both screamed in unison, as did Roach, whose tone added a horrible contralto effect. Little Wally’s mouth fell open and he fainted across Uncle Willie’s lap. Uncle Willie himself had become a statue with a scraggly beard and huge, frozen eyes.

  The phone dropped from Jeryline’s suddenly nerveless fingers and clunked on the floor. The twitching body of Sheriff Tupper hung from the Salesman’s arm. The Salesman tried to shake it free.

  “Get me out of these cuffs!” Brayker shouted at Martel, but Martel was doing an Uncle Willie imitation without the beard. “Dammit!” Brayker howled. “Jeryline! Help me!”

  She stared at him. Between her feet Mavis’s voice on the phone was a tiny buzzing.

  “Jeryline,” Brayker shouted, his teeth clenched, his bloody face drawn up. “He’ll kill all of us if you don’t move!”

  She blinked at him. Her mind could not unscramble the sounds he was making. The Salesman had Tupper’s body on the floor now and had a foot on his shoulder, still trying to jerk his hand out of the mangle of meat and shards of bone that had been Tupper’s head.

  The antique key had fallen from Tupper’s hand when he died and now Brayker stepped to it and kicked it under the table. Moving backward, he got to Martel and tried to open a pouch on his belt that looked likely to hold keys. Jeryline watched all this from the safety of her senseless, dreamy world.

  “Goddamn you, Jeryline!” Brayker shrieked. “Move your big fat fucking ass!”

  She jerked. Her ass was not big. She had been told by many a man that her ass was to die for, so gorgeous was it. She unlocked her body and skirted the desk. “You’re a jerk,” she snarled in Brayker’s face, and dug Martel’s official set of keys out of the pouch. She pawed through them, found the smallest one, and unlocked the cuffs. Brayker twisted out of them just as the Salesman’s hand pulled free. The Salesman then swung his fist in a huge arc, catching Brayker only slightly as he ducked.

  Martel finally came to life. With a hand shaking so hard he could barely unsnap his holster, he hauled his pistol out and stuck it toward the Salesman’s chest. “You stop doing that stuff!” he hollered, barely able to hold onto the pistol. Jeryline was reminded of Barney Fife and his case of nerves.

  Uncle Willie stood up suddenly. Wally Enfield thumped to the floor like a rubber dummy. “I’ve knowed me some judo,” he shouted to the Salesman, and assumed an odd stance. “Take me on, Snakebite!”

  The Salesman turned to look at him, laughing. Brayker coupled his hands together to form one huge fist and swung out hard, as if he held an axe. When it connected, the Salesman’s nose broke with a wet little snap, but he only turned again and smiled.

  “At long last,” he breathed, and clamped both hands around Brayker’s neck. He lifted him an inch or two off the floor. “You’ve been lucky for too long,” he sneered. “I hope you like what happens next.”

  Jeryline looked around for a club, an ashtray, any kind of weapon. There were chairs but they would splinter in a heartbeat. There were the curtain rods but they were flimsy aluminum.

  “Remember Quebec?” the Salesman crowed. “Remember Seattle? Remember all the times you should have been dead?”

  Jeryline spotted the oversized key. She dropped to her knees and crawled under Brayker while he shook and gobbled above her. It was heavy and cold. She staggered to her feet and swung it back like a knife, intending to stab it somewhere in the Salesman’s face, maybe his eye.

  “Goodbye,” the Salesman said, and squeezed his hands tighter.

  She drove the key toward his face with all her strength. An arm swung out and blocked the blow. She careened backward.

  Brayker had done it. Though she had fallen on her butt, her arm was still a captive to his hand. His face had turned from blue into purple, and a thin line of blood slid from the corner of his mouth. His eyes, fixed on the key, were bulging so hard she thought they must pop out.

  His hand slid down her arm to her hand. He jerked on the key, jerked again. Jeryline let him take it, stunned and bewildered.

  “Fuck . . . you!” he gurgled, and mashed the key against the side of the Salesman’s face.

  The Salesman screamed. Long tendrils of steam hissed out from under the key. He dropped Brayker but the key was still welded to his face. He pranced and whooped, slapping at it as if it were a wasp that could sting and sting again. As Brayker wobbled to his feet, the Salesman peeled the key away. New steam and smoke burst from his fingertips as he did. The key clunked on the floor and lay there with strings of flesh boiling on its edges.

  The Salesman staggered and reeled to the nearest window, both hands clutching the side of his face. With a clumsy backward leap he crashed through it. Cold wind and wet drizzle blew inside, billowing the curtains while shards of glass crashed on the floor.

  Choking and retching, Brayker crawled on his hands and knees to where the key had fallen. When he had it in his hand, he rose to his knees and stuffed it back into the leather pouch that Sheriff Tupper had belatedly found hidden under his clothes.

  Uncle Willie, Irene, even Cordelia and tonight’s lover Roach, slowly stepped to the window. On the floor, Wally uttered a groan that everyone ignored.

  “Don’t,” Brayker gasped. “Not yet.”

  He clambered to his feet, one hand swiping away the blood from his mouth and chin. “It’s not over,” he said, his voice cracked and rasping. “It’s never over.”

  Irene emitted a strange, strangled noise. “Look at what he’s doing,” she whispered. “Look!”

  Jeryline stumbled past Brayker to get to the window. Irene�
�s porchlight was only a $8.99 K-Mart special Jeryline had picked up in Avery, and then installed for the bitch, but the poor light its forty-watt bulb cast was enough. On the porch the Salesman was furiously stripping off his shirt, where blotches of his own melted skin were smoldering. Lightning flashed nearby and in the tick of time it took for the thunder to report in, Jeryline saw his face illuminated. It was twisted, somehow pointy, wicked, scarred badly by the application of the antique key. Had he been wearing a mask? she wondered. She remembered a movie they had shown in the women’s prison about a year ago, a film where this guy could make artificial faces—she had liked it enough to write to her sister Joan in Albuquerque, asking that she send the book, if there was one. For a moment now her mind went gray: false faces, like in the book and movie? Or was this even more sinister than that?

  The Salesman extended a hand, grinning horribly to his audience, which now included Brayker. A windowful of faces, Jeryline thought, and wondered how many of these faces would be left if the Salesman got back in. Nobody could hit like that; nobody could punch a fist through a living skull. Unless, maybe, they are wigged out on drugs and totally insane.

  “Damn,” Brayker whispered. “Just like before.”

  She was about to turn her head to comment on this, ask him when and where the hell the befores had happened, when the Salesman shouted: “It could have been easy, my good people. It could have been a simple matter of giving me that key.” He let his gaze bounce from face to face in the window as if memorizing each one, finally settling on Brayker. “You must be so dreadfully tired after all these years, Brayker,” he said. “So horribly, dreadfully sick of it all.”

  Brayker said nothing, but raised the pouch so that the Salesman could see it. “Not as long as I’m alive,” he rapsed through the aching knot that was his throat. “It starts again tonight, and it will end like it always has.”

  The Salesman looked off to one side, shaking his head. “Sometimes even I grow weary of this,” he said.

  Jeryline watched as he extended his other hand to the one he was holding to his side. A trace of light gleamed off his moving little finger, where a pointed fingernail that seemed as thick and yellow as a talon grew. With it he rasped the skin of his palm in the shape of a cross, and held it out for them to see. “Behold!” he hissed, and punctured his palm with the talon. A drop of dark blood peeked out. With a hard and purposeful swipe of his hand, he carved his entire palm open in a single deep line.

  Bob Martel slumped backward against Jeryline. “So damn much blood,” he groaned. “The Sheriff, ah God, the Sheriff . . .”

  His eyelids fluttered. Jeryline wormed herself to the side and let him thunk to the floor, her eyes still on the Salesman and his hand. He cupped his palm for a moment while blood formed a pool in it, watching it with an almost motherly expression of concern.

  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 . . .

  Author’s Interlude

  by

  T. C. Keeper

  Was that cool, or what? Rubber monster suit! R-U-B-B-E-R monster suit! According to Lesson Two of the Famous Dead Writer’s Course it is important to keep the reader wondering what will happen next. I’ll bet that none of you expected the Salesman’s blood to bring guys in rubber monster suits out of the ground! Took you by surprise and made you want to read more, didn’t I?

  Truth is, Jeryline only thinks they are monster suits, because never in her life has she laid eyes on a real demon—but she won’t be thinking it long! Demons come in many shapes and sizes, yet they all have one thing in common: they love humans. Love them. Rare, medium, or well done, that is.

  Since we’re taking a break, why don’t you go ahead and peek in the fridge for something to snack on, if you can eat after reading about Sheriff Tupper’s latest headache, or go use the bathroom, if you haven’t already soiled your undies. Myself, I’m taking my typewriter to the cemetery to work on the plot.

  6

  Brayker had seen it all before, too many times before, but the display of the Salesman’s power always hit him like a fresh punch to the gut. There were four of the newborn creatures beginning to caper and prance out there now as the Salesman dropped new blood on the ground. Lighting cut the night, and rain slashed across the earth as if the black sky was aware of this new confrontation and was trying to drown it.

  “Get back from the window,” Brayker shouted, shoving people aside. He dug his hand into the pouch and jerked the key out. “Back, dammit,” he commanded, pushing his way through. “Goddammit, Irene, move your green ass out of the way!”

  Lightning flashed again: one of the creatures already had its rubbery claws on the open window frame. With a clumsy leap it sprang into the room, lurched in a half-circle with its yellow eyes bulging, and jumped at Deputy Martel. Martel coughed out a short scream as it latched itself to his clothing like a large toad and wrenched its mouth open. With an animal grunt it tried to take a bite of his face, but Martel jerked backward.

  Brayker jammed the key into his pocket and darted to Sheriff Tupper’s fallen body. He bent and jerked Tupper’s pistol out of its holster, turned, and fired two quick shots.

  The creature’s eyes were the target. Parts of the back of its head blew outward in a spray of green and red liquid. With a high-pitched, pig-like squeal it dropped to the floor. Whitish fluid drizzled from its punctured eyeballs, causing shallow burns in the carpet where it dripped.

  Irene suddenly let out a whoop. Brayker spun, raising the pistol again. Another creature had leapt through the open window and hooked itself to her. She batted at it with her open hands, spinning in circles, shrieking. Brayker hesitated, then fired twice. The creature thumped greasily to the floor with its eyes shot out, twitched once, and was still.

  Someone began to giggle. Brayker snapped his head around. It was Jeryline. Her giggles became real laughter. She pressed both hands to the sides of her head, making her hair stand up in comical pony-tails, and lurched in a circle. “Don’t you see?” she shouted. “Don’t you see?”

  The other five, and Brayker, eyed her. Wally Enfield, almost awakened from his previous fainting spell, had fainted again.

  “They’re costumes!” she bellowed. “Fucking costumes!”

  She walked to the creature that had attacked Irene. Smoke drifted up from the stained, burned carpet where its blood had hit. Jeryline dropped to her knees and, with a grunt, rolled the thing over. She began to poke her fingers at the nape of its rubbery neck.

  “There’s a zipper here someplace,” she said. Her hair hung across her eyes in damp strings; her eyes themselves were overly bright. Brayker had seen this reaction before, and not just in women. Ignoring her, he jogged to the open window, pulling the key out of his pocket as he moved. He stopped and twisted the glass orb on its mounting, exposing a small hole. When he upended the key a single drop of the dark liquid fell on the window sill.

  “Well, I’ll be hanged,” Uncle Willie breathed wonderingly.

  The single drop had instantly begun to sizzle. Two horizontal lines of yellowish flame shot from it, spread to the sides and zipped upward as fast as a pair of slot cars on an easy track, then met again at the top. Poof, and the flam
e was out.

  Brayker turned. “This window is sealed now. None of the demons, not even the Salesman, can pass through it.”

  Roach rattled his head as if clearing it of cobwebs. “Hold on here now,” he said. “They ain’t no such things as demons.”

  Brayker offered him a bitter sneer. “Are you going to look for zippers now too? Or just shut your eyes and pretend nothing happened?”

  Cordelia put a hand against Roach’s chest. “Listen to me,” she said, her eyes moving back and forth from Brayker to Roach. “The Bible talks about demons all the time. Remember when Jesus commanded them to leave that man? He made the demons go into a herd of pigs.”

  Irene nodded. “Jesus believed in demons. Why can’t we?”

  Jeryline shot to her feet. “Listen to you people,” she hissed, staring incredulously at the others. “There are no demons, and even if there was, they would be spirits. Jesus didn’t have a bunch of guys in monster suits running all over the place, and that’s what these are, nothing more. Here.”

  She strode to the desk, extracted a pencil from a jar of pens and pencils, went back, and squatted by the fallen creature. “The game’s over,” she blared in its face. “Hop up or get a pencil in the eye!”

  Brayker hurried to the front door. He let a drop of liquid fall on the wooden threshold. Lines of yeliow flame burst into existence, shot from angle to angle, and met at the top. Poof! and they were gone.

  Jeryline lowered the tip of the pencil to the deflated hole where once a huge yellow eye had been. “One, two, three,” she said almost gleefully. “One, two, three!”

  Brayker went to another window, shook out a drop, stepped back.

  “You faker!” Jeryline screamed. She stood and began to kick the corpse. “Get up! Get your fucking ass up!”

  She slapped her hands to her face and began to weep. Uncle Willie went to her. She whirled and embraced him in a sudden, crushing bear hug. “It can’t be,” she moaned against his dirty jacket. The pencil dropped from her hand and clicked on the floor beside the creature—beside the demon. Uncle Willie looked down at it. He had seen ten thousand unbelievable things in his life and in his delirium tremens, but nothing to match this slimy, puckered, green dead thing, this demon.