Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (12 page)

He walked back into the light and assessed his chances of making it through the night, everyone’s chances of making it. Cordelia and her new boyfriend Wally Enfield were sitting against the wall holding hands and chatting, Wally as beet-red as a beet can get under all that new attention. Roach had wandered away to lick his wounds; Uncle Willie had his little bottle of whiskey out and was draining the last drops into his mouth. Irene was in the shadows behind the front desk scratching her head with a pencil; what she had in mind Brayker could not know. Deputy Martel was missing, at least from this area. It occurred to him that Martel and Jeryline might be together, trying to escape again, running hand-in-hand across a dark field of weeds with mud glopping under their shoes and a new romance rising in their hearts. The thought disturbed him, but he mentally brushed it away as if it were the size and weight of a fleck of lint. There was no time for jealousy. Jeryline was a pretty girl, she was balanced keenly on the hot edge of life, she had that inner kind of, of . . .
something
. . . that made him know she was special, that she was more than just a girl doing time in a hotel instead of a prison, but a silly love affair with her was the last thing he needed. He felt an attraction to her that bordered strangely on hate, a crazy desire to either beat her senseless or sweep her up in his arms. This had not ever happened before, not that he could remember, but he had lived a long, long time and had forgotten much of the past.

He stopped at the desk and tapped a finger on it.

Irene looked up from what she was ciphering. “What now?”

He shrugged, using more of his eyebrows than his shoulders. “Have you seen Jeryline? Or the deputy?”

She frowned. “Not since—oh jeez, everything is so crazy—not since we tried to make it out the front door. Did the deputy ever explain what stopped them from getting to the car, like we’d all planned?”

“Same thing that happened out back,” Brayker said. “You can’t outrun those things, and you can’t beat them physically. Outsmart them, yes. Outrun them, no.”

She put on a pensive look, idly scratching one ear with the eraser tip of the pencil. “Will they ever leave, Mr. Brayker? Is the whole world being attacked like this?”

He shook his head. “It’s not the end of the world, no. It’s just a fight between two opposing forces.”

“Good? And evil? Sounds Biblical after all.”

“In a sense.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “About Jeryline,” he said. “Any idea where she might be? Any favorite place she likes to go when she’s afraid?”

“Her? Afraid?” Irene shook her head, scowling. “That little twat is not afraid of anything—or maybe one thing. Work. Hard work. You have to kick your foot deeply inside her ass to get her to move at all.”

He frowned. “How much do you pay her?”

She frowned back. “Uh, about two dollars an hour. Before taxes.”

He let his arms fall. “For two bucks an hour, you’re lucky she even gets out of bed.”

Irene aimed the pencil at Brayker, stabbing the air as she talked. “I’ve seen your eyes,” she said. “I’m not a dummy. The first second you’re alone with that girl you’ll both be tearing each other’s clothes off. I know your type. I know your MO.”

Brayker raised his eyebrows. “MO?”

“Cop talk,” she said. “You hang around Tupper long enough and you start talking like he does. Or like he did, I guess.” She put the pencil down, visibly sobered. “Shouldn’t we call the coroner or something? He’s stationed in Junction City.”

Brayker twitched a little. “Do you really think the phones here still work, Irene? That we could have simply called the cops to save us all along?”

“What cops?” she shot back. “Both of them are right here with us. This is New Mexico, you know. There’s more Gila monsters than people in this state. And more Eskimos than cops, practically.”

“Then try the phone,” he said, weary of this.

She reached for it. “Somebody left it off the goddamn hook,” she said and ducked. When she rose up she had the receiver in her hand, an old-fashioned black job that had probably been installed in the 1930s, but it sported a new white spiral cord. She stuck it to her ear, frowned, hung it up, tried again.

“Dead,” she muttered. “But if your pal cut the phone wire, how come he left the electricity burning?”

Brayker knew the answer immediately. “He thinks that we’ll be concocting escape plans in the light, plans that depend on the lights all working so we can see. If we try to run again, off they go and we’re all stumbling around in the dark.”

“Devious,” she agreed. “So those demon things can see in the dark with those big yellow eyeballs of theirs? Can they?”

“Yes.”

“And as long as we stick together and sit tight, the lights won’t go off?”

He rubbed his nose. “Actually, there’s only one rule in this fight, and it’s the only rule the Salesman has always obeyed.”

“Oh?” She touched her chin. “What rule is it?”

“It’s rule number one.”

“Which is?”

A small smile lifted the corners of his lips. “The rule is this, Irene: there are no rules.”

He turned and stumped away, leaving her just as confused and unhappy as people always were when Silas Brayker came into their lives.

8

T
here was something about the old basement that Jeryline felt comfortable with; in a strange way it was like discovering a new home.

She was hunched in one corner with a tall red candle stuck into the dirt beside her, watching the shadows around her flicker and shift as it burned. It appeared to Jeryline that the church overhead, which was now a
motel
(Irene go to
hell,
by the by) had been built on the foundation of a much older building, maybe a farmhouse that burned to the ground, maybe a general store that supplied the early settlers with food and tools. It was obvious, anyway, that this basement was not a part of the original structure of Irene’s motel overhead.

When things had gotten too hairy with Irene in the past, Jeryline had found this place to be a good refuge until the storm had blown over. There had been a time not long ago that Irene had chased her around with a lamp, swearing she would smash it over her head; another time she was trying to whip her with an electrical cord Jeryline had accidentally severed while using the old Black & Decker ripsaw to cut replacement pieces for the motel’s outer siding.

Jeryline was convinced that Irene did not know there was a basement here. Despite her fire and brimstone she was basically a frightened old woman trying to make it in a hard and cruel world. To get down here you had to duck into the closet that had the preserves in it, feel around with your foot until a piece of the flooring gave way slightly, then bend and remove the trapdoor. The best part was that once you were on the makeshift ladder beneath it and had lowered the trapdoor back into place, no one could ever find you. At least not Irene, and who should know the place better than her?

Only Jeryline, who had combed every inch of this old structure, from the ridiculous old steeple overhead that had once housed a church bell and was now full of leaves and cobwebs and bird nests, to down here, where nobody ever came. It was much the same reason she had memorized the layout of the women’s prison; she had to keep one step ahead of her captors if the time ever came to escape.

There was another secret thing she did down here besides hide from Irene, actually. The crumbling walls were made of old, brittle bricks, and at a spot just to her right, at about shoulder level as she sat in the dirt, was a pack of cigarettes jammed inside a deep crack. In the work-release/probation program she was not allowed to use drugs or alcohol or tobacco, as if a puff of pot, or a can of beer, or a cigarette might send her on a wild killing frenzy. The wonder was that caffeine was not on the list she was supposed to abide by. So down here, smirking at her captors and their rules, she could break the law in peace.

The cigarette of choice tonight was a Chesterfield, which her secret supplier had bought the last time he went to the store in Avery. Her supplier was none other than Wally Enfield, whom she had befriended on her first day here. At first the boardinghouse (motel) rumors were that Wally was not operating on all eight cylinders, was addicted to both the post office job he loved, and addicted to his love for a certain unnamed person who happened to live here—gosh-golly-gee, who could that be? But by talking with him one evening, by gently acquiring a sense of who he was, Jeryline arrived at her own opinion of the man: none of his cylinders were firing at all.

Yes, he was crazy in love; Irene was crazy about her shoddy motel, Cordelia was crazy about men who made her feel young again, everybody who roomed here was crazy in one way or another. Maybe that’s why Brayker seemed to fall into place so well, she supposed; that was why, when the stuntmen in the designer wetsuits showed up, nobody keeled over dead on the spot. The Mission Inn was always open to such types: they merely had to sign the register and watch an evening of TV programs that had no sound, fall asleep to the rhythm of Cordelia’s squeaking bedsprings as she humped a customer, and arise to the clang of Jeryline’s serving spoon against the breakfast pot.

She leaned a bit and pulled the pack of cigarettes out from between the bricks. It was not so much an addiction with her, as she could take these or leave them. It was basically her style of getting away with something—
anything
—that Irene Galvin did not know about.

The candle made a handy lighter. She leaned back again and blew a leisurely cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, which was of course the floor for everyone above. Between the thick, dark beams that held everything up were cobwebs. Acres of cobwebs. What were they really? she wondered. Actual spiderwebs, or just strands of collected dust? There was no evidence of spiders down here: what the hell could they catch and eat, anyway? It was like the dark side of the moon, and it smelled like dirt and mold.

With a small shrug she pushed the pack of cigarettes back into the proper crack, and regarded the darkness outside her circle of light. Were there some secret things here that she had not yet found? The place was actually huge, though barely deep enough to stand in. The dirt floor was a convolution of lumps and valleys, the air was as dry as sandpaper despite the rain outside, the dark spoke of age and forgotten things, of the dead people who had dug this basement, the dead people who had laid these bricks.

Knock it off,
she warned herself. Once or twice she had gotten scared down here, but not by any ghosts that she knew of. Her candle had twice sputtered out on a sudden gust of breeze—but where could a breeze come from? She had heard, just as she was lighting a cigarette a few weeks ago, a long and unhappy moan drift out of the darkness. Rather than dash up from here and burst through the trapdoor in terror, she had made herself small and waited for it to go away. She had years ago learned a great lesson among the many lessons of her life, and it was this: do not fear the dead. It is the bastards who are still alive you have to worry about.

She went back to her cigarette again, trying not to think of anything but the local calender that was inching, day by day, toward the time of her freedom. What would she do on that blessed day? Fly to Paris. Fly to Rome. Bask in the luxury of a Mediterranean beach, sip wine with a count and countess.

She spit in the dirt between her knees. Chesterfields sucked and so did her dreams. She had grown up with a mother who was quick with a fist, and a father who did not exist. Paris attracted her because it was the only far-away place she had known of as a child, and seemed romantic, judging by the pictures. Well, here she was at the age of twenty, sitting in the dirt of an ancient basement, sneaking a smoke and waiting for her work-release time to be over so that she could leave. She had made no progress toward her goal, and the goal itself was mightily reduced: instead of aching to go to Paris, she was aching simply to get the hell out of New Mexico.

She brought the cigarette close to her face and blew across its orange tip, creating a shower of sparks that spiraled crazily into the darkness. Her life was like them, in a terrible way. She was wild and hot, as hot as sparks, but fate kept blowing more darkness her way, darkness that threatened to extinguish her. This deal with Brayker all of a sudden—who in the hell
was
he, anyway? He pops in from nowhere and all hell breaks loose—literally! Demons of various shapes and sizes crawl out of the night, the Sheriff gets killed by a guy who looks like Billy the Kid in designer jeans, Brayker uses drops of blood to seal up windows and doors, lines of fire burst alive when he does, and on, and on . . .

Sudden, sour-smelling air gusted across her. The candle flickered, then went out. Jeryline pressed her back against the wall, frozen in place with the cigarette halfway to her mouth, her eyes jerking open as wide as they could get. The smell of smoky wax drifted up from the dead candle, burning her eyes.

Something, off to the right. Some kind of presence, some kind of thing; she could feel it, feel that she was no longer alone.

Impossible, she told herself. This basement was dark and dry, and nothing, save a handful of starving spiders, could possibly be down here.

She heard something, something that rustled. An image popped into her mind: Brayker’s demons, having slaughtered everyone upstairs, were converging on her now. The gust of wind had been the foul breath of one of the things, all were down here encircling her in this utter blackness.

Her heart squeezed painfully inside her chest; her blood thumped hard in her veins. She had matches. She simply had to light one, look around, chide herself for being the fool, and light the candle again.

But she could not. Being killed by demons had to be a lousy way to die. Death by lighting a match, seeing them, and going insane with terminal fright, that would be worse.

She waited, breathless, her senses as keen as an antelope’s when it sniffs lion in the air. Sweat sprang alive on her forehead and began to trickle into her eyes. But still—