Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (21 page)

“Come on, Jerry!” Martel cheered. “Come on through!”

She dropped to her haunches and wriggled backward through the hole, where the wind of a hundred wings blew a furious gale of dust, still chopping at the demons. Martel reached out, took hold of her rearmost belt loop, and jerked her through. She tumbled onto the cement floor, then rocked to her feet. “Do it,” she said, extending the key to Brayker.

He snatched it from her hand. “Give me light,” he grunted at Martel, and jerked the flashlight from his hand. “Now get back.”

Martel pulled away. Roach crowded forward, pushing the stench of his armpits into Brayker’s nose. “Gimme a shot,” he shouted over the noise. “Brayker, move your ass and gimme a shot!”

Brayker shook his head. He trained the flashlight on the key, ready to thumb the orb open, but let out an involuntary gasp instead. The key was slick with blood. He swiveled the light onto Jeryline’s hands.

Shiny with blood. She looked at them, her eyes widening. “I didn’t know it was open,” she cried. “Brayker, I didn’t know!”

He looked at the key again. The small hole was partially open. The last of Harrison’s blood-mix could create maybe one small drop, but no more. “Wipe your hands on the edge of the hole someplace,” he said, but his voice was devoid of hope. It took a decent size drop to seal even a small window. If the drop was disturbed or just plain wasn’t enough as it dried, the seal would vanish. It had happened before.

She scrubbed both hands on the jagged, dirty rim of the hole. A fantastically ugly demon shoved its head through just then. Jeryline squealed, falling back, then lunged forward again and slapped it neatly across the face. Her handprint remained, beginning to sizzle. The demon performed a hasty retreat, hissing, all three of the yellow eyes on its jaw, nose, and forehead blazing with anger.

“Has to be done,” Brayker groaned, leaned forward, and shook the last drop out.

Twin lines of sparkling red fire traced the crumbly insides of the hole, and met at the top. A two-fingered claw was jabbed through enroute to Brayker’s hair, and instantly turned to ash and smoke.

Brayker stood. Sweat sparkled on his face. “That ought to hold,” he panted. “So much for the mines.”

Roach dropped to a crouch suddenly. “Hey!” he shouted through the hole. “What are you gonna do now, you ugly fuckers?” He jabbed the shotgun at them.

“Don’t shoot,” Brayker warned him.

“Just look at these pinheads,” Roach howled, laughing. “Who’s scared of them, anyway? Not me!”

“We need to look for other openings down here,” Brayker said above the noise of Roach’s glee. “We can’t seal it, but we can sure as hell guard it.”

Roach’s tone suddenly changed. “You!” he shouted. “Here’s for four years of minimum wage at your stinking cafe!”

Brayker straighted in sudden alarm. He dropped to look through the hole.

The guy, that kid Danny’s father, had pushed through the demons somehow and was glaring in, the exposed half of his brain shining and bloody, his face dripping. Brayker swung out to knock the shotgun aside, but too late.

“Eat this!” Roach had bellowed, and now he fired.

The cafe owner’s entire head blew apart. Thin white liquid simultaneously jetted out of his shattered eyes. It splashed against the perimeter of the hole. The blood seal evaporated into a wisp of grey smoke.

Brayker tossed the flashlight aside and took two handfuls of Roach’s greasy T-shirt. He hauled him upright. “You dumb little bastard,” he snarled in his face. “You just killed us all.”

He jerked the shotgun out of Roach’s hands and shoved him away. Roach crashed down on his elbows as the first demon hand shoved through the hole unharmed. “I didn’t know!” he squealed. “Don’t be blaming me!”

Brayker looked at the others. “Back upstairs,” he said hollowly. “Be quick or be dead.”

No one offered an argument. Not even Roach. They all turned and ran as the demon horde clawed through.

For Brayker and Jeryline and Roach, for Martel and Willie and Irene, and for little Danny, the only survivors in a town of the dead, the long struggle was just about over.

But not the long night.

15

D
anny was an extremely heavy kid, Jeryline Noticed as she climbed the ladder, which had mysteriously lost its bottom two rungs and required extra effort. With a groan of effort, she hoisted him overhead into Uncle Willie’s waiting hands. For a drunk, Jeryline decided, the man sure could move when the heat was on.

She squirmed up through the small rectangle after Danny had been pulled out of sight, the opening to the cellar that had, until tonight, been her secret. On her knees she waddled into the warm familiarity of the Mission Inn’s homey smell, got to her feet, and still managed to crack the back of her neck on the shelves loaded with preserves. The day would come, she hoped, that she would see this place burn to the ground. She still had a few matches; would anyone suspect arson on such a crazy night? She thought not.

Brayker came up next, his face heavy with concern, an observation which did Jeryline’s mood no good at all. She took Danny’s hand and stood away, waiting for orders, aware of the burden of fear in the faces of Irene and Martel and even Uncle Willie. The Mission Inn was under siege, and no one here had the remotest training in such military tactics, except Roach, who was some kind of ditchdigger in the National Guard. Deputy Martel had been in the army, or so he had said, but Jeryline doubted that even General Patton could organize his troops against this onslaught.

Brayker crawled out of the closet and rose tiredly up, his face perhaps the most negative of the whole bunch. He had seen these things before, it was obvious, and as the commander of this doomed troop he looked about ready to hang out the white flag. Did demons take prisoners? She tossed the errant thought away and concentrated on Brayker. He had brought all of this shit here. He was the professional.

“Up the stairway,” he said, pointing. “The rooms are still sealed.”

Roach burst up through the trapdoor with his hair frazzled and his T-shirt torn almost to tatters. “Pull me up!” he shrieked, jerking and squirming. “The bastards are tearing up my legs!”

Everyone, in perfect synch, looked at each other. Unspoken questions passed from eye to eye. Gazes became downcast. The group gave a communal shrug.

“It ain’t funny!”
Roach roared, clawing at the floor. He was jerked down a bit, howled out a string of curses, and kicked his way back up. His eyes locked with Jeryline’s and for a tiny slip of time she could see the frightened boy in him, the scaredy-cat bully.

“Hell, Deputy,” she said, since Martel was closest. “Save his worthless ass.”

Martel dragged him out, swiftly got hold of the trapdoor, and jammed it in place after using it as a club to smash a groping pair of claws. “Head on upstairs,” he grunted as he turned on his knees. He sat on the trapdoor. It thumped and hammered. Martel raised his hands, grabbed hold of the lowest shelf as a brace of sorts, and pushed up to make himself heavier. The board popped up from its moorings and a host of Mason jars became momentarily airborne. Everyone jumped back. Jars arced down and exploded on the floor. The aroma of peaches and blackberry jam jumped into the air.

Brayker laughed. Jeryline looked at him, her face a blank slate. He laughed some more. He put a hand over his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut, helpless with growing hilarity. His knees looked as if they might unhinge and dump him on the floor. Jeryline smiled a little, utterly confused, and looked apprehensively at the others, but no one else was laughing at all.

“Up the stairway,” she told them. “Irene, take Danny.”

Irene took a step and snatched him up. “Come on, big boy,” she crooned in his ear. “Let’s go play us a game or two.”

She cast Jeryline a worried glance. Brayker had sunk to his knees, wrenched into spasms by the force of his unexpected hilarity, the shotgun trailing out of his hand onto the floor, barely held by his trigger finger. The tattoo on his open hand looked dull now, the clumsy work of an amateur.

“Shit, I’ll take it,” Roach said, and bent over.

Jeryline kicked him in the face. It was a surprise blow to both him and her, one that knocked him completely backward. He slid a foot or two across the wooden floor, went up on his elbows, and frowned up at Jeryline. “That’s gonna cost you, bitch,” he said in a strange, drowsy monotone. A bright line of blood slipped from his left nostril to his lip; his tongue popped up and he sucked the blood into his mouth, his eyes narrow and cunning.

Now Martel seemed to find himself being jostled more than his taste would allow. “I’m not sitting here all night!” he shouted. “Get upstairs!”

Roach got languidly to his feet. He swiped an arm under his nose. “Gonna cost you
bad,”
he growled, plodding away.
“All
of you.”

Brayker began reassembling himself. The bags under his eyes were wet with tears of whatever mad joy he had endured. He used the shotgun as a crutch to push himself upright, chuckling at times as his bizarre merriment pricked him. Finally he stood with his jaw hanging open, staring at nothing, swaying on his feet, a man so sodden with fatigue that his entire body seemed to sag.

Jeryline went to him and offered her arm. He shifted his eyes. “Thank you, madam,” he said. “Chivalry is not dead.”

“Maybe not,” Jeryline said. “But you just about are. When’s the last time you slept?”

He made a noise. “Not since the war.”

She urged him to move toward the stairwell. “Vietnam screwed up a lot of guys,” she said. “You’re not alone in this.”

He jerked suddenly away. “My war saw seven million men die, Jerry. And it was only the first one. The second one was even more fun.”

Martel let out a whoop behind them. “Frigging
run!”
he shouted, and shot off the trapdoor like a rat under sudden light, aiming for the stairs. The trapdoor jumped out of its rectangle and skittered across the floor. Twisted arms and strange heads popped up.

Brayker blinked his tired, unhappy eyes. “I guess this war’s not over yet,” he said. His shoulders became firm and his chin tilted up a notch. He unhooked himself from Jeryline’s supporting arm and took her by the hand instead. “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” he said, and winked at her. “You suppose we could get Irene to sing for us?”

Now, finally, wonderfully, she laughed. It was crazy, it was inappropriate, but it was genuine.

They ran off while the demons scrabbled and clawed at the floor, each one mindlessly fighting to be the first one out.

“It started before the beginning of time,” Brayker said. “But time had no beginning, and can have no end. The keys, in various forms, were always there.”

They were huddled together in Room Five, the room Irene had assigned to Brayker earlier this evening when the world was a sane and normal place, when devils and demons were the stuff of fairy tales and religious hokum. Now the survivors sat tensely on the bed or stood on the floor to listen, at last, to the real story behind the Salesman, Brayker, and the key.

As he and Jeryline had hurried up the stairs together they had found the others waiting at the top landing: a nervous crowd, to say the least. In that instant the weather outside decided to return to the previous mode, dumping a barrage of noisy rain at the roof, jabbing the windows with stark white light, filling the night with thunder. They were tired, Brayker could see, yet worse than that, as it became obvious that the battle was going badly, they were fed up with fighting for a cause that was, except for the need for simple survival, a complete mystery. In the first gigantic war so long ago the world had sent millions of men to fight and die without explanation, other than that their nations demanded it of them. That had been Brayker’s war. But now, at the end of a century that had seen war follow upon senseless war, people at last refused to fight unless they knew why.

Knowing that, sensing that same thing among these unlikely soldiers of Wormwood, Brayker realized at last that he would have to tell them the whole story. It was not really much of a secret, but two hours ago they would not have believed it. Now they would. Gathered together in that room, with Irene and Danny and Jeryline sitting on the bed, Deputy Martel and Uncle Willie and Roach standing in various spots around it, they listened quietly to things not many humans had ever been privileged to hear.

“You all know the first book of the Bible,” Brayker said. He was standing at the window, leaning stiffly against the wall beside it, uncomfortable as always when speaking in front of people who had many good reasons to be hostile. “In the beginning, the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep.”

“The book of Genesis,” Irene said. “The forming of the earth.”

Uncle Willie was recovering marvelously, or so it looked. “Let there be light,” he said wonderingly. “And there was light.”

“Back up one step,” Brayker said. “Before the light. Before it there was darkness, but it wasn’t empty. It was filled with all kinds of creatures.”

Jeryline sat up straighter. “Creatures like them? The ones out there?”

Brayker frowned, hedged a bit, then nodded. He could hear that demons were tromping up the stairs, troops on the march. “Worse than them, because they were smarter,” he said to Jeryline. “They had seven keys, formed into a circle that focussed the power of the cosmos into their hands, until God stepped from the darkness and created the universe. He scattered the demons and the keys.”

Past the door, the Salesman’s troops hissed and slobbered, scraping and punching at the walls of the hallway, grunting loudly when shocked backwards by the threat of a seal. Danny Long moaned and squirmed in Irene’s arms, looked over to Jeryline, to Brayker. “We have to get my mom and dad,” he said. “When are we going to save my mom and dad?”

Brayker caught Jeryline’s gaze. What could be said? That his dad was dead? That his mom was
worse
than dead? He was no good at handing out bad news; Jeryline seemed like the one best equipped to deal with Danny.

“These things happened uncountable years ago,” he hurried on. “As the millennia passed, the Salesman consolidated his power. You all might have noticed how down-home dumb the demons are, like the ones outside this room right now.”