He was in the kitchen. He paused to tap his forehead with a finger and close his eyes. He had gotten no more than a few snatches of sleep in the last eight days and it was showing pretty badly now. He seemed to recall a time when the manufacturers of breakfast cereals put things like magic decoder rings or cryptic treasure maps inside the box of cereal. He had a memory of digging such things out for a little kid, a niece or nephew somewhere down his family tree, of trying to get the damned prize out without scattering cereal all over the table. But that would have been in the fourties, the fifties. His relatives were all much older now than he, and all contact with them had been lost. It was for the better.
Brayker took a moment to stop, yawn, and stretch. He had hidden from the Salesman in many towns, many houses, and knew the design structures fairly well. This building of Irene’s, this former church, was not laid on a concrete slab, which had been a popular architectural sleight-of-hand in the fifties, and it therefore had to have a crawlspace below the floor. Maybe barely deep enough to actually crawl through, maybe a basement so big it could house a ping-pong table and a set of bunk beds, a family room, a wet bar with beer on tap. Either way, it didn’t matter much to the stability of the building. What mattered was that the Salesman and his ceaselessly cavorting friends would find it, and use it, if it were there.
A few moments ago he had felt a distinct but soundless bump from below that had sent a small vibration through the floorboards. On the heels of that odd sensation came a very, very muffled scream or shout. Activity in the basement? Could be. But the demons did not have any vocal abilities beyond screeches and hisses, so the screamer, or shouter, had to be human. For a fact Brayker knew that Irene and Roach, Wally and Cordelia, and Uncle Willie, were here with him, in various findable locations. The only missing persons right now were Jeryline and deputy Martel, but Jeryline was a volatile firecracker of a woman and Martel was an overzealous clod. For all Brayker knew, Martel might be crawling around outside on his belly, hunting for the two pistols that had been left behind in all the confusion. It was, actually, a pretty good idea.
Brayker resumed his tour of the establishment, gnawing a fingernail as he walked. Every place that he had suspected, every possible point of entrance he had found, was sealed. The key was in its pouch, weighing heavily around his neck as usual, a crude and simple bit of metalwork hammered out of iron and silver, once dotted with jewels long since fallen off or stolen. The glass orb was nearly empty of its liquid, but he felt—hoped—that the time to refill it was coming fast.
He turned and stalked to Irene’s so-called entertainment center, full of impatience. The Salesman was not outside dozing the night away under a tree; he was searching for a way to get inside. And he had more talents than just making creepy creatures pop up out of the ground. His power of mind control was awesome, his ability to bend the will of even the most hardheaded man to his own ends was unmatched. If there was a crawlspace here, it would at the very least be ventilated, which meant an unsealed opening guarded at best by a louvre or screen wire.
Uncle Willie was sitting on one of the couches, ignoring the television, looking around with uneasy eyes, squirming a little. It came to Brayker that he had been awfully hard on the old geezer when he ran into him at that gas station tonight. “How might it be going?” he asked Willie.
Willie jerked. Through the hole in his beard that was his mouth a tongue poked out, and he licked his lips. “Mighty dry right now,” he said. “Do you suppose Irene keeps any liquor hereabouts? I used to come here many a time and do odd jobs, before she got ahold of Jeryline. But do you suppose? Maybe a bottle of genteel wine, even?”
Brayker smiled. “Tell you what, old Willie. I’ll go ask her right now. Pay her top dollar, too.”
Willie relaxed. “Thanks to you, sir. Bless you.”
Brayker turned, glad he had a way to ease the hard feelings the old dude might have harbored, and took a step with the mental pictures of Irene and a bottle fixed in his mind before fatigue could muddle his thoughts and cause him to forget.
Something, some wooden thing, bumped slightly to his left. He froze in place, cocking his head, straining to hear.
Thump . . . scratch-scratch . . .
He aimed himself toward it, suddenly as alert and wary as a cop at a shootout.
Scratch . . .
The sounds were drifting from inside the closet he’d just inspected. He reached into the pouch and clamped his hand around the key, and moved toward it.
Thump . . .
He stopped at the door, thinking about but immediately canceling the idea of pressing his ear to it. If a webbed fist shot through it the shards of wood would be pointy enough to kill him.
Scratch . . .
The knob was not much more than a little button. He tweezed it between two fingers and turned it, breathless and ready.
“Them’s just preserves in there,” Uncle Willie blared at the back of his neck. Brayker whirled, whipping the door open in the process, and jumped to the side while simultaneously jerking the key out, his teeth baring themselves for the coming fight.
Nothing happened. Gorged on adrenaline, his heart racing and his blood pounding sickly in his ears, he shifted his eyes to Willie. “Don’t,” he was able to say, but barely. “Don’t do that.”
Willie made faces indicating apology, shrugged, pretended there was a zipper installed between his lips, and zipped it.
Brayker gave his attention back to the closet. The preserves still sat as before, nothing was moving as before, there was no news to be found in there at all.
“I would swear,” Brayker muttered.
Thump.
He dropped to his haunches, straining to see in the dimness. A dark, almost invisible line on the floorboards was widening, shifting. When his eyes adjusted to the light, Brayker could see the impressions of fingers, even whole hands, in the dust.
He looked back at Willie. “Trapdoor. Knew it had to be here someplace.” He put the key away.
Scritch-scritch-scritch . . .
Willie groaned as he sank to his knees, which popped and crackled. “Oof. A man my age, I ought to know better. So Brayker, what’s making that racket down there?”
Brayker got his fingernails under the small lip that kept the trapdoor from falling inside, and lifted it up. Dry, sour air puffed up. He leaned to see and was face to face with Cleo the cat. She was perched on the topmost step of a crude ladder that led down into darkness. He reached for her but she jumped through the opening between his outstretched arms, bounded up into the closet, and scurried away. The trapdoor clattered back into place.
“Damn cat,” Uncle Willie muttered as he watched her vanish up the stairwell.
“We might be thanking that cat before the night’s over,” Brayker replied. “Willie, go ask Irene if she has a flashlight. If not, then some candles. If I’m thinking right, this might be the safest place to hole up.”
Willie stood again, tendons and bones cracking. “Oof. Gimme a minute. If she don’t have any of that stuff, I can make us some torches.”
Brayker nodded. “Whatever it takes.”
Deputy Bob Martel was outside, crawling around on his belly, a man-shaped loaf of mud. The rain, which had just about ended, had created less mud on Irene’s short stretch of lawn than he had hoped, so he had worked hard to get filthy from top to bottom like this. It happened to be that he had been to a movie or two in his life, among them Predator, the science-fiction job with Arnie Schwarzenegger. The alien hunting him could not see light; rather, it saw heat, and so Arnie coated himself with cold mud. Nifty, eh?
So, just to be on the safe side, Martel was now a living mud pie as he inched toward Sheriff Tupper’s police cruiser. The ruse, so far, had seemed to work; that or the Salesman and his employees had clocked out for the night. They were not to be seen, at least not on this side of the Mission Inn.
He had about six yards left to go. At first he had gone on a search for his pistol, which Wally had stolen and then l
ost in the heat of battle, the little shit, then remembered Roach losing the other one in about the same area near the front porch, but do you suppose he could find them? Risking his life for a set of police specials with a questionable number of bullets left in them? In the morning they would be lying in plain sight, no doubt, unless the Salesman had already picked them up.
But the battle was not yet lost. Sheriff Tupper carried a short-barreled riot gun in his car, a nice 12-gauge Remington pump-style that could blow the living shit out of anything, man or beast, Salesman or demon. It was not fair that everybody else was racking up the body count of the bad guys while Martel had yet to shoot anything; the old Remington would change the score soon.
Hopefully. But with the rain easing up, the clouds would probably be scattering soon, and oh-holy-night, if the moon came out and the demons used, after all, plain old light to see, Martel was a gone goose. Woe to the survivors here: without a lawman around they were doomed.
He paused. It suddenly struck him that once inside the car, he could radio Mavis up in Junction City, tell her to get every cop in the state to haul ass to Wormwood, where all hell had busted loose and a lone deputy was about to defend the Mission Inn to the last bullet.
Last bullet? Holy Hannah, did Tupper carry any spare shells for the shotgun? Did he even bother to keep it loaded, seeing as he had carried it for ten or more years and never once found the need to fire it? This whole shotgun thing might be shakier than Martel thought. It had to boil down to this: the gun was either unloaded with a box of shells in the glove compartment, or loaded with all the five rounds it would hold. One way or another, there were some shells in that car.
If the shotgun was even there, though.
He dropped his head down onto his fists. These mental gymnastics were wearying his brain. So far tonight he had seen a horrendous crash, seen a burning man walk away from it wearing a smoking jacket, had seen the same man in cowboy duds later, saw Sheriff Tupper get his face caved in, and saw a mysterious guy with a mysterious key. And the demons, don’t forget the demons. Could it get any more bizarre?
Yet once, and not too many hours ago, he had bemoaned the fact that Tupper got all the exciting cases. Well, scratch that. This case was too exciting. In fact, when he got done crawling to the car he might, he just might, start it up and drive home. This case was too complex, there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians, and besides, he hadn’t eaten for a long, long time.
The police cruiser was black and white. For a fraction of a moment the moon drilled its beams through the clouds hard enough to make the white parts glow in the dark. Martel mashed his face to the ground, forgetting that he had made it to the gravel section already, and nearly broke off a tooth.
“Mo-fo,” he muttered, spitting out pebbles. In the army they gave you combat pay in a war, ninety dollars a month extra, but not here. Here, he collected his annual $12,820 no matter if he slept in his car or gunned down bank robbers every Tuesday and Thursday. As a matter of fact, his shift of duty was supposed to end at eleven and it was much later than that. Perhaps, a newcomer to New Mexico might say, he would be paid some nice overtime bucks, so quit bitching. But no, such things did not happen in this fair state. This county, actually. Maybe the state cops got overtime, but not the Deputy Sheriff of Diamond County, no sir.
The moon went away and he resumed crawling, in a much nastier mood now, not wanting to read the obituaries in the morning paper and find out he was dead. This crawling over gravel was a noisy affair, much noisier than sliding across the wet grass, which of course had ruined his uniform, turned it green all over the front, while the mud had stained it brown all over the back. He could not see these special effects in the dark, but he knew with utter positivity that it was all true. So who would pay for a new uniform?
Don’t even ask.
He decided the crawling could go to hell, and worked his way to his feet. The car was three steps away. He strode to it with all the pride and anger his glands could produce. Wet rocks cascaded from his clothes. He jerked the door open and leaned inside.
It was still slightly warm from the day’s heat. The scent of dusty carpet was thin and lifeless in the air. The shotgun was under the front seat, and Martel tugged it out with a grin creasing the mud of his face. “Gotcha, bitch,” he whispered. He straightened, and pumped a round into the chamber.
Suddenly he whirled, his teeth bared in a huge, evil smile. “Be smokin yer asses,” he breathed. “Make my day, mo-fo. Make my fucking day.”
He turned, stifling a chuckle. Artillery shells could blow people’s asses off many miles away, but with the Remington here the killing was up close and personal. In his military training he had learned that the shotgun was banned as a weapon of war by the Geneva Convention, whatever the hell that was. It seemed that in World War I the American soldiers, the Doughboys, used shotguns to clean out trenches when they found any Germans still alive after an attack. It was so horrible, so they said, that this big convention on rules of war got together some place and decided the nicest way to kill people was probably the best way. No shotguns, no poison gas, cool stuff like that. People back then were so damned queasy.
But not Deputy Martel. He popped the glove box open and felt inside for shells. No such luck. He stuck his arm under the seat again and could dredge up only a flat, empty bottle of Fleischmann’s vodka. He wagged his head. My oh my. Tupper was a lush.
He tossed it on the floor, then scanned things one last time, trying to decide. Stay here? He pumped the shotgun about halfway and saw a fresh yellow shell waiting to slam into the chamber. The only way to check how many were inside was to pump them all out, which he did not want to do, not if some Creature from the Black Lagoon was waddling his way. He laid the gun across the seat, ready for it in an instant, frowning as thoughts bubbled and burst throughout his brain. Could he get out of this nightmare and wind up with some kind of heroism medal? That would add to his paycheck. Could he maybe capture one of these creatures, and be famous for that, as if he were a scientist of note? Or would he die here, along with everybody else?
He sat inside. The creatures were gone. The fun was over. He needed food and he needed sleep. Anyway, he had to go back to Junction City to report Tupper’s death, fill out reports on the crash on Highway 47, make a diagram of the disaster, maybe other stuff.
He drew his legs in and pulled the door shut. “Duty calls,” he said to himself, and reached for the key to get this baby fired up.
The windshield shattered with a terrific crunch! Pebbles of glass belched across his face and chest. He instinctively raised his arms to shield himself, his brain not yet able to process this new bit of data. A webbed claw the size of a catcher’s mitt smashed through the window to his left, deluging him with more glass. It pawed at him. He screamed and backpedaled across the seat, hammering the steering wheel and that claw with his feet, a mud-man jerking and shaking like a prisoner being fried in the electric chair.
The claw raked down the inner seam of his trousers, tearing it open to expose one hairy white leg that was remarkably skinny, considering the size of the rest of his body. He shrieked and bellowed, his eyes as big as jumbo marbles, his hair standing on end.
The demon worked its huge, misshapen head through the ruined window. Martel found new reasons to scream; the thing was plug-ugly, almost as plug-ugly as Betty Newton, the fattest, ugliest girl at Junction City High, whom he used to hound and embarrass in the hallways by making elephant noises or shouting ship ahoy! As Martel’s mind began now to sort out the seriousness of this invasion, he was for one brief moment grateful that it was a demon, and not Betty Newton clawing her way in, so fat and ugly was she.
Betty’s stunt double clapped both claws around Martel’s right leg and began to haul him out. As he fought to stay inside, Martel found himself being shaped and twisted into forms he had never imagined his body could form. He hooked his elbows firmly around the steering wheel and saw with surprise that it could be bent almost in half before th
e metal-reinforced plastic snapped. He tried hanging onto the rearview mirror, a seat-belt buckle, the gearshift, the brake, the seat, the door itself, but all for naught. His last handhold, the outside mirror, broke off and he thunked face down on the gravel, this time losing a front tooth in earnest.
“Yaaahhhhhh!” he tried screaming as he was dragged away. It came to him that he had not even tried to get the shotgun, though it had been poking him in the back the whole time.
“Yaaahhhhhh! Wahoooo! Pleeeeeeeeeease!”
None of this impressed the monster. Martel was dragged on his face across the lawn, his fingers combing furrows in the wet grass. Just before the dragging was over he felt a cold, hard thing bump from his crotch to his chin. He grabbed at it.
One of the pistols. One of the pistols!
The demon dropped him. Martel rolled over onto his back, the pistol hidden between his arm and ribcage, realizing that after all was said and done, the army had at least taught him how to aim a gun and pull the trigger.
Shapes moved out of the dark. Martel whipped his head from side to side.
More demons. Two more, then three. Then four. They formed a circle around him, hissing and drooling. Martel brought the pistol out and clutched it with both hands, aiming here, aiming there, his face drawn up in a snarl of fear and hate.
The one who reminded him so much of Betty Newton leaned down. It seemed to grin at him. Its jaw hinged open.
Martel fired. One eye became a puckered hole. The thing’s skull ruptured and began to leak black fluid in jagged lines, yet it had barely reacted.
Martel shot again. The demon jerked erect. Some crazy glow-in-the-dark liquid squirted out of both eyeholes. A line of it crossed Martel’s stomach, burning through his shirt, burning his skin like hot grease. The demon crumpled.
Another one bent for the kill. Martel fired, seeing a drift of hope in this situation. The shot missed everything but the sky. Cursing, he aimed again and pulled the trigger.
Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight Page 11
