The End - Visions of Apocalypse

PETE McLEAN The Last Hand

Peter McLean lives in Norwich, England, with his wife and their two Siamese cats. When he isn’t being an account manager at a global technology outsourcing firm, he is busy writing about magic, fantasy, and demons. He is currently courting agents for his urban dark fantasy series.

Occult hitman Don Drake gambles his way into the debt of the nastiest demon in London. He can’t drink his way out of this one, but maybe he can make a deal with something else to save his skin. Something much worse…

He saw my warpstone and raised me an angel’s skull, and there was no way I could cover that bet. I had a Knight-high flush and the Tower, a fair hand in Fates, but that warpstone was all I had left. My palms were itching. I looked down at my cards, and the face of the Knight of Cups looked back up at me. He looked drunk and happy in his painted tarot world, the lucky sod. I was only drunk.

Someone laughed, away on the other side of the smoky club. Glasses clinked. Across the table from me, Wormwood was starting to look impatient. He lit another cigarette off the butt of the last and poked it between his thin, grey lips before he mashed the old one out in the overflowing ashtray beside him. A strand of his long hair was stuck greasily to the three-day growth of stubble on his cheek.

He rested his free hand on top of the skull and stroked the pristine white bone with fingers that were nicotine-stained to the colour of dark mahogany.

“Well, Drake?” he asked. “I ain’t got all bleedin’ night.”

I cleared my throat, and the waitress wiggled up beside me and poured another generous slosh of whisky into my glass. Very old single malt whisky. I nodded a thanks at her. She was pretty, I thought. Nice tail. Another night I might have tried it on with her, but this was serious now and I needed to concentrate on the game. I knocked the whisky straight back and set the glass down on the table.

The Tower, again. This was the third hand tonight that I’d drawn it as my trump, and if that didn’t suck for an omen I didn’t know what did. I glanced at the two decks of cards on the table, the thick one for the suits and the slimmer deck of major arcana, the trumps in the game. I half wondered if Wormwood was cheating somehow, but that was a dangerous kind of thought to be having here. I reached up and loosened my tie a little, stretched out my aching neck. He was drumming his fingers on the skull now, and his ugly, horned minder was starting to give me that look that said I’d better not be taking the piss.

“Well now,” I said. “I’d be about ready to call you on that, but, ah…”

“But you’re skint,” Wormwood finished for me. “Ain’t you?”

He grinned. He had one of the most repulsive grins I’ve ever seen, and he stank. I could smell him from where I was sitting, with three feet of card table between us and enough cigarette smoke in the air to kill a beagle. It wasn’t that unwashed body stink like tramps got, it was worse than that. Wormwood smelled of rot, somehow, of disease and misery. And cheap cigarettes, I thought. Lots and lots of cheap cigarettes.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

His mean little eyes glittered as he looked at me.

“Now I might,” he went on, “be able to do something about that.”

I reached for my glass, and remembered it was empty. I glanced around the club instead, playing it cool. There were maybe twenty punters in tonight, a mixture of us and them. Mostly them. Wormwood’s club was private, obviously, not open to the general public. Hell, it wasn’t even visible to the general public. You’d walk straight past it if you didn’t know exactly where to stop in the alley, and precisely which bit of graffiti-covered brickwork was a glamour covering the front door.

“Oh?” I said. “How’s that then?”

“I might sub you,” he said. “Enough to finish this hand, anyway.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked him.

He shrugged.

“I know you’re good for it,” he said. “Anyway, I like you Drake.”

No you don’t, I thought. You don’t like anyone.

I had a Knight-high flush and the Tower, and I really, really wanted that skull. There was a lot I could do with an angel’s skull. I met his eyes, trying to feel him out. If I folded now I’d lost the warpstone anyway. If I went for it, if I won, I’d walk away with both and a good pile of cash besides.

What’ve you got, you little bastard? I wondered.

The waitress was filling my glass again. She really did have a cute little tail. I swallowed the drink and coughed, feeling the shot of ancient whisky burn its way down my throat and chase all its little friends into my guts. There were a fair few people watching us now, I noticed. Well, I say that, but people might be stretching it a bit. This was Wormwood’s club, after all.

“All right,” I said. “Sub me then, and I’ll call.”

I laid my hand out on the table. Wormwood took a long, careful look at my cards, and slowly shook his head. He turned his own hand over to show a full house and Judgment. Bastard.

“It ain’t your lucky night, Drake,” he said.

I shoved my chair back from the table and stumbled to my feet, feeling the hot rush of the whisky slam up and into my forebrain all at once. I wobbled on my heels, holding on to the edge of the table to keep myself upright.

“Steady,” said Wormwood’s minder.

I took a deep breath, my guts twisting into a sick knot as it sank in. I’d lost the hand, I’d lost my warpstone, and now I owed Wormwood big time.

“I’m all right,” I muttered. “Just need some air.”

“Right you are then,” said the minder, affably enough for a nine foot monster with horns.

“Go home, Drake,” Wormwood said as he lit yet another cigarette. “I’ll be in touch. Like I said, I know you’re good for it.”

I wasn’t good for it. Not by a long way. I was so not good for it, in fact, that I had to walk home from the club. It comes to something when you can’t even afford a pissing taxi.

South London is bloody awful at three in the morning when it’s cold and raining, but at least this part of town is so bad even the muggers don’t dare go out after midnight. I had the pavement to myself, and I weaved my way down it with my hands buried in my coat pockets, collar turned up and my hair stuck wetly to my forehead. The cold rain was starting to sober me up, and that was the last thing I wanted. At one point I felt something watching me from the darkness of an alley, but it kept to the deal and stayed out of my way.

I’d made my deal with the night creatures of this part of South London when I first came here, and the terms of that deal were pretty simple. So long as they didn’t bother me, I wouldn’t come and bother them. They were more than happy with that.

I made it home in the end. Home was my office, above a Chinese pawnbrokers. At least I had my own front door at street level, with my own sign on it and everything. The sign said “Don Drake, Hieromancer,” in nice big gold letters. Well it had done, anyway — some wag had spray-painted out the word “Hieromancer” and written “wanker” underneath it instead. I kept meaning to do something about that, and I kept not getting around to it.

I leaned my forehead against the door as I fumbled through my pockets for the key. It went in the lock at the third attempt, and I opened the door and stumbled up the bare wooden stairs to my office. I had a couple of rooms out the back where I actually lived, and another where I worked, but I kept the booze in the office. I sank down into my chair and opened the bottom draw of my desk.

There was a half-empty bottle of whisky there, much cheaper stuff than Wormwood served, and a couple of relatively clean glasses. I ignored the glasses and drank it straight out of the bottle, which, when you thought about it, was glass anyway so what the hell difference did it make? It’s not like I had anyone to share it with.

I swallowed and let my eyes close. Damn it!

The phone woke me up. I was slumped over my desk, my fingers still curled around the empty bottle. I fumbled out with my right hand, realised that was the one holding the bottle, and winced as it rolled off the edge of the desk and shattered on the hard wooden floor. I groaned and let the machine pick up.

“Good morning, Mr. Drake,” said a woman’s voice. “This is Selina from Mr. Wormwood’s office. Mr. Wormwood would be pleased if you could telephone him this morning to discuss your repayment terms. Good day.”

I frowned. Wormwood? What the hell did he want… Oh no… My sodden memory turned over in the throbbing mess of my head, and I suddenly felt like crying. My warpstone. I had gambled away my warpstone, I remembered now, and I owed Wormwood the equivalent value of an angel’s skull to boot. The warpstone had been the last artefact of power I had left. The rest… well, I’ve always been better at drinking than I have at playing Fates, if I’m honest about it.

I slowly hauled myself up into a sitting position, and had to clutch a hand to my stomach as an acid rush of half-digested whisky burned its way up my throat and into the back of my mouth. I gave serious consideration to throwing up before I winced and swallowed it back down again. Maybe I’ve never been that good at drinking either.

Of course the warpstone wasn’t exactly the last artefact I had left, but if I ever consider gambling away the other you have my permission to shoot me though the head on the spot. I dragged myself to my feet and shuffled through to my work room to look at it.

My sign downstairs wasn’t entirely truthful, of course. Well, the wanker part might be I suppose, but not the Hieromancer. Hieromancy is divination through reading the entrails of a sacrifice, in case you didn’t know, and while I could do that it wasn’t exactly my main line of work. A man would struggle to earn a living looking at the insides of a pigeon, after all. The real money was in Sendings.

Summoning and Sending is one of the oldest, most dangerous and most taboo disciplines of magic. It’s also, it ought to go without saying, the most lucrative. That was what really paid the rent and bought the booze. I pushed open the door to my workroom and looked at the Burned Man.

“Morning,” I said.

“Now what?” it muttered.

The Burned Man was a nine inch tall fetish who stood on the altar at the far side of my work room. Tiny iron chains bound it by the wrists and ankles, and were bolted firmly into the solid oak top of the ancient, sanctified altar. It was the most powerful thing I’ve ever owned, or even seen. The floor of my workroom was carefully inscribed with a grand summoning circle from the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, the Lesser Key of Solomon, one of the great classical grimoires. Through the Burned Man, I could use that circle to summon demons and send them to do my bidding. Certain people, not the sort of people you’d have round for tea exactly, would pay a hell of a lot of money to get you to set a demon on someone.

“I’m in the shit,” I admitted.

The Burned Man snorted with laughter.

“No change there then,” it said.

I pushed my hands back through my hair and sighed. The only trouble with the whole set-up was that the Burned Man wasn’t quite as bound as it was supposed to be. Oh sure, it did what I told it to, it had to, but it had a bitch of an attitude problem. That, and it always wanted its cut.

I shrugged out of the crumpled suit jacket I had fallen asleep in and chucked it in a corner, well outside the circle. I noticed there were dried sweat stains on my white business shirt. Oh well. I pulled my tie off, too, wrinkled as an old typewriter ribbon after my night face-down on the desk, and dropped it on the floor. My hands fumbled with the buttons of my shirt.

“What’s up?” the Burned Man asked.

I looked at it as I took my shirt off. It was little, as I said, but it was horribly lifelike. Every millimetre of its tiny naked body was blackened and blistered, its skin cracked open in places to show the livid, weeping red burns beneath. It was thoroughly revolting, and the bloody thing was always hungry.

“Wormwood,” I said. “I owe him, and I can’t pay.”

I approached the altar and crouched down, offering my scarred chest to the Burned Man.

“You’ve been playing Fates again haven’t you, you pillock,” it said. “Were you drinking too, by any chance?”

I grunted as it lunged forward and sank its tiny, needle-like teeth into the flesh beneath my left nipple. It started to suckle, blood running down its chin from the fresh wound.

“Is a bear catholic?” I muttered, wincing against the pain. “I need you to get rid of him for me.”

The Burned Man snapped its head back and stared up at me.

“Wormwood?” it repeated. “The Wormwood? Are you mental?”

“How many Wormwoods do you know, exactly,” I snapped. “Yes, that one.”

“I can’t do that,” it said. “No can do. Nein. Nyet. Not gonna happen. End of. No.”

It leaned its head forward and bit into my chest again, a little harder than it really needed to. Horrible thing.

“You have to,” I reminded it. “I own you, Burned Man. I command it.”

It whipped its head back again without opening its mouth first, spitefully taking a chunk of bloody meat out of my chest. I yelled in pain, hand raised to swat it. That, of course, would have been ten kinds of a stupid thing to do. I let my hand fall and glared at it instead.

“I command it,” I said again. “Send something. Summon and Send… I don’t know, Astaroth if you have to for pity’s sake, I don’t care. Just get rid of Wormwood for me.”

“Listen to me for a minute, you dog-sucking little puke,” the Burned Man spat, “or I’m really going to have to hurt you.”

I stared at it, and had to remind myself that this was just the fetish of the demon it represented and not the real thing. The real thing itself, bound somewhere in the Oblivion Marches by a magic far older than London itself, didn’t even bear thinking about.

“I’m listening,” I said, but I moved back out of reach.

“It. Can’t. Be. Done.” the Burned Man spelled out, slowly and carefully like it was talking to a simpleton, or perhaps to a very scared, very hungover magician who was in a very long way over his head. “Wormwood would have Astaroth for breakfast.”

I blinked. “Astaroth is a Crowned Prince of Hell,” I said.

“Astaroth lives in Hell,” the Burned Man said. “Wormwood lives in Mayfair. Who do you think has the most pull, exactly?”

When you put it like that…

“Bugger,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it that way.”

“You ought to pay better attention to who you’re playing cards with in future,” it said.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets and groaned. I could feel warm blood trickling down my chest from where the Burned Man had bitten me. My head was pounding, and I was seriously starting to reconsider the whole throwing up thing.

“What can I do, then?” I demanded. “I can’t pay him, unless you can summon me up an angel’s skull, or something worth the same amount.”

The Burned Man sniggered. “If I could summon up things you wouldn’t be broke, would you?” it sneered. “There’s a limit to what I can do, bound and chained to your sodding altar.”

I gave it a sharp look. The Burned Man never said anything it didn’t mean, and it never said anything useful at all unless you asked it a direct question.

“What?” I said. “That sounded like a hint.”

“There was a settlement on the Thames, where London stands now, long before the Romans came,” the Burned Man said. “I was bound before even then, bound by a magic you can’t even begin to imagine, you little puke. So if there are things I can’t say, it’s not because you’re clever, you understand me?”

I nodded slowly. “You can’t say,” I said. “I have to guess?”

The Burned Man shrugged, and rattled its iron chains.

“So,” I began, pausing to wipe the oozing blood off my chest with the back of my hand, “if there’s a limit to what you can do while you’re bound, there might be less of a limit if you weren’t bound, is that what you’re getting at?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment on idle speculation,” the Burned Man said. “I could tell you a little story, I suppose, if you’re bored. Just to pass the time, you understand.”

I shrugged. This was getting obtuse, even for the Burned Man, but like I say it never said anything without a reason.

“Go on then,” I said. “Story time.”

“Back then,” it said, “in Tir Na Nog, before the waters made this land an island, there was an antler druid called Oisin who had the gift of Summoning. Oisin had the words of binding, and the gift of iron, and the power to take his pick of all the demons of Hell to enslave to do his bidding. Oisin chose me, as the most powerful, and bound me into this fetish to serve him. Do you see?”

I frowned at it. “You’re saying he chose you over Astaroth, is that it?” I said.

The Burned Man shrugged. “Is it?” it asked. “Why would that be, I wonder? If a man asked a direct cocking question maybe I could answer it.”

“Are you more powerful than Astaroth?” I asked it.

It laughed. “Is a bear catholic?” it said.

“Ah,” I said. “Well fuck me sideways.”

“Of course,” the Burned Man went on, “not while I’m bound into this hideous little thing and chained to your puking table I’m not.”

“So,” I said, thinking out loud, “if I unbound you, could you get rid of Wormwood for me?”

The Burned Man nodded. “I could,” it said.

“Forever?” I asked. “I don’t mean send him to Spain for a week’s bloody holiday, I mean smash him into atoms so he’ll never bother me again, yeah? And get my warpstone back. And fuck it, I wouldn’t mind his money, and his club, and his minions and his house in Mayfair while you’re about it, yeah?

The Burned Man laughed. “You drive a hard bargain,” it said, “but yeah, why not? I could do that for you. If you let me free.”

“Then I reckon I could let you free,” I said. “If I had that lot I wouldn’t need to work any more, so I wouldn’t need you anyway. It’s a deal.”

“Deal,” the Burned Man hissed. “Do it. Now.”

“Now hang on,” I said, “we need to plan this out. We need to get near him, don’t we? That club’s like a fortress, but he’s always suspected I’ve been sitting on something special, something that gives me my edge. How about I offer him a rematch, double or quits? If I bet you, he’ll be more than happy to go for it. Once we set up the meet, I’ll turn you loose in his club, how’s that?”

The Burned Man didn’t have a lot of choice, of course. I wasn’t stupid — I’d get Wormwood to put his club, his business and everything he owned up, as his stake. If I won the rematch I could keep the Burned Man and the club and everything else, and be happily rich. If not, well, turning the Burned Man loose to get it for me anyway could always be plan B.

I phoned Selina back in the early afternoon, and by nine that evening I was leaving the office with a big black holdall in my hand. I had used a circular saw to chop the middle out of the altar, with the burned man still chained to the ancient consecrated wood. It was in the bottom of the holdall now, grumbling and cursing to itself as I carried it down the stairs. I stopped to lock the door behind me, and noticed somebody had scratched “drunken” in front of the “wanker” underneath my sign. Someone had seen me come home last night then. Sod them, whichever way the game went tonight I wouldn’t be living in this shithole much longer.

I lugged the holdall the three miles to Wormwood’s club. I turned into the alley, and stopped in the right place. I moved my hand over the exact piece of graffiti-covered brickwork, and muttered the words of entry under my breath before I walked into it. The wall felt cold and sticky as I walked through it, like a huge spiders web, but it offered no real resistance. There was a dimly lit, grubby bar on the other side, and there were people in the bar. Sort of people, anyway. I recognised Wormwood’s huge, hulking minder, and nodded at him.

“Evening,” I said. “I’m meeting your boss for a hand of cards.”

“You’re Drake, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Selina said you was coming. Come on up.”

He led me through the crowd of colourful characters in the shabby downstairs bar and up the staircase with its thick red carpet, into the upstairs club. It was smoky up there already, and busier than it ought to be this early in the evening. It seemed like our rematch might have drawn a bit of a crowd.

Wormwood was sitting at his usual table, with the two decks of cards neatly positioned on the green cloth in front of him and an already full ashtray at his elbow. The waitress with the cute tail was nowhere to be seen, but there was a glass and an open bottle waiting for me by the empty chair.

“This had better be good, Drake,” Wormwood said, but his eyes glittered with avarice. He knew it would be.

“Oh yes,” I said. “It is.”

I opened the bag and lifted out the Burned Man, still chained to the sawn-out piece of ancient oak. Wormwood gaped. The cigarette fell out of his mouth and landed in his lap, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“You’re shitting me,” he said.

I shook my head. “The Burned Man,” I said. “That’s my bet.”

“What’s mine?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Against this? My debt, and pretty much everything else you have. Your money, your house, your club and the rest of your business interests. And I’m still undervaluing this, and you know it.”

“Yeah, well, you ain’t got a lot of choice, have you,” he said, and noisily sucked his greyish teeth for a moment while he made up his mind. “Deal.”

Normal blokes would have shaken hands at that point, but neither of us were exactly normal and neither of us much wanted to touch the other one. We nodded at each other instead, and the croupier cut the two decks and began to deal the minor arcana from the thicker deck.

I poured myself a drink. If I’m honest, I’d had a couple already, well a few actually, just to steady my nerves, but now I really felt the need. I tipped the first shot straight down my neck and was refilling the glass before I’d even finished swallowing. This was big. This was really, really big. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the club staring at the Burned Man in something between awe and horror. It was about then that I realised I was the only human in the club tonight. There were none of us today, it was all them. Shit.

I picked up my cards and fanned them, looking at a pair of sixes and a mixture of random junk. I kept my face smooth. Except for the uncontrollable tick that was beating under my left eye, anyway. Wormwood looked down at his own cards, his horrible face expressionless. The way the game is played, you have to decide on your minor arcana, your suits, before you draw your trump.

Wormwood plucked a card out of his fan and discarded it on the table, face down.

“Card,” he said.

I did the same. The dealer dished us each out another minor card, and I had to fight to keep my face still. Six of pentacles — this was more like it.

Wormwood said nothing, nodded. He looked at me. “I’m good,” he said. “Stand.”

I swallowed another shot of whisky and poured again. My palms were itching so bad I wanted to scrape them on the side of the table until they were raw. Three of a kind was good, but this was Wormwood I was playing and tonight I was playing for everything I had.

“Card,” I said, dropping a useless three of swords face down onto the table.

The dealer pushed a new card to me across the table, and I gently eased it up and into my fan. Six of cups! That gave me four of a kind. I nodded, trying and failing to keep my left eye still.

“Stand,” I said.

“Trumps then,” said Wormwood.

The dealer slipped us each a card from the slim deck of major arcana. You can’t change your trump card, once it’s been dealt. That’s the “fate” part of Fates. I gently eased mine up and peered at the corner of the card. It was the motherloving Tower again. I cleared my throat.

“We agreed no raising,” I reminded him. “This is it, Wormwood. What’ve you got?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Challengers first,” he said.

I shrugged and laid my cards out. Four sixes and the Tower was a blinding hand, and I knew it. A smug smile was starting to creep across my lips even before I saw the wide-eyed expression on Wormwood’s face.

“Four sixes?” he whispered. “”You’ve got four sixes, you wanker?”

I nodded. “Looks that way,” I said, unable to resist twisting the knife. “It ain’t your lucky night, Wormwood.”

The look of surprise vanished from his face like someone had thrown a switch.

“Yeah it is,” he said.

He turned his cards over, one by one. The little arsehole had a royal flush and the Devil, the top hand in the game. The unbeatable hand. He looked up, and he met my eyes.

“Gimme,” he said.

I lifted the Burned Man up onto the middle of the card table. My hands were trembling, and for once not with drink.

“You want this, Wormwood?” I asked him. “Have it then!”

I spoke the deep, guttural, pre-Roman druidic words the Burned Man had taught me and snapped the tiny iron chains between my fingers. The fetish on the piece of sacred altar wood crumbled into ashes and collapsed onto the discarded playing cards as though it had never been there.

Wormwood stared at me. “You didn’t,” he whispered. “Tell me you didn’t!”

There was an overpowering stench of sulphur from the piece of ancient oak where the Burned Man had been chained. For a moment, nothing happened. Then Wormwood screamed.

He reared up to his feet, throwing the card table over on its side and scattering the cards and my drink and a confetti of cigarette butts across the floor. Wormwood shrieked. He burst into flames a second later, his filthy hair burning like a torch. He lunged at me, mad hatred flaring in his eyes even as they liquefied and ran down his stubbled cheeks. I stumbled backwards out of the way and he crashed face-down onto the floor, burning and screaming. His minder took a step back, gave me a wary look, and exploded.

I gagged as ragged chunks of meat splattered against me. The ceiling of the club caught fire, and fell in. Everyone was screaming now, running for the stairs in a mad panic. I stood amongst the burning devastation, and slowly shook my head.

“You’ve had me, haven’t you?” I said, but there was no reply. “You little bastard, you’ve had me good and proper.”

I crossed the room, dodging burning rafters as they fell from what was left of the roof, and pulled back the heavy, smouldering velvet curtains that covered one of the windows. I looked out at London, and shuddered. Whole city blocks were burning already, huge flares roaring up into the cloudy sky. I could just make out the gigantic, shadowy figure of the Burned Man, standing as tall as the sky. It strode through the hellish waste, setting fires wherever it passed.

“Burn!” it roared, throwing its mighty arms wide.

The night sky flared crimson, the flames racing towards the horizon in an ever expanding circle of blazing fury.

I could only stare, wide eyed with horror, as I watched the world begin to burn.