by Peter McLean
“Oh shut up,” I snapped at it. “I was hurt and scared, OK? You can’t expect me to remember my Greek myths when I’m being bullwhipped, for pity’s sake.”
“I expect a fucking lot more than I’m getting at the moment, I know that much,” the Burned Man grumbled. “Come here and feed me if nothing else, you useless cunt.”
I sighed and knelt in front of it, opening my dressing gown to bare my chest. It sank its teeth savagely into the meat beside my left nipple and started to suckle. I winced. I ought to be used to it by now, I knew I should, but it still hurt like hell.
“You know your problem, Drake?” it asked me when it had drunk its fill.
“No, but I dare say you’re going to tell me,” I said.
“You’ve got no ambition, you know that? No vision.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. For fuck’s sake, I put the power of Hell at your fingertips and what do you do with it? You rent it out to cheap scum like Gold Steevie.”
“He pays well,” I said.
He paid well, anyway. I didn’t do that anymore, whatever the Burned Man might think. I was ready to do it for Wormwood though, a little voice said in the back of my head. What’s the real difference at the end of the day?
“He’s pathetic,” the Burned Man snapped. “A nasty, cheap little local gangster is all he is. You could own him, Drake, if you put your mind to it. Him and all his ridiculous little friends and enemies.”
“Jesus, are you mental?” I said. “They’ve got guns. Not to mention blowtorches and bolt cutters and who-the-fuck-knows-what-else that they like to use on people. I’m not getting on the wrong side of them.”
“Pitiful,” it said. “You’re just pitiful, you really are. Guns? You’ve got demons! Queer Steevie, that other twat – the Russian one – that greasy Albanian cunt, fuck the lot of them. If you only put your mind to it you could own London, don’t you realize that?”
“I’m not a gangster,” I said. “I don’t want that.”
No, I’m not a gangster, I thought. I’m a hired killer, because that’s such a whole lot better. What’s the bloody difference?
I knew I was right though, I didn’t want that. I hated Steevie and the Russian and all of them, but I worked for them just the same. Sure there were the other gents too, the ones I’d always suspected were something to do with the government, but they didn’t come around that often. Anyway, I was hardly likely to get one of them to admit who they were, or to land myself a regular job with GCHQ or MI6 whoever the hell they were. So what did I want? Me and Debbie all cosy in a little cottage in the country somewhere with roses around the door? It was a bit late for that, if so.
The Burned Man looked at me like I was something it had just stepped in.
“The time’s coming, Drake, when I’m going to lose patience with you,” it said.
I met its stare, but inside I started to feel cold. As I think I said, on my own I’m really not that great at magic. The Burned Man was pretty much all I had.
“Don’t be like that,” I said. “We’ll sort it out, we always do.”
“Mmmm,” it said. “Don’t we, though. We sort it out one minor emergency to another, but nothing ever moves forward with you, does it? We’re still here in this shitty little flat in shitty South London, working for the sort of arsewipes who ought to be kissing your handmade shoes in Monte Carlo by now. You are, on balance, probably the shittiest waste of space I’ve ever belonged to.”
“Oh do fucking tell,” I shouted at it. “I suppose you ruled the world in 9,000 BC or something, so high and mighty you got yourself chained to a fucking piece of wood!”
It growled at me.
It growled, and the sound filled the room like there was a whole herd of rabid grizzly bears in there with me. It had never done that before. Now I’m sorry, I know it’s only nine inches tall and chained up as well, but that growl frightened the fucking life out of me. It was the fastest way to remind me that the Burned Man was only the fetish of the demon it represented. Right then I could feel the full malice of the real thing blazing behind its tiny eyes, and honest to God I almost wet myself. That, if you hadn’t quite got the idea yet, is what the Burned Man was really like.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You listen to me, you dogsucking little puke,” the Burned Man said. “You are going to make a fucking choice, and you are going to make it very soon. You’re going to man up and make something of yourself and make me proud, or you and I are going to part company.”
* * *
Now, perhaps I ought to explain something. I haven’t always owned the Burned Man, obviously, and I haven’t always been this much of a shit either. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that maybe there’s a connection there. It started liked this.
Debbie and I were at university together. She was reading chemistry and I was sort of drifting between various arts courses, not really doing a whole hell of a lot. We were dating but it wasn’t anything meaningful, just the usual sort of student relationship that you take terribly seriously at the time but always know deep down isn’t going to last past graduation. Anyway this was in the late Eighties, about the time the third Indiana Jones film came out, and me and my mate Jim and a handful of other academic layabouts went to the flicks and then naturally got all enthusiastic about taking an archaeology course. That’s when I first met Professor Davidson, and that was when everything in my life suddenly started to get very weird.
To my intense disappointment, and that of my fellow layabouts, Professor Davidson was not Indiana Jones. He was a proper professor, right down to the tweed three-piece suit and half moon glasses. That and he was about a hundred years old, to our undergraduate eyes. Jim was the first one to drop out, two days in. Three weeks later I was the only one of our little crowd still on the course.
I don’t know if it was Debbie urging me to take something seriously and stick with it for more than half a term for once, or if it was Davidson himself, but something kept me turning up lecture after lecture. Now these were the late Eighties as I said, those hazy student years of Jack Daniels and Guns N’ Roses, of Thatcher and Reagan and the Lockerbie bombing and the end of the Cold War. The world was changing all around us and like everyone else in my circle of friends I was looking for a way to make sense of it all.
Sense for Debbie came from the ordered relationship between agent and reagent, in atomic weights and the periodic table. For me, it was provided by occultists like Crowley and Gardner, by Israel Regardie and Franz Bardon and Austin Osman Spare. The university library had a surprisingly well stocked selection of what they liked to call “esoteric” books, and I devoured them all. I locked myself away in my student digs and studied like I had never studied for an actual course subject before. I was learning magic, real proper magic, and I discovered I was good at it. I mean OK, nothing ever really happened, as such, but all the same I felt I was making real progress. I was in touch with my Will, and I trained myself to see auras. Debbie scoffed, of course, until I dug out a couple of volumes on medieval alchemy and showed them to her. She was fascinated from that moment on, and we grew even closer.
It was about then that the professor’s class size really began to dwindle and I found I got more tutorial time with him than I had ever had before. He might have been a fossil himself but he struck me as a genuinely nice guy, and we got on fairly well. If I’m honest about it, I suppose I was still looking for some sort of father figure in those days. My own dad had been a total shitbag of an alcoholic who had battered my poor old mum black and blue on a regular basis. The only good thing he had ever done for our family was to die of a heart attack when I was ten years old. Life had got a bit more tolerable after he was gone.
It wasn’t long before our one-to-one time in Davidson’s office turned into me going to the pub with him and chatting over a pint instead. It was about then that I discovered just how bad his drinking problem was.
We had gone for
a quick lunchtime pint one day in lieu of my scheduled half hour tutorial, but that was three hours ago and it was now the middle of the afternoon. He had been supposed to be taking a freshman class at one o’clock, but he assured me his researcher could handle it without him.
“I’m fucking the librarian,” he announced, very loudly. He had one of those overly educated accents which somehow made him sound even more dissolute, like some awful cross between Brian Blessed and Uncle Monty, if you’ve ever seen that film. Still, he seemed harmless enough. He wasn’t the same sort of drunk as my dad had been, that was something. “Sandra, Sheila, whatever her name is.”
“Are you, sir?” I asked politely.
I was still sipping the end of my second bottle of lager. He’d had six pints of bitter and at least five whiskies and about fifteen cigarettes by then, and I was starting to feel a bit scared of him. I knew it was just bad childhood memories, though. I still had a lot of them, in those days. Davidson was OK.
“Anyway, doesn’t matter,” he said, leaning unsteadily across the table between us. “Point is, she’s worried about you, Drake. Asked me to have a word, and all that.”
“Worried about me how, sir?”
“All those books you’ve been taking out,” he said. “So-called magic. Aleister Crowley, all that crap.”
I sighed. Of course, he’s a scientist. An old, pickled one maybe, but a scientist all the same. Of course he doesn’t approve.
Of course he didn’t, but not at all for the reasons that I had been expecting.
“It’s all bollocks,” he said. “It’s a load of watered down, mistranslated and mangled shit, mixed with wishful thinking and makebelieve. You’re doing it all bloody wrong, boy.”
“She, um, told you that, sir?”
“Who? What, oh, you mean Sandra? Sheila, whoever she is? God no, she wouldn’t know a hex from a handbag.” He snorted with laughter and drained his pint. “God bless her, I’m fucking her you know. Well, I haven’t been capable for years, between you and me, but you know what I mean.”
He waggled his tongue disgustingly at me, and informed me that it was my round. I suppressed a shudder but went to the bar anyway to get him yet another pint. Student funds being what they were, I got myself a lime and soda. I wasn’t much of a drinker in those days anyway, for obvious reasons. I’d spent my whole life determined not to turn into my old man.
I ought to have just left him to it, I knew I should, but he’d caught my attention by then. I’d heard a lot of slurring and bluster and innuendo from him, but I’d also heard you’re doing it wrong and that had caught my attention more than I really cared to admit even to myself. There was something here I didn’t quite understand yet, but it was more than a little bit interesting. It was certainly worth turning a blind eye to his drunkenness to hear what else he might have to say. I took the drinks back to our table and sat staring expectantly at him.
“Aren’t we supposed to be going over your… your last paper or something?” he asked me. “I, um, I can’t quite remember.”
“You were talking about my books,” I reminded him. “About magic, and what you think I’m doing wrong.”
“Oh God yes, hopeless,” he said. He swallowed half his pint in one go, and glared at me with bloodshot eyes. “Bloody hopeless.”
“In what way, sir?” I prompted when it looked like he wasn’t going to say anything else.
“What? Oh, yes. Well it doesn’t work, does it?”
“Well,” I said, feeling defensive and embarrassed all at once. “Well, I feel I’m making some good progress actually.”
“Towards what, a better understanding of your navel? Bullshit!”
“Well…” I said, preparing to defend the occult mysteries that I, at all of twenty years of age, was sure I was on the brink of mastering.
“What have you ever actually summoned?” Davidson interrupted me.
“Summoned?” I echoed, wondering if I’d heard him right. “Well, I’ve studied the Goetia of course, and Bardon’s theories of evocation, but obviously they shouldn’t be taken literally, so...”
Davidson was in the middle of gulping his beer, and my statement made him laugh so hard he almost choked on it. A vile mixture of beer and snot trickled out of his nostrils. He wiped it away with a nicotine-stained finger and grinned at me.
“Come back to my rooms with me,” he said. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
Now drunk or not I was fairly sure he wasn’t going to try and stick his hand down my trousers like Jim’s rowing coach had to him last term, however much he reminded me of Uncle Monty out of whatever that film was called. Besides, with the state he was in I was even more sure I could just knock him on his arse and leg it if he did. I nodded.
“All right,” I said.
He led me somewhat unsteadily out of the pub, resting one hand on my arm for support. It was a long, slightly uncomfortable walk back to his flat, what with him having to stop and cough and wheeze or talk incoherent bollocks every ten minutes or so, but we got there in the end. I remember hoping nobody I knew had seen me with him. He shut the door behind us, and grinned at me.
“Come through,” he said, gesturing to a door at the end of the hall. “Come into my study, and I’ll explain everything.”
“Thank you,” I said politely. “Who are we meeting, again?”
“What,” he said. “What, not who. It.”
He opened the door, and I gaped in astonishment. The study was filled with all manner of occult paraphernalia, things I never would have believed he owned if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes. At the far end of the room there was a huge piece of ancient-looking wood standing on a pair of trestles, and on top of it was some sort of hideous statue bound with tiny chains.
“Come here and feed me you useless old cunt!” it screamed.
* * *
I woke with a start, my head on my desk. Dreaming of poor old Davidson after all these years had left a sour taste in my mouth. He had been a wreck of a man towards the end. Is that where I’m heading? I couldn’t help but ask myself the question, for all that I didn’t really want to know the answer. I reached for the phone before I had a chance to change my mind. She picked up on the fifth ring.
“Debs, it’s me,” I said.
She hung up so hard the bang made my ear hurt. I winced and redialled.
“Don’t…” I said, and she hung up again.
“I didn’t do it!” I shouted the third time, before she had a chance to react. There was deathly silence, but at least she hadn’t hung up on me again. Yet. “It’s Wormwood, he’s gouging me, I haven’t got any choice but I didn’t do it, honest to God I didn’t. It was some rich bloke, no one else, but he was already dead so I didn’t…”
“Get fucked, Don,” she interrupted me. “You lied to me, you stole from me, and you’re probably still lying to me now. Just get fucked, and don’t call again.”
She hung up. I dialled again, and her machine picked up. I gave it up for a bad job.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered.
I went through to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and was just stirring boiling water onto cheap instant coffee when the phone rang. I ran back into the office and all but dived across the desk in my haste to pick it up.
“Debs?” I said.
“No,” said Wormwood. “It ain’t.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Yeah, it’s me, you cretin. Thought I’d give you a bell, seeing as you haven’t bothered calling me. Again.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was going to come over last night but, um…”
“Never mind,” he said. “That was some good work yesterday, Drake. Heart attack, nice one. No complications. How did you manage that then?”
“I, um,” I said, thinking frantically. I’d had nothing to do with it after all, and only a vague suspicion of what might have actually happened. “Um, you know. Professional secret.”
Wormwood snorted.
“
Ponce,” he said. “Whatever, that’s that out of the way and all to the good. Now then, I’ve got another little job for you.”
“What?” I said. “We’re square now, yeah? We are fucking square.”
“No we ain’t,” said Wormwood. “Remember that interest I told you about? It went up. A lot.”
I stared at the phone in my hand. He had to be kidding me, surely? Except I knew that Wormwood had no sense of humour whatsoever. I could already picture Connie kicking in the door of my office with a bonebreaking sledgehammer in his enormous hands. No, Wormwood didn’t do kidding, not one little bit.
“What now?” I sighed.
“Don’t take that snotty tone with me, you prick, this one’s in your interest as much as mine,” he said. “There’s a bit of a problem with that Scottish job.”
“What? That’s done with.”
“No,” he said. “Apparently it ain’t. Turns out that pair of bastards had some insurance. Dig out your laptop, I’ll mail you the details.”
“Right. Right, OK. I, um, look. Look, it’s going to be a problem if you want me to, um, you know, do another thing.”
“For fuck’s sake Drake, no one’s tapping your bloody phone,” Wormwood snapped. “Out with it.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, after the probably-government work I had done in the past, but fuck it. They already knew more than enough about my business to bury me forever if they wanted to.
“My source has dried up,” I said, thinking of Debbie with a sick feeling in my stomach. “I can’t get any ingredients at the moment.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Wormwood said. “Like I said, this is in both our interests. I can get you anything you want, within reason. Just let me know what you need and I’ll put it on your tab.”
I winced. Wormwood’s idea of compound interest was scary enough as it was without him adding fresh debts to the running total, but I didn’t really have a lot of choice. I had been going to Debbie for so long I didn’t even know any other alchemists any more.
