The Card

 The tavern floorboards beneath my boots felt less like seasoned oak and more like the frozen crust of a shallow grave. They called this place *The Inverted*, a rotting cellar-hole swallowed by the damp belly of Essex, though whether we were beneath the earth or somewhere far older and darker, no man dared guess.

Around the salt-rimed table, four of us sat shivering in the greasy gutter-flicker of a single tallow candle. Across from me sat Miller, his fingers twitching like hooked eels against the stained green felt, and beside him whispered old Mother Corley, her breath smelling of stale gin and churchyard loam. But it was the dealer at the head of the board who commanded the marrow of our bones.

He sat hunched in a cowl of such absolute, velvet-clotted darkness that the flickering candlelight seemed to die a sudden death the moment it touched the heavy folds. His face was a void—a smooth, featureless abyss where light went to drown. Where eyes should have been, there were only twin hollows of absolute nothingness, pressing upon my temples like the weight of wet earth.

He did not speak. He only dealt.

*Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.*

The sound of pasteboard sliding across the scarred timber was like fingernails scraping the inside of a cheap pine coffin. A card flipped, spinning lazily through the sulfurous air, landing face-down before Miller. Another for Corley. Another for the trembling wretch to my right.

And then, a card for me.

My pulse thudded in my throat like a trapped bat. We were playing for the only currency left to us in this God-forsaken parish—our remaining years. Every man and woman at this board had bartered away their tomorrows for desperate wagers, debts of blood, and bargains struck in moonless lanes. Tonight was the settlement. Tonight, the deck would be purged, and the hand would fall where it must.

No one dared touch their cards yet. We stared at the neat little rectangles of parchment resting on the table, each one a ticking clock of mortality. To turn them over was to invite the judgment of the hooded thing that presided over us.

"Go on, then," Miller croaked, his voice cracking like dry autumn twigs. "Turn the bugger over. Let’s have it done."

With fingers slick with cold sweat, I reached out. The air around the table grew suddenly thick, smelling faintly of stagnant ditch-water and burnt feathers. My hand hovered over the back of the card—a swirling, hypnotic pattern of faded blue ink.

I flipped it.

The Jack of Clubs. A reprieve. I let out a ragged, shuddering breath that fogged in the freezing air, the tension in my spine snapping like a rusted spring. Miller let out a wet, hysterical laugh, turning his own card—a harmless Seven of Hearts.

Across the table, Mother Corley let out a long, rattling sigh, her trembling, arthritic fingers slowly peeling back the corner of her parchment.

Beneath the shadow of her thumb, the stark, bone-white background of the card revealed a single, jagged black pip.

The Ace of Spades.

The silence that rushed into the room was heavier than lead. Corley’s jaw went slack, her eyes widening in ancient, frozen terror as the shadow above the table seemed to stretch and lean forward. The hooded figure raised one long, grey-skinned hand—a hand tipped with nails like iron tacks—and tapped a single, skeletal finger upon the center of her card.

As the finger made contact, Corley’s shadow on the damp stone wall behind her detached itself, shuddered, and dissolved into thin air. Her skin grew grey and translucent in the candlelight, the lines of her face smoothing out not into youth, but into the waxy stiffness of an open-casket wake.

The dealer did not look at her. He simply began to sweep the cards back into his pale, lifeless palms, his movements hypnotic and deliberate.

The deck was whole once more. The deck was shuffled.

The candle guttered lower, and the first card began to slide across the table toward my fingers.