Waking the Witch (The Witch of Cheyne Heath Book 1)

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

  She tries to sob, but she has no more tears to shed.

  The light shining down through the cellar door darkens as if clouds passed in front of the sun. The ground beneath her shifts in one great lurch and she squeals, her parched throat aching in protest. The packed earth of the cellar walls and floor softens and moistens, crumbling around her as insects burrow through it and onto her skin. As she struggles to her feet, her arms still cuffed behind her, the ground wrenches again, throwing her off balance and toppling her. The insects swarm over her. If she screams, she will open her mouth, and the crawling creatures will get in.

  Through eyelids half-clenched so that tiny legs don’t scuttle across her eyeballs, she watches the cellar grow around her. The ceiling lifts, vanishing into the gloom, the walls crumbling open revealing passages beyond. Dark figures slither and trample around her. A cavern of fear opens within her. The stranger made her frightened she would die, but now she has slipped through a crack in the waking world into a place from her nightmares. Clenching her eyes shut, she wonders if there might be something worse than dying.

  After an eternity, the door of the cellar slams open and she hears her mother’s voice speaking words in her strange language. The handcuffs fall from her wrists, and a great wind blows the insects off her.

  “Mama,” she says, but her voice can only manage a cracked whisper.

  Her mother sweeps her up into her arms. Her mother’s hair is disheveled, her clothing ripped, a streak of red blood smeared across her pale skin. For a moment, Gosha knows relief. And then the world grows dark.

  * * *

  The days that followed were a blur as Gosha drifted in and out of consciousness. Every time she crested into groggy wakefulness before falling back into her stupor, her parents stood over her arguing. When she came to, weak and thirsty, her mother wrapped her in a blanket, picked her up, and carried her out of the house, shouting for her father.

  In the lane outside their tiny home rumbled a car she had never seen before, a rusty old wreck with dusty windows and a grime-smeared bonnet. Her father, Mateusz, and several other cousins and uncles—no aunties!—rushed out with bags of food and bottles of water to load into the trunk. Her mother lay her down across the back seat, slammed the door as she yelled at the men to hurry, and got into the passenger side. The car was loaded, and they were on the road in a matter of minutes.

  The drive to the coast was long. Her father drove them the most indirect way possible, only arriving in the dark of night. A rickety fishing vessel met them at the water. The next day they were in England.

  In the years that followed she found out her father had been arrested during protests against the Communists. Because her mother had been discovered using Craft to free him, all the women like her were forced to flee the country for fear of more reprisals.

  “Will we ever go home?” she asked her mother one day as they walked across the pebbled beach of their new home, nursing a void inside her where her friends and her cousins, even crude and stinky Mateusz, used to be.

  “No.” Her mother pulled a hand-rolled cigarette out of her cardigan sleeve. She struggled against the wind to light it, cupping one hand around the small white twist of tobacco as she thumbed the lighter. “That earth is salted. Best put it behind you and look to the future. Only misery remains back there.”

  15

  As the sky above Canterbury Gardens grew lighter, her body gave up and surrendered all its stored-up terror to fatigue. Gosha dozed, crumpled up in her bolt-hole wedged between a cabinet of stored negatives and a portrait of Quentin Crisp.

  In her dreams, she played a game of cards with her cousin, Basha, in her aunt’s kitchen with a strange deck of unsettling pictures. Dressed in outrageous costumes, the lords and ladies on the cards chattered to each other across the spread as she and Basha laid them out on the table. Outside, a storm raged. Lightning flashed across the roiling gray clouds, and thunder rumbled in the distance. Gosha’s mother caught them playing, snatched up the cards, and drove them from the kitchen with insults and curses.

  * * *

  When Gosha awoke, the sun was up. She tried to stand, but her right leg had gone to sleep and become a mound of dead flesh that hung from her hip. It came alive with pins and needles as she hobbled to the upstairs bathroom.

  With at least another hour of peace alone in the house until Cressida returned from taking the boys to preschool, a shower would be the best therapy. She opened the hot tap as far as she could bear to wash away the aches and pains of the night. In her cocoon of heat and steam, the terror of whatever she captured in the darkroom nipped at her, but her body was too fatigued to respond.

  As she warmed up and her mind brought her back to cowering in fear downstairs, she clenched her fists and cringed. She was a grown woman. She’d given birth to two sons. Canterbury Gardens was hundreds of miles and a score of years away from that cellar in Poland, and still it tormented her.

  Shame turned into anger, a hot fury from within that matched the heat on her skin. She would never be rid of this hidden life that only brought her misery, and death to innocents like Mick.

  What was that creature haunting Mick? She knew so little about Influence and how it worked. Her mother, her grandmother, and all the aunties who passed through her mother’s kitchen in Poland were the only users of Influence and Craft she had ever known. And the witch hunter. The witch hunter called her mother an oath-breaker, a detail Gosha remembered for the first time last night. Had Mick taken some kind of oath to a dark power? What could that power be?

  In the foyer at the bottom of the house, the grandfather clock chimed eleven. Miranda expected her for lunch at the Cheyne Arts Club in an hour. They hadn’t spoken in months, and Gosha didn't want to be late. Miranda had been her closest friend for over a decade, but they’d drifted apart since the overdose. Perhaps now was the time to come clean about her mother’s witchcraft and the visions. She slipped on a pair of black drainpipe jeans, a black silk blouse styled to look like something Keats or Shelley would be happy to lounge about in, and a pair of pointy-toed black winklepicker boots.

  Ready for action, she went downstairs to the boys’ room, the one place in the house untouched by the insanity of witchcraft, to think. She still had nothing concrete to go on, nothing anyone in the real world would understand. She sank onto Edmund’s bed, put her head on his pillow and breathed in his scent. As she lay looking up at the blue ceiling covered in luminous stars, a vague plan formed in the back of her mind. Her mother always said Influence came from people. Someone conned Mick into killing himself. That thing in the darkroom came from someone, a real person. If she could figure out who and why, she might also figure out a way to make them answer for what they’d done. She needed to know more about Mick and the people he hung out with. Her next step would have to be to talk to Johnny and the band. She could make a few calls after lunch and track them down.

  On her way out of the house, she locked all the doors to the basement flat, and took with her every copy of the key she could find.

  16

  Parking was its usual nightmare along the Rake’s Road, the major shopping thoroughfare at the posh end of Cheyne Heath. Proud of her ability to get her car in and out of a tight space, she found a spot just large enough to cram in her Mini Cooper. And only a five-minute walk from the Cheyne Arts Club.

  As she adjusted the rear-view mirror toward her, Miranda's new single came on the radio. Before the overdose, her music had been middle-of-the-road rock written and produced by whatever gentleman troubadour rocker fancied her his muse that year. After emerging from rehab and, with the help of Gosha and George, emancipating herself from the overprotective control of her parents, Miranda's sound turned darker, her lyrics full of bile at the torment of her inner demons. Ominous synths and chunky, aggressive guitars flooded out from the radio and filled the cramped interior of Gosha's Mini Cooper as Miranda sang against injustice and racist politics. The third single off her new album, the song rose higher on the
charts every week.

  Gosha took out her compact and patted a layer of face powder under her eyes with the powder puff. The recipes she concocted while still at home were good enough to earn her the money to run away to London, but to compete against the established makeup artists of London, she had been forced to refine her recipes. Her face powder took a year of clandestine trips to the heath behind Miranda’s back under the full moon with a bag of supplies and a camping stove to get the formula right. If she’d paid more attention to her mother and been less intent on confounding the old harridan’s every expectation, the process would have gone a lot quicker. She was in dire need of the powder now to cover up the black circles under her eyes after two nights of troubled sleep. Even a quick dusting was enough to freshen her up to look like she’d just stepped off a plane from a month in the Caribbean. Satisfied after one last check in the mirror, she packed the makeup away and got out of the car.

  The Cheyne Arts Club was founded at the end of the nineteenth century by Sir Henry Belter as a thumbed nose to the arts clubs of Chelsea and Mayfair, which refused him membership. Cheyne Heath had long been a refuge for artists, performers, and philosophers deemed too scandalous, outrageous, or treasonous for the genteel salons of High Society. The artistic brethren of the neighborhood flocked to the new establishment in droves. When the club first opened, all it took to join was to buy Sir Henry a meal once a month and cover your bar bill, although, once he developed gout from his prandial exertions, admissions became more stringent. Even in death he was a generous man, endowing a large part of Bramshill Crescent to the club along with enough funds to make sure dues would stay accessible to even the poorest applicant for centuries to come. As long as you could find two members to vouch for you, you were in, the only limitation occupancy regulations imposed by the local council.

  The buildings that made up the club were usually painted a pristine white. On special occasions, the board commissioned a member artist to cover the facade with murals of daringly lewd content, most often whenever the board got fed up with the complaints of the neighbors, a humorless bunch of yuppie social climbers. Tensions must have been running particularly high. A beautiful and anatomically correct pastiche of Botticelli’s Venus masturbating, spread-eagled on her clamshell, greeted Gosha. She walked in through a gargantuan pair of labia as Venus fingered her clitoris above her head.

  Inside, simple but comfortable decor was interspersed with furniture from every period of the club’s one-hundred-and-fifty-year history. Every available surface was covered in spectacular artwork, from sculpture to watercolors, tapestries to cubist nudes, with several manuscripts and signed first editions scattered about in display cases. If a member or resident became unable to pay, the board were always happy to accept work instead. As a result, the club had acquired one of the most eclectic and valuable art collections in Europe.

  The tinkle of piano keys and the unmistakable sound of Miranda’s whiskey and cigarette roughened voice led Gosha into the barroom. Inside, Miranda was up on the low stage, a young man accompanying her as she performed her single, a quieter, more intimate version than what Gosha just heard on the radio, but no less powerful. Miranda’s eyes glittered as she sang with a fire Gosha hadn’t seen in years. Gosha resolved on the spot not to tell her anything about witchcraft. She didn’t deserve that burden.

  Whatever difficulties Gosha had experienced in her life, her old roommate’s trials and tribulations were so much greater. Addiction plagued her almost from the first moment she arrived in London from her parents’ estate in Devon, a porcelain sparrow among the pig shit. Discovered in the back room of a pub in Shoreditch, success tumbled into her lap. She recorded her first single in nineteen sixty-six, but one big hit a few years later catapulted her into the rock-and-roll firmament and massive tours in Europe and the States. With success came alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. Everything she achieved came crashing down after the overdose in Gosha’s bathroom. Two failed marriages and an unscrupulous accountant who ran off with most of her money turned Miranda’s affairs into a wreckage, and her parents swooped in to take control.

  Cecily and David Lovelock did right by their daughter, nursing her back to health and getting her the help she needed, but after that they went too far. Treating her like an invalid child, they effectively held her prisoner at their farm in the country. Not until a Hollywood action film featured her biggest hit, and she made her own money again, was she able to pry herself away from her parents and re-establish herself in London.

  She finished her song to the delight of the assembled crowd, a group of young people in their early twenties, recent additions to the club membership Gosha didn't know. Her audience cried out for more, but she shook her head as she stepped down off the riser.

  “Buy the record.”

  She laughed and walked over to a tall man in his early thirties with lank, dark hair and a weak chin, dressed in an elegant suit who watched from the bar, and gave him a long hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Gosha!”

  Her face lit up when she saw her. She ran across the room and threw her arms around her.

  “I can't believe it's you. We mustn't go so long without seeing each other.”

  “It's so good to see you.” Gosha held her at arm’s length to take her in. “That song! I’ve been hearing it everywhere. I love it.”

  “Oh, darling. It’s so good to be working again.”

  “And who's that dapper gentleman at the bar? Is he a new beau?”

  “He’s just a friend.” She hooked her arm in Gosha’s and steered her out of the bar. “Come on. Let’s eat.”

  Gosha glanced back. She recognized the man, one of the many faces she’d been introduced to once, but their circles never reconnected.

  “Darling.” Miranda led them to a table in the dining room beneath an elaborate costume from a nineteen-thirties German Expressionist interpretation of Don Giovanni mounted on the wall behind plexiglass The costume's beaded batwing cape loomed over them as they sat and took menus from the waiter.

  Friends since the day she first arrived in London with only three pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks and a bar of her favorite soap, the experience of closeness with someone her own age was new to Gosha. Her mother always insisted she come home at once after school to help in the kitchen, and Gosha never made more than passing acquaintances. She planned her escape to be one week after her last day of term, allowing her time to stash supplies in the hedge at the bottom of the garden. When the time came, she was too frightened of her mother’s watchful eye to retrieve them and fled with only what she had in her satchel. She left the house pretending to go to her job at the cosmetics counter and instead made her way to the train station. She found herself at Victoria Station by lunchtime.

  A pair of backpackers she befriended on the train told her about a hostel in Cheyne Heath. As she stood looking up at the shabby door, wondering if she’d made a terrible mistake, Miranda stepped up beside her with her own bundle of possessions under one arm tied up in brown paper with a length of twine, a glowing waif in sensible country clothes.

  “Not much, is it,” said Miranda in her ringing upper class accent, her soft whisper lifting Gosha’s spirits. “But at least it’s a start. Coming?”

  Now that voice was husky and cracked, her face hard and lined, the luminous waif in the portrait in Gosha’s workroom gone forever. But her eyes were bright in a way Gosha hadn’t seen in years, filled with the same tinge of wonder and optimism of their youths.

  “You look amazing.” It wasn’t a lie. Gosha was so happy to see her looking so well. “What’s been going on? I haven’t heard from you in months.”

  “I know, I know.” She reached across the table as they sat and held Gosha’s hands in her own. “I’ve been a terrible friend, but I’ve found something wonderful and it’s transformed my life.”

  “What is it, tell me?”

  “There's this incredible group of people. They’re so loving and supportive. We do a prac
tice together.” She stroked the back of Gosha’s hand, a gesture she always did when she was happy. “Like meditation or yoga, but there’s no sitting around or doing silly things with your body, just people at one with themselves, each other, and the world around them.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” said Gosha with a laugh.

  “Oh, Gosha, it is. It’s changed the way I see the world. It’s changed the way I see you.”

  She laughed. Although deeper than before, it was the same laugh Gosha remembered from their first night in the hostel, sharing a dinner of chips rolled in newspaper and sardines from a tin. Gosha missed that laugh and couldn’t help but laugh along with her.

  “If I start to sound batty, please stop me,” Miranda said. “I don’t know if I can explain it. I was never really with you before.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  Miranda laughed again, shook her head and hid her face in her hands.

  “I’m so bad at this,” she said, peeking through her fingers. “But I have to explain it to you. I’ve been writing my own songs, you know. It’s helped me clarify so much.”

  “I have your album. It’s wonderful.”

  Miranda put her finger to her lips and made a little shushing sound.

  “Let me say this. Let me try to put it into words.”

  Gosha nodded, happy to see her friend so excited after so many years of misery.

  “When I was with you, or with anyone else, not just you, I wasn’t present. I wasn’t actually talking to you, or being with you, but with an idea of you in my head, of who you are and what you mean to me, but it wasn’t actually you.”

  As she spoke, she rearranged the flatware and glasses on the table along an invisible grid, to Gosha a remarkable transformation, knowing, as her former flatmate, how messy she could be.