Fiction River: Hex in the City

by Fiction River

  “Huli,” he replied. It was part of the code of the family, as well as a greeting: Hound and fox.

  Gou collected her bags, carrying them easily despite their weight, like all the other official couriers did. He politely asked about her trip, but that was all, her stillness affecting him too.

  Instead of leading her out to the rows of limousines and state cars, though, Gou walked her across the broad concrete courtyard in the front of the station to the rows of pedal cabs. Gou’s company colors were brown and yellow, with real licenses and enough bribes that he could reserve the front parking spots.

  The young woman clapped her hands with delight when she saw Gou’s pedal cab. “Papa arranged for you,” she said, settling into the back of Gou’s cab.

  “Of course,” Gou replied. He’d learned a lot about his clients since that first trip on his own to Huli Hutong: They didn’t like automobiles, and merely tolerated motorbikes when they needed speed. They preferred old-fashioned things, like handmade brooms and rickshaws.

  Once all her luggage was strapped in, Gou started off at a leisurely pace, letting his client enjoy the city. Cars along the wide road raced past them, as did students on their bicycles, their bells ringing merrily. Gou took his time, though. He no longer had to hustle, racing for just one more fare.

  Gou actually no longer needed to pedal a cab himself, he could have hired one more rider, but he liked to pick up family members himself: It kept his patron happy, helped smooth out any bumps in their relationship. Plus, he’d met other, stranger beings this way, building his network, hoping to become the exclusive carrier to all the spirit creatures and their kind.

  Later that afternoon, Gou would take the daughter on a tour, through the tourist hutongs, as well as the secret, hidden ones that only the fox fairies could find.

  And a few, well-trained hounds.

  Introduction to “The Scottish Play”

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch, our Benevolent Queen, really wanted to get this right, and girl did she. Of all the short stories she’s written for me over the years, “The Scottish Play” is my favorite. How could it not be, with witches, magick, ghosts, the theater, family tension, historical references, and London, the greatest city of them all? I absolutely see her as the main character, and imagined myself to be one of the sisters, probably Viola, although I’m probably more like the mother. Did I mention I have two sisters? They don’t have a bit of magick; I got it all, too bad for them. Kris has magick; she could easily write these Witches into future volumes.

  Kris publishes several series at the same time, all under different names. She writes award-winning mystery as Kris Nelscott in the Smokey Dalton series, award-winning romance as Kristine Grayson, sf/romance as Kris DeLake, and has three series under Kristine Kathryn Rusch: the Retrieval Artist series, the Fey series, and the Diving series. For the first time in her career, all of the books in all of the series are in print. She's excited about that. The next Diving book, Skirmishes, came out in September; the next Smokey Dalton novel, Street Justice, will appear in March of 2014; and the next Retrieval Artist book shortly after that. Her standalone thriller, Snipers, appeared in July. She writes:

  “When I heard Kerrie Hughes describe what she was looking for in this anthology, she stressed, ‘Hex. In a city. Hex. City.’ At the same time, I'd been watching a really cool PBS series called Shakespeare Uncovered. The first episode featured Ethan Hawke, searching for the real MacBeth. I saw the Patrick Stewart version of MacBeth in London in 2007, and the play gave me nightmares. Bad ones. I have seen almost every Shakespeare play in a professional production, and while I've enjoyed them, none upset my subconscious like MacBeth. It really is one of the creepiest things ever written. And quite prescient. Somehow Shakespeare, London, theatrical superstitions, and magic all combined in my head at that moment to give me ‘The Scottish Play.’”

  The Scottish Play

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  408 Years Ago…as I usually picture it from my book-lined office in one of those pseudo-Gothic buildings at Yale. And no, I’m not telling you which one. I’m just sharing the way I think of these things when I’m sitting at my antique desk, littered with books about The Theatre and The Theater, depending on the snob level and the side of the Pond the author lives on.

  I am an Elizabethan scholar, among other things, and I know real magic too, and still, this vision comes in mixed clichés.

  Just saying I know better, okay?

  So…

  408 Years Ago:

  (Or maybe 421 or maybe even 418. I mean, really, how do you know when a man made a deal with the Devil. If, indeed, he did make a deal with the Devil. And not just the Devil’s helpers. Or his handmaidens, as the case may be. Anyway…)

  These three women are hanging out in their hovel in London. Because for some reason, witches can’t afford more than a hovel, even though they have more magic than anyone else, which makes no sense to me and never has. Anyway, they’re hanging out and some young playwright with the ear of the Queen shows up, believing they can give him magic powers. I mean, come on. Really?

  But it’s my imagination, and it’s untamable, at least on this. Maybe because the images came into my head so young, before I knew about Elizabethan politics and Guy Fawkes and the Tower of London and beheadings and—

  Anyway:

  Three women. Witches. Standing around a cauldron. There had to be a cauldron, because Shakespeare describes it later in the Scottish Play and everyone from Bugs Bunny to The Simpsons have parodied it. The women circle the cauldron and they give Shakespeare magic powers.

  Or they don’t give him any powers at all.

  I’m betting on don’t, given what happens later.

  He goes away with a sense of magic, the supernatural, and all of its dangers. He writes somewhat subversive plays about kings and abdications and strong women and hidden loves and even though he criticizes the monarchy, still the monarchy lets him perform.

  Scholars believe the Scottish Play’s witches were added to flatter King James the First, Elizabeth’s successor, who wrote a book on demonology, called, of all things Daemonology. But I know there’s more to it than that. I know, because of family lore.

  Because I’m descended from those witches.

  Because I’m still carrying on their tradition.

  I mess with the theater, but only in a good way.

  Or so I would like to believe.

  ***

  Of course, it would be the Scottish Play that tested those beliefs. The Scottish Play, for you Philistines who don’t know, is Macbeth. It’s safer to call the thing the Scottish Play because of the curse.

  Everyone knows about the curse, or should. To say the name of the Scottish Play in a theater—any theater (and that includes movie theaters, Philistines)—invokes a centuries-old curse that will destroy someone or someones associated with that theater. Technically, to say the name of the play and to quote from it outside of rehearsals for the Scottish Play invokes the curse. But that distinction often seems to get lost in translation.

  Theoretically, there are ways to neutralize the curse. They include turning around three times, spitting over your left shoulder, and quoting from one of Shakespeare’s “lucky” plays like Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“If we shadows have offended…”). Simplistic answers to a simplistic problem, because the problem isn’t with the name of the Scottish Play. The problem is with the play itself.

  I avoided entanglements with the Scottish Play for years; mostly because I figure anyone stupid enough to a) stage the play and b) call me to fix whatever has gone wrong is beyond help. They have to pretend not to believe in magic, and then call in magic when the curse rears its ugly head. They want that cake. They want to eat it. And usually, they want me to save a multi-million dollar production that should simply be abandoned.

  I say no. Then they find someone else. The play’s run is plagued with bad luck. The story of the play’s production usually appears in articles about the curse of
the Scottish Play, and then becomes part of theater lore.

  Except this last time.

  This last time, I went to London’s West End because the idiots in charge hired my mother.

  And killed her.

  ***

  To say my mood was foul as I approached the Lancaster Theatre in the West End really doesn’t do justice to just how dark my mood was. If someone were using the over-the-top visuals of horror movies to backlight me, thunder and lightning would trail in my wake.

  It was midnight and the moon was almost full, albeit hard to see in the bright lights of the 21st century city. That’s the thing about London: It is a modern city. Yeah, sure, it’s filled with nooks and crannies of the past butted up against the present, but it’s always been that way. That’s part of the problem.

  The Lancaster Theatre was a case in point. A rebuild on top of a rebuild, the Lancaster first appeared in the West End in the late 18th century, and burned down at least three times. Two of those fires took place after cannons fired on stage in productions of Henry VIII. Even the Globe burned after cannon fire from Henry VIII, proof of Shakespeare’s displeasure with John Fletcher’s so-called collaboration.

  Despite the pictures I found online, I did not expect the Lancaster that was waiting for me. The online photos made the Lancaster seem like a 1970s monstrosity, all glass and chrome, with too much red in the seats and on the carpet.

  Apparently I had missed a remodel, because now the Lancaster looked like a proper British theater of the movie-magic type—a roundish exterior suggesting a 17th century origin, lots of wood (fake I hoped), and solid oak doors that should have kept the riff-raff out.

  I was the riff-raff, at least on this night. I didn’t go under the marquee, advertising the upcoming opening of Shakespeare’s Macbeth! (as if someone else had a Macbeth to perform) with Edward Burton, one of the greatest stars of stage and screen, a man who (fortunately) got his start in the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  I stopped in front of the posters, staring at Burton’s craggy face twisted in confusion and fear as he held a bloody knife. He looked appropriately Macbeth-like. I double-checked the names of the other players, seeing a solid group of Shakespeareans mixed with some up-and-comers. Not even the director was new.

  This production should not have had troubles, not in filling the seats nor in behaving properly during rehearsals for the accursed play. The magic here should never have flared, and it definitely shouldn’t have caused the death of my mother.

  The theater was shut down while Scotland Yard finished its investigation into her death. They believed it an accident; I knew that because they had already released the body to my family—most of whom were angry at me for not going directly to Cornwall for the death rites.

  I knew I had time; my aunt Eustacia had to conduct the ceremony, and she was still in Moscow. She had a different theatrical mess on her hands. Had the owners of the Bolshoi Theater called her when the troubles began, the acid attack on the director of the ballet would never have happened. My aunt was caught in an international mystery, which meant she had to keep her head down and her magic quiet—never the best way to work.

  Besides, I was afraid she might not be able to do much, with Mother dead.

  So far, my mother’s death at the Lancaster received little mention. She wasn’t an official employee of the theater, and her death had occurred in the lobby. It looked like a heart attack, which is what the authorities concluded it was, and it caused no interruption of the play’s already elongated schedule.

  I wasn’t about to enter by the front door. Even after midnight on a weekday, there were too many people around. The neon displays from Piccadilly Circus lit everything up. Tourists thronged past the shops and pubs, blinking under the glare of lights. It would have felt like Times Square except that Times Square was broad where Piccadilly was close. I always felt not just the press of history here, but the press of pickpockets as well.

  The Lancaster was on a side street, and the stage door in a narrow alley around back. Cobblestone of indeterminate age would have made the alley feel old if it weren’t for the pubs all around with their moving beer signs and their open doors. Laughter echoed out of them, as did the scents of ale, fried foods, and vomit.

  Such things made me nervous when I was thinking of magic. Especially magic that would let me into a theater without the owners’ express permission.

  Because such magic required speaking the words of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Not just one of his plays, mind you. But the Scottish Play.

  But in for a penny, in for a pound, as the British say. (And it wasn’t until I realized that was a British expression that it made sense; rather like those ancestral witches.)

  I went to the door, placed my hand on the knob, and said in the softest tone I could manage, “Open, locks, Whoever knocks!”

  The click of the door lock, the snap of a deadbolt, the digital music of a security lock, and the slide of a chain lock followed one after the other.

  I pushed the door open, and stepped into the last place my mother was seen alive.

  ***

  All theaters smell the same. Greasepaint, sweat, shaved wood, and dust. I’m not sure why dust, since most theaters are clean, but the dust remains underneath everything.

  I pushed the door closed behind me, letting my eyes adjust. I expected the light. Every theater leaves a light on upstage center, even theaters run by practical people. Most theatrical folk know the light is on to ward off ghosts. A few might acknowledge that the light serves another duty; it makes the backstage clutter easier to see.

  But in this theater, the light was wrong. It was both too soft and too bright at the same time.

  I realized I was looking at it with both my physical eyes and my metaphysical ones. I closed my eyes, and the light remained the same.

  My heart started to pound.

  I opened my eyes.

  There was more magic in this theater than I had ever seen in a theater before. Usually there are bits and pieces of magic, and they’re fun to encounter. A glowing skull, from a particularly magical rendition of Alas, poor Yorick! Or a slightly illuminated costume of one of those actors who touches every role with his own special enchantment.

  Normally, different kinds of hexes had different colors, lengths, and brightness. A mistaken wish of luck instead of the common and careful “break a leg” should display a small spray of greenish light that remained in the area where the mouth emitted the accidental curse. If the spray touched someone connected with the play, then that person would have had a moment of bad luck. If that person got drenched in the spray, the luck might have been particularly bad.

  That moment of bad luck would remain for weeks, maybe months, sometimes years, depending on the power of the person who spoke the curse, whether the curse was intentional, and whether the curse hit the target for whom it was intended.

  But I couldn’t see little jetties of green or any other color for that matter. Every hex in this theater glowed with a pure white light, the light of sheer power, a light I might not be able to combat.

  For the first time, I regretted coming alone. If I succumbed to the magic, no one could pull me out of this place. And that realization led to another: my mother would have come through the stage door. Had she threaded her way through the webbed hexes to the front of the theater?

  I folded my right hand and rubbed my first three fingernails against the ridge of my thumb, flicking my fingers forward. My fingers emitted just a tiny bit of magic, a personal magic, one that was almost as old as I was. I had done this before I had any magical control, before I had any memories, before I had language, to summon my mother. She used to laugh at it, and speculate whether or not I made that movement in the womb.

  The magic jutted outward, pink and baby fresh, like it always did. It illuminated a trail, twisting and turning through this part of the theater, around the heavy red curtains pulled to the side, and off stage right. My mother had picked her way through the ma
gic to the front of the theater. But the magic had grown so much stronger that most of her path was barred by thin white lines.

  To my metaphysical eyes, it looked like a million spiders had worked overtime to create all of the magical lines. They grew thicker and more elaborate on stage, fading off on the sides, and—at least from this vantage—vanishing in the back of the house.

  But I didn’t trust my eyes—physical or metaphysical. That might have been the mistake Mother made. She had grown cocky in her later years, doing jobs that she should have brought her sisters to. In fact, she should have given up the magic when her oldest sister, Laylee, had died. But neither Mother nor Eustacia had given up their work with the loss of Laylee. In fact, her death seemed to make both of them work even harder.

  My sisters and I vowed to quit when one of us died. Mother had laughed when she heard the vow and said it was foolish, that we diminished our powers by remaining sisters instead of growing our own talents.

  “See where that got you, Mother?” I whispered, and then gasped at the shoot of pain that ran from my mouth to my heart. My hand flew to my chest, rubbing the ache away.

  Mother made me feel like that once. I was ten and I called her a stupid fat-butted hag. Instead of laughing or admonishing me with a single word, she touched my mouth. Pain circled my lips, ran through my tongue, and down my throat all the way to my heart. I fell to my knees, clutching my chest.

  You do not curse the magical, Mother had said. Not in anger, not in jest. Not ever. Do you hear me?

  I had heard her. I never cursed at her again, although I silently resented that, especially in my teenage years. But I never wanted the repeat of pain, and I never experienced it.

  Until now.

  I tilted my head and stared at the magic lines. Had they found that old memory? Or was the ghost of my mother still here?

  I glanced at the light, upstage center like it was supposed to be. It appeared to be on. But was it?