Fiction River: Hex in the City

by Fiction River

  I wasn’t certain, and the pain wasn’t ebbing. I had to leave.

  I backed up, stunned that I had only gone a few feet into the theater. It felt like I had walked half the length of backstage.

  My hand found the door. The locks had turned again. They were covered with pinkish magical light. My light, from my spell, one I couldn’t repeat or I would be saying the words of the Scottish Play inside a theater, something I never did.

  I caressed the pinkish light. “Repeat,” I commanded, hoping that would work.

  The pink flared and the white lines inched toward it. But the locks all turned at once, and the door eased open. Either the theater wanted shed of me, or it was protecting me by getting me out quickly.

  I hurried through the door, and it slammed behind me.

  I stood in the alley, stunned to see that the lights of the pubs around me were off. The stench of fried food and ale had faded to a common everyday odor, and the smell of vomit had receded to a near-memory. How long had I been inside?

  I did not wear a watch nor did I carry a cell phone—such devices, mechanical and digital, interfered with my magic—so I had no idea of the time.

  I looked at the sky, expecting to see some darkness. Instead, the sky was pinkish, and it wasn’t from my magic.

  Dawn was breaking.

  I had lost time, and that was the worst thing of all.

  ***

  By the time I made it back to the Savoy, the pain in my chest had vanished, leaving only a sharp ache. I was deep-down tired, the kind of bone-aching exhaustion that had nothing to do with jet lag and everything to do with a serious expenditure of energy.

  Hotels in the morning were a mixture of bustle and calm. A tour group passed a pile of luggage to the bellman for his storage area. A gaggle of American tourists were making their very loud way to the Thames Foyer in the heart of the hotel. I was surprised the smell of kippers didn’t make them leave. Or perhaps that was my personal taste.

  I headed toward the wood paneled lift, which always struck me as too rickety for a famous five-star hotel that charged more per night than most Americans made in a month. But I was being picky, partly because my head was starting to hurt now, and I had some decisions to make.

  Charles, my on-call butler, scurried toward me, anxious to please. I had forgotten the so-called amenities that the high-end hotels had. I didn’t find them amenities at all, and if I had remembered, I would have told the producers who hired me that I needed to stay in an anonymous touristy hotel in the heart of the West End.

  I had Charles order me a large continental breakfast with coffee, and let myself into the one-room suite that some hotelier had named after Noel Coward. My grandmother and her sisters told delicious stories about Coward, his wit and his kindness. I had no idea if he would have been kind about the suite. His photographs were everywhere, and they distracted from the view of the Thames.

  I passed the living room altogether, and flopped on the bed, reaching for the phone on the bedside table. I punched the code for an outside line, then dialed my sister Viola, the only sister with the right kind of magic that allowed her to carry a phone 24/7.

  “Where are you?” she asked without saying hello. She always knew it was me on the other end of the line, even if I called her on a pay phone from a town I hadn’t told her I’d be in.

  “You know where I’m at,” I said.

  “That’s not what I meant. Aunt Eustacia is about to give up. She says she’s going to be here in three days.”

  I wasn’t going to deal with Aunt Eustacia and the Bolshoi, not right now. I had my own theater problems.

  “You might want to tell her to hold off,” I said.

  “And why’s that?” Viola asked.

  “Because I think the Lancaster killed Mother,” I said.

  Viola made a dismissive sound that had a magic all its own. “Of course the Lancaster killed Mother. She was alone. Do you know how hard I’ve had to work to get Aunt Eustacia to see reason? She can’t handle the Bolshoi, not without her sisters. And her sisters—”

  “Vi,” I said, “it has nothing to do with working alone.”

  “You would say that,” she said. “You’re there, in London, on assignment while Rosalind and I are here, waiting to put our mother’s spirit to rest.”

  “You won’t be able to do that,” I said. “I’m not sure her spirit went with her body.”

  “Now you’re being paranoid,” she said.

  “No,” I said, feeling incredibly tired. “Don’t you understand? I’m asking for help.”

  ***

  You must understand the implications of that moment: I had never asked for my sisters’ help before. I was one of the only magical dramaturge in the entire world, and I was in constant demand, even though I only took one or two jobs a year.

  My sisters took the remaining jobs, and on the disasters you’d heard of (including that massive superhero musical monstrosity that should never have been allowed in a Broadway theater), my sisters would call me for help.

  They preferred to work as a threesome, like the women of our family had done all the way back to the dawn of the modern English theater in the 16th century. The industrial revolution actually harmed the threesomes, because it became economical for one sister to travel to a small theater somewhere to solve a small problem. Then there were sister things, the in-fighting sisters always did, especially close sisters, like the women in our family. Going back generations, none of us had been separated by more than a year—three sisters born in three years. There was no real word for that, although my father, ever the naïve man, tried to call us Irish Triplets for a while. My mother hated that.

  She also, by the end, hated her sisters. They held her back or so she believed. I personally thought she was like my sister Rosalind, the least talented of the trio. Aunt Eustacia had all of the power, or she did, until Laylee’s death. And then it all started to go awry, just like it had for our grandmother when the first of her sisters died.

  I figured I had at least six hours of uninterrupted sleep before my sisters arrived. I ate most of the breakfast, then closed my eyes.

  I had forgotten Viola’s penchant for daring the traffic cameras on the A30 to catch her going double the speed limit. Since Viola’s magic let her control technology, she never got caught—and she never hit anything while she was driving. Still, I hated to be in a car with her.

  As a result of Viola’s singular talent, my sisters arrived at my hotel room in less than four hours. It was almost enough to make one believe that witches really could fly.

  I heard Charles the butler arguing with them before one of them spelled the lock and opened the door to my room, claiming all along that I had left a key for them at the desk.

  I had fallen asleep in my clothes, spread-eagle on the bed, and I sat up, my hair tangled and my mouth tasting of rancid butter.

  “Coffee. Shower. Then conversation,” I said as I staggered out into the living room. But of course it didn’t work that way. When you grew up with two siblings near your age, you got used to a certain lack of privacy in the bathroom, even an ornate bathroom with a specially designed rain shower.

  They shouted questions at me, and I shouted answers, hoping the walls weren’t too thin. I wasn’t about to get out to tell them everything.

  Still, when I emerged and wrapped myself in a ridiculously thick and luxurious towel, my hair dripping on my shoulders and my bare feet sliding on the marble floor, my sisters looked as disconcerted as I had felt in that theater.

  The reason? My mention of that pain which ran from my mouth to my heart. I hadn’t realized Mother had pulled the same trick on all of them.

  Rosalind leaned against the marble counter, her back to the mirror. Her reflection showed up all over the room, reaffirming once again how perfect her dark hair always looked, and how her height accented her trim figure. Her appearance varied depending on needs—she could make herself boyish, even though no one would describe her that way at the moment.<
br />
  She always made me feel insecure, especially when I was naked and wrapped in a towel, which happened more than I liked.

  “Tell me,” she said in that cultured Katharine Hepburn voice of hers. “Did that deep pain happen after you conjured her with your childhood fairy dust?”

  “After,” I said.

  “Crap,” Viola said. She was sitting on the toilet lid, her elbows on the back of the toilet. She was the smallest of the three of us, and if I hadn’t known she had the brown family mane, I would have thought her the natural blond she pretended to be.

  “You do realize, Porty, what this means,” Rosalind said. I winced. I hated the nickname as much as I hated my real name. Portia. Gauche American men sometimes conflated me with the car. I could never explain to them that Mother had perpetrated a cruel joke when she named her daughters after three of Shakespeare’s most famous women.

  “What does this mean, Rosy?” I asked, wishing that my play on her name had more effect.

  “Mother’s spirit might still be in there,” she said.

  “Ya think?” I asked.

  “That’s why Portia brought us here,” Viola said to Rosalind. “You really shouldn’t stress the obvious.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I brought you here because that theater’s a nightmare, and it’s dangerous to anyone with even a thread of magic. I know I can’t clean all of the warnings and hexes and spells out of it on my own. I’m not sure the three of us can.”

  “But Mother thought she could,” Rosalind said.

  “And look where it got her,” Viola said. “Perhaps we should call Aunt Eustacia.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do first.”

  ***

  What we could do involved computers (Viola), research at museums and libraries (Rosalind), and discussions with the play’s producers (me). Viola sat quietly in my suite’s living room, happily surrounded by the photographs of Noel Coward, while I sprawled on the bed with the landline, trying to talk the producers out of a joint walk-through in the theater. I wasn’t going back inside the Lancaster alone, but I didn’t want to go with those folks either.

  Finally, I got them to send over an employee with a package of all the materials the theater’s unofficial historian had used to put together the “history” of the Lancaster and, more importantly, a key. Charles the butler once again circumvented the room service staff and delivered lunch, promising to order afternoon tea if we were still in the room.

  We were. I went over materials, Viola kept making muttery noises, and Rosalind returned, dusty and triumphant, clutching photocopies of ancient records.

  “We have troubles,” she said, waving the papers at us.

  “Toil and tr—?”

  “Don’t you dare quote the Scottish Play,” I snapped at Viola.

  “For heavens sake,” she said. “We’re not in a theater.”

  “We’re surrounded by pictures of Noel Coward,” I said. “What if that’s enough?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Technically,” Rosalind said, picking at the chips, which were all that remained on the plate for my club sandwich, “the Savoy herself could be considered a theater, given all of the performances that occurred here.”

  “Whatever,” Viola said, not looking up from her computer screen. “So I won’t ask if your news is fair or foul.”

  “Viola!” we said in unison. “Stop!”

  “It’s not a direct quote,” she said.

  This was what irritated me about my youngest sister. She had a terrible penchant for testing the edges of things, including magical rules.

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked Rosalind, trying to change the subject.

  She spread photocopies of very old maps on the table. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Still, all I saw were black lines from a badly tended copy machine and images that looked too faint to understand.

  “I’ve seen that before,” Viola said, and tapped at the keyboard. An image appeared on her computer screen with a helpful header: 16th Century London.

  Rosalind didn’t even look at the computer. She tried not to use technology at all if she could avoid it.

  “This map was made sometime in the last two decades of the 16th century,” she said, her back to the computer. “See anything?”

  “Not really,” I muttered.

  “No,” Viola said.

  “Here.” Rosalind’s finger slapped the center of one of the photocopies. “See it now?”

  “No,” I said.

  Viola tapped at her keyboard and made another humming noise. “That’s the site of the Lancaster?”

  “Yes,” Rosalind said.

  “Oh, dear,” Viola said.

  “Oh, dear, what?” I asked.

  Viola raised her head and frowned at me. “It’s a house.”

  “So?”

  “You’ve always insisted on calling it a hovel.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, and sat down. Then I realized what was going on. “You can’t know for certain that this was where Shakespeare’s witches lived.”

  “I wouldn’t call them ‘Shakespeare’s witches,’” Rosalind said. “For a so-called scholar, you’re incredibly lazy.”

  “They might’ve been fairies,” Viola said.

  “We’re not going to get into textural analysis,” I snapped. Many modern scholars believed the witches were an addition by Thomas Middleton.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Rosalind said. “The hovel was here.”

  “Why would they build a theater on top of it?” I asked.

  “Let me do a quick search,” Viola said. That clicking keyboard was driving me nuts. I glanced at the materials the producers had sent over, and something caught my eye.

  A claim, on the original broadsheet for the current performance of the Scottish Play. “Is this true?” I asked Viola, shoving the paper in front of her.

  “I’m checking,” she said without glancing at it.

  “Is what true?” Rosalind asked as she came up behind me. I handed her the broadsheet.

  Her skin actually lost all color, and she sat down on a nearby chair. “Oh, my God,” she said.

  “It’s true,” Viola said.

  We looked at each other. I have no idea how they felt, but my heart pounded so hard that I was sure they could hear it in Westminster Abbey.

  “No one’s ever performed the Scottish Play in the Lancaster before,” Rosalind said. “Not once in three hundred years?”

  “Not that I can find,” Viola said.

  “Obviously the historian looked for it too,” I said.

  Rosalind rubbed her forehead with her forefingers. “Oh, my God,” she said. “We’re doomed.”

  ***

  408 Years Ago…Or maybe 421 or maybe even 418…not that precision matters in this instance…familial and theatrical lore state that one William Shakespeare made a deal with three witches. They would share their magic with him, and he would protect them.

  Protection was important back then. Witches were persecuted on both sides of the Atlantic. Burned at the stake, stoned, buried alive, drowned, around 60,000 people were executed in the three centuries that witch persecutions infected Europe and her colonies.

  Most of those people were innocents—real witches had enough magic to protect themselves (even if they chose not to use it)—but that didn’t mean the terror brought on by these persecutions was any less real.

  The story goes that Shakespeare wrote The Scottish Play to impress King James I of England (and VI of Scotland) who was one of the prime proponents of smoking out witches. Initially, the play was supposed to be a cautionary tale for the monarch—be careful how you usurp power. Then Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament in the Gun Powder plot, which would have resulted in the death of hundreds, including the King himself, and Shakespeare decided his timely critique of the King was a bit too seditious.

  So he revised the Scottish Play and, some believe (my family believes) added the witch sequences t
o deflect some of the criticisms.

  The witches who had served as Shakespeare’s advisors, who taught him the magic that made his words live, grew angry and cursed The Scottish Play, partly to prevent the inadvertent practice of magic the play caused.

  Because all those famous lines about boiling and toiling and eyes of newt were actually parts of existing spells. Shakespeare believed if he didn’t put the entire spell in there, nothing would get cast, not understanding the nature of magic, the way that a particularly talented actor could call a bit of the craft to himself just by being in character.

  What we three faced was a conjunction of magic, a mixing of spells ancient and modern, mixed with superstition, fear, and not a little bit of good old-fashioned revenge, even if it was four hundred years too late.

  “No wonder the theater burned down so many times,” Viola said. “It had nothing to do with the stupid play Henry VIII. The theater got burned down to get rid of the magic.”

  “You’d think our family would keep records,” Rosalind said. “That way we wouldn’t have to keep reinventing the wheel, and making it look like Shakespeare’s ghost hated that misattributed play.”

  “It wasn’t our family.” I was shivering. “If it had been our family, the magic would have dissipated. We’re the ones who originated the curse, after all.”

  “You mean others tried to get rid of it?” Viola asked.

  I nodded. There were other magical dramaturge over the centuries. Some were even passingly good. But none approached our family in talent or vision.

  “That’s what Mother was warning against,” I said more to myself than to them. “She wasn’t upset at me for making a snide comment. She had released the last of her magic at her death to let us know that the curse had come from our lips. Our familial lips. She had solved part of this already.”

  My heart ached, but this time because Mother died alone, not because of her curse.

  “She realized it was too strong for her by herself,” Rosalind said.

  “It takes three,” Viola said staring at me. “Just like it always has.”