***
We snuck back to the theater at midnight. We were making this up on the fly. None of us had ever approached a curse this old, let alone one that had been active worldwide. Nor had we ever tried to disable a curse that had another curse woven into it.
We figured that those lines I saw were the words of the Scottish Play, spoken on stage, spoken backstage, spoken throughout the theater, sent forward like little missiles and wrapping with the existing magic, turning the theater into a thicket of competing curses, one inadequately done.
Until we arrived outside the Lancaster, I didn’t even think to ask the producers which version of the Scottish Play they had chosen. Did it include Hecate? In that case, dozens of hands had touched it. Did it leave out the Porter? In that case, it was a modern version without a gateway to the magical realm.
I could have had Viola call the producers, but that would alert them to our presence at the theater. We decided to try this first, and if it failed, then we would try again, with direct knowledge of which version of the play we were attacking.
For good measure, though, Viola left a phone message—a sticky voice mail, she called it, which meant one that couldn’t be deleted ever—for Aunt Eustacia just in case we didn’t get out of this. Frankly, we wasted even more time arguing about what Aunt Eustacia would do about this, since her sisters were dead and her son’s wife had only recently given birth to his third daughter.
We decided it wasn’t our problem—or it wouldn’t be. We would be dead, a thought that made all three of us shudder in unison.
Then we got busy.
We decided not to enter through the stage door. The key we had opened the theater lobby, and here was where we found the 1970s reds and silvers. There were fewer webs of magic up here, as we suspected there would be. They were creeping out of the doors leading to the house, but they hadn’t arrived.
We all wore black, the closest we could get to traditional witch’s attire. Rosalind wore some designer gown that looked like it belonged on this red carpet. Viola had chosen a pseudo Disco revival thing in keeping with the theater’s redesign, and I wore the simple black dress I always traveled in. Our only concession to the modern era was black athletic shoes. We wanted to be able to run if we had to.
Viola clutched our great-grandmother’s cauldron, which she had thought to bring from Cornwall. The stupid thing was supposed to have been part of Mother’s death ritual. The cauldron was smaller than I remembered it, and scarred up with hundreds of years of use.
Rosalind held the proper ingredients for the spell, and I had the spell written down in the correct order, so I wouldn’t have to think about it.
Someone had left a light on in the lobby, and it probably wasn’t a ghost light, but proper security lighting mandated by a proper security company. We hadn’t disabled the security alarm, deciding not to use magic inside the theater until we were ready.
We stopped for just a moment, staring at the bank of doors ahead of us. The box office was covered with a padlocked board that looked like it might discourage even the most determined burglar.
“I would love to set up out here,” Rosalind said—and these half measures were why she wasn’t as good as Viola and I at dealing with theatrical magic.
“We set up as close to the magic as we can safely get,” I said.
“This is close enough,” Rosalind said.
“Nope,” Viola said. “We have to at least get inside the house. If we do this away from the stage, we negate the powers given us.”
She wanted to do a flying spell before we got inside, so that we could fly over the magic to the stage, drop down like the witches of old, set up the cauldron and say our bit.
Flying magic was half-assed and rarely effective. Besides, the story of our three ancestors doing the same thing to the Scottish Play after it premiered was apocryphal. I had looked that much up years ago when I started as a magical dramaturg, and that one thing had led to my degree in Elizabethan history.
“Look,” Rosalind said, pointing toward the set of doors leading into the theater proper. Viola and I turned.
A shape rested outside them, curled in a fetal position. I went closer, my sisters following.
It was Mother. Or what remained of Mother. Her spirit, some would say. Her magic, others would say.
“So much for the death ritual,” Viola said with the characteristic bitterness she felt toward our mother. “She wouldn’t have attended anyway.”
“I don’t think she would have been able to attend,” I said, crouching. Mother’s spirit, usually outlined in green, had turned almost completely white. The tendrils of the multiple curses had seeped under the door and nearly enveloped her.
“She’s trapped here,” Rosalind said.
We looked at each other. We didn’t have to speak our single thought: For a moment, we were tempted to leave her and walk away. She would have done so had it been magically expedient.
“Let’s try a different door,” Viola said, and the moment passed.
She pulled open a door to the right of Mother.
The seats ran downward toward the orchestra pit, the stage illuminated behind it. The ghost light was on, of course, but that wasn’t what made this theater so bright.
In the 24 hours since I’d last been here, magical webs had gotten thicker. They coated everything. And now that I stood just on the edge of them, I could see multiple colors of magic.
Rosalind opened her mouth to utter some kind of surprised oath, then clearly changed her mind. She shut her mouth.
“You want us to wade through that?” she asked me.
Even if we could start, I wasn’t sure we would get through. I barely made it to the stage the night before, and that was going through a thicket not one-tenth as powerful as this. Now we had five times the distance to cover, and one-hundred times the magic to fight.
I glanced around us. The magic dripped down the walls, coated the doors, and swirled around our feet. It would prevent us from leaving if it could.
“We do it here, I guess,” I said, my heart pounding. I’d been a witch all my life, and I’d dealt with some powerful curses, but all of them threatened someone else, never me.
This one could destroy me and my sisters, just like it had destroyed my mother.
“Let’s set up,” Rosalind said, and, to her credit, did not add, and do this fast. Because we all knew if we did it fast, we would do it wrong. We had to pretend we had all the time in the world.
Which we most decidedly did not.
***
We took the cauldron to the center of the back of the theater, directly across from the ghost light. We deliberately did not set the cauldron near the door that Mother’s spirit lurked behind.
We had to fill it with the ingredients Rosalind held. We had to improvise with those, which didn’t make me feel the best. Instead of water from the nearest swamp, which Viola took to be the Thames and Rosalind took to be water from the latest rainstorm running down the back alley, I decided we would use local ale, made with local ingredients, made by one of the local pubs. Rosalind found one that had had a series of health complaints and we decided to use that.
That was the easiest ingredient to find. The whole eye-of-newt thing, much tougher. Not even modern New Age shops carried anything like it, and the one true magical store that we knew of had closed nearly a decade earlier.
Plus we couldn’t use magic to heat the cauldron. We needed a real fire, which we were loathe to do. Viola bought a gigantic hot plate that ran on batteries of all things, and we hoped it would work.
Modern improvisation meets ancient magic. Fortunately, our family’s magic was old enough that we knew these improvisations happened all the time. If we hit on the right formula, we would make it through.
If we did not, then our spirits would be trapped here with Mother’s forever, which was my personal version of hell.
We combined everything quickly. As we did so, the tendrils of white magic climbed up our legs, but
the darker tendrils—which some would have called black but which I slowly realized were dark as fresh blood—tried to fight them off.
The family magic recognized us, and was combatting the newer magic. I hoped it would buy us time.
Whatever we had made in that cauldron truly smelled foul. Ale mixed with sewers mixed with the stench of decaying flesh. My eyes watered, and my hands shook.
We circled the cauldron as I recited the original witch’s spell from the original version of the Scottish Play. Only part of it appeared in modern reprintings, with certain words changed to take away power. I changed the words back, added the missing ones, and said the spell backwards which was, according to our personal grimoires, the only way to reverse an ancient spell.
By the time I got to the second “boil,” and finished the backwards recitation, the magic had reached our hips. It was impossible to walk any longer. Smoke and foul odors rose from the cauldron, but nothing else happened.
Rosalind had opened her mouth to inform me of that, when the air ignited around us.
The white tendrils exploded, the dark tendrils covered them, and my legs felt like they were on fire. My sisters’ hair stood straight up, which I would have laughed at in any other circumstance, but this time, I knew it for what it was.
The air had become magic-charged with new and old curses battling each other for supremacy. The cauldron glowed yellow—our combined magical colors—and a spirit rose out of it, waving at us dismissively. The green color near the hands told me all I knew.
Mother’s spirit, trying to save us for once.
We didn’t need to be told twice. I grabbed the nearest door handle, burning hot against my hand, and yanked the door open. Smoke rose from the spots where the tendrils had been, and a gigantic burn stain covered the carpet where Mother’s spirit had curled into its little fetal ball.
We ran across the lobby, and I wished that we had the flight spell now, because we needed to get out. Viola’s Disco gown, with its fancy uneven edges was on fire, and the edges of Rosalind’s dress had burned off. My feet were bare, and I only noticed that because the carpet felt cool under my toes.
We reached the main doors, shoved them open, and everything ignited around us—air, fire, magic. A deafening explosion followed, and we catapulted into the street without a flight spell at all, rolling along ancient cobblestone, until we came to rest against a parked Mercedes.
We slapped out the fires consuming each other’s clothes and realized that we had not been burned. No wonder the ancient witches worked naked. I would remember that for the next time.
If there was a next time.
I vowed there wouldn’t be.
Fire trucks, ambulances, police vehicles all sped down the narrow street. I knew they couldn’t have arrived that fast based on our explosion. They had come because we hadn’t shut off the security alarm and then there was an explosion.
I was about to tell my sisters we had to leave when Viola’s cell phone rang.
She pulled it out of the pocket of her shredded dress; the screen illuminated with a number none of us recognized.
“Yes?” she asked, her voice trembling.
The voice on the other end was so loud Rosalind and I could hear it too. Or maybe Viola had spelled it so she didn’t have to turn on the speaker. Or maybe she had turned on the speaker and I hadn’t noticed.
“Confounded device,” Aunt Eustacia said. “Girls? That better be you girls. Because there was a major magical occurrence. They just grounded my plane, claiming some kind of electrical impulse, but I know it wasn’t me. I’m spent. It was—”
And then the phone cut off.
“Oh, crap,” Viola said again. “She’s going to be mad.”
“Not going to be,” Rosalind said. “She is mad.”
I leaned my head against the car, watching as the Lancaster went up in flames. “We’re not done,” I said tiredly. “She’s right; this spell went everywhere. There will be spot fires throughout the West End.”
***
And there were. Every single theater in the West End had a tiny fire, usually contained to the prop room or an old pile of scripts. In the Gielgud, Playbills done for a 2007 version of the Scottish Play went up in flames. At the National, costumes from the 1970s ignited. Fortunately, the resident magical dramaturg at the rebuilt Globe stopped the stage fires as they began, and so did the dramaturg at the Royal Shakespeare Company. But two soundstages at the BBC went up as well, and something bad happened at Pinewood Studios, although no one would admit what.
We stopped it all. But reports kept coming in, from New York, Tokyo and Berlin, and other theaters around the world. Tiny fires, everywhere, igniting for a moment, and then usually burning out, although several Shakespeare companies lost everything.
The fires did not occur on the same night—the magic traveled at its own pace, as magic did—but they occurred within three days of our little explosion, and when it was done, Viola—tired, disheveled, and looking forever like the Shakespearean Twelfth Night character she was named for—said,
“So much for the curse of the Scottish Play.”
We looked at her. We were sitting inside the Noel Coward suite at the Savoy, too tired to get up and take showers, even though Charles the butler hinted we should.
“What do you mean?” Rosalind asked.
“That’s what went up, you know,” Viola said. “The curse.”
“You don’t believe it,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes. “What makes you think that?”
“If you believed it, you wouldn’t have called it the Scottish Play,” I said.
She grinned at me, then leaned her head back. “I have revised my opinion,” she said. “I now believe in caution. Besides, as you reminded me, the Savoy might be classed as a theater.”
It was, but I didn’t tell her that. Spot fires occurred that night in the famed American Bar and elsewhere in the famous property, all explained away by the typical problems the chefs had when serving cherries jubilee or bartenders had when making flaming drinks.
“Aunt Eustacia’s going to be mad that we lost the cauldron,” Rosalind said.
“Aunt Eustacia’s going to be mad that she missed the death ritual,” Viola said. We had all agreed that the events at the Lancaster were the proper death ritual, since that’s where Mother’s spirit had been trapped.
“Aunt Eustacia is just going to be mad,” I said.
I would have too, stuck in some backwater Russian airport while they tried to find a plane that would carry my magical aunt out of the country.
I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about anything—except a shower, and a long winter’s nap.
“We do work better together,” Viola said.
“Bite me,” I said.
She was right, of course; we did work better together. But that didn’t change my decision.
I was done with this profession.
Until the next time, anyway.
Acknowledgements
This project wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without the Kickstarter support from these wonderful people:
Gerard M. Ackerman
JC Andrijeski
Donald J. Bingle
Kirsten Brodbeck-Kenney
AnneMarie Buhl
T. Thorn Coyle
Gary Dockter
Eric Edstrom
Lynda Foley
Karen Fonville
Robbyn Foster
Mark-Wayne Harris
Malachi Kenney
Pierre L'Allier
Rich Laux
Stephen Lebans
Christel Adina Loar
John Lorentz
Michael Lucas
Big Ed Magusson
Lisa M. May
Robert J. McCarter
Sean Monaghan
Carole Nelson Douglas
Alexei Pawlowski
Jeanette Sanders
Risa Scranton
Janna Silverstein
Bob Sojka
Margaret St. John
Robert E. Stutts
Raphael Sutton
Scott Tefoe
Edd Vick
Terry Weyna
Stephanie Writt
Thank you!
About the Editor
Kerrie L. Hughes is a full-time writer, editor and researcher, currently located in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She has done ten anthologies for Tor and DAW, published nine short stories, two articles, and been a major contributor and editor for two compendiums on Mercedes Lackey and Lois McMaster Bujold. She is currently working on several book and anthology projects.
FICTION RIVER
Year One
Unnatural Worlds
Edited by Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch
How to Save the World
Edited by John Helfers
Time Streams
Edited by Dean Wesley Smith
Christmas Ghosts
Edited by Kristine Grayson
Hex in the City
Edited by Kerrie L. Hughes
Moonscapes
Edited by Dean Wesley Smith
Crime (Special Edition)
Edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
A subscription to Fiction River saves you money and ensures you receive the very best short fiction from some of today’s best authors. Subscriptions are available in electronic and trade paper formats and begin with the very next volume. Don’t wait! Subscribe today at www.FictionRiver.com.
Missed a volume? No problem. Buy individual volumes anytime from your favorite bookseller.
Fiction River: Hex in the City Page 23
