Fiction River: Hex in the City (30 page)

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 magic 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?

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 16
th
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.