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

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

  “Thanks, Gary.”

  She slipped the pouch of countermeasures out of her bag and stuffed it into the pocket of her jacket. One good thing about the Vivienne Westwood French Revolution dandy couture she’d put on this morning was an abundance of places to stash things.

  She walked over to the camera, a gorgeous Arriflex she would have loved to take home with her.

  “Arthur,” she whispered to the operator, “do me a favor? Forget to run the camera for this one, would you?”

  “You got it, Gosha.”

  She patted him on the shoulder. A veteran of the film business, Arthur was no stranger to on-set politics.

  Johnny, Mick, and the others hit their marks, their faces wiped clean of offending cosmetics, Johnny’s magnificent coat replaced by a boring silk vest.

  Forty people stared at her, waiting for her to call ‘action.’

  She looked back at Darren, who gave her a thumbs up.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Quiet on set!” shouted Gary, setting in motion a clockwork machine of human activity. “Lights!”

  Five thousand watts of incandescence struck the plywood, chicken wire, fabric, and glitter, turning it into a shimmering wonderland.

  “Roll camera!”

  “Speed,” the camera assistant called back, and a PA stepped in front of the lens to clap the slate.

  “Roll playback!”

  Four loud electronic bleeps echoed across the empty warehouse.

  “Action!” shouted Gosha. The dolly beneath her rolled back on thick rubber wheels as the first bars of synthesized bass and drums throbbed through her chest, taking her breath away.

  She huddled over the Arriflex and peered through the viewfinder. Even hobbled, the band were brilliant. Johnny danced in an explosion of color as he strutted across the set, lip-syncing and gyrating to the backing track while Mick pounded at his rack of keyboards, a musical mad scientist with crazed hair and eyeliner, fused to his keyboard and guitar. The boys threw themselves into it like they were the Bay City Rollers on Saturday morning children’s TV. Johnny was Elvis Presley reborn, and Mick possessed all the bounce of a young Paul McCartney, the other two goofing around in the background like they were down the pub. It was charming, but she knew what they were capable of: sex and longing and danger. They’d go far, these boys.

  Swish Brigade had come a long way since she first saw them play on a bill sandwiched between a man singing earnest protest songs to mangled chords on a cheap electric guitar, and a woman with an accordion performing off-key nineteen-sixties ballads. They blew the other performers away. Their music was seedy and futuristic, bridging the gap between punk and something much more subversive, and the crowd lapped them up. Johnny and Mick’s interpretation twisted the cheery pop of the obscure Dusty Springfield tune the record company was making them cover for their first single into a plaintive lament to sexual frustration.

  The final bars of bleating synthesizers and distorted guitars faded away into echoes that bounced around the vast open space.

  “Cut!”

  She swaggered over to Darren with a bravado she didn’t feel. Flashes of the dead flickered in and out around her, making it difficult to know what was real and what was a phantom.

  “Well, Darren? Happy?”

  “Yeah.” He did his best to play it cool, but he’d seen a taste of their charisma. The finished product would be a thousand times better.

  “Lovely, darling.” She kissed him on both cheeks. “Now fuck off and let the elves turn shit into gold.” The promise of easy money was the only thing men like Darren understood. And profanity. They loved it when their sex objects talked filth. She did her best not to flinch when he patted her on the bottom as he left.

  Darren handled meant one less problem to think about. She paused before heading back to the camera. Indistinct suggestions of shape and movement flickered in and out around her in the dim corners of the warehouse.

  “He’s gone, Mrs. Armitage,” said a young PA, clutching her clipboard and walkie-talkie across her breasts like a shield against Darren’s unwanted gaze.

  “Down the pub to get smashed, I’ve no doubt. Get me my handbag, would you?”

  She strode back to the camera and clapped her hands.

  “Let’s reset for another take. Lads, come with me!”

  The PA brought over her bag as she led them to the makeup table.

  “Marie, get Kevin and Keith back to the way they were. I’ll do the other two. Johnny, you first.”

  She pulled her makeup kit from her bag and spread out the collection of pots and palettes and readied herself to take advantage of the sudden lack of supervision. Her initial proposal to the record company was a much more extreme look.

  “Remember that first set of sketches I showed you?”

  “With all the blocks of color?” Johnny’s face lit up at the memory.

  “That’s how I'm going to make you up.”

  He grinned and clapped his hands with glee.

  Something clicked within and her world came into focus, the anxiety of having to prove herself melting away. At fourteen she had plucked up her courage and begged her mother to allow her to get a job in the village like all the other girls her age. If they hadn’t needed cash, her mother never would have allowed it, but witchcraft didn’t often pay in hard currency and there was only so much for which you could barter. The job of shopgirl at Mrs. Halliwell’s Boutique for Ladies of Distinction was much sought-after among the girls at school, but Gosha’s mother had cured Mrs. Halliwell’s chronic chest infection when a fleet of doctors failed. Gosha was hired as a general assistant on the spot. The first time Geraldine at the cosmetics counter had made her up Gosha was smitten by visions of Hollywood glamor. Of course, she had to wash it all off before she got home or her mother would have had a fit, but until then, Gosha’s evenings had been filled with alternating bouts of boredom and terror assisting her mother with complex and disgusting potions and charms for the many visitors to the kitchen. Now she had something to dream about.

  Making an impact these days meant being bold. Bowie had just released a new video in full New Romantic drag turning the music world on its head. It was Swish Brigade’s bad luck to have signed with a record label more interested in mining tired pop styles from the sixties and seventies than letting artists like Johnny and Mick get on with it.

  “There you go.” She dabbed a final coat of powder on his face. “What do you think?”

  Blocks of iridescent purple covered his eyes and lips, while clouds of magenta blush contoured his cheekbones against moon-pale skin, the warpaint of an alien god.

  “Amazing,” he whispered.

  At sixteen, she stole a concoction from her mother’s pantry that gave her flu symptoms for two hours, long enough to convince the school nurse to send her home. Instead she caught the bus to the nearest cinema for a matinee of Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor. After that, she knew she wanted to work in movies and hatched a plan to get away from her mother. Even she would agree she was useless in the kitchen, scarcely any help at all, but she learned enough to concoct her own cosmetics: foundation, concealer, and blush with just enough witchcraft in them to wipe ten years of hard living off the face of any man or woman. Mrs. Halliwell snapped up everything she could produce. The Saturday after her final day of school, Gosha threw as many of her possessions as she dared into her satchel, said goodbye to her mother as if she were off to the shop, and hopped on the first train to London, a wad of pound notes in her pocket.

  “Get your jacket back from wardrobe.” She shooed Johnny away. “Mick!”

  His pale, round face emerged from the gloom. His makeup would be easier: asymmetrical tribal marks in purple, blue, and red.

  “You all set?”

  She tucked tissue paper around his collar to protect it from the pigment. He didn't respond, his gaze a million miles away.

  “Ground control to Mick?” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Everything okay?”
>
  His face lit up as he looked at her.

  “Oh, yes. Couldn’t be better.”

  Two men in sweat-stained work shirts walked past, one in tears, the other with a comforting arm draped across his shoulders. They grew faint and dissipated into nothingness.

  She should have known better than to shoot in Bosworth Grove. Most of the neighborhood had been abandoned since the seventies, leaving acres of industrial space empty for artists to colonize. Her one attempt at renting a studio here lasted a week. The pressure on her senses was too overpowering. Most months the episodes only came with her cycle, but the short corridor between Barnaby Chase and Stepbourne Canal had been one of the worst neighborhoods of London. Only Whitechapel was more notorious. Several hundred years of crime and misery left vestiges of shattered lives potent enough they could erupt into her awareness at any moment. If she stayed still and focused, she could sometimes keep the apparitions from erupting. She only hoped she hadn’t left it too long for her countermeasures to do any good.

  It took another hour before the call for lunch. The band was brilliant, take after take. The crew made everything she had hoped for come to pass, but she couldn’t enjoy any of it. Despite her efforts at self-control, the phantoms intruded like cuttings of film projected on layers of scrim around her, transparent superimpositions spreading out and obscuring her connection to reality.

  If her mother could see her this way, she’d be ecstatic.

  “I told you so,” Gosh could hear her mother cackle in her Polish accent. “But you think you know better.”

  But her mother’s way, cynical and mean, had filled Gosha's childhood with horror, forcing them to flee Poland and take refuge in a small town miles from everyone she’d ever known, her one source of hope the train that chugged down the line toward London three times daily, four on Saturdays.

  And now, when all her ambitions were coming to fruition, the occult threatened to suck her back into its stinking and corrupted claws.

  She struggled through five more takes of the master shot and a few inserts before the call for lunch when she could slink away clutching her pouch of countermeasures. She found herself an abandoned corridor in the back of the warehouse, safe enough despite the worn and rotted floorboards buckling underneath her. The flickering and jarring of phantoms was minimal, and the decaying dividers gave enough cover to open her pouch and get to work.

  Stashed in the bag were a hodgepodge of religious paraphernalia cobbled together over the years: a Jewish tefillin, a tiny leather box containing prayers from the Torah attached to a leather strap to wrap around one arm, a Catholic rosary for the other, a figurine of a Santeria orisha, and the phial of holy water from an Anglican church.

  She had the tefillin strap wound halfway up her arm when a young production assistant stuck her head around the corner and got an eyeful of strangeness. The girl stammered apologies for intruding, her eyes bulging out of her head as she backed away.

  Great, thought Gosha. Perhaps the girl will think I’m doing drugs. That would be easier to explain.

  The phantoms first appeared around her eighteenth birthday, a year after running away from home and a decade before she and her mother had worked their way back to a cordial relationship. Without guidance, she was forced to find her own ways to keep them at bay. The power of religious paraphernalia to banish them was a chance discovery. Without her mother to ask, she’d never discovered why it worked. But she was inquisitive and adventurous. Since fleeing her mother’s oppression, Gosha never let ignorance stand in the way of a successful plan of attack. The beauty of living in a cosmopolitan city like London, and in a hub of international cultures like Cheyne Heath, was exposure to every imaginable color and creed. Time, curiosity and the willingness to look foolish was all it took to develop this little ritual.

  Tefillin on one arm and rosary around the other, she held the little figurine and the phial of holy water as she recited a Jewish prayer, an ‘Our Father,’ and a ‘Hail Mary.’ She turned around three times counterclockwise and sprinkled the holy water over her head and to the four cardinal directions.

  She believed in none of it, and her homespun ritual would be an affront to anyone of the faiths she was appropriating, but it did the trick. The jittery angst throbbing through her calmed and the flickering, disjointed apparitions faded, allowing her to go on working and give the job the attention it deserved. She closed her eyes for a moment to enjoy the quiet.

  Feeling a little lighter in her bones, she unwrapped the tefillin and rosary and put everything back in the pouch, but the relief didn’t even last a minute. As she stepped back into the cavernous open space of the set, a dark streak smeared across her vision, an omen she’d experienced before.

  Someone was about to die.

  2

  Gosha’s heart leaped in her chest as panic ratcheted her muscles tight around her bones. The omen of death was only a smudge in the corner of her eye, but it would spread, lengthening and curling into a circular vignette of darkness around the edges of her peripheral vision. ‘Widow’s weeds’ her mother had called it. It would grow and grow until someone close to her was dead.

  She checked her watch. Noon. Her mother had claimed widow’s weeds never lasted for longer than twelve hours. She had at most until midnight, though the rate at which the abomination spread around her field of vision told her it would happen soon. When her grandmother died, it took hours, before a truck ran her cousin down, only a few minutes. Her father lived long enough to eat his lunch and sit down to watch the news.

  “Gosha, love, are we doing the dancers next?” Gary ambled over, his kind eyes and receding hairline peering over a roast beef sandwich. She’d met his wife and daughter only last week. He loved them so much. Would it be him?

  Her second sight might have told her, but she’d just done her best to cut it off, and the widow’s weeds gave her no clues.

  “Yes. Let’s get close-ups of their hand gestures and their hips moving in the costumes. Then the routine with just them before we bring the band back.”

  “Gotcha.” He folded the last bite of roast beef sandwich into his mouth as he headed back toward the lunch table, his feet shuffling across the rough floor in a playful lope. A picture of his lifeless face flashed before her eyes, his body sprawled on the ground. Only an impression of dread, not a premonition, but it broke her heart.

  Most of her mother’s witchcraft was common sense dressed up in pantomime and spices from the pantry, but there were other things she did that Gosha couldn’t explain: words in the secret tongue her mother spoke only in whispers or behind closed doors where only the other women of her family were present, words that caused a scar to melt away, or a gimpy leg to take weight, or cured the weakness of a near-lethal bout of influenza.

  Every evening growing up, the old witch had forced her to help greet the visitors to her kitchen. If the inexplicable things her mother took out of the locked cabinet in the pantry didn’t scare her witless, the tedious litanies of mundane problems the women and men of the village came to her mother to solve bored her to distraction. Either way, she absorbed very little of what her mother tried to teach her.

  And now, with a death sentence hanging over one of the crew, she wished she hadn’t been so stupid. Thirty people were on set with her and she had no way of knowing who was the target of the widow’s weeds. The stain of death kept spreading, an hour or two at most until its awful release. How would she find out who the widow’s weeds had doomed to die?

  The wardrobe mistress approached with a costumed dancer in tow to get Gosha’s approval. Neither of them could be older than twenty-three. Was it one of them? They both looked so perfect, so fresh-faced, their lives so delicate to Gosha knowing that one of them might soon be dead.

  She approved the outfit and sent the two girls on their way. The pressure of knowing someone was about to die clutched at her ribs and made it hard to breathe. She needed to focus, to consider her options. If only she hadn’t used her countermeasures. The
ritual that dispelled the longings of the dead dampened the only access she had to her mother’s world of occult mysteries.

  The hard edge of her camera pressed into her ribs as she clutched her bag against her. Maybe there was something in it. She crouched and shook out the bag, its contents pouring onto the floor: a dozen rolls of unexposed film; her chunky Nikkormat camera and her tiny Instamatic; one of Timothy’s stuffed toys; a bag of cough drops; her notebook and a handful of pens; her makeup kit; the countermeasures. And a small manila envelope containing a few sprigs of white sage, leftovers from a session with a South America shaman in Golders Green she’d attended with her friend, Miranda, after Miranda got out of rehab and was searching for something to provide her life with deeper meaning.

  She sniffed the sage, a complex, mouth-watering aroma, and her panic softened just a smidge, just enough for her gaze to soften and the suggestion of phantoms to flicker around her.

  It might do the trick.

  She waved at a passing PA.

  “Darling, do you have a light?”

  “Sorry, Gosha.” What was his name? Eric? Wasn’t he the cameraman’s nephew? “There’s no smoking in here. Fire hazard.”

  She swept her things back in her bag, the envelope of sage in her hand.

  “Oh, I know, but I’m gagging for a fag. I promise I’ll go outside.”

  She winked at him as he handed her a disposable lighter, amazed that she was able to act cool with her mind racing.

  “I’ll bring it back. Promise.”

  Outside, on the street by the loading bay, she dropped her bag at her feet and fished out a sprig of sage. What had they done with the shaman? A prayer to the four directions. Too religious. That would only reinforce the countermeasures. What would her mother do to prepare to read someone’s fortune? Roll her bloody acorn pendant between her fingers and mutter something incomprehensible to herself. Also not helpful.

  There was another way, she realized, and rummaged through her bag to fish out the Nikkormat. Experience shooting hundreds of portraits had taught her to unfocus her rational mind and turn the camera lens into a scrying glass to draw out images when inspiration escaped her. She could do the same now. With a little extra help.