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

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

  She lit the sprig and waved the smoke around, breathing in deeply, and wished she was brazen enough to ask around if anyone had weed. That would do a much better job. The visions would be impossible to manage, but this was much more important than a bloody music video. As the sage seeped into her bloodstream, two men dressed in sixties mod suits fought, the victor knocking the loser to the ground and kicking him sharply in the head. Gosha reached in her bag and took out the rosary. As she wrapped it around her wrist, the two men faded. Maybe she could have it both ways: find the victim and do a halfway decent job directing the video.

  She went back in as Sally called the end of lunch. The crew geared up to work, giving Gosha a perfect opportunity to take pictures without drawing attention to herself as they set up the next shot. This was another thing she knew how to do well. Confidence in her own ability settled her nerves even further.

  This way of using the camera she’d taught herself opened something within her that summoned ghost images of the hidden desires of whoever she made the subject of her lens. If she looked past what her subject wanted her to see and saw what was truly there—the line of a body, the color of a cheek, the texture of a person’s clothes—any detail could be an entrée.

  She focused her lens on the young man in charge of the lunch table and shot off a few exploratory snaps. The film wound on with its satisfying, chunky click. She paused with the viewfinder held up to her eye and softened her gaze, allowing the composition within the frame to wash over her. Observing someone through her lens like this became an act of intimacy.

  He looked up.

  “Do you mind?” she asked.

  He smiled and shook his head.

  He wore jeans and a white t-shirt, with a red bandana tied around his neck and a red pair of suspenders clipped to his waistband. His appearance was simple, but deliberate, his t-shirt ironed and pristine, his haircut fresh and styled, short on the sides with just a hint of extravagance on the top. The contrast of his shirt against the dingy warehouse caught her eye, the shock of his brightness moving across the frame as he cleaned up the empty platters of food.

  An image came into her mind, an inner tableau different from the skittering fragments of anguished phantoms. She saw him sitting with friends, smiling and drinking in a pub somewhere, his arm around a girl who leaned in to kiss him. The image shifted to him in a tiny kitchen, oven gloves on his hands, pulling a dish from the stove. A sunny day in the park, a tablecloth on the lawn, the remains of an elaborate picnic spread out around him and his girlfriend. This was a man in love who liked to express his emotions with food.

  “Lunch was delicious,” she said, as she fired off another couple of shots.

  Nothing showed her he would be the one to die.

  The afternoon progressed. At every opportunity she pulled out her camera and took a photo or two, gleaning whatever she could from the crew and performers, but there was nothing. The time flew by, her desperation increasing as the smear of widow’s weeds progressed around her field of vision. When the next break was called, she slunk away to a quiet corner, curled herself up into a ball between two camera crates, and wept. It was impossible. She’d sensed nothing that could help her, not a single clue to who was fated to die.

  She wracked her brain to scour her memories of her mother’s kitchen for some solution, but nothing came to her. The air in the cavernous warehouse thickened, pressing in as if a warm front were rolling through, pushing storms ahead of it. She wiped the tears from her face. Her widow’s weeds were at their greatest. Death would strike at any moment.

  A heavy wind blew through the warehouse and buffeted against her. Worried that the turbulent gusts would ruin her set, she looked around to see who’d opened the windows, but they were all shut and covered with blackout curtains. The fabric draped across the set hung still. Even though she could feel it gusting against her face, there was no wind.

  She remembered this sensation from her mother’s kitchen whenever the visitor’s problem was a big one and a convincing pantomime wouldn’t be enough. Her mother would roll her acorn pendant between her fingers and the same charge of phantom wind would fill the air, though the visitor never noticed.

  Once, after her mother had performed a particularly challenging healing and the phantom wind had blown through the house, she asked her mother what it was.

  “Influence,” said her mother. “That which powers Craft.”

  “You mean magic?”

  Agnieszka Mierzejewska reached across the kitchen table and swatted her daughter across the back of the head. It wasn’t the first time she’d clipped her, nor would it be the last. Her mother’s open palm conveyed a wealth of information. Not the hard slap of irritation when she fumbled one of her mother’s instructions, this one informed Gosha that a lesson was coming.

  “Stupid girl. Never use that word, ever. In times past, saying it would get you stoned, or drowned, or burned at the stake. Now it makes you look ignorant. We never talk of magic. Only Influence and Craft.”

  The way her mother said those words always made Gosha think of them as capitalized. And the contemptuous sneer in her mother’s voice guaranteed she never even thought the word “magic” again.

  She hadn’t felt the strange currents of Influence flowing around her since she’d fled her mother’s home, but the sensation was unmistakable. Something supernatural was happening. It had to be connected to the widow’s weeds. As she grabbed her camera and went back to the set, snapping off shots as she went, the Influence pushed against her like a warm tide. The crew was almost ready for the next shot, the band hanging around adjusting their costumes, all of them oblivious to the rising flow of energy around them.

  The cast and crew were all assembled, except for one.

  “Where’s Mick?” she asked the nearest production assistant, but the boy shrugged.

  “Johnny,” she cried out across the room, the bluster of Influence droning in her ears making it hard to hear her own voice. “Where’s Mick? Have you seen Mick?”

  The clusters of lights aimed at the set began to glow as the intensity of the flow of Influence increased.

  “Who turned on the lights?” shouted Gary. “We’re not ready.”

  He rushed over to the lighting board where the technicians slid faders and pulled plugs. The lights grew brighter and brighter no matter what they did until they were so bright she had to shield her eyes. The hair on her head stiffened to bristles. Influence pressed against Gosha’s ears and temples with a chaotic bluster, rising in power until her head felt like it would break.

  “Where’s Mick,” she shouted.

  With a loud pop and a shattering of glass, darkness fell around them. The pressure against her head stopped. The surge of Influence had passed.

  Cries of shock rang out and the crew threw open the shutters that held back the daylight. The glow of late afternoon flooded into the cavernous space. Her eyes adjusted to the light.

  The widow’s weeds were gone.

  3

  Mick was the only person she hadn’t accounted for when the lights went out. He must have slipped away in the break between camera set-ups. She pushed through a confusion of crew figuring out why the lights exploded to get to Johnny.

  “Where did Mick go?” She grasped the lapels of his frock coat.

  “The loo, I think.” She pushed past him toward the back of the warehouse and the toilets. “What’s the matter?”

  “Get help!”

  No sign had filtered through her camera lens to tell her Mick would be the one to die, but she knew the widow’s weeds were for him.

  A handful of stalls and sinks lined one wall of the men’s room opposite a single, vast urinal. It was clean, but well-worn, the porcelain stained by decades of dripping pipes, the small hexagonal floor tiles cracked and uneven.

  Mick’s slumped body stood out against the grime in the washed-out light from the frosted and mesh-reinforced windows above the urinals. Collapsed by the sinks, his head drooped against h
is chest, his legs crumpled beneath him.

  As she rushed to his side, she saw something out of the corner of one eye on the edge of the sink, but Mick consumed her attention.

  “Mick!”

  She dropped to her knees, slid an arm around his shoulders, and lifted his head, but his neck was slack, his head a dead weight.

  Only a year ago, a school friend of her oldest son, Edmund, had almost died. Gosha insisted she and George learn CPR. She was sure she’d be lost if she ever had to use it, but now her hands were steady and her head was clear. What were the instructions? First, call for help. She ran to the door and screamed for an ambulance at the top of her lungs, hoping Johnny, at least, would investigate.

  Shifting Mick’s body all the way to the floor proved harder than she expected, the dozen stone of uncooperative weight almost more than she could manage. As she tilted his head back to clear his airway, his skin was dry and brittle under her hands, his usual pallor set further into an inhuman shade of gray. She didn’t even bother to check if he was breathing. The widow’s weeds had disappeared. He was dead, but she was buggered if she wouldn’t do her utmost to revive him.

  She pounded at his chest and blew air into his lungs for an eternity. The rhythm of her efforts took over when her arms began to ache, and her lungs felt like they would burst. Her body became a tool, fatigue overridden by her force of will. All that mattered was to give this young man a chance.

  The world around her narrowed. When help finally arrived, she heard their cries of shock and ignored them as they tried to move her off for someone else to take over. Only when the ambulancemen arrived did she let them pull her to one side. A PA tried to lead her away, but she refused, insisting on watching over the two men as they worked on Mick. They cut his shirt open to reveal his thin, bony chest beneath, his skin that strange shade of gray. She held her breath as they used a defibrillator on him. His body jerked under the sudden current, once, twice, three times, but always the body collapsed, lifeless. No matter what they did to revive him, it was too late. The widow’s weeds didn’t lie. Mick was gone.

  * * *

  Somehow Johnny talked his way onto the ambulance as they carted off the body, leaving the other two boys to clutch each other, crying in one corner of the set. It took an hour for the constables to get the answers they needed, the crew waiting to be questioned in shocked huddles.

  Events blurred behind a scrim of numb exhaustion. When the police came to question her, she recounted the events as best she could. It took all her mental strength to stick to the cold, concrete details that any normal person would understand, omitting anything that brushed against the bizarre truth. When her haze lifted, she found herself perched on an equipment crate with a blanket draped around her, a mug of sweet, milky tea in her hands. She tried to remember how she got there, who was so kind to give her the blanket and tea, but it was all a blur.

  As the sugar and caffeine worked their effects in her bloodstream, her body unclenched, cables of taught agony unwinding, tension sloughing off her until she could move again. Her thoughts chattered with questions that were easier to bear than the shock of Mick's death.

  Based on the evidence, the bobbies had determined it an overdose, but she’d seen one of those before. She'd cradled her friend Miranda in her arms, forcing coffee into her, trying to keep her alive until the ambulance came. This was not the same. The texture and pallor of his skin was something different, something she'd never seen.

  And the surge of Influence that blew out the lights right before the widow’s weeds vanished? What had Mick been doing?

  This was why she hated witchcraft. It dwelt at the edge of madness. No sane person should have anything to do with it. Mick had been mixed up in it and look at what it did to him. She should pack up her stuff, go home, and put it behind her again. That was always the best solution.

  She checked her watch. The boys would be home soon for their tea. She could give the housekeeper the afternoon off and make them their favorite, fish fingers and chips. A simple task like that suddenly seemed the best thing in the world.

  But Mick. What was he doing?

  The constables finished questioning Sally and left.

  “May I have your attention, everyone?” She stepped up onto the abandoned camera dolly, her cigarette between her fingers burned down to the filter. “This has been an awful, sad day. Let’s all go home. We will obviously cancel the shoot, but we can pack up and load out tomorrow.”

  One final constable stepped out from the passage that led to the men’s room. Gosha put her mug down and darted across the set to retrieve her handbag from a mound of unclaimed belongings and head back to the scene of Mick’s death before anyone interrupted her. The thought of talking to anyone right now filled her with dread.

  The sun dipped in the sky. A chill settled in the bathroom as the afternoon light faded behind the wire mesh on the windows. Little trace remained of the struggle to save Mick, just a discarded protective glove and the remnants of whatever he was up to at the sink.

  She pulled out her camera and ran the calculation in her head for what aperture would give a decent shot in the available light. The numbers fell into place despite her weariness. As she softened her gaze and eased up the firm and defined edges of her awareness, she shivered. She jumped at a sharp snap behind her, but it was only a loose window banging against its frame caught by the evening breeze.

  She wasn’t superstitious. Superstition, her mother drilled into her, was the fruit of weak thinking, but something in here had her on edge. A quiver of fear rippled through her body. The darkening shadows at the corners of the room lurked as if ready to pounce on her and drown her in their depths.

  She clicked off a few snaps, took a deep breath, and went to the sink.

  Mick’s lighter, a cheap pink and orange plastic Bic disposable, had wedged itself between the back of the sink and the wall. In the bowl lay a burned slip of paper, a scant corner left uncharred with a single stroke of ink scrawled on it, the remnant of an elaborate calligraphic curlicue. A small bottle cap like the one she used for the holy water in her countermeasures kit balanced precariously at the edge of the plug hole.

  Its companion bottle she found under the sink on the floor next to where Mick had fallen. She picked it up with the tips of her fingers, held it up to the light and took a close-up. It was long and narrow, no wider than a small marker pen. No special insight came to her of what had been in it. There were a few grains of mottled powder still in the bottle, gray with flecks of green. This must be the reason the police assumed it was drugs. She recognized the odor as she wafted it under her nose: bitter herbs, the kind her mother would keep in her pantry on the shelf never used for the spices that went into the food.

  The rosary beads rattled on her wrist as she moved around. Something was in here, something left over from what killed Mick, but the beads were getting in the way of her being able to sense it.

  “Gosha,” came Sally’s voice from behind her, making her heart leap in her chest. “What are you still doing here?”

  “I just wanted to see.”

  Sally wrapped her in her arms and hugged her tight, forcing Gosha to hold her arms in an awkward position to not drop the bottle. The smell of nicotine in Sally’s hair drove the scent of herbs from her nostrils.

  “You were amazing, Gosha. You were a superhero. It’s so awful.”

  Gosha didn’t allow herself to melt into the embrace. She wasn’t amazing. If she were, Mick would still be alive.

  “Are you sure you should be here?” Sally pulled back. “It must have been so traumatic.”

  “I’ll hang out for a minute, then I’ll head home. I’m not keeping you, am I?”

  “No, no. Take all the time you want. I can’t leave till security lock up. Just don’t make yourself crazy, okay?”

  Gosha waited until she heard the click and scuff of Sally’s heels on the concrete floor disappear into the distance before digging in her bag for something to keep the bottle
safe until she could find out what was in it, and drew out a silk neckerchief. Silk was a good insulator against Influence.

  How did I know that?

  Astonishing, the things she still remembered from the childhood torture of her mother’s kitchen, no matter how hard she pushed them down.

  She picked up the bottle and cap with the scarf, a buried instinct from watching police procedurals on the telly, and screwed them together. Adding to them the fragment of paper and the lighter, she folded the lot into the square of silk and slipped it into a pocket so it wouldn’t get battered in her handbag.

  She unwound the rosary beads from her wrist, dropped them in the bag, and took out another sprig from the envelope of sage. The lighter she used before she’d given back, but Mick’s still had fluid in it. The sprig smoldered in the flame and she breathed the smoke in deep.

  In the corner, a man in oily jeans and a sweat-stained t-shirt throttled another man to death. Not the evil she wanted. She closed her eyes to banish the image, and a shiver of fear rippled across her skin. Every hair on her body stood on end. Animal claws scraped across the tiled floor behind her, and the stench of rot filled her nostrils as a hot, damp breath blew across the back of her neck.

  She ran from the room with eyes clenched tight, terrified to open them and see what was in there with her, and slammed headlong into a wall. Disoriented, she kept running, not stopping until she’d made her way out into the light.

  The bright afternoon made her feel foolish for acting so afraid. Cursing herself for ignoring her better judgment, she patted herself down and walked the long way round the block to get back to the loading dock where the production cars were parked. Whatever she sensed wasn’t real, she told herself, but she still wasn't about to set foot in the warehouse again.

  What could it have been that killed Mick? And how would it have left behind such a powerful disturbance? Had he meant to kill himself?