The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (4 page)

“By the pricking of my thumbs,” one of the other Witches said, looking across the stage at me. “Something wicked this way comes.”

They all turned to look at me and smiled in unison. None of them had any teeth. I don’t think they’d ever had any teeth.

“This isn’t what I paid to see!” I yelled at them, slurring my words to sound even drunker than I was. It wasn’t a lie, not really. “What the hell is this?”

“A deed without a name,” the first Witch said.

“A deed without a name,” the second Witch agreed.

“Double, double toil and trouble,” the third Witch said.

I don’t think they have names any more than they have teeth. It doesn’t matter. I’ve long suspected they’re the one and the same entity anyway, just split into different bodies. Kind of like the way gorgons are separate beings but all share the same group mind. Maybe it’s an ancient monster kind of thing.

I kept playing the part of the drunk and stumbled across the stage to them. “I want a refund!” I shouted, then added in a lower voice, “I also want a favour.”

The Witches left the cauldron and circled around me.

“Speak,” one of them said.

“Demand,” another said.

“We’ll answer,” the third one said.

I glanced into the wings and saw several of the stagehands talking. I knew I didn’t have long before they sent out some of the extras for an improv intervention.

“I want a counterspell for the Macbeth curse,” I whispered to one of the Witches. “It’s run amok. I need to stop it before someone else gets killed.” I didn’t tell them who I was worried about getting killed. It’s not a good idea to let the Witches know what’s really valuable to you. Those are the sorts of things they like to put in their cauldron.

“Seek to know no more,” the Witches said, shaking their heads together. “Double, double toil and trouble.”

“Tell me,” I said. “Or I’ll tell the world you’ve been hiding in this play all these centuries.” Now I raised my voice again, so the audience could hear. “Tell me!”

It was the only threat I could use against them, but it was a good one. The Witches had once lived in the real world, until too many people took an interest in them not living anywhere anymore. There’s even a hill in Scotland named after the place they met the real Macbeth in his travels—Macbeth’s Hillock. It’s a farmer’s field now. Crops grow very well in that field, thanks to all the blood that’s been spilled there over the ages. The Witches didn’t have angry mobs chasing them anymore, but there were still other things searching for them. You can’t be a Witch—or even a witch—without pissing off someone. And there was no better hiding place for the Witches than in a Shakespeare play. It was better even than fairy tales, because those old legends had some pretty nasty supporting characters that might not like the new neighbours.
Macbeth
was a safe, comfortable home for them, and one they wouldn’t want to give up.

The Witches looked at each other without saying anything. I looked into the crowd. Several people were filming the scene with their phones.

“Look at that,” I said. “We’re going to be online soon.”

That made up the Witches’ minds. They knew they couldn’t allow me to reveal their secret in front of all these witnesses. They pushed me toward the cauldron, striking me hard with their bony hands, harder than old women should be able to hit. Actually, harder than most football players should be able to hit.

“For a charm of powerful trouble,” one of the Witches said.

“Fire burn and cauldron bubble,” another of the Witches said.

“Don’t be shoving me about or we’ll be having a proper riot up here!” I yelled at them, back in my drunk character. I played the role well. I’d had my share of practice over the years.

“Like a hell-broth, boil and bubble,” the third Witch said and shoved me into the cauldron.

All right, I wasn’t expecting that.

I
was
expecting them to give me the counterspell. I
was
expecting them to be unhappy about it and try a little witchery to get even with me—you know, turn me into a small rodent that would be chased by the city’s feral cats, or maybe just hit me with a curse that affected my sexual performance for a decade or so. I should have known better. The Witches have always been more Brothers Grimm than Disney. So into the cauldron I went.

It burned pretty much the way you’d expect boiling water and whatever else was in there to burn. I thrashed about, trying to escape, but they pushed me back in with their long bone spoons. I could hear them chanting through my screams.

“Round about the cauldron go!”

“In the cauldron boil and bake!”

“Cool it with a baboon’s blood!”

Then I was spilling out of the cauldron and onto the ground as the stagehands suddenly appeared and pushed the Witches out of the way to upend the pot. They screamed as well as the hot metal burned their hands. I eased their pain with a bit of grace I breathed their way. They were trying to help me, after all. I didn’t do anything about my own pain for a moment. I deserved it.

The air was thick with steam from the cauldron, but instead of dissipating it grew thicker, turning into a mist. I took that to mean the Witches were taking the play back to wherever I’d summoned it from.

“Come like shadows, so depart!” the Witches cried from somewhere in that mist, confirming my suspicions.

Fair enough. I had what I’d come for. The counterspell burned in my mind now, even though the Witches hadn’t told it to me. In return, they had some new flavours for their soup. Things had worked out well for everyone.

There was more yelling and the sounds of people running into each other and falling over on the stage. I didn’t know if they were trying to find me or the Witches. And then came the sounds of the audience shrieking and cursing. The mist must have rolled out to cover them.

I crawled over to the edge of the stage and dropped into the pit. Every inch I moved hurt about as much as you’d expect it to if you’d just been boiled alive. I couldn’t see anyone around me because of the mist, so I took a few seconds and a lot of grace to heal myself. I hated to waste the grace, but the skin was already peeling off my body. I shook my head and cursed my own carelessness. The Witches never failed to extract a price somehow.

When I was back to normal, or as close as I come to normal, I joined the rest of the crowd in pushing for the exits and got the hell out of there before the Witches changed their minds and came back to demand a higher price.

It was just like in Shakespeare’s time, all right.

I expected the mist to lift when I went outside the theatre, but instead it grew thicker. It reminded me of the time I’d cornered Judas at Stonehenge with the help of King Arthur and his knights after that first unfortunate Morgana incident. Judas had summoned a similar mist, which had turned into a dragon that swallowed me. I would have been lost if Arthur hadn’t cut me free with Excalibur. I wondered if there was some trick that I was missing but everyone else knew. Maybe all the ancient supernatural beings carried around mist in a bottle just in case they needed a quick escape. If so, I could really use some of that.

Then again, maybe it was just the normal London fog rolling in. It didn’t matter. It was a handy way to lose myself so I didn’t have to deal with any awkward questions from the other audience members or stagehands or even police officers.

I went down the pedestrian pathway bordering the Thames as fast as I could without running and drawing attention to myself from the people who materialized out of the mist. I needed another place to hide, and quickly. The scene in the Globe may have drawn unwanted attention.

I found my way to the Tower Bridge, then crossed it and took the Thames pathway on the other side, past the Tower of London. Thankfully, some of the mist, or whatever it was, had blown across the Thames and cloaked this side of the river as well. When I hit a particularly thick patch where no one could see me, I jumped over the side of the pathway and into the river. Even though my skin was healed from the Witches’ cauldron, the cool water still felt soothing. I swam down to the bottom and felt around in the mud where the riverbed met the foundation of the embankment. I had to go back to the surface a couple of times for air, but eventually I found what I was looking for. A rusted grille mostly buried in the muck, clogged with plastic bags and strands of rope and the usual underwater detritus. I cleaned everything away from it and then peered into the tunnel behind. It was an old, stone affair, mostly filled with more muck, but there was room for me to pass.

I went to the surface for another breath of air and heard shouting on the pathway above. It could have been just drunks fighting, but it also could have been the authorities looking for me. Or other things looking for me. The angel Abathar had once tried to buy my mercy by revealing the Royal Family had a standing order to dispatch the Black Guard to any reported sightings of me. Which maybe explained the rise in riots and mass murders of late, as the Black Guard cleaned up after themselves and disposed of witnesses. It was time to disappear, just like I’d made Abathar disappear.

I swam back down to the grille, placed my feet on either side, then grabbed the bars and pulled. In ye olden days, when this was a secret entrance, the grille had been bolted on too tight for anyone without grace to move it. But I’d used some grace on it in a past age and nobody had bothered to reattach it again since. Now it was just held in place by mud and time. I managed to pull it far enough back with my mortal muscles that I could slip through and into the tunnel beyond.

It was a short swim to the end of the tunnel and the small stone chamber there. I pulled myself out of the water and up some steps onto a landing, where I spent a few minutes catching my breath. It occurred to me I may have been breathing the same air as the last time I’d come this way. Nobody had probably been down here in centuries. I imagined no one but me even knew about this chamber anymore.

I got up and found the next tunnel in the darkness and followed it, into the maze underneath the Tower of London. It’s not a real maze, of course. It’s more a random jumble of corridors, forgotten rooms and abandoned dungeons. All of the kings and queens of England liked to add their own touches to the Tower in their times, so they were constantly digging moats and building walls and generally trying to outdo each other. Now all those kings and queens were dead and most of them were gone, and the Tower was just another museum and tourist attraction. Hardly anyone knew about the secrets underneath it. Most of those old queens and kings probably didn’t know all the secrets hidden away beneath the Tower.

Which made it a perfect place for me to hide.

It was darker than night down here, so I burned a bit more grace to sharpen my vision. Maybe it was a waste of grace, but I don’t like stumbling around in the dark. You never know what you’re going to run into. I made my way to another chamber, this one lined with bricks that were older than the British Empire. It was full of forgotten artefacts—suits of armour, ancient cannons, halberds and battle axes. Much of it was half-melted or blackened from flames, so I figured they were things that had been damaged in one of the fires that happened at the Tower from time to time. I was in an old storage room. It seemed as good a place as any to rest.

I searched through the room until I found a wool blanket in a crate in one of the corners. The blanket was wrapped around some bones that had once been a person, so I shook them free. Someone else had obviously thought this would be a good hiding place as well—a hiding place for a body. It looked like they’d been right. I wrapped myself in the blanket and lay down on another crate containing broken swords to keep myself off the cold floor. Then I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

It was hard, though, on account of the apparitions that kept passing through the room.

The first was the woman in the ragged dress, carrying her head in her hands. She stumbled along, passing through the suits of armour, the pillar supporting the roof, the crate I’d taken the blanket from. Her eyes were open but didn’t seem to see anything, at least not anything I could see.

If you didn’t have my experience and eyesight, you may not have noticed her at all. Even if you did notice her, you probably wouldn’t have recognized her. But I knew her. Anne Boleyn, a queen who had seen better days before she wound up at the Tower. I’d witnessed her doing this routine dozens of times before on previous visits.

I rolled over on my crate to face the wall, but it was no better on that side. A Roman soldier stepped out of the brick and looked around. He wore the armour of a legionnaire, but he was weaponless. He shook his head at whatever he saw and then stepped back into the wall. I’d seen him before too, but only a few times. He was always looking for something, but I didn’t know what. He stuck to the lowest and oldest levels of the basement. The Romans had built a fort here once, and they used the blood of sacrificed soldiers in the mortar. But I’d once heard a rumour from a mummified man in a bog that the Romans had just built on even more ancient structures, all with their own violent and dark histories. It was blood and torture all the way down. The Tower was one of those places. Even I didn’t know the truth about its history.

I sighed and rolled over again. Anne was gone but she’d been replaced by two boys chasing something I couldn’t see through the room. A cat maybe? Or a rat? They kept looking over their shoulders, like they were being chased too. The two princes who were forever lost in the Tower, courtesy of another royal intrigue. It was busy in here tonight. Must have been something in the air.

I didn’t bother talking to any of the apparitions. I’d tried that in the past, but they’d always ignored me and just kept on doing whatever it was they were doing. It was always the same thing: Anne wandering with her head, the soldier looking for whatever it was he was looking for, the children chasing something I could never see. And all the others doing their own thing. They weren’t like other ghosts. They didn’t see the world around them and carry on conversations with the living. They didn’t take on real form and bump into walls or pick up swords or do any of the other things ghosts sometimes did. They were trapped in their memories.

Or maybe they were trapped in the memories of the Tower itself. That sometimes happens with important places. They develop a sort of life of their own and the memories of what happened there just won’t fade away. Those memories can be so strong that the souls of the people who die there can’t escape them and have to relive those memories forever. That’s why I tend to avoid places like Auschwitz and Gettysburg, if I can help it.

Well, there were always worse fates than being trapped in the memory of the Tower of London. Just trust me on that.

Besides, the people I saw here meant nothing to me because they were all dead and long gone, and none of them could help me now. I pulled the blanket over my head and settled into my own memories.