Haunt Me Still by Jennifer Lee Carrell
It was the room, though, rather than the witches or the bloody-minded warrior, that sent prickles running up and down my skin. “I know this room,” I said. “I’ve been there.” It was Tree’s private retreat, tucked up under the dome at the very top of Her Majesty’s Theatre. The Dome room, it was called. It was rented out as rehearsal space. I’d spent hours up there a few years back, running through Othello.
The camera cut from the witches to Tree’s startled eyes, and then to a black title screen with fancy lettering in white:
HOW NOW,
YOU SECRET, BLACK, AND MIDNIGHT HAGS!
WHAT IS IT YOU DO?
The witches cavorted with evil delight.
A DEED WITHOUT A NAME.
The camera cut to a close-up of the bubbling cauldron and then pulled back to reveal the entire wall beside the fireplace, before cutting across to Macbeth again, who was swelling with pride. Advancing slowly toward the camera, he raised his arms.
I CONJURE YOU, HOWE’ER YOU COME TO KNOW IT:
ANSWER ME.
The witches recoiled, as if in terror, but Macbeth kept advancing. The camera pulled back once more. In the paneling to the right of the fireplace, a rectangle of darkness had appeared, the smoke of hell billowing from its depths.
I hit “pause.” In 1916, I thought, that recess in the wall wasn’t just a trick of light. There was a cupboard there. A cubbyhole in the paneling.
But there wasn’t. Not in the room I knew. I rewound to an earlier shot of the wall. I was right; there was no door visible. Not so much as a crack.
“What’s happening?” asked Eircheard.
I let the film roll on. Macbeth—Tree—strode to the hell-mouth. Plunging in his hand, he plucked from the darkness a book—Odin pulling wisdom from the underworld. With a flourish, he opened it and began to pronounce a spell.
Though you untie the winds,
Though trees blow down and castles topple,
Though palaces and pyramids do slope…
The Shakespeare had been drastically cut for the title frames, but its power was still recognizable. Filmmaker and actor alike had no doubt intended viewers to focus on the concentrated fury on Tree’s face as he commandeered the forces of the hell. But it was the book that captivated me. It looked old, a leather-bound tome with one word just visible on the spine: Dee.
I let the iPod slip onto the seat beside me and began riffling through the folder for Ellen Terry’s letter. On the seat, Bach’s Toccata and fugue in D Minor sounded tinny and distant through the headphones. Skimming through the letter, I came to the sentence I wanted: I think the book queer enough, but it is the letter inside that you will find most curious.
In 1911, she’d sent Beerbohm Tree—Monsieur Superbe Homme—a book to do with Macbeth…on the eve of his theatrical premiere. By 1916, he could have spliced into his film an older version of the conjuring scene. One that had him reading from a volume by Dee.
A volume he had pulled from a hidden cupboard in the wall of his theater.
“So the room’s still there?” asked Eircheard. “Yes.” Whether or not the book was, though, was another question.
An image of Lily floated up in my mind, as I had last seen her: wrapped in the blue Cailleach’s veil, her hand slipping from mine in the dark Edinburgh close. Lily rising in fury in the hall, red hair gleaming in the firelight. The image flickered and shifted to the ghostly sight of her lying bound on the hillside, a thin red line across her neck. And a symbol of one large circle and two small ones, carved into flesh.
Forty-eight hours.
Drive faster,” I whispered.
30
THE SKY CONDENSED to sodden gray wool as we slipped down out of Scotland and into the steep hills and fells of northwestern England. We stopped once, for sandwiches, at a service area somewhere outside Preston, in Lancashire.
Lily’s parents had died on the motorway outside Preston. The chicken-and-bacon sandwich went tasteless in my mouth, though I knew it wasn’t.
Soon after we got back on the road, the shimmying of the van lulled me into fitful sleep. When I woke, London had swallowed us, and the gray afternoon was thickening toward early nightfall. The thought of driving in London soured my stomach at the best of times, but Eircheard drove like a gleeful madman through streets clogged with the evening rush and spattered with rain. We parked in a garage near Leicester Square, and I slipped a flashlight from Eircheard’s glove compartment into my bag, along with the iPod and the folderful of precious papers. Huddling together under a single lopsided umbrella, we hurried up a dank, narrow street. Stepping into Haymarket, which was lined with grand buildings, was like walking into a completely different city. Just down the street sat Her Majesty’s Theatre, lit like a dowager in diamonds, its blue-gray square dome in the french baroque style as imposing and intricate as a Marie Antoinette coiffure.
I pointed at the dome. “That’s it. The room we want is just under the cupola.”
“And just how do we plan to get there?” asked Eircheard.
Same way that Sir Angus meant to, for starters. We buy our way in.”
We bought two tickets for the royal Circle, as close to the exits as possible, and headed up the stairs. It wasn’t long before the houselights went down and the iconic white mask of the Phantom began to glow from the covers of programs scattered through the audience. I wove my way through cluckings of disapproval back out to the plush corridor, followed by Eircheard. When the lone usher disappeared, leading another late soul into the Phantom’s lair, I veered to the end of the corridor and pulled back a curtain to reveal a nondescript door.
“fingers crossed,” I said under my breath. I pulled the whole door upward and turned the knob slightly, and the lock clicked open—a quirk long known by everyone who knew someone in the cast of Phantom, which was pretty much everyone in the theatrical world.
We found ourselves in an entirely different place from the gilt and red plush of the front of the house. As the entire theater hushed, leaning toward the stage, we wound into the labyrinth of corridors behind. I closed my eyes, trying to remember my way around. Rattling up to the top floor in a tiny pale blue elevator, we hurried down a narrow hall with threadbare red carpet and peach walls punctuated by white doors, all closed. Up a few steps, around a corner, I paused by an old radiator. Behind it, a large barrel key hung on the wall from a tassel. Down one more short corridor and up a half flight of steps we came to a wide landing before an immense arched door whose medieval look was faux but whose studded oak solidity was not. Welcome, it read, in Old English letters.
I inserted the key into the lock.
The door opened, exhaling the scent of rehearsal rooms: dust, old sweat, wax for the linoleum. And dreams. One wall of the outer room was lined in mirrors, like a dance studio. On the other, high windows looked over Haymarket. From beams crisscrossing the dome overhead hung massive circular iron chandeliers—the kind that burned real church candles, though their sockets were empty and drear.
As Eircheard slipped in behind me, I shut the door and locked it from the inside, leaving the key in the lock. And then I switched on the flashlight.
“Jesus,” he said. “Could you get more cliché for a phantom’s lair?”
“He lives in the dungeons,” I said absently. “This is more like Quasimodo’s tower. Though old Sir Herbert would be put out by both comparisons. He’s supposed to have given fab dinner parties here. Lived here, as much as he could. Didn’t much care for the niceties—or the narrowness—of Victorian home life, apparently.”
I’d spent long wonderful hours here away from home, too, rehearsing Othello.
A wide archway led through to a more intimate room, paneled in warm Jacobean squares and filled with an oval table probably built for the room. Beyond was an offset stone fireplace.
“That’s it,” said Eircheard quietly.
I nodded. “The room in the film. Which means that that part of the film didn’t belong to the original, which was shot on location in
“You think it was shot later?”
Or earlier. The costume he’s wearing in this room looks like the costume from his stage version of Macbeth, which premiered here. In 1911. The same year that Ellen Terry wrote Monsieur Superbe Homme.”
I slid past the table to the opposite wall. The door in the wall, if there really was one, should be to the right of the fireplace. But even close up, I could not see it, or even its seams, much less a latch.
I stood back, biting my lip. Had it, after all, been a trick of light? The magic of film? Slipping the iPod from my pocket, I brought up the cauldron scene. Just before the cupboard opened, the camera lingered in close-up on the cauldron.
I went to the fireplace. There was no obvious chain or lever from which to hang a cauldron now. But it wouldn’t be a working fireplace anymore, in any case. Not in a theater. I leaned in and looked up. A small slice of sky was visible far above.
I ran a hand up the stones. Nothing. I felt around all four sides…wait, one stone jutted out. It was loose. Carefully, I pried it out. Behind it, folded up, was a lever. I pulled it down. At its end was a hook.
A thunderous knocking exploded on the door behind us. “Desmond, you sodding wanker,” said a deep voice. “It’s my turn to use the roof.” He tried a few more times, and then he went grumbling away.
I turned back to the film. The witches bent around the cauldron, stirring it. Something had been in it. Weighting it down. My heart in my mouth, I pulled the lever even farther, putting some force into it.
There was a pop, and several panels in the wall next to me pushed outward and over the wall in a sort of sliding wooden door. Behind was a cupboardful of shelves, bowed and bent with books, their titles obscured beneath a duvet of dust a century thick.
I hovered above it, loath to disturb it. Finally, I ran a finger across the spines, and glimmers of tarnished gilt appeared in partial words.
Secretor—and—catrix and Daemono. They were, at a guess, some of the oldest printed grimoires. And a few, even older, in manuscript.
This time I swept my palm across the books, dust cascading to the floor. The titles leapt out: Secreta Secretorum. Aristotle, read one. Picatrix, said another. And Daemonologie. King James I and VI. Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum. And Bacon, The Mirror of Alchimy.
“You think Tree was a wizard?” asked Eircheard.
Doesn’t fit the general picture of the man,” I said. There was no way of knowing if he used these books. But he was certainly a connoisseur of magical books. I wondered, fleetingly, if the owner of the building had any idea what was hidden back here. From the thickness of the dust, he did not.
It would be the project of a lifetime to work through these books, figure out just what was there. With regret, my hand passed over rare volumes that even the British Museum and the Bodleian might well not possess. Occult esoterica was one subject in which private, hidden libraries were still better stocked than the great repository libraries, which had gotten a late start on officially banned books.
There were books claiming to be by roger Bacon, Aristotle, Agrippa, Hermes Trismegistus, Solomon, and Trithemius. But nothing so short and sweet as Dee.
At last I came up with what I was looking for: The Monas Hieroglyphica. Dee’s treatise on symbolic language, in which he devised a single sign, or sigil, supposed to contain all knowledge within it. The monas was a curious stick figure, like a little man wearing a horned hat. Heart in mouth, I opened it and riffled through the pages.
No letter.
Damn. Replacing the volume, I skimmed on down through the shelves. There. At the bottom. A thin book, almost a pamphlet. “DEE” was stamped lengthwise in gold on the narrow spine. I looked closer.
DEE and the Theatre, it read.
I pulled it out and opened it. On the flyleaf was a neat inscription: Herbert Beerbohm Tree, 1911. The year he had opened Macbeth. The year that Ellen Terry had sent him a present.
I flicked through the pages. It was not a printed book. It was, for the most part, a notebook full of geometrical drawings. Bound in front of that, however, was a letter. In an italic hand. I skimmed down to the signature. Arthur Dee. John Dee’s eldest son and favorite child. Heart in mouth, I moved up to the beginning.
My dear Sir Robert:
Apologies for the tardyness with which this will no doubt find you, but news must take a while to travell to Muscovy and back. I am apprised that you are interested in ferreting out certaine Books and Papers once in my Father’s Library. You possess, I know, a number of them already, and admiring your esteem for Books and for Learning, as I do, I cannot think of better hands to protect them.
Those which you propose to find, however, are of a different nature. You may discover, after perusing them, that it is you who needs protection, rather than the Books. My Father, at any rate, felt so.
The moon flitted through a cloud, sending a shadow over the lines. I looked up at the windows but saw nothing.
You aske, in particular, after any with connexions to a Witch my Father called Medea. This was the Lady Elizabeth Stewart, sometime Countess of Arran, and also of Lennox and March.
There was a small ping somewhere in my abdomen. Lady Nairn was right. Her ancestress was mixed up in this, somehow. With a nickname of Medea, for heaven’s sake. Possibly the most infamous worker of cauldron magic in renaissance myth.
Another woman with a penchant for carving the life out of people.
My Father possessed, at one time, two Manuscripts concerning this Quondam Countess. One, a Work as wicked as it was ancient. The other, borrowing wholecloth from the first, was a sly piece meant to shadow her forth on the stage….
Was he talking about Macbeth? If so, the letter backed Aubrey, and Shakespeare had stolen Lady Arran’s magic, but not just that. He’d also stolen her person, and he’d set both on the stage. Had she killed in response? Had she murdered the boy who played her? If so, why? Why Hal Berridge and not Shakespeare? Did it have to do with his scrying? Or with the rite of magic? “Aubrey says that Dee begged Shakespeare to alter the play,” I said, thinking aloud. “So Dee must have seen the early version. Maybe he kept it.”
Eircheard whistled. “Does his son say?”
I skimmed through the letter, my finger coming to rest on a sentence that I could not read aloud.
Looking over my shoulder, Eircheard read it. “Deeming that their pages might tarnish even the noonday Sun, my Father buried these and other Workes of Darkness where they belonged, in the dark at the bottom of his garden.”
For a moment, we both stared in silence at the book shaking a little in my hand. Buried in Dee’s garden. Where the hell was that? Mortlake. I’d always thought it the perfect home for a wizard: Dead Lake. Lake of the Dead.
But it was little more than a word to me. Somewhere west on the Thames, on the way to Hampton Court, I knew, but couldn’t get much more precise than that. In Dee’s day, it had been a quiet village, well out in the country, but the chances that his garden on the Thames had remained undisturbed in the booming centuries since were virtually nonexistent.
What if Dee’s works of darkness had been destroyed long ago?
I pushed that thought aside. They had to exist. “We need someone who knows about Dee.” In London, as Lady Nairn had pointed out, that meant one person: Joanna Black, of Joanna Black Books and Esoterica, in Covent Garden. The problem was that Joanna was elusive. I’d been told I must meet her, and I’d been to her shop once or twice, the public part of it at any rate. But I had never laid eyes on her. It was said that somewhere in the back was a small door that opened onto a labyrinth that only the wealthy and well-connected could penetrate. Beyond that lay inner rooms that not even money would open, where only serious students of Dee’s Great Art were granted entry.
I knew only one person who might gain me quick access to Joanna. Without waiting to read the rest of the letter, I texted Lady Nairn.
I had just pushed “send” when I heard a small click and whirled aro
31
SWITCHING OFF THE flashlight, I stood in the moonlit darkness, watching as the key continued to turn. I looked quickly around the room. The only other way out was the fire escape, a wide wooden ladder that led up to one of the high windows. Eircheard was looking at it in dismay. We had no time to wait. Slipping the book into my bag, I dashed up the ladder.
The window opened with a groan. Outside, a peaked roof sloped steeply to the left. The rear of the building stretched away, long and narrow, into the distance. Slick with rain, it would be treacherous going for me. It might well be impossible for Eircheard.
I turned and ran back down the ladder, pulling Eircheard with me to the door. When it opened, we’d have to hope its angle would hide us while the open window drew the picklock forward. With luck, we’d have just long enough to slip around the door and out before the intruder turned around.
The key clattered to the floor, and the door slowly pushed open. A man stepped inside and stopped. He was dressed all in black, down to gloves; the long barrel of a pistol with a silencer extended from his right hand. In the darkness, I couldn’t see his face. A gust of wind sent rain clattering through the window, and he looked sharply up at it.
He was halfway across the room when I moved out from behind the door. At a small squeak in the linoleum he spun, and I found myself gazing down the barrel of the silencer. The face above it belonged to the Winter King. The dark-haired man.