“I have to admit: it sure is pretty.” Hank Brownlow slammed the cab door behind him, leaving Ms Benn to pay the fare. He drank in the sight of Anne Hathaway’s cottage ahead of him and rubbed his hands. Cheese would be powerless in the face of Brownlow’s interrogative powers. Brownlow who had reduced top brass in the CIA to tears - on camera! - in his show about the Roswell aliens.
Ms Benn, apparently indifferent to the charm of the place, strode ahead to the entrance, where she proceeded to bark questions at anyone in period costume.
“No!” she cried in exasperation. “I do not want your artisan cheeses. I want Auberon Cheese, you know, the world-renowned Shakespeare expert? You might have heard of him.”
She turned on her heels and stalked back to Brownlow with a face like thunder.
“He’s not here. According to the peasants, anyway. They say he was here but we’ve just missed him.”
“So what -”
“Back to the birthplace. He’ll show up eventually. I’ll call us another taxi.”
She whipped out her phone while Brownlow wondered if the show’s entire budget was going to be blown on cab rides.
“Tell you what,” Ms Benn handed him a ten-pound note, “You go back to town. I’ll join you later.”
“Why, what are you going to do?”
“Oh,” Ms Benn shrugged, “have a look around. Think I’ll get a souvenir for my mother.”
“Ah. Okay; see you later, then.”
“Yes.”
She tottered away to the gift shop. Brownlow watched her go and then looked up the road, in both directions, wondering from which direction the cab would come.
Kelly Benn followed the signs to the Ladies toilet. She ran the tap in the wash basin.
Ah, water!
Was there anything better in the whole wide world?
***
“I don’t understand...” Harry tried his key again. He checked and re-checked it was the right bloody key. It wasn’t the key; it was the bloody lock. He stepped back from the front door and looked up at the building. Yes, it was his house all right. “The lock’s been changed!” he gaped in shock. “She’s only been and gone and changed the bloody lock.”
“Problem?” Ariel was drinking in the scent of the weeds that were thriving along the garden wall.
“My housemate’s bloody girlfriend has changed the lock. I’m locked out. We can’t get in. That’s what’s the problem.”
“We, Harry? I can get in. No lock can keep me out.”
Ariel floated towards the door.
“No, no; wait!” Harry chewed his lip. “Let me think. She won’t be in there; she’ll be at work. And Olly won’t be in there; he’ll be at work.”
“Then it is no problem.” Ariel’s hand turned to a facsimile of itself in vapour and melted through the door.
“No, wait... If you let me in, that will give rise to questions. She’ll accuse me of breaking in! It will be more ammunition for her to use against me. She’s already trying to turn Olly against me.” Harry’s mind was racing. “Can you believe how evil this woman is?”
Ariel withdrew his hand and it solidified.
“Aye, verily. I have met her like before.” A shudder ran through the spirit like a shimmer across a pond as he remembered the witch Sycorax. “Shut me in a pine tree for twelve years.”
“Then you know the kind of enemy we’re dealing with. Yours shut you up; mine’s shut me out. I’m going to call Olly.”
He took out his phone. Ariel was fascinated by the device. Harry could summon spirits of light and sound with the small and sleek rectangle. It was like the late master’s staff, the conduit of his powers. And the slightest glance around revealed that most people were in possession of these objects, bending sights and sounds to their will. Just about everyone was a sorcerer! O, brave new world!
“Olly!” Harry snapped at Olly’s voicemail recorder. “What the bloody fuck is going on? She’s changed the locks. Did you know about this? What the fuck, Olly? Right. Well. If that’s the way you want it, you can have it. I’ll pick up my stuff later although fuck knows where I’m going to go. Did you think about that, Olly, when you let that witch lose on our locks? Did you?”
With a roar of frustration, Harry threw his phone across the front garden. Ariel rushed to catch it before it could hit the ground. He cradled the precious, powerful object in his hands. It lay as though dead, like a stone. While Harry fumed and fretted, Ariel tried to activate the device as he had seen Harry do, but it would not respond to his fingers, no matter how he wiped them across the dark reflective surface.
“Give it here,” Harry held his hand out. “I’ll book us a B and B for tonight. The bloody witch can pay for it, or Olly can. Serves them right for not giving me proper notice. Hey! I wonder where I stand legally... They can’t do this to me.”
“What’s a B and a B?”
“A B and B. Bed and breakfast. A sort of hostelry. You get somewhere to sleep and something to eat in the morning.”
“I do neither of those things, Harry.”
“Well, bully for you. But I do. Hello, yes, is that Goosegog Cottage? Hello, Dickie. It’s me, Harry. You know, from the tours? Wondering if you’ve got a room for the night. No...” He looked at Ariel, “Just a single. Cheers, Dickie; you’re a star.”
He put the device away and said, “Sorted.”
Ariel was none the wiser.
“Right, come on,” Harry clapped his hands together. “Off to the prof’s. We can pick me up a toothbrush on the way. The witch can pay for that and all.”
“Toothbrush, Harry?”
“Don’t tell me: you don’t need one.”
Ariel bared his teeth and ran his tongue over them. “I confess mine are for show. I adopt this form so you can relate to me.”
“Yeah, that’s working out really well...”
Harry’s sarcasm was lost on the spirit. “Thanks, Harry,” he grinned.
***
Back at the Birthplace, Hank Brownlow wangled free admittance, by cooing at the girl on the box office and suggesting that she might appear as a talking head in his next TV show, giving her expert testimony. Trish, turning fuchsia pink, had let him through the turnstile. He autographed the pale skin of the underside of her forearm and she resolved to have it tattooed on straight after work.
Brownlow kicked his way around the neat little garden. The house would look good in the background as he spoke to camera. He might even be able to use a couple of the actors who were wandering around in costume. He took a few snaps with his phone; he may as well use the time productively, but things had reached a pretty pass when a historian of his calibre was reduced to scouting out his own locations. A couple of things had potential. There were the windows with graffiti - over the years, visiting writers and other worthies had etched their names into the glass in a collective act of vandalism that spanned centuries. How many of those names, Dickens, Wilde and so on, could Brownlow recruit into his hypothesis? How many of them were ‘in on it’? - the ‘it’ being Shakespeare’s hidden identity as a master of black magic.
What was taking Ms what’s-her-name so long, he couldn’t guess. And of the elusive Professor Cheese there was also no sign. Brownlow had enlisted the ditzy chick on the ticket counter to alert him as soon as the prof showed up. How long a lunch break did the old coot need anyways?
Brownlow guessed that was where Ms Benn - that was it: Benn - was. Having a crafty lunch break while he was left dawdling around this old house. Well, if it was good for the goose... Brownlow took himself to the Birthplace’s coffee shop, which was glaringly modern next to the old house. He was dismayed by the menu, which listed several types of tea. What was wrong with the Brits and their obsession with tea? They didn’t even take it iced, for Christ’s sake.
He ordered coffee, strong and black, and a portion of apple pie. The mere idea of it made him homesick.
Through the cafe window he could see the house. The actors were performing an al fresco scene, something silly and charming from a comedy, he guessed. In Brownlow’s show, he decided, he would have them do a scene from Macbeth, casting spells. Shakespeare knew what he was on about, sure enough.
His order arrived. He thanked the elderly waitress and offered her his autograph. The old dear shuffled away, ignoring him.
***
The waiter at the Filthy Fowl brought a steaming plate of shepherd’s pie with peas and baby carrots to the cantankerous old fart’s table. There was no sign of the cantankerous old fart. Perhaps he’d gone to the Gents to do battle with his prostate. Whatever. The waiter took the meal back to the kitchen to be kept warm. If the old coot dared to breathe a word about being kept waiting...
But the old coot was not in the Gents; he was no longer in the pub. He was tapping his way along the brickwork pavements, heading for home, a man on a mission.
To think: Shakespeare’s muse right here in Stratford! The airy spirit that gave the playwright his insights into the supernatural and who brought him specialist knowledge about countless matters! Professor Cheese knew it was not only unfashionable but downright career suicide to make public these views but all along he had suspected it to be the truth. The Bard of Avon had assistance from another plane - perhaps another planet; it was just one of the myriad questions Cheese wanted to ask Ariel.
How did they meet, Will and the spirit? Was there some kind of arrangement between them, or was it, like Prospero and the Ariel in the play, a form of pressed service, of slavery?
And what was the great man like? This was the burning question that scorched the heart of every Shakespeare scholar. The works give conflicting glimpses of the man behind the lines. Contradictions and obfuscations and gaps in the records made the writer one of the most intriguing and ungraspable people in history.
But at last, and impossibly one would have thought, here was someone (something!) who had actually known the man.
Professor Cheese cackled to himself as he hurried through the old town district. This was the chance of a lifetime. He had little time to prepare - not just his questions but also... He didn’t want to call it a trap. That sounded cruel and barbaric. So not a ‘trap’ then but rather the means by which he could ‘persuade’ the spirit to stay...
Fumbling his keys with excited hands, Professor Cheese let himself into his ivy-covered cottage. He put his hat and cane on the hall table and shuffled into his study. Despite the protestations of his back, he pushed some furniture to the walls and bent double to roll up the oriental rug.
The chalk would stand out excellently well on the dark wood of the floorboards, he expected. He ransacked his own desk to find the box he had kept from his old teaching days - it was all marker pens on white boards or PowerPoints projected from computers now. Progress! Bah! You can keep it, he grumbled. What he was about to do was the opposite of progress.
His fingers seized eagerly on the battered box of chalk. He consulted his first edition of Doctor John Dee’s notebook and reminded himself of the arcane symbols he would have to describe on the floor.
He wondered how Sycorax had done it - how had the witch trapped Ariel in a pine tree? The play gave no clue. And all Cheese’s years of research and study had yielded nothing of her practices. It was possible she was an invention, a fiction. But with Ariel present in the here-and-now, if not exactly in the flesh, it was tantalising to think that other characters might also have some basis in Shakespeare’s real life...
A twinge along his backbone warned the professor not to scrabble around the floor to create the arcane design. The flash of pain put the light of an idea in his mind. He hurried to the kitchen for the broom. He fixed a stick of chalk to the end of the broomstick with parcel tape; he would be able to draw the symbols without having to bend over.
Like Lavinia writing in the sand, he chuckled - No; like Prospero with his staff!
Energised by this notion, Professor Auberon Cheese carefully turned around on the spot, sweeping the tip of the chalk across the floorboards.
He worked quickly and methodically, pausing only to consult Dr Dee’s book for reminders.
Time was running out - the boy would be here with the spirit - the divine spirit! - any moment now.
Ding-dong! As if on cue, the doorbell chimed.
Bugger, Cheese swore. He stashed the broom behind the desk and padded into the hall.
“Coming!” he called out and reached for the latch.