The Thirteen Hallows

by Michael Scott; Colette Freedman

  The blue-eyed woman nodded.

  SARAH MILLER was confused. The events of the last two hours were already sliding and fading in her consciousness, the details blurring like an old dream.

  She wasn’t entirely sure how she had ended up sitting in the back of a train beside a virtual stranger. Sarah glanced sidelong at the woman. She was…sixty? Seventy? It was hard to tell. With her silver hair brushed straight back off her forehead, tied in a tight bun, wisps of stray hairs curling around her delicate ears and onto her high-boned cheeks, she enjoyed an ageless beauty reserved for those people who never worked a day of hard labor.

  Sarah wondered why she had come to this stranger’s assistance.

  Even though she had been taking classes in self-defense—one of her friends told her it was a good place to meet sober men—she’d never actually used any of her training. Weeks earlier, she’d crossed the street to avoid having to walk past five shaven-headed teenagers kicking an Indian boy outside a fish-and-chips shop. Sarah was someone who purposely avoided conflicts.

  “Are you okay?” the elderly woman asked suddenly.

  Sarah blinked. “Sorry?”

  “You were staring at me, but you seemed to be miles away.”

  “I’m sorry. I was just wondering…”

  The woman continued to look at her, saying nothing.

  “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “You’re a very brave young woman.”

  Sarah shrugged. “It was nothing.”

  “Don’t denigrate what you did. Few would have had the courage to come to a stranger’s assistance. You’re an extremely brave woman.”

  Sarah smiled at the compliment. And they remained content with their own silent thoughts for the rest of the ride.

  When the train stopped in Bath Spa station, Judith linked her hand in Sarah’s as they walked up Dorchester Street and turned right across the bridge on the river Avon.

  “I’ve never been to Bath before.”

  “I’ve lived here most of my life,” Judith said.

  At the bottom of Lyncombe Hill, she turned right onto St. Mark’s Road. “I’m just up here on the left,” she said. Pushing open the squealing wrought-iron gate, she immediately noticed that her front door was open. Judith felt the coffee sour in her stomach, knowing instinctively what she was going to find inside. She clenched Sarah’s hand, establishing contact once again, meeting and holding her bright eyes. She knew people found it very difficult to refuse something when there was actual physical contact. “You will come in?”

  Sarah started to shake her head. “Really, I can’t. I must be getting back to the office. My boss is a bit of a prick. Don’t want to get fired for taking a four-hour lunch,” she said with a smile, but even as she was speaking, she was walking up the path toward the house.

  “You must give me your boss’s phone number,” Judith said softly. “I will call him and commend your actions. People win awards for doing less than you’ve done.”

  “That really won’t be necessary….”

  “I insist,” the old woman said firmly.

  Sarah found herself nodding. A word of recommendation to old man Hinkle would not do her any harm.

  Judith smiled. “Good, then that’s settled. Now, let’s have some nice tea, and then I promise I’ll send you back to work.” She had her key in her hand as she approached the door but purposely fumbled with her purse to give the young woman an opportunity to see the open door before her.

  “Do you live alone?” Sarah asked suddenly.

  “No, I have a cat.” Judith had forgotten about Franklin. He had already exhausted six of his nine lives, and she prayed he was all right. As if on cue, the infuriated tabby meowed from behind the bushes where he was hiding. Judith collected him in her arms and calmed him, thrilled that her beloved pet was safe.

  “Your front door is open,” Sarah said. “Did you lock it this morning?”

  “I always lock it,” Judith whispered, then added, “Oh no.”

  “Wait here.” Sarah placed Judith’s bag of books on the ground and approached the open door carefully. Using her elbow, she pushed it inward. She could not suppress her loud gasp. “I think it’s time to call the police.”

  6

  Robert Elliot had always wanted to be an interior designer.

  An artistic youth, he would spend hours inside the house coloring at the kitchen table until his father would smack him on the side of the head and yell at him to play football with the other boys. However, Elliot preferred drawing to athletics: sick, dark pictures often involving people being guillotined or animals brutally cut open for dissection. He had a vivid imagination, which was best served confined within the pages of his notebooks. It was safer that way. Yet Elliot’s father continued to push him throughout his youth, and the teenager finally snapped on his eighteenth birthday when he made the first of many pictures come alive, bludgeoning his father to death with a cricket bat.

  A gifted public prosecutor had managed to commute Elliot’s sentence to fifteen years, during which time Elliot continued to draw as well as read voraciously, using the prison library to educate himself. Hardened by his time in prison, Elliot found that jobs for which he was best suited required only two things: an enormous financial incentive and a great deal of violence.

  He picked a piece of lint off his chocolate brown Dolce & Gabbana sports jacket as he watched the elderly woman hobbling up the street. Elliot smiled and made a quick call. “She just arrived, sir.”

  Static crackled on the cell. It was the latest BlackBerry on the market, yet the reception was always fuzzy and when he spoke he could hear his voice echoing back at him. He had no idea where he was phoning. The number was in the United States, but Elliot guessed it was bounced around a dozen satellites before it reached its final destination.

  “I’m sorry, sir. What?…Oh. No. There’s someone with her. A redhead. Early twenties, I’d venture to guess. She wasn’t in any of the lady’s pictures.”

  Robert Elliot listened carefully to the baritone voice on the other end of the phone, abruptly glad of the distance separating him from his employer.

  “Presently, I think that would be unwise, sir,” he advised cautiously. “The girl’s a variable. I don’t know how long she’s likely to be there. She could be police for all we know.”

  Static howled and then the line went dead.

  Elliot gratefully hit end. He dropped the phone back into his pocket, turned on the engine of his black BMW, and pulled away from the curb. As he cruised slowly past the Walker house, he was unable to resist a smile, imagining the look on the old woman’s face when she saw the way he had redesigned her beloved home.

  Robert Elliot had always wanted to be an interior designer, and his new employer had finally given him his opportunity.

  7

  The house had been completely trashed.

  Judith clutched Franklin tightly in her arms as she stepped into the hall. There were gaping holes in the floor where the floorboards had been torn up. Anger welled up inside her, burning in the pit of her stomach, flooding her throat, and stinging her soft gray eyes. Holes had been punched in the walls, and all the framed covers of her children’s books that had once lined the walls lay crushed and crumpled on the floor.

  Judith put the cat down and walked to the end of the hall, stumbling over the shredded Oriental rugs as she tried the door to the sitting room. It would open only halfway. Peering around the corner of the door, she realized that the hideous horse hair sofa she’d always detested was jamming the door. It had been completely gutted, the back slashed open in a big X, wiry hair spilling across the floor, mingling with the feathers from the eight ornate cushions she had embroidered herself. The ebony Edwardian wood cabinet was lying at an angle against the upturned easy chair, drawers and doors hanging open, the dark wood scarred as if it had been cut with a knife.

  Hundreds of delicate china teacups she’d spent a lifetime collecting were scattered on the floor, br
oken into a thousand fragments. All of the photographs had been pulled off the wall, a lifetime of memories torn and stamped to shreds.

  “The police are on the way.” Sarah reached out to the older woman, but Judith reflexively pulled away. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked lamely.

  “Nothing,” Judith said as the realization gradually sank in that her life, as she knew it, was now over. “Nothing anyone can do.” She put her hand on the banister to steady herself. “I need to look upstairs.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No. Thank you. Please just wait for the police.”

  The worst destruction had been wrought in the bedroom. The bed itself had been slashed to ribbons by a razor-sharp blade. The canary yellow down comforter, in which her late husband used to wrap himself when he watched television, lay in shreds on the floor. She held a sliver of the torn material, trying to smell a fragment of the memory of the man with whom she had shared a lifetime.

  And Judith knew that she would be seeing him soon.

  Surveying the rest of the room, she noted that nothing had been spared. Every item of clothing had been pulled out of the closet and systematically slashed and torn. The remains of a pair of expensive silk heels she had long ago worn at her nephew’s communion were shoved in the overflowing toilet. The smell of acrid urine was almost unbearable. Judith closed the door and leaned her forehead against the cool wood, while tears burned at the backs of her eyes. But she was determined not to cry.

  The bedroom she had converted to an office was similarly ruined. The floor was awash with paper, decades of carefully collected and collated notes once neatly filed and cataloged in her cabinet were unceremoniously dumped out, scattered everywhere. Not one of her beloved books remained on the shelf. Paperbacks had been torn in half, every hardback cover was ripped, and some of the older volumes were lacking their leather spines and covers. The original artwork to her children’s books was all on the floor, the glass shattered, wooden frames broken, filthy footprints on the delicate watercolors. The twenty-five-year-old Smith Corona typewriter on which she’d written her first book lay crushed, as if someone had jumped on it. Her iMac was completely destroyed, a huge hole in the center of the screen. Stooping, she lifted a random page from the floor at her feet. Page twenty-two of the manuscript of her latest children’s book: It was smeared with excrement. Judith allowed the page to flutter to the floor, and the bitter tears finally came. Even if she had the time, it would take her years to sort out the mess. But it didn’t matter: Whoever had done this hadn’t gotten what they were looking for.

  They would be back.

  After placing her shoulder bag on the scarred wooden desk, she removed the books and papers she’d been carrying around with her all day. Nestled at the bottom of the bag, still wrapped in its newspapers, was the treasure her assailants had been after.

  Dyrnwyn, Sword of Rhydderch.

  The old woman smiled bitterly. If only they knew how close they’d been to getting it. Her gnarled fingers closed around the rusted hilt, and she felt a ghost of its power tremble through her arms. She had never harmed anyone in her life, but if she could get her hands on the savages who had done this, who had destroyed a lifetime of work and memories…

  The metal grew warm and she quickly jerked her hand back; she had forgotten how dangerous such thoughts were in the presence of the artifact.

  8

  Richard Fenton pulled off the terry towel and slid naked into the water, hissing with pleasure. A perfect eighty-five degrees. A bit too hot for some, but when you reached his age, the blood grew thin and old bones felt the cold. With long, even strokes he swam the length of the swimming pool, turned, and swam back to the deep end again. On a good day he could swim twenty lengths, but he’d had a late night last night, and it had been dawn before he had gone to bed. He hadn’t woken until one thirty in the afternoon and was feeling stiff and tired…and old.

  Today, he felt like an old man.

  He was an old man, he reminded himself grimly, seventy-seven next month, and although he looked at least ten years younger and had a body to match, there were days when he felt every one of his years. Today was one of them. He would try to do ten lengths of the pool and then he’d have Max give him a massage. He had planned to have dinner in the club tonight, but perhaps he’d give it a miss, stay home and relax.

  His feet pressed against the teal tiled wall, he pushed off again, his overlong fine white hair streaming out behind him, plastering itself to his skull when he raised his head above the water. Sunlight lanced through the high windows, speckling the water, dappling the tiled floor of the pool, the light bringing the ornate design on the floor to shimmering life. He’d had the architect who’d designed this wing of the house copy the pattern from a Greek vase: stylized human figures copulating in a dozen unusual and improbable positions.

  Somewhere deep in the house, a phone rang.

  Richard ignored it; Max or Jackie would handle it. He ducked under the water, opening his eyes wide. The water was clean; he would not allow chlorine or any of the other detergents into his pool. The water was completely recycled twice a day, usually just before he took his morning swim and then again late in the evening. Looking down, he watched the design on the floor tremble and shiver, the figures looking as if they were moving.

  The phone was still ringing when he raised his head above the water.

  Richard ran his hands through his hair, pulling it back off his face, and turned to the double doors at the opposite end of the room. Where was Max…or Jackie, for that matter? They should have answered the phone…unless they were otherwise engaged. He suddenly grinned, showing a perfect set of teeth that were too white and too straight to be real. He’d suspected for a while that they were becoming more than colleagues. The old man’s smile faded. They could do what they liked on their own time, but he employed them to work.

  The phone stopped.

  Richard Fenton flipped over and floated on his back, raising his left arm to look at the watch that never left his wrist. Two thirty. It had been his father’s watch and his father’s before him. It had cost Richard a fortune to have it rendered waterproof, but the money had meant nothing. The watch was a symbol. Every time he looked at it, he was reminded of his father, who’d finished his days coughing up his lungs, the blood black and speckled with coal dust. His grandfather had died down in the pits; “exhaustion,” the death certificate said, but everyone knew there had been gas leaking down in the mines. Richard barely remembered his grandfather, though he had vague memories of the funeral.

  He remembered his father’s funeral vividly.

  He recollected standing at the edge of the grave, a clump of earth in his hands, cold and damp and heavy, and swearing that he would never go down into the mines. It was an oath he’d broken only once in his lifetime, and that was when he’d been photographed with a band he’d discovered in the sixties: the Miners. They’d done a publicity shoot in the cages and tunnels, the five teenagers posing wearing miners’ helmets, holding the picks and shovels like the musical instruments they never learned to play.

  Richard grinned. He hadn’t thought about the band for years, a sure sign he was going senile. They’d had two top-twenty hits and seemed destined for great things. The next Beatles, the future Stones, the music press called them. Fenton had sold their contract to one of the big American labels—and walked away with a fortune in his pocket. The boys had complained, of course, and looked for their share, but they had signed a contract, a cast-iron contract, that allowed him to be reimbursed for his expenses. And his expenses had been high, very high. They’d threatened to sue, until he’d pointed out how expensive that would be, adding that they would lose. Eventually, they’d given up; they were convinced they were going to make ten times what he’d stolen from them in the States.

  They’d never made another record.

  The phone started ringing again, and Richard surged up in the water. Where was Max? What the hell wa
s going on? He struck out for the shallow end of the pool, anger making his strokes ragged and choppy.

  Richard Fenton caught the barest glimpse of the object in the air—dark, round—before it hit the pool in an explosion of pink-tinged water behind him.

  “Jesus!” Fenton looked up. One of the ornamental hanging plants must have fallen from the rafters. He could have been killed. He turned, treading water, looking for the plant. If he didn’t get it out of the pool right now, the soil would clog up the filters.

  “Max?…Max!”

  Where the fuck was the bastard? Controlling his temper, Richard ducked beneath the surface, looking for the plant. He spotted it in the deep end, surrounded by a growing cloud of dark earth, and struck out for it. He was going to make someone pay for the cleanup of the pool, and for new filters, and for the fright it had given him; he could have had a heart attack. He’d sue the gardeners who’d installed the flowers, or the architect, or both. Breaking the surface, he took a deep breath and then ducked back down again. It was only when he swam into the cloud billowing around the plant that he realized it was pink, shot through with thin, ropy black tendrils. As he reached for the thick ball of earth, it rolled over…and Richard Fenton found himself looking at the severed head of his manservant, eyes wide and staring, face blank with surprise. The mouth opened, and blood, pale and pink, bubbled upward.

  Fenton surged out of the pool, coughing and hacking, heart hammering so violently in his chest that he could actually feel the skin tremble. He coughed up the water he’d ingested, felt his gorge rise, and swallowed. He was trembling so hard that he could barely hold on to the metal ladder as he pulled himself up to the slick, cold tiles. He tried to marshal his thoughts, but his head was spinning, the constriction in his chest was tightening, and black spots were dancing before his eyes. Doubled over, he breathed deeply and then straightened. He swayed as the blood rushed to his head; however, he could think clearly now.