The Thirteen Hallows

by Michael Scott; Colette Freedman

  She looked at the neighbors’ houses on either side, comparing them with her own. They were identical in style, shape, and size: four-bedroom detached redbrick houses built just after the war with large, generous rooms, high ceilings, and large bay windows.

  She reached into her pocket for a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from her forehead…and then realized what was wrong. This year had been the wettest, coldest summer on record, but then, shockingly, surprisingly, the fall had been spectacular, with a high-pressure zone settling over most of the south of England, pushing temperatures into the unseasonably high seventies. All the houses on either side of her mother’s home had windows open in an attempt to circulate fresh air through the rooms. Yet the windows in her own home were closed.

  They were all closed.

  Perhaps James was trying to sweat out his hangover. Or her mother and brothers had gone out. But they wouldn’t have left the bike in the garden….

  Sarah pushed open the squeaking gate and hurried up the driveway. Walking up to the front door, she was conscious of her own thundering heart, beating hard enough to nauseate her. She realized she was afraid. She tried to convince herself that everything was going to be fine. She was going to put the key in the lock and push the door open, and Martin would come barreling down the hall in his football kit, and then the kitchen door would open and her mother would appear, all grim and disapproving, surprised to find her home so early, and…

  And Sarah would be relieved.

  The key turned easily in the lock, the heavily lacquered door opening silently on well-oiled hinges. She stood blinking on the doorstep, squinting into the dim hall, and she had opened her mouth to call out to her family when the smell hit her with full force. Sarah covered her mouth and nose, trying not to breathe in the mixture of noxious odors, new smells that were completely alien to the usually flower-scented interior of her home. Some smells she recognized: the bitter stench of urine and feces, the sharper tang of vomit. But there were others—dark, meaty, metallic—that she couldn’t quite identify.

  Sarah stepped into the hall. Liquid bubbled and squelched underfoot, and she jerked her leg back, rubbing it on the white step, smearing thick dark crimson across the alabaster marble.

  Frozen in fear, Sarah began to hyperventilate. She tried to calm herself, pretending it was a prank, something her family had cooked up to get her back for inviting a stranger into their home. As she tried to make sense of the smells, she felt something dripping on her in a slow, repetitive rhythm. Something hot and thick. Sarah looked up.

  And then the screams began.

  13

  Sarah was planting flowers for her mother.

  She was up way too early on a Saturday morning for a teenage girl, but she was desperate to please her perpetually irritable mother, so she had volunteered to plant the bulbs. She dug her hands into the warm soil, which felt oddly moist on her small fingers. As she pulled her hands out of the dirt, the brown earth turned bright crimson. She abruptly fell back and noticed that the entire garden was bathed in bloody red flowers now mingled with the dismembered body parts of her dead father. She frantically tried to gather the fragile flowers, piecing together his broken body; yet the petals fell away like ragged strips of skin, revealing pale weeping flesh underneath, blood dribbling from her hands, forming a strange hieroglyphic pattern….

  All around her flowers bloomed, each one more hideous than the last, each one bloodred and bone white.

  There was blood.

  So much blood.

  She had never seen so much blood before in her life….

  14

  Ms. Miller?…Ms. Miller?…Sarah?”

  The voice was male. Bright and chirpy. More mature than her brother Martin’s voice—bright hair black with blood—but younger than James—blue eyes missing from their sockets.

  Sarah Miller bolted upright with a scream that tore the lining of her throat. She screamed again and again, breathing in uncontrollable gasps, blood pounding in her temples, heart hammering in her chest, tasting metal in her mouth, the same meaty, metallic odor that had permeated the house.

  There were voices all around, officious-looking people in white coats, concerned faces, bright lights. Sarah was only vaguely aware of them. There was a sting in the crook of her arm and she looked down to see that one of the white-coated figures had pushed a needle into her arm.

  She was unaware of them, conscious only of the dark images, the terrible vision of her mother splayed across the kitchen table, little Freddie broken and butchered on the stairs, Martin hanging from the chandelier in the foyer…and James, dear God, what had they done to James? There had been so much blood. So much blood. She had never seen so much blood before in her life.

  And then the needle worked its magic and she slept.

  Thursday, October 29

  15

  How do you feel?”

  The face swam into focus, an earnest young man with a kind smile, who showed a little more than just professional concern.

  Sarah’s eyes slowly focused as they followed the young man in blue scrubs. As the male nurse moved around the bed, she gradually became aware of her surroundings. She was in a hospital, in a private room. There must have been an accident, but she couldn’t recall anything. She didn’t seem to be in any pain, and there were no tubes in her, no plaster casts.

  Sarah licked her dry, swollen lips. “What happened?” she attempted to say, but it came out in a scratchy whisper.

  “You’re going to be just fine,” the nurse said, not answering her question as he brought her a cup of water with a straw. She drank gratefully while he lifted her left arm and applied a blood pressure cuff. When he had finished taking her temperature and blood pressure, he tilted the back of the bed upward, raising her to a sitting position.

  “What happened?”

  Still not answering her, he said, “There are some people who want to talk to you. Do you feel like talking to them now?”

  Sarah struggled to straighten up, but the nurse gently pushed her back onto the pillows. “How long have I been here?”

  “Sixteen hours.”

  “What happened?” she asked a third time.

  The nurse wouldn’t meet her eyes. “There was an accident in your home,” he said eventually. “Some sort of gas leak, they said. That’s all I know,” he added quickly, turning away before she could ask any more questions. Sarah stared at the door. A gas leak? She didn’t remember a gas leak…but then again, she couldn’t even remember how she got here. She lifted her hands and touched her face: It was soft and damp. No cuts, no bruises, no marks. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to remember…but the images that flickered at the edges of her consciousness darted and twisted away, leaving only the impression of dark shadows.

  “Ms. Miller?”

  Sarah opened her eyes and knew instinctively that the butch young woman with the close-cropped platinum hair standing at the end of the bed was a police officer. Behind her, a craggy-faced older man perched on the window ledge, watching her intently.

  The woman indicated the older man. “This is Detective Inspector Fowler and I am Sergeant Heath, London Metropolitan Police—”

  “What happened?” Sarah interrupted. Her voice cracked with the effort, and she started coughing.

  Sergeant Heath came around the bed to pour her some more water.

  “Please. What happened at my house? No one will tell me anything.”

  “We were hoping you would be able to tell us,” Inspector Fowler said abruptly, pushing himself off the window ledge to stand at the end of the bed, big, hard-knuckled hands clutching the metal bed rail. His lips were so thin, they were almost invisible.

  “The nurse said there was a gas leak….”

  “There was no gas leak,” Fowler said firmly.

  The sergeant sat on the bed next to Sarah. “What do you remember?” she asked quietly, trying to catch and hold the girl’s attention. Yet Sarah was having trouble listening.

 
“We know you received two phone calls on Wednesday morning,” the police sergeant continued. “You left your office immediately after the second call, caught a cab, subsequently ditching it in Oxford Street approximately fifteen minutes later. Then you caught the tube out of Tottenham Court Road, changed in Victoria, and headed home. You were back in Crawley around twelve forty-five—”

  “And then,” Detective Fowler interrupted sharply, “what happened then?”

  Sarah looked at him blankly. It was the same question she had been asking herself. Something had happened. Something terrible….

  “Why did you leave the office so quickly?” the sergeant asked, eyes locked on Sarah’s face. “Who called you?”

  The phone calls. The voice.

  Images danced, dark and bloody.

  “The phone calls?” Sergeant Heath prodded gently.

  “The man. There was a man with a strange voice, and he said…he said that I had something belonging to him, and that…” Her voice trailed away.

  “And what?” Heath murmured. “What did he say?”

  “He said that his representatives would call for it at noon.”

  Heath glanced quickly at Fowler, but the older man was staring fixedly at Sarah Miller’s face. The sergeant turned back to Sarah, anxious to keep her talking. “Does this caller have a name?”

  “No. I mean, he didn’t give me a name but…I don’t think I asked,” Sarah said quickly. She needed to talk and keep talking, because when she stopped, the images, the dark shadows, drew closer. “But he knew…he knew my name and my address. He knew my address.”

  “Have you ever spoken to this man before?”

  “No. Never. I didn’t recognize his voice. It was so deep and there was some sort of an accent…but I’m not sure.”

  “What do you have belonging to this man?” Fowler asked quickly.

  “Nothing.”

  “So he just picked you at random?”

  “No. I don’t think so. He said…he said the old woman had given me something.”

  “What old woman?” Heath asked patiently, keeping her face expressionless.

  “The woman who stayed the night with us. Judith. Judith Walker. The man on the phone said Judith had given me something that belonged to him and that his representatives would call for it at noon.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know!” Sarah was starting to get agitated. She was close to something. So close.

  “Who was the woman?”

  “Judith Walker. I just told you that. Why aren’t you listening to me?”

  “Why did she stay the night?”

  “She was attacked on the street in front of the library. I helped her. And…and…and when I took her back to her house, it had been burgled, just completely destroyed…so I invited her to stay the night at my place. She didn’t have anywhere to go…and of course my mother freaked out, thinking that she was going to stay and never leave. My mother was horribly rude to her at tea…they all were, but especially my mother…but when I woke up the following morning, the old woman, Judith Walker, was gone. She made the bed, it was like…it was like she was never there.” Sarah couldn’t stop babbling.

  The shadows were closer now.

  The words were coming quicker, and she was breathing in great heaving gasps. “And when I got to work, there was this phone call. I thought it was a joke…one of the guys from the office…and then my boss called me into his office. I thought he was going to fire me for not coming back to work the previous day….”

  “Because you were bringing this Judith Walker home?” Sergeant Heath asked.

  “Yes, but he told me Sir Simon called to commend me. But when I got back to my desk, there was another call from the same man. The man with the deep voice. He told me to give him what was his…but I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t know what was his…Judith Walker hadn’t given me anything…I swear, she didn’t…but he wouldn’t listen to me. And there was something about him…about his voice…something about his voice scared me, so I went home, and then, when I got there, when I walked in the door, when I…I…I…I found…I found…I found…”

  The darkness washed over her, bringing with it the images—the terrible, terrifying images, of death and bloody destruction.

  FOWLER AND Heath stood in the corridor and listened to Sarah Miller’s screams fade as the sedatives took effect.

  “What do you think?” Victoria Heath asked. She patted her pockets, searching for the cigarettes she’d given up six months ago.

  Tony Fowler shook his head. “No one is that good of an actor,” he said regretfully. He’d had Sarah Miller pinned as the murderer. In the vast majority of cases of domestic homicides, a member of the family or a close friend usually committed the crime. And from what he’d been able to put together from the reports of relatives and friends of the deceased family, Sarah had always cowered under the thumb—some would have said the heel—of her overbearing mother, who controlled every aspect of her daughter’s life. So one day she cracked and butchered her entire family: exorcising twenty-two years of repressed hostility in an orgy of bloodletting.

  Her terrible screams had drawn the neighbors, who’d found her paralyzed in the middle of the dining room, standing in a pool of blood, surrounded by the dismembered and butchered bodies of her entire family.

  An open-and-shut case, Fowler had thought.

  But now, having listened to Miller scream aloud her hurt, he wasn’t so sure. And if Miller wasn’t guilty…well, Tony Fowler didn’t even want to consider that. Right now, Miller was their prime suspect, and he was going to proceed along those lines.

  The door opened and the exhausted-looking doctor appeared. “I thought I told you not to upset her!” he snapped.

  “We didn’t,” Heath said easily.

  “When can we talk to her again?” Fowler demanded.

  “You can’t. Not right now. I’ve sedated her. She’ll be unconscious for at least eight hours. And I insist you leave her alone. Detectives, she’s been through an extremely traumatic experience. I want you to give her some time to recover.”

  “Well, we can’t have everything we want, can we?” Tony Fowler said, turning away. “We’ll be back in eight hours.” As they walked down the corridor, he pulled out his phone. “Let’s see if we can get anything on this Judith Walker. Be interesting if she didn’t exist, wouldn’t it?”

  “Be even more interesting if she did.” Victoria Heath smiled.

  16

  Robert Elliot dialed the number from memory, amused albeit unsurprised to discover that his fingers were trembling slightly. He was frightened, and rightly so. There was no shame in fear, he reflected.

  Fear was mankind’s most potent imperative, its most valuable tool. Fear had kept primitive man alive; fear of starvation and rival tribes had sent the first migrants out across the world. Fear kept the many from rebelling against the few. It had fueled most of mankind’s finest inventions, and it was that same fear that would ultimately prevent humanity from destroying itself.

  Elliot had followed the same rules…and they had kept him alive.

  Robert Elliot was an expert on fear. Small, unprepossessing, and physically weak, he had discovered its value in the playgrounds of his childhood. In the years that followed, he had studied the nature of fear, learned how to inspire it, how to prosper from it. In doing so, he had explored the limits of his own fears and discovered that little frightened him…until he received the phone call at dawn on a pristine summer morning from a man who knew too much about him and his dealings. And who had backed up his vague threats by sending him the rotting remains of a troublesome youth Robert Elliot had buried six months earlier.

  Static howled on the line. Knowing from experience that no one would talk, Elliot spoke first. “I’ve found her. She’s at Crawley Hospital, suffering from shock. She’s been sedated. I’ll visit her shortly.”

  “And the…item?”

  Sometimes, when he concentrated, E
lliot thought he could detect a trace of an accent in the baritone voice. West Country, perhaps? Welsh? Irish? But despite his best efforts, he had been unable to trace his mysterious employer. “It wasn’t in the house, and I searched her office last night. Nothing there. However, I’ll be sure to ask her…personally.”

  “Do that. Having seen your handiwork, I’m sure she’ll understand that we’re quite serious, and I’m confident she will cooperate.” The connection was broken and Elliot shoved the phone back in his pocket.

  Although he’d orchestrated all of the arrangements, Elliot hadn’t been in the house on Wednesday morning. He didn’t know exactly what had happened when he’d instructed Skinner and the junkie to do his dirty work; however, he had given them explicit instructions.

  Elliot had made sure he had a very public alibi for that time: lunch at the Athenaeum with an old friend. He had worn his new houndstooth Armani blazer and given the waiter a memorable tip.

  Later, through a source, he’d obtained a copy of the police report and crime scene photographs. He kept a private collection of eight-by-ten photos of all his “jobs.” He collected them in a keepsake memory book, whose first page contained a graphic photo of his bludgeoned father taken just moments after the murder.

  As he looked at the photos of the butchered Miller family, a part of him couldn’t help but wonder if the girl would cooperate. Elliot had instructed Skinner to leave a brother or two alive. Killing all the family was a mistake; one family member, perhaps two, was all that was needed to make a point.

  Now, the girl had nothing left to lose.

  In Elliot’s experience, people with nothing to lose made dangerous enemies.

  17

  Judith Walker sat on the park bench, her arms wrapped tightly around the bag on her lap, the weight of the ancient metal heavy on her frail legs. She’d left Crawley on the first train the previous morning and returned to Bath. She’d been sitting on the wooden bench since, petrified to go back to her devastated home. A Frisbee landed by her feet, and Judith smiled at the young man who darted in and quickly picked it up. The park was teeming with children, full of laughter and life, full of hope for their futures. She watched them, mothers and fathers playing with their children, brothers and sisters running, all squalling and screaming around one another.