“You are Nick Jacobs, but you are commonly called Skinner, so that is how I will address you.” The voice was deep and commanding.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“I am Robert Elliot’s employer. His former employer.”
Skinner straightened. “You’re the guy he keeps phoning?”
“I am.” There was a long silence broken only by the line clicking and snapping. “Tell me, Skinner, what happened tonight?”
“Miller and the bloke got away. Karl was killed,” he added bitterly.
“And you were close to Karl?”
“I was. It was Elliot’s fault. We should never have gone in there in the first place. We should have snatched the bitch on the streets.”
“I would agree. It is Elliot’s fault Karl is dead. You should exact your revenge.”
Skinner sat up straight. “I will.”
“Did you know that Mr. Elliot is planning to flee the country?”
“When?”
“Within the hour. If you’re going to catch him, you will have to be quick.”
“I don’t have his address. He never told me.”
“Mr. Elliot was a very cautious man.” There was a pause, then the voice asked, “Would you like his address?”
“Yes sir, I would.”
“Good. Very good, Skinner. I believe we’re going to get on quite well. Need I remind you that you’re now working for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“After I’ve given you the address, and your instructions, I’ll give you a phone number. You may reach me there at any time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Skinner…”
“Yes, sir?”
“Tell him that running was a mistake. Make him suffer.”
“Oh, you can count on that,” Skinner said grimly.
47
Robert Elliot strode across the underground parking lot, heels tapping on the ground. He whistled a song from Wicked. He couldn’t wait to see it on Broadway. Elliot felt that most American musicals were diluted by the time they reached the West End, and he wanted to see proper American boys dancing and singing in their tight costumes. Perhaps he would reinvent himself next as a producer and personally audition young talent who wanted to make their mark on the Great White Way. Yes. He would set up a small office on Broadway and seduce potential clients. Men only.
Elliot smiled as he approached his car, imagining his future. Enveloped in his dreams, he barely noticed that the air was heavy with gas and carbon monoxide fumes. Since he wasn’t planning to return, he’d drive the BMW to the airport. He hated having to leave the car, but he’d buy himself another in America. A Hummer. Black.
The smell of gasoline was stronger at this end of the garage, strong enough to make his eyes water. He used the remote control to open the car doors from a distance. He walked up to the car, pulled open the door, and slid into the leather seats.
“Fuck!”
The interior of the car was reeking of gas fumes. And then Elliot was aware that moisture was soaking into his trousers and back. He touched the passenger’s seat…and put his hand in a puddle of liquid. He didn’t have to bring his hand to his face to realize that it was gasoline.
A shape moved alongside the car, and then the passenger window exploded inward, shards of glass raining around Elliot, tangling in his hair, nicking his cheeks. “Skinner?” he whispered.
“Your former employer told me to tell you that running was a mistake.” Skinner’s broken yellow teeth gleamed in the sulfurous flare of a long kitchen match.
And then the match was falling, slowly, slowly, slowly, onto the leather seat.
“IT IS happening.” On the other side of the country, the naked woman spread-eagled on the silken sheets grunted in ecstasy when the car erupted into flames. Elliot’s agony was a vague and distant discomfort, nothing more. If she heightened her consciousness, she could experience Elliot’s pain. “He burns. He is in excruciating pain.”
On the Otherworld Astral plane, she looked down over the burning car, watching the writhing figure within. Waves of color—the man’s terror and torment—spiraled up like smoke. She absorbed the colors, drinking the emotions.
“Remember, do not allow him to die quickly, chain his spirit to his body as long as possible. Let him suffer.”
“He is suffering.”
“Good. Now show him this.”
Vyvienne opened her eyes and looked at the man standing at the end of the bed, wrapped in a red cloak woven of birds’ feathers. He stretched his arms wide, spreading the cloak. “Let him see me.”
THROUGH SHIMMERING waves of raw anguish, Robert Elliot saw the towering man-bird in the crimson cloak appear before him. He opened his mouth to scream and vomited flames onto the bubbling glass. The windscreen melted, a hole appearing, curling outward. The pain was too great, and he closed his eyes moments before he lost them.
His last impression was the smell of burning meat, and by then there was no pain.
48
Gavin Mackintosh smelled something rotten.
Handsome, charismatic, and witty with the soft Scottish accent made sexy and acceptable by Sean Connery, he was a regular on late night television talk shows and radio phone-ins. In the twelve years he had been a pathologist, he had collected a wealth of amusing and anecdotal stories about his job. Invariably, someone would ask him what he liked least about his unique occupation, and he’d always respond, “The smells.” It always got a laugh, but it was actually true. The mixture of decomposing flesh and decaying gases from a particularly ripe corpse was indescribable. However, if the truth be told, after the first year on the job he barely registered the smells. It was as if his olfactory sense closed down once he stepped into the building.
But Mackintosh was smelling something rotten now.
Mac had been leaving for an early luncheon appointment with a charming magazine editor when he’d caught the faintest hint of a suspect odor. Something bitter and sweet, like rotten fruit, sticky with juice and flies. He’d wandered back down the tiled corridors, head thrown back, broad nostrils flaring. He’d worked in this building for so long now that he knew it intimately, its peculiarities, its smells, and the rattling doors and shaky windows that gave the building its haunted reputation. There was mildew in one of the basements, dry rot in another corner of the building, but here…here there should have been only the sharpness of disinfectant, perhaps the faintest sweetness of decomposition or the touch of metallic blood.
Mackintosh threw his briefcase and coat onto the desk in the outer office and pushed through two sets of double doors into the morgue. He brought up the lights. Everyone was out to lunch and the building was almost completely quiet; only the distant hum of the air-conditioning disturbed the stagnant silence. The smell was stronger here.
He recognized it now: It was the stench of advanced decomposition. That state of decay when rotting flesh turned the consistency of soap and sloughed off brittle bones. But there was nothing in that state here…unless something had come in and he hadn’t been informed.
Mac wandered down the numbered freezers, nostrils flaring, identifying the corpses by odor before he read the tag on the door.
Raw, bloody meat: road-traffic accident.
Rancid seaweed and salt: drowning.
Burned meat and petrol: a car suicide that had just come in. The victim had doused his car in gasoline, locked himself in, then set it alight.
As he continued through the room, Mac blinked, eyes suddenly watering.
Unknown Male 44. Unknown Male 45.
The headless young men struck down by the sword-wielding maniac. Neither had been positively identified. Mac pulled open the drawer of Number 44, the youth from the train, and recoiled, pinching his nostrils shut. The smell was appalling. The meaty, fruiting smell of advanced decay. And yet it shouldn’t be…He tugged back the sheet…and then the hardened pathologist spun away and vomited.
The body was a mass of wriggling white worms. Mu
ch of the flesh was missing, and the bones were already beginning to show the characteristic yellow white of age. What flesh remained was black and leathery.
Squeezing his watering eyes shut, Mackintosh pushed the drawer closed and pulled out Number 45, the headless body from the flat off of Earls Court Road. The smell here was even more intense, and the sheet, which covered the body, was lying almost flat on the metal tray, only the curve of the skull and the jut of the ribs indenting the sheet. The white sheet was stained yellow and black, and tendrils of sticky liquid dripped onto the tiled floor. Mac staggered back and stumbled out of the morgue.
The bodies, only hours old, looked as if they had been dead for years.
49
It’s a letter, from Aunt Judith.”
Tears magnified Owen’s bright green eyes as he held up a flimsy sheet of paper that was covered with tiny script.
Sarah sank to the floor facing Owen. Romulus immediately climbed onto her legs, and Sarah’s fingers started moving over his sleek fur.
“Did you read it?” Owen asked, almost accusingly.
She shook her head. “I went through the bag to get your address. That’s all. I didn’t read anything.”
Owen took a deep breath and began to read slowly, struggling to decipher the crabbed, often hurried writing.
My dearest Owen,
If you are reading this, then there is a good chance that I’m dead. You must not grieve for me, my boy. Everything dies, but only so that it may be reborn. I pray that this note is accompanied by the sword. It may look like nothing more than a piece of rusty metal, but I must ask you to treat it with all the reverence of a holy relic. The sword is Dyrnwyn, the Broken Sword. It is older than the land, and forms part of the Hallows, thirteen sacred objects that are the Sovereignty of the Land of Britain. When I was a child I was entrusted with the sword and I became one of the thirteen Hallowed Keepers.
I now pass this Keepership on to you.
This is not a task I do lightly, but you are of my bloodline. Guard the sword well, and in time you will be able to wield a fragment of its terrible power.
Owen looked up, eyes burning. He suddenly crumpled the page and tossed it to one side. He looked away, forcing himself not to cry.
Sarah leaned over and retrieved the letter without a word. She unfolded it.
“I knew she was mentally ill,” Owen said, sobbing, “but she wouldn’t let anyone help her. She lived alone; she wouldn’t let me put her in a home. A couple of years ago she fell and had to have a hip replaced. She was incapacitated for two days before someone eventually found her. Two days! She’d written children’s books that had won all sorts of awards. But in the last few years, her books had become wilder…darker.” Owen nodded toward the page in Sarah’s hands. “She was obviously slipping further and further into her fantasy world.”
“The men who flayed her alive, who abused and killed her, were no fantasy,” Sarah said quietly. “The men who broke into your apartment were no fantasy.”
Owen stopped and stared at her. “Are you saying you believe her?”
“The men who killed my family were no fantasy.” Sarah bent her head and smoothed the crumpled page flat, then turned it over to read the writing on the back of the page.
I have spent most of my life researching the Hallows, their forms, identities, and powers. Much of what I have learned or conjectured is contained in these notebooks. How I came to be a Keeper is also contained in the smaller, separate notebook.
It is my diary.
In the last few months my work has taken on an additional urgency. I have learned that the Keepers of the Hallows are being killed; horribly, cruelly, systematically killed. There are—were—thirteen of us; I am unsure how many survive now, and only the Lord knows how many will still be living by the time you read this. I have listed the names and the last addresses I had for them. I am convinced that the Keepers are being killed for their Hallows.
That someone is collecting the Hallows.
My dearest Owen, this must never happen. The Hallows must never be brought together.
Never.
I am sorry, truly sorry, that this burden has been passed on to you. From father to son, mother to daughter, the Hallows have been handed down through the generations, though if the lines die out, then a Guardian is reputed to come to redistribute them to new Keepers. You are my nearest relative. You are all I have.
Do not fail me.
“It’s not signed,” Sarah said. She looked over at Owen. “Well?” she asked.
“‘Well’? What does ‘well’ mean? Ancient artifacts. Keepers of the Hallows? It’s like something out of one of her novels.”
Sarah lifted the padded envelope off the floor and shook everything onto the worn mauve carpet between them. There was a notebook, faded and tattered, with “Judith Walker” scrawled in large childish script on the brown cover, a small gilt-edged address book, and a fat scrapbook. A piece of paper curled from the edge of the scrapbook.
Pensioner and Good Samaritan Slain
Police in London are investigating the brutal slaying of Beatrice Clay (74) and the neighbor, Viola Jillian (23), who went to her assistance. Police investigators believe that Mrs. Clay, a widow, disturbed late night burglars in her first-floor apartment, who tied her to the bed and gagged her with a pillowcase. Mrs. Clay died of asphyxiation. Police suspect that Ms. Jillian, who lived in the apartment upstairs, heard a noise and came to investigate. In a struggle with one of the burglars, Ms. Jillian was fatally stabbed.
Sarah opened the book to push the cutting back inside. The pages were covered with neat extracts clipped from newspapers with wavy-edged scissors.
Pensioner Hit by Train
A coroner has returned a verdict of accidental death on Miss Georgina Rifkin (78), with an address at the Stella Maris Nursing Home in Ipswich. Miss Rifkin was struck by the six-thirty Intercity. The coroner dismissed as “malicious” press reports that she had been tied to the track.
Gangland Slaying
Police fears of an upsurge in gangland crimes were repeated today as criminal mastermind Thomas Sexton (76) was slain in one of the bloodiest gang murders Brixton has ever seen. Sexton, whose links with organized crime were well-known to the police, was killed in what a police spokesman described as a “particularly brutal manner.” This reporter has learned that Sexton was disemboweled with a knife or sharp sword.
Sarah closed the book with a snap. She picked up the diary and turned it over in her hands before opening it. On the inside front cover was a list of names. Some of them leapt up at her: Bea…Georgie…Tommy…
She closed the diary, then picked up the small address book and flipped it open. Thumbing through the pages, she saw that most of the book was empty, little more than a dozen names in the flimsy pages, all of them written in a splotchy fountain pen ink that had faded to purple. Bea Clay…Georgie Rifkin…Tommy Sexton…
“You should look at this,” she said, her voice sounding thick and numb.
“I don’t want to.”
“Look at it!” she suddenly snapped, shoving the scrapbook into his face. “Look at it.” She could feel the rage bubbling inside her now, a burning, trembling rage. “Look at these names, here and here and here. And now look at your aunt’s diary. And now the address book. Here. And here. And here.”
The anger subsided as quickly as it had begun, leaving her drained and exhausted. “Don’t you see, Owen? Judith knew all of these people. And they’re all dead.” Crouched on the floor, she reached across and cupped Owen’s face in her hands. “If she wasn’t dreaming, or fantasizing or raving…what then, Owen? What then?”
Owen Walker looked into her eyes. “She was crazy.”
Sarah stared at him, saying nothing.
“She was crazy,” Owen insisted, trying to convince himself. His eyes fell on the papers on the floor. “She was crazy,” he whispered, yet much of the conviction had gone from his voice. Then he picked up his aunt’s diary, opened it at random, an
d began to read aloud.
Monday.
The tramp Ambrose returned to the village today. Bea and I saw him hiding in the woods. We know he saw us, but he would not come out. He stayed in the trees, staring at us with his one eye. Everyone says he’s harmless, but I’m not so sure. He scares me, and Bea told me she was frightened of him, too. Bea also said that she’d been dreaming the strangest dreams about him; I wonder if I should tell her that I was dreaming about him, too?
Tuesday.
Dreamt about Ambrose again last night. The strangest dreams, only this time all the others were in the dreams, too. We were in the middle of the forest. Ambrose was the only one who was properly dressed, he was wearing some sort of long gown.
We gathered in a semicircle around Ambrose, who was standing next to an enormous tree stump. On the stump were loads of strange objects. Cups, plates, knives, a chessboard, a beautiful red cloak. One by one we walked up to Ambrose and he gave us each one of the beautiful objects. I was last, and there was only a piece of rusty metal left. The others had gotten better things: He gave Georgie the pretty red coat, Sophie got a spear, and Donnie got a knife. Even Bea got something pretty. I didn’t want to take the rusty metal, it was ugly, but Ambrose insisted, and he leaned so close that I could see the burst veins in his single eye.
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