The Thirteen Hallows (18 page)

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.

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. Much 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.

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.

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.

“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.

Sarah opened the book to push the cutting back inside. The pages were covered with neat extracts clipped from newspapers with wavy-edged scissors.

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, and 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.

“This is the most precious of my treasures, guard it well.”

Owen closed the book with a snap. Sarah was turning the sword over in her hands, absently stroking the broken blade with the backs of her fingers.

“Go on,” she said softly.

Owen shook his head. “I don’t want to. It seems…too personal.” He reached for the scrapbook and silently read through the catalog of death and suffering. When he was finished he looked across at Sarah, who had picked up the diary and was reading the large, rounded, childish script.

“My aunt knew all these people?” he said.

“From childhood.” She tapped the diary pages with the sword. “Listen to this. They were all evacuated together. Thirteen children from all parts of the south of England. They were billeted on a farm in Wales, where they met an old one-eyed tramp called Ambrose. Ambrose gave them all the objects known as the Hallows. This is from close to the end of the diary.”

It happened. It was almost exactly like my dream, I thought it might have been a dream. But now I know it really happened. But I’m still not sure when I stopped dreaming and everything started to become real.

I dreamt I woke up in the middle of the night and climbed out of bed, and slipped out into the night. Some of the others were already there, and the rest were coming from where they were staying in the village. When the thirteen of us had all gathered, Mr. Ambrose appeared. He didn’t say anything, and we followed him into the heart of the woods. Sometimes I thought I was an old, old woman, wearing ragged clothing, then I was a short man shivering in the cold, then I was a knight on horse back, then a lady wearing a fabulous gown, then an old man with hands twisted by arthritis. There were more, but the dreams slipped past, too quick to follow. Finally I was just myself, but my pink nightdress had disappeared and I was naked, and so were the other boys and girls, but none of us minded. Even though it was October, we didn’t feel the chill in the air. We gathered around Mr. Ambrose in a half circle, and he called us forward one by one to take the little objects he gave us. I was last, only this time I didn’t refuse the sword. Mr. Ambrose seemed surprised. “I thought you would not want this?”

“This is Dyrnwyn, the Broken Sword,” I said, and lifted up the object.

Mr. Ambrose seemed pleased. “Truly, you are a Keeper of the Hallows. The blood of the ancients flows in your veins, diluted certainly, but it is there. You and these others are all descended from the first Keepers of the Hallows, and only you thirteen are worthy enough to keep the sacred Hallowed objects.”

Then he whispered the special words in my ear and told me that whenever I was in trouble, I was to hold the sword in both hands and call it thrice by its name, Dyrnwyn.

I asked him what thrice meant and he said three times.

Sarah closed the book, laid it on the floor, and lifted the sword in both hands. “Dyrnwyn,” she said strongly.

“Sarah…what are you doing?”

“Dyrnwyn.”

“Sarah!” Owen’s voice was high with alarm.

“Dyrnwyn!”

No sound broke through the long silence that followed.