The Thirteen Hallows (2 page)

A woman died.

She was sixty-six years old, in good health, active, a non-smoker who rarely drank. She had simply gone to sleep and never woken up. Her family and friends mourned, a funeral was arranged, flowers were ordered, a service organized.

Viola Jillian was thrilled.

She had never met the woman, never even known of her existence until she had heard of her death. But she was glad she’d died. Viola was vaguely embarrassed by the emotion but selfish enough not to be
too
embarrassed. After all, the woman’s death presented her with an amazing opportunity. And opportunity, as she kept reminding herself, didn’t come calling too often, and when it did, you had to grasp it with both hands. This was her opportunity. The buxom brunette with the Elizabeth Taylor eyes had spent the last few weeks in the ensemble cast of Drury Lane’s reprisal of
Oliver!
The woman who had died was the lead’s mother, and now the producers had informed Viola that she was going to play Nancy the following evening.

The young woman had immediately gone to sympathize with the distraught Nancy, but only after she had shifted her publicist-almost-boyfriend into high gear to ensure that there would be sufficient press in the audience for her debut. This was her chance, and she was determined to make the most of it.

Viola Jillian had always wanted to be a star.

Usually on Sundays, Viola would grab a few drinks with some of the other girls in the cast, but she wanted to be well rested for her proper West End star turn. Viola knew her theater history: Every great star was discovered by accident. And she knew, deep in her selfish heart, that she was a great star. She fantasized that she would be discovered. She had the talent, the looks, and the drive. And she wanted to move beyond the stage and start acting in films. She had already played small parts in the British soap operas
EastEnders
and
Coronation Street,
but she was tired of always playing second fiddle, or even fifth or sixth fiddle, and was afraid that she was becoming typecast. She was nearly twenty-four; she didn’t have much time left. Let the others drink all night in the Ku Bar, she was heading home to bed.

It was a spectacular fall night, cloudless and balmy, when she left the bar early, and she decided she’d walk to her nearby Soho flat.

She’d not gone more than two hundred yards when Viola felt the skin on the back of her neck tingle. She’d been a dancer all her life, and every dancer had experienced the same sensation, usually when someone in the audience was focusing on them.

Viola knew that someone was watching her.

At eleven thirty
P.M
., the London streets were filled with Sunday night carousers. Viola pulled her bag closer to her chest and picked up her pace, walking briskly down Shaftesbury Avenue. There had been a series of violent muggings lately, and she did not plan to fall victim to one of them. Her flat was less than ten minutes away. She kept glancing behind at every corner, but she could see no one, although the tingle at the back of her neck remained. Viola hurried up the less crowded Dean Street and was half running by the time she reached the almost empty Carlisle Place.

It was only when she reached the safety of her building and had closed the door behind her that Viola relaxed. She made a mental note to talk to her shrink about her growing anxiety attacks. For an actress she led a fairly vanilla life, and the chance of someone like her ever getting hurt was practically nil. She laughed at her ridiculous fear as she hummed one of Nancy’s signature songs. Standing in the hallway, she checked through the day’s mail, throwing away a few overdue bills and keeping a coupon for Anthropologie, which had recently opened on Regent Street. Her mind shifted to far more practical matters as she wondered if she could convince the wardrobe mistress to alter Nancy’s red dress in order to show a bit of extra cleavage and accentuate her two best features.

It was when she started up the stairs that she heard the muffled cry in 1C. Mrs. Clay’s flat.

Not usually one to get involved in other people’s business, especially when the other person was a septuagenarian who constantly complained that Viola made too much noise, she began to climb the stairs. Then there was the faint tinkle of breaking glass. Viola stopped, then turned back down the stairs: Something was wrong.

Standing outside the old woman’s door, she pressed her face against the cool wood, closing her eyes and listening. But the only sound she could make out from within was a faint rasping, like the sound of labored breathing.

She knocked quietly, conscious that she did not want to wake the other neighbors. When there was no response, she pressed her finger to the lighted bell. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture blared on the other side of the door. For a moment she thought it might be the bell she was hearing before she realized it was probably the classical radio station, the only station Mrs. Clay listened to—usually very early in the morning.

Still no response.

She pressed the bell again and realized that the music sounded unnaturally loud. She’d never heard any sounds from the old woman’s flat this late in the evening. Viola suddenly wondered if Mrs. Clay had suffered a heart attack. She looked the picture of health and was extremely spry for her age. “Good country air,” she had once told Viola as she chastised her for smoking, a habit she’d picked up at drama school. “When I was a girl, I lived in the country. That kind of air nourishes you for life.”

Viola rang the bell again, pressing hard, the tip of her finger white against the plastic button. Perhaps Mrs. Clay could not hear the chimes over the now obnoxiously loud music. When she got no response, Viola fished into her hobo bag and pulled out her key ring. The old woman had given her a key to the apartment “in case of an emergency” months ago.

Sorting through the bundle of keys, she finally found the right one, then shoved it into the lock and pushed open the door. The smells hit her as soon as she stepped into the flat: a sharp metallic odor, harsh and unpleasant, mingling with the stench of feces. Viola recoiled, bile rising, pressing her hand to her mouth as she reached for the light switch. She flicked it up, but nothing happened. Leaving the door open to shed light into the tiny hallway, she walked forward…and realized that the carpet beneath her feet was squelching, sodden and sticky with a liquid that was too viscous to be water. What was she standing in? She decided she didn’t want to know; whatever it was, it would wash off. She hoped.

“Mrs. Clay…Mrs. Clay?” she said, shouting to be heard over the overture. “Beatrice? It’s Viola Jillian. Is everything all right?”

There was no reply.

The old woman had probably gone and had a heart attack or something, and now Viola was going to have to go and get an ambulance and probably spend all night in the hospital. She’d look like shit in the morning.

Viola pushed open the door into the sitting room. And stopped. The stench was stronger here, acrid urine stinging her eyes. By the reflected light, she could see that the room had been destroyed. The beautiful music continued to play, a mocking counterpoint to the desecration around it. Every item of furniture lay overturned, the arms of the fireside chairs had been snapped off, the back of the rose floral sofa was broken in two, stuffing hanging in long ribbons from the slashed cushions, drawers pulled from the cabinet, the contents emptied, pictures torn from the walls, frames warped as if they had been twisted. An antique Victorian mirror lay on the floor, radiating spider cracks from a deep indentation in the middle of the glass as if it had been trodden on. Mrs. Clay’s extensive collection of glass figurines were now ground into the carpet.

A burglary.

Viola breathed deeply, trying to remain calm. The flat had been burgled. But where was Mrs. Clay? Picking her way through the devastation, glass crunching underfoot, she prayed that the old woman hadn’t been here when it happened; yet she knew instinctively that she had. Beatrice Clay rarely left her apartment at night. “Too dangerous,” she’d said.

Books scraped as she pushed against the bedroom door, opening it wide enough to slap at the light switch, but again, nothing happened. In the faint glow of the light from the hall, she could see that this room had also been torn apart and that the bed was piled high with dark clothes and blankets.

“Beatrice? It’s me, Viola.”

The bundle of clothes on the bed shifted and moved, and she heard shallow breathing. Viola darted across the room and saw the top of the old woman’s head. Clutching the first blanket, she yanked it back, and it came away in her hand, warm and wet and dripping. The woman in the bed convulsed. The bastards had probably tied her up. Viola was reaching for another blanket when the bedroom door creaked and swung inward, throwing light onto the bed.

Beatrice Clay’s throat had been cut, but not before her body had been terribly mutilated. But despite her appalling injuries, she was still alive, mouth and eyes wide in soundless agony, breathing a harsh rattle.

The young woman’s scream caught at the back of her throat.

A shadow fell across the bed.

Sick with terror, Viola turned to face the shape that filled the doorway. Light ran off damp naked flesh. She could see that it was a tall, muscular man, but with the light coming from behind him, his features were in shadow. He lifted his left arm, and the light reflected liquid running down the length of the spear he clutched. The man stepped into the room, and she could smell his odor now: the rich meaty muskiness of sweat and copper blood.

“Please…,” she whispered.

Black light trembled on the blade of the weapon. “Behold the Spear of the Dolorous Blow.” Then, obscenely, he began to conduct the nerve-wracking 1812 Overture with the deadly weapon, and as the overture reached its climactic conclusion, his shoulder shifted and rolled and the light darted toward her.

There was no pain.

Viola felt a sudden coldness beneath her breast, then the warmth that flowed outward to embrace her. Liquid trickled across her stomach. She tried to speak, but she couldn’t find the breath to shape the words. She was aware of light in the room now, cold blue and green flames sparking, writhing along the leaf-shaped blade of the spear.

She had been stabbed—dear Jesus, she had been stabbed.

The lines of fire coiling around the shaft of the spear rose to illuminate the flesh of the hand holding the weapon. As Viola fell to her knees, both hands pressed against the gaping wound in her chest, she noticed that the man was disturbingly handsome and tall.

So tall.

Tall, dark, and handsome.

Viola tried to concentrate, wondering if her eyes were playing tricks on her or if the newborn pain was clouding her judgment.

The spear rose, serpents of cold fire splashing onto the head of her attacker, illuminating his face. When she saw his eyes, the woman realized she would not be playing Nancy in tomorrow’s performance.

Viola Jillian would never be a star.

Another one,” Judith Walker said to her cat, Franklin, as she opened a can of tuna. Despite being rescued from behind a garbage can, her tabby was a food critic and snubbed anything other than canned fish. Judith tried to find some solace from her beloved feline, but he was too busy eating.

Another death, and this was the one she had been dreading.

Judith had met Bea Clay seventy years earlier when they were wee little children, and the pair had remained steadfast friends throughout the decades.

Judith had taken the train down to London just last month, where they had met for tea before traipsing around the National Gallery like a couple of giggling teenagers. Theirs was a relationship closer than sisters. They had remained close through the marriages and divorces, children and grandchildren, and indignities of approaching old age. Letters had evolved into e-mails, and they’d kept up a regular correspondence that had brought them closer together than if they had lived next door.

Judith had first met Bea in Wales when they were both children, evacuees together during World War II, and they had formed an instant friendship. Whenever Judith thought of her friend, she remembered a beautiful young girl with jet black eyes and matching hair so thick, it would sparkle and crackle with electricity every time she combed it.

Poor Bea. There had always been so much pain, so much loss, in her life. She had buried three husbands and had outlived her only child. She had a granddaughter living in New York City whom she never saw, and she was lonely.

At seventy-four, most people were lonely.

Bea seemed to always draw the short straw. She had lived through the hungry years and the recession, and then, when property values had spiraled and she’d finally had a chance to make some real money, she’d waited too long to sell her home, gambling that prices would continue to rise. When the next recession had hit hard and prices had tumbled, she’d been forced to move into a tiny flat in a building occupied primarily by students and artists several decades her junior. In her last e-mail, she had been talking about possibly leaving London, cashing in her meager savings and seeing out her days in a nursing home up in the Cotswolds.

Judith had joked that perhaps she would join her. It was getting harder and harder for her to navigate around her cottage with her arthritic hip, and nursing homes were usually on one level. In one of their recent e-mails, they had joked that they would end up being the terrible twosome of the home, causing havoc with their equally stubborn sensibilities. And side by side, they would live out the rest of their days in the peaceful beauty of the north: living an uncomplicated life of reading, playing cards, and basking in a deliciously simplistic tranquillity.

The old woman sat down, suddenly overcome by emotion. “Too late now,” Judith Walker lamented to Franklin, who had wandered in from the kitchen and leapt up to stretch out on the windowsill, ignoring her. She smiled grimly: When she died, she would like to come back as a cat and merely sleep and eat all day. Almost reluctantly, Judith picked up the paper and reread the story in
The Guardian
. The bloody death of an old woman, and it rated half a paragraph on the third page.

Judith pulled off her glasses and dropped them onto the newspaper. She squeezed the bridge of her nose. What did the report
not
say? What had been intentionally suppressed?

From inside her knitting bag she pulled out a newly sharpened pair of scissors and carefully cut out the story. Later she would add it to the others in the scrapbook. The obituary list was growing.

Bea Clay was the fifth death. The fourth in the last two months. Or at least the fifth that she knew about. If the murder of an elderly woman in London rated less than eight lines, then the death—accidental or otherwise—of a pensioner would probably pass unnoticed by most people.

And Judith had known all of the victims.

Millie had been the first. Ten years ago, Mildred Bailey had died in her home. The invalid, who lived with her nephew in a farmhouse in Wales, was the victim of a terrible accident.

Later, Judith would come to realize that these were no accidents.

Millie had never left Wales. Her parents were killed in the Blitz and she’d been adopted by the Welsh couple who cared for her. Judith remembered Millie, the oldest of the group of children, as extremely practical. At eight years old, she’d taken it on herself to look out for the ragtag group of evacuees, especially the younger children who were no more than four and a half at the time of Operation Pied Piper, when three and a half million children were evacuated to the country in three days. In the early years of World War II, it was believed that German aircraft would bomb all the major cities, and the only way to keep the next generation alive was to evacuate them to the countryside. Four hundred were evacuated to Pwllheli in Wales in the far west of the country, and a small group of thirteen, including Judith, ended up in the mountainous county of Madoc. Twelve of those eventually returned to their homes, but Millie remained. The obituary read that Mildred had somehow fallen out of her wheelchair, tumbled down a flight of stairs, and impaled herself on the steel banister.

Judith had written it off as a horrible event.

Unfortunate. Unexpected. Untimely.

Until the next death.

Judith had never liked Thomas Sexton. Tommy had been a bully as a child. A fat boy with curly red hair and brown piggy eyes, he used to torment the younger children, teasing them incessantly. Tommy had grown up to become an even bigger bully, earning his living as a debt collector in his youth and, after retirement, making a living as a collections agent and moneylender. Two months ago, he had been slain in Brixton in what the police called a gangland killing. The brutality of his murder had excited some press interest: His chest had been opened from throat to crotch, and his heart and lungs had been removed.
MODERN RIPPER STALKS LONDON
, the headlines read.

Judith hadn’t been surprised by Sexton’s murder. She had always known that Tommy was going to come to a bad end. She remembered one night when he had been caught shining his flashlight up into the sky as the enemy bombers flew over, trying to attract their attention. One of the grown-ups had caught him and beaten him silly. Later, he boasted to the others that the punishment was worth it; he’d been hoping they would bomb the town because he wanted to see a dead body.

When she had learned of Georgina Rifkin’s death in Ipswich three weeks ago, Judith had felt the first icy trickle of fear. The death of two people who knew the secret was a coincidence. The death of three was something more. Officially, Georgie, a retired schoolteacher, had fallen into the path of the National Express. Later, Judith had discovered the online rumor that the old woman had been tied spread-eagled to the train tracks.

Only four days ago, Nina Byrne had died in Edinburgh. The press reported that the retired librarian had accidentally tipped a pan of boiling oil over herself as she cooked in the kitchen of her apartment. Judith knew that Nina never cooked.

And now Bea.

How many more were going to be savagely killed?

Judith Walker knew that they were being systematically slaughtered, and she wondered when it would be her turn.

Judith stood, lifted a sun-faded picture off the mantelpiece, and carried it to the window. Tilting it to the light, she looked at three irregular rows of thirteen smiling faces. It could have been a classroom photo, with the elder children standing in the back and the younger ones kneeling and sitting in the front. The black-and-white photograph had long faded to sepia, and it was difficult to make out any detail in the faces. Mildred, Georgina, and Nina were all standing in the back, asserting their eight-year-old independence with their arms easily slung over one another.

A smirking Tommy was kneeling to Bea’s left. Judith was sitting cross-legged beside her; the two girls were wearing identical floral dresses, with their black hair in matching ribboned headbands, hanging in loose ringlets around their shoulders. The small dark girls looked alike enough to be taken for sisters.

Five of those children were now dead.

Walking slowly, leaning heavily on the cane she’d sworn she’d never use, she moved around the small terraced cottage, double-checking that all the windows were locked and the doors were bolted. She wasn’t sure how effective a barrier they would prove when
they
came for her, but perhaps it would delay them long enough for her to swallow the prescription tablets she carried with her.

She could go to the police, but who was going to believe the ramblings of a mad old woman who lived alone and was famous for talking to her cat? What was she going to tell them, that five of the children with whom she had been evacuated during the war had been killed and that she was certain she would be one of the next victims?

“Tell us why someone would want to kill you, Mrs. Walker?”

“Because I am one of the Keepers of the Thirteen Hallows of Britain.”

Judith paused at the bottom of the stairs, smiling at the thought. It sounded ridiculous even to her. Seventy years ago, she had been equally skeptical.

She climbed slowly, making sure she had a solid grip on the banister, planting the cane firmly before moving onto the next step. She had broken her right hip two years ago in a bad fall.

Seventy years ago; a glorious war time autumn. Thirteen children had been billeted in the village in the shadow of the Welsh mountains, and in the months that followed they had become a makeshift family. For most of them it was the first time they had ever been away from home, the first time they had been on a farm.

It had been a grand adventure.

When the old man with the long white beard had come to the farm in the summer of 1940, he had been just another curiosity, until he had started telling them his wild and wonderful tales of magic and folklore.

Judith turned the key in the spare bedroom and pushed open the door. Dust motes spiraled in the late afternoon sunshine, and she sneezed uncontrollably in the dry, stale air.

For months the old man had teased them with secrets and fragments of tales, hinting, always hinting, that the children were special and that it was no accident that they, specifically, had come to this place. “Summoned” was the word he’d used.

Judith opened the closet, wrinkling her nose at the pungent smell of mothballs.

For weeks he had called them special, his young knights, his Keepers. But as the summer closed and autumn approached, a new urgency had entered the old man’s stories. He began speaking to them individually, telling them special stories, disturbing, frightening stories that were strangely familiar, as if they had always been present in their subconscious and he were merely unlocking them. She still thought about him this time every year when October 31 approached, the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain: All Hallows’ Eve.

Judith shivered. She could still remember the story the man had told her. It had created echoes and stirred resonances that had never been stilled. For the last seventy years, her dreams were peppered with fragments of vivid images and startling nightmares that she had used to forge a successful career as a children’s writer. Putting the fantastic images down on paper seemed to rob them of a little of their daunting power and, in turn, gave her a little power over them.

Judith Walker reached into the closet and pulled out a Military Bridge overcoat that had once belonged to her brother and had gone out of fashion in the sixties. After hanging the gray coat on the back of the door, she lifted a paper-wrapped bundle from one of the enormous pockets and carried it to the bed, where she slowly, and with great reluctance, unwrapped the parcel.

It took a great deal of imagination to realize that the chunk of red-rusted metal nestled in the yellowed newspaper was the hilt and portion of the blade of a sword. But she had never doubted it. When the old tramp had first pressed it into her hands, he had whispered its true name into her ear. She could still feel his breath, spicy and rancid against her small face. All she had to do was call the sword by its true name to release its power. She hadn’t spoken its name in years….

“Dyrnwyn.”

Judith Walker looked at the lump of metal in her hands. She repeated the name: “Dyrnwyn, Sword of Rhydderch.”

Once, it would have come trembling to life, cold green flames shooting from its hilt, forming the remainder of the Broken Sword.

“Dyrnwyn,” Judith called a third time.

Nothing happened. Perhaps there was no magic left in the Hallow anymore. Maybe nothing had ever happened and it had been only in her imagination. The eager dreams of a prepubescent girl mingled with the fading memories of an old woman. She dropped the rusted metal onto the bed and brushed flakes of rust from her lined flesh. The rust had stained her skin the color of blood.

Millie, Tommy, Georgie, Nina, and Bea had also possessed one of the thirteen ancient Hallows. Judith was convinced that they had been tortured and brutally slaughtered for those artifacts. And what about the others she’d lost touch with? How many of them still survived?

Seventy years ago, the old man’s last words to each child had been a distinct warning: “Never bring the Hallows together.”

No one had ever thought to ask him why.