The Thirteen Hallows Read Free Page A

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