Free The Thirteen Hallows by Michael Scott, Colette Freedman Page A

they come and gone? Were they waiting inside, even now watching her through her mother’s ridiculous lace curtains? What exactly did they want? Something Judith Walker had allegedly given her.
    Sarah stepped out of the shadows and walked up to the gate. Something wasn’t quite right. She knew it was staring her in the face, yet she couldn’t see it.
    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
     
    S arah 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