The Five Tors

by Benjamin Ford

  Benjamin Ford

  The Five Tors

  Copyright © Benjamin Ford 2007

  First published 2007

  This edition published 2014

  All rights reserved

  Cover designed by Benjamin Ford

  Novels by Benjamin Ford

  Master of the Scrolls

  Portrait of Shade

  The Master of Prophecy

  The Five Tors

  Preface

  The Five Tors is a little different from my previous three novels. Unlike the others, I would describe it more as a supernatural chiller rather than a supernatural mystery.

  As with my other books, some place names and character names are quite important to the story, several of which are anagrams. These are detailed in the Author’s note at the end of this novel.

  I hope you enjoy reading the book.

  Benjamin Ford

  Portsmouth, September 2007

  Prologue

  ‘You will bring him to me.’

  The woman’s silken voice caressed the man’s ears, insinuating its way into his mind like tendrils of ivy forcing a grip on mortar and brick. He tried valiantly to fight it, but the voice had a power he could not resist, and totally subjugated to the will of the flame-haired woman, he could merely nod.

  ‘Be sure that he comes to the village by the first of next month. He must be here three weeks before the winter solstice. Use whatever means you deem necessary, but be certain that he comes of his own free will.’

  The woman pressed a hand against the man’s chest as he moved to leave. His jacket smouldered slightly beneath her gentle touch. ‘Be warned; there are others that would seek to prevent him from coming here. You must not allow their intervention, even at the cost of your own life. You are expendable. He is not! Is that understood?’

  The man nodded silently and the woman removed her hand, drawing a single blood red talon gently down his cheek. ‘Then go now. Make haste, and let no one interfere in your task.’

  As the man left the room, the oddly out of season scent of honeysuckle filled his nostrils, but of his meeting with the woman he could remember nothing.

  One

  Devill’s Tor

  Rob Tyler sat at the desk in the middle of the cramped, cluttered first floor room that served as both his study and library, staring forlornly at the blank sheet of A4 he had placed in his battered old typewriter over two hours earlier. A mug of coffee, congealed and cold, rested to his left, long forgotten and abandoned after a single sip as he tried desperately to force words - any words - from his mind onto the paper.

  In his desperation, Rob had forgotten one of the most important rules regarding the craft of writing, which is that words - sentences, paragraphs, chapters and ultimately the finished novel - cannot be forced under any circumstances. Writing must come from the heart; the words must flow from the mind naturally, in their own time, and if nothing is forthcoming then that is because there is nothing there - and one simply cannot force nothing from a blank mind onto an equally blank sheet of paper.

  With resignation, Rob realised his creative juices had ceased to flow. His mind had dried up, his imagination frozen - as congealed as the coffee in his mug.

  After fifteen highly successful novels, it seemed he had nothing left to deliver to his editor, nor to his adoring fans - ghouls that they were; only ghoulish people could possibly enjoy subjecting themselves to the disturbing, disgustingly sickening, stomach-churning horror novels that he dished out without fail every year.

  Rob had cultivated a new breed of horror novel: the grotesque and macabre, intertwined innocuously with mundane everyday events of reality; scorching passion transformed into explicitly searing sex scenes, which frequently shocked even him with the sinuous manner that the same scenes then degenerated further into carnal baseness; people died in the most unimaginably cruel and bestial manners possible. Rob often felt he must surely have gone too far, so sickening were the horrific scenes of death and mutilation, and so realistic in the way he wrote them. However, when he suggested to his editor that perhaps he should tone down the graphically detailed scenes of gore and sex, tame them to little more than comic book violence and Mills & Boon romance, he was always rebuked for pandering to the whims of censorship and not trusting in his own instincts. His publisher constantly reminded him that in the Horror genre he now outsold Stephen King and James Herbert in the UK, and so his novels were always published, just as he wrote them, to be read, devoured and enjoyed by his legion of fans.

  After the publication of his fifteenth novel, The Creature Within, three years ago, Rob had decided to take a sabbatical - in his opinion, a rest he thoroughly deserved. The novel had been his biggest seller, had sold more copies in hardcover than his previous three combined, and had finally launched him into the morbid consciousness of the American Horror fans. Sales of his previous novels increased to the point that he quickly found himself a multi-millionaire from the US sales alone, and following the publication of the paperback edition of The Creature Within, eighteen months ago, he had embarked upon a grueling publicity tour that seemed to take in every major city in America.

  Since then, he had been taking things easy, resting on his laurels and luxuriating in the fruits of his labours – and who could blame him for wanting to take a break? He certainly had no need to write again; he was set up for the rest of his life.

  He sat back and watched the money roll in, his faith in himself at last justified. He had worked so hard for so long, all but cutting himself off from friends and family as he set out on the long journey from unknown newcomer to bestselling author to publishing phenomenon. It had taken fifteen novels, but it was worth the wait in his eyes as he finally caught up with a backlog of movies he had missed, thanks to the timely intervention of the video age.

  However, a mind could stagnate if it remained unstimulated, as Rob discovered as he sat down to write something new now that boredom had finally ended his sabbatical. The fans had been clamouring for a dynamic new bestseller for months, and he felt the time was right to give his fans what they deserved.

  Fifteen novels in fifteen years was no mean feat, even for someone who lived for writing, especially when all bar the first two novels were over six hundred pages apiece. The critics had criticized the first two for not being long enough, and the remainder for being far too long – but even they unanimously heaped praise upon the nine hundred page opus The Creature Within, which they hailed as a modern masterpiece of literature… unique praise indeed for a graphically gruesome horror novel.

  In that last novel, Rob Tyler had proved the critics wrong. He was an enigma, whose novels gripped from page one, yet built slowly over the course of the narrative before breathlessly racing onwards to a usually fraught and stunning denouement, and after The Creature Within confounded them, most critics subsequently re-evaluated his previous novels.

  Last year his publisher re-released all fifteen novels in paperback with brand new covers that Rob detested, though the public seemed to like them. For thirteen months straight, at least three of his re-released novels hovered unrepentantly within the Sunday Times’ top ten bestsellers list, an almost unheard of feat for reprints of novels not accompanied by an author’s newest novel. The reprint of his thirteenth novel, The Thirteenth Scroll, proved the most popular, achieving the second highest sales of all paperback books for the year, which Rob still could not understand.

  Thirteen seemed, ironically, to be Rob’s lucky number: the thirteenth publisher he submitted his debut novel to had accepted it, and each novel had been published on the thirteenth of the month – by luck rather than design.

  The unanticipated sales of the reprints caught even the publishers by surprise; they were forced to reprint each boo
k several more times, and prompted Rob’s agent to demand that he start work on a new novel, strike while the iron was still hot.

  Rob had been disinclined to agree with Jonathan Carson, even though his agent was also his best friend whose opinions he valued. He felt the sales proved his popularity to the extent that there was no need for him to rush into working on new material before he was ready. He had no desire to foist a substandard novel upon his fans, and he was just not in the right writing frame of mind.

  When last month his editor added his own weight to the demands for a new novel, Rob reluctantly acquiesced and decided perhaps the time was right to at least start work on something new.

  As he sat in front of the typewriter, staring at the blank sheet of paper, he feared that perhaps he might have left it too long; his mind was stagnated by his inactive delirium of restfulness.

  A loud mewing from behind caused him to half turn in his chair, and he smiled at the large black cat who sat in the doorway, staring forlornly up at him with expressive amber eyes.

  ‘Oh, Satan, my career is over,’ he muttered as he stood, sauntered over and scooped his feline companion into his arms. He rubbed the cat gently under his chin, rewarded as ever by the appreciative purring that always brought a smile to his face. ‘You don’t care though, do you, you big fat lump?’ He brought Satan back to the desk and set the cat upon his lap, where his erstwhile companion curled into a comfortable position and promptly fell asleep. Rob sighed as he stroked Satan’s back tenderly. ‘And I guess I don’t care either, if I’m really honest.’

  With no mortgage on his luxury house, and no expensive hobbies or fetishes to feed, Rob had little to worry about financially. He had plenty of money in the bank, certainly far more than he could spend without difficulty.

  A few years shy of forty, and having done nothing else in his life except writing, he was glad he was well off enough to have no money worries. When he racked his brain to think of anything else he could do with his life, nothing much came to mind. Writing was all he had ever done, and writing was all he ever wanted to do: nothing else interested him. He found his writing therapeutic, a way of eradicating angst and fears and phobias, of making dreams come true through some of his characters, whilst making others go through the most horrendous rites of passage that he himself hoped and prayed to never endure.

  Rob sat at his desk for several hours, reminiscing about his past, stroking Satan repeatedly until the cat became disenchanted with the constant attention and leisurely extended his claws, causing Rob to gasp in pain.

  ‘Now, Satan, there was no need for that,’ he chuckled as he placed the cat upon the floor, watching as the heavy black lump of fur arched his back languorously and wandered off into the shadows of the hallway.

  Rob sighed deeply, pushed back the chair and stood, stretching away hours of cramp. He followed his pet into the gloom, snapping on the light as he made his way down the stairs, smiling as Satan bounded past him to be the first to reach the bottom step, where he sat, staring up balefully at his owner, reproachful in his mewing.

  ‘All right, I know it’s dinner time,’ sighed Rob as he bent to tickle Satan once more beneath his chin, ‘although you can’t be hungry already, because you eat more than me!’

  He paused on his way to the kitchen, inspecting his appearance in the hall mirror. He would never describe himself as handsome, but he had a definite edge on most of his friends. His wayward jet hair could never be tamed, and a longer cut suited his pinched features more than a short one did; his blue eyes twinkled with mischief from behind spectacles, giving him a perpetually guilty look – a relic of the misdemeanours of his youth. He had always liked to think of his looks as being casual in an off-hand manner, as though the description was meant for someone else and had only been loaned to him out of pity because he had been eavesdropping.

  His lack of classic good looks did not bother Rob. He knew from an early age that he would remain one of the most ordinary, non-descript people in England and had grown accustomed to cruel jibes about his oversize teeth and skinny frame. When people said they thought he was good looking, he could always tell if they were telling the truth: thirty-odd years of experience had given him a sensitive ear to the nature of lies.

  He idly licked his hand and patted down the upstanding tuft of hair above his left ear, but it remained steadfastly unkempt. He smiled self-consciously, wondering why he always tried to tame his hair, when he knew perfectly well that even the strongest hair products on the market could not achieve such miracles.

  He stroked his clean-shaven chin. Until a couple of years ago, he always allowed a growth of beard to carpet his face, mostly to hide the spots that had plagued him since adolescence, but having taken a long holiday relaxing in the Seychelles whilst on his sabbatical from writing, he had shaved it off due to the unpleasant itching caused by the heat. The influx of sunshine on his newly nude face caused the spots to beat a hasty retreat, and regular holidays in the sun ever since had kept them at bay. He only liked to shave every two or three days, though, as he otherwise came out in an unsightly shaving rash no matter whether he used an electric razor or wet shaved the offending stubble away. He was pleased to see that, even though he had not been in the sun for a couple of months, there was no sign of any spots.

  Sighing once again as Satan caressed his fat body around his legs, Rob continued on his way to the kitchen. ‘All right, all right, be patient you big fat lump!’ He smiled down at the cat, whose bright eyes shone with happiness as Rob opened the cupboard where he kept the cat food. ‘Oh, you just wait,’ he added beneath his breath. ‘You’re not going to like me, because from tomorrow you’re going on a diet!’

  Fishing out the dried cat food, Rob filled a bowl, then pulled out a fresh salmon steak from the fridge, which he cut up and added to the contents. He then set it down on the floor, where Satan took one sniff at it, wandered straight over to the cat flap, and disappeared out into the late evening gloom.

  Rob grinned. ‘Temperamental old thing!’ he muttered. Satan’s eating habits seemed to have changed recently; he seldom ate when Rob put down the food, always sniffing it with disdain before disappearing, only to return after several hours to wolf it down without pausing for breath: he no longer even settled down onto Rob’s lap after eating to fall asleep like he used to. Rob put it down to old age.

  Satan had come into Rob’s life as a rescue cat at the beginning of his sabbatical. Rob had visited the RSPCA with a view to giving a home to one of their rescued dogs, having planned to take several long walking holidays in Wales, Scotland and the Lake District, but as he passed Satan’s cage the big black cat had cried out to him, putting a paw through the cage door. Having been a firm believer that an owner does not choose their pet, rather the pet chooses its owner, Rob saw it as a sign and took Satan home with him. They bonded before they even left the animal sanctuary.

  Rob had seen photos of the flea ridden, half-starved condition in which Satan had arrived at the animal sanctuary and cried for hours. He had never been cruel to any living thing at any time in his life, had never even pulled the wings off a fly or burnt ants with a magnifying glass like so many of his childhood friends. It sickened him that someone could treat an animal in the manner Satan had been treated, which was why he spoiled the cat with luxury food.

  He had frequently been told that the cat ate better than he did, that if he ate as much as Satan he would put some weight on his own bones, but Rob knew it did not matter how much he ate, he would never put on any weight: his high metabolism saw to that.

  Satan, on the other hand, was another matter. Yesterday, Rob had taken him to the vet for his annual check up, to be informed that he really needed to put his pet on a strict diet as his weight was becoming detrimental to his health.

  Rob was horrified that his love for Satan should be having an adverse effect upon the cat’s life. In trying to ensure he did not mistreat the animal, he had inadvertently done just that. He promised the vet he would put Sat
an on a strict diet immediately.

  Bending down, he fished the salmon out of the bowl and threw it in the bin. ‘A bit of a waste, but since you didn’t want it, you’re not getting it!’

  Flicking the switch on the kettle, he waited for the water to boil, and as he did so, his thoughts drifted to his mother.

  Maureen Tyler had died six weeks ago. Mother and son had not been particularly close, but Rob had asked her to move in with him when her arthritis had become so bad that she could no longer look after herself without help. She had refused his offer, and within a week had passed away.

  It was almost as though she had somehow known her time on Earth was coming to a close and had not wanted to be a burden upon her son, but that thought did little to alleviate Rob’s sense of grief.

  No matter their differences, his mother had always been there for him and he felt inadequate for not being there at the end; there was little comfort in the fact that she died peacefully in her sleep.

  When his father had died some years earlier, there had been no shred of grief from wife or son, for Malcolm Tyler had been a tyrant with an alcohol problem and anger management issues.

  He used to beat Maureen’s son from her first marriage as much as he beat Rob, so much so that the lad had run away from home twenty years ago. Nothing had been seen nor heard from Gerald in all that time, not after Malcolm’s death four years ago, and not even following Maureen’s well-publicized funeral.

  ‘Oh Mum,’ sighed Rob as he glanced over his shoulder at one of the many photos of her that were scattered around the house, ‘I think it’s time I tried to find Gerald. After what he went through, it’s only fair that I make the effort!’

  Having made a fresh cup of coffee, he returned to his office to jot a few erratic ideas down on his notepad. Thoughts of his parents and of Gerald had produced the germ of an idea for a new novel, centering around a pattern of disappearances in the lives of his three protagonists.