TORMENTOR
William Meikle
First Edition
Tormentor © 2015 by William Meikle
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
www.darkfuse.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Other Books by Author
Broken Sigil
Clockwork Dolls
Night of the Wendigo
The Exiled
The Hole
Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:
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To Sue. Without her I’d still be scratching stick figures.
Acknowledgements
A big thank-you once again to the team at DarkFuse for making me look good. And many thanks to the people of Skye, some of the friendliest folks I’ve met, on one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
FOR SALE
THE SPANIARDS’ COTTAGE —
Nr. DUNVEGAN, ISLE OF SKYE
Recently renovated detached single-story cottage situated near the community of Dunvegan on the shore of the remote and beautiful Loch Dunvegan, with one bedroom, shower room/water closet and open plan lounge/kitchen/dining room. The property benefits from a recent modernization of both its electrical system and its plumbing, and has modern fittings throughout while retaining much of its rustic charm from its long and varied history.
The ruined crofter’s cottage on the shoreline to the north and the nearby barn both lie within the owner’s title.
The area offers inspiring views, rugged landscapes, and a general sense of seclusion. There is a primary school and local amenities in Dunvegan village, where there are also several hotels, a grocery shop and a post office alongside seasonal shopping catering to a brisk tourist trade centered round Dunvegan Castle.
OFFERS OVER £105,000
Viewing can be arranged through David Bean and Sons, Solicitors, Portree, Isle of Skye.
PART 1: KEY
1
As funerals go, it wasn’t a bad one.
Nobody fell, wailing on the coffin in the crematorium, nobody cocked up the speech; everybody present—and that was quite a number—said what a lovely girl Beth had been, and how she would be missed. A lot of people asked me how I was holding up, and I didn’t swear in my replies. When everybody else had gone, I got a nice little urn that didn’t feel heavy at all, and a ride home in the back of a posh car.
Home. That was a word that didn’t mean much any more. Not with her gone from it. I held my shit together long enough to get back there, and even managed to pack several boxes of books—alphabetical order, the way she’d have wanted it—before the wall I’d built against the day came down. I sat on the floor amid the cardboard boxes that were all that remained of my life, and wept.
Cancer is too small a word for the thing that destroyed so much, so quickly.
It was there when I scrubbed her back. She had a bad day at work and got a treat—a bottle of wine, some chocolate—and a tumor. I found a lump, no bigger than a pea, nestled up close to her right armpit.
I went with her to see the doctor the next day, then we did the round of tests, more tests and finally diagnosis but by then we both knew it wasn’t good news. The cancer was hungry, ravenously so, and it ate her in just over three weeks—twenty-three days to consume sixty kilos of fat, muscle, blood, tissue, and one life, barely used.
Beth fought it every inch of the way, with all her heart, which was considerable. She raged, she swore and she endured; radiotherapy first, chemo almost straightaway after. Her hair fell out in clumps, her eyes fell back in her skull into shadowy pits, and her arms when they held me were like thin, dry sticks. She fought harder. She was strong.
The cancer was stronger. She slipped away from me in a morphine haze, and I’m not even sure she knew who I was at the end. Around eight o’clock in the evening, five days short of her twenty-eighth birthday, I held her hand as the machines stopped beeping.
Three years—that’s what we had. It was never going to be enough.
* * *
There are two things you need to know about me—firstly, I’m what they used to call “independently wealthy.” Dad was in shipping—lots of shipping. He loved to tell everyone he was a self-made millionaire, ten times over. I never really knew how much money he earned—or spent—all I knew was that I had very little contact with him during my childhood in a variety of boarding schools. His heart gave out when I was fifteen, almost two years to the day from the last time I’d seen him. I got a trust fund that set me up for life, Mom got a new man—I got the better of the deal.
The money meant university was stress free, and I could take my time choosing a job. Rather too much time, as it turned out, but two years in the Med pretending to be an artist left me with plenty of memories to carry forward. A chance interview where I and the guy across the desk just seemed to click meant I started a job in IT in London only three weeks after getting back. A week after that I met Beth—and you already know what happened there.
The second thing you don’t know is that I’m a runner; it happens whenever I get stressed. Some people buckle, some work harder, but I’m a quitter—always have been, since back before puberty. I hide with my hands over my eyes until it’s safe to come back out again. I’m not proud of it, but it’s hard-wired, and it’s an impulse I always have to push against.
For the two years after Beth died, I pushed, trying to keep my act together, because that’s what she would have wanted. I struggled, but one day I looked up and things seemed a bit clearer, a bit less bleak. People started to talk to me like a human being; I even socialized occasionally. But after three months of being a normal person again, I came to the realization that I no longer gave a shit about the job, or London, or any of the things I’d been working so hard to keep together. I looked at my bank account, looked out instead of in, and ran.
* * *
All of the above is by way of preamble—necessary background I thought I should get out of the way early on to save having to explain myself later. I don’t want to waste much more time talking about me.
This story isn’t really about me. I want to tell you about the place I ran to.
This is the story of a house.
2
Beth was always a city girl through and through, born and bred in London with little thought for how life was lived anywhere else. She’d never had fantasies about escaping to the countryside and getting away from it all; she loved the hustle and bustle of the city too much. She needed her coffee, her cinemas, shops, bright lights and nightlife. She wanted to be able to call up friends and be in a bar ten minutes later, or to take a visit to the V&A and eat in Harrods at the drop of a hat.
While I was with her, I needed those things too, but without her London seemed pointless—a mound full of termites running around doing things that benefited other termites and pretending it mattered a jot.
Growing up in boarding schools hadn’t been too bad. I remembered big skies, rolling hills, farmers and the smell of manure, clear
flowing rivers and tall trees. I wanted that again, that sense of youth. When I run, I don’t do things by halves. Barely a month after making my decision, I moved into the house by a sea loch in Skye.
I chose a shoreline because of a childhood memory of clambering through rock pools, chose the island because I’d always liked the name and the history it evoked, and chose the house because when I saw the picture on the estate agents’ website, it spoke straight to my soul. I didn’t even bother paying a visit before buying it—I was living on instinct.
But on the day I got the keys and moved my stuff in, I knew I’d done the right thing.
It was early May—spring, almost summer back in London, but up here it was still late winter, with snow clinging to the tops of the hills and some slushy ice in the harbor at the foot of the slope by the kitchen door.
Alan Bean showed me around. We’d talked a lot on the phone over the last few weeks as he untangled the mess of paperwork that goes with buying an old property. From his manner on the phone I’d imagined a stocky, almost portly man, middle-aged maybe, but Alan was younger than me—also three inches taller and a couple of stone lighter.
“This lanky streak of pish is my son, Alan,” his father had said as he’d introduced us. Alan shook my hand.
“Jim, Jim Greenwood,” I said. He smiled and I knew straightaway—I’d found a friend.
I had followed his car over the winding coastal road from Portree then up the rutted track that was euphemistically known as “the private road.” We got out of our respective cars and stood outside the cottage for my first look around.
From this vantage point the view was completely wild—no roads or pylons visible, no other houses, just the loch, with wavelets slightly churning in a stiff breeze, the purple hills hanging in a haze across the water and white clouds scudding north across the sky.
The house itself was unremarkable from the outside—four whitewashed walls and a slate tiled roof, a window on either side of a door placed slightly off center, giving the structure a slightly quizzical demeanor. A ruined crofter’s cottage sat twenty yards away on the shore to the west. We had parked the cars in a stone enclosure to the south I knew at one time had been a barn, reduced now to three good walls, and open to the elements above.
“I don’t normally come out on moving day,” Alan said as we walked towards the main building. “But nobody’s ever bought a house from me, sight-unseen, before today.”
I laughed, and it felt natural and right, so I did it again.
“I took the web tour,” I said. “Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
Alan laughed with me.
“This is Skye—we’ve only just come out of the nineteenth around here. And in some places, even that is seen as too modern.”
I patted the barn wall on the way past.
“Just how old is this?” I asked.
“The barn is nineteenth century, the crofter’s cottage about the same. The main house is anybody’s guess—some say the name came from a shipwrecked crew from an armada galleon trying to take the long way home—but there are even older stories about the place if you believe the locals. I’ll let you find that out for yourself—you’ll need something to talk about in the bar.”
The main room of my new home had little sense of the kind of age Alan had just described. The front door opened into a small porch, then straight into a long open area that took up half the house. There were new hardwood floors, exposed beams and rough stonework, but it all looked like it had been put together yesterday, and even the large granite fireplace had been scrubbed clean of any soot that might have built up over the years.
Alan saw me looking.
“Mrs. Menzies was a bit obsessive about dirt,” he said. “I’ve never seen a cleaner house.”
“I’m sure I can do something about that,” I said, and smiled.
The movers had been and gone, and the sum of my belongings—apart from a new bed, a sofa, a cooker and a fridge that had also been delivered that morning—were huddled in a small sad group of boxes and suitcases in the center of the floor.
Alan raised an eyebrow.
“Traveling light?”
“I brought what I thought I’d need,” I said—but in truth, I’d only brought things that wouldn’t remind me too much of Beth.
“Well, so did I,” Alan replied. “I’ll be back.”
He left me alone for several minutes, and I had my first impression of what this place was going to be like for me—even in that short time, I felt the emptiness start to close in, the silence creeping. I was looking forward to it.
Alan returned and handed me a long box containing a bottle of Talisker single malt.
“This is the local firewater,” he said. “Treat it with love and care, and it’ll serve you well in cold nights to come.”
“Will you have one with me—to christen the house?”
A look I didn’t understand crossed his face, quickly wiped away with a smile.
“Just a wee one, then, if you insist. I have to drive back to Portree.”
It took me ten minutes to find the glasses—they were packed away in the same box as Beth’s ashes, and I wasn’t able to prevent Alan from getting a look at the urn. He was too good a man to say anything right then, but I had a feeling the conversation was now inevitable at some point in our future.
The Scotch was stronger than I’d anticipated, and I’m afraid it caused me to splutter on the first sip.
Alan laughed loudly.
“Dinna worry, man. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”
He was as good as his word and only had one small glass—a single finger at most, then he was off and away leaving me with an empty house and a load of boxes I had no urge to unpack.
A pair of French doors dominated the west-facing side of the room, and led from the dining room out to a small paved patio. I made myself a coffee and took it—and another small glass of the Scotch, outside. The garden furniture on the patio was cast iron and solid—freezing cold on the buttocks to start with, but surprisingly comfortable once I got settled. I was more than aware of the cold wind off the sea, but it was not too hard to bear, and I sat there for some time, sipping alternately from coffee and whisky, and letting the quiet fill me up.
My stillness served to embolden some of the other inhabitants—a stoat, just losing its ermine, poked its head out from a pile of firewood down by the ruined cottage and just as quickly turned away. A pair of sparrows briefly touched down—in case I had any crumbs to spare—and out in the loch a seal bobbed up to check me out before diving away. There was no traffic noise, no music. There was just the lap of water on rock and the whistle of the wind in my ears.
I felt more alive than at any time since Beth’s passing.
* * *
I spent the rest of the afternoon doing some halfhearted unpacking—essentials like stereo system and laptop first—but after putting Beth’s urn on the huge stone mantel above the fire I lost the heart for it. I’d had enough foresight to bring some basic food supplies and, after taking a good ten minutes to figure out the new cooker, I was able to throw together a basic meal of rice, fish and vegetables that seemed much better than anything I’d ever eaten in the city.
I got the laptop fired up. Internet access was going to be expensive, having to be done through my phone and a dongle, but I wasn’t anticipating much need for it anyway. I found a small folding table in the pantry when I was putting the food away, and sat the laptop on it in front of the sofa. I chose one of the movies I had on the hard drive and lay on the sofa watching the U.S. military fight off an alien invasion. The plot was set on Earth, but may as well have been on another planet entirely—I was a long way away from Hollywood’s idea of civilization.
I was also starting to realize how much I was going to need a work desk and chair for a start, and probably a washing machine, unless I wanted to spend my time bent over the butler’s sink in the kitchen. Then there were the practicalities—meter readings, s
eptic tank emptying—something I promised myself I wouldn’t forget—council tax payments, bank statements and all the other small bureaucratic hoops that needed to be jumped through. I’d already dealt with a lot of the more pressing issues, but the speed with which I made the move would inevitably lead to some loose ends if I didn’t get to it soon.
After the film finished, I started to make a list of things to do the next day—it took longer than I thought, and by the time I was finished I was surprised to look up and see it was almost full dark outside.
I made another coffee, poured another Scotch, and went out to see my new view at night.
* * *
It was immediately obvious I needed to add a flashlight to my list—it was a moonless night, and when I looked up I saw no stars—it had clouded over since earlier. Several lights showed on the far shore of the loch—far apart, solitary dwellings at a guess. Out on the middle of the sound a red light flashed—a marker buoy of some kind—another guess. Water lapped on the old stone in the small harbor down to my left, but I could see nothing but shifting darkness down there. What little light came through from the dining room and out the doors only lit up the immediate area around the iron table and chairs. The ruined crofter’s cottage was merely a darker blob in the shadows, and I couldn’t make out the woodpile at all.
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