Once Upon A Haunted Moor

By Harper Fox

Gideon Frayne has spent his whole working life as a policeman in the village of Dark on Bodmin Moor. It’s not life in the fast lane, but he takes it very seriously, and his first missing-child case is eating him alive. When his own boss sends in a psychic to help with the case, he’s gutted – he’s a level-headed copper who doesn’t believe in such things, and he can’t help but think that the arrival of clairvoyant Lee Tyack is a comment on his failure to find the little girl.

But Lee is hard to hate, no matter how Gideon tries. At first Lee’s insights into the case make no sense, but he seems to have a window straight into Gideon’s heart. Son of a Methodist minister, raised in a tiny Cornish village, Gideon has hidden his sexuality for years. It’s cost him one lover, and he can’t believe it when this green-eyed newcomer stirs up old feelings and starts to exert a powerful force of attraction.

Gideon and Lee begin to work together on the case. But there are malignant forces at work in the sleepy little village of Dark, and not only human ones – Gideon is starting to wonder, against all common sense, if there might be some truth in the terrifying legend of the Bodmin Beast after all. As a misty Halloween night consumes the moor, Gideon must race against time to save not only the lost child but the man who’s begun to restore his faith in his own heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper Fox
• Release date: Mar 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781910224052

Harper Fox

Harper Fox is the author of many critically acclaimed M/M Romance novels, including Stonewall Book Award-nominated Scrap Metal and Brothers Of The Wild North Sea, Publishers Weekly Best Book 2013. Her novels and novellas are powerfully sensual, with a dynamic of strongly developed characters finding love and a forever future – after an appropriate degree of turmoil. She loves to show the romance implicit in everyday life, and she writes a sharp action scene too.

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Once Upon A Haunted Moor

Harper Fox

Copyright Harper Fox 2014

Published by FoxTales at Smashwords

Once Upon A Haunted Moor

Revised edition, October 2013

Copyright © October 2013 by Harper Fox

Cover art by Harper Fox

Cover photo licensed through Shutterstock

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from FoxTales.

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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Dedication

This book is lovingly dedicated

to the memory of Winifred Harper.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Once Upon A Haunted Moor

Harper Fox

Chapter One

That sound – you feel it before you hear it, a kind of low vibration in your bones.

Gideon Frayne came to a halt on the moorland path. The rustle of his own movement ceased, and a damp silence closed in. High above him on the crag, the rocks of the Cheesewring floated eerily, their impossibly balanced towers stranger than ever in the wreathing mist.

Nothing but silence. Gideon shook himself. No hard-headed Cornwall copper should listen to such nonsense, and he’d ripped a strip off Bill Prowse in the pub last night for spreading it around. The legend of the Beast of Bodmin Moor was all very well in its way, and certainly brought tourist trade to a spot with little else to recommend it. But the village of Dark was missing a child, and Constable Frayne had a duty to nip all dangerous and superstitious rambling in the bud.

It seemed there was damn-all else he could do. Six-year-old Lorna Kemp had been lost for almost a fortnight now, and all of Gideon’s leads had gone cold. The Truro constabulary had turned out to help him. Volunteers from miles around had combed the moors in a five-mile radius from Dark, and air-sea rescue chief Flynn Summers had brought out the Hawke Lake choppers to search far more widely than that, his grey-and-orange fleet of sky whales thundering low enough over the Cheesewring to make its weird rocks vibrate in their stacks.

And nothing. Gideon resumed his walk. The Cheesewring – how innocuous it sounded, part of the whole Cornish landscape of dairymaids and clotted cream... And in summer, bright with buttery gorse and scrambling tourists, the name fitted well enough. The bleak moors spread out to the west, but from the top of the crags to the east, a jewelled hillscape of villages and fields would draw your vision to the far horizon, and the wind at your back would make you feel ready for flight.

At the burned-out end of October, all was grey. The mist was thickening. Somewhere out on Bodmin’s wasteland reaches, little Lorna Kemp – or, more likely by now, her corpse – was about to meet a thirteenth night alone. It was two days before Halloween. Gideon Frayne, whose trails had all gone cold, who could neither help her nor rest until he had, walked alone. He came out here every night now, as if by doing so he could keep the child company, walked until the dusk had turned to black night, and made his way home by torchlight.

You feel the sound before you hear it. Gideon stopped again. He was halfway along the hawthorn-lined ridge that formed a sort of ceremonial route to the foot of the crag. To his right was a barbed-wire fence. It had pleased his Victorian ancestors to quarry for granite here, and the fence was a token warning – ignored every summer by children and climbers – to stay clear of the cliffs. Lorna Kemp hadn’t fallen down there. That would have been an easy and dreadful solution, discounted right away by sniffer dogs and Commander Summers’ ground-search team. Gideon steadied himself, holding on to a fence post. His bones were vibrating.

What in God’s name was that noise? It rose up long and low from the moorland behind him. He wanted to turn. He had always faced his enemies head-on – teeth gritted, every muscle in a stubborn defiant knot. But the sound grew louder, closer, and something in its desolation held Gideon still.

The gorse crunched and swayed. Gideon’s attention fixed on a spider’s web, a huge cob of silver concentrics spun between one bush and the next. First its tracery of droplets shivered and fell. Then it exploded into rags. Gideon’s dog, a fat border collie deemed too brainless to herd even the docile local sheep, shot out of the thicket. She raced past her master without a second glance and vanished off into the mist.

The sound abruptly stopped. Then it boiled up again, closer than any beast’s natural movement could account for – a howl, a wail, a shriek like the painful opening up of the earth. Gideon’s useless dog had abandoned him, but her terror at least had awakened his own. He sucked in one lung-clenching gasp of the fog, and he ran.

***

The Dark police house lay a mile outside the village. The shortest way to it was straight down the track from the Hurlers stone circles, but Gideon hadn’t taken that route, some instinct of evasion sending him plunging across the stretch of broken rocks to the south of the crag. Only a man who’d grown up here could have crossed these barrens in one piece. As it was he was grazed from a fall, soaked to the skin with brackish water from the peat ponds. He was fit, but his breath was scraping harshly in his chest. He took the stile from the moor into the lane in one flying vault.

He’d left a light on in the porch. It shed a yellow gleam across his front garden and the wet slate path. Gideon pounded down the lane, strands of ivy and honeysuckle dumping their accumulation of mist-water onto him from the overhanging walls. His feet slid on the slates. He tore the porch door open. The dog emerged from some hiding place in the garden and charged past him for safety, almost knocking him down. The inner door opened with one wrench of its heavy old lock. Shoving it wide, Gideon darted inside and slammed it after him. There was no point in worrying about the outer door, a flimsy new construction of glass and aluminium. The wood behind him now – he pressed his spine to it, gasping – was solid, made at the same time as his thick-walled house.

His legs were about to give. He had failed to bring home Lorna Kemp, the one missing-child case that had ever come his way. He had just been chased off the moor by his own imagination – the wind in the gorse, probably, or one of Bill Prowse’s brood up to their tricks. To save himself the final shame of landing on his backside on the floor, he made it to the hearthside chair and sat down.

The stove was dark and cold. James had used to get home from work first, and even a year after his departure, Gideon often forgot that he was no longer there to start the fire. He looked around the bare front room. An enthusiastic primary-school teacher, by now James would have

Reviews for Once Upon A Haunted Moor

[andyjusty · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow. Punchy, evocative writing and great characters. Short but perfect.