The Power of Five (re-titled as The Gatekeepers in the US) is a series of five fantasy and suspense novels, written by English author Anthony Horowitz. Published between 2005 and 2012, it is an updated re-imagining of Horowitz's Pentagram series, which the author had left unfinished in the 1980s after he only wrote four of the five planned books in the series. The novels deal heavily in the occult and examples of things such as human sacrifice and blood rituals are major plot elements, such as in the first book, where Matthew Freeman is hunted by a Cult who want to conduct a blood sacrifice on him to blast open a portal using a combination of nuclear physics and black magic, to unlock another dimension which is holding a group of ancient evil demons captive.
The series is published in the United Kingdom by Walker Books Ltd and in the United States by Scholastic Press.
Plot overview
The series focuses on five children: Matthew Freeman, Pedro, Scott Tyler, Jamie Tyler, and Scarlett Adams, a group of five modern day teenagers with some sort of power who are expected to defeat the Old Ones and save humanity.
Books
Raven's Gate (2005)
Matthew Freeman is a fourteen-year-old boy who lives in Ipswich with his aunt, Gwenda Davis and her boyfriend, Brian Conran. He lives with her because his parents died in a car crash when he was eight years old. While living with his aunt, he breaks into a warehouse filled with electronic equipment with his friend, Kelvin Johnson. The security guard apprehends them and tells them he has called the police. Kelvin panics and stabs the guard and then runs away. But when he is caught, he blames it on Matt. After they are caught, Matt is sent to Yorkshire on the L.E.A.F. (Liberty and Education Achieved through Fostering) Project, which involves sending troubled children into the countryside to get away from city temptations. Matt's foster parent is a woman named Jayne Deverill, who lives on a farm named Hive Hill, with a strange farmhand named Noah, who doesn't talk much.
When Matt goes down to the nearby village of Lesser Malling on an errand for Mrs Deverill he receives a warning from a strange man. The man warns him to get away from Lesser Malling before it is too late. So Matt tries to escape, and while trying to find some money he goes into Mrs Deverill's bedroom and finds a copy of the police report detailing his parents' deaths and his clairvoyant powers. Matt tries to escape Hive Hall by stealing the bike of Mrs Deverill's missing husband. He tries to ride away, but finds it impossible to escape, because which ever way he goes, he always ends up back at the same intersection in the forest he started at. He hears strange whispers and sees a light in the trees.
After a while, Matt discovers Omega One, an abandoned nuclear power station, in the woods and meets the man from Lesser Malling again. The man introduces himself as Tom Burgess, gives Matt a charm that prevents him from going in circles like before, and tells Matt to meet him at his house. Matt visits his house the next day and finds Tom Burgess murdered, with the words "Raven's Gate" painted on the wall in green. Matt runs away as fast as possible, then finds the police and tells them what he saw. They go back to the house where a woman named Miss Creevy says that Tom Burgess has gone to tend to his sheep and visit someone far away. He shows the police officers the scene where he saw Tom Burgess's body, but finds nothing. The words painted on the wall have been painted over.
To get information about Raven's Gate, he finds a book by someone called Elizabeth Ashwood, but the chapter on Raven's Gate is ripped out. When he searches on the Internet, an instant-mail box appears, and a man called Professor Sanjay Dravid talks to him, asking Matt who he is. Matt tells him his name, then the pop-up window disappears. The librarian tells Matt to go to the Greater Malling Gazette to find articles on Raven's Gate, and there he meets Richard Cole, a young journalist working there. Matt tells his story to him, but Cole doesn't believe him. And oddly, when he leaves the Gazette he finds Mrs Deverill waiting for him with Noah. They forcefully take Matt back to Hive Hall.