The Man Who Built the World

by Chris Ward

  ‘Matthew Cassidy!’ As though to see him more clearly, she sucked her chin back into the jowls of her neck, reminding him of a farmyard hen. ‘Well, haven’t you grown up! You’re the image of your father.’

  ‘Why are you –’

  ‘Oh, I retired some years back, poor heart and all that. When old Mr. Bellray died, this place went on the market cheap, I think to keep it with local people. My Arthur and I – God rest his soul – thought it would provide a nice little income to keep us going.’ She lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes. ‘It gets a little tough on my own, but in the summer I get in a couple of staff. Are you back for –’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Matthew. It’s tragic, terribly tragic. Such a beautiful girl. So . . . angelic. To go in such a way –’

  Matt was keen to avoid this conversation. How much she knew about his past he didn’t know, but he did know that in small towns people liked to talk. He wanted to keep his involvement in the place as minimal as possible.

  ‘Do you have the keys to my room, Mrs. Carter? I’ve had a long drive, and I’d like to get settled in.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes of course.’ She fumbled in a drawer beneath the desk. ‘Room six, top of the stairs. It looks out towards the hill. It’s a nice room, and we’re not all that busy.’

  ‘I’ll get my cases.’

  He left her standing behind the desk, still prattling on to his back. So, she had set the tone for his visit. Forgotten faces returning to haunt him. Mrs. Carter was nice enough, but within an hour, the whole village would know that, after fourteen years, Matthew Cassidy was back.

  ###

  Bethany’s Diary, November 15th 1984

  Christmas is coming, whoopee!! I can’t wait for the ground to be layered with snow. Daddy hates it because it makes his car difficult to drive, but I don’t think the car minds much. It looks quite warm and snug beneath that fluffy white blanket. I like to play out in the snow, though no one ever plays with me, because I always play at night. It’s nicer then, because it gets all shiny under the moon and the trees give it neat patterns. I’m hoping that next time Mummy comes she’ll leave some tracks . . .

  5

  There was no such familiar face in the village store, and Matt bought himself a bottle of Bell’s Malt in gleeful anonymity. He had been desperate for a drink all day, and as he sat at the window of his room and looked out across the churchyard to the fields and forest beyond, to the lane, partly obscured by unchecked foliage, that led up the hill and through the trees to his father’s house, he took a first swig from the bottle. He felt its scolding warmth illuminate him and begin to dissolve his fears like nothing else ever had. A little more and he might feel ready to face his father.

  Through the top of the trees beyond the church he thought he could just see the uppermost peak of his father’s roof, thought it was difficult to tell for certain in the fading light. Perhaps a few years ago the whole upper floor would have been visible, but the trees had grown up a little since then. No one would have cut them; his father had never respected prying eyes.

  Tomorrow, his sister would be buried. The last link to that place, besides his father. He would have to wait to find out where the funeral would be, though. Matthew would prefer to see her in the churchyard he could see now, in the centre of the village, amongst real people, but suspected his father would want otherwise.

  At the back of their house a path led down into the woods. It had always seemed overgrown, even though his father had regularly cut the undergrowth back to clear a way through, especially in the springtime when brambles and bracken sprouted almost overnight. The path led down to a stream at the valley’s bottom, to a little crossing made of heaped stones, like a child’s dam. It then rose up through the trees and the undergrowth on the other side, almost to the summit of the hill, where it opened out into a clearing.

  Matt had been there countless times during his childhood, exploring, storming his enemy’s stronghold, hunting invisible aliens. Picking his way through the overgrown entrance into the tumbledown building itself, between the cross beams of the collapsed roof, up on to the raised preacher’s platform at the back, to stand victorious. The old ruined chapel at the back of the clearing had been the site of so many of his childhood fantasies and adventures; for a long time a placed he had loved, as a boy’s base camp, as a place for solitude, and for refuge.

  Until they had buried his mother there.

  Matt swigged from the bottle until he thought he would choke.

  6

  By seven o’clock a light drizzle had begun to fall, and its presence helped to sober Matt up as he made his way across from the Bed & Breakfast towards the lane leading up to his father’s house. He cut across the village green and through the churchyard, stepping among the lichen-covered gravestones of his ancestors, their names lost now to time. He soon regretted it as the soggy ground quickly soaked his shoes, but at least the whiskey gave him an otherness that helped him forget the discomfort.

  Two five-foot granite gateposts marked the entrance to his father’s lane, a gravel trail leading blindly up into the dark. Once, two imposing stone gargoyles had guarded the entrance, horrible squat things like mutated cats with short, hooked horns and contorted, mocking smiles. One had been stolen, for reasons unknown, when Matt had been ten or eleven, and never recovered. The other had been knocked from its perch when a drunk driver had careened into the right-side gatepost a couple of years later. The gatepost had been re–erected but no one had ever bothered to replace the gargoyle, and it had stayed face down in the undergrowth at the foot of the hedge where it had fallen. He could see it now, in the glow cast by a street lamp behind him, carpeted with moss and partially buried under years of decomposing vegetation. At some point someone had come along and kicked it further along the road, and it now lay a good ten feet from the lane entrance, just short of where a black Nissan car had been parked tight in against the hedge.

  Matt frowned. There were no houses close by, and he wondered if his father had a visitor. He didn’t want to intrude (not an excuse not an excuse) and for a moment thought about turning back. The pub was just a street away. But no, his father’s house was fronted by a wide courtyard, so any guests would park there. The car must belong to someone inside the church. Grudgingly, he turned back towards the dark lane entrance.

  As he began the steep climb towards his father’s house, he found, even now, after so many years, that he could skip between the puddles and the potholes like an old pro, his instincts leading him where the obscured moonlight could not. Just as he had done so many thousands of times as a child, he felt he could run this lane blind, even if now his poor physical condition might resent it.

  Trees loomed on both sides and the forest he had once taken for granted became a thing of menace to his acute writer’s mind. Every rustle of undergrowth potentially yielded a man, or a dog, or something perhaps worse, something that he could only identify at the back of his mind as a foreboding, unwelcome presence. His father had scheduled the funeral for tomorrow, and by Monday Matt wanted to be gone, back to Lancashire, the kids and Rachel. Monday at the very latest. If he could stay sober, he wanted to be gone by tomorrow night.

  You can’t just leave like that, you know you can’t.

  The thought hit him like a hard slap across the face, and for a moment he stumbled, catching his footing just in time to avoid tumbling towards the puddles hidden in the dark at his feet. Just a thought, just a stupid, irrational thought, but it had snagged him like the barb of a fisherman’s hook. His very presence back in Tamerton had opened up a whole can of long forgotten emotions that would take time to sort, time he didn’t have.

  Time he didn’t want to give.

  He should have stayed away. They didn’t need him, hadn’t for fourteen years. His sister wouldn’t know he had come; she was dead, after all.

  And what sort of reception could he expect from his father? Ian Cassidy had made the call to him – only Hea
ven knew how he had found Matt’s number – but how much of that had been as a duty? How much did he really want to see his son?

  Welcome home son. Welcome home, little me.

  ‘No!’ Matt snarled through gritted teeth, and wished he had brought the bottle with him.

  The lane reached the brow of the hill, opening out on to a wide gravel courtyard. Opposite, through the sheeting rain which glittered beneath two large spotlights on either side of a wide porch, stood the house.

  Home.

  No! Not home. Home is Lancashire. Home is with my family. This is the past. And what’s in the past is gone, might as well have never been. I don’t need you.

  Why did you have to call?

  It rose like something out of Dracula, four storeys high, dating originally, Matt thought, from sometime around the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries but restored numerous times since then. From its recessed entrances to the balustrade that ran all the way around the steeply pointed roof, it displayed many of the Gothic features that so typified that period, even down to some of the smaller windows which were made from a number of decorated panels fitted together. Many of these had long since been replaced, but especially around the back of the house Matt remembered how some of the windows had been constantly grimy from the dirt and bird mess caught in the elaborate designs.

  On the right-hand side of the building was a two storey annex which housed the garage and a clutch of storerooms overhead. Not that they had ever needed storage space; only the three of them had lived there permanently, though sometimes his uncle had overnighted and a maid had stayed over to clean and launder from Tuesday to Thursday. Matt doubted he had even seen all of the rooms, and often wondered how his family had ended up living in such a monstrous place.

  By his teens he had known the house had been in his family for generations, his father’s income generated from land rents and the occasional sale of a patch of ground for development. There was a title somewhere in his family; Lord or Baron, maybe, though his father had never used it. He had a vague memory of overhearing his grandfather being referred to with a title, but both grandparents on his father’s side had died during his early childhood; their graves were in the churchyard in the village. Those on his mother’s side had always been strangely absent. She had never spoken of them, and he had rarely asked; perhaps she had had her own family rift to deal with. If she were alive now he thought she might understand how he felt.

  Looking up at that huge building, he realised his father was sitting on a goldmine. With lands covering several miles of forests, moors and farmland, his father’s worth was immeasurable. Even had Bethany still been alive Matt would have stood in line to inherit enough to put aside ideas of working for the rest of his days, and probably those of his family. Even if his father had written him out of the will he still had rights. He would have gotten a substantial portion at least.

  I don’t want it. I want to forget this place, it’s all I’ve ever wanted. There’s too much blood here, too much darkness.

  A couple of lights shone from ground floor windows, but curtains were closed against the night. Something – a dim light – suddenly flashed in one of the upper rooms, and Matthew jumped. Gone as quickly, probably an internal hall light being switched off, yet it still spooked him, sending a shiver down his whiskey–numbed spine.

  The moon cleared momentarily, exposing a sleeping hulk parked on the gravel outside the garage, similar to the old open–backed truck his father had owned before, but a newer model. He heard the sound of a dog barking a long way off, and he turned on his heels, looking nervously back across the courtyard as he made his way across to the house.

  He didn’t give himself time to bottle out, stepping into the deep shadow beneath the arched recess and thumping hard on the heavy oak door.

  Sometimes they come back. Well, Dad, here I am.

  ‘Dad? Dad!’

  No answer. He reached out for the huge, brass door handle.

  BOOM!

  Matt instinctively dropped to his knees as a gunshot echoed out across the courtyard, sending sleeping birds skyward in a cacophony of shrieks and terrified calls. The dog began to bark again.

  ‘Fuck this,’ Matt muttered, picking himself up, and starting back across the courtyard. I should never have come.

  Fear gripped him and he began to run back across the courtyard, feet splashing through puddles left in the gravel by car tyres. By the time a second gunshot sounded from somewhere deep in amongst the trees, Matt had lost all sense of reason and had begun sprinting for the head of the lane as fast as he could. He didn’t care that he would have been safer under the cover of his father’s porch, he just wanted to be away from that place.

  He turned down between the trees, breathing hard, his shoes and the lower part of his trousers soaked. Ahead of him he could see the lane entrance, illuminated by the churchyard street lamp. It looked so far away.

  And then a figure stepped out of the trees, directly in front of him.

  Matt cried out and tried to turn, but lost his footing on the loose gravel and instead sprawled forward, his face striking the rough ground and his hands landing in a puddle that slopped muddy water back over him. He shook his head, dazed from the fall, and started to rise, only to find the huge, bulky figure looming over him. Something was thrust towards Matt’s face, something long and metallic. He flinched.

  A bright light blinded him. He lifted a hand to cover his eyes and a second later the torchlight flicked off.

  ‘Huh. Well, I never . . .’

  The torchlight flicked on again, this time a little to the right so that it cast a glow bright enough to illuminate them both. Matt lifted his head, saw first a pair of old, worn hiking boots, then dirty rainproof trousers and finally a long shotgun in the stranger’s other hand. He froze for a second, tried to raise his hands, then saw two dead pheasants hanging from the man’s belt.

  Lines scored the man’s stoic, hardened face, and the hair beneath the cap had undoubtedly greyed. But the eyes, a deep brown, still shone with a mixture of darkness and light which terrified Matt even more because he recognised them.

  A hand reached out to pull him up. ‘A little wet, aren’t you?’

  Mat brushed himself down, although it made no difference. Soaked head to foot, his cheek and hands throbbed with a sore warmth.

  He had prepared perhaps a hundred different introductions. None of them came.

  ‘I –’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you cleaned up. Just thought I’d get us something a little fresh for dinner, and I’ve always been rather fond of hunting by torchlight. You were staying for dinner, weren’t you?’

  The torchlight flicked off. In the darkness the man’s expression was unreadable. Then he gave a short chuckle. ‘How are you, son?’

  ‘A little wet, Dad. And I think I’ve busted my lip.’

  The man laughed, a thick, hearty sound like a roaring fire. ‘Let’s get inside, out of the rain. We’ll soon get you cleaned up.’

  Matt let himself be steered back towards the house. His father held his shoulder with one hand, supporting Matt until the courtyard came into view and the ground leveled out.

  Matt’s sense of foreboding grew as they approached the house. In the upper floor window, the rogue light flashed on then off again.

  7

  ‘Of course he’s coming back, Luke.’ Rachel frowned, running a hand through her son’s hair. She forced a smile. ‘Don’t be so silly. Is that what’s been bothering you?’

  Luke looked away from her, his face puckering up in the way that children’s sometimes do, as though he had done something wrong and been found out.

  ‘It’s okay, sweetie, I’ll understand.’

  ‘All you and Daddy do is shouting.’ Luke began to pick at his fingernails, face red, tears imminent. ‘Like the other night –’

  Oh God. He hadn’t heard them, surely? She had been certain the children had been in bed, asleep.

  The night Matt hit her.
>
  The door had been closed; they couldn’t have seen.

  ‘Luke, honey –’

  ‘Mummy, do you and Daddy still love each other?’

  Their house’s previous owners – an elderly couple Rachel had only met once, on the day they had come for a viewing – had built the kitchen as an extension, and had knocked through the wall of the old kitchen to increase the size of the lounge, to cope with a horde of grandchildren, she had assumed. The old couple had left the old door attached, the old back door.

  Matt and Rachel had never got around to replacing it, just stripped it down and given it a lick of paint.

  The keyhole was still there.

  ‘Mummy, have you sent Daddy away?’

  ‘Luke, honey . . .’ She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him tight to her. ‘Daddy’s just gone to have a think for a while . . .’

  She felt her son crying quietly into her arms, hiding his sobs, even at such a young age embarrassed to cry in front of her. She stroked his hair, and after a moment realised she was crying too.

  ###

  Bethany’s Diary, November 28th, 1984

  It snowed bad today, diary. Woohoo! I went out, made a snowman, gave him coals for eyes, a carrot for a nose and everything, just like in my fairystory books. He looked so nice. But then Matty came and kicked him down, stamped Ralph – that was his name, Ralph – all over the ground, until only his eyes were left, looking up at me, really sad. I think he wanted to speak but the gravel I got for his mouth was all over the snow, so he could only go ‘jobba jobba jobba!!’ which I couldn’t understand.

  Mummy came again tonight. I pretended to be asleep, but watched her from under the covers. She sat by my window, watching me back. She smiled, and it was beautiful. Mummy is soooo beautiful, like a princess in the picture book Daddy gave me. Then she got up real quick, and disappeared, and by the time I got to the window, she had gone.