The Man Who Built the World (24 page)

They were a link, a doorway, nothing more.
A way into the past, the future. But for whom?

In time, others had come, stumbling, unintended, among them Gabrielle, who became a Cassidy.
Some they could send back if they found them in time, before the impurities of mortality had set in. Once decay had seeded, there could be no return.

Except –
except
–

Liana glanced down at the baby in her arms, and her heart lurched.

By restoring purity.

Elaina felt sure if they put their magic together it would work.
Liana was not so sure. And she didn’t want to see the baby go.

Didn’t want to see the baby die.

‘There is no good without evil,’ Liana whispered softly to the baby, whose quiet breathing didn’t change. ‘Because what is good without evil? Even something as pure and infinitely beautiful as Gabrielle had her dark side. She sucked the life out of the earth, the trees, the people, in order to preserve herself. Not her fault, of course, she could do nothing to prevent it. The
world
made her do it.’

The baby didn’t respond.

‘Her son’s anger came from her, I suppose you’d say,’ Liana continued. ‘She sucked the love out of him, as she did with many others. But in the end it wasn’t enough, not enough to save her, not enough . . .’

Liana realised that tears
were rolling down her cheeks like milky waves across a sandy shore. ‘Huh. I guess you don’t really know what I’m talking about, do you? You’re just a baby.’ She stroked the child’s forehead.

‘Your grandmother, that’s who.
Gabrielle Cassidy. The loveliest woman in the world.’ Liana chuckled. ‘Heaven knows why she came to your grandfather. He’s never been an oil painting. But then, I guess perhaps Heaven
does
know. Huh. It’s a shame it won’t say, isn’t it?’

She sat in silence for a few minutes, watching Jack’s sleeping form.
So sweet, so innocent. Like a tiny package of purity, molded into human form.

It was e
asy enough to send Gabrielle back, if they conducted a sacrifice.

Liana had felt
ill when Elaina first mentioned her plan. It couldn’t work, it was just plain stupid. To sacrifice a child to send someone back, it was sickening, heinous. There was no choice, Elaina had said.

Liana knew what had happened to
Gabrielle, knew how lost her soul had become. Now, existing as nothing more than essence, she slowly drew life out of the world around her in order to maintain her own soul.

The community around them had fallen out of balance.
Soon, people might begin to die as Gabrielle’s soul began to degrade.

It was always the way with women, according to Elaina.
When it happened to men, it was different. Women lost themselves, falling apart like dolls tossed into a fire, molding, twisting into wretched, leprous shadows of their former selves. Wasting away like starving children until their skin and their bones became nothing but dust.

Men, caught up in the corruption of their souls, struck out,
destroyed
. They took out their anger on the world around them, their homes, their families,
especially
those close to them, their own loved ones. They rotted
inside
the mind, degenerating like a battered engine put mistakenly into a brand new car, choking on its clogged components until it burst from the inside out.

Liana sighed.
It was tragic, so tragic to see them fall apart. And always, almost always they started out so beautiful. Like Gabrielle had been.

An
angel
.

Liana guessed that she and Elaina could just
die
, which would close the doorway, prevent any others mistakenly stumbling through. Gabrielle had been the first in twenty years or more, and the first to go
bad
that Liana could remember since a young man about 80 years ago, who had called himself Michael Samuels. Michael had been a beautiful, loving boy until he reached his late teens, at which point he had abruptly started to change, the purity of his mind dissolved by mortal feelings like hate and lust and greed. He had murdered four young children over the space of a few horrifying days, children he took from their beds and strangled, leaving their bodies in the forest. Finally, unable to stop himself, he had tried to take one too many and been surprised by alert villagers. He had tried to escape across the moors, but a mob had quickly formed and ran him down within a couple of miles.

Liana closed her eyes, a single tear caught in the tangle of her lashes.
She could still see his limp body swaying in the breeze from the bough of the oak where they had strung him up, his head twisted at a hideous angle but a cloth mask thankfully hiding his face.

Although the townsfolk had burnt his body, spat on his ashes and poured them away into
the drains, Michael’s soul had remained for years, wandering the village and the forest, lost, unable to leave, too corrupt to return. Tamerton, then even smaller than it was now, had suffered for the ills done against him. Older people started to die of lesser illnesses, curable even in those days. Colds, flu and whooping cough all claimed lives. The fit and strong began to drop their heads, stoop as they walked, cough, sneeze, as though fighting off hands that tried to grasp them and steal the strength from their bodies.

Only when the first innocent baby died did the sickness come to an end.
Liana and Elaina searched long and hard for him but Samuels had gone, and the townsfolk, thinking themselves free at last of a curse left by his soured memory, soon began to forget.

Yes, Liana and her sister
could
just give it up, take their own lives to close the doorway between this world and . . .
beyond
. They didn’t want to die, but if necessary they could, if it meant the people of Tamerton would be safe. But it wouldn’t solve anything.

It would only serve to trap Gabrielle here.

There were more people in the village now, but no one new had moved to Tamerton in years. Houses stood long empty, abandoned vehicles grew rust like mould. The roads had begun to wear thin, cracks had appeared in the tarmac, hedgerows had collapsed, rotting gates hung neglected from their hinges. No one came to repair anything; no one came at all. Sneaking a peek in through the window of the pub on a Friday night, Liana found no one laughing; few people even smiled. A funeral became an event; coffee mornings and darts matches and Women’s Institute gatherings and craft fairs were abandoned or cancelled.

Soon people would start to get sick.
Gabrielle’s lost soul would unwillingly absorb their life, their vitality, their
goodness
, searching to regain her own lost purity and escape back to her old life. The mortality given her on entrance was gone, only a one-way ticket home remained. But the price of mortality made the cost of getting home high for the people of Tamerton.

Yet Gabrielle had been dead seventeen years.
People were miserable, but no one Liana could think of had yet died as a result of her. There should be no reason why Gabrielle could not survive out in the forest for just as long again, give her and her sister a chance to find another way, a chance to give Jack a go at life.

Liana shook her head, so, so sad.
Because it wasn’t just Gabrielle, was it? She alone could not ravage an entire community.

There was another.

A
man
.

Seventeen years ago, a chain of events had begun, and one way or another, it was about to come full circle.
Elaina was afraid. She remembered Michael Samuels only too well. The man was close to the edge, Elaina believed. And that meant danger. Never before had two been in the same situation at the same time. Elaina intended for Jack to die to save both.

‘It’s time to go to bed,’ Liana whispered, finger lingering on the child’s forehead.
Her eyes rested too long on the baby’s still form, and she wondered if she could ever let her sister carry out her plan, despite what might happen if they failed.

She stood up and went through to a back room, the baby held in her arms, so delicately it could be a fragile egg she felt sure would break at the slightest gust of wind.
A crib was set up near the back of the room, between a shelf of dusty books and what appeared a piano by outline, a faded blue sheet slung over it. Neither played. Elaina had once made someone sell her the monstrous thing for next to nothing. She had wanted to see the look on the man’s face as a treasured family heirloom fell out of generations of his family’s possession for a few meagre pounds. The delight Elaina had felt had disgusted Liana, but ever since the piano had stood covered up in their spare room, a testament to her sister’s wickedness. Liana had wanted it gone, but her sister had never allowed it. In the end Liana had made do with an old sheet, but she still scowled when she looked at it, even now, years later.

She stepped
past a couple of tables, one upturned upon the other, and laid the baby down. She lowered a tea towel-sized blanket over his chest, smiling at the decoration of bears and toy giraffes. She had bought it from a market stall in Plymouth a month ago, and surprisingly Elaina had not wanted to take it away. It symbolised Liana’s silliness, Elaina had told her with a smirk.

‘You sleep tight, my little angel,’ Liana whispered, then immediately became sad at the a
ssociations the word brought.

She smiled once more at Jack, then turned and left the room.

12

She had already stopped three times for directions, but when Rachel saw the first of the signs indicating Tamerton, next junction off the A27, six miles, rather than belated relief she felt only a sense of dread.

To Rachel, it seemed every man and his dog and his dog’s
whole family of goddamn Pound Buddies had come out in their cars today to keep her away from Tamerton. After finally breaking through Birmingham, she had got stuck for over an hour just past Bristol at the Avon Bridge, and by the time roadside signs just shy of Exeter flashed up their warnings of possible delays to the north of Liskeard she was ready to give up and turn back. If it hadn’t been for the line that seemed to be reeling her in, that three hundred mile stretch of invisible elastic that was inexorably drawing her further south, she thought she might have.

The kids were waiting back at her parents
’ house, probably wondering now where their mother had gone, would she be back later, would she still tuck them in and make their sandwiches for school tomorrow?

The idea tempted her.
To go back to her children, to sweep them up into her arms and tell them everything would be fine, it would be
all right
. But would it? Could she possibly tell them that, when in her own mind she couldn’t even believe it? Kids were perceptive, they picked up on a lot of things adults thought they had got away with. She remembered her own parents’ messy break up. She had known for months about her father’s affair, about her mother throwing him out of the house.
Away on business
was the line they fed a nine-year-old Rachel. Yeah, right. Children heard, saw, more than they ever should.

Luke had seen.
She no longer doubted it.

But while Luke might be scared of his father, Rachel wasn’t, not anymore.
Matt
hadn’t hit her. Matt was kind, loving, considerate. Matt would never have lifted a finger towards her. Whatever dark secrets that existed in his past had made him this way, and she felt confident she could turn him back. He wasn’t a wife beater, and Rachel would prove it.

Somehow.

She turned off the A–road, sorry to see the street lights at the intersection quickly disappear in her mirrors as she descended down into country lanes, high hedgerows and the craggy, bone–fingers of overhanging trees. For a few miles they enveloped her, the hedgerows wrapping her up in their awkwardness, twisting her one way then the other then back on herself. The road opened out at last as she reached a steep corner leading over a forge, the waters high after the heavy rain. As the wheels of her car sloshed through the water, rather than the rust it might cause she wondered,
what
if
, what if I get stuck here in this? Who’s going to find me out here?

The lights of the occasional farm outhouse or isolated cottage gave her scant comfort as the car ground its way up a long hill, and Rachel wished she
had had more opportunity to drive on this type of road during the couple of camping holidays they had taken in France before they got married. These days, she had so little need to leave the city she didn’t think she had ever driven anywhere without street lights before.

Halfway up the hill she found drifts of fog floating past her, gradually thickening.
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ she muttered, as the road leveled out and the car headed straight into a wall of mist. Some people hated driving in cities, but Rachel didn’t feel comfortable unless she was boxed in by angry motorists on either side. At least she would have someone to curse at then; out here there was simply,
nothing
.