The Man Who Built the World (27 page)

Behind his father’s voice Matt can hear the choked sobs, the sound of his father’s misery as he lifts the corpse of the woman he loved and still loves despite her ravaged mind and body, and carries her out of the room.

For Matt, the conflict resolves itself differently. He does not know what his father has done; he does not know his father has saved his life, saved that part of his soul the woman had not had time to take from him, although his father worries that he may have got there too late, hesitated too long, and that his son, also, may be scarred.

He is right: Matthew will be scarred.
Matt knows, deep down, beyond (––––––––––) that his mother was more than sick, that she wasn’t suffering from cancer or leukemia or spina bifida, but from something that ran far deeper than he can ever understand. Something that has left her just a shell of the beautiful, elegant woman he remembers, turned her into something different, something dark, something bad. But this knowledge is deep; this knowledge is far below the deepest ocean floor of his mind. All Matt can understand is what the facts tell him, the facts as he sees them.

That his father has just murdered his mother.

All Matt can remember are her words,
love you, love you, love you more than Heaven
. . . nothing else matters. The rest is irrelevant.

His eyes are still closed when his father comes back in.
Matt hears his name and then his father takes him in a hug, whispering over and over, ‘I love you Matthew, thank the world you’re safe . . .’

It doesn’t matter.
His father’s tears do not matter. His father’s loving words do not matter . Nothing matters except what Matt sees when he opens his eyes.

Over his father’s shoulder, Matthew can see the lug hammer where it lies on the floor.
One corner of it has what looks like a shadow, a shadow that has leaked on to the floor and spread itself out in a small corona around the hammer’s head. It seems to glimmer under the bedroom light.

Matt wouldn’t mind if it were shadow, but it is not.
It is blood from where the hammer smashed open his mother’s skull.

A door closes in Matthew’s mind, locked tight even as he sways in his father’s arms.
A door that leads to forgiveness.

Part Three

Angels

1

Rachel killed the engine.
The lights stayed on, illuminating the road ahead for about thirty yards before the wall of fog rose to block her way. She waited, listening to the rapid thudding of her heart, the only sound besides the low, muffled howling of the wind outside and a steady drumming that she took a moment to place as the sound of her shaking fingers tapping on the hard plastic of the steering wheel. There was no sign of the woman.

Rachel felt too shaken to cry, too frightened even to scream.

She’s lying out there,
she thought.
Dead.

The thought rocked back and forth through her head like marbles bouncing off one another.
I’ve killed someone. Someone is dead now because of me
.

Then a face appeared at the nearside window, almost touching the glass.

Rachel screamed.

At first it looked skeletal, demonic, like Death come to take the dead woman’s soul.
Rachel tried to reach for the lock button, to keep the face outside, but as her fingers darted up the door swung away from her, opened from the outside. Rachel screamed again, but as her eyes took in the woman standing on the road outside, she realised the steamed up windows and her shock had obscured her view. This was no demon. Just a woman, that was all.

And from her expression, a very angry one.

‘You stupid fucking bitch, what were you trying to do,
kill me
?’

Rachel shook her head, speechless.
At least the woman didn’t seem hurt. Rachel didn’t know whether to be thankful or not.

‘I was just trying to cross the fucking road, you crazy –’

Rachel finally managed to pluck some words out of the air. ‘Hey, I’m . . . I’m sorry, but give me a break, won’t you? You came out of nowhere.’

The woman glared at her.
‘Well of course I did! Can’t you see all this fucking fog?’

Rachel shook her head in exasperation.
Words floated into her mouth then vanished before she could catch them. ‘I . . . I . . .’

The woman leaned against the car’s doorframe.
‘Well you’re lucky you hit that rock instead of me! You could have killed me, you know. Would you like murder on your conscience?
Would
you?’

Rachel felt like crying.
She said nothing, just sat in silence while the woman berated her. She went on and on until she seemed to run out of things to say, at which point she turned her nose up at Rachel and stepped away from the car.

‘Well, I guess I ought to try and make something of my evening, despite your best attempts at ruining it.
I’ll just have to hope there are no more crazy drivers out there like you or I’m in for a long night, aren’t I?’ She planted her hands on her hips and huffed. ‘Good
bye
.’

Rachel stared as the woman turned and stalked off.
She felt tired and upset but equally as confused, unable to bring into reality what had just happened. Where was she? Was the car damaged? Was
she
hurt? And how far was she from Tamerton and Matthew?

And who on earth was that
woman
?

Despite the woman’s anger, her face had been beautiful, almost abnormally so, as though she had stepped out of a television studio’s makeup department right on to the moor.
Rachel had felt a sense of something wonderful, something
magical
about her, but couldn’t place exactly what. Perhaps she would never know, perhaps it was beyond her to understand.

Perhaps it had never happened.
The long journey had left her tired, seeing things.

She twisted the key in the ignition, waited for the engine to turn over, but instead the car just wheezed, refusing to start.
She tried a couple more times, but the engine just groaned and strained, coughing and spluttering like a smoker on a sports field. Whatever she’d hit, it had left her stranded.

The woman had left the door open, letting in a cool, moist breeze.
Rachel swung her legs out on to the ground and made to get out of the car, resigned to a long walk. But as her weight shifted from the seat on to her legs, her left ankle buckled, twisting underneath her. She cried out in pain and slumped forward on to the road.

She gritted her teeth, hands reaching for her ankle as pain bloomed across the bridge of her foot and up her calf.
She must have sprained it in the accident, but the shock had hidden the pain. She glanced back into the shadowy footwell of the car, saw the glint of metal where the accelerator pedal had been pushed through.

She had managed to do some serious damage.
How fast had she been traveling? She had not thought more than twenty, twenty–five, but perhaps in these conditions the fog had proved deceptive.

Stranded in the middle of nowhere with a broken–down car.
At night. Rachel had a problem.

‘
Help me
!’ She shouted into the fog. ‘Help me, I’m hurt!’ Perhaps the woman would hear her cries and turn back. Rachel glanced up and down the road. What had the last sign said? How many miles to Tamerton was it?

She had no choice.
She would have to walk.

Using the door of the car for balance, she hauled herself up.
She took one tentative step, then another. Pain lanced up through her leg, but with each step it became more bearable. The accelerator pedal must have jarred it. Now she had come to terms with her ordeal, and realised that whatever she had struck had already been dead, the pain had free reign to do what it liked.

She rounded the front of her car.
She had hit what looked like a gatepost, a round boulder of granite mirrored by another similar piece about twenty feet further on, together marking a lane entrance, little more than a potholed dirt track leading downhill away from the main road. She had struck it head on, the impact smashing in the front of the chassis and buckling the bonnet. Her limited knowledge of cars extended far enough to know her car was an insurance write off.

Feeling a mixture of anger and despair, Rachel squinted into the fog and the darkness, ho
ping to see the lights of the town. Nothing glowed ahead of her, but off to the right, in the direction the dirt track led, she could see a faint light some distance away. A building of some kind, she hoped, a farmhouse or secluded cottage. Images conjured in her mind of more Hammer horrors, and also poor old Hansel and Gretel, finding their cottage of candy. She shivered, glanced back at her wrecked car, and made up her mind.

She had no choice.
Making sure she kept the distant light in sight, she started off down the lane.

###

Bethany’s Diary,
May 19th, 1998

She tells me secrets. Too many secrets. I don’t like hiding anymore, but she says she’ll leave me if I break my silence. Says she’ll have no choice. What can I do? I love my mother, but I can’t handle this.

I can’t get away much anymore, Dad watches me like a hawk, now his drinking has eased.
Uncle Red speaks to me a lot, and although I know how much older than me he is, I find him somewhat . . . intriguing. I feel something I haven’t much felt before. It’s different with the boys I see in the village. They stare at me like a freak, shout obscenities and abusive remarks. Last Tuesday, as I made my way back from the village store with some more Lamberts for father and some bread, one of them, one of the Calver boys, grabbed me and told me he wanted to . . . wanted to . . .

He said, ‘I’ll get you to talk girl, I’ll make you talk.
Give me five minutes. And if you won’t . . . If you won’t I’ll find a use for your silence, I’m telling you.’

Then he grabbed my hand and before I could flinch away he pushed it against his groin.
I felt a hardness there, unnatural, desperate, and I saw the carnal desire in his eyes. He wanted me so badly. Perhaps to prove something to his friends, perhaps because I symbolize taboo, something they cannot have, and therefore they want more than ever.

Whatever the answer, he frightened me, and it took all of my nerve to avoid just what he had said and cry out for father, but I resisted and pulled my hand away.
Needless to say, I ran then, but not before raking his face with my nails. I ran back to the house, dropped my things down on the table and went up to my room. I locked myself in then cried into my pillow for what felt like hours. I felt shocked, dirty and humiliated.

This is how they see me, the boys from the village.
They all want me for the same reason, and because of that I cannot find anything attractive in any of them.

But Uncle Red is different.
He wants nothing from me, just to sit and talk, to be my . . . my friend. I know he is not my real uncle, and I’m afraid I let myself get carried away. Yesterday, as he sat on the end of my bed, talking to me about China, about when he visited as a young man, about the places he had seen, the cities, the people, Shanghai, the Great Wall . . . I reached forward and touched his face. At first he flinched, then he frowned, but he didn’t move away. He watched me as I leaned in and kissed him softly on the cheek.

I don’t know what I meant to achieve, but I pulled away then, feeling uncertain; for the first time in my life had I talked I would have had nothing to say, full of the buzz of emotion that ran through me like tiny mice in my veins.

And then he reached up and touched my face with his hand. I froze, felt warmth emanate from my skin, embarrassment, nervousness, and he pulled me forward and kissed my lips. At first I felt like a rabbit caught in headlights, then I managed to relax and open my mouth a little. His mouth felt warm, sweet, and I loved it. I put a hand on his neck and pulled him closer.

We kissed for a few seconds but it felt like only an instant later when he pulled away from me, gave me a smile and went to stand up.
He promised to come and see me again soon, then put a finger to his lips, kissed it and placed it on mine. My heart seemed to burst out of my chest and I had to stop myself from pulling him back down to me.

He left me then, closed the door softly behind him, and I heard his boots retreat down the hall.
Once, I heard his stride break and he stopped for a second before continuing again. He had thought about coming back, I knew, had thought about coming back to me right then. I know he wants me, only his apprehension holds him back.

Soon, though.
I’m twenty-two years old, I’m no child. Whatever they might think of me, I’m still a woman. And I still need the same things that other women need.