The Man Who Built the World (8 page)

Then he heard the sound.

Shattering the silence like a hammer through glass: a baby’s piercing cry.

Matt froze, but only for a second.
He now understood what the figure was carrying. He started to follow again, increasing his step to catch up.

The hedgerows
on both sides of the road began to drop in height, until finally they fell away completely where the road was split by the old cattle grate. He had always seen this as the true boundary of Tamerton, for Dartmoor stretched away beyond. From the top of the hill you could see the moorland rolling away impressively into the distance on a clear day, though now of course it was shrouded in dark and fog. Dartmoor as a concept had always enthralled and daunted him in equal measures, its vastness, its rugged beauty, and the tales that came associated with it. As a boy he had always wanted to set a novel here, but after
things
had happened he had dropped the idea. Now, as he thought of the endless miles of open moorland, he felt a fresh surge of creativity unlike any he had felt in months. Maybe a novel about Dartmoor could revive his fortunes.

Up ahead, he heard the figure clattering across the grate, and he hastened to follow, brea
king into a run along the last stretch of road. But as the cattle grate appeared out of the fog in front of him he felt a sudden lethargy, and he pulled up short, breathing hard, feeling lightheaded. The grate lay just feet away, a barrier between himself and what lay further, out there in the darkness.

And memories began to float back, manifest themselves out of the fog.

Oh, heavens, not more ghosts.

Fear gnawed at him like a dog
’s teeth on a bone, breaking his resolve, taking the first involuntary steps back and away from that place on his behalf. How many years had it been since he had thought of
them
?

Out there, maybe a mile distant, where the moorland curved down into a natural hollow, a scraggy tree-lined ravine with a shallow, meandering stream at its bottom, stood a cottage.
Two floors; an old farmhouse, perhaps, and the scourge of every schoolboy in his year and countless years either side.

Meredith.

Elaina and Liana Meredith. Sisters.

Exotically elusive, they ha
d lived in quiet solitude in that cottage out across the moor for as long as Matt or anyone he knew could remember. Over the years their lives had gradually become part of local folklore, the
two weird sisters
, regarded by many to be witches, believed apparently ageless. Stories grew fat quickly in the pubs and living rooms of small communities like Tamerton, but no one Matt had ever spoken to knew them well enough to either confirm or refute any of the spectacular theories he had heard. The skeptical side of him imagined their lives were insipidly inane; two forty–something spinster sisters working as HR managers in a cold office block somewhere in Plymouth. But his whimsical side, the side that had once spawned the ideas for more books than he could ever hope to write, still remembered the tales that abounded in the playground at lunchtimes, of sacrifices and black magic, of two beautiful sirens whose lilting song drew unknowing men up on to the lonely moors to their deaths.

There
had been a hundred stories passed back and forth while he grew up from primary and middle school into secondary, but by his early teens there was only one thing that preoccupied the minds of himself and the other boys his age about the two mysterious Meredith sisters.

What they did at night.

At school, on Friday afternoons in the winter, they used to draw lots. The shortest straw had to take the challenge. Go up there that night, camera in hand, and get a photo of some
action.

Few made it past the cattle grate.
Even fewer got as far as the cottage, got to photograph anything. Some did, though, their blurred, poorly lit treasures displaying a corner of wall, a door, an amorphous shape as likely a sheep as a woman. Boys returned with fanciful tales of their bravery and what they had seen, but the lack of any hard evidence only added to the mystery, making the challenge more appealing. During his school years everyone with any guts eventually got landed with the dare, and although most returned with little to tell, they all returned somehow
fulfilled
, as though by taking the challenge of the Meredith sisters each schoolboy had somehow crossed a threshold into manhood.

Matt remembered the night it had been his turn only too well.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

A burning sense of shame and humiliation swamped his senses.
He started back down the road, at first walking backwards, then turning to bolt, arms pumping as he fled back in the direction of the village. It was too late at night, too dark, to go chasing ghosts. Some things really were best left alone.

#

He hadn’t seen the woman standing at the foot of a scrawny, wind-battered tree, just to the left of the cattle grate, shrouded by the mists. He hadn’t seen her standing there, clutching a bundle in her arms, a bundle that occasionally squirmed irritably. He hadn’t seen the smile on her ageless face.

He hadn’t seen her.

But Liana Meredith had seen him.

11

Rachel lay awake, one hand cupping her face, listening to the tick of the clock as the mi
nutes and then hours slipped past. Her eyes and cheeks were red, sore from her tears. They had come all of a sudden in a torrent and she had been unable to hold them back.

She thought of the kids, tucked up in bed, asleep down the corridor, and listened to her own steady breathing as she waited in vain for sleep.

Her fingers lifted to brush her face, touch the fading mark of the bruise. She felt a small numbing pain, so small as to be barely noticeable, and yet at the same time it meant so much.

To her, and for the children.

#
##

Bethany’s Diary,
December 21st, 1984

Helped Daddy put up the tree in the lounge today. Daddy and Uncle Red got it from out in the woods, chopped it down themselves – chop chop!! – and carried it in from the garden. It towers over all of us, and I spent ages covering it with tinsel and jingly balls and little angels and fairies, including one big one for the very top which Uncle Red had to fetch a ladder for. It looks beautiful. I wish Mummy could have been here to see it, all sparkly and glittery, but Mummy is staying out in the cold this year. I wanted to ask Daddy why, but he just looked so sad as he stared up at the tree.

I wanted to ask Matty instead, but he just stared at me with horrible eyes.
I looked around behind me at the fire burning in the grate, and couldn’t help but wonder why Matty hates me so. Daddy loves me, but Matty hates me. Only Daddy and Uncle Red seem to love me, now Mummy’s gone. She can’t really give me love when she looks so cold peering in through the glass.

Maybe she might surprise us all, and come back for Christmas.
Who knows, diary? Who knows??

12

Matt thought the late night walk would have cleared his hangover.
But no, there it was, thudding away at the inside of his skull as he awoke, like a heavy metal band warming up for a farewell tour. He gripped his temples with his fingertips, and squeezed as though he might squash the pain out through his eyes.

‘Fucking . . .
hell
.’

Even now he couldn’t remember how many glasses of whiskey he had shared with his f
ather. The whole evening was little more than a blur, but no matter, he had to push it out of his mind.

His sister was getting buried later today.

He climbed out of bed, took a brief shower, and threw on some fresh clothes. He hung the damp ones from yesterday over a radiator, despite a small, hand–written note pinned to the back of the door that warned him otherwise. He slipped on his shoes and stumbled downstairs to catch the tail end of breakfast.

Mrs. Carter had cleared away the breakfast things for the other guests, but with a little pe
rsuasion agreed to cook Matt a small fry-up, them being old friends and all that. He gobbled down the bacon and eggs greedily, ignored the tomato juice on his chin and spooned down the beans and mushrooms. Nothing helped the hangover, but at least he satiated his hunger.

As he sat back at the table, sipping on a strong coffee, he remembered vaguely that his f
ather had gone over the funeral arrangements last night. Yes, the service would be held in the church in Tamerton, with a small private goodbye up at the old chapel, and a reception back at the house. Matt’s assistance wasn’t required in anything; he came as a guest alone. Which, of course, suited him fine.

Matt thanked Mrs.
Carter and went outside. He needed a little fresh air, thought it might help his head. The service was due to begin at one, which gave Matt a few hours to kill. He paused only briefly, remembering that the pub wouldn’t open until eleven, and then turned on to the road that headed up the hill toward the moor.

The fog had partially lifted, some of it burned off by the di
m, hidden sun. It was still chilly, though, and Matt had to stuff his cold–stiffened fingers into the pockets of his jacket for warmth. Only the graze on his right hand gave off any heat, in the form of a tingling, numbing pain.

He could cope with the imposing atmosphere during daylight, even the sudden flood of nerves and trepidation as he crossed over the cattle grate on to the moor.
He didn’t want to go close, just close enough. Late at night, with his head muggy from sleep and too much whiskey, he couldn’t be sure what his eyes had seen. Dreams were beginning to cross over an invisible line into consciousness with alarming regularity.

That’s what a place like this does to you.

The road, in poor condition and barely wider than a single lane, led across the moor towards Princeton, where Dartmoor Prison stood, and then on to Plymouth, but Matt turned off after some hundred yards and headed downhill across the spongy grass, sheep and wild ponies ambling lazily out of range as he got near. A couple of derelict buildings rose up ahead of him and to either side, the remains of a long abandoned military base. Dating back to the Second World War, the low, arch–roofed buildings had been silos for ammunition and storage buildings for an airbase a couple of miles further out across the moor. They had all stood disused and empty for some fifty years or more, but Matt could still remember the time a kid from school had found a live grenade out in a small hollow formed by an overhanging rock. The army had come out and cordoned the area off for a couple of days while they carried out an extensive search for any other antiquated war artifacts. He remembered being disappointed when no atom bombs or artillery shells were found buried just under the grass, and for weeks afterwards Matt and other kids from the school had carried out their own searches of the moor. He must have been ten or eleven, before everything started to go wrong.

He followed the remains of a path between the two old ammunition stores, heading for a
nother building, one that completed a triangle as it looked out from the crest of the hill towards a wide, sparsely forested valley, and the rise of the next moorland crest a mile or so distant. An old communications tower, it rose sixty feet out of the damp moor, little more than a shell now, everything of value either taken by the departing military or looted decades ago. The stairs to the upper levels still remained, but windows, doors, shelving, even tiles off the floor had all been broken or removed. It smelt of damp and that chalky mustiness that Matt always associated with the rotting, crumbling concrete of old, ruined buildings, and of manure, strong and pungent, made fresher by the rain. From the state of the ground floor Matt knew that the sheep and moorland ponies used the building to shelter from the rain, and was vaguely impressed that they had only crapped along one wall, leaving the other clear to sleep against. Signs of intelligence among sheep were rare, but that was definitely one, he reasoned.

He climbed the stairs to the third floor, more aware now than he had ever been as a kid just how unstable the concrete framework looked.
He had to pick his way over a few fallen girders and a scattering of roof tiles, but from the yawning maw of the south-facing window he had a near perfect view of the valley below. The fog was clear enough for his vision to reach the next ridge of moorland, topped by a small granite tor – Merry Tor, he thought, though couldn’t be sure. Hardly appropriate. The moorland vanished into fog a little further on, but he could imagine seeing the metallic grey spread of Plymouth far to the south. Once, on a clear summer’s day long ago, at sixteen years old, a far more athletic Matt had climbed up on to what remained of the tower’s roof and seen the glittering blue of Plymouth Sound and the English Channel. He had planned to come back another day with his binoculars, look for ships out there on the waters, but if he remembered rightly the rest of that summer had been wet and he had gone before the next one came around. He felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for his childhood but pushed it away.