The Man Who Built the World (15 page)

Just another minute, he will soon be gone –

Tears fill his eyes, hot like vomit, stinging like acid.

‘Mother . . .’

He can see the blows raining down.

It is time to leave.

Matt climbs to his feet, unsteady, walks to the wardrobe, and pulls out a rucksack and starts to stuff it with clothes. He clears essential items off his dresser: razor, shaving foam, toothbrush, soap, deodorant. Takes his wallet, his keys (
though will I ever need these again?
) his watch, a couple of keepsakes – a signed Stranglers tape and a little stone in the shape of a heart that he found on the beach at Falmouth on a primary school trip. It all goes into the rucksack, shoved to the bottom to make way for a blanket he strips off his bed. Who knows where he might be sleeping tonight?

Matt pulls a coat
around his shoulders, stuffs gloves into the pockets – the spring is late, snow still blankets the world outside and the air has a sharp bite like hungry piranhas – pulls a woolen hat over his head. He slips shoes over his feet.

And goes.

There is no sign of Bethany; he hopes she is stowed away in her room, doing . . .
whatever
. He can’t fight off a surge of guilt for leaving her, but even now he can barely see his sister as anything other than the pearl-white wraith which haunts the corridors and his dreams. In an act of defiance, he faces upwards along the corridor that leads towards her room, and spits. For a second he watches the spit spread out across the carpet like the body juices of a crushed bug, then he turns away and heads down the stairs.

There is no sign of his father in the lounge or dining room, and Matt goes out the back door into the garden.
He heads for the break in the hedgerow where the path begins, leaving footprints in the snow behind him. He knows his passage is as obvious as a freight truck dripping black paint on a white highway, but he has no choice. He wants to see his mother’s grave one last time, but wants to get away soon. He hasn’t time to cover his tracks, but the snow is still falling; within an hour it might cover them for him.

He reaches the edge of the lawn, the maw of the path gaping in front of him, white
-tipped branches and grasses pointing the way downhill towards the river. He stops, his feet halting without request, and turns back, to look on the house one last time and remember its external beauty with its cloak of snowfall, perhaps to mask the pain that throbs from inside.

He sees Bethany standing at the top of the lawn.

She still wears her bedclothes, and her face is as white as the snow, tilted to one side as though she watches him like a curiosity, an anomaly, something unexplainable and incomprehensible within the mind that ticks behind her unreadable expression. A lock of hair beside her ear dances like a sprite in the breeze.

He watches her in return, feeling his blood run cold, wondering what she will do.
Will she run after him, will she turn and walk away, will she simply disappear into nothing, become part of the snowflakes that fall around her?

She lifts a tiny hand, the sleeve of her sweatshirt slipping away to reveal milky white skin.
She smiles.

And she waves.
Two movements of her hand, once left, once right. The hand drops. She smiles again. It seems to split her face from side to side and is so bright it is as though the sun is trapped inside her head and is trying to squeeze out through her mouth.

‘Bethany –’ Matt starts to call to her, but she turns and walks stiffly back into the house, her feet marching like those of a clockwork soldier.
He looks down at the point where she stood, but already her footsteps have covered over, as though she was never there. Feeling some kind of complex emotion that resides in the eternal void between euphoria and despair, Matt turns and starts down the path.

He only gets a few yards before he stops, and turns back to see if she is there, behind him.
Of course, the path behind him is empty.

It takes longer than normal to negotiate his way down the steep path
to the river. Under the trees, much of the path is free from snow, but wherever a break in the foliage occurs the path becomes blanketed, hiding roots and outreaching stones and rabbit holes, any of which might send him sprawling. He picks his way, kicking aside the snow, and soon the river appears before him, its thin width frozen solid.

Climbing the other side seems far easier but as he makes his way up through foliage made thicker by the snow, his nerves begin to rattle and Matt feels his heartbeat start to race.
As though something terrible is set to happen some time soon.

It is a feeling he finds irrational, but one he cannot shake.
He has no reason to fear his mother’s grave, no reason for trepidation to grow inside him almost to bursting, as though he is a human pressure cooker. No reason at all.

But when he reaches the clearing, he understands.

His father stands a short distance away, leaning over the grave of Matthew’s mother. His head is down, his eyes on the blank stone that rises up from the snow like a tiny rectangular pedestal. As Matt watches, his father reaches down and begins to scrape the snow away.

Matt feels the pressure building inside him.
He wonders why he is afraid, then suddenly realises how he has been mistaken, that his fear has evaporated with his steamy breath, and taking its place is something that terrifies him as much as it seems to energise, to galvanise him towards action.

‘Why are you here?’
Matt’s voice echoes from one end of the clearing to the other.

His father stands up
and turns towards him. The seconds seem to stretch like elastic as Ian Cassidy’s eyes look across the clearing at his son. For a moment they hover on the rucksack slung on Matthew’s back, then he looks away, back down towards the partially uncovered gravestone.

‘And you?’
Ian asks.

‘I’m leaving.
I came to say goodbye.’ As if to clarify, he points at the grave. ‘To Mother.’ He takes a few steps forward towards his father. ‘Get out of my way.’

His father does not move.
Ian can see the anger pulsing in his son’s eyes. So much anger, and all because Matthew does not – cannot – understand.

‘Where exactly do you plan to go?’

‘Wherever I choose. Away from here.’

‘And you would have left saying nothing to me?’

Matt scowls. ‘I have nothing to say to you. Why don’t you understand?’ He shakes his head, disbelief in his eyes. ‘I
hate
you.
You killed my mother
.’

Ian Cassidy’s eyes flood with pain as though a sluice gate in his mind has opened.
He wants to tell his son the truth, make him understand. Matthew only remembers his mother as she was in the good days, before the corruption and sickness turned Gabrielle bad. Turned her evil, depraved.

But Ian knows Matt will never understand.
Nor, he suspects, will Bethany, should she ever choose to listen. Bethany, he worries for. Her mother had already begun to change by the time Bethany was born, and Ian knows Gabrielle exists strongly in their daughter. Matt, though, was born pure. His only corruption is from the hatred breeding in his own mind.

Ian shakes his head, wondering who to blame.
Matt doesn’t lie. Gabrielle died at Ian’s own hands; but to save her, and to save them. And now Ian suffers. Like Lady Macbeth before him, he will never cleanse his hands of his lover’s blood. Good blood, or bad, blood is blood.

He saved her from her own damnation, even if it meant
losing her himself. But, had she not refused to go back to where she came from, to leave Ian forever, choosing instead to stay with him and live her life in Tamerton, she would never have turned bad, corrupted by the baseness of the mortal world that the purity of her mind could not control.

They ha
d never known it would affect her so, but they had known the risk.

You couldn’t combine two worlds and expect there to be no consequences, but they
had been willing to try.

For
love
.

So in love, Gabrielle and Ian had not let life nor death nor anything else separate them.

She could have left
, Ian tries to tell himself.
At any time
.
Even when the sickness began, and later when she had to . . . had to . . .
His eyes squeeze shut against the terrible memories. ‘Even then she could have gone. It was her choice to stay. I did what I had to. To save her.’

He opens his eyes and looks up, surprised to realise he has been speaking aloud.
He turns around to look for his son, only vaguely aware that somewhere someone is screaming, and a whooshing sound is racing through the air towards him, a sound like a brush through shallow water.

Something heavy strikes him, and Ian Cassidy feels his knees buckle, his balance go, and he drops forward, the snow cushioning him, but only from hitting the ground, not from the great blunt thing which strikes him from behind, over and over again.

It is Matt who is screaming. Ian struggles in the snow, trying to roll on to his front, to fight off the blows. A couple more blows land on his back and shoulders before he achieves it, only to have one strike him across the side of the face, knocking the fight out of him. One arm rises weakly to deflect a blow from the branch Matt holds, but Ian’s last strength fails him and he starts to drift away as the screams get louder and the blows continue to rain down.

In his mind he sees the face of his son, Matthew, his eyes blazing like a forest fire, one that will obliterate everything in its path.
Ian can see nothing behind those eyes, behind the stark anger and hostility which so terrifies him, and he starts to wonder how much of Gabrielle’s corrupted soul had manifested itself before his son was born.

Matt batters and batters his father and then suddenly, with a splintering of wood the branch breaks.
He feels incensed enough to fall upon his father and finish it with his bare hands, but something holds him back. Breathing hard, sweat forming on his brow despite the snow and the cold, he takes a step back, stunned. The branch, where it has fallen, leaves red stains on the snow.

He looks down on the bloodied mess which had been his father.
Ian’s face is almost unrecognisable, his nose crushed, his lips swollen and his eyes closed. One hand lies upon his chest, where it fell after its last effort to fend off the blows.

His father looks dead.
No sound comes from his body; not even breathing is audible beneath the howling of the wind. His cries and pleas stopped some time before; Matt is unsure when, is unsure exactly how much time has elapsed since his anger clouded his senses and took control. Already snowflakes are beginning to cover Ian Cassidy, the snow a waiting grave.

Matt Cassidy feels a sudden, very real fear.
He takes a step forward, intent on checking his father’s pulse, looking for breathing. He wants the man to die, but equally, he doesn’t want to spend his life in prison.

Ian Cassidy stirs.
Not much, only a twitch of his chest, a clenching of his fingers and a groan somewhere deep in his throat. It could easily be a dying breath, but that doesn’t matter, it is enough to trigger flight in Matt, and he turns and bolts, sprinting towards the far end of the clearing, where the trail continues up through the wood towards the moors, the highway, and freedom.

As he reaches the edge of the clearing, he stops, takes one last regretful look back, at his mother’s half buried gravestone, and his father’s broken body.
A mix of emotions rise in him, wretched sadness and boiling anger, but he chokes them down, turns and disappears into the trees, rucksack bouncing up and down as he runs as fast as he can away from that place.

Ian Cassidy watches through bloody, swollen eyes until his son is out of sight.
His own tears choke him, for a few brief seconds causing the red curtain to part from his eyes, then his strength fails him and he slumps back into the snow. He tries again to rise, to no avail. He closes his eyes and lets his mind slip away, taking with it the pain and the anguish, leaving him to the mercy of fate. He doesn’t care if he dies; with Matt gone Bethany alone waits for him in this world, and he is unsure if she even knows his identity. Maybe, maybe not.

#

A light flickers beyond the protective walls of his eyelids, and he tries to force them open. Nothing moves, at least not of his accord, for a moment later soft fingers touch his eyes and face and light floods in, immediately blinding him. He cries out in pain, a howl like a weak, dying animal, and the fingers flinch away, plunging him once more into a darkness only punctuated by that peculiar half–light.

‘Ian.
Can you hear me?’

The voice is soft, lilting; a woman’s voice with a dreamy,
awayness
in the tone, as though he is hearing her underwater. He recognises the voice, or
thinks
he recognises the voice, but the name or indeed any details surrounding the owner escape him.