The Man Who Built the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 Heaven 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 i ncome