Read Online The Man Who Built the World by Chris Ward - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    He glanced up at what remained of the roof. He would never make it up through those girders now, but