Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  ‘Hah, I knew it was a girl. What’s her name?’

  ‘There’s no girl.’

  ‘Of course there isn’t.’ He looked in the mirror. His son’s cheeks had grown red, if he wasn’t mistaken. ‘Was she . . . was she on your trip?’ He paused. His son said nothing. ‘Well, I hope I get to meet her sometime.’

  If there’s anything you want to talk about, just let me know, OK? I’m here. I’ll always be here.

  ‘My dream . . . it was about Mum. Mum was in it.’

  Alec dreamt about her too, sometimes. And he thought about that a lot. He had ideas about it.

  It’s what people don’t tell you, when you lose someone. Your dreams don’t know. They’ll appear just like they always were, as if they’d never gone. But some part of you knows it, and seeing them, it . . . it doesn’t know what it’s doing to you, your brain. It’s showing you the part of that person who lives inside your mind.

  That’s all people are to each other in the end, Alec thought. All our experiences, the good times and the bad, everything we’ve ever done or had done to us by a person, it forms an impression in our heads. It takes much longer for that to die than any body.

  He stared ahead at the road.

  ‘I dream about her too.’ That was all he said.

  ‘I know.’

  There had been silence after that. They kept on.

  Ten miles to town, now.

  ‘You know, I used to have this one really bad dream when I was a kid,’ Alec said.

  ‘A nightmare?’

  ‘Kind of. I don’t know.’

  ‘What happened in it?’

  ‘It was one of the only ones I had more than once, that I remember at least. It’s funny, isn’t it? That we have all these things happen to us and we don’t know half of them . . .’

  He took the exit, turning left.

  ‘I didn’t know what it was at the time, not at first.’

  He felt down for his water bottle, and took a sip.

  ‘The way this thing looked, in my dream I mean . . . it was this place, this black building on a hill, it was dirty. I think I had a thing about that . . . I still do, kind of, though it’s better . . . like I always washed my hands too much. You ever notice that?’

  Simon didn’t say anything.

  ‘I used to be worse. As a kid I’d wash my hands for two minutes – for three, even – just scrubbing till I was sure, digging under my nails, sometimes. I grew out of it, but I still don’t like mess.’

  The moon came and went beneath the clouds.

  ‘Your gran and me, we’d be driving through town – we’d be coming back from a friend’s house, or the beach, sometimes . . .’ He paused. There were signs above the road. ‘It was cold and dark – colder than anywhere had ever been, in real life at least. And the wind, it blew down newsagent signs and restaurant menus and even dog walkers, it was just silly, really . . . I’d try to look at the sea, but there’d be nothing there, just noise. It was a town a little like this one, but bigger – in better condition, I guess.’

  He paused, feeling an itch in his nose. He sneezed a great big sneeze.

  ‘Bless you,’ Simon said.

  Alec smiled. Simon smiled too.

  ‘It’s so silly that we say “bless you”,’ Alec said.

  ‘Why do we even say it?’

  ‘We’ll look it up when we get back.’

  He yawned.

  ‘What happened in the dream then? You just walk around with Gran?’

  ‘Well, in my dream . . . it was one of the only dreams I ever had more than once, like I said. We’d be in the car, and I’d see this black building . . . this ruin . . . and it looked at us from the hill. I couldn’t make out anything but for some letters – great big dirty white letters, the others all missing. It was tall. And I wasn’t myself.’

  He scratched his head.

  ‘I’d see this building and I’d—’

  Simon came to, something wet on his cheek. He touched his face, barely able to see, his sight blurred. Then he saw red. His hand had blood on it.

  He struggled to straighten himself, one of his fingers crunching in pain.

  ‘What—’ he croaked, starting to focus on the trees in front of the car, illuminated only by the headlights.

  They weren’t moving. He turned. The car was at an angle.

  The driver-side door was open. His dad wasn’t there. The airbags had inflated in the front, engulfing the seats. He didn’t know the windscreen had been cracked. He didn’t see the blood.

  Simon immediately shifted upright in his seat, eyes darting across the land before them. It was night. They were not on the road. He undid his belt and tried to open the door. Every bone hurt. His belt had worked, but he’d slammed forward nonetheless.

  They’d hit something.

  He swung the door open and staggered out.

  There was a noise in the distance. Faint.

  ‘Dad?’

  They had driven into a field, somewhere, somehow, tyre marks on the ground where they’d spun round. There was no road before him, just the mud the car tyres had churned up, just the filth and the trees and all those things an eye can’t see.

  He stepped forward uncertainly, head bobbing as he lurched, adrenaline spiking through the groggy wake, the world moving up and down with his vision.

  There was something wheezing on the ground in front of the car.

  ‘Dad, where . . .’

  The noise, it was clearer now. It was sirens.

  He moved closer to the body.

  It had its back to him. It was long and brown, broken antlers springing back from its head as it coughed.

  They’d hit a stag.

  It was only a stag.

  The sirens got louder. They were almost there. Ambulances. Something else, too.

  His dad must have called them. Why wasn’t his dad answering?

  What if he never answered?

  Simon turned, looking behind him at the lights. The ambulances were coming down the road.

  He looked back down at the stag. It could barely move, let alone stand. He bent down at its side and sat with it.

  The ambulances drove past them.

  There was silence, but for the croaking of the stag.

  ‘Ph—’ it coughed. ‘Ph—’

  Simon blinked, his vision hazy with blood and tears. He’d not cried for so long.

  He knelt in the dark. His father’s radio crackled out from the car.

  All—

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  When Cooper woke up, it was still dark. There were no voices outside, neither in the hall nor in the street. The sea sighed through the thin window. She tried to make out the clock on the wall, but it was too dark. Her alarm hadn’t sounded yet. She felt terrible.

  She reached for her phone, arm aching, and found it was ringing, silent, no sound, no vibration. There was an incoming call from an unknown number.

  She’d been asleep for six hours. It was just past midnight.

  She’d missed her alarm – she’d—

  Shit. Shit shit shit, she’d been supposed to go to the vet’s, she—

  She answered the phone, sitting up in the dark, her neck and back stiff.

  ‘Have you—’ There was static.

  It took Cooper a while to recognize the voice, and even then, she was not sure.

  ‘Hello?’ Cooper cleared her throat.

  There was static again.

  Outside their buildings miles apart, the black sea shook, ancient stars caught in rippling reflections.

  ‘I have.’ Kate’s voice was thin on that line, caught close to laughter, to tears, to silence. ‘They screamed as he cut them.’

  Dark cars drove down dark streets.

  Through shadows that had once been marshlands, the long and level world stretched its teeth around them.

  They danced through the darkness, through the void.

  Red and blue lights, they began to dance.

  They came towards the sea
.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Kate’s speech grew slower, each sentence more slurred than the last.

  She had taken something, or been given something. She wouldn’t answer Cooper’s questions.

  ‘Who did this to you? Who—’ Cooper’s voice was firm and deep across the noise, though she felt her heart beginning to race in her chest. She’d sat up, hands shaking. She remained calm on the line.

  ‘I drove us. I thought – I thought we were just, just taking them, I didn’t know what—’

  Cooper struggled to switch on her bedside lamp.

  ‘He cut them in the back,’ Kate murmured. ‘I was driving. He cut them, and they screamed, they – they screamed, they could hardly move, I’d given them – I – I—’

  The woman began to cough. Cooper looked frantically for her clothes, her keys.

  ‘Where are you, Kate?’

  ‘Crazy for Ewe. You – you liked my mug, you—’

  ‘Kate, what did you—’

  ‘He told me he’d tell everyone what I’d done,’ she whispered, the line croaky, full of noise. ‘I’d be struck off. I’d – I’d never work again, and I – I had to help – I didn’t know what he’d do, I—’

  Cooper hit her head on a wooden beam as she picked up her boots.

  ‘It’s in you now, too. What’s in me, it’s in you. I never meant this. I never meant any of this.’

  ‘What’s in me?’ Cooper asked, starting to shake, her head pounding.

  Lights came through the curtains.

  ‘I found a message . . . when I woke up, I found it,’ she whispered. ‘He loves you.’

  The lights were red and blue.

  There were men outside their homes.

  ‘For Ewe . . .’

  It was the last thing Kate would ever say.

  The men’s biohazard suits were pure white, almost fluorescent in that dark.

  The hotel’s halls were deserted, just like they’d always been.

  Outside, an ambulance waited for her. Multiple vehicles all around, a roadblock a little way along the shore keeping a smattered crowd back.

  They gathered as they always gathered.

  Reality began its collapse.

  Boats headed out into the night.

  ‘We have reason to believe—’

  Cooper couldn’t hear. She couldn’t think.

  ‘Infection—’

  She thought of the horses, of the eyes in the earth.

  She thought about that number, sixteen. That strange number. Not once had she wondered about it before; not once had she said a thing about it.

  They gave her a sedative.

  The world went black.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Charles Elton woke up and found his wife gone.

  He made the bed again, pulling the duvet back. It was 3 a.m., but he’d had five hours of sleep. He often found it difficult to get much more.

  He shaved and showered, his face strangely red, or maybe it had been this red for a while, he didn’t know. He felt like it was a new start, somehow. Like the weather had broken. Like the air was clear.

  He was supposed to go to the station today, or they’d arrest him, wouldn’t they? That was the threat.

  He got dressed and went downstairs, calling out for a coffee from his wife.

  There was no answer.

  He went looking for her around the house and noticed some things.

  He went outside, and her car was gone. Down the slope, the stables stood empty, too, their roofs wet. He didn’t remember it raining. Perhaps it was a trick of the night. It was hard to see. The fields were empty but for the red tractor, abandoned weeks ago, not moved since then.

  Sometimes, Louise went for walks.

  So she’d gone for a walk, then. Taken the car somewhere to get away. Who could blame her, what with the day they’d had?

  He got his phone and went to the kitchen and made a list of groceries they might need. He texted them to her on the off-chance she might still be out and about in a few hours’ time.

  He made himself a coffee, and a ham and cheese sandwich with brown bread. He waited and decided to tidy, to make the place nice.

  He waited, and it was almost light, and still Louise had not answered. He checked his phone. She had seen his message.

  It would be the last message she would ever send him, that notification, that ‘seen’. He lingered over his phone in the minutes to come, holding it there, thinking of what to say, what to type. Charlie is typing no doubt appeared a hundred times on her phone, but he never sent a message in the end, not then.

  He found it a while later.

  In his wife’s office, tidied now of all the photographs, there was a letter on the desk.

  On the piece of paper there was a request, pasted in newspaper letters.

  KILL YOURSELF.

  Louise must have opened it. Must have seen it.

  His name was on the front of the envelope.

  The password to his encrypted hard drive lay below.

  Are you coming back? he finally texted.

  No reply came. He went to the bedroom, looked through his wife’s cupboards, her drawers. All of her jewellery was gone. Most of her clothing, too: their suitcase, absent from the loft.

  He went down to his study, letter in hand, and sat amongst the horse plates, the horse paintings on the walls.

  He sent a final message.

  I love you, Louise. I love you.

  There were still things he needed to do outside. Rubble that had to be cleared. Things he had to move. He tried to concentrate on that.

  He burned the letter in the fireplace.

  He went upstairs.

  He took the gun from the safe, put it into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  GRUINARD ISLAND, 1942

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  Five men stand in gas masks. They are of different shapes and sizes, looking almost like a family huddled for a photograph. One of them has a camera. They direct it at bleating sheep.

  The air is cold. The sea around them is peaceful.

  The sheep have been accumulated in tethered masses near the detonation sites. The men stand far enough away that they are at little risk.

  The countdown over, Vollum 14578 manifests in a cloud of dust. The air becomes brown near the sheep. It all happens on the end of a stick, the detonation toppling it, spores inhaled by all living things within a prepared radius.

  The strain had been discovered in a cow in Oxford.

  The man who discovered it gave his name to it, and Vollum was all that remained of him in the world, the final memory of his life.

  The sheep die and are incinerated within days.

  Men make the world warmer.

  No one ever lives here again.

  PART TWO:

  THE HOLE IN THE WORLD

  Day Four

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  There was an image in Cooper’s head, the last image.

  The flesh of a horse’s face, laid out across a board.

  Numbered tags poking into each lesion, ready for examination, for recording.

  That was the final thing she could remember, the last remnant before she came to.

  The skin from the face stretched out against the chrome and the white lights.

  Skin that had been stroked a thousand times in rain and sun, a map of trauma and love.

  She woke up.

  Specialists from Public Health, police officers from surrounding areas, they had come for her on the roads.

  What’s in me, it’s in you.

  But it wasn’t.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about Kate’s voice. She couldn’t stop hoping she was OK, that they were all OK.

  Cooper had been given the all-clear in the early hours.

  The night had felt like a dream, somehow. Like all the parts of her mind had splintered off into the waking world.

  The authorities had put her up in this room, twent
y miles from Ilmarsh itself, and had told her little else.

  This room in which they’d put her – it was full of mahogany bookcases, but for the bed in its centre, its impossibly white, now-ruffled sheets. She was staying in what had once been an old mansion. It was mostly used for conferences, now. The authorities had set this building up as a base of operations, an area for the press in halls on the lower floor, beds for officials to stay in on the floors above.

  There were leather chairs in shadowed recesses. There were books on the shelves that could be read by anyone, that never were.

  There were bright yellow curtains. It was a terrible colour scheme. Cooper thought it looked like something her sister might have come up with.

  These curtains reminded her of something else, too, but what, she could not remember.

  A knock came.

  When Cooper was twenty, she’d tried to die. She’d climbed onto some distant train tracks. No one had been at that station so far from any city. The vet practice where she’d been completing her extramural studies had been perfectly pleasant to her. Hardly allowing her to do a thing other than watch, of course, but their lack of petty power displays or absurd neglect made them nicer than many of the other places she’d been. On her way to her temporary accommodation, the sun was still, warm, visible – it didn’t hurt her to stare right at it. She stared long enough that all sound seemed to leave the entire world.

  She’d stopped right at the cusp of a railway bridge. The country fields beyond – the rolling pastures and oaks older than her parents, the distant cottages and the air so free of smog and smoke – she saw them all.

  She went down the steps and slid off the platform with slow, calm movements, her mind relaxed in the same way a hot bath might have calmed her body. The loose grit of the platform dug into her palms as she pushed herself off it. Her palms were softer back then.

  She walked down the track towards the sun and the hills, wondering.

  She passed by people who looked at her briefly from their old homes with purple doors. She felt her legs tremble.

  No train ever came. The government had decommissioned this railway line sixteen weeks before.