Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  He brought his filth and his lies to this community.

  And now he’s dead, isn’t he? Now he’s dead, and we’re not.

  And I’m happy with that.

  I’m happy.

  All throughout this day and the days that followed, Alec kept messaging Cooper. He kept asking if he could help. He kept giving her suggestions – kept telling her the best way to do things. Kept asking her to come round and see him. To let him help. To talk to the doctors, to tell them he was needed, to tell them—

  To tell them what?

  Cooper stopped answering, after a few times.

  He could barely walk.

  And this . . . all of this . . .

  Who knew what his release might precipitate?

  The fingerprints . . . the letter . . . the son . . .

  The dancing plague went on.

  Day Thirty

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Alec remained up late one night, thinking it all through.

  Though his bones ached still.

  He thought of the circles.

  He thought of the heads.

  The crates.

  What lay within.

  W A T C H.

  The number.

  Why had his son been speaking to this stranger?

  What had he got himself involved in?

  Why hadn’t Alec known?

  These questions had swarmed around the pity of half a dozen faces, their sad gestures, their awkward smiles.

  Cooper herself had barely asked, which had felt worse, somehow.

  He had offered to help.

  He had done everything he could.

  And they’d kept him here, hadn’t they?

  He closed his eyes in the dark.

  His son was out there.

  His son was out there, and he—

  It kept going around his mind.

  The piece of paper on the table.

  The night of the break-in at his home. The muddy footprints on the stairs.

  The farmer, walking through the fields.

  You won’t fall, he’d said. Not afraid of a little dirt, are you, Sergeant Nichols?

  And the man was dead, now, wasn’t he? Collapsed in the fields they’d walked in so long ago, no blackmail initiated since, no further development in the case after the two suicides.

  No trail, nothing that anyone would tell him but that which they’d had to: the number of a woman.

  In her photo, in her profiles online, Grace Cole had red hair. Standing on a beach with her back to the camera, a classic tourist shot.

  Other officers had messaged her again and again, trying to phone, trying to force her social networks to give them information about her account access.

  He’d thought about what Cooper had said, so long ago.

  That this – all this – wasn’t about the animals.

  It was about the moment of discovery.

  Of witnessing the pain in the face of the owner.

  You could have saved him.

  The smile is yours.

  It was about him, Alec knew, somehow, some way.

  This is what Cooper wasn’t saying, after all – this is what no one was saying.

  Why else would they ask him the things they had asked?

  Why else would they look at him the way they’d looked?

  There was more than just the phone number: there was something else that linked Alec to these strange events; not enough to condemn him completely, but enough.

  He sat in the dark and took his phone.

  He logged into his profile and removed all of his friends, setting the account to private.

  He went to Grace’s profile and added her as a friend.

  If a game was being played, he’d play.

  He’d do what he could, until he could do nothing else.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  [00:18] Grace: Hi.

  [00:18] Grace: I got your message.

  [00:21] Grace: Do we know each other?

  [00:21] Alec: No.

  [00:21] Alec: I don’t think we do.

  Finally, a hit.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  [00:32] Grace: How do I know you’re a real policeman?

  [00:32] Alec: I’ll ring from a registered number.

  [00:33] Grace: Is it normal to contact someone this way?

  [00:33] Alec: Not usually, no.

  [00:33] Grace: Unless you’re friends, I guess.

  [00:34] Alec: We tried your phone number but it wouldn’t work. I understand you’re no longer in the UK.

  [00:37] Alec: Are you still there?

  Day Thirty-One

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  [07:12] Grace: You don’t have many photos.

  [07:20] Alec: What do you mean?

  [07:21] Grace: On your profile.

  [07:21] Grace: Did you look at my photos?

  [07:41] Alec: No.

  [07:50] Grace: Some good ones.

  [07:52] Alec: Why did you leave Ilmarsh?

  [07:58] Grace: Didn’t my husband talk to you?

  [07:58] Alec: He did.

  [07:59] Grace: Where are you now?

  [08:00] Alec: In my bed.

  [08:00] Alec: Where are you?

  [08:01] Grace: Sitting near the beach.

  [08:02] Alec: Why can’t people reach you on your phone number?

  [08:02] Alec: If you give me a new number, I can ring.

  [08:03] Grace: They wouldn’t want to speak to me.

  [08:03] Grace: I’m not that interesting.

  [08:04] Grace: What really happened there?

  [08:08] Grace: What did Albert do?

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  In the early hours of the morning, the house at Well Farm burned.

  The fire was not seen until 4 a.m. By the time the fire brigade arrived, it was too late to save the structure.

  That the empty house had followed the culling of the flock – it seemed natural, somehow. The end of the Coles’ story, written in flame.

  Alec read about it on his phone. The local town group had noted the event.

  Cooper did not tell him.

  The inspector did not tell him.

  No one did.

  So he phoned a cab and left the ward without informing anyone in turn.

  He’d been doing better, much better.

  He was better.

  He knew he was.

  He knew.

  Just a few months ago, Alec had seen a documentary. Most days, Simon had usually just gone straight up to his room once he returned from school, but this time, the boy had sat and actually watched this film with his father. It had surprised Alec. It had expanded his idea of his son, this thing he’d made, that was him, half of him at least. All that would be left of him when he was gone. All that was left of parts of Alec that had already faded. He could see it as the boy grew up, ghost echoes of a way he’d seen himself smile in photos, sounds he’d heard his voice make in old recordings.

  So they’d watched this documentary together.

  They’d sat there as the dark images on the screen passed by, as slow lines were read out by the croaking voiceover. The film was about plans to bury nuclear waste so that future cultures would understand not to approach. The plans involved building vast spikes in a maze to warn interlopers of the material within, planting signals of danger throughout time. In the centre there would be these words:

  This place is a message, and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it. Sending this message was important to us.

  We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

  This place is not a place of honour. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here.

  What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.

  The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

  ‘This message is a warning about danger,’ he murmured, watching the snow coat the ruined structures.

  The long level fields were white, too. Bleak, flat, barely text
ured.

  The driver stopped the car and opened the gate, jumping back in. Alec had promised to give him fifty extra pounds for this. The police would stop them soon, he knew, but no one had been at the barrier.

  They drove the same way the horses had most likely come.

  They saw the vans parked in the distance, the cars, Cooper’s own.

  Alec got out, his legs still weak, and she turned.

  Markers stood against the white snow, crimson spears shot into the ground to delineate the points of burial, almost a mirror to the spurs of the sheep-pyre opposite, though here they were thin, spread out, elegant, almost metallic in their red. They had been harder to see from the road.

  Alec thought back to the moment he had first caught sight of the glassy eyes, the coiled tails of these creatures.

  Have you ever seen anything like this? he’d asked the farmer. It’s—

  Grotesque.

  Beautiful.

  No. Have you?

  That’s murder, the farmer had continued, his voice soft. Just look at them. Look.

  Alec walked through the void. Smoke rose from one farm over.

  Cooper would explain it all to him later.

  The firemen had not been able to save the home.

  At dawn, before they left, one of them had wanted to see the place where sixteen horses had been buried.

  One of them had wanted to see the place of death.

  He’d come here, right up to the red spears.

  And he’d seen it.

  Alec didn’t know this. He didn’t know anyone had seen anything. He just saw a stolen investigation.

  He just walked on towards the horror, glad to be out at last.

  Glad to be breathing fresh air, glad to be using his limbs.

  Glad to see the looks on all their faces, the disgust, the horror that he’d deigned to return to his old life without permission.

  He would be who he’d been again.

  He would help.

  He would mean something.

  There had been something in the grass and snow, near the base of the metal. Something red.

  Cooper had knelt down and parted it, taking forceps from her coat.

  She’d found a human nail.

  Alec approached, Cooper already saying something to him, but he couldn’t understand, he couldn’t hear her, he couldn’t hear anyone.

  Blackened, weeks old, its rot had been slowed by the cold.

  Upon the closest spear, a finger had been placed. A hole incised in its centre, just before the bend. Enough to prevent it falling.

  It hung, human flesh. It had been amputated with a knife, sawing through bone.

  There was nothing else. No letter. No note. No photo.

  Just this.

  The final bloom.

  DNA testing would confirm that both the finger and the fallen nail belonged to Simon Nichols.

  Twenty Years Ago

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  London

  How do you know if you love someone?

  It is 16 June.

  An off-duty police officer meets his future wife.

  He stands at the edge of the South Bank with his jacket over his arm, his feet squeezed tight by his new trainers. At long last, the sweat on the back of his neck is beginning to fade. He stares out at London.

  The low sun ripples its light through the thin trees of the riverbank, mingling with the breeze. People huddle on green and patchy grass by the sides of buildings. They clink glasses. They hold wrinkled hands and hot dogs on benches that bear the names of memorialized and anonymous dead. These benches are curved to stop the homeless sleeping. The Thames spits itself out into the distant sea.

  In ten minutes, he will walk along and say, ‘Angela?’ to a woman whose name is something else.

  She will apologize for not being Angela. ‘Met online?’ she will ask, and the police officer will nod, sheepishly. She will wish him luck. She will go for a coffee with a friend.

  He will remain in the area for an hour, alone, wishing he had put on sunblock.

  By the time he will finally think of leaving, the woman mistaken for Angela will walk past him once more, and – surprised at his persistence – will ask if he is OK.

  He will lie and say that he is.

  She will ask his name. ‘Alec,’ he will say.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ she will answer in turn.

  They will have their first date two weeks later.

  In three months, he will ask her this question.

  How do you know if you love someone?

  They will move in together, shortly after. They will start a life.

  It is 4 November.

  Alec meets Elizabeth’s parents for the first time. She cooks spaghetti sauce with bacon lardons. Within two years, she will become pescatarian. Within five, she will become vegan. Within eight, she will have given it all up again, living life in a cloud.

  The parents come to their flat, a small place in Tottenham Hale. Throughout the meal, Elizabeth repeatedly stresses how sorry she is that the place is so messy. It is, as far as Alec can tell, immaculate. He was the one who cleaned it. She does not chastise him about it, then or after.

  Before he goes home, Elizabeth’s father will remark that Alec is ‘better than the last one’. He will do this when he thinks neither his daughter nor Alec can hear. He will talk about their age difference – she is twenty-five, Alec is twenty. He will resist his wife’s protestations that the man seems nice. He will say they don’t have to pretend this is permanent. Their daughter’s new boyfriend doesn’t even have a degree. How much does the man even earn? He knows his—

  Elizabeth will walk into the hall.

  They will all pretend nothing had happened.

  The past infects them.

  And that night, as they lie in bed together, Alec will talk about his own parents for the first time.

  He will talk about the scars on his back, and how he got them.

  He will do all this to try and make Elizabeth feel better.

  It is 8 June. It is almost their anniversary.

  He looks on her phone while she showers.

  He unlocks it with her PIN. He has seen her enter it a dozen times.

  She had been a mystery to him, lately.

  He finds a message. She had sent it to her ex.

  It is a photo of her, almost naked.

  He puts the phone back down.

  When she is out of the shower and in her pyjamas, they watch television. She goes to make herself a drink. ‘You want one?’

  When she is in the middle of pouring it, he appears in the kitchen doorway, and tells her he thinks she has a problem with alcohol.

  She is surprised.

  He tells her that he’d like her to pour the drink down the sink.

  She tells him to fuck off.

  As she passes him, he grabs the drink from her, spilling some over the glass’s edge, and throws it in the sink, shards flying across the metal.

  He never mentions having seen the message or the photo, not then, not ever. The ashes of his own faithfulness give him a strange and secret comfort. He had been better than her.

  She never confesses.

  He never finds anything like it again.

  It is 5 January.

  Elizabeth asks Alec what he thinks of having children.

  When they’d pass babies in prams, or little children being lifted up by their parents, swung along in smiles, he’d smile too, sometimes.

  At Christmas, when a boy had pointed at Alec’s reindeer jumper – at the giant cotton red nose stuck to its surface – Alec told Elizabeth about it, all those hours later.

  She asks again now, sitting at night in their lounge.

  ‘We could call her Angela, if she’s a girl.’

  He smiles at this, but his smile is hollow.

  He talks about the world. About everything happening. How could they bring a kid into this?

  She talks about all the things their child might do. That who kn
ows? They might help fix the planet. They might be denying a prodigy, or a prime minister, or a scientist discovering a cure for cancer. They might set the world on fire, creating unimaginable art, great works of which others could not even conceive. They might—

  He wonders, aloud, if they’d be good parents.

  She is silent.

  He realizes he has hurt her. He does not know what to say.

  He says he will sleep on it.

  It is 6 January.

  After she leaves for work, Alec finds a pregnancy test in the bathroom bin, partially hidden. It is positive.

  He has the day off. He creates an online dating profile. He has never done anything like this before, not during their relationship. He talks to women and men throughout the early afternoon. Three hours before Elizabeth gets home, he deletes the profile.

  He wonders what friend he can talk to. He wonders who he has.

  He thinks of phoning his own mother. He does not. They have not spoken for months. They will not speak again. She will die of a heart attack four years later. She will never meet her grandchild.

  It is evening.

  He tells Elizabeth that he has been thinking.

  About what he said the night before.

  Of course she’d be a good mum, he says. He didn’t mean to ever say she wouldn’t be.

  He—

  ‘You’ll be a great dad,’ she says, quietly, nervous, trying to smile. ‘If you want to be.’

  He tells her he doesn’t know.

  It is 9 October.

  A blade pierces a mother.

  A boy is torn from her womb.

  Minutes later, a nurse passes him to his father.

  He holds his baby’s hand.

  Day Thirty-One

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Partially rotten, heaving with bacteria, found impaled on one of the red spears marking the burial site of the sixteen horses, DNA testing confirmed the flesh to be Simon’s own.

  His ring finger from his left hand, it had likely been fractured before the point of its severing, possibly infected, too. It had been taken with a heavy cutting tool, perhaps an axe, in a single fast motion a number of weeks before.