Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  So she ran, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, her grey trainers sinking into the soft mud of the track.

  She felt joy in stretching her legs, in seeing these things, to be out here alone at last, away from all their failures, to be out here in this beautiful air.

  Somewhere in the trees she heard the cry of a crow.

  She kept running.

  Everything around her spiralled into a great silence, the sea shifting, the noise of the waves and the arcade echoing away into empty buildings, into empty streets.

  Ilmarsh died, as it died every day.

  She kept running.

  When she came back to her hotel room, a package was waiting for her outside the door, an envelope with no name upon it.

  She went down to reception, but she couldn’t find the manager.

  She went back upstairs and picked it up. She went inside her room.

  The curtains were drawn wide as the red sun set. Fresh towels and a bar of soap lay upon the neatly folded bedsheets.

  She went to the desk and felt around the envelope. There was a small object inside, a few inches wide, rectangular.

  She opened the envelope, knowing she should wait.

  But she had to know.

  She had to.

  She opened it, and found a small, black, old-fashioned camcorder videotape.

  ‘I think I’d die if anything happened to you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t have anyone else.’

  . . .

  ‘What?’

  ‘What am I supposed to say to a thing like that?’

  ‘Nothing. I just . . .’

  ‘Come here.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’m older than you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Rebecca, I—’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘You don’t know anyone.’

  ‘Exactly. So it will be easy.’

  ‘Who did this to you?’

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

  Years past

  A camcorder begins filming.

  The town is in spring, at first. Petals fall from trees around a flaking pavilion in the park.

  There are occasional gaps of static, of blue light in the flow.

  There are happier moments recorded around town, glimpses of strangers, some homeless women in sleeping bags on the beach, playing cards and laughing, telling jokes. The camera records them from nearby each time. No one speaks to the camera, or seems to know they’re being filmed.

  Night comes.

  It is not clear where the camera films now. Not at first. It is so dark.

  Wind braces against the microphone.

  There is a stone building, rising from the ground. There are fields, far away and all around, trees in the distance.

  It is Well Farm.

  All around, reeds shake and shiver.

  Voices talk about the sickness of the world.

  They talk about a need to do something, anything.

  They talk about an island.

  They talk about being watched.

  Bonfire Night

  It is night. The filming goes on, all those months later. The colours of the hotels become visible in streaks as the occasional firework thunders in the sky. When they were converted into residential blocks, each building was given the corporate branding of a thin cladded facade on one edge, a great vertical of colour to rejuvenate the homes, to give a new lease of life to the town by the sea.

  The camera moves around, showing how they curve, how they loom around the field in their midst. It almost looks as if it is flying off the ground at one point, but it is just being held out of a window.

  Something moves in the field below.

  It is larger than any person.

  It is frightened.

  December

  The last shots are of Alec and Cooper, sometimes together, sometimes apart.

  The torsos are washed up upon the sands.

  A dog in the woods, wooden crates all around.

  The beach in the evening. Alec and Cooper sit side by side from far away, their backs to the film, talking about something the filmmaker would never hear, never know.

  There is one final scene.

  It is indoors. It is dark. The only light is thin, seeping from the fairy lights of the promenade, from the reflections of the arcades, the seams around the curtain edges.

  Cooper leans forward towards the screen, her lips parting, her eyes wide and dry.

  In the film, there is a woman, dreaming in a bed, turning beneath the duvet covers.

  The lens watches her.

  It watches Cooper’s sleeping face in the dark, captured by that camera, witnessed from the corner of her hotel room some anonymous night, just a few feet from her body.

  I had been with her and she hadn’t known.

  Day Forty

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

  The tape finished.

  They sat in Alec’s home. It was a little after dawn.

  She hadn’t been able to sleep in her own place.

  ‘We can’t stay here.’

  Shadows moved as light danced along the trees outside.

  ‘I can’t stay in that hotel. You can’t stay in that house, you – we’re – we’re what this person wants. We’re what he’s watching, now.’

  There was a birth of smiles, once, in a town by the sea.

  ‘It came through . . . I got permission, just like you wanted. It’s been arranged.’

  ‘What’s been arranged?’ Alec stared at her.

  ‘An interview. A meeting . . .’

  There was anger in me once.

  I have held the dancing plague.

  ‘I feel like I’m – I feel like I’m losing my—’

  PART FOUR:

  SIXTEEN HORSES

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

  On the final day of school, Rebecca walked towards her locker. She had waited in the bathroom at the end of the day, had sat in a cubicle until the sound of movement and clanging had ceased. She had just been on her phone.

  She went to her locker. It was so new she hadn’t even got a padlock for it yet. The whole place looked duller than it had in her memories. Her mind had made the drab beige something bright and terrible. She only had her books with her, nothing expensive.

  She looked down the corridor. A teacher left his room and headed towards reception. A cleaner had started mopping the waiting area.

  Rebecca opened her locker and white powder tumbled out, entering her lungs, filling her eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

  Alec and Cooper were halfway there, now.

  The girl from the island – the girl whose father had destroyed her entire family, who had poisoned them, who had set their homes and farm alight – the girl who had not spoken in all this time . . . Alec thought was his one last hope to find an answer to these strange events.

  Cooper didn’t know. But he was right, in a sense. They were running out of options. And however unlikely it was that a child might hold their solution, at least they would be out of Ilmarsh. At least they would be far away from whoever hunted them.

  This girl waited for them, far away.

  ‘At least you have a reason, now.’

  ‘For what?’ Alec asked.

  ‘For doing what you do.’ She slowed down in the traffic. ‘The day after we met, you told me you just fell into this work. That you’d lacked imagination.’

  ‘. . . And how about you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What’s your reason for all this?’

  ‘It’s my job. And . . . and I want to help you, too. We’re friends.’

  ‘Are we friends?’ he asked. ‘Is that what we are?’

  ‘I . . .’

  She said nothing else.

  It would be night by the time they arrived, only a few hours left for visiting.

  They kept going.

  He looked at her, every so often.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-S
IX

  The first and only sign of what had happened on the island had been the choking smoke from the fires. Passing boats had reported it; others had come to investigate; soon infected, they had received swift treatment. They had only found the little girl by accident; she had been hiding in a corner of one of the collapsed barns, had coughed, violently, having held her silence each time strangers had passed by before.

  She had not spoken. Not then, not after, not now.

  Their family had not always been so isolated. Her great-grandfather had been a regular sight at markets in town; people remembered the jokes, the easy manner, the occasional temper of her grandfather. It was the final son who had broken with society; strangely so, considering he had left for university, then a successful career in a government lab. He’d come back one day, bringing with him his children, his pregnant wife. And as the decade had unfolded, whatever rift had separated him from this old life had faded, and it was the new life that was cast aside.

  Strange materials were found in his home.

  Writings about heaven and hell.

  Scriptures of his own devising. Life had been sin. They’d live apart.

  They’d find a new way. People didn’t do things to a place. A place did things to people.

  And the father, he killed them all.

  Trauma never ended. It just spread its spores.

  Only a girl remained.

  She couldn’t speak.

  Niamh was now ten years old.

  The staff had asked Alec to wait outside. Men made her nervous.

  ‘I’ll be OK,’ Cooper had told him.

  Children liked Cooper, generally speaking. She knew if her sister became a mother, her niece or nephew would think she was great; of course they would. Cooper tried to treat kids like people. She tried to pay attention to what they liked, what they didn’t. She tried to be normal.

  This girl, she liked drawing. There were crayons all across the table when Cooper came in.

  Cooper explained who she was, why she had come here. In the middle of her story, she mentioned the word ‘horse’.

  So Niamh drew them. Her T-shirt was blue and was covered in images of puppets. Her hair was short and red. She—

  ‘That’s not a very good drawing,’ Cooper said.

  The girl looked up, eyes wide. Her shock turned to annoyance, and Cooper grinned.

  ‘I’m sorry, that was mean. Can I try drawing one?’

  The girl looked back down at her paper and kept going.

  ‘Hold on,’ Cooper said, and opened her bag. She removed her notepad and pen. ‘Here we go.’

  Cooper drew something that looked like a tube on cylindrical stilts, a ridiculous smiley face drawn on the end.

  ‘How’s this?’

  Cooper handed her the piece of paper.

  The girl looked at it. A flicker of a smile crossed her face before she saw Cooper smiling in turn, and immediately it vanished.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what your horses look like, I’m afraid,’ Cooper said. ‘You shouldn’t draw stuff from imagination. You should draw stuff you can see. You’ll learn more that way. Like . . .’ She put her thermos on the table. ‘This. Draw this.’

  The girl and the woman both drew the thermos.

  ‘Now you see how the light catches against it, the shadow? You can fill that in. It makes it more lifelike, it gives it depth.’

  They both began to fill theirs in.

  ‘I used to draw all the time,’ she said.

  They finished.

  The girl’s was better. She looked up at Cooper for approval.

  ‘This is better than our horses. We’re definitely getting better.’

  Alec chased up the visitor records while they spoke.

  There had been no family, no distant relations that had come to claim Niamh. Social workers had visited her; court-appointed staff and other authorities immediately after the original incident and the aftermath.

  No one else.

  He searched through the database for other names.

  COLE.

  Nothing.

  ELTON.

  Nothing.

  NICHOLS.

  Fifteen times throughout the last twenty years, he’d come to this place, apparently. Not for this girl. For patients with names he did not recognize.

  ‘Nichols, Alec.’

  He did not remember coming here.

  He did not understand why his name was in this system, who he was supposed to have visited.

  He asked a clerk.

  ‘I didn’t visit,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been here before, I don’t—’

  They couldn’t help him.

  How could they help him?

  It was just what the computer said. Records had been transferred to a new system from across the region’s services. They—

  ‘This isn’t just this institution, then?’

  It wasn’t.

  He let them leave.

  He looked at each name, wondering why he could not remember them. He must have visited them for cases he’d been working on, back in his old district.

  Had they meant so little to him?

  Or had something happened to his mind, too?

  How many things in a life really stayed with you? How many days did you really live enough to remember them?

  Alec came back to the observation room. Cooper was still drawing with the girl. It had been forty minutes, now.

  There were horses across the desk. Pictures of her thermos. Now pictures of each other.

  Still they did not talk of anything.

  What was she doing?

  They didn’t have time for this.

  ‘Can I go in there?’ Alec asked.

  The social worker told him it would not be a good idea. These things took time. ‘Your partner’s doing well.’

  He waited for twenty minutes in a hard chair, watching through the one-way glass.

  He’d forgotten his own laptop. He took out Cooper’s.

  She’d let him use it briefly in the car, surprised that it didn’t make him motion-sick. So he used her password now.

  He got it out, logged into his email, his notes.

  He’d listed all the meanings he could find, just days ago.

  Sixteen:

  A unit of measurement. A square number, four times four. The base hexadecimal of all computing. The number of pawns on a chess board – for that matter, the precise number of pieces you start with in any game, elegant, mirrored.

  The tarot card for the Tower.

  Destruction. Revelation. Higher learning. Change.

  The age of consent.

  The number of completion.

  Divisible by one, two, four, eight, and itself.

  The number of waking hours in a day.

  The date of the Boston Tea Party, the first Academy Awards, Marie Antoinette’s marriage, the day of her death, the number of her husband, XVI.

  The atomic number for sulphur.

  The age of Rebecca.

  It meant everything and nothing.

  He had images contained in the document. Photos of the heads. Of wooden crates amidst the trees. The Tower card, showing a collapse, two people throwing themselves from a building.

  A finger. A nail.

  For the horses themselves, there were other combinations:

  Riding. Rescue. Racing. Work. Pet.

  War. Pulling the chariot of the sun. Glue.

  Hunting. Meat. Power. Friend.

  Horse burial as a ritual could be found in a variety of cultures, symbols of Odin, of fertility, of wealth, of death.

  In Shandong province, six hundred horses were discovered in a pit, centuries past their deaths.

  In the Trojan war, a wooden gift had been given at a gate.

  There had been a plague. The Greek forces had been lost at sea, sick, dying without hope of reclaiming lost Helen.

  A deer, sacred to Artemis, had been slain.

  The plague of the place was of their own making, a reward for all they
were and all they had been. It drew attention to their crimes, serving justice, restorative and punitive.

  To end it, the Greek forces had to provide a sacrifice of equal value to the dead deer.

  The Greek king had to slit the throat of his daughter Iphigenia.

  The war would end, years later, with men hiding within a horse.

  The king would go back home, victorious.

  He would kiss his wife and walk on purple sheets.

  He would look on all he had done, and smile, victorious.

  He would never wake.

  The wife would kill him in his sleep.

  Before Alec shut down the laptop, he went into Cooper’s own email using the same password. He wasn’t surprised when it worked.

  He read all of the private correspondence he had time for.

  He saw emails from her sister.

  He saw emails arguing Alec’s innocence, reporting on the contents of his home. He saw emails requesting that he be allowed to re-join the investigation, attempts to argue against what someone called Ada Solarin thought to be Alec’s ‘instability’, his negligence, his incompetence.

  He saw emails about bird necks.

  He saw emails about his own fingerprints, found on plastic.

  An obsession with a mirror.

  He got up and put the laptop away in Cooper’s bag.

  He went through to the hallway and opened the door.

  ‘Alec?’

  He walked past Cooper and pulled one of the chairs from the opposite wall, placing it across from Niamh. The girl flinched at the noise of its metal legs dropping down onto the floor. She avoided eye contact with the both of them. Her drawing slowed and shifted.

  ‘Alec, we’re—’

  He ignored Cooper. ‘Hey, Niamh. I’m a policeman. My name is Detective Sergeant Alec Nichols.’

  The girl blinked as she drew.