Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  The radio show went on and on. The host asked if a guest would ever consider eating a steak if it was grown in a lab, if no animal really suffered.

  The guest told him that steak was still very complex and hard to get right. A hamburger would be easier to grow. It—

  Cooper leant forward and changed the radio station, clicking it a few times past Christmas songs until she just switched it off. They drove in silence after that.

  The world thinned as they approached the outskirts of Ilmarsh.

  Only one room waited for them at the bed and breakfast – two beds, at least, but still, not what they’d booked.

  There was no other option, though, unless one of them wanted to sleep in a room without any bed at all.

  ‘We’re doing renovations,’ said the woman at the desk.

  They took the key and went upstairs.

  CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

  She didn’t face him. She didn’t sit up. She just lay on her bed, still wearing the clothes of the day. She stared at the ceiling and began to talk.

  ‘What happened today . . . it can’t happen again.’

  He did not answer. She did not know if he was still awake.

  ‘You’re careless, sometimes, Alec.’

  Thin light came through the blind slats, the street lamps still on outside. The place smelt like all such places: musty, mildewed. If other people were staying there, they’d barely heard them.

  Cooper turned from him and shut her eyes.

  At some point in the night, she woke. She had no idea if it had been two minutes or two hours.

  Alec was talking, now. She didn’t know if he’d said much else.

  ‘—rather be careless than cruel.’

  She turned her head.

  ‘My dad used to say that, when I was younger.’ He was staring up at the ceiling. He didn’t look over at her. ‘Meaning to do good, he thought it was more important than . . . well . . . he wasn’t clear on what. Just that meaning, it was better than . . . than not meaning.’

  His voice was hollow, worn, gentle.

  ‘The car you scratched . . . did you mean to do good?’

  Cooper rubbed her eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘I asked you the worst thing you’d ever done. You told me it was—’

  ‘Scratching the car,’ she said. ‘Alec, it . . . it wasn’t that. But I’d just met you. And asking a question like that, it—’

  ‘You’ve been asking the same question all these days. Ever since the hospital, you’ve been wondering about me. I know you have.’

  There was laughter, somewhere, distant through the walls.

  ‘Mine was Elizabeth. What I did to her.’

  Photographs, hung around bodies.

  Patches of skin, displayed on a board.

  Cooper watched Alec, just like she had watched all these things.

  She had pulled them apart, every life a mystery. She had tried to help the dead.

  ‘She hid the diagnosis from me at first. A year to live,’ Alec said, quietly. ‘Cancer.’

  Still, she said nothing.

  ‘She took three years to die. So I . . . I left her, one year into the three. I left Simon, too.’

  He told her.

  He told her about how hard it had been.

  He told this woman the same things he’d told himself a thousand times before.

  He—

  ‘Men whose wives get cancer, apparently it’s . . . it’s common for us to leave them.’ He took a deep breath.

  Still, Cooper said nothing.

  ‘My whole life, these things I did, that I do . . . they’re just things other people do, aren’t they? If I’d died, what would have been lost?’

  He blinked. His eye twitched uncontrollably. A nerve trapped.

  ‘I’ve always been alone. What did I want?’

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘You asked me why I did it, why I’d chosen this life. I didn’t lack imagination. It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t that.’

  A door opened somewhere outside.

  ‘Why did you do it, then?’ she asked.

  And what was her voice?

  What was it but more coldness, more curiosity?

  What was he to her? What was he to anyone?

  He—

  Cooper listened to her friend.

  He turned over towards the window. She didn’t know what to say.

  She didn’t know what to do that would make him better.

  She just listened.

  She kept closing her eyes, she—

  ‘—wanted to feel powerful, I—’

  I wanted to feel like I was good.

  CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

  He thought of the letters on the crates.

  He thought of Grace’s face, her photos.

  He thought of Cooper.

  He thought of the eyes in the earth.

  He got up half an hour later and took Cooper’s laptop with him through to the hallway outside. She did not stir.

  A renovated room without a bed lay opposite; he needed space if he was going to be able to think about this, to think about all of this.

  A solution lay ahead. He knew it did, he just had to work hard. That’s what he’d been told. That’s what everyone had been told.

  Work hard. A good life would be yours.

  Maybe this – maybe this would make him better.

  Maybe this would heal them all.

  He poured himself a glass of water from the tap. He thought about messaging someone. It didn’t even have to be Grace. It could be anyone. He wanted to talk to everyone. He felt light-headed and so he drank more, shaking his head. The quicker he was back to work full-time, he knew, the better. He went to the desk of his new room. It smelt of paint, even though the walls were dry.

  He opened the chat with Grace.

  He scrolled up.

  [10:04] Grace: What’s it like there, anyway?

  [10:14] Grace: Raining probably.

  [10:16] Alec: It snowed.

  [10:16] Alec: But the sun is slowing.

  [10:17] Alec: Sorry, meant shining, autocorrect.

  [10:19] Grace: Take a photo.

  He thought of Cooper, how they had met.

  I was the one who found the horses, Alec had said. Well, after Mr Cole and his daughter, of course.

  Cooper had then snapped the bird’s neck.

  He thought of the animals, his lungs weak, his chest sore.

  He thought of his life here.

  He selected a picture of the crates, of W A T C H, of the rotting animals in the dark wood, and sent it to Grace Cole using his phone, now charging from the socket next to him.

  There was a draught, somewhere.

  A window was open.

  He looked down at the laptop. He was still logged in on his social media and email from earlier in the day; he needed to be more careful.

  He went to the tabs.

  He went to close them.

  And then he saw it.

  CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

  He had a friend request.

  CHARLES ELTON.

  Another. KATE BABBIT. Another. Another. Names he recognized, names he didn’t.

  Some of them had been dead for weeks.

  He accepted all the faces of the lost.

  A message came through from Grace, thirty-four minutes later.

  A location arrived on his phone. She had shared it via the app.

  The map and the pin would remain active for an hour, then expire.

  She was close to Well Farm. The woods, it seemed. Had she been there all this time? He did not know.

  Come alone, she said.

  Do you have Simon? he typed.

  Ashamed, upset, he shook in his chair, wondering what to do.

  Telling himself he was all right.

  Telling himself he could do this, that he needed to do this. He could not wait for the others to be ready. He could not allow them to stop him. He could not risk her running, and he knew her. They had never met, but he knew Grace
, just as she knew him.

  She was the solution to everything. Maybe the others were right. Maybe one person had done all this, after all. Or maybe . . . maybe she, too, was their victim, whoever ‘they’ might be.

  Yes, she typed.

  She had his son. He just needed to find her. He smiled, thinly, and stood up.

  He gathered his things.

  He left, alone.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

  Alec arrived at Well Farm for the last time. The location shared on his phone was past here, or so his map said – into the woods, half an hour by foot from the stone ruin at the farm’s edge. A path ran from there to a small lake.

  The gate was open. He didn’t know if the others had forgotten to close it when they were last out here or if someone else had driven through in the interim. He looked ahead, his car’s engine still humming. He had barely driven since the crash, had been worried he might somehow have forgotten how or that the experience might panic him, but earlier that day no trauma had manifested, not like that. He paused at the edge of the land. He drove onto the soil as the van must have done that November night, its occupants ready to lay the horses to their final rest. He imagined it as the wheels of his own car turned on the scrub, designed for none of this. There were forty-three minutes remaining on the location share on his phone.

  The forest became clear as he moved towards it, its blackened mass now outlined in columns of shivering bark, of needles splayed out along the heavens. He stopped the car and switched on its light.

  He had a flashlight. A truncheon. Some pepper spray, cuffs, too.

  A kitchen knife. If he needed it.

  He checked his phone. Forty minutes left, now. He turned back to the road and saw a flash of electric red and white in the dark. The reflection of passing traffic lit up the markers of the buried heads, the red spears in the ground behind him. He grabbed his coat and opened the car door.

  It was winter, now – true winter, the kind that scoured skin and dried your eyes and scraped at your bones.

  It was the darkest evening of the year.

  He buttoned his coat up tightly, shivering slightly already. He hoped walking would make him warmer.

  Did he know Ilmarsh now, at last? These strange weeks had felt like a year in themselves. One more year and he’d meet Elizabeth’s prediction, that it took four to belong in a place, in any place.

  In forty, Ilmarsh would probably be underwater.

  His torch flickered. He looked for some batteries in the back but he’d packed quickly. He supposed he could use the light on his phone, if it came to it.

  He turned towards the treeline. He remained there for a moment, unmoving, cold in the winter breeze.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

  Cooper woke up, half delirious.

  Alec wasn’t in his bed when she looked over. The sheets seemed smooth, barely slept in.

  He wasn’t in the bathroom either, though she splashed her face with water while she was up.

  It was then she realized his bag was gone.

  Her laptop was gone, too.

  She put on her shoes and muttered to herself. She left into the halls, already typing Where the hell are you? on her phone.

  The light across the hall, the open door, and the ‘under construction’ sign seemed to give her a pretty good idea. She found only her laptop there.

  The screen glowed blue-white in the semi-darkness.

  There was no noise but her own, the night quieter than she’d ever heard it.

  No one stirred in that building, nothing moved but Cooper’s fingers.

  She shut down the tabs Alec had opened.

  She hit upon his profile, last of all.

  A message window flickered in the corner with new notifications.

  She read it. Saw the photo of the crate.

  The location. The message.

  Come alone.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  Torchlight caught small mounds of stones, massed in puddles. The trees, seething, anomalous, blocked any light from the moon. Alec possessed only what he could hold.

  He pushed on, his socks beginning to soak through. His feet felt sore; his arches felt like they had collapsed, his calves on the verge of an everlasting cramp.

  He wiped his forehead of sweat, but found none there.

  He kept on, checking his phone when he could.

  There was, somewhat surprisingly, phone signal out here, though it came and went, and he supposed Grace must have some too.

  Alec had never been out this far.

  He never went to places like this at all, not even as a child. He’d had no interest in the wild, in nature, not then, not really. Simon had gone camping and hiking, back when Elizabeth had looked like she might get better. He’d even taken his mother with him once, one brief day, one walk through the hills. These two years in Ilmarsh, Simon hadn’t once wanted to go out again, he hadn’t once wanted to explore. Not until he’d started to make friends.

  The trees moved faster.

  There were things in these woods.

  Alec had passed a pebble-encrusted structure early on, surrounded and ornamented by leaves. It was only when he shone his torch above it that he saw the cracked wooden boards and realized he was looking at an old well. It had not been used for decades, aluminium soft drink cans with old depreciated branding all nestled around its base like votive offerings, enthralled in a nest of weeds.

  He saw a wheelbarrow tipped on its side further along. Further still, great thick wooden poles that could almost have been trees if not for all the metal up high. They looked like loudspeakers, like air raid klaxons. Why they were here, he did not know.

  Around it all, an almost invisible world proceeded. In places where the trees had grown apart, plants and flowers stood tall, some with very few branches except up the top, despite their height. Top-heavy in their arms, they shook even in the light wind. And there were bees, somehow, swimming through the night ocean. He didn’t know they could live in the cold. Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe he was wrong and they were something else, these flying creatures, but what else he could not fathom. They were fading clockwork. An anonymous droning issued louder and louder from the insects, the longer Alec remained, the more he listened.

  Minutes left, now.

  All this, grown around human mistakes.

  All defined by absence, in the end, these structures throughout time, these stories of the things we had left behind, that we had ruined.

  The feeling that someone was watching us.

  He was close. There was no signal left on his phone but he had to be close.

  It was us, always.

  All of us, more scared of ourselves than anything.

  He heard the water ripple through the trees.

  He shone his light ahead at the twist of the path, the wide parting of the branches.

  He hesitated, checking his phone again.

  There was a single bar of reception.

  If Grace was beyond, she had not moved, though he could see no light, not yet.

  He gripped the knife within his coat with one hand, his light with the other.

  He walked on.

  He saw the lake.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

  The hissing struck him first. The low drone of all the insects in the reeds. A cold that smelt of apples, somehow, somewhere. The strange dust that hit his skin. All who had ever lived here and died here touched the policeman’s neck. The water haunted the stars, holding their reflection in its black enormity. Some plants and reeds crested round the edges of the lake, like the first hairs of a beard. The water, as far as the light stretched, looked like a crescent moon fallen to the world, but that wasn’t right at all.

  The more he looked at it, the more it seemed like a smile.

  There would be so many colours, if he’d come during the day. Flies sang around the air. One drew blood, and another, though Alec did not even know or feel it. He didn’t feel so cold any more. He even f
elt warm, even as he stood so stiff, even as his shivering came to its final end.

  There were just trees and the lake, just plants, and the shell of a rusted car thirty feet to Alec’s right, a torch lying on the ground nearby, pointed back in a horizontal at the treeline. It had not moved. It had not even flickered the entire time Alec had been standing there, pointing his own light.

  ‘I’m—’ he began, his voice coming out as a croak, as a quieter thing than he had meant. ‘I’m here.’

  No one answered.

  The rusted car shell, when Alec shone his torch towards it, seemed briefly as if it were occupied.

  Three figures within.

  But they were just seats. The fourth was missing.

  He’d heard it, just a few days ago, reading about the search for patterns, for symbolism, for numbers. He’d wanted to understand ‘sixteen’.

  Pareidolia.

  Seeing a face in that which had no face. Hearing a message in a howl of wind.

  It was so dark in that place that the edge of his vision was pure black, now.

  ‘Is anyone here?’ Alec asked, more tentatively than he’d meant to once again, but who could make him louder? Who was going to make him someone he could not be? His words carried across the dark waters, and no reply came. The wind did not blow harder from the world. The trees did not shiver or shake. Reality was indifferent to the sound of Alec Nichols’s voice, his footsteps as he finally moved forward, as his light shone onwards, as every noise became like death.

  He came closer and closer to the torch on the ground.

  He did not know it had been just like this when the horses had been buried.

  He had not seen it, would never see it.

  He came closer still to the torch.

  He still heard no one. He saw no one. His own light bobbled and stuttered in its focus, unable to remain steady when the hand that held it had already failed, crumpled in cold and terror.

  The beam briefly caught something.

  There was a camcorder on the ground.

  CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

  Tufts of cloud burned black in the night.