Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  The world was silent as Cooper pulled up alongside Alec’s abandoned car. She’d had to beg for the use of another vehicle, desperate enough to give the front desk manager a hundred pounds to borrow it, plus her passport as a safety deposit.

  Insects pulsed along the reeds.

  She opened the door.

  The silence was more than silence. It seethed. It was manifest.

  Ilmarsh watched her, its last and final emissary.

  The people of this place would leave in the coming weeks, the coming years, as the tides grew higher, as the world grew warmer.

  She’d wanted to help people, unable or unwilling to help herself.

  She got out of the car, calling Alec’s name.

  She’d phoned the police already, told them where Alec was, had shared the final messages from her computer. She’d phoned her client. She’d phoned everyone.

  And everyone? They’d asked her to wait.

  She went into the woods, regardless.

  There would be no more abductions.

  No more mutilations.

  The town’s pain was over.

  There was no one left to feel it.

  It was over.

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  Alec thought of his son, long ago, sitting in the kitchen corner, playing with paper clips, stringing them together, tying them round wooden chairs, hanging his toys and action figures from various hoops. He thought of tussling his hair. He thought of holding his wife as she cooked spaghetti, how they made fun of each other.

  ‘You’re just copying me,’ she’d protested.

  ‘You’re just copying me.’

  ‘I think Alec Nichols is very sorry for whatever bad thing he did.’

  ‘I think Alec Nichols is bla bla bla blah.’

  Simon had laughed at this. Alec had smiled too, in spite of himself.

  ‘Hey,’ he’d said, touching his wife’s arm, gentler than before. She’d turned, clearly tired. ‘I think Alec Nichols doesn’t know how lucky he is.’

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

  There was a small, almost imperceptible red light upon the camcorder. It had been propped up on a small pile of clothes. Beside it, something else. Alec moved round the lens, trying to stay out of its focus.

  There was a small mobile phone, cheap, battered, leaning against a pair of jeans. The clothes were women’s clothes.

  He felt, for the last time in his life, like there was someone there.

  His hands shaking, his face numb, he took his own phone out. Its battery was at seven per cent. How was it at seven per cent? He’d had it charged.

  He wouldn’t make it back to his car before it ran out. He stared at his contacts, at all the people he knew, at all those he liked and thought he loved.

  He saw Elizabeth’s number, a few places below Cooper. He’d never deleted it.

  And Grace, just a few places beneath them in turn.

  The mother of all this.

  The number his son had phoned a hundred times, two hundred—

  She—

  She was out here.

  She had his boy.

  And Alec, as terrible, as disgusting as he knew he had been – he could be better, he knew.

  Everyone could be better, and that was it, wasn’t it?

  You could do anything, if you pretended to heal the world. If you told yourself you had a plan. If you told yourself all that was wrong could be right.

  If you had hope.

  He stared, tapped her name, and waited for his phone to ring her number.

  A moment later, the phone on the pile of clothes began to ring and vibrate, a stock ringtone, nothing personalized at all. Nothing like he imagined.

  It rang and rang.

  He turned and moved closer to the lake, trying to shine the light further across.

  He thought he saw a shape, briefly, but it was just leaves.

  He leant down and looked at the camcorder.

  Another noise, at his right, the crunching of a twig underfoot.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, staggering round, his grip on his light loosening. It flickered.

  A light came on in the darkness, further ahead.

  His heart pounded all the faster, his sight blinded by the sudden ray. It shifted, whoever held it now moving towards Alec from within the trees.

  ‘Grace?’ he croaked, gripping his knife in his shaking hand, his own torch falling to the ground.

  The light shut off.

  He picked up the flashlight next to the camcorder. He shone it in the direction of the departing visitor.

  Tree branches coiled back, a thin shape moving away into the darkness.

  Alec called out, his ‘Stop!’ tearing his vocal cords, his face shivering with the cold.

  He ran into the night. Somewhere along the path he would lose his phone, fallen from his pocket as he in turn tripped over a branch. Still the shape disappeared.

  ‘Please—’

  He gripped the knife, trying to make sure he did not hurt himself.

  His breathing grew faster and faster.

  He began to cough as he came to the clearing, his vision blacking out.

  There was something there. Something—

  He moved towards it, far away.

  There was a crate. A wooden crate. He shone his light all around.

  There was no one there. There was—

  He felt it, its edges, its splintered sides. There was no lid on it. Nothing within. It was empty.

  Breathing grew heavy behind him, in the cold night.

  The smile of the forest contracted.

  He turned and saw, fallen by the treeline, hunched, moaning, a pale figure in the light.

  Alec approached, shaking.

  He looked at the face, pupils contracting.

  He saw Simon, and Simon saw him.

  The father went to his boy.

  ‘I’m so – I’m so sorry,’ he choked, hugging his almost limp, shaking body. ‘I’m sorry—’

  Simon did not say a word. His eyes seemed lifeless, despite the flowing tears.

  His face was dirty, cut.

  Alec grabbed at the boy’s hand. His ring finger came to a stump, bandaged round. His little finger was missing, too.

  ‘What did they do to you?’ Alec whispered.

  The boy shook. The sounds he made were guttural, almost unintelligible. ‘I – ah – a—’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Here . . .’ Simon croaked, his face anguished, his arms suddenly hugging at his dad all the tighter.

  ‘We have to – to go.’ Alec looked around, shining his torch into the trees. ‘How many of them are there? Are they armed?’

  His boy did not answer.

  He turned and shook him gently. ‘Si, I need you to – I need you to pull it together. I know it’s hard, but we have to – we have to get you to safety, OK?’

  Simon nodded, blinking, unseeing.

  ‘How many of them are there?’

  ‘F-f—’

  ‘What?’ Alec’s head darted around.

  ‘They’re – they made me—’ His son gasped as if for air. ‘They made me—’

  ‘Are they here, Simon?’

  He shook his head. ‘T-two are gone.’

  There was anger in me once. I dreamt at times of being better. We killed to help and in helping I tasted something in me.

  Kate.

  Charles.

  Alec nodded. He walked on, just a few steps, and realized Simon wasn’t following. He turned to see the boy staggering back to his tree.

  Alec grabbed the boy’s good hand and began to drag him along. Still the boy wept.

  ‘It’s OK, OK?’ Alec tried to calm him. He hushed him, stuttering, trying to pull him close, his son’s skin cold against his own. ‘It’s OK.’

  He did not know where to go. He did not know which way he had come, did not—

  I have burned fires. I am awake and no one saw me and no one will.

  ‘Did they say anything to you
?’ he asked. ‘Before they left you. Did they say anything?’

  ‘Grace, she – she—’

  Simon did not finish his sentence.

  They kept going through the trees. Alec grinned when he caught sight of the crunched branches, the signs of his trail.

  ‘This way,’ he said.

  I have held the dancing plague. I blossom, now.

  They went back to the lakeside.

  The hissing struck Alec once more, mounting as they came closer. A cold that smelt of apples, somehow, somewhere. The strange dust that hit his skin. The water, the smile of the lake.

  His son let go of his hand as Alec walked towards the camcorder. He needed to take it with him. This was not over, not until he found them all. But he had his son back. He had mended the fallen mirror. He had fixed it, he had fixed everything.

  The dark trees seethed.

  The smile is yours.

  Alec turned.

  Simon was not there.

  He stepped towards the rusted car shell.

  Something was inside.

  He heard a snap of a twig behind him, low in the earth.

  He twisted.

  He—

  You could have saved him.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

  Cooper arrived at the lake.

  She did not cry out any name.

  She did not shine her torch blindly into the dark.

  She’d switched it off, a minute before, relying only on the low light of her phone.

  She watched.

  She waited, the trees shaking, another light left low on the ground, a red dot before it.

  No one appeared to be there.

  She stepped forward, shivering as she came closer.

  Near a pile of clothes, there stood a wooden crate, splinters rough around the edges, its shadow long past the light of her phone.

  It was like something from another reality, a made thing amongst the dying of the wildland, amongst the wreck of all those things that had come before. The rough, almost yellow wood of the crate seemed black, somehow, against this light.

  It felt like it had been waiting for her, all these years.

  She looked around and saw nothing else, heard nothing else.

  She rang Alec’s phone.

  She’d sent a dozen messages, but nothing, no response, no ‘seen’ ticks.

  And still he didn’t answer.

  The crate stood before Cooper, her phone’s light held upon it all the while. The water of the lake still rippled gently against the banks.

  Her heart tight in her chest, she hesitated.

  She looked through her phone and found Grace’s number.

  She dialled it, as if in a dream, no longer looking, no longer seeing.

  She rang the number, and something shook along the rocks, right by the water’s edge.

  It buzzed to life in the dark.

  The lakeside sang with the ringtone, strange and beautiful.

  She moved towards it.

  As Cooper bent down to pick it up, she felt a sudden force hit her skull. She wanted to be sick. Blood came dripping along her hair.

  She crumpled into the water.

  Everything fades.

  There are flashes.

  There is a hand in the water, a shaking body.

  The fire of a distant red above the rippling, the coast so far away.

  Her throat would fill with water, and her body, it was so cold, it—

  A man watches her from the shore.

  She tries to climb up, and hands push her back down beneath the surface.

  Reality falls.

  She pulls her pathology knife from her pocket and digs it into the man’s hand.

  His other plunges into the water, his face, his hair shifting side to side. He tries to free himself.

  She pulls him down further, her other hand grabbing on to his skull, her fingers crushing against his eye socket. He screams, he falls with her, into the dark.

  She gasps air, briefly, before falling once more.

  She has lost her weapon.

  The world pulses black.

  She sees the face, looking up at her from the deep.

  It is full of hate, of malice, of death.

  She gets to the shore.

  As she pulls herself up onto the lake’s bank, as she coughs, as she staggers towards the crate, towards the light, the figure follows her.

  He grabs at her, lunges at her.

  She turns and pushes him.

  He staggers, falling, hitting his head back against the rocks.

  Cooper, shivering, her fast, palsied breaths now close to a scream, comes closer.

  The man is wearing Alec’s clothes.

  She comes closer still.

  Blood is pooling, though she can barely see it in the dark. His eyes are twitching.

  He could barely move, let alone stand. She bent down at his side and sat with him. His face was blank, as if he was tired, but there was water in his eyes.

  There was silence, but for croaking.

  ‘Ph—’ he coughed. ‘Ph—’

  Cooper opened the wooden crate. The lid was loose, not yet nailed down like the others so long ago.

  There was silence, but for croaking.

  She looked at what was inside.

  She stood there for a minute, numb, and then went back to the lakeside.

  ‘Ph—’

  ‘Sssh,’ Cooper said, propping the man against a tree. She took her torch and shone it around the head.

  There was blood at the back, a fracture in the skull.

  ‘Ph—’

  She held it, gently, her fingers tracing the line of the cut.

  She imagined it, plunging her thumb within.

  She did not.

  The body shook.

  ‘Sssh,’ she said.

  When it grew still, she got up, and left Simon where he lay.

  He was dead.

  It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust.

  The sun was starting to rise.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO

  Two divers had entered the lake. The clothes and camcorder had already been bagged up, and Cooper already knew what they’d find. She’d watched the tape herself.

  But still. She had to see.

  As the sun rose, the drone and hiss of the insects renewed itself. Birds chittered and sang. Along the edge of the lake’s smile, a kaleidoscopic biomass faltered. What seemed briefly red and green and blue, what seemed teeming with health, revealed itself at last.

  What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.

  The minutes passed.

  From the water, they emerged with a pale, soaked figure, dark hair spilling around her shoulders, her whole body bare but for the muddy water.

  They lay Rebecca Cole on the ground and covered her. She had died three hours before Cooper’s arrival. Evidence of strangulation.

  The second body took longer to remove.

  The face was unrecognizable, but Cooper already knew, had known for hours now.

  They removed the body of Grace Cole.

  Dead for a year, they’d tell Cooper, soon.

  She’d never gone to Portugal.

  Never gone abroad, not her whole life, but for Ireland, once, on a plane.

  Grace had never left her family, had never fled her daughter, her husband, her home.

  Grace had never left at all.

  The bodies were removed.

  The wooden crate was taken, too. A body had been left within, naked, stripped of its clothes.

  Hours later, others would find the head, buried in a copse seven minutes away, a single eye exposed to the light of the sun.

  The videotape had shown Cooper’s room, a stranger watching her as she slept, weeks past.

  It had shown the night of the horse burial, Kate’s hands shifting along the soil, the filmmaker wearing protective gloves while she wore none.

  The tape cut to the sea at night, further and higher along the coast than Cooper had
ever been. Rebecca looked over the edge of the clifftop and turned, shaking. ‘Please,’ she said, weak, quiet. ‘Please.’

  ‘We killed her,’ a voice came. ‘We—’

  ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘I love you,’ the young voice whispered, tender, hissing in the poor microphone of the camcorder. ‘All I’ve done, I’ve done for you. You—’

  The tape cuts to the girl, riding through the Eltons’ stable yards.

  It cuts to her, riding along in a carriage by a beach.

  It cuts to her, discovering the horses at morning, shaking, crying. A phone rings, close to the camera.

  It cuts to her, walking towards a lake.

  It shows Alec, last of all.

  Three final shots.

  In one of them, Simon is arguing with his father. His dad is asking him when he’ll take a driving test again. That he needs a licence.

  Simon tells him he’ll book it soon. He’s almost ready.

  Alec asks him to do it now.

  Alec gets in his way, blocks his path up the stairs.

  Simon shoves him to try and get past, causing Alec to bash his elbow on the bannister rail. Alec winces, turns, and stops him, the two pushing against each other.

  The boy gives way. The father slams him into the wall, his son’s head hitting the mirror behind him, cracking it in turn, but not shattering it.

  Simon is frozen against that glass, and Alec, stiff, steps back, releasing him.

  ‘I’m . . .’ Alec starts. ‘Just . . . just book the test. Just—’

  The second shot is of Alec walking past a camera by a lake.

  The third is of him talking.

  ‘They were only animals,’ Alec whispers, his eyes wet.

  ‘How will you help me?’ the voice asks.

  ‘Do you understand what you’ve done? You’ll spend your life in prison – you can’t throw it away,’ Alec says. ‘I won’t leave you,’ he says.

  ‘You left Mum. You left me.’

  There is silence.

  Alec tries to smile, and he does not know why. He still carries a blade within his right hand, limp, forgotten.

  ‘The others did this to you. They made you do it,’ he says.

  The voice makes a noise, as though it is trying to speak, but has no idea what to say.

  Alec shushes it.