A Collapse of Horses

by Brian Evenson

  It rang perhaps thirty more times and then stopped. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out, then headed back to the window. By the time he arrived there, the phone had started ringing again.

  It might be Miss Pickaver, he told himself this time, less because he believed it and more because the idea of hearing the phone ring over and over again seemed impossible. Maybe it is for me after all.

  But when he picked the phone up, the connection was odd, thick with static. “Hello?” he said. When he had no response, he added, “Miss Pickaver?”

  A voice that sounded very distant said something in another language, maybe French, maybe not. Or maybe it was just the distorted echo of what Hovell had said. He waited a long moment for the voice to say something else. When nothing was forthcoming, he hung up the telephone.

  Late in the afternoon, he managed to make it downstairs. The concierge was there now, sitting in the lodge just beside the door. It wasn’t the same man as yesterday, or at least he didn’t look the same. Maybe it was a job shared by two different people, or maybe it was just one person who, depending on what he wore and his mood, could look very different.

  Hovell tried to make the man understand what he wanted. Town he repeated, again and again, then the actual name of the town, with both pronunciations he had heard, but the concierge just looked blank. The concierge said something back in French, a question judging by the intonation, but Hovell couldn’t understand a word of it.

  After a while he gave up and went toward the front door. But quickly the concierge was in front of him, between him and the door, gesticulating, pushing him back.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Hovell. “I just want to go outside.”

  But when he reached for the door again, the concierge knocked his hand away.

  Under normal circumstances this would have been enough to turn Hovell around, send him back up the stairs, but with everything else that had gone on, he was not himself. He reached out and grasped the concierge by both shoulders and moved him out of the way, then went out the door. This time, the man did not try to stop him.

  He crossed the courtyard to find the gate he had originally come through locked, so he circled around the edges of the compound until he found a place where the fence met a wall and he was able to climb up and over. Nothing on the other side looked familiar. Immediately he was lost, and when he started out in what he thought might be the direction of the town center, he found himself squirreling around small little streets that gradually became larger and emptier, the houses sparser and sparser. He’d been too tired to pay any attention when Miss Pickaver had led them from the train station. He should have paid attention. He tried to work his way back to the complex, but the streets seemed different going the other way on them, and quickly he was off course. There were streets and houses, but no town center. And then, suddenly, he was at the beach.

  He felt immediately conspicuous, dressed as he was in the same khaki trousers, ratty sweater, and worn, gum-bottomed shoes he wore to putter around the garden at home. He was overdressed. The most anyone on the beach was wearing was a thin strip of fabric over their fork, if fork was the right word, and the majority were not wearing even that. Most were nude, scattered in clusters here and there on the beach, and in the few moments he looked out over them none of them moved, as if the sun had reduced them to a sort of paralysis.

  “Please?” said a voice behind him in a thick, guttural accent. Russian, maybe.

  He turned to see a tall, bronzed man who was completely bald and completely nude, greased from head to toe with some sort of oil. A gold watch glinted on his wrist. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of goggles with dark protective lenses.

  “I seem to have gotten lost,” said Hovell. It was disconcerting, he realized, to talk to a man naked except for a watch and goggles. He felt as if some sort of rule of etiquette was being violated but wasn’t sure whether he or the bronzed man was the one violating it.

  “This you can say,” said the bronzed man, crossing his arms. “This they all say.”

  “But it’s true,” protested Hovell.

  “If you care to have your look, we shall have our look too,” the man said, and he reached out to take hold of Hovell’s sweater.

  Hovell recoiled, stepping rapidly backwards. For a moment the man held on tight and then he suddenly let go. Hovell stumbled and almost went down in the sand. He rushed quickly away, the giddy laughter of the bronzed man ringing loudly behind him.

  It was nearly dark by the time he found the complex again, which revealed itself to him just at the moment when he’d finally given up looking for it. The gate was still locked, and though he rang the buzzer, the concierge never came to open it. He circled the complex until he found the place he had climbed over and climbed back in that way. It was more difficult coming back in than going out, and he tore open the knee of his trousers.

  In the twilight he crossed the courtyard. The same couple, or a couple very much like them, were there once again tonight, walking arm in arm, heads inclined toward one another, and he thought again of the resemblance of the middle-aged man to himself and of the younger woman to Miss Pickaver. He was tempted to approach them, and indeed had started toward them. But as he came closer, he realized that something was happening between them, that what he had taken to be a genial arm-in-arm was the man holding the woman’s arm so tightly she couldn’t release it. He was pulling her forward, and the reason her head was so inclined was because it was hard for her to do otherwise. And yet, the woman did not cry out. Surely if she was in trouble, if she needed him, she would cry out.

  Unsure, he drifted toward them anyway until, with a sudden burst of speed, they darted away. He stayed there for a moment confused, looking after them, before he went inside. The concierge was there, waiting, and immediately began to wag his finger at him, but whether for climbing the fence or for some other reason, Hovell was at a loss to say. Hovell pushed past him and climbed the stairs.

  By the time he reached his own window and was looking out of it, the couple had gone. There were however two men wearing what looked, in the growing darkness, like uniforms. Police perhaps, or people dressed to look like police. What did the police over here dress like anyway? He watched them walk in a unified step across the courtyard and enter his building.

  The next hour he spent waiting for them to knock at his door. They did not knock, but knowing they could at any moment was enough to keep him agitated and upset. In his head he imagined what he would tell them about climbing the fence, about accidentally wandering onto the beach. He found his hands moving, gesticulating his innocence to the empty air. He tried for the first time to close the metal shutters over the window, to keep them from seeing him through the window, but though the mechanism made a humming sound, the shutters did not come down. Eventually, he took a blanket and a pillow and locked himself in the bathroom to wait for morning. There had been no need to leave the apartment—why had he done it? He would not, he promised himself, leave the apartment again until Miss Pickaver returned.

  4.

  He was awoken by a narrow strip of light coming under the bathroom door and shining into his eye. He was sore all over from the hardness of the bathroom floor, from having to prop his feet on the bidet as he slept. No, in the light of day, it seemed foolish to have panicked. He hadn’t done anything wrong. There was no reason the police would have come for him. He had let his imagination run away from him.

  But still, he did not leave the apartment. He moved from room to room, reading, looking idly out the window. He sampled more of the unfamiliar tins Miss Pickaver had bought, and though he wasn’t fully taken with any of it, some of it was at least slightly better than edible. It was good to relax, he told himself. Before long, he would feel like himself again.

  Twilight found him at the window watching for the couple, but tonight they were nowhere to be seen. Or, rather, now there was only the man, walking and pacing the courtyard all on his own, in a seemingly agitated state. Perh
aps Hovell had started watching for them too late, after the woman had already gone in. Or perhaps the woman was elsewhere tonight. Or perhaps—but no, what other reasonable possibilities were there? No point letting his imagination run away with him.

  He would read and then fall asleep, Hovell told himself. No late night for him. Not tonight. But instead he found himself still at the window, the lights of the apartment extinguished behind him to allow him to see better. How much time went by, he wasn’t sure. An hour maybe, or maybe more. And then, suddenly, he noticed again the shape on the balcony, the man there—he was almost sure now it was the man—visible in the moonlight and in contrast to the pale metal of the balcony. Another watcher, much like himself, unable to sleep. But what was there to see at night?

  And then the clouds shifted, and he realized it was there again, on the paving stones of the courtyard: the large black shape, the heap or mound of something. One moment it hadn’t been and then now, suddenly, it was. What was it? He felt the hair rising on the back of his neck as his mind darted from terror to terror, offering each as a way to fill the mystery.

  But no, it was ridiculous to think this way. He was letting his imagination escape him again. There must be an explanation. If he went down, he’d find what it was.

  He did not move from the window.

  The figure on the balcony, he noticed, didn’t move either. It must be staring down at the same black heap, just like me. Unless, he suddenly realized with a start, it’s staring up at me.

  It was as if the figure had taken this thought of his as its cue. He watched as it clambered onto the rail of the balcony, and then, before Hovell could do anything or even cry out, it jumped.

  He clattered his way down the stairs, heart pounding, and rushed past the closed concierge’s box and out into the courtyard. The body was nowhere to be seen, no human figure was sprawled on the pavement below the balcony. But wasn’t the fall enough to kill it? Or him, rather? Maybe he had crawled away.

  He moved farther out into the courtyard and thought for a moment he’d glimpsed it, but no, what he saw was too big to be a human figure—it was instead a large, dark heap.

  He almost turned and went back but he just couldn’t. Now, so close to it, he wanted to know.

  He moved forward, wishing he had a tiny flashlight. When he came quite close, he could feel the warmth rising off it, and he thought for a moment it was a compost heap or some other form of refuse. But then he came closer still and touched it and felt fur and realized it was a horse.

  It was dead, or seemed to be. The body was still warm, but cooling rapidly. It must have been black, or a very dark brown, or he would have been able to see it better from above. But even close to it, even touching it, he had a hard time making it out clearly.

  It wasn’t possible. It was immense in the darkness, the biggest horse he had ever seen. Where had it come from? And what had the heap been on the earlier night? Surely it couldn’t have been the same dead horse on both nights.

  But what about the man who had leapt from the window?

  He pulled back his hand as if stung and stood up. There, near the door now, between him and the door, stood a figure, apparently a man. At first he thought it was the concierge, but when it began to move toward him with a stuttered, broken stride, he was no longer so sure.

  For a moment he hesitated, wanting to understand what was happening, to give it a logical explanation. This turned out to be his undoing.

  5.

  When Miss Pickaver returned, she had seen four countries in four days, but since they were not new countries to her, not countries she had not seen before, they hardly counted. What did count was that she had seen them in the company of the German gentleman she used to know, who had footed the bill. She would not tell Hovell about that—he wouldn’t be likely to understand, not in the way he should. But she would tell him about the four countries and what she had seen over the course of those four days. Or, to be honest—which she would not be—two days, since she and the German had not left his room in town for the first two days. After all, she had told herself at the time, she was a Miss, not a Mrs. What she did with her leisure time was nobody’s business but her own.

  The concierge greeted her with a torrent of French and gestures she could not understand. She just shrugged and nodded until he either thought he’d gotten his point across or decided to give up—with the French, how could you know what they were thinking?

  Upstairs, she found a man in grubby overalls, a maintenance man of some sort, at the door of their apartment, nailing the 6 in 306 back in place, the right way up, so it no longer could be read as a 9. Inside, Hovell was at the same window he’d been at when she’d left, still staring out into that deserted little courtyard.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. “Have a nice time?”

  He grunted in reply, turned just long enough to give her a wan smile and pat her arm. Same old James, she thought. And then, suddenly, he did something that surprised her.

  He turned fully toward her. “Shall we take a walk?” he asked, in a voice so confident it seemed hardly his own. “A turn arm in arm in the twilight?” And then he smiled in a way that seemed to her not like him at all. “Come on,” he said. “It’ll be fun. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  He stood and put his arm around her and began tugging her toward the door.

  The Dust

  I.

  A few days after they arrived, the baffles started to clog. They had expected the baffles to clog—that wasn’t a surprise. Grimur had been trained to unclog them, and now he trained one of the men. Trained Orvar, in fact. They were a skeleton crew, just enough of them to prepare for the arrival of the full contingent three months later if the site proved productive, so there was little for Orvar to do at the moment.

  At first Orvar protested. As head of security, cleaning baffles was not part of his job description. Grimur just stared patiently, with his pale, steady eyes, and waited, impassive, for Orvar’s protestations to run down. When they did, Grimur simply opened the contracts file, called Orvar’s up, and appended a clause assigning him the cleaning of the baffles. Then he turned the screen toward Orvar for his thumbprint.

  “Supposing I refuse?” asked Orvar.

  “You won’t,” said Grimur.

  Orvar looked uncomfortable. “You could clean them,” he said. “You know how to do it already.”

  Grimur shook his head. “I have other things to do,” he said. “You don’t. Not yet.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, Orvar thought. Though there were only seven men, not counting himself and Grimur, there had already been a fight, a drunken one. It had nearly cost a man an eye. Orvar had broken it up, separated the men, but there was no brig yet—that would come later, after the arrival of the next vessel. For now, all they had was the space that would become a brig: three door-less, unreinforced walls, exposed ductwork. There was no way to hold someone in.

  So he had had to improvise. He had chained the uninjured man, Jansen, to the rock drill halfway down the shaft and left him bellowing there to grow sober. The other man, Wilkinson, he’d restrained with nylon cord before closing the cut above his eye with suture tape. When he was done, he propped Wilkinson up against the wall in what would one day be the brig.

  “What gives you the right?” the man complained in an uneven slur.

  “What gives me the right?” repeated Orvar, surprised. “This is my job.”

  But Wilkinson wasn’t listening. He had already passed out.

  Orvar stared at the screen for another moment and then pressed his thumb against the scanner, just as he and Grimur had always known he would. Grimur nodded once, curtly, then stood.

  “Come on, then,” he said.

  They clambered through the partially built complex, past the workers’ bunkroom, around the piles of boxes, and through the stacks of paneling to arrive at the system that brought in the unbreathable air from outside and scrubbed it. There was, Orvar felt, always a bad taste to the air afte
rwards, a taint to it. He had been feeling light-headed. If he ran or otherwise exerted himself, as he had when breaking up the fight, his head throbbed.

  Some of the particulate matter was so fine that it passed through the filters and baffles, Grimur was telling him. That was the problem with the filters, he said: they had not been designed for this environment.

  He showed Orvar how to close the baffles and shut the filtration down, then how to remove the filters and clear them. When he took one out, Orvar could see the sides of the channel were coated in a thin layer of dust. Grimur banged the filter softly against the metal wall, and a haze of dust arose and floated in the air. The cloud stayed there, motionless. Orvar could see it, but when he passed his hand through it, he felt nothing. When he drew his hand back, though, it had taken on a faint sheen.

  “Ideally,” Grimur said, “we’d do this in a contained space. But we haven’t built one yet.”

  Orvar nodded. “Only the necessities,” he said.

  Grimur pointed at the remaining filters. “I’ll leave you to do the others. Clean them and slide them back in, then turn the system on. Put your hand up here,” he said, pointing to the first vent in the ductwork above. “If you feel air pushing out, then all is as it should be.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then take the filters out and clean them again.”

  It was not a hard job. There was, to be truthful, nothing to it, and it gave Orvar something to do. He’d been languishing, he realized. Cleaning the filters helped him pass the time.

  There had been no more fights. When he’d unchained Jansen, the man had been sheepish and embarrassed. He’d asked immediately how Wilkinson was.

  “He lost an eye,” said Orvar initially, but when he saw Wilkinson’s pained expression, he decided to drop it. “Or could have, anyway,” he said. “No more fighting.”

  As for Wilkinson, when Orvar had asked what he’d said to set Jansen off, he’d just shrugged. The man had been so drunk he didn’t even remember the fight. He had been surprised to awaken chained up. Why, Wilkinson wanted to know, had Jansen attacked him?