A Collapse of Horses

by Brian Evenson

  “Because it’s just dust,” said Grimur simply. “I’m going to go back to my room. Try not to let anybody else die.”

  Back with the others, he explained that Gordon was dead and Yaeger nowhere to be found. There was every indication that Yaeger had killed Gordon and the other two as well.

  “So you solved it,” said Jansen. “That was quick. Yaeger’s our killer.”

  “Yaeger wouldn’t do that,” said Lewis.

  “It’s Yaeger,” Orvar said.

  “Then where is he?” said Lewis.

  Orvar shrugged. “Hiding,” he said.

  “Hiding where?” asked Lewis.

  “Why are you brushing your arms?” asked Jansen. “Are you cold?”

  Only with enormous effort was Orvar able to stop. “I don’t know where,” he said. “I’m searching for him.”

  “How do we know that you didn’t kill them?” asked Durham.

  “Why would I do that?” asked Orvar.

  “Why would Yaeger?” asked Lewis.

  “No,” said Jansen slowly. “You heard the shot, Durham. Orvar was here when Gordon was killed.”

  “He could have set something up,” said Durham. “Some sort of trap to make the gun go off automatically. And then as long as he’s the first one to the body, he could hide the trap.”

  “Don’t be paranoid,” said Jansen.

  “There are three dead bodies,” said Durham. “We’d be fools not to be paranoid.”

  “Be careful,” said Orvar. “Stick together. That’s the best thing you can do. That’s what will keep you alive.” He moved toward the doorway.

  “Where are you going?” asked Jansen.

  “To find Yaeger.”

  He looked through the halls and down the shaft and then started poking through boxes, but there was no sign of the missing man. He couldn’t find Yaeger anywhere. How was this possible? He had to be somewhere. Eventually Orvar went back to the bunkroom. Everybody was pretending to be sleeping.

  “Has Yaeger come back?” he asked.

  Nobody responded. Taking that as a no, he went back out again.

  He leaned against the samples table in the research area, thinking. Where could Yaeger be? There was a chance he was hiding undetected in one of the boxes, that Orvar hadn’t checked thoroughly enough. Or that Yaeger had simply been circling through the halls in a way that deliberately avoided Orvar. It would have been difficult, but it was possible.

  Or he could be in Grimur’s room.

  Yaeger could have snuck in when Grimur came out after hearing the gunshot. Perhaps he was still there, hidden.

  But no, thought Orvar, picturing the room in his head, there was nowhere to hide. If he was there, either he was holding Grimur hostage at gunpoint, or Grimur was dead.

  What was the best way to go about it? He stood outside Grimur’s door, hesitating, and then finally knocked lightly. There was no answer. He pressed his ear to the door. No indication of movement inside. Perhaps Yaeger was lying low. Or perhaps he’d left. Orvar knocked again, louder this time. When there was still no answer, he slowly pushed down the door’s handle, opened the door, and slipped inside.

  The room was dark. He let the flashlight play slowly along the walls. Nobody there, nobody standing anyway. He moved a few steps in and pointed the light down and saw, behind the desk, Grimur’s makeshift bed. In it was a human shape, mostly covered in blankets, facing the wall.

  Very slowly he approached, the light mostly covered, just enough to make out vague outlines. He moved closer and finally fell to his knees, crawling the rest of the way until he was very close, close enough to be fairly certain that it wasn’t Yaeger. It must be Grimur.

  Yaeger had already killed him, Orvar thought. He couldn’t tell if the sounds he was hearing were the body’s breathing or his own. He held his breath, but it didn’t help.

  He reached out and softly touched the neck. Warm. Still alive. He pulled his hand back but already the body was moving, a blur in the half dark. Something struck him hard in the face and he fell to one side, the flashlight clattering away. Two heavy blows to his ribs and suddenly he couldn’t breathe and then the body had clambered on top of him and had its hands wrapped around his throat. Everything went darker still, then the world seemed to stutter and stop entirely.

  A light. Slowly, his eyes began to focus. Grimur was crouching over him, watching him closely, a disgusted expression on his face.

  “Coming around?” he asked.

  Orvar just groaned.

  “I could have killed you,” Grimur said. “What were you thinking?” He reached out and helped Orvar sit. Orvar groaned again, his head throbbing. “You can’t do that,” Grimur explained. “I thought you were trying to kill me.”

  “I thought you might be dead.”

  “And that’s how you figure out if I am?” he said. “What were you thinking? Do you know how much oxygen we must have wasted struggling like that?”

  “I was looking for Yaeger,” said Orvar.

  “Yaeger? Why would he be here?”

  “We can’t find him.”

  “You must not be looking in the right places,” said Grimur.

  “We’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Obviously not,” said Grimur. He helped Orvar to his feet. “Go look somewhere where he might actually be,” he said. “Do your fucking job.”

  Do my job, thought Orvar, a little dizzy, confused. Do my job. He made his way back to the bunkroom and lay down. The others were in the beds, dark, motionless shapes. They were probably alive. There was no reason to assume they were not. As long as he didn’t know they were dead, he could think of them as alive.

  He stared into the semidarkness, thinking. Do you know how much oxygen we must have wasted struggling like that? he heard Grimur say again in his head, saw again his look of mingled concern and disgust. He thought of the diminishing oxygen, the air thick with dust, and through those little twisty mental passages scrabbled his way back to the other time he had been trapped without air. What had gone on exactly? How culpable was he? He hadn’t killed the others; he was sure, or almost sure, he hadn’t slit the first man’s throat. And the man who died in the hold, that had been his own fault. But Orvar hadn’t tried to get him out.

  He took a deep breath and let it out. A little more oxygen gone.

  He shook his head. No, he couldn’t think like that. They were still days away from running out of air. It wasn’t going to be like last time: they had enough oxygen to last until the company came to get him.

  But then he found Grimur’s words rising again in his mind. Why had he said that? Now that three people were dead, there was no danger: they had extra air.

  So why would Grimur be worried?

  He kept thinking too of the ventilator, and of the body stuffed in it. Or not thinking of it, exactly. Just seeing it over and over again in his mind. Each time it felt just a little off, as if his mind was revising it.

  What did it all mean, all these various things cycling through his mind? How did it all come together? He didn’t know. He stared into the dark, willing himself to see a pattern. But he didn’t see anything.

  Until, suddenly, he did.

  VII.

  He got up and pulled his boots on. He made no effort to hide what he was doing, but he wasn’t noisy either. He grabbed the flashlight. If the others were going to say something, then let them say it. If they were not, if they were just going to pretend to be asleep, then so be it.

  He went down the hall to the ventilator. Once there, he fell to his knees and stared up into the housing. There was the body, just as it had been before—or almost. Yes, that’s what he’d been trying to understand: it was a body, but it wasn’t the body he’d first seen there. The head was twisted away from him, but it wasn’t hard to stick his hand up into the housing, wrap it in the hair, and tug hard. With a crinkling sound, the head came around to reveal Yaeger’s face.

  He worried the body back and forth until it came loose and spilled out onto
the floor. His gun clattered out with it. Back in the housing, pushed farther up, was the other body, the one missing its eyes. The killer had been smart: he’d hidden Yaeger’s body somewhere that nobody would think to look: disguised as another body. But he’d been careless too. If he’d taken out Lee’s body and put Yaeger’s above it, Orvar would never have realized it. He would have gone for days thinking Yaeger was on the loose, when in fact the killer was someone else.

  He examined Yaeger’s corpse. It hadn’t been shot. One side of Yaeger’s head was soft. There were marks, too, around the neck, the bruises of fingers. He’d been strangled, probably shoved up into the housing long before Gordon was killed. Someone had killed Yaeger, forced Lee’s body up higher, pushed Yaeger in, then gone after Gordon.

  Orvar checked the gun’s chamber. Five shots left. He holstered it. And now, he thought, my turn to go after the killer.

  A few moments later he was knocking on Grimur’s door. What time was it? Early? Late? He didn’t know anymore.

  He heard a voice rumbling inside but not what it said. He tried the door’s handle, but it was locked. He knocked again.

  He heard slow, patient movement within. He tried to imagine Grimur rubbing his eyes, getting up, getting dressed, approaching the door.

  “Who is it?” Grimur’s voice asked from just inside.

  “Orvar,” said Orvar.

  “What do you want?”

  “To come in.”

  For a moment there was only silence. “What is it this time?” Grimur finally asked.

  “Somebody else is dead,” Orvar said.

  At first nothing happened. Then the lock clicked and the door slid open.

  “Who?” asked Grimur. His eyes, Orvar saw, were curious, but when Orvar said “Yaeger,” something changed.

  “Ah,” Grimur said. “I see.” He waved Orvar into the room. “You haven’t done your job very well, have you?” he said.

  “On the contrary,” said Orvar. “I figured out who killed them.”

  Grimur stopped. He turned around. His surprise, when he saw that Orvar was pointing the gun at him, seemed genuine.

  “You’re the killer?” said Grimur.

  “Me?” said Orvar. “No, of course not. It’s you.”

  Grimur slowly shook his head. “You’re mad,” he said. “You’re getting confused.”

  “Don’t try to confuse me,” said Orvar. “It has to be you.”

  “Does it?” said Grimur. “Why?”

  “No,” said Orvar, waving the gun. “Let me explain it to you. We were all in the bunkroom when Gordon was killed. Except for you.”

  “What about Yaeger? Was Yaeger in the bunkroom?”

  “No,” Orvar admitted. “He wasn’t. But he was already dead.”

  Grimur swallowed. “Are you sure he was dead by the time Gordon was killed?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know there aren’t two killers? Maybe Yaeger killed Gordon and then someone else killed Yaeger.”

  “Who would the other killer be?”

  Grimur shrugged. “Who knows? It could be anybody. Did you watch everybody? Did you have your eyes on them all the time?”

  “You’re trying to confuse me,” said Orvar. He licked his lips. His mouth felt too dry.

  “No,” claimed Grimur. “I’m trying to make you think straight.”

  “Why would any of them want to kill Yaeger?”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “No,” said Orvar. “You said it. I heard you.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Do you know how much oxygen we must have wasted?”

  “So?” said Grimur.

  “Why would you care?”

  “Why would I care?”

  “With the others dead, we have more than enough oxygen to survive. It doesn’t matter how much oxygen we wasted.”

  Grimur once again looked genuinely shocked. “That’s your evidence?”

  “You lied,” Orvar insisted. “You told us there was more oxygen than there was, but you knew some of us would have to die if the rest were to survive. You knew you could kill them and that I, because of what had happened at my last posting, would be blamed.”

  “What happened at your last posting?”

  “You know,” said Orvar. “Oxygen shortage. Everybody died but me.”

  Grimur shook his head. “This is all news to me.”

  Orvar tried to think back. How much had he told Grimur? He couldn’t remember exactly.

  “How long has it been since you slept?” asked Grimur.

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Orvar.

  “It does matter,” said Grimur firmly. “You’re panicked. You’ve become paranoid. There’s something wrong with the air. The dust in it. You’re letting it get to you.”

  Was he? He shook his head. It ached.

  “Orvar,” said Grimur gently. “Don’t you see? I’ve spent days figuring out how much oxygen we have and how long it will last us. Doesn’t it make sense—even if I know we have enough to survive—that the first thing I would think of is oxygen?”

  Orvar looked at him. The gun shook in his hand. He had been so sure when he had found Yaeger. Wasn’t he sure now?

  “This has all been a misunderstanding,” said Grimur. “I understand why you thought it was me, but surely you see now that you were wrong?”

  Orvar didn’t answer. Yes, what if you’re wrong? a part of him was thinking. Alone, in his head, it had all made sense, but now, with Grimur calmly talking, he wasn’t sure anymore.

  But if it wasn’t Grimur, who was it?

  No, it had to be Grimur. It had to be.

  “Orvar,” Grimur said, his voice serene. “Put down the gun.”

  “No,” said Orvar.

  Grimur spread his arms slowly. “You’re going to kill me over a slip of the tongue?”

  “It wasn’t a slip.”

  “Are you crazy? Is that proof? Is it really enough?”

  “It’s all I have,” said Orvar desperately. And when he saw that Grimur, confident now, was going to continue talking, was going to talk Orvar out of killing him, he pulled the trigger.

  VIII.

  He holstered the gun. The shot was still ringing in his ears, and the room reeked of cordite. Maybe I should have waited, thought Orvar. Maybe I should have just immobilized him somehow, tied him up. But if he’d done that, Grimur would have convinced the others that Orvar was mad, and before he knew it, Grimur would be free and Orvar himself tied up.

  There was blood all over his shoes, glistening and then slowly growing dull as the dust began to adhere to it. Blood had spattered onto the wall, and there was a swath of it across the floor. There was no point trying to clean up. It was too much to hide.

  And it doesn’t matter, he told himself. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just killed a killer.

  There was blood on his sleeve. He would have to change his shirt before the others saw. If he didn’t, they would think he was the killer. But I’m not the killer, he told himself. Grimur was. He was almost certain that was the case. All but certain. Less so, admittedly, than before Grimur had started talking, but still. He looked once around the room and then went out, closing the door behind him. At least now, he told himself, it’s over.

  But is it really over? his mind was already asking only halfway down the hall. What if he’d gotten it wrong, taking what was plausible for what was actual? What if he’d killed an innocent man? Was there any way to be sure the killer wasn’t still on the loose?

  No, he told himself just outside the bunkroom, there’s no way to be sure. What, really, did he know? One, the ventilators were broken. Two, they were running out of air. Three, someone, eventually, would rescue them. Four, he wasn’t the killer.

  Anything else, everything else, was speculation. He needed to stay aware and alert. He needed to remember that perhaps it wasn’t over. If it wasn’t, any of the remaining three might be the killer. He had to watch them carefully, keeping his gun within reach.r />
  In the bunkroom, the lights were on, dimly, each of them taking on a strange halo from the dust. All three still-living men were there. Durham sat on the edge of his bed. Lewis was at the desk and seemed to be writing. Jansen just stood there, arms loose, pretending to do nothing.

  Suspicious, Orvar thought.

  “Where’ve you been?” asked Durham.

  “Nowhere,” said Orvar. He moved slowly toward his bunk. How could it already be time to wake up? Where had the night gone?

  “What’s on your sleeve?” asked Jansen.

  Blood, thought Orvar. But said, “Nothing.”

  He unbuttoned the shirt, slowly stripped it off, draped it on the post of the bed. It had to be Grimur, he thought. It had to be. But each time he thought it, he felt less sure.

  He kept his movements succinct, steady, trying to give the others no sense of what he was thinking. He took off his gun belt, laid it flat on the bed. He shucked his boots. Don’t be paranoid, he told himself. You’re not thinking right. It’s the lack of oxygen. The dust. He pushed the gun belt over and sat down. A little sleep and you’ll see things more clearly.

  But he was not given a chance to sleep.

  “You found your gun,” said Lewis.

  He could tell by the way Lewis said it that that wasn’t all he meant. In a brief flash he saw it all: he had no choice. In a few hours there would be three more corpses, followed by days of him wandering the complex alone, slowly going mad, head filling with dust, oxygen slowly draining away. In the end, with a little luck, Grimur’s calculations would be correct, and the ship would arrive well before he ran out of air. And then he would explain. It was Grimur, not me. It was the dust, not me. I’m no killer, I swear. I’m just a man lucky to still be alive.

  He blinked. The other three were watching him, frozen, waiting. Jansen was poised on the balls of his feet, tense. He would probably give Orvar the most trouble and so should be taken care of first. Durham was standing now. He could be easy or hard, too early to say. Lewis, clueless, was still in the chair. He would be the easiest.

  It wasn’t me, he told himself again. He reached casually over, pulled the gun belt into his lap. “Yes, Lewis,” he said. “I found my gun.” It was the dust, he practiced, and tried to make himself believe it. And then he smiled and drew his weapon.