Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

from two fields over . . . for a moment, it looked just like them.

It tilted. It was breathing, pulsing. She pulled her legs up instantly, bracing with her hands on the rock side. She blinked, the thing in shadow. She shone her phone’s torch down, and it stared back, unmoving now.

It was only a snake.

Black ran like pixels along its body, all mingled with leathered grey. A single V crowned its face.

The adder had risen at the fast movement of her feet, letting out a sharp hiss. The camera light still shone down upon it in the dark. She stared at the snake, and the snake stared back.

The sky grew brighter until at long last the girl sneezed again. The adder reared its head back, baring its fangs in response to her sudden noise. She wondered what it would feel like to be bitten.

She got up, dusted her jeans, and looked down to see the snake had vanished.

It felt like a dream. It felt like she was living in a dream.

And a car was pulling up, slowing down on its route from town.

Rebecca didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of her dad’s friends, few as they were. It wasn’t more police. It wasn’t anyone she knew.

The noise frightened her, somehow.

She clambered along from her perch. Later, when the police had gone, her father would have to come out here to kill that thing. There were sheep nearby.

CHAPTER TEN

Cooper accelerated. She always accelerated on big verses, ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’ ringing out from the speakers and from her own lips.

The roads were empty and long. Little broke the world but itself, the edges of the forest, the car.

She was going to be forty minutes late to the crime scene and she’d slept terribly, the bed of her shitty hotel room seemingly made of granite. She had stayed out too late, probably, and had been up too late when she’d got back. But she’d felt better this morning, waking to the sight of waves, of their brief almost-blue in the fresh sunlight. What was it they’d said? Try to be positive?

She swigged black coffee from her flask. She sang about winning, about love, about a war.

It was the only CD in the hire car, forgotten by some previous driver. Her phone signal was poor, and the radio, the radio was just full of static out here. And this, it was the kind of song that made you push your foot down on the accelerator. The kind of sound that woke you up.

She made up five minutes in the end. Just thirty-five minutes late now, not the forty she would have been. Yay.

A police car was parked by the side of the road, thirty feet or so from a farmhouse, and there was an open gate nearby, tyre tracks running into the fields.

Cooper parked further down. She got out and hurried to the boot after taking a final slurp of caffeine. She stuffed her dead phone into her jeans pocket. She opened her boot bag and hopped as she made the change from driving shoes to waterproof overalls and boots. She grabbed her kit last of all. Her lenses, tissue-sampling pots, forceps, flea brush, needles and syringes, biopsy punch, a packet of mints, and scalpels. She almost always carried a scalpel, or a pathology knife, if the mood struck. You never knew when you might need one.

Sixteen horses dead, their heads and tails severed from their bodies, each buried with a single eye facing the sun.

They’d sent her all they’d found.

She slammed the boot shut.

Over near the farmhouse, she saw a police officer scratching at his arm, his sleeve rolled up. There was a red rash along it.

Cooper walked on.

She’d once seen a sergeant put his fingers into a bullet hole in a sheep’s skull, no gloves. They had stopped on an unrelated call about poaching. The accused man had just stood idly by, nodding as the sergeant suggested that the sheep’s wound might have been caused by a bird or something. A bird who could somehow peck through living bone, apparently.

She crossed the bank, the hum of flies and crickets all about her. Everywhere was saturated with the rain of the night before, and she could only thank God there did not seem to have been much flooding. She let out a sigh of relief when she saw the white arc of tents in the distance, waving like the sails of a ship. The bodies had been covered.

Her boots squelched slightly, sinking in the mud, the noise of the insects ever louder. She swatted midges away from her face.

She thought about the photos she had seen.

The eyes in the soil. The rat-king of tails in the dark.

There was something different about a horse, wasn’t there?

Cooper had gone on about it once, sitting in a bar with some colleagues after a long day. How when people crashed a car, they said ‘I crashed’ or ‘I got hit’, not ‘my car crashed, my car got hit’. They extended their concept of selfhood to their vehicle. If they thought about it, they’d see it’s just the same with a horse and a rider.

She blinked, listening to the sounds of the reeds as her boots clipped through them. She briefly thought someone was looking at her, but there was no one.

The crime scene had been staged in a ritualistic manner, the heads placed carefully on their sides so that one eye was exposed to the sky. The tails were left in a pile nearby. It was theatrical and showy. It was intended to cause fear and anger and outrage. This much the photographs had suggested. She’d need to look at the scene to know more.

Dying places produced desperate people. Desperate people were not, as a rule, careful or subtle in their actions.

She did not imagine the case would be difficult.

Nearer the tents, around twenty feet away, a police officer had stooped down, examining something on the ground.

The man was tall and stocky, his face