Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

near the Wooden Bridge. One of the arcades on a day shift. They’d let Cooper come with them, thankful for the new spirit of shared information.

It was difficult finding anyone to talk to at the arcade, the halls dim and dark, but a manager had finally emerged and answered their questions.

‘We have a lot of staff turnover,’ he said. ‘Hard to keep track.’

No one seemed to know the woman.

Like Simon, like the farmers, like Alec . . .

They had been apart.

They had been alone.

(Woman, 53)

No question it was that farmer. No one knows who he is. He’s been here, what, seventeen years? Eighteen? And no one knows him. No one can say what he did before any of this, why he even came out here. His wife leaves him. He hurts his daughter – God knows what he did to her, what he planted in those fields . . . And then he goes and kills himself, just walks out of hospital like that? I know what sickness is. It’s guilt. I know guilt. It’s guilt.

(Man, 28)

A lot of people are making assumptions.

(Woman, 53)

I heard Albert hit her, the police got called out . . . took a few hours, of course. The wife denied everything. The daughter, she kept her mouth shut. It’s just a tragedy.

(Man, 49)

I hope the girl is OK. I don’t know about her dad, that’s not for me to say, but . . . I hope she gets through this. We all do.

(Man, 32)

Men like him . . . personalities like Albert’s . . . they’re what grow, what always grow, in places like this. A certain kind of person, alone with their thoughts. Something ends up giving. Something sort of . . . fake, happens, for you to keep going. And everyone around you knows it, they know something’s wrong, even if they can’t name it.

(Woman, 35)

You can’t rescue yourself.

The daughter had woken, just a few days before.

When asked by the doctors about her mother, Rebecca had just repeated what she’d already told them: she’d left a year ago.

Did you ever see her with a boy?

They showed her a few photos of Simon Nichols.

And Rebecca just stared at them, and told them no, she’d never seen her mother with a boy, with anyone.

Grace Cole did not go out much, not in the end.

She wasn’t well before the end.

Her medicine had been – it had been making Grace unwell. She hadn’t been herself.

Rebecca had looked down at the photographs again before they’d left.

‘Who is he?’

He’s lost, they told her.

They told her to get well soon.

(Woman, 36)

She’d tell me about them, those final months before she left school. She wasn’t always so distant with everyone. All the teachers, all of us loved her.

She’d play games on her computer all the time. Tried to do her class project on one of them. Worlds where you didn’t watch a story, but you made your own decisions.

I think the escape appealed to her. I think that’s what it was . . . well, probably what all stories are. They’re escapes into the lives of others. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We’d die if we couldn’t escape.

That girl had dreams. And maybe . . . I don’t know if she kept playing, but maybe it wasn’t enough any more.

Maybe whatever was happening to her, maybe she couldn’t escape it. Maybe no story was enough. You consume media where there are heroes . . . where beautiful people win the day and, you know, do the things beautiful people do . . . You start viewing life like stories. More than a year of that, alone, her mother gone, that awful man her only friend . . . What if it stops working?

What if the things keeping you alive, what if you’re numbed to them? What if they break? Who’s going to save you then?

Her dad tried to kill us.

He brought his filth and his lies to this community.

And now he’s dead, isn’t he? Now he’s dead, and we’re not.

And I’m happy with that.

I’m happy.

All throughout this day and the days that followed, Alec kept messaging Cooper. He kept asking if he could help. He kept giving her suggestions – kept telling her the best way to do things. Kept asking her to come round and see him. To let him help. To talk to the doctors, to tell them he was needed, to tell them—

To tell them what?

Cooper stopped answering, after a few times.

He could barely walk.

And this . . . all of this . . .

Who knew what his release might precipitate?

The fingerprints . . . the letter . . . the son . . .

The dancing plague went on.

Day Thirty

CHAPTER SIXTY

Alec remained up late one night, thinking it all through.

Though his bones ached still.

He thought of the circles.

He thought of the heads.

The crates.

What lay within.

W A T C H.

The number.

Why had his son been speaking to this stranger?

What had he got himself involved in?

Why hadn’t Alec known?

These questions had swarmed around the pity of half a dozen faces, their sad gestures, their awkward smiles.

Cooper herself had barely asked, which had felt worse, somehow.

He had offered to help.

He had done everything he could.

And they’d kept him here, hadn’t they?

He closed his eyes in the dark.

His son was out there.

His son was out there, and he—

It kept going around his mind.

The piece of paper on the table.

The night of the break-in at his home. The muddy footprints on the stairs.

The farmer, walking through the fields.

You won’t fall, he’d said. Not afraid of a little dirt, are you, Sergeant Nichols?

And the man was dead, now, wasn’t he? Collapsed in the fields they’d walked in so long ago, no blackmail initiated since, no further development in the case after the two suicides.

No trail, nothing that anyone would tell him but that which they’d had to: the number of a woman.

In her photo, in her profiles online, Grace Cole had red hair. Standing on a beach with her back to the camera, a classic tourist shot.

Other officers had messaged her again and again, trying to phone, trying to force her social networks to give them information about her account access.

He’d thought about what Cooper