Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

All they had left him – their only boy who had survived birth – all that was gone, now.

Frank had put his vet practice up for sale. Perhaps a corporate would come in and rescue them. Perhaps no one would. He’d changed the name before he’d done so, hoping against hope that the bad press might be harder to find.

All these people they’d let down.

He’d come out here a few times with Kate in her early days, seeing how quiet she was, seeing how little she’d integrated with the others – others who had never come back to work, others who had betrayed him, when only the dead had remained loyal.

They’d come out here and they’d bought chips by the sea.

Day Thirty-Five

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Rebecca watched television, mostly, during her time in the hospital. She’d wanted her phone, but no one could find it and – unused to making demands of adults – she had not asked again. Who would she have messaged, anyway?

Who was left?

Investigators had come and gone. At first they’d asked about her father, who was dead, which was strange and which she tried not to think about. She knew she’d have weeks, months, years enough to remember him, whether she wanted to or not. They said awful things about him, implied them, anyway, and while she had not liked her father, he had loved her.

He had protected her. Had kept her safe against a world that might have taken her away.

And she had taken that time – that last gift – and what had she done with it?

She knew her dad hadn’t understood the games she’d played. Why she’d spend all her time in other worlds than this one.

She didn’t do it for fun.

Pretending, it was all she’d had.

She’d found the horses at 5 a.m. not because she woke that early, but because she rarely went to sleep before six. She’d been awake when the phone call had come, telling her to go outside.

When the voice of the man who had once filmed her on her birthday, who had walked with her in woods and distant places, came back at last.

The voice was sorry for all the messages.

Everything they had done would be for nothing, if she didn’t come outside.

So Rebecca had gone.

She hadn’t known how to argue.

She’d taken the dog with her that night, not for a walk.

She’d taken it because she’d been afraid.

She’d gone out towards the eyes in the earth.

She’d gone out, and she knew it, now, all these weeks later – the doctors telling her about the new life that awaited her in the morning, about the foster parents, about a place at school once more – she knew, now, deep in her bones.

Her father had found it in himself to love her, this past year.

And she’d killed him, hadn’t she?

All of these people . . .

It was all her fault.

Day Thirty-Nine

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Rebecca followed the rest of the road, having been dropped off by her foster father and mother. She insisted on walking the rest of the way, even if she still felt weak – how else would she get better? Grey and potted, warped with every heatwave and every round of frost, the road snaked past abandoned factories, uninhabited and unused for at least fifty years. To the edge of the woodland, green like Christmas trees, like ponds.

After weeks of illness, a year after her father had begun to home-educate her, Rebecca was going back to school. They’d thought it might be good for her, take her mind off things: she’d only known these foster people for a few days but already they’d created a rota for her, had pulled strings to get her three days at school before it closed for Christmas.

Once she’d dreamt of having a different family.

These people were pleasant but quiet, absorbed mostly by their end-of-year accounts, and Rebecca quickly felt – even in the span of a few days – like one more column in a spreadsheet. They hadn’t noticed how she’d—

She—

She walked on.

The trees were separated from the school’s own fields by a chain-link fence along their far edge. In places the roots had pushed the land up, had made the metal warp and flex towards the sky. In other places children had used to climb over the fence or force their way through holes, out to play in the trees, to smoke, to go far away. There were rumours people had sex in those woods.

Along the playground edge there were other trees, deciduous, leafless oaks that crested the whole boundary. They rustled in the low wind. There was no one else in sight. She’d got there early.

It was the first time she’d been to this place in over a year. She didn’t even know if she’d do her GCSEs or not. They hadn’t said anything either way.

How did you find the horses? Why were you out so early?

Why did you touch one?

Did you see or hear something strange?

Do you know why someone would want to do this?

A crow screamed from the chain-link.

She walked into the playground. There were grids for cars, but cars were never allowed to park here, not normally, but for parent evenings. Sometimes car boot sales, too, every other weekend in the summer. Townspeople and parents would sell old DVDs and board games and other flotsam from their homes. Her mother and father had once sold their things here, back when they’d still thought they could tame Well Farm, that they could let go and clear space.

She went inside, the doors unlocked, the long metal bars cold to her touch. The hallways already had their lights on, sterile fluorescence reflecting on the cheap shiny floors. Images splayed themselves across the white walls. There were old headmasters, all men. Photos of football teams, of rugby. Some posters by the Year 9s. A few old trophies in a cabinet. The hatch for reception was closed. It all felt smaller than she’d remembered it.