Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

and had gone back home now. Something about the other British people put her off. Her grades had been middling; she had been involved in far too many extracurriculars at first, too many societies and clubs, her skill in practical application, not theory. It was perhaps strange she’d ended up in the line of work she had, but then she’d always thrived in the unexpected. You find yourself disappointing people enough, you find new people.

So she ran, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, her grey trainers sinking into the soft mud of the track.

She felt joy in stretching her legs, in seeing these things, to be out here alone at last, away from all their failures, to be out here in this beautiful air.

Somewhere in the trees she heard the cry of a crow.

She kept running.

Everything around her spiralled into a great silence, the sea shifting, the noise of the waves and the arcade echoing away into empty buildings, into empty streets.

Ilmarsh died, as it died every day.

She kept running.

When she came back to her hotel room, a package was waiting for her outside the door, an envelope with no name upon it.

She went down to reception, but she couldn’t find the manager.

She went back upstairs and picked it up. She went inside her room.

The curtains were drawn wide as the red sun set. Fresh towels and a bar of soap lay upon the neatly folded bedsheets.

She went to the desk and felt around the envelope. There was a small object inside, a few inches wide, rectangular.

She opened the envelope, knowing she should wait.

But she had to know.

She had to.

She opened it, and found a small, black, old-fashioned camcorder videotape.

‘I think I’d die if anything happened to you.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t have anyone else.’

. . .

‘What?’

‘What am I supposed to say to a thing like that?’

‘Nothing. I just . . .’

‘Come here.’

‘OK.’

‘I’m older than you.’

‘I know.’

‘Rebecca, I—’

‘I won’t tell anyone.’

‘You don’t know anyone.’

‘Exactly. So it will be easy.’

‘Who did this to you?’

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Years past

A camcorder begins filming.

The town is in spring, at first. Petals fall from trees around a flaking pavilion in the park.

There are occasional gaps of static, of blue light in the flow.

There are happier moments recorded around town, glimpses of strangers, some homeless women in sleeping bags on the beach, playing cards and laughing, telling jokes. The camera records them from nearby each time. No one speaks to the camera, or seems to know they’re being filmed.

Night comes.

It is not clear where the camera films now. Not at first. It is so dark.

Wind braces against the microphone.

There is a stone building, rising from the ground. There are fields, far away and all around, trees in the distance.

It is Well Farm.

All around, reeds shake and shiver.

Voices talk about the sickness of the world.

They talk about a need to do something, anything.

They talk about an island.

They talk about being watched.

Bonfire Night

It is night. The filming goes on, all those months later. The colours of the hotels become visible in streaks as the occasional firework thunders in the sky. When they were converted into residential blocks, each building was given the corporate branding of a thin cladded facade on one edge, a great vertical of colour to rejuvenate the homes, to give a new lease of life to the town by the sea.

The camera moves around, showing how they curve, how they loom around the field in their midst. It almost looks as if it is flying off the ground at one point, but it is just being held out of a window.

Something moves in the field below.

It is larger than any person.

It is frightened.

December

The last shots are of Alec and Cooper, sometimes together, sometimes apart.

The torsos are washed up upon the sands.

A dog in the woods, wooden crates all around.

The beach in the evening. Alec and Cooper sit side by side from far away, their backs to the film, talking about something the filmmaker would never hear, never know.

There is one final scene.

It is indoors. It is dark. The only light is thin, seeping from the fairy lights of the promenade, from the reflections of the arcades, the seams around the curtain edges.

Cooper leans forward towards the screen, her lips parting, her eyes wide and dry.

In the film, there is a woman, dreaming in a bed, turning beneath the duvet covers.

The lens watches her.

It watches Cooper’s sleeping face in the dark, captured by that camera, witnessed from the corner of her hotel room some anonymous night, just a few feet from her body.

I had been with her and she hadn’t known.

Day Forty

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

The tape finished.

They sat in Alec’s home. It was a little after dawn.

She hadn’t been able to sleep in her own place.

‘We can’t stay here.’

Shadows moved as light danced along the trees outside.

‘I can’t stay in that hotel. You can’t stay in that house, you – we’re – we’re what this person wants. We’re what he’s watching, now.’

There was a birth of smiles, once, in a town by the sea.

‘It came through . . . I got permission, just like you wanted. It’s been arranged.’

‘What’s been arranged?’ Alec stared at her.

‘An interview. A meeting . . .’

There was anger in me once.

I have held the dancing plague.

‘I feel like I’m – I feel like I’m losing my—’

PART FOUR:

SIXTEEN HORSES

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

On the final day of school, Rebecca walked towards her locker. She had waited in the bathroom at the end of the day, had sat in a cubicle until the sound of movement and clanging had ceased. She had just been on her phone.

She went to her locker. It was so new she hadn’t even got a padlock for it yet. The whole place looked duller than it had in her memories. Her mind had made the drab beige something bright and terrible. She only had her books with her, nothing expensive.

She looked down the corridor. A teacher left his room and headed towards reception.