Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

A cleaner had started mopping the waiting area.

Rebecca opened her locker and white powder tumbled out, entering her lungs, filling her eyes.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

Alec and Cooper were halfway there, now.

The girl from the island – the girl whose father had destroyed her entire family, who had poisoned them, who had set their homes and farm alight – the girl who had not spoken in all this time . . . Alec thought was his one last hope to find an answer to these strange events.

Cooper didn’t know. But he was right, in a sense. They were running out of options. And however unlikely it was that a child might hold their solution, at least they would be out of Ilmarsh. At least they would be far away from whoever hunted them.

This girl waited for them, far away.

‘At least you have a reason, now.’

‘For what?’ Alec asked.

‘For doing what you do.’ She slowed down in the traffic. ‘The day after we met, you told me you just fell into this work. That you’d lacked imagination.’

‘. . . And how about you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s your reason for all this?’

‘It’s my job. And . . . and I want to help you, too. We’re friends.’

‘Are we friends?’ he asked. ‘Is that what we are?’

‘I . . .’

She said nothing else.

It would be night by the time they arrived, only a few hours left for visiting.

They kept going.

He looked at her, every so often.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

The first and only sign of what had happened on the island had been the choking smoke from the fires. Passing boats had reported it; others had come to investigate; soon infected, they had received swift treatment. They had only found the little girl by accident; she had been hiding in a corner of one of the collapsed barns, had coughed, violently, having held her silence each time strangers had passed by before.

She had not spoken. Not then, not after, not now.

Their family had not always been so isolated. Her great-grandfather had been a regular sight at markets in town; people remembered the jokes, the easy manner, the occasional temper of her grandfather. It was the final son who had broken with society; strangely so, considering he had left for university, then a successful career in a government lab. He’d come back one day, bringing with him his children, his pregnant wife. And as the decade had unfolded, whatever rift had separated him from this old life had faded, and it was the new life that was cast aside.

Strange materials were found in his home.

Writings about heaven and hell.

Scriptures of his own devising. Life had been sin. They’d live apart.

They’d find a new way. People didn’t do things to a place. A place did things to people.

And the father, he killed them all.

Trauma never ended. It just spread its spores.

Only a girl remained.

She couldn’t speak.

Niamh was now ten years old.

The staff had asked Alec to wait outside. Men made her nervous.

‘I’ll be OK,’ Cooper had told him.

Children liked Cooper, generally speaking. She knew if her sister became a mother, her niece or nephew would think she was great; of course they would. Cooper tried to treat kids like people. She tried to pay attention to what they liked, what they didn’t. She tried to be normal.

This girl, she liked drawing. There were crayons all across the table when Cooper came in.

Cooper explained who she was, why she had come here. In the middle of her story, she mentioned the word ‘horse’.

So Niamh drew them. Her T-shirt was blue and was covered in images of puppets. Her hair was short and red. She—

‘That’s not a very good drawing,’ Cooper said.

The girl looked up, eyes wide. Her shock turned to annoyance, and Cooper grinned.

‘I’m sorry, that was mean. Can I try drawing one?’

The girl looked back down at her paper and kept going.

‘Hold on,’ Cooper said, and opened her bag. She removed her notepad and pen. ‘Here we go.’

Cooper drew something that looked like a tube on cylindrical stilts, a ridiculous smiley face drawn on the end.

‘How’s this?’

Cooper handed her the piece of paper.

The girl looked at it. A flicker of a smile crossed her face before she saw Cooper smiling in turn, and immediately it vanished.

‘Yeah, that’s what your horses look like, I’m afraid,’ Cooper said. ‘You shouldn’t draw stuff from imagination. You should draw stuff you can see. You’ll learn more that way. Like . . .’ She put her thermos on the table. ‘This. Draw this.’

The girl and the woman both drew the thermos.

‘Now you see how the light catches against it, the shadow? You can fill that in. It makes it more lifelike, it gives it depth.’

They both began to fill theirs in.

‘I used to draw all the time,’ she said.

They finished.

The girl’s was better. She looked up at Cooper for approval.

‘This is better than our horses. We’re definitely getting better.’

Alec chased up the visitor records while they spoke.

There had been no family, no distant relations that had come to claim Niamh. Social workers had visited her; court-appointed staff and other authorities immediately after the original incident and the aftermath.

No one else.

He searched through the database for other names.

COLE.

Nothing.

ELTON.

Nothing.

NICHOLS.

Fifteen times throughout the last twenty years, he’d come to this place, apparently. Not for this girl. For patients with names he did not recognize.

‘Nichols, Alec.’

He did not remember coming here.

He did not understand why his name was in this system, who he was supposed to have visited.

He asked a clerk.

‘I didn’t visit,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been here before, I don’t—’

They couldn’t help him.

How could they help him?

It was just what the computer said. Records had been transferred to a new system from across the region’s services. They—

‘This isn’t just this institution, then?’

It wasn’t.

He let them leave.

He looked at each name, wondering why he could not remember them. He must have visited them for cases he’d been working on, back in his old district.

Had they meant so little to him?

Or had something happened to his mind, too?

How many things in a life really stayed with you?