Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

worst thing you’d ever done. You told me it was—’

‘Scratching the car,’ she said. ‘Alec, it . . . it wasn’t that. But I’d just met you. And asking a question like that, it—’

‘You’ve been asking the same question all these days. Ever since the hospital, you’ve been wondering about me. I know you have.’

There was laughter, somewhere, distant through the walls.

‘Mine was Elizabeth. What I did to her.’

Photographs, hung around bodies.

Patches of skin, displayed on a board.

Cooper watched Alec, just like she had watched all these things.

She had pulled them apart, every life a mystery. She had tried to help the dead.

‘She hid the diagnosis from me at first. A year to live,’ Alec said, quietly. ‘Cancer.’

Still, she said nothing.

‘She took three years to die. So I . . . I left her, one year into the three. I left Simon, too.’

He told her.

He told her about how hard it had been.

He told this woman the same things he’d told himself a thousand times before.

He—

‘Men whose wives get cancer, apparently it’s . . . it’s common for us to leave them.’ He took a deep breath.

Still, Cooper said nothing.

‘My whole life, these things I did, that I do . . . they’re just things other people do, aren’t they? If I’d died, what would have been lost?’

He blinked. His eye twitched uncontrollably. A nerve trapped.

‘I’ve always been alone. What did I want?’

He closed his eyes.

‘You asked me why I did it, why I’d chosen this life. I didn’t lack imagination. It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t that.’

A door opened somewhere outside.

‘Why did you do it, then?’ she asked.

And what was her voice?

What was it but more coldness, more curiosity?

What was he to her? What was he to anyone?

He—

Cooper listened to her friend.

He turned over towards the window. She didn’t know what to say.

She didn’t know what to do that would make him better.

She just listened.

She kept closing her eyes, she—

‘—wanted to feel powerful, I—’

I wanted to feel like I was good.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

He thought of the letters on the crates.

He thought of Grace’s face, her photos.

He thought of Cooper.

He thought of the eyes in the earth.

He got up half an hour later and took Cooper’s laptop with him through to the hallway outside. She did not stir.

A renovated room without a bed lay opposite; he needed space if he was going to be able to think about this, to think about all of this.

A solution lay ahead. He knew it did, he just had to work hard. That’s what he’d been told. That’s what everyone had been told.

Work hard. A good life would be yours.

Maybe this – maybe this would make him better.

Maybe this would heal them all.

He poured himself a glass of water from the tap. He thought about messaging someone. It didn’t even have to be Grace. It could be anyone. He wanted to talk to everyone. He felt light-headed and so he drank more, shaking his head. The quicker he was back to work full-time, he knew, the better. He went to the desk of his new room. It smelt of paint, even though the walls were dry.

He opened the chat with Grace.

He scrolled up.

[10:04] Grace: What’s it like there, anyway?

[10:14] Grace: Raining probably.

[10:16] Alec: It snowed.

[10:16] Alec: But the sun is slowing.

[10:17] Alec: Sorry, meant shining, autocorrect.

[10:19] Grace: Take a photo.

He thought of Cooper, how they had met.

I was the one who found the horses, Alec had said. Well, after Mr Cole and his daughter, of course.

Cooper had then snapped the bird’s neck.

He thought of the animals, his lungs weak, his chest sore.

He thought of his life here.

He selected a picture of the crates, of W A T C H, of the rotting animals in the dark wood, and sent it to Grace Cole using his phone, now charging from the socket next to him.

There was a draught, somewhere.

A window was open.

He looked down at the laptop. He was still logged in on his social media and email from earlier in the day; he needed to be more careful.

He went to the tabs.

He went to close them.

And then he saw it.

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

He had a friend request.

CHARLES ELTON.

Another. KATE BABBIT. Another. Another. Names he recognized, names he didn’t.

Some of them had been dead for weeks.

He accepted all the faces of the lost.

A message came through from Grace, thirty-four minutes later.

A location arrived on his phone. She had shared it via the app.

The map and the pin would remain active for an hour, then expire.

She was close to Well Farm. The woods, it seemed. Had she been there all this time? He did not know.

Come alone, she said.

Do you have Simon? he typed.

Ashamed, upset, he shook in his chair, wondering what to do.

Telling himself he was all right.

Telling himself he could do this, that he needed to do this. He could not wait for the others to be ready. He could not allow them to stop him. He could not risk her running, and he knew her. They had never met, but he knew Grace, just as she knew him.

She was the solution to everything. Maybe the others were right. Maybe one person had done all this, after all. Or maybe . . . maybe she, too, was their victim, whoever ‘they’ might be.

Yes, she typed.

She had his son. He just needed to find her. He smiled, thinly, and stood up.

He gathered his things.

He left, alone.

CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

Alec arrived at Well Farm for the last time. The location shared on his phone was past here, or so his map said – into the woods, half an hour by foot from the stone ruin at the farm’s edge. A path ran from there to a small lake.

The gate was open. He didn’t know if the others had forgotten to close it when they were last out here or if someone else had driven through in the interim. He looked ahead, his car’s engine still humming. He had barely driven since the crash, had been worried he might somehow have forgotten how or