Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

that the experience might panic him, but earlier that day no trauma had manifested, not like that. He paused at the edge of the land. He drove onto the soil as the van must have done that November night, its occupants ready to lay the horses to their final rest. He imagined it as the wheels of his own car turned on the scrub, designed for none of this. There were forty-three minutes remaining on the location share on his phone.

The forest became clear as he moved towards it, its blackened mass now outlined in columns of shivering bark, of needles splayed out along the heavens. He stopped the car and switched on its light.

He had a flashlight. A truncheon. Some pepper spray, cuffs, too.

A kitchen knife. If he needed it.

He checked his phone. Forty minutes left, now. He turned back to the road and saw a flash of electric red and white in the dark. The reflection of passing traffic lit up the markers of the buried heads, the red spears in the ground behind him. He grabbed his coat and opened the car door.

It was winter, now – true winter, the kind that scoured skin and dried your eyes and scraped at your bones.

It was the darkest evening of the year.

He buttoned his coat up tightly, shivering slightly already. He hoped walking would make him warmer.

Did he know Ilmarsh now, at last? These strange weeks had felt like a year in themselves. One more year and he’d meet Elizabeth’s prediction, that it took four to belong in a place, in any place.

In forty, Ilmarsh would probably be underwater.

His torch flickered. He looked for some batteries in the back but he’d packed quickly. He supposed he could use the light on his phone, if it came to it.

He turned towards the treeline. He remained there for a moment, unmoving, cold in the winter breeze.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

Cooper woke up, half delirious.

Alec wasn’t in his bed when she looked over. The sheets seemed smooth, barely slept in.

He wasn’t in the bathroom either, though she splashed her face with water while she was up.

It was then she realized his bag was gone.

Her laptop was gone, too.

She put on her shoes and muttered to herself. She left into the halls, already typing Where the hell are you? on her phone.

The light across the hall, the open door, and the ‘under construction’ sign seemed to give her a pretty good idea. She found only her laptop there.

The screen glowed blue-white in the semi-darkness.

There was no noise but her own, the night quieter than she’d ever heard it.

No one stirred in that building, nothing moved but Cooper’s fingers.

She shut down the tabs Alec had opened.

She hit upon his profile, last of all.

A message window flickered in the corner with new notifications.

She read it. Saw the photo of the crate.

The location. The message.

Come alone.

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

Torchlight caught small mounds of stones, massed in puddles. The trees, seething, anomalous, blocked any light from the moon. Alec possessed only what he could hold.

He pushed on, his socks beginning to soak through. His feet felt sore; his arches felt like they had collapsed, his calves on the verge of an everlasting cramp.

He wiped his forehead of sweat, but found none there.

He kept on, checking his phone when he could.

There was, somewhat surprisingly, phone signal out here, though it came and went, and he supposed Grace must have some too.

Alec had never been out this far.

He never went to places like this at all, not even as a child. He’d had no interest in the wild, in nature, not then, not really. Simon had gone camping and hiking, back when Elizabeth had looked like she might get better. He’d even taken his mother with him once, one brief day, one walk through the hills. These two years in Ilmarsh, Simon hadn’t once wanted to go out again, he hadn’t once wanted to explore. Not until he’d started to make friends.

The trees moved faster.

There were things in these woods.

Alec had passed a pebble-encrusted structure early on, surrounded and ornamented by leaves. It was only when he shone his torch above it that he saw the cracked wooden boards and realized he was looking at an old well. It had not been used for decades, aluminium soft drink cans with old depreciated branding all nestled around its base like votive offerings, enthralled in a nest of weeds.

He saw a wheelbarrow tipped on its side further along. Further still, great thick wooden poles that could almost have been trees if not for all the metal up high. They looked like loudspeakers, like air raid klaxons. Why they were here, he did not know.

Around it all, an almost invisible world proceeded. In places where the trees had grown apart, plants and flowers stood tall, some with very few branches except up the top, despite their height. Top-heavy in their arms, they shook even in the light wind. And there were bees, somehow, swimming through the night ocean. He didn’t know they could live in the cold. Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe he was wrong and they were something else, these flying creatures, but what else he could not fathom. They were fading clockwork. An anonymous droning issued louder and louder from the insects, the longer Alec remained, the more he listened.

Minutes left, now.

All this, grown around human mistakes.

All defined by absence, in the end, these structures throughout time, these stories of the things we had left behind, that we had ruined.

The feeling that someone was watching us.

He was close. There was no signal left on his phone but he had to be close.

It was us, always.

All of us, more scared of ourselves than anything.

He heard the water ripple through the trees.

He shone his light ahead at the twist of the path, the wide parting of the branches.

He hesitated, checking his phone again.

There was a single bar of reception.

If Grace was beyond, she had not moved, though he could see