Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

He gripped the knife within his coat with one hand, his light with the other.

He walked on.

He saw the lake.

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

The hissing struck him first. The low drone of all the insects in the reeds. A cold that smelt of apples, somehow, somewhere. The strange dust that hit his skin. All who had ever lived here and died here touched the policeman’s neck. The water haunted the stars, holding their reflection in its black enormity. Some plants and reeds crested round the edges of the lake, like the first hairs of a beard. The water, as far as the light stretched, looked like a crescent moon fallen to the world, but that wasn’t right at all.

The more he looked at it, the more it seemed like a smile.

There would be so many colours, if he’d come during the day. Flies sang around the air. One drew blood, and another, though Alec did not even know or feel it. He didn’t feel so cold any more. He even felt warm, even as he stood so stiff, even as his shivering came to its final end.

There were just trees and the lake, just plants, and the shell of a rusted car thirty feet to Alec’s right, a torch lying on the ground nearby, pointed back in a horizontal at the treeline. It had not moved. It had not even flickered the entire time Alec had been standing there, pointing his own light.

‘I’m—’ he began, his voice coming out as a croak, as a quieter thing than he had meant. ‘I’m here.’

No one answered.

The rusted car shell, when Alec shone his torch towards it, seemed briefly as if it were occupied.

Three figures within.

But they were just seats. The fourth was missing.

He’d heard it, just a few days ago, reading about the search for patterns, for symbolism, for numbers. He’d wanted to understand ‘sixteen’.

Pareidolia.

Seeing a face in that which had no face. Hearing a message in a howl of wind.

It was so dark in that place that the edge of his vision was pure black, now.

‘Is anyone here?’ Alec asked, more tentatively than he’d meant to once again, but who could make him louder? Who was going to make him someone he could not be? His words carried across the dark waters, and no reply came. The wind did not blow harder from the world. The trees did not shiver or shake. Reality was indifferent to the sound of Alec Nichols’s voice, his footsteps as he finally moved forward, as his light shone onwards, as every noise became like death.

He came closer and closer to the torch on the ground.

He did not know it had been just like this when the horses had been buried.

He had not seen it, would never see it.

He came closer still to the torch.

He still heard no one. He saw no one. His own light bobbled and stuttered in its focus, unable to remain steady when the hand that held it had already failed, crumpled in cold and terror.

The beam briefly caught something.

There was a camcorder on the ground.

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

Tufts of cloud burned black in the night.

The world was silent as Cooper pulled up alongside Alec’s abandoned car. She’d had to beg for the use of another vehicle, desperate enough to give the front desk manager a hundred pounds to borrow it, plus her passport as a safety deposit.

Insects pulsed along the reeds.

She opened the door.

The silence was more than silence. It seethed. It was manifest.

Ilmarsh watched her, its last and final emissary.

The people of this place would leave in the coming weeks, the coming years, as the tides grew higher, as the world grew warmer.

She’d wanted to help people, unable or unwilling to help herself.

She got out of the car, calling Alec’s name.

She’d phoned the police already, told them where Alec was, had shared the final messages from her computer. She’d phoned her client. She’d phoned everyone.

And everyone? They’d asked her to wait.

She went into the woods, regardless.

There would be no more abductions.

No more mutilations.

The town’s pain was over.

There was no one left to feel it.

It was over.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

Alec thought of his son, long ago, sitting in the kitchen corner, playing with paper clips, stringing them together, tying them round wooden chairs, hanging his toys and action figures from various hoops. He thought of tussling his hair. He thought of holding his wife as she cooked spaghetti, how they made fun of each other.

‘You’re just copying me,’ she’d protested.

‘You’re just copying me.’

‘I think Alec Nichols is very sorry for whatever bad thing he did.’

‘I think Alec Nichols is bla bla bla blah.’

Simon had laughed at this. Alec had smiled too, in spite of himself.

‘Hey,’ he’d said, touching his wife’s arm, gentler than before. She’d turned, clearly tired. ‘I think Alec Nichols doesn’t know how lucky he is.’

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

There was a small, almost imperceptible red light upon the camcorder. It had been propped up on a small pile of clothes. Beside it, something else. Alec moved round the lens, trying to stay out of its focus.

There was a small mobile phone, cheap, battered, leaning against a pair of jeans. The clothes were women’s clothes.

He felt, for the last time in his life, like there was someone there.

His hands shaking, his face numb, he took his own phone out. Its battery was at seven per cent. How was it at seven per cent? He’d had it charged.

He wouldn’t make it back to his car before it ran out. He stared at his contacts, at all the people he knew, at all those he liked and thought he loved.

He saw Elizabeth’s number, a few places below Cooper. He’d never deleted it.

And Grace, just a few places beneath them in turn.

The mother of all this.

The number his son had phoned a hundred times, two hundred—

She—

She was out here.

She had his boy.

And Alec, as terrible, as disgusting as he knew he had been – he could be better, he knew.

Everyone could