Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

be better, and that was it, wasn’t it?

You could do anything, if you pretended to heal the world. If you told yourself you had a plan. If you told yourself all that was wrong could be right.

If you had hope.

He stared, tapped her name, and waited for his phone to ring her number.

A moment later, the phone on the pile of clothes began to ring and vibrate, a stock ringtone, nothing personalized at all. Nothing like he imagined.

It rang and rang.

He turned and moved closer to the lake, trying to shine the light further across.

He thought he saw a shape, briefly, but it was just leaves.

He leant down and looked at the camcorder.

Another noise, at his right, the crunching of a twig underfoot.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked, staggering round, his grip on his light loosening. It flickered.

A light came on in the darkness, further ahead.

His heart pounded all the faster, his sight blinded by the sudden ray. It shifted, whoever held it now moving towards Alec from within the trees.

‘Grace?’ he croaked, gripping his knife in his shaking hand, his own torch falling to the ground.

The light shut off.

He picked up the flashlight next to the camcorder. He shone it in the direction of the departing visitor.

Tree branches coiled back, a thin shape moving away into the darkness.

Alec called out, his ‘Stop!’ tearing his vocal cords, his face shivering with the cold.

He ran into the night. Somewhere along the path he would lose his phone, fallen from his pocket as he in turn tripped over a branch. Still the shape disappeared.

‘Please—’

He gripped the knife, trying to make sure he did not hurt himself.

His breathing grew faster and faster.

He began to cough as he came to the clearing, his vision blacking out.

There was something there. Something—

He moved towards it, far away.

There was a crate. A wooden crate. He shone his light all around.

There was no one there. There was—

He felt it, its edges, its splintered sides. There was no lid on it. Nothing within. It was empty.

Breathing grew heavy behind him, in the cold night.

The smile of the forest contracted.

He turned and saw, fallen by the treeline, hunched, moaning, a pale figure in the light.

Alec approached, shaking.

He looked at the face, pupils contracting.

He saw Simon, and Simon saw him.

The father went to his boy.

‘I’m so – I’m so sorry,’ he choked, hugging his almost limp, shaking body. ‘I’m sorry—’

Simon did not say a word. His eyes seemed lifeless, despite the flowing tears.

His face was dirty, cut.

Alec grabbed at the boy’s hand. His ring finger came to a stump, bandaged round. His little finger was missing, too.

‘What did they do to you?’ Alec whispered.

The boy shook. The sounds he made were guttural, almost unintelligible. ‘I – ah – a—’

‘Where are they?’

‘Here . . .’ Simon croaked, his face anguished, his arms suddenly hugging at his dad all the tighter.

‘We have to – to go.’ Alec looked around, shining his torch into the trees. ‘How many of them are there? Are they armed?’

His boy did not answer.

He turned and shook him gently. ‘Si, I need you to – I need you to pull it together. I know it’s hard, but we have to – we have to get you to safety, OK?’

Simon nodded, blinking, unseeing.

‘How many of them are there?’

‘F-f—’

‘What?’ Alec’s head darted around.

‘They’re – they made me—’ His son gasped as if for air. ‘They made me—’

‘Are they here, Simon?’

He shook his head. ‘T-two are gone.’

There was anger in me once. I dreamt at times of being better. We killed to help and in helping I tasted something in me.

Kate.

Charles.

Alec nodded. He walked on, just a few steps, and realized Simon wasn’t following. He turned to see the boy staggering back to his tree.

Alec grabbed the boy’s good hand and began to drag him along. Still the boy wept.

‘It’s OK, OK?’ Alec tried to calm him. He hushed him, stuttering, trying to pull him close, his son’s skin cold against his own. ‘It’s OK.’

He did not know where to go. He did not know which way he had come, did not—

I have burned fires. I am awake and no one saw me and no one will.

‘Did they say anything to you?’ he asked. ‘Before they left you. Did they say anything?’

‘Grace, she – she—’

Simon did not finish his sentence.

They kept going through the trees. Alec grinned when he caught sight of the crunched branches, the signs of his trail.

‘This way,’ he said.

I have held the dancing plague. I blossom, now.

They went back to the lakeside.

The hissing struck Alec once more, mounting as they came closer. A cold that smelt of apples, somehow, somewhere. The strange dust that hit his skin. The water, the smile of the lake.

His son let go of his hand as Alec walked towards the camcorder. He needed to take it with him. This was not over, not until he found them all. But he had his son back. He had mended the fallen mirror. He had fixed it, he had fixed everything.

The dark trees seethed.

The smile is yours.

Alec turned.

Simon was not there.

He stepped towards the rusted car shell.

Something was inside.

He heard a snap of a twig behind him, low in the earth.

He twisted.

He—

You could have saved him.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

Cooper arrived at the lake.

She did not cry out any name.

She did not shine her torch blindly into the dark.

She’d switched it off, a minute before, relying only on the low light of her phone.

She watched.

She waited, the trees shaking, another light left low on the ground, a red dot before it.

No one appeared to be there.

She stepped forward, shivering as she came closer.

Near a pile of clothes, there stood a wooden crate, splinters rough around the edges, its shadow long past the light of her phone.

It was like something from another reality, a made thing amongst the dying of the wildland, amongst the wreck of all those things that had come before. The rough, almost yellow wood of the crate seemed black, somehow,