Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

against this light.

It felt like it had been waiting for her, all these years.

She looked around and saw nothing else, heard nothing else.

She rang Alec’s phone.

She’d sent a dozen messages, but nothing, no response, no ‘seen’ ticks.

And still he didn’t answer.

The crate stood before Cooper, her phone’s light held upon it all the while. The water of the lake still rippled gently against the banks.

Her heart tight in her chest, she hesitated.

She looked through her phone and found Grace’s number.

She dialled it, as if in a dream, no longer looking, no longer seeing.

She rang the number, and something shook along the rocks, right by the water’s edge.

It buzzed to life in the dark.

The lakeside sang with the ringtone, strange and beautiful.

She moved towards it.

As Cooper bent down to pick it up, she felt a sudden force hit her skull. She wanted to be sick. Blood came dripping along her hair.

She crumpled into the water.

Everything fades.

There are flashes.

There is a hand in the water, a shaking body.

The fire of a distant red above the rippling, the coast so far away.

Her throat would fill with water, and her body, it was so cold, it—

A man watches her from the shore.

She tries to climb up, and hands push her back down beneath the surface.

Reality falls.

She pulls her pathology knife from her pocket and digs it into the man’s hand.

His other plunges into the water, his face, his hair shifting side to side. He tries to free himself.

She pulls him down further, her other hand grabbing on to his skull, her fingers crushing against his eye socket. He screams, he falls with her, into the dark.

She gasps air, briefly, before falling once more.

She has lost her weapon.

The world pulses black.

She sees the face, looking up at her from the deep.

It is full of hate, of malice, of death.

She gets to the shore.

As she pulls herself up onto the lake’s bank, as she coughs, as she staggers towards the crate, towards the light, the figure follows her.

He grabs at her, lunges at her.

She turns and pushes him.

He staggers, falling, hitting his head back against the rocks.

Cooper, shivering, her fast, palsied breaths now close to a scream, comes closer.

The man is wearing Alec’s clothes.

She comes closer still.

Blood is pooling, though she can barely see it in the dark. His eyes are twitching.

He could barely move, let alone stand. She bent down at his side and sat with him. His face was blank, as if he was tired, but there was water in his eyes.

There was silence, but for croaking.

‘Ph—’ he coughed. ‘Ph—’

Cooper opened the wooden crate. The lid was loose, not yet nailed down like the others so long ago.

There was silence, but for croaking.

She looked at what was inside.

She stood there for a minute, numb, and then went back to the lakeside.

‘Ph—’

‘Sssh,’ Cooper said, propping the man against a tree. She took her torch and shone it around the head.

There was blood at the back, a fracture in the skull.

‘Ph—’

She held it, gently, her fingers tracing the line of the cut.

She imagined it, plunging her thumb within.

She did not.

The body shook.

‘Sssh,’ she said.

When it grew still, she got up, and left Simon where he lay.

He was dead.

It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust.

The sun was starting to rise.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO

Two divers had entered the lake. The clothes and camcorder had already been bagged up, and Cooper already knew what they’d find. She’d watched the tape herself.

But still. She had to see.

As the sun rose, the drone and hiss of the insects renewed itself. Birds chittered and sang. Along the edge of the lake’s smile, a kaleidoscopic biomass faltered. What seemed briefly red and green and blue, what seemed teeming with health, revealed itself at last.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.

The minutes passed.

From the water, they emerged with a pale, soaked figure, dark hair spilling around her shoulders, her whole body bare but for the muddy water.

They lay Rebecca Cole on the ground and covered her. She had died three hours before Cooper’s arrival. Evidence of strangulation.

The second body took longer to remove.

The face was unrecognizable, but Cooper already knew, had known for hours now.

They removed the body of Grace Cole.

Dead for a year, they’d tell Cooper, soon.

She’d never gone to Portugal.

Never gone abroad, not her whole life, but for Ireland, once, on a plane.

Grace had never left her family, had never fled her daughter, her husband, her home.

Grace had never left at all.

The bodies were removed.

The wooden crate was taken, too. A body had been left within, naked, stripped of its clothes.

Hours later, others would find the head, buried in a copse seven minutes away, a single eye exposed to the light of the sun.

The videotape had shown Cooper’s room, a stranger watching her as she slept, weeks past.

It had shown the night of the horse burial, Kate’s hands shifting along the soil, the filmmaker wearing protective gloves while she wore none.

The tape cut to the sea at night, further and higher along the coast than Cooper had ever been. Rebecca looked over the edge of the clifftop and turned, shaking. ‘Please,’ she said, weak, quiet. ‘Please.’

‘We killed her,’ a voice came. ‘We—’

‘I don’t want to—’

‘I love you,’ the young voice whispered, tender, hissing in the poor microphone of the camcorder. ‘All I’ve done, I’ve done for you. You—’

The tape cuts to the girl, riding through the Eltons’ stable yards.

It cuts to her, riding along in a carriage by a beach.

It cuts to her, discovering the horses at morning, shaking, crying. A phone rings, close to the camera.

It cuts to her, walking towards a lake.

It shows Alec, last of all.

Three final shots.

In one of them, Simon is arguing with his father. His dad is asking him when he’ll take a driving test again. That he needs a licence.

Simon tells him he’ll book it soon. He’s almost ready.

Alec asks him to do it now.

Alec gets in