Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

got dressed and doubled back to the woods. He needed to gather kindling. Half-dry moss, peeled from the tree trunks. Sticks and wood both short and not so short. A few inches, thin for the beginning. Longer and thicker for the flame proper, to lay on it afterwards. It was the water that kept it going, the impurities and imperfections. He gathered what he needed and left. The day was growing darker.

By nightfall, he had fire. He fashioned the moss and the twigs – the small ones, the thin ones – all into a ball, cupping his hands round them and forging a shallow well with his fingers. He lit his match and sparked the fire in the centre of the ball, blowing into the orb, giving his own air to help the flame spread. He started it outside the little stone house he’d called home these past few nights, stacking the longer sticks in cross-hatch around the kindling. It kept him warm and gave him light for his book. He heated his beans in a can above it. He heated coffee. He’d killed a bird the day before, had stripped it of its feathers and meat. It had a tag attached to its leg.

Fireworks burst in the darkness, far away.

A small whistle, a stuttered ‘pop’ of stars in the long black. The rockets had been going off for weeks, though tonight was worse. He wasn’t sure when the fifth was, when the bonfire and fireworks would be. Imagine an effigy of yourself being burned alive for hundreds of years. He did not want to imagine or see.

He closed the book covers and let his fire die. He went into the stone house and lit his candle. His blankets and bedding were still stretched out from the night before. They were enough to keep him warm. This place was a small ruin; it had holes in the ceiling and flooded when it rained. It was not large. He had worked out the best place to sleep. It was close to the woods and the lake. He had been left alone here. He’d stay, if he could.

He’d seen the farmer a few times, the one who lived adjacent. WELL FARM. Most people didn’t know why it was called that. A good name for a farm. Hopeful, they thought. But it was nothing to do with goodness. There was a water-well in the woods, on land that had once been a part of this place.

So people thought ‘Well Farm’ was a nice name.

He hadn’t spoken to the farmer, he’d just seen him and tried not to be seen, in case the man laid claim to this land, or knew who might. He’d watched him in his fields, spraying nettles. He’d watched him walking a dog. Something about the farmer seemed lonely.

Like a prisoner.

The hermit went to sleep.

He was awoken before light.

It was still dark. The candle wax had set, though. He relit it. Something was outside.

He heard the running of an engine, a car or a small truck, over almost as soon as it had begun. But the hermit saw nothing when he looked out through the window. The noise had come from the farm, or closer to it. There was nothing, until there was something. It made him breathe.

A torch. Two torches.

They danced in the dark, further down the fields. They moved back and forth, until they rested against the ground, illuminating vast horizontals.

The hermit pulled his coat around him and left the stone house. He wanted to see.

There were hands in that earth, patting down soil around lifeless shapes.

The strangers moved back and forth.

One of them was crying.

The hermit left the next morning, gathering his things before first light. Before the policeman arrived at the farm. Before the eyes in the earth. Before all of it began.

‘I came back,’ he told Alec, shaking. ‘I came back. I – I didn’t want to be alone, not after that. I wanted to get new books. I wanted to – I wanted to be with people. And I heard what had happened . . . I heard what they did.’

Alec stared at him from across the table, piles of blue paper towels all around them.

‘Did I help?’ the hermit asked, staring back.

Alec asked the man if he could identify the people who had done this. If he had seen their faces, if he knew their gender, or any identifiable characteristic at all.

‘They – they were crying. One of them was crying,’ the man said.

Of all else, he was not sure.

He was sorry. He—

‘You’ve been helpful,’ Alec said, trying to smile. ‘Of course you’ve been helpful.’

This made the hermit beam and nod his head, his tired eyes glistening.

He had nowhere to go that night.

Alec helped him down the metal stairs.

He never saw the man again.

CHAPTER FIVE

The CD player sang a song about the end of the world. It could be heard through the glass, it was that loud, the curtains drawn at the front of the house, the fire burning – a real fire, wood and all – casting the living room in a golden glow.

Inside, visible through the hallway’s end, a child could be seen playing with paper clips in the kitchen corner, stringing them together and tying them round wooden chairs, hanging his toys and action figures from various hoops.

Alec tried his best with the child, which was all anyone could do. He didn’t know how to talk to him.

His wife stood near the stove and stirred minced beef into tomato, tomato into minced beef.

The smells hit him as he came in through the front door. The track changed.

He shouted, ‘I’m back,’ but it felt a little pointless. His wife was still busy with dinner, his son was busy with . . . well, whatever the whole paper clip thing was about. Alec tussled Simon’s hair as he walked past and the boy grumbled.

‘How was your day?’ Elizabeth asked, not turning around.

He put his hands round his wife’s waist, and