Sixteen Horses, Greg Buchanan [good books to read for beginners TXT] 📗

by the weight of it, its coarseness. He held it higher and ran his fingers along the strands, gripping at intervals. Towards the base of the spiral, where the rest of the hair still lay upon the ground, he felt flesh and bone.

Alec put it back carefully. The sun continued to rise. There was something else.

It was black, almost like plastic in its sheen, a thin half-moon of dulled white at its rim. It looked past him.

There was an eye, a large sad eye in the earth.

Alec stepped back.

‘My daughter found them,’ the farmer said. ‘Shouldn’t even have been out . . .’

Alec shone his torch across the area. There were others – some close together, some alone. He walked until he was sure he had found the whole set. He paced back and forth, a hundred feet all around.

He counted sixteen submerged heads, all apart, all with only the barest strand of skin on display, all with a single eye left exposed to the sun. One of the heads had been dug up a little more than the others, revealing the neck, at least. It was unclear how much of the corpse remained beneath the surface.

There were footprints everywhere: his, the farmer’s, the daughter’s, no doubt. He hadn’t been told any of this . . . He hadn’t known . . .

‘Who could do this?’ the farmer croaked, blinking. ‘Who could make themselves—’

Alec looked up suddenly, acid rising in his throat. The sky was growing brighter, its red spreading like fire, the clouds shifting blue. Still the flies and crickets screamed across the reeds, though nothing crawled along those dead eyes. Nothing seemed to touch them.

There was a stone house half a mile away along the horizon.

‘Who lives over there?’ Alec asked.

‘No one.’

Alec stared at it a moment longer. It was a lonely-looking place.

‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ he asked. ‘It’s—’

Grotesque.

Beautiful.

‘No. Have you?’

Alec shook his head, stepping back, staring once more at the hair. It was all tails, he could see that now.

‘That’s murder,’ the farmer said, his voice soft. ‘Just look at them. Look.’

It was in fact criminal damage, a mere property crime.

If you decide something isn’t human, you can do almost anything.

Alec looked at the house again, dark and cold in the distance.

‘Do you know anyone who might have a grudge against you? Anyone who might try and cause you harm?’

The farmer tried to smile. ‘Apart from my wife? No, no . . . I get along with folk. Always have.’ He paused. ‘What do I do?’

‘We need to get a vet in.’ Alec stood up. ‘We need to get post-mortems performed, if we can. I wouldn’t touch them until we know more—’

‘Can’t afford any of that,’ the farmer said.

‘You wouldn’t have to—’

‘And besides,’ the farmer interrupted. ‘Someone buried them, didn’t they? Horses don’t just get that way themselves.’

‘What about the mud? If this used to be wetland, maybe they . . . I don’t know, maybe they—’

‘No,’ the farmer said, firmly, without elaboration.

Alec paused, looking back down at the eyes. But for the lack of motion, they might have been alive.

He got his phone out to take some photographs of the scene. They would have to do until help came. ‘Try and keep your other animals away,’ Alec said. ‘If you can keep your other animals inside or—’

‘What about the owner?’ asked the farmer.

‘Of what?’

‘Them – these—’ The farmer gesticulated, wincing.

‘What?’ Alec glanced down at the heads and up again at this man. ‘Were you stabling them?’ He paused. ‘We’d need to contact the—’

‘NO,’ the farmer spat. ‘No – no – no—’

‘Hey, it’s OK,’ Alec said, stepping closer as the farmer turned away. ‘I’m sure it’s covered by your insurance.’

‘You don’t understand. I don’t keep horses – I’ve never kept horses. That’s what I tried to tell the girl on the phone—’

A fly landed on the rim of an eye.

‘I’ve never seen these horses before in my life.’

2.

A dead man sits in a room. His hands are tied behind his back; it’s why he hasn’t fallen. The air is full of dust and gas. There is something moving inside his stomach. His right eye is no longer there.

His hunger outlives him. His teeming gut, his microbiome aflame with bacteria and symbiotic juices, they carry on. All that life within him continues consuming and breathing until it can breathe no more. He digests himself.

It smells like rancid pork mixed with sugar. It smells like a nightmare of food. It smells like the worst thing in the world.

A dead man sits in a room, but he isn’t alone.

Two detectives watch as a sample is taken from the body. It isn’t from the victim, it isn’t even human.

Three white cat hairs, found in blood.

Cooper clutches her mask to her face, the stench unbelievable, but still she carries on. She won’t run to the window and vomit. She won’t give any of these smug pricks a reason to doubt her.

It is the first time Cooper has ever seen a dead body, but you wouldn’t think it.

She focuses on the cat hairs, and only the cat hairs.

She ignores everything else. It is no time to get emotional.

These cat hairs are going to solve the case. They’re going to ID a man no one could ID. They’re going to—

‘Why are we here?’ her therapist asked.

There was no clock in the small, fluorescent-lit white room. Cooper had a black smart watch on her left wrist, though. It needed charging once a day. It was bulky. It had a red trim. It was hard to use and it was far more trouble than it was worth.

The watch was not something Cooper could easily check the time on without being accused of fidgeting. The therapist used anything against her. She was relentless.

‘Why are we here, Cooper? I want to go back to why we’re here.’

Cooper narrowed her eyes.

‘You want me to express what I’m feeling?’ Cooper straightened up a little. ‘I’m expressing what I’m feeling.’

‘I want to go back to something you mentioned before. That “it was no time to get emotional”.’

‘I was at