Page 135 of Bonetide

The horse drops its head and comes down the slope at me, the size of it fills the whole sky. the hooves loud on the turning ground, and I have just enough time to understand that I am going to die, that I have put myself in front of a monster that is going to run me into the dirt, and I manage to throw myself sideways, into the gorse.

It doesn’t hit me.

It checks, pulls up short three feet from where I was, the great white body wheeling while it lets out a loud whinny, and I understand, even as I’m sprawled in the gorse with the breath knocked out of me, that it was never going to hit me. It simply moved me out of the way, the way you’d move a dog out of a doorway with your foot. It wanted me out from in front of the thing it came for.

Now I am out of the way, and Sinclair has stumbled back toward his car at the shock of it. The horse stands between us, breathing wet clouds from his nostrils, and I’m pretty sure it’s already forgotten I exist.

And Sinclair—Sinclair, who grew up with Highland ponies, who just watched a half-wild animal nearly trample his witness—goes to the boot of his car, pops the trunk, and takes out a coil of blue nylon rope.

“No,” I whimper from the gorse, “no, no, no, don’t⁠—”

“It’s spooked, that’s all,” he says in a soothing, competent voice, looping the rope in his hands. “A loose animal like this’ll do somebody harm if it’s left. I’ll get a line on it and we’ll ring round, find who’s missing a horse.” He’s moving toward it slow now, the rope held low and easy, his voice murmuring there now, there, easy, easy. The horse stands and lets him come.

Of course it lets him come.

I get up out of the gorse. My palms are bleeding from the fall, my slippers half on, and I’m screaming now. “It’s not a horse! Detective, it is not a horse, it’ll kill you, please, please get away from it⁠—”

He doesn’t even look at me.

The glamour has him all the way now. He reaches the horse. He lays his free hand flat on the slope of its shoulder, the way you gentle a horse before the rope, that broad confident pat, there now⁠—

…and his hand doesn’t come off.

I see the exact moment it goes wrong, and his face changes. He tries to lift his palm to bring the rope up over the neck, but his hand stays where it is—fixed to the wet shoulder like it’s been set in concrete. Incredulous, he starts, “What the f⁠—”

The horse rears.

It goes up, up, Sinclair’s stuck arm wrenching up with it so his whole body is hauled off the ground. For one frozen second he hangs there, his trapped hand against the rising bulk of it, and then the hooves come down.

The first one catches him low, between the legs, and the sound he makes is one that will stay in the marrow of my bones until I die. The second comes down on his shoulder and I hear it break, a wet wooden crack, the joint going the wrong way. He screams. He’s still alive, and he’s screaming, and his hand is still stuck. The third hoof comes down somewhere in the soft middle of him, and the scream changes pitch into something that isn’t human anymore.

He’s not dead. That’s the fucking horror of it all: it hasn’t killed him. It’s broken him, methodically, hoof by hoof, and left enough of him alive to know what’s happening.

Then it runs.

It drops to all fours and bolts down the slope toward the bay, dragging Sinclair with it, his hand still fixed to its shoulder, his ruined body bouncing and tumbling over the rocks, and the stone, and the gorse. I hear him going over the ground, parts of him meeting the rocks with sickening thumps and splats. I run after them and I don’t know why—there is nothing I can do—my legs moving on their own.

“Alasdair!” I scream his real name at the man that’s somewhere inside there, at the white horse racing toward the water. “Alasdair, stop, stop, please—Alasdair!”

My voice goes out over the bay and comes back to me off the far spit, off the castle stone, Alasdair, Alasdair, thinned, and doubled, and useless.

The horse doesn’t stop, hitting the shallows at a gallop, throwing up sheets of silver. It doesn’t slow at the water’s edge the way a real thing would; it goes in like a homing missile. The detective goes in with it, dragged under in a thrashing grey jacket, and blue rope; the last of his voice cut off in a gurgle as the loch closes over his head.

I stop at the edge of the rocks, not daring to go in. The water’s still heaving where they went under. I can see the white shape of the horse beneath the surface for a moment like a beluga whale, moving fast, going deep, then the dark masses that were the detective and the horse are…gone. Nothing resurfaces, and the bay goes still.

For one held second, the loch is flat and silver and giving nothing back, and I stand on the rocks with my bleeding hands and my screamed-raw throat, thinking it’s over, that the worst thing I have ever seen is over.

Then the water moves.

But not just where they went under, but everywhere.

A flurry breaks across the bay—a dozen lines of current cutting the surface from the deep middle toward the place the detective sank, fast, converging. Along the lines, a head breaks the silver; dark wet hair, the curve of a shoulder, a face turned down toward the depth. It’s the drowned women, surfacing from wherever they wait, coming from every part of the loch at once.

They go down where he is.

And then the water churns and turns.

It blooms red from underneath, a dark stain spreading up through the silver, and the surface starts to roil, a frenzy, the way I’ve seen footage of piranhas strip a thing in a river, that terrible, joyful thrashing. Things break the surface in the churn and go under again. A length of blue rope. A piece of a grey wax jacket. And once—only once—something pale, soft, and unmistakably part of a man, lifted clear of the water for an instant in the grip of a dark-haired woman before she pulls it back down into the red.