The Salt Beneath the Skin

Chapter One: Before Dark

“Could you come tonight?”

Mr. Stewart asked it before he said hello.

I had him on speaker while I scraped mud from my boots outside another client's barn. Beyond the low stone wall, the sea was the colour of old cutlery, its surface disappearing into a sky that had spent three days coming apart. The rain had stopped shortly after midday, leaving a dry, salt-tasting wind. My afternoon appointments were already running late, and I still had two holdings to visit. I wanted a bath, something hot to eat, and an evening in which nothing larger than a kettle expected anything from me.

“What's happened?”

“The horses need their feet trimmed.”

I looked at the diary on my passenger seat. He was booked for the following Tuesday. Ten horses and ponies, eight barefoot and two shod. The Stewarts farmed sheep and cattle; the horses were a separate devotion. There were three Highland ponies, a Shetland, two cobs, a pair of Clydesdales he took to local shows, and two older riding horses. They were family animals, not a team still ploughing a modern farm. I had known them for years, even if I hadn't known the Stewarts much longer than that. His wife usually brought tea to the yard. Their daughter liked to collect the curls of horn that fell from my knife, until her mother explained what they were made of.

“Is somebody lame?”

A pause. Behind him came the rattle of crockery, followed by a scraping noise that stopped abruptly.

“They're not standing right.”

“All of them?”

“I haven't checked all of them.”

“Then tell me about the ones you've checked.”

Another pause. I heard him breathing through his mouth.

“Arrow won't lift his foot.”

“Does he have heat in it? Has he been putting weight on it?”

“I don't know.”

His voice had the flat, obedient quality of somebody answering questions after a bereavement. I stopped scraping my boot.

“If he's suddenly lame, you might need the vet before you need me.”

“No.” The word came too quickly. “No, it's the feet. You know their feet.”

That was true. I knew the old bay's crumbling heels, the chestnut's tendency to wear down the outside of her forefeet, the little cob who would quietly steal a glove if I left one within reach. It had taken Arrow six appointments to learn I wasn't going to hurt him. By then he rested his muzzle against my back while I worked, lending me a portion of his immense, unnecessary head.

“Mr. Stewart. Is there something else going on?”

In the silence that followed, I heard a small voice ask whether he had told me.

He covered the receiver. There was a soft thump, and then he came back.

“Please. Before it gets dark.”

People called a great many things a problem with the feet when they didn't know what else to call them. I had arrived for overdue trims and found laminitis. Once, a fracture. Once, a horse that had been dead since morning, its owner sitting beside it with the head in her lap, still hoping somebody with the right equipment might be able to make a difference.

I told him I would come after my booked calls, and gave him the duty vet's number. If an animal was suddenly unable to bear weight, he needed to ring now. I couldn't diagnose it over the phone, and I couldn't leave another horse halfway through a shoeing.

He called back while I was clenching the nails on a Clydesdale at the next farm. I let the phone ring until the foot was safely down.

“Where are you?”

I told him.

“You said you were coming.”

“I said after my other appointments.”

“You could leave them.”

The Clydesdale's owner looked up. I moved away from him, lowering my voice.

“No. I can't. Have you called the vet?”

“Don't bring anyone else.”

“Then you need to explain what's happening.”

He hung up.

At my final call, a mare with an old tendon injury needed breaks between feet. I worked at her pace. Every time I straightened, the phone vibrated in my pocket. There were six missed calls by the time I put my tools away, and a message that read, PLEASE BEFORE DARK.

I rang him from the van. He answered immediately.

“I'm on my way. Twenty minutes.”

“It's been nearly two hours.”

“I couldn't abandon my clients, Mr. Stewart.”

Something scraped close to his receiver. He made a small sound, almost a sob, then told me not to stop anywhere.

The sky had remained dry through both appointments. Beyond the road the fields shone with standing water, but the wind was drying the raised track. A pale opening spread in the western sky. I had been pleased that I wouldn't have to work with rain running down the back of my collar.

Chapter Two: Supper

The village, on the eastern side of Mainland Orkney, was small enough that refusing a meal could require more explanation than accepting one. People fed the woman who delivered their post. They fed the man who repaired their boilers. During lambing season, they fed whoever wandered through the door looking capable of holding something still.

Being a female farrier had made me a curiosity when I first started visiting. Older men watched me lift a hind foot with a concern they did not extend to their own backs; their wives stood beside them and observed that perhaps they ought to let the girl get on with it. Fifteen years later, I was still the girl to some of them, although I had a mortgage and grey hairs hidden inside my braid.

The Stewarts had fed me before. There was nothing strange about the invitation itself.

Mr. Stewart met me at the farmhouse door before I knocked.

“What took you so long?”

His voice was hoarse. One hand gripped the doorframe. He wore a clean shirt over trousers dark with mud, and sweat shone at his temples despite the cold.

“I explained on the phone.”

“I've been waiting.”

“I know. Where are the horses?”

He looked at my tool bag before he looked at my face. The anger drained from his expression with such suddenness that I wished it would come back.

“You've brought everything?”

He stood across the threshold instead of stepping aside. Behind him the kitchen was bright and warm, yellow light spreading over the stone floor. I could smell onions and boiled potatoes. For an instant, I resented him for being frightened over what would probably turn out to be routine soreness. I was tired enough to mistake the smell of dinner for evidence that nothing terrible had happened.

“Let me have a look at Arrow first.”

“Supper's already on the table.”

“I thought you were worried.”

“I am.” His eyes moved past me toward the barn. “You'll need something in you.”

His wife appeared behind him with a dishcloth folded between both hands.

“Come in before it goes cold.”

She said it gently. Then she took my wrist and brought me across the threshold, and her fingers were so cold I looked down at them.

“I won't stay long,” I told her.

She let go.

At the kitchen table, their daughter was sitting in her school uniform. Her cardigan was buttoned crookedly. She held a fork in her right hand, with her left hand tucked beneath her thigh as though keeping it out of trouble. A roast lay beneath foil at the centre of the table. Four plates had been set out.

They had expected me to say yes.

“You remember Miss Maclean,” her father told his daughter.

I smiled at the girl. “Have you still got your collection?”

She looked at her mother before she looked at me.

“Only the white ones.”

“The hoof trimmings,” I explained when her father didn't react. “She used to keep them in a biscuit tin.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

He sat facing the back door. His wife took the chair nearest the stove, and I sat between her and the child. A kettle stood on a cork mat beside Mrs. Stewart's plate. When I reached for the water jug, she moved it toward herself.

“Leave that one.”

She poured me a glass from the kettle instead. It was cool enough to drink.

“Trouble with the tap?”

“A little.”

The jug held something faintly cloudy. A white deposit had gathered around its lip. Beside it lay a tea towel soaked through with the same water. Mr. Stewart reached for it and dabbed his wrist. His wife shifted her chair away.

When he put the cloth down, I saw how carefully she had kept the kettle beyond his reach.

Nobody asked about my day. Even before the worse things, that small absence unsettled me. Mrs. Stewart usually wanted to know whose animals I had seen, who was breeding, who had finally sold the old pony they kept threatening to sell. Her husband complained about fuel prices and asked after my father, whom he had never met. Their daughter interrupted them both.

That evening I could hear the clock above the refrigerator scraping through each second.

Mr. Stewart tried to cut a potato and missed it twice. His fork trembled. A drop fell from his nose onto the plate; he wiped it away with his sleeve, leaving a thin red smear. When his wife stood to get a clean cloth, he caught her forearm.

“Sit down.”

“I'm only—”

“Here.”

She sat. Their daughter stared at the hand around her mother's arm until he released it.

He noticed me watching and tried to smile. His lower lip shook independently of the rest of his face.

“Been a long day,” he said.

I could see the girl counting beneath her breath. She stopped whenever he turned his head toward her.

I tried talking about the weather. Mr. Stewart nodded. I mentioned the flooded road by the kirk, and his daughter lifted her face so quickly her fork scraped the plate.

“The burn's deep,” she said.

“Yes. I saw.”

“You could stand in it.”

Her mother closed her eyes.

“If you had good boots,” I said.

“Even if you didn't.”

Mr. Stewart set down his knife.

“Eat your supper.”

The girl lowered her head. Beneath the table, her shoe pressed against mine. I moved my foot, thinking she needed room, and she followed it.

Mrs. Stewart lifted the foil. Steam rose from the roast, briefly obscuring her face. The meat beneath was lamb. I had established that with unreasonable care: the familiar shape of the joint, the bone, the browned fat. Later, I would examine that memory again and again, as though identifying what we had been served might make the rest of the evening comprehensible.

She cut me a slice. The knife trembled against the dish.

A door banged outside.

All three of them stopped moving.

Mr. Stewart still held his fork halfway to his mouth. The girl's shoe pressed harder against mine. His wife watched the back door with an expression I had seen on an animal waiting for another blow.

“Barn door?” I asked.

“Wind,” he said.

There was scarcely any.

I put my cutlery down.

“I really should see them.”

“In a minute.”

“If Arrow's in pain—”

“In a minute.”

“You've spent two hours asking me to hurry.”

He looked genuinely bewildered. Then he glanced at the untouched place setting opposite mine.

“Best to do things properly. Feed you first. Like always.”

His wife caught his sleeve. It pulled back enough to show four narrow marks inside his wrist. The skin around them was swollen and dark, with a wet yellow sheen along the edges.

“What happened there?”

He pulled the cuff down.

“Wire.”

Under the table, the child took my hand.

She didn't squeeze it. She held it with both of hers, flat between her palms, and I felt how violently she was shaking. Her palms were damp. She glanced at the kettle, then the window, then back to her father, tracing a route she could not tell me about.

I turned to her mother.

“Do you need me to call someone?”

Mrs. Stewart opened her mouth. Her husband looked at her, and she swallowed whatever had been there.

“You haven't touched your dinner,” he said to me.

I was suddenly conscious of how far I had come from the road. The farmhouse stood beyond the stream, reached by a narrow track and a little bridge I had driven over without noticing much beyond the missing section of parapet. My van was in the yard. My coat was on the passenger seat. I had left the van unlocked when he hurried me across the yard; the keys were in my coat. The house lay between me and the road.

These were ordinary arrangements. They had become information I needed.

“I'll eat when I'm finished.”

I stood. The child let go of my hand reluctantly, one finger at a time.

Mr. Stewart rose with me. For a moment I thought he might stop me leaving the kitchen, and the possibility brought a familiar, unwelcome calculation: his height, his weight, the space between the table and the door. Then he stepped aside.

“You go ahead. I'll fetch the headcollars.”

He coughed into his closed fist. A thick black thread stretched between his knuckles and his mouth before he wiped it away.

“I'm getting the vet,” I said.

“Look first.” His hand closed on the doorframe again. “Please. Just look first.”

Mrs. Stewart was looking at me now. Her lips parted around a breath she could not seem to draw deeply enough.

“Leave it open,” she said.

“The barn?”

She nodded.

“Whatever happens. Leave the door open.”

Chapter Three: Leave the Door Open

Outside, the warmth of the kitchen left me so abruptly that I shivered. The converted barn stood beyond the yard, its windows black except for a thin fluorescent glow in the farthest pane. Nothing whinnied. Nothing kicked impatiently for supper.

Mr. Stewart had said he'd fetch the headcollars. I waited a few seconds, watching the farmhouse door. Through the window, his wife moved quickly toward the sink. The girl followed her with the kettle held against her chest.

Then the curtain fell across the glass.

I crossed the yard.

At the barn, a dark wet streak extended beneath the door and stopped in the grit. I mistook it for water until I saw a fly settle on it.

Something shifted inside. Several heavy bodies moved at once, followed by a low, strangled sound that made every small hair along my arms lift.

“Easy,” I said, reaching for the latch. “It's only me.”

The horses came out of the barn as though something had set fire to the air.

I had barely lifted the latch when the door struck my shoulder. The chestnut cob mare burst through the opening, followed by the two grey Highland geldings, the black Shetland, and the old bay riding horse whose feet I had been tending since before the arthritis began eating his knees. They collided with the frame and each other. One stumbled in the yard, scrambled upright, and limped for several strides before breaking into a ragged gallop.

None of them stopped at the gate.

They went through it.

For a moment I could only stand there with my tool bag hanging from one hand, watching the broken timber swing. The little cob was last. She struck my hip hard enough to turn me sideways, her eye rolling white against the darkness, and I caught a glimpse of something clinging to her mane. It came loose as she passed. A pale ribbon landed on my boot.

I thought it was baling twine.

Then I saw the hairs growing from it.

Through the doorway I saw loose-box doors standing open along the aisle. Several hung from broken hinges. Something had already let the survivors out of their boxes; the outer barn door had kept them trapped together.

Beyond the gate, the horses scattered across the field toward the burn. It was a shallow stream most of the year, a dark seam between the farm and the road, but three days of rain had swollen it into something that could carry a lamb away. They plunged in without hesitation. The old bay nearly went under. The chestnut turned back and stood in the current until he found his footing.

Her waiting for him was the detail I would return to afterward.

At the time, I wondered what could make a horse choose water over a barn.

Then something struck a stall door inside.

“Mr. Stewart?”

My voice sounded offensively normal.

Behind me, the evening stretched grey and empty toward the sea. Ahead, one fluorescent tube hummed above the aisle. The farmhouse door was still closed.

I stayed at the threshold, fumbling my phone out with fingers suddenly clumsy. No signal. I could walk toward the road, find reception, call the vet and the police. I had begun to turn when I heard the dragging hoof again and saw the edge of a pale blaze at the far end of the aisle.

Arrow.

I slid the phone back into my trouser pocket and stepped inside, meaning to go only far enough to see what had happened to him.

I had learned to separate smells in this work. A hoof abscess had its own terrible little signature. So did thrush, old bedding, wet leather, the sweet animal warmth held in a stable through winter. I could walk into a barn and know somebody had missed a week of mucking out before I saw a single stall.

This smelled of opened meat and the bottom of a harbour.

My first thought was that somebody had dumped fish in the drainage channel. My second was that a horse had died.

My third did not arrive properly. It stopped somewhere behind my teeth.

The first horse was hanging over the partition.

I knew her. Plover, the dapple-grey Highland mare with a habit of nudging my braid while I worked. Her forelegs dangled on my side of the low timber partition. Her hindquarters remained in the loose box. Something had folded her across the timber with such force that her back had opened, and the white knobs of her spine sat in the wound like teeth in a second mouth.

Her head hung low beside the hay net.

There was hay between her lips.

“No. No, what the fuck—”

The words came out too loudly. I clapped a hand over my mouth, then snatched it away because I couldn't bear anything touching my face. My heart was beating so hard that my vision pulsed at the edges. There was too much blood. There was an impossible quantity of it, and I couldn't stop looking for the person who must have done this, someone behind a door with a blade, someone close enough to hear me breathing.

I stood looking at that hay for several seconds. It was easier than looking at anything else. She had been eating. Whatever had happened to her had arrived in the middle of something ordinary, and the ordinary thing was still there.

“Oh, sweetheart.”

I reached toward her before I stopped myself. Then I bent over and retched onto the concrete. Nothing came up but saliva. My knees kept trying to fold, and I braced a hand against the wall, saying “No” into the barn as though it were an answer somebody might accept.

Beyond her stall, the concrete was wet. Blood had followed the slight slope into the drainage channel, carrying straw and small pieces of tissue toward the back of the building. Something substantial had caught beneath the grate. It shifted in the draining blood like a strand of seaweed.

My phone had no signal.

I knew I needed to go outside. I knew there was nothing in that barn I could mend with a rasp and a bag of nails. But another stall door shuddered, and a hoof dragged across concrete, and Arrow was somewhere beyond the dead mare.

I had held his feet when he was young enough to lean his whole ridiculous body against me. He still tried it sometimes.

I took another step.

In the second loose box, one of the bay Clydesdales lay on his side with his throat pulled open. The wound continued down his chest. One foreleg had been stripped to the long pale bones, but his shoe was still attached. I had replaced it on a separate call eleven days earlier after he pulled the old one off. There was the extra nail hole I'd left empty because the wall was weak.

That small decision sat at the end of him, intact.

Wide strips of hide had been dragged from his shoulder toward the wash bay. The exposed muscle beneath was compressed in four long channels, too deep and too widely spaced for any tool I carried. Plover's wound had the same marks. Whatever had folded her over the partition had held her there while she struggled.

I couldn't make my breathing quiet. Each inhalation hitched and caught. I kept looking at the open entrance, measuring the distance to it, and then back at the horse at the end of the aisle.

In the third loose box, something had torn away the other Clydesdale's lower jaw. His severed head lay on its side in the bedding. Beside it were more strips of hide, laid across one another. The body had been pulled into the adjoining passage.

I backed away.

Behind me, the entrance was a pale rectangle of sky. I could see my van beyond it. My sensible white van with an unpaid insurance renewal in the glove compartment and my coat folded on the passenger seat.

Then Arrow struck his door again.

I turned.

He was in the last stall, his chest pressed to the lower half-door. His ears were forward. His head was high. Across his muzzle the pale blaze I knew had turned pink, but he was standing.

“All right,” I whispered. “All right. I'm here.”

I put my bag down and walked toward him, keeping close to the opposite wall. There was a space between us I could not yet see into: the broad passage to the wash bay, screened by hanging rubber strips.

Arrow's open eyes faced me as I approached.

His body shifted sideways behind the door.

Both front feet stayed where they were.

I stopped.

Something clicked low in the stall. His head dipped, then rose again, and the movement pulled a wet red cord tight beneath his throat.

The cord disappeared behind the rubber strips.

What remained of his body leaned against the partition. There was no hind end. His abdomen opened directly into the straw, where loops of intestine lay beneath him in a pale, glistening heap. A thick band of hide from his chest had been drawn beneath his forelegs and passed over the top hinge. The partition and the taut strip held the front of him upright. The red cord I had mistaken for a rein was intestine, caught around the same hinge and stretched back toward the wash bay.

It was moving his head by moving what remained inside him.

I made a sound I had never heard come out of myself. My bladder let go. I knew it was happening and couldn't stop it, couldn't care, couldn't take my eyes off his muzzle as it bumped the door again.

His lower jaw trembled.

I could not tell whether he was alive.

That uncertainty would stay with me longer than the sight of some of the wounds.

Behind the strips, a hoof settled on concrete.

It was too large.

I had spent fifteen years lifting hooves. I knew their weight, their proportions, the blunt dark crescent they made beneath an animal. This one was broad as the bottom of a bucket. Water ran from it, but the water was thick and black, and something like a fin unfolded against its heel before drawing back into the flesh.

The rubber strips parted.

At first I tried to make two bodies out of it.

A horse, terribly injured. A man bent over its back. Somebody who had been caught in machinery, somebody who could still be helped if I stopped staring and called for an ambulance.

The horse had no skin.

Neither did the man.

Light shone along the wet red arrangements of muscle. Yellow vessels crossed them in branching ropes, carrying something so dark I could see it moving. Where the man's hips should have been, his abdomen widened and disappeared into the horse's spine. The flesh there grew together without a seam. Each time the horse breathed, the ribs of the thing above it opened too.

Its arms hung almost to the floor.

One hand held the cord attached to Arrow. Beneath its other hand lay the stripped hides, pressed against its naked belly. They slid off as it moved, leaving patches of skin dangling from the raw muscle before those, too, fell away.

It had pulled the horses apart with its hands. Now it was trying their coverings against itself, turning the remains over with a dreadful, exploratory patience. I couldn't tell whether it wanted skin or simply hated the fact that they had it. Nothing my grandmother had told me prepared me for that.

The upper head rolled against its shoulder, enormously swollen, its naked jaw working beneath exposed cheek muscles. No lips covered the teeth. Below it, the horse's head pushed through the strips. A single eye burned above nostrils that opened sideways into the meat of its face.

It breathed out.

The smell reached me before the warmth did. Rotting seaweed. Blood left in a closed bucket. A sweetness so concentrated it felt greasy against the tongue. My eyes watered. The back of my throat tightened, and when I coughed, a thread of red spattered my sleeve.

Beside the wash bay, the fern Mr. Stewart kept in an old feed bucket curled inward. Its green fronds darkened while I watched.

I knew its name then.

My grandmother had been from the islands. She had told me things when I was small that my mother called unsuitable, although my mother never objected to the Bible lying open beside her chair. The Nuckelavee had been one of them. The naked thing from the sea. Its dreadful breath, blamed for sickness in horses and ruin in the fields. Its terror of fresh water.

“Sea water belongs to it,” she had told me when I asked how a thing from the sea could fear water. “A burn doesn't. Rain doesn't.”

She had never offered a reason beyond that. The stories gave boundaries, not anatomy. But looking at those exposed vessels, I imagined fresh water entering a body that had never learned to keep itself separate from the salt. I didn't know whether that thought was true. I knew the rain had stopped, and the burn was outside, and I had walked too far from it.

Until that night, the name had belonged to a childhood cupboard: something containing fears I no longer expected to find loose in the house.

Its hand opened. The red cord slipped loose. It caught the band of hide supporting Arrow with one long finger and lifted it off the hinge.

Arrow collapsed.

The sound was terribly small.

I ran.

My heel slipped in the drainage channel. I caught the stall partition with one hand and felt something wet slide beneath my fingers. Behind me, the creature moved. Its hooves struck in an uneven sequence, heavy enough to shake dust from the beams. I snatched at my bag as I passed, caught its edge instead of the handle, and overturned it. Tools scattered across the floor.

The upper body scraped the fluorescent fitting.

Glass broke. The aisle went dark except for the open door, and I ran toward it with my left arm stretched ahead of me, like a child searching for her mother in a crowded shop.

A hand caught my braid.

My head jerked back. I fell against the partition, knocking the breath out of myself. The pull lifted me onto my toes. Hair tore from my scalp in tiny bright points of pain.

Its fingers were closing around more than my hair now. They slid against the back of my neck, wet and shockingly warm. A nail pressed beneath my ear.

My hoof knife was still in the sheath at my belt.

I got it out and sawed upward through the braid. The blade was curved for paring horn, useless for the angle, and I cut my own thumb before enough hair parted to let me drop.

The creature's hand closed on what I left behind. As I scrambled away, I saw it draw the severed braid between the teeth of its upper mouth.

I crawled through the doorway and stumbled into the yard.

I went for the van. Of course I did. I could see it. It had doors that locked, an engine, familiar things that promised to turn this into an event I was leaving behind.

Mr. Stewart was sitting against the front wheel.

For one absurd, relieving instant I thought he had come to help. Then his head lifted without his shoulders moving.

His clean shirt had split from collar to waist. Inside it, the bones of his chest had spread outward. A bruise as black as the fluid in the creature's veins extended from his wounded wrist to his neck, and his skin had begun coming loose along it, peeling beneath the cuff in soft folds. His right hand lay palm-up on the gravel. The fingers had bent backward until the nails touched his forearm.

“Lottie,” he said.

I stopped breathing.

“I brought you.”

His mouth opened again. His jaw moved, but what came out was a wet inward whistle. Beneath the torn shirt, something continued pulling his ribs apart. I saw the muscles tighten against one another with no hand touching them.

He had already been dying at the table. He had made his wife and daughter sit there watching it happen, and brought me in to pretend it was only supper.

I backed against the van and pulled the handle. The door opened.

My coat was on the seat. I got my hand into its pocket, found the keys, dropped them, and heard them strike somewhere beneath the van.

I crouched. His ruined hand moved across the gravel toward mine.

“Wait,” he whispered.

A hoof struck the doorway behind us. I abandoned the keys.

The shortest route to the little bridge ran between the house and the barn, past the doorway where the creature would emerge. I couldn't reach it without running toward that sound. The field and the burn were my only other way out.

The barn lintel cracked behind me.

I ran toward the broken gate.

The creature came down the raised strip of gravel beside the barn, avoiding the flooded hollow in the middle of the yard. It stepped over a puddle and reached toward me instead. The wet field would slow me; perhaps it would slow that thing, too. I clung to the possibility until I heard it leave the gravel.

The burn was perhaps sixty yards away. It might as well have been at the end of my life. The field had been cut low, but the ground was sodden, and each footstep sank deep enough to wrench at my ankles. My chest hurt. My bitten tongue filled my mouth with blood. Behind me came the impact of those hooves, then the softer sounds of hands touching earth.

It was using its arms to run.

Halfway across the field, its breath passed over my shoulder. The grass ahead of me flattened and darkened. I inhaled before I could stop myself and felt something catch inside my lungs, a hot knot that tightened with every attempt to breathe.

I fell onto my knees.

The mud took one boot when I tried to stand. I went down again, scrabbling barefoot in the cold grass. The stream sounded close enough to touch, but the bank was still yards away. Behind me a hand dragged through the earth, tearing the turf in long parallel furrows.

I thought, with a sickening absence of drama, that I wasn't going to get there.

The thought made me sob. I wanted my mother. I wanted someone to know where I was. I had been patient with a frightened mare an hour earlier; I had thought I was a good person for staying until she was comfortable. None of it could help me now.

A finger caught the heel of my remaining boot. I pulled my knee toward my chest and felt the leather slip off. Its grip closed where my ankle had been.

I crawled.

The horses had gathered along the far bank of the burn, their bodies trembling.

The chestnut was nearest, her forefeet in the shallows. She lowered her head until her nose almost touched the surface and looked at me.

I got up.

There was no beautiful explanation for it. I was frightened. I wanted to remain alive. A horse was looking at me, and I could still move my legs.

I reached the bank on buckling legs and tried to jump. The earth crumbled beneath my bare foot. Instead of clearing the water, I fell chest-first into the current. The cold hit hard enough to empty my mind. Water closed over my face. The current rolled me toward the far bank. I grabbed at grass and found mud, grabbed again, and felt a root hold.

Something grazed the sole of my bare foot.

I kicked.

There was a sound above the water, so violent I felt it through my ribs. I surfaced choking. On the farm-side bank the Nuckelavee drew its hand against its chest. Where the stream had touched it, the flesh whitened and split. Black fluid ran from its fingers.

It could not cross.

The knowledge brought no immediate relief. I was still in the water, my legs dragging downstream, my hand loosening around the root. The chestnut stepped toward me, then away, then toward me again. I caught her mane when she lowered her head. She lifted it sharply, and that was enough to get my other elbow onto the bank.

I dragged myself onto the bank beside her forelegs. She startled back, and I lay where she had left me, coughing river water into the grass.

The current had nearly taken me even after the creature failed to. I couldn't feel my feet. My hands were white, and blood from my cut thumb travelled across them without seeming to belong to me.

I started laughing. It broke halfway through into a scream, and I pressed my face to the ground until I could stop.

Across the burn, the creature stood very still.

It lifted my severed braid from between its teeth and held it in one hand.

The swollen upper head bent to examine it. Its fingers separated the strands with a patience that made me begin crying. Then it laid the hair against the raw horse neck, just beneath the upper body's chest.

The strands adhered.

One finger smoothed them flat.

I watched until the chestnut moved between us. Her wet flank filled my vision. Beneath it I could see the creature's feet turn toward the farm.

It went back to the barn.

I followed the burn upstream on the road side, crawling when I couldn't stand. The water had soaked through my pocket and flooded my phone. The screen lit once and went black.

Headlights appeared beyond the bend.

I tried to wave. My arm wouldn't lift high enough. The vehicle slowed anyway, and a woman got out wearing a fleece over her nightdress. I knew her. I had trimmed her Shetlands the previous month.

She said my name, and I screamed when she reached for me.

“It's me. Lottie, it's only me.”

Those were the words I had said outside the barn. I began shaking so badly she couldn't get her coat around me.

She had seen horses on the road and come to find out whose they were. She called an ambulance while I clutched her sleeve, telling her not to take me across the bridge. When she tried to help me into the passenger seat, I looked beneath the vehicle first. I couldn't explain why. I couldn't trust a space I couldn't see.

The relief arrived in painful pieces: her phone working, somebody answering, the door closing beside me. I held the seat belt in both hands because I could feel its edges. Every time the woman looked toward the farm, I begged her to drive.

She did.

Chapter Four: What Followed

In the ambulance I kept asking whether the doors were shut. A paramedic showed me the latch twice. When he put an oxygen mask over my face, I fought him before I understood what it was. He lifted it away, spoke to me until I could follow him, and let me hold it myself.

I spent five nights in hospital. My lungs were inflamed; I had inhaled river water as well as whatever I had breathed in the barn. The doctors asked about chemical storage, agricultural sprays, whether there had been a fire. Their questions gave the night shapes they could treat. I tried to fit my answers inside them.

A nurse washed mud out of my hair. When her fingers reached the torn patches on my scalp, I caught her wrist and apologised so many times she stopped me.

“You're safe here,” she said.

I wanted to believe her enough that I cried.

The first night, every footstep outside my room became a hoof. I kept the curtain open and watched the door until dawn. The second night I fell asleep and woke choking, certain I could smell the harbour. It was a meal trolley. I knew that after the nurse showed me, but knowing didn't make my heart slow down.

Someone brought back one boot, recovered from the field. I asked them to take it away. I didn't want anything from that side of the water near my bed.

On the fourth afternoon I walked to the bathroom without help. I locked the door, saw the back of my head reflected in the second mirror, and couldn't bring myself to turn off the tap.

Mrs. Stewart and her daughter were found on the road beyond the burn. The girl was still holding the kettle. They had gone through the kitchen window while I was in the barn, carrying the fresh water her mother had boiled that morning, before the tap began tasting of salt. The little bridge was too close to the yard. They had waded across farther upstream instead.

Her daughter had seen it first, through the wash-bay window. Mr. Stewart went out to investigate. When he returned, his wrist was injured and he was coughing. Over the next hour his fear hardened into something his wife couldn't reason with. He hid her phone, took the child's, and stood between them and the door. They had been preparing dinner before any of it happened. He ordered them to finish.

His wife thought the injury and whatever he had inhaled had made him delirious. She also knew him well enough to recognise how desperately he wanted to remain the man who could fix everything. When he couldn't save the horses, he decided someone else could. When she tried to leave with their daughter, he held her hard enough to bruise her arm.

He had telephoned me about twenty minutes after returning from the barn. By the time I arrived, his wife and daughter had been trapped with him for more than two hours.

Mrs. Stewart told the police her husband had become confused. He kept insisting the visitor needed someone who understood horses. He believed that if he brought the right person, the rest of them would be allowed to go. There had been no spoken demand. He had watched it holding Arrow upright, moving the ruined animal against the stall door, and decided it was waiting for help.

I thought he had needed a reason it hadn't killed him yet. He had built one large enough to put me inside.

His wife had tried to get us through dinner without giving him cause to hurt the child. When I left for the barn, he followed me into the yard. She heard him shout once, then a heavy impact against the van. She couldn't see what had happened from the kitchen window. That was when she opened it. I had heard neither sound from inside the barn. I couldn't tell her whether he had collapsed against the wheel or something else had put him there.

I understood why she had done what she did. Understanding didn't stop me remembering her hand around my wrist, pulling me into the kitchen.

She asked to visit me in hospital. I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear the thought of her staying away, either.

We spoke once by telephone. She said my name, then began crying, and for a long time neither of us said anything at all.

They recovered Mr. Stewart from the yard and the dead horses from the barn. Three people went in together. All three were sick afterward. The official explanation involved a person with access to the property, some kind of weapon, and a substance the laboratory had not yet identified.

No chemical had yet been identified. That qualification tended to disappear when people repeated the explanation. Soon there had been a spill. Soon the spill accounted for my description of the animal, too.

I let them speak.

Mrs. Stewart told investigators her husband had been clearing storm-cast seaweed from the shore path that afternoon. He burned part of it with old fencing timber in the yard. The smoke drifted seaward after the rain stopped. Later she found wet marks leading from the shore-side track to the stable block.

My grandmother's stories had connected the creature's anger with the burning of seaweed. I couldn't prove a bonfire had called anything ashore. The storm had piled the weed high; the break in the rain had given him time to burn it. Those were facts. The rest lay in the distance between what she remembered and what I had seen.

The rain itself hadn't protected us once it was gone. It had left a swollen burn between the farm and the road. I thought about that often: the same weather that helped make the fire possible had left the one thing I could reach that the creature could not.

The chestnut survived. So did the little cob, the black Shetland, and the two grey Highlands. The old bay died two days later. I was told his heart had failed, and I lay in the hospital bed thinking of the mare waiting in the stream while he struggled toward her.

Nine weeks passed before I worked again.

For the first few, I couldn't climb a flight of stairs without stopping. I let another farrier cover my appointments and couldn't answer when owners asked how soon I'd be back. There were mornings I wanted nothing more than the familiar weight of a hoof in my hands. There were others when I couldn't pass a field without watching the horses until they lifted their heads.

I cut my hair short. The woman at the salon asked whether I wanted to keep the length she removed, and I said no too loudly.

I didn't return because I had recovered. I returned because the bills continued arriving and because I didn't know who I would become if I never touched a horse again.

My first appointment was outdoors, in daylight, with the owner beside me and the gate open.

My hands shook badly on the first call. The horse was patient. I held his foot between my knees and waited until I could trust myself with the knife. His owner stood at his head, pretending not to notice, and I was grateful enough to hate her a little for it.

Eventually the horn came away in pale curls. The rasp settled into its familiar rhythm. For half an hour there was a horse, a foot, a thing I understood how to do. Then he shifted suddenly at a passing tractor, and I dropped the rasp and had to walk away until I could stop shaking.

I needed that half hour.

By then I was working again. Some days I finished every appointment. Some days I sat in the van outside a holding and had to telephone the owner to explain that I could not get out. I kept my keys on me. I looked for water before I opened a barn, although I had never explained that to anyone.

Several weeks later, on a Thursday, I stopped at a farm inland, miles from the shore. The owner had a mare I hadn't met before, young and suspicious, with a dark mane braided for a show. While he fetched her headcollar, I waited beside the loose box.

She put her nose through the bars and smelled my hair.

Then she backed away so quickly her hindquarters struck the wall.

I didn't move.

Over the next partition, another horse lifted its head. Then another. The barn filled with the soft, accelerating sounds of animals shifting their weight, preparing to run.

At the back of my neck, beneath the hair that had begun to grow again, something tightened.

It felt exactly like a hand taking hold of my braid.