A Collapse of Horses

by Brian Evenson

  “Why?” she said. “Do you know where to find a corpse?”

  “Yes,” it said. “Any corpse.”

  She wondered at the locution, then shook her head and slung her grapple over her shoulder. She stepped out into the sun. “Well,” she said. “Where is it?”

  They crowded around her, jostling her, pressing her tightly. They were awkward, ungainly in their armatures, but by the time she realized what they were doing, it was too late, there were too many of them. She struck a few away with her stick and managed a few steps, but several had already taken their place, and there was nowhere to go. They kept clawing at her, dragging at her, trying to pull her down. She fell quickly to her knees. She tried to turn back to the mouth of the cave. She got her hand on her grapple, but her arms were pressed down now, and she couldn’t raise it to strike. She opened her mouth and screamed, and something filled her mouth. A few moments later she was dead.

  Soon everything was as it had been, the furnishers standing at a distance with their cloth bags, bowing. One of them, a representative or envoy, approached and spoke to the woman’s body.

  “Any corpse,” it said, and extended what in the armature passed for a hand. “Person pay well.”

  It stayed there, false hand extended, patiently awaiting its reward, its fellows attentive and eager behind it.

  II.

  When he awoke, a shower of raw flesh had fallen upon the field. It lay there, glistening in the sun. Where were the furnishers today? he wondered. Usually they were here and eager, scavenging the fields and then trying to sell to him. Sometimes, he had to admit, he bought, but only after the flesh was smoked. One smoked meat was like another, he had come to feel, and if you were to eat any flesh, what did it matter what flesh it was? He had even, he had to admit, acquired a taste for it.

  In the back of his cave, he blew the embers into flame and heated water, adding the old and sodden leaves to it. They barely changed the water’s color now, even when he squeezed them. No, he would have to go back soon. There was little for him here.

  Some of the ports of the tablature were starting to rust, and these he rubbed with sand until they shined. He polished the surface, rubbing it with the chamois, then nicked his arm slightly, just below the elbow, and let a few drops of blood fall on the surface. These he rubbed over the surface with the chamois, until they were spread so thin as to be invisible.

  He went back to the mouth of the cave. Still the furnishers had not come. Flies had begun to gather on the hunks of flesh.

  He slipped into his boots and began to walk the field, careful where he stepped. No, only bits and pieces, hardly anything recognizable, nothing large. A finger there, but stripped mostly of skin and the nail and bits of its meat gone. Even with a full finger he might have been able to get the tablature to do something. He searched and prodded, but no, nothing.

  Near the edge of the field, he caught sight of a group of furnishers. They were on the edge of the next field, the ditch lying between them and him, and there were more of them than he had ever seen in one place, several dozen at least. One was beckoning to him, or gesticulating in a way he took to be beckoning. He still wasn’t altogether sure how to interpret their gestures.

  “Person,” the creature started saying when it believed it had gotten his attention. “Person, hear and see!”

  He walked to the edge of his field, heard the startled gasp of the furnishers as he crossed the field’s border. He stood on his side of the ditch, looking over.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Query: person buy?” the furnisher asked, the horde behind him rumbling some muted variation of his words, like an echo.

  “What do you have?” he asked. “Flesh?”

  “Flesh,” said the furnisher. “Flexible organs still capable of speech. Whole flesh.”

  “Whole flesh,” he said. “What do you mean? A body?”

  The furnisher flinched. “Query: person buy?” it said again. “Query: person pay well?”

  “There is no occupant of this field?” he asked.

  “No occupant of field,” the furnisher confirmed.

  He slid down the bank of the ditch and up the other side and into the other field.

  The body was fresh, as fresh as any he’d ever seen. It was a woman’s body. It did not look as if it had fallen; the limbs were intact, the bones seemingly unbroken, the lips blue, cuts and a few deeper wounds running up and down the arms and torso. He could not tell what had caused them.

  “Where did you find this?” he asked.

  “Field,” the furnisher said. “A good find. Query: you pay well? Let it be written and beads exchanged.”

  He nodded and asked how much. When the envoy told him, he reached into his purse and fished out a handful of beads, which he piled in a heap beside the body.

  The furnisher refused to take them. It was, he remembered too late, the haggling that they enjoyed as much as the beads themselves. And so he put most of the beads away and started dickering.

  It was hard not to be impatient. Every moment they delayed, the body lost tractability. The skin was already lying differently on the bones. But he bargained back and forth with the envoy until, at last, the furnishers had a neat stack of beads and were satisfied.

  He left them gathered together staring at the pile of beads. He passed the hook beneath the jaw of the corpse and up through the bottom of the mouth until he could see the tip of it glinting between the teeth. Fastening his cord to the hook’s eye, he flung it over his shoulder. He dragged the body through the scattered flesh and along over the dips and swells and grasses and rocks and stones, then down into the ditch and back up again and back to his own field and to his cave.

  There, he slung the dead body onto the tablature and worried it. He suppled its wounds and infused a clear fluid into its veins. He washed the dirt from the body and cleared its skin of clotted gore. The lungs he inflated with a small bellows inserted down the windpipe, watching the chest rise.

  He struck the chest twice, muttering. The jets of the tablature began to hiss lightly. He carefully opened the body cavity and reached in, slitting the integument surrounding the organs, and grasped the heart, slowly massaging it. He rearmed the tablature, then withdrew his hand and sprayed foam into the incision.

  He waited. At length the congealed blood became liquid and warm. It oozed out of the wounds, slowly becoming paler, finally stopping. The fibers were called to action beneath the gelid breast, and the nerves mimicked the instinct of life. The eyes shuttered open, like the eyes of a doll. They roiled independently in their sockets, only slowly coming to focus on him. The eyeballs were already losing their turgidity, he saw, beginning slowly to deflate.

  “Awake,” he said. “Ye who lie dead.”

  The corpse tried to speak, sputtered, coughed out a plug of black bile. Bloody flux welled from the hole beneath her chin. She swallowed, tried again.

  “Dead?” her broken voice said with a kind of wonder, as if she didn’t believe.

  “Where are your treasures?” asked the man. “What are the mysteries of this place? Show me.” He tugged on the hook run through the jaw.

  “Who are you?” asked the corpse. “And what are you to me?”

  “You must tell,” said the man. “I control thee.”

  But the corpse was trying to rise, was grasping at his hands and arms. “Here,” the corpse was saying. “I have been waiting for you. I have spent many days hungry and waiting, and now you are here. You have fallen from the sky. Lay yourself upon my tablature, and soon we will both have what we want.” But her movements were muddy and sluggish, and it was easy for the man to shake her off.

  This corpse has gone mad, he thought. Another part of him thought, This corpse thinks she is me and knows my thoughts.

  “The mysteries,” the man said again. “You shall tell me of them and then I shall be your voice to the living, to tell the living of what you were when you were alive.”

  The corpse stopped, hesitated.
Slowly the mouth split wide, and she began to make a choking noise the man took some time to realize was laughter. “Ah, very good,” she said in between gasps. “They had me good and proper. Very good indeed.”

  He applied pressure to one temple with the chisel, breaking just through the bone, and the corpse stopped laughing.

  “Speak!” he commanded again.

  For a long time she was silent. Just when he had decided she had become a simple corpse again, she spoke. “I shall tell you a story,” she said.

  “A story?” he said.

  “A story,” she said. “About a man and a woman, in which one could be the other and the other could be the one, and each to each, and both puppets of a handful of beads.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, raising his eyebrows with surprise. “I do not understand this story. Is your only treasure beads? I warn you, do not try to deceive me.”

  “I do not deceive you,” she said. “You deceive yourself.”

  “Speak clearly,” he said. “No parables, no stories, no riddles, just plain speaking from beginning to end.”

  She raised her head slightly and moved her lips, and he, thinking she was whispering something, leaned closer. But when he did, she spat full in his face with a force and vehemence he had never known the dead to possess. He stumbled back, wiping the spittle away. She tried to stand again and this time sat up and slid jerkily off the tablature. She took a step toward him and suddenly stopped, then spoke, swaying.

  “There, in the distant city, there came . . .” she said, and trailed off.

  And then she collapsed in a heap. Despite his best efforts, she could not be revived again.

  III.

  He made a fire and roasted her, the black smoke pouring out of the mouth of the cave. She would last him many months, he thought. As her skin split from the heat and her flesh bubbled, he jotted notes to himself about what she had said, what he had said and done. He had, he told himself, made progress, even if he had little, if anything, to show for it. Next time would be different.

  When he judged her cooked, he rolled her body out of the fire with his boots, left her steaming and smoking on the stone beside, the fat rendered from her flesh darkening the cave floor. Furnishers, he saw, had gathered around the mouth of the cave, eager and attentive but unwilling to disturb him.

  “Person: good flesh,” one of them called.

  “Yes,” he said. “Very good flesh.”

  Later he would cut and joint her. Some could be eaten immediately, the rest he should carefully preserve. No doubt parts would have to be cooked longer, smoked. It was just meat, he told himself, meat like any other. Though that was not, he knew inside, why he chose to partake of it.

  “This was a good one,” he said again, turning to the mouth of the cave. “Can you bring me another as good?”

  “Query: as good?”

  “As whole,” he said. “As complete.”

  The furnisher envoy shivered. What did that mean? Was it the same furnisher he had spoken to in the fields, or did they take turns serving as envoy? He couldn’t tell one from another.

  “Query: any?” it said.

  “What?” he asked, confused.

  “Query: any corpse?” it asked.

  “Any corpse?” he said. “I suppose so, as long as it’s a whole corpse. As long as it’s a good one.”

  “Any corpse,” it said.

  “Yes, any.”

  It turned to consult with the others. They conversed for a long while in their odd language. They kept gesticulating, arguing among themselves, or so it seemed to him. Finally the envoy turned back.

  “Please to proceed out of cave,” the envoy said.

  “Why?” he said. “You know where to find a corpse?”

  “Yes,” it said. “Any corpse.”

  “As good as this?” he said, gesturing to the charred meat beside him.

  “Any corpse,” it said, and flinched. It raised its armature in a way that revealed a series of barbs on the dark body enclosed within. “Person, please out of cave.”

  The Moans

  At first everyone told him the back porch was haunted and invited him to throw his rucksack in one of the other rooms, share an already shared bed or curl up on the floor. But when he pressed them, they said, well, no, not haunted exactly, not haunted all the time, anyway. You only felt it was haunted when you were flying.

  “Flying?” he asked, thinking his English must not be as good as he’d thought.

  “Tripping,” said the woman whose name was Hannah but who called herself Little God. “Stoned.”

  Ah, yes, he had learned those slang terms, he understood. Flying was the same? But in that case he would be okay, he would not be haunted, for he was here to observe the community, to be in it for a time but not part of it, and he was a teetotaler.

  “A what?” whispered Little God, smoke curling out of the corners of her mouth. Was it the wrong word? “Whatever, man,” she said, “it’s all good.”

  It was all good, for now he had a room to himself. Or something like a room, since the way they had nailed up the scrap lumber to close off the porch still allowed the wind to whistle in. He bought a lamp from the thrift store down the street and ran in an extension cord; there was half a mattress in the porch room, and if he put his rucksack at the bottom just right, he could sleep comfortably enough. There was a stack of broken chairs that Summer or Fawnstar—could that possibly be her name, anyone’s name, a name someone had actually chosen?—claimed to be planning to repair but never looked at. Other than that, there was just him.

  During the day he moved through the collective and observed. At first he made notes on what everyone was doing, but then the man called Big Dig told him no, it wasn’t cool, observation could mess with their rhythm, that you start writing things down and they change, recording something changes it, so he stopped taking notes. He just watched and then later, on the porch, he would write down what he could remember, whatever he thought might be important.

  And Big Dig was right. Before, everybody had been playing to him and his notepad. Now that he wasn’t taking notes, after a while everybody just kind of ignored him; they bumped and jostled around him, passed the pipe right past him, reached around him for a glass or a plate. It was as if he wasn’t there, as if he was a ghost. Which was funny in a way, considering he was living in the haunted room. In the community but not part of the community, he thought. He liked it. It was like being alive and dead at the same time, or being alive but being the only one who knew you were.

  He got so used to them not noticing that it was a surprise when, suddenly, one did. It was Little God, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was stoned, even more so than usual; her dull eyes swept past him and then swept back, made an effort to focus as if seeing him for the first time, as if he was difficult to see. “You’re still here?” she said. “I thought you’d left.”

  Yes, he claimed, he was.

  “Still writing about us?” she asked.

  Yes, he admitted, though in a way he wasn’t anymore, had stopped recording much of anything in his notebook. He was still there, but wasn’t sure what exactly he was doing now.

  Little God nodded. She turned and stretched backwards, grabbed a sheet of pink paper covered with a series of blurred, blotted red images from behind her. She tore a square of the sheet off and handed it to him, but even looking at one of the images up close he wasn’t sure what it was. It was a face, maybe. Maybe human, maybe not.

  “Thank you, no,” he said and pushed the square back toward her.

  But Little God just shook her head. And when he kept his hand held out, she lazily reached out with both her own. With one, she took the square; with the other, she reached out as if in slow motion and touched his lips, parting them with her fingertips. He let her do it and let her, a moment later, place the paper on his tongue. It tasted slightly bitter, but only slightly. She kept her finger there, just inside his mouth. “Just hold it there,” she said, “don’t s
wallow it.” And when he nodded, she slowly withdrew the finger.

  Maybe it was a defective tab, because nothing was happening. “Just wait,” Little God said. “It’ll come.” But it didn’t come. How much time went by? It felt like a lot of time, hours perhaps, but the hands on the clock hadn’t seemed to move much. What time had it been when she gave him the tab? He couldn’t remember. But every time he looked at the clock, the hands seemed to be in the same place.

  “Where are you going?” Little God asked.

  What? He hadn’t been aware he was going anywhere, but yes, it looked as if he was on his feet. He was so concerned about what would happen once the drug started working that he wasn’t paying attention, really. He was anxious. He needed to stop being anxious since the drug wasn’t working, it was a defective batch, or his tab hadn’t gotten painted properly, if that was how they got the acid on it—how was he supposed to know how they got the acid on it? He wasn’t an expert, he never claimed to be.

  A voice was calling from behind him, and it took him a moment to realize it was Little God. Where are you going? she was calling out, or rather had called out—it was hard to know if it was happening or already had happened. And there was his own voice, coming from a place where he knew his body not to be. Who had gotten hold of his voice? To my room, the voice said from behind him, and yes, that made sense, because his body already was there, already in the porch room, waiting for the voice to catch up.

  Once there, once around his familiar things, everything seemed fine again, normal. Yes, that was all he needed, some time to himself. He’d just imagined everything, nothing was really happening, he was just fine. He picked up a book, began to flip through it.

  For a moment the letters had a startling crispness and clarity, then they began to pulse slightly. When I have killed, he read, I make a pile of stones, a cairn, and I set in my memory who it was, what it was died there and how. My mind is shaped like a map of these cairns.

  Excuse me? he thought. What book was this? He tried to turn it over to look at the title, but no matter how he turned the book he couldn’t see the cover. And when he turned the page of the book, it was still the same page and the same words, and somehow he knew they were words of a book that hadn’t been written yet, that what he was reading wasn’t a book, or not yet a book, but that he’d plucked something out of a web of a future time without getting entangled himself, like a ghost might.