The Scorpio Races

legs and we lean back against the wall of the lean-to. Finn, sensing my black mood, clinks the edge of his bowl against mine as a cheers. Dove stands half in and half out of the lean-to and picks at her hay. I have a clear view of the scratch on her neck from here, and again, I hear the sound of my cry on the cliff top. I can’t stop wondering what would’ve happened if I’d just galloped with them when they’d first asked. I can’t stop seeing their faces as they pulled their horses back from Dove.

For a few minutes, we’re all silent, slurping potatoes and broth, listening to Dove’s teeth grinding up the expensive hay and the sound of the light rain whispering across the metal roof of the lean-to. Finn piles more hay across his legs for insulation. Outside, the sky is going blue-brown and black at the edges.

“She looks faster already,” Finn says. He slurps the bottom of his soup to annoy me, and then smacks his lips to make sure he’s succeeded.

I set my own empty bowl on the hay bale behind me and take a piece of bread. My stomach still feels empty. “Can you come at me again with that sound? I don’t think I heard you.”

“You’re in a black mood,” Finn says.

I think of three things I could reply to that and in the end just shake my head. If I say it out loud, it will only make it harder to forget.

Finn is enough of a private creature that he doesn’t try to make me speak. He spreads the hay thin and then thick again over his legs, trying to make it even. After a long pause, he says, “What do you think will happen?”

“Happen when?”

“With the race. And with Gabe. What do you think will happen to us?”

Crossly, I throw a stick of hay toward Dove. “Dove will eat her expensive food and the capaill uisce will eat beef liver and the bets will all be against us, but on the day of the race it’ll be warm and windy and Dove will go straight while the others go right, and we’ll be the richest people on the island. You’ll drive three cars at the same time and Gabe will decide to stay and we’ll never have to eat beans again.”

“Not that one,” Finn says, like he’d asked for a story and I’d picked the wrong one. “What will really happen.”

“I’m not a fortune-teller.”

“What about if you don’t win? I’m not saying anything bad about Dove. But what if she doesn’t make any money?”

I glance at him to see if he’s picking at his arms yet, but he’s just mutilating a piece of hay. “We lose the house. Benjamin Malvern kicks us out.”

Finn nods at his hands, like he’d guessed this before. Gabe had underestimated both of us.

“And then I guess…” I try to imagine what it will look like if I fail. “I guess I will have to sell Dove. And we’d have to find someplace to live. If we got a job, the living could come with it, if it was something like… cleaning. Or at the mill. There’s mill housing.”

No one wants a life at the mill.

I try to think of something else truthful but not so dire. “Gratton said he was eyeing you as an apprentice. I know you couldn’t, but maybe he’d consider me instead…”

Finn says, “I’d do it.”

“You couldn’t bear it.”

He’s demolished the hay in his hands; it’s just dust. “You couldn’t bear to ride in the race, either, but you are. I reckon I could learn to bear it, if I had to.”

I don’t want him to learn to bear it, though. I want to keep my sweet, innocent brother the way he is, and I want to keep my best friend Dove here beside me and I don’t want to trade the house I grew up in for a tiny flat and a mill job.

“But it won’t happen that way,” I say. “The first way is how it’s going to happen.”

Finn shreds another piece of hay. So does Dove.

And, just then, there’s an odd creak.

The lean-to’s metal roof is old, so there’s plenty to creak there, and its one wall forms part of the fence, so where the boards meet the posts of the lean-to, there’s yet another chance of creaking. And the fence itself is not the youngest thing on the island, so, really, it could creak anywhere there’s a joint.

But this isn’t that sort of creak.

It’s more like a creak plus a knock. Not quite a knock. Softer. A pat. I can’t think of how I even heard it, really, once I think about it, until I see Finn looking at me, completely still, and realize I didn’t just hear it – I felt it.

Finn and I both turn our heads toward the lean-to wall that we lean against.

I want to say, Maybe it was Puffin. But Dove has stopped chewing and has pricked her ears toward the sound, though of course there’s nothing to see. I don’t think she’d prick them for a cat.

Finn and I sit motionless. The drizzle goes ssssss on the roof. We’re trying not to look at each other, because looking would make it harder to hear. There’s nothing. Nothing at all. Just the rain on the roof. Dove’s still listening, but there’s nothing to hear. It was just the lean-to settling. Our little electric lantern makes a circle of yellow up on the ceiling. The world is quiet.

Then:

Whuff

And the unmistakable sounds of slow steps on the other side of the wall.

It’s not the sound of feet.

It’s the sound of hooves.

We stare at each other.

There is the creak-pat again, and this time, we both know what it is. I feel the experimental push on the other side of the wall and I bite my lip, hard. With a questioning expression, Finn puts a finger on the switch to the electric light. I shake my head furiously. The only thing I can think of that’s worse than facing a capall uisce in this drizzly night is to do it without light.

Instead, I start to burrow down into the hay blanket I’ve made; slowly, to keep the pieces from making noise. Finn immediately follows my lead. Dove’s ears swivel to follow an invisible signal on the other side of the wall. If I strain my ears, I can hear the sound of a hoof hitting the ground, then another. Another exhale of breath, no louder than the rain on the roof.

I don’t know what the capall uisce is doing. Maybe it’ll lose interest. Maybe it’ll be discouraged by the fence between it and us. In my head, I trace the steps we’d have to take to get back to the house: around the other side of the lean-to, down two sections of fence, over the metal-tube gate, then fifteen feet to the door.

Maybe one of us would get over the gate in time. That’s not enough.

The night is dark and silent. I strain my ears for another hoofstep. Dove’s attention remains fixed on the last point where the sound came from. Finn, mostly covered in hay, meets my gaze. His jaw’s clenched.

The mist hisses over the roof. Water drips down off the edge of the metal, one drop, two drops at a time, making a soft, barely audible sound when it lands on the ground. Somewhere far away, I hear what sounds like a car engine, maybe. The wind teases the hay. There’s nothing from the other side of the wall.

Dove jerks to attention.

Looking in the side of the lean-to is a long black face.

It is the devil.

It takes everything in me not to whimper. The creature is black as peat at midnight, and its lips are pulled back into a fearsome grin. The ears are long and wickedly pointed toward each other, less like a horse and more like a demon. They remind me of shark egg pouches. The nostrils are long and thin to keep the sea out. Eyes black and slick: a fish’s eyes.

It still stinks like the ocean. Like low tide and things caught on rocks. It’s barely a horse.

It’s hungry.

The capall uisce has hooked its head around the side of the lean-to, over the fence. All that stands between us and its strangely light grin is three boards that I nailed up myself while Mum watched. Three nails, not two, into each, because ponies, she said, will test everything.

And now this night-black horse presses its chest against them. Not hard. Only as hard as it had pushed against the lean-to wall.

The nails creak.