Darkside

He remembered the heady smell of the coarse mix and hay; the quiet sounds of hoofs brushing straw over concrete, and the velvet breath of Taffy’s muzzle touching his hair, while all the time he was held down and ordered not to cry while unspeakable things were done to him.

Unspeakable.

He shuddered against Lucy’s back.

‘Jonas?’

But Danny had seen. Danny had known. Maybe Danny had even had the same thing happen to him. He knew that must have been true, because even though they’d never spoken of it – because it was unspeakable – Danny had done something about it.

He’d burned the place down.

Now, here, twenty years later, Jonas’s head pounded and he twitched, as he remembered like a dog.

Going down the row of smouldering stables, roofs caved in and doors thrown open for the ponies to escape. Someone had done that. Someone who loved them had thought of the ponies. But the ponies had not escaped. Terrified by the flames, the ponies had screamed and died in the fire, just as Robert Springer had. Seven sad carcasses still in their boxes. Some so charred that only their legs protruded from a pile of ash, some barely damaged, killed by smoke.

Tigger was half gone but Taffy was unmarked – collapsed against the back wall of his stable, with his legs tucked under his chest, his clever little head bowed gracefully, and his soft lips pressed against the concrete, as if he were lying in a summer meadow nibbling at daisies.

The eighth carcass had already been taken away in an ambulance with a sheet over its blackened, grinning face.

The smell of death was overwhelming.

Turning to his friend through a blur of tears to find comfort in shared misery, Jonas had instead seen pale shock – and guilt.

‘Why didn’t they run away, Jonas? They should have run away!’

The ponies had died because of him. Because he was too weak to stop it.

Jonas started to shake.

‘Sweetheart. What’s wrong?’

‘Danny Marsh is dead,’ he told her bluntly.

And then – finally – he started to cry.

* * *

‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ said Joy Springer. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

Marvel was so surprised that he sloshed Cinzano on the kitchen table. The stuff wasn’t so bad once you got a taste for it.

Joy sat on a kitchen chair, elbows on the table and her glass outstretched for a refill. The old woman’s frizzy grey bun had escaped its grips and she looked like Albert Einstein on a bad-hair day.

‘Why?’ he said – and Marvel didn’t often say that around Joy Springer. He’d soon learned in their almost nightly sessions not to use certain words. Why was high on the list, with its answering convolutions and explanations, although When was the real killer, as it allowed Joy to ramble back over what felt like the last 150 years of her life – none of it of the slightest interest to Marvel. One night she had held him hell-bound, running through the names of her friends from nursery school onwards. No stories, no descriptions, no insightful recollections or pivotal moments – just a litany of meaningless names like a bore of biblical begattings.

‘Nothing,’ she said after a pause, and waggled her glass at him.

Marvel was instantly fascinated. All of a sudden here was something Joy Springer didn’t want to talk about.

‘You knew Danny Marsh?’

‘Years back.’ She shrugged. ‘Something be wrong with your arm, bay?’

But Marvel withheld the bottle and took a deep breath. ‘When?’

The story Joy Springer told was a good one. Everyone has to have one, Marvel reasoned, even if it was bullshit.