Uchenna's Apples (21 page)

“Mammy—” Uchenna said. “I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t, I—”

Her Mam reached out and squeezed her hand, shook her head. “You’re going to tell me the whole thing from beginning to end when we get home,” she said. “But meanwhile we’d better see what’s happening here.” She got up. “Doris? You with me?”

Emer’s Mom was already heading for the door. “You kidding, Flora?” she said. “Anything that makes that senior a cop move that fast
has
to be worth seeing!“

And they were out the office door, gone.

Uchenna couldn’t remember that she’d ever been happier to leave a room, not even after her last visit to the dentist when she had three cavities drilled one after another. 

When she reached the school’s main doors, they were just swinging shut behind Mr. Mallon and several other teachers who were following him out. Uchenna’s Mam pushed them open, and she and Emer’s Mom went out and then stopped at the top of the stairs down into the schoolyard, staring as far as they could down the street in the thick mist that still covered everything, astonished by the noise they all heard rattling off the plate glass and steel of the shops and apartment buildings down the road: hooves. Hoofbeats loud as gunshots, cracking on the hard road in an assault of noise on the ear, though the sound was oddly dulled by the thick fog: and horns honking in the mist too, and two-tone sirens blaring, with headlights and flashing blue lights glowing faintly away down the street in the fog—

Uchenna’s Mam and Emer’s Mom ran down the stairs to join the crowd of adults and kids late out of school who were all gathered around the school gate, all desperately interested in finding out what was happening, but all also a little too nervous to strike out on their own. People were pushing back from the road, pushing toward it, pulling kids out of the way, calling advice to each other, shouting, as the horses came plunging down out of the mist, straight the main street of Adamstown toward the business centre and the school and the midtown shops. It was the three boy horses and the fourth one, the Mammy Horse’s girlfriend. They were running from side to side of the street, confused in the fog, shying away from car doors that opened unexpectedly in front of them, neighing in annoyance and fear. For a few moments they slowed down a little, just down the block from the school, near the Spar minimarket: but then the Spar’s doors flew open and a bunch of kids ran out to see what was happening, and the horses panicked again and once more started to run. They galloped past the school gates, manes flying: one of the black and white “boyfriends” skidded on the hard smooth road surface, nearly fell, then caught himself near a Toyota Prius that was parked near the school gate. His eyes were rolling and his teeth were bared as he kicked it hard with a hind foot, making a foot-deep dent in its left rear door before running after the others—

Behind the horses came a little white utility van, like a small estate car with its rear windows blocked up. It was blowing its horn, the driver hunched over the wheel and hard to see: after him came a Garda car, its lights and siren going. The horses shied again in the middle of the street, skidding and bumping into each other: the white car almost hit one of them, veered around it crazily, veered again to miss a car that appeared suddenly out of the fog in the opposite lane, and then turned into Station Road and sped out of sight of the school gate.

Off to one side, Uchenna caught sight of the Garritys. Mr. Garrity was standing there staring in amazed horror at the madness in the street. “You bleedin eedjits, have ya never caught a horse before?!” he yelled. “Turn off those feckin sirens before you have the beasts runnin’ in front of the next train!”—and a second later Jimmy’s dad and mam were off in the wake of the Garda car, running past it as it slowed, as the horses in front of it stared around them, saw the end of the street near the train station, and started trotting toward it.

The whole space in front of the school was now a bedlam of honking horns and shouting voices, people pushing and yelling in all directions, kids in football strip mingling with kids in civvies and adults in suits and dresses, teachers from school or business people from the offices in the nearby buildings. In the midst of all the craziness, Uchenna caught sight of Jimmy, left behind on the pavement by his parents—or maybe they just didn’t realize yet that he hadn’t followed them. Jimmy caught Uchenna’s glance, made a gesture like somebody holding a giant beach ball in front of their gut, and then spread his hands, a “where?” gesture.

Uchenna’s eyes went wide. She immediately understood that he’d noticed what she had: the Mammy Horse was nowhere to be seen. “Eames,” she said, for Emer was next to her, watching both their mothers, neither of whom was paying them any attention at the moment, “the Mammy Horse! Come on!”

The two of them pushed their way hurriedly through the crowd, over to Jimmy. “She’s not up the road anywhere I can see,” he said. “If they were up in O’Shaughnessy’s field—”

“I don’t care how haunted it is, we have to go,” Uchenna said. They started running up the road. A thought hit her. “Your phones,” she said to Emer and Jimmy, reaching into her pocket, “turn ‘em off!”

They did, and kept running. A couple more Garda cars with their lights going, but mercifully no sirens, materialized out of the fog and headed toward them. Uchenna’s heart started pounding at the thought that maybe somebody had noticed them going, maybe Sergeant Moran had sent more Guards to look for them—but the car just kept on going, and the driver paid no attention to them at all. “And where were you this morning?” Uchenna said to Jimmy as they ran.

He gave her an annoyed look. “I was sick.”

“Oh, sure!”

“You great eedjit,” he said, “sometimes people really just get sick, you know? Still don’t feel so great.” Then he grinned. “Glad me mam and dad dragged me in here, though, even though they were so pissed. Wouldn’t have wanted to miss this—”

They kept running. Uchenna’s heart was still beating fast, not just because of the running, but of everything together: the awful time in the Headmaster’s office, her Mam being angry at her and then maybe not so angry any more, the scary excitement of the horses running down the road—but also more and more, as they got further away from the center of town, the way the fog seemed to be getting thicker, the way everything was getting strangely quiet, even the sound of their own running feet now muffled in the thickening mist. After a few minutes they had almost run out of the built-up part of town and were at the edge of another of the developments that were furthest west, and they slowed as Jimmy looked around him. It was hard to see anything in this strange afternoon murk: the street and the houses around it were shadows, fading away into the silvery nothingness after just a few feet. After a moment Jimmy said, “This way—”

He led them down a paved path between a couple of houses and into an area Uchenna had never seen before, a wide concrete space with strange lumps and humps of higher concrete in the middle of it. “There was a gas station here once,” Jimmy said. “They wanted to build something new on it, but the owner wouldn’t let them: so they just knocked the old place down—”

He led them along to the back of the property, where a chainlink fence stretched from side to side of the concrete walls that backed up the last apartment building on the right and the first mini-housing estate on the left. Someone had cut through the links of the fencing, though, and pulled it right back to make an opening ten or twelve feet wide. There were horse trailers off to one side, open, their back door-ramps down. But everything here was abandoned for the moment. Whoever had brought the horse boxes here had left them to go chase after the horses. Past the horse boxes, on the other side of the fence—

There was no telling
what
was there: beyond the concrete, and the visible patches and tufts of damp, dust-grayed weeds, everything was obscured in a shroud of silvery fog. Uchenna shivered. The warming effects of their run were wearing off: now that fog was starting to feel chilly. Next to her, Emer was looking a little dubious too. “Those stories everybody was telling, about stuff that happened in here—”

Jimmy, beside them, went over to the fence, stopped there. “I don’t know—”

From somewhere ahead of them in the mist came a strange strangled-sounding neigh.

“I don’t care!” Uchenna said, and went quickly through the gap in the fence, watching where she walked: the fog was literally so thick now that you could barely see your feet. The field on the other side of the fence was as bad as the field near the Condom Ditch, all ruts and raised tufts of weed and hillocks of stony dirt. Behind her she could hear Emer and Jimmy scuffling along through the weeds, and Emer cursing softly to herself as she ran into a patch of nettles that Uchenna had somehow missed.

Uchenna was still shivering.
Just cold,
she kept saying to herself,
it’s just cold…
But then she started shivering really hard, because she saw something in front of her, on the ground, lying there very still: something white, something big—

Oh no! She’s dead!
was Uchenna’s first thought. But then the big white mass moved in a convulsive heaving shudder, and that scared her even more than the Mammy’s stillness had. Uchenna stopped still right where she was, staring—

The shape moved again. This time Uchenna could get a sense of what she was looking at. The Mammy Horse was lying on the ground: Uchenna was looking at her from behind. But there was something wrong with her back end. It looked weird—

Uchenna’s insides seized. “Oh holy God, look at that,” she said. “Something’s sticking out her back end—”

Emer came up beside her, and gasped. Then Jimmy caught up with them, and stared. “She’s having it!” he said.

“What
is
that?” Emer said, sounding very freaked out.

“It’s hooves,” Jimmy said. “The foal’s hooves. They come out first.”

Uchenna wanted to hide her eyes to stop seeing what she was seeing, except that wouldn’t do the Mammy Horse any good. “What do we do?” she said to Jimmy. “How can we help her? Should she be lying down like that?”

He frowned, moved closer to the Mammy. “Maybe not,” he said. “I’m not sure. Mostly they do it standing up—”

“This time,” Emer said, “I think we really better call for help—”

Uchenna couldn’t argue the point. “Go ahead,” she said, moving around the front of the Mammy. “But I don’t know—”

The Mammy Horse’s belly heaved. “Might not be time,” Jimmy said, joining Uchenna around the front.

“What do I do? Do I call 999?” Emer said, hurriedly getting her phone out.

The Mammy Horse made a noise like a moan, sucked in a big breath, moaned again. “Yeah,” Uchenna said. “Ask for the police. They’re all over the place in town—we should be able to get some of them back up here! And they should know who brought these horse boxes. There must be somebody with them who can help the Mammy—”

Jimmy was studying the Mammy’s head. “She’s still got that old halter on her!” he said. “Let’s see if we can get her up.”

Emer frantically started dialing. Uchenna and Jimmy both grabbed the halter and hauled on the Mammy’s head. She grunted and strained, waving her legs around. “Not that way,” Jimmy said. “Toward the legs! That way maybe she’ll roll over toward them—”

They both pulled. Uchenna heard Emer babbling something into the phone, but she couldn’t take the time to pay attention to it: all her attention was on the Mammy’s eye, so placid once, now wide and rolling with distress. The eye closed, opened again: the big pink nostrils blew, sucked air, blew again. Suddenly the Mammy rolled over, got her front legs under her, sort of knelt on them, and then, with more puffing and blowing, staggered to her feet.

She wobbled, and Uchenna and Jimmy staggered into each other, both holding onto the halter. The Mammy Horse put her head down until the front of it pushed up against the front of Uchenna, as if she was bracing herself. To keep from losing her balance, Uchenna threw her arms around the big head. That horsy smell, part mud, part sweat, part green grass, filled Uchenna’s nostrils for a moment, distracting her—until she heard a heavy noise, a kind of wet thud on the ground, like someone dropping a really full bin bag—

“Wow,” Jimmy said, staring.

“What?” Uchenna said, peering around.

And then she saw. Something was moving around behind the Mammy on the ground. It was blotchy and splotchy and shiny-wet, black and white and brown, and suddenly it started waving little skinny legs in all directions, thrashing and staring with eyes that were amazingly big for such a little head.

The Mammy pulled her head out of Uchenna’s grip and turned around to sniff at the new foal, poking its head with her big blunt nose and licking it once or twice. The strange wet little face waved its ears at her, blinked a couple of times—the eyes were absolutely black-dark, with no whites that Uchenna could see—and all of a sudden rolled over more or less the same way the Mammy had. It looked like it was kneeling forwards on its knobbly front knees and apparently backwards on its back ones, and when the Mammy snuffled it between its ears, it got up all at once, in a rush, as if it had springs. It stood there with its skinny legs all spraddled away from it, trying to get its balance.

Emer was putting her phone away. Somewhere in the distance Uchenna could hear sirens, suddenly cut off as they got closer.

“Don’t,” she said. “Your phone camera’s better than mine. Take a picture, quick! So I can see how their legs go.”

Emer pulled her phone out again, circled carefully around the Mammy and the foal, and started taking pictures. “How can something so cool,” she said under her breath, “be so gross. Or the other way around…”

“There’s more stuff coming out,” Jimmy said.

“I’m not looking!”
Emer said. She closed her eyes and tried to take more pictures: then let out a hiss of annoyance at herself, opened her eyes again, and kept snapping, though she made a lot of faces while she did it.

Uchenna went slowly closer to the foal, watching the Mammy carefully: but the Mammy didn’t seem to care, just snuffled her baby again and poked it with her head. The foal’s ears wiggled around some more, and then it put its head underneath the Mammy’s still-saggy tummy and started having its first drink of milk. “Look at that,” Uchenna said, as Emer came up beside her. “Its hooves are
white.”