Obadiah

Obadiah was a good horse, a strong horse, and one that Pa had always said was born with more skills than Abe would ever acquire.

On days like this, with the sun setting and the and the heat still prickling, Abe almost wished his Pa back to life, if only to prove him wrong about the brute of a Draft and then push him gleefully back into wherever he might have been summoned from.

Take that, Pa.

He thought as he imagined it, wiping the back of his neck with the bit of rag he’d been using to bat flies away from Obadiah’s hind-quarters. He’d found it muddied and musty at the bottom of a potato sack the day before and the powdery earth had shaken out, eventually.

“Come on, you great bastard. Ain’t nothin’ in there bigger than you- chance’d be a fine thing.”

Obadiah grunted and shook his mane, tack jingling.

The idea that they might come across any game in these trees seemed laughable after all these years, though what kept the deer and the birds from making a home here like every other grove was beyond Abe. It was the only thing his Pa had let him go un-berated for not having an answer for, if only because he himself was just as stumped.

‘Maybe they’ve been seein’ your scrawny hide traipsin’ back an’ forth an’ thought there were a curse upon the place.’

Pa had said once, accent thickening with amusement, framed by his young sisters’ snide glances as he struggled across the barn with a saddle bowing his spine.

Whatever their reasons, Obadiah shared in them, and refused to pass through the copse that separated the fields and the stable each and every time he was tasked with it.

Abe swatted at the beast lamely with his cloth and sighed, spitting out a gnat he inadvertently inhaled in the process. They went through this every day, twice a day, and god help him, he wasn’t built to be patient in this heat. He tugged at the reigns for the horse to follow. The horse dug his scuffed silver shoes into the mud. Snorted. A breeze rustled through the branches in the trees ahead and one heavy back hoof planted itself a step backwards in response.

“Ah, y’great bastard…” Abe muttered, stirring the insides of his satchel around like a pudding bowl. He pulled a knife out, then an apple- his apple, he thought ruefully. The tip of the blade sank into the red flesh and then span around awkwardly until one side of it was lopped unevenly off. He held it out. Obadiah liked apples.

The horse’s ears twitched and he stooped, lips peeled back to reveal big tombstone teeth.

Obadiah liked apples very much.

“Not so scared now, are yeh?” Abe led the Draft horse along slowly, eking out the first chunk of the apple as long as he could before the horse got the better of him, and his big, gormless teeth snatched the last of it. Suddenly aware of being tricked, Obadiah’s head jerked back up to alertness and his big black-brown eyes flittered. His ears pricked forwards, stiff. They twitched again.

“Yeah, don’t fret, I’m cuttin’ some more…” Abe’s root knife went back to work in the flesh of the apple, knowing the horse would only dig his heels in once more without bribery.

My apple.

Next to him, hooves shuffled over the dirt track nervously. A long black tail whipped enough to catch Abe’s backside and he paused cutting the apple to swat back with the cloth, missing. A low whinny.

“You’d think you were surrounded by wolves- that you’ve ever seen a damned wolf.”

Not that he’d ever seen a wolf.

“‘Ere- an’ don’t scoff, this time.” More apple waved under Obadiah’s mottled, pink nostrils.

Abe frowned. “What? Gone off my apple now I done cut it with the dirty knife?” He waved it a little closer, and then petulantly poked the horse in the cheek with it. He was ignored, apple and all.

“You like bloody apples!” Abe cried in frustration, shoving the half an apple that was left in his other hand at the horse, too. Never once in his nine years had Obadiah resisted the siren call of a small red fruit that wasn’t damned well his to have.

Thoroughly annoyed, Abe stuffed both bits of apple into his satchel, juices be damned, and wiped his sticky palms on his trousers. Obadiah’s front hooves left the ground and then scuffled back down again, mane splaying into he air for a moment. His wide, doe eyes searched the flora frantically and he snorted again, backing up clumsily toward where they’d had come from.

“Oh no you bloody don’t-” Abe grabbed onto the reigns before Obadiah could undo all his hard fought coercion and tried to bring the horse to a still, rubbing down his thick black neck just how he liked. The cords of muscle beneath his hand were tense. Giant, flared nostrils exhaled like bellows.

“Abe?”

“Ah, now look,” Abe motioned blindly through the trees towards his sister’s distant voice. “Won’t hear the bloody end of it, now. Come on.” He tried pulling the horse along again, grunting.

Why a dray horse, Pa? Why not a normal horse, or a big dog, or-

With no further warning, Obadiah’s immense bulk shifted with a louder whinny than before, and Abe was dragged a dozen feet before letting go of the leather strips.

“You great bastard!” He hollered after the bolting horse, spitting and coughing as he rolled on to his front to push himself back up to his feet. He staggered upright and leaned heavily against a birch, groaned at the scuffs on his shoulder and then rolled it around in its socket. Thin dusk light pattered through the thin canopy above.

The two remaining bits of apple had rolled out onto the patchy grass when he had fallen, sticky insides coated in bits of twig and soil, and he looked at them and then in the direction Obadiah had run. Bloody apple. Bloody oversized donkey.

Behind him, a rustling caught Abe’s attention and he huffed.

“Come back, ‘ave you?” He asked, not bothering to look. “If you’re ‘opin’ for the apple, it’s right down there, y’can get it yerself. All covered in dirt, now, mind, that it’s anyone’s fault but your-” Abe turned.

“What-”

Obadiah’s strong legs were buckling. His knees bent and he stumbled forwards, just about managing to keep himself on his feet.

“‘Ay, now- easy, what-” Abe’s hand came away from the horses neck hot and wet. Obadiah whined hard as Abe pulled his sodden mane back to look at the mess.

Abe wretched. The sight of shredded muscle and flesh was enough, but the abnormal, awful stench- he dropped the mane and looked wildly through the trees, suddenly afraid. Obadiah staggered again. What animal did this? None lived here, not ever, not one.

“It’s alright, boy, it’s-” Something hit him solidly in the side, and he sprawled back onto the ground, twisting and grasping, air forced out of his lungs. Something writhed for footing on the other side of him, and then the curdling sound of fingers digging into the dirt and earth and scrambling back towards him. Whatever it had been, it was coming back, Abe thought hysterically, and it was doing so incredibly fast.

By the time he had righted himself enough to try and glimpse what had attacked him, it was already on him again. Grey, gangly, all sinew and slick with some vile smelling oil, bones protruding freakishly from every joint, every vertebrae. Where its eyes would have been, were two empty pits, with thick, taught-stretched, flesh grown over the sockets. It’s teeth were small and thin and plentiful, and protruded inward, upward, and outward from its gigantic, low-hanging jaw. It sank them straight through Abe’s hand, tore through the muscles and the small, snappable bones, then let go, only to sink them back into his arm as he screamed and tried to roll away.

A second later, and the weight of it, the smell of it, was flung from his side and Abe vaguely registered the sound of it wetly hitting a tree as he spluttered and stared at his hand in paralysed horror. Obadiah had turned, lurched onto his front legs, and kicked at the demon with all the might of the 19 hand draft horse Abe’s Pa just had to have. His roar carried high on the fast-cooling night air as he turned back, snorted hard, his adrenaline-fuelled hooves hitting the ground solidly enough to spray earth and torn grass. His ears were pinned fast to his skull.

The sound of fingers.

Obadiah was a good horse, a strong horse. Abe lost his grip on the world around him to the sounds of kicking, and ripping, and the resounding thud of all 19 hands crushing a horror into the ground by two thirds of an apple.