You ever feel like nothing scares you anymore?
There’s gotta be a reason we seek out horror movies, and Stephen King novels, and even trawl places like this, looking for something to put the fear in us. Something to give us one more reason to stay up at night, eyes glued to the door, reminding us of that long-forgotten truth that we were prey once.
I’m in my mid-twenties now and I’m still chasing that high. These days, almost nothing pushes my buttons - Well, except Horses, but that’s not the kind of fear I ever try to court. It’s the difference between going on a rollercoaster and getting your brake lines cut. One is a cheap thrill in an ultimately safe, controlled environment, and the other is one last shot of adrenaline before the county coroner ties your name around your big toe.
The funny thing is, I’ve never had a bad experience with Horses myself. You’re probably expecting the standard story: I used to ride as a kid, or maybe I only did it once or twice, and got bucked off. My parents dragged me out of the dirt and straw, a crying, blubbering mess. That kind of trauma will stick with you, I’m sure, but that’s not why my legs turn to jelly when I hear hooves clip-clopping down a country road at night.
It all started with this story my grandad used to tell me when I was a kid, something that got passed down from his grandad, and something I’ll tell my grandkids, too, if I ever have them. Like all grandad stories, I’m sure it rests somewhere along that hazy border between truth and bullshit, but it stuck with me all the same.
Grandad died recently. Alzheimer’s, it’d been raging like a wildfire in his mind for years before he finally got his end, courtesy of a brief bout of pneumonia in the care home. An awful, lonely way to die. I guess that’s what got me thinking about this story again, and why I wanted to share it here. I apologize to you all in advance, because I could never tell this one as well as he could.
He was a transplant out of rural Texas, not far from Hudspeth County, and the story he told took place in a dusty old town close to where his own grandad settled in the early 1800s. The heart of this town was horse breeding, so much so that locals in the neighboring towns nicknamed it “Old Mare Bones” during its heyday - cause the local cemetery had more horses buried there than people.
Let it be known: A Texas rancher who doesn’t have his head up his ass can make a lot of money in the equestrian business these days, but back then, when horses were the backbone of all transport and logistics, the man with the thriving stable was King.
The King in Old Mare Bones was a man they called Jim Caliche, because he was known to be as tough as the parched Texas ground. His ranch was just West of the town, a palatial estate where he lived with his wife, his several sons and daughters, and a few of their wives and husbands - Along with a small army of ranch hands, many of which slept on their own dedicated quarters off the side of the main building. Real John Steinbeck type stuff.
Caliche could afford all this cause he had one of the most prosperous horse-breeding businesses around. At any given time, he had a couple hundred horses to spare, and foaled and sold a few hundred more for a pretty penny, every single year. But there was one horse that Caliche would never sell: His prized stud, a proud, black stallion he called Diomedes, who had been the sire of some of his most lucrative sales. Diomedes was essentially an ATM with four legs and a tail, his genes the lifeblood of the family.
Until the day the fog rolled in.
It was already strange, in and of itself, to wake up to a cold, misty morning in the middle of an otherwise punishing Texan August. Many would report suffering from night terrors in the days leading up to this, as though people could sense something awful trundling down the tracks. There was a pervasive sense of wrongness in the air, that much was certain.
That morning, when Evangeline, one of Jim Caliche’s oldest daughters, poured herself a glass of fresh milk to take with her breakfast, it’d already curdled. People all over Old Mare Bones said they saw crows dropping out of the sky that day, and livestock were spooked all over. But no animal in that town seemed to be as, well, we’ll say “affected” as Diomedes.
While Jim’s horses were his business, they kept plenty of animals on the Caliche ranch - Notable among these were a pair of terriers named Echo and Persephone, yappy little rat-hunting dogs that kept the estate vermin-free. They’d greet their master together every morning, except this morning. Only Persephone chewed on a slipper at the foot of Jim’s bed; Echo was nowhere to be found.
Then one of Jim’s younger daughters, Hattie, aged eleven, screamed.
Jim and about fifteen ranch hands were out to her in no time. The one benefit of this strange, foggy day was that it put everyone on edge, so folks were on high alert for anything untoward happening. Hattie was standing out in one of the ranch’s fields, weeping her eyes out. A few feet in front of her was Diomedes, hunched over, chewing at a red carcass that’d once been Echo.
It was plain for anyone to see that something was terribly wrong with that horse, beyond even the fact that it was munching on one of Caliche’s terriers. His eyes were as clouded over as the town itself in that impossible fog. He swayed and teetered, almost drunkenly. Thick ropes of red saliva dangled from his mouth, and strangest of all, his legs looked like they were buckling slightly… In the wrong direction.
Being a seasoned rancher and horse breeder of some renown, Jim Caliche had seen it all in terms of equestrian ailments. But he’d never seen anything like this before. While of course, he still wanted to play the big man in front of his ranch hands, seeing his prized stallion like this undeniably shook him up. Even in this state, one terrier down already, he wasn’t going to sign off on anyone putting both barrels of a boomstick up against Diomedes’ head.
Instead, he ordered his ranch hands to quarantine Diomedes in the barn, away from the other horses. They’d give him some time to work through this and attend to it when the fog cleared. Even if they did end up putting him out to pasture, there’d be no prize for jumping the gun on that.
But here’s the thing, the fog didn’t clear. Rather than slowly dissipating over the course of the day as the heat picked up and the sun shone in, it just seemed to get thicker and thicker.
The ranch hands tried their best to just go about their work that day, but more strange incidents started piling up. All the other stallions and mares on the farm seemed to lay on the spectrum between skittish and outright aggressive. They had more bites in that one day on seasoned ranch hands than they’d had in the three years prior. And while Diomedes was kept separate from the rest of them, he was still kicking up a hell of a racket inside the barn. Stomping, bucking, whinnying, and making low, guttural moans that a stallion had no earthly business making.
The Caliche family buried what little was left of Echo. Diomedes had eaten most of him by the time Hattie screamed and the others intervened; there were only a few fragments of collar in amongst the mangled mess of meat, bone, and fur left to identify him by. Jim Caliche kept up his brave face for the rest of the family, but what he’d seen that morning wouldn’t leave his mind.
What the hell, other than one of his dogs, had gotten into Diomedes?
Ranch hands started to notice similar symptoms in the other horses. Those glazed, milky eyes, the globules of red drool, that strange buckling in their legs. It wasn’t like any kind of horse malady they’d ever seen before. Little did they know, as nightfall crept in an hour at a time, things were about to get so much worse for all of them.
Soon enough, it was dark out, and the thick fog still lingered everywhere. The Caliche family had holed up inside the ranch house and the ranch hands, after completing their final duties for the night, were returning to their quarters for beer, card games, and supper. Diomedes had gone quiet in the barn - meaning he’d either calmed down or dropped dead, and either would mean they’d be having no further issues with him for now.
The horses may have been sick or spooked or some other such thing, but they’d all been returned to their stables and locked away. Whatever problem they had, Caliche and his boys could address it in the morning.
Until the noises started again, closer this time. The same kind of low, guttural moaning that they’d heard coming out of the barn. Maybe it was just the darkness shaping their thoughts, but it sounded almost like growling. Of course, this woke up the Caliches and their many employees, who spilled out into the nighttime fog with lanterns to see what was going on.
Jim insisted that his wife and kids remained inside until they knew it was safe.
The men spread out, these tiny pinpricks of light in the ocean of fog around them. Some had rifles, shotguns, six guns, others had pitch forks, horsewhips, and clubs. They were confident in the fact that between them, there was nothing out there that they couldn’t handle.
Until a distant barn door creaked open, and one of the ranch hands screamed.
Nobody knew who it was, or where the scream had come from, but it was unmistakable. Anyone who was carrying a gun shouldered it, and anyone who wasn’t carrying a gun wished they were. Nobody wanted to believe it, but it was quickly dawning on them that they weren’t alone out there.
People tried to stick together, seeking safety in numbers, but even with their lanterns they started to realize that they couldn’t seem to find each other in the fog - it was as though the whole space had somehow expanded around them, isolating them. Either that or the fog itself was truly impenetrable now.
But if that was the case, they never would have seen the silhouettes.
The outermost ranch hands saw them first: Huge shapes, moving quickly on four legs, the thumping of hooves against hard-packed dirt. But these things, what little they could see of them like this, didn’t move like horses. The way the legs moved, no, it was all wrong. They almost bent outwards, moving the way a spider’s legs do.
A gunshot rang out in the fog. Then another. Then more. Followed by a terrible chorus of screams, ringing and reverberating through the thick night air. More hooves pounded against the dirt, adding to the rising cacophony of gunfire and screams. Nobody could see far enough in front of them to even know what was going on, as what must have been hundreds of those things poured in and started attacking.
Soon enough, when the screaming and running and gunshots died down, another sound rose to prominence in the fog: Chewing, careful and slow.
Even as the ranch hands were snuffed out around him, Jim Caliche was still alive. Despite the disorientation and terror flooding his mind, he could remember the way he came in. The old rancher turned tail and ran as fast he could. His family were still there, back in the ranch house. They needed to get out of here. But if the horses had gone bad, what would take them away?
Just as the light of the house returned amidst the fog, Jim could hear the staccato thumps of hooves behind him, getting closer. He looked over his shoulder: Huge, black shapes were becoming more defined in the mist, legs twisted all wrong but carrying those great, muscular bodies just the same.
It couldn’t end like this. He needed to get back.
Before they could get him, though, he made out his front door in the fog. Sweet salvation. He mounted the porch faster than he thought possible at his age and ran into the house, slamming the door behind him, breath feeling like broken glass in his throat.
It was pandemonium out there, but at least he’d escaped.
That’s when he saw the shape dominating his living room. That huge, black form he’d known so well, hunched over what remained of his wife. She lay there, her remaining arm outstretched, eyes dead and skin pale as a porcelain doll.
Diomedes, legs bent unnaturally, was feasting from her belly.
Caliche gasped at the terrible sight, alerting Diomedes to his presence.
The stallion - or at least, the thing that had once been a stallion - turned and looked up at him. Its mouth, still dripping with Mrs. Caliche’s blood, was different now. It stretched all the way up the jawbone, like a crocodile, exposing rows of long, needle-like teeth, and a wriggling, black tongue.
Jim Caliche screamed, and Diomedes was upon him.
The next morning, a single, traumatized ranch hand, the night’s sole survivor, made his way to Old Mare Bones to tell the others. When the fog lifted, the local sheriff sent his deputies to see the carnage that’d unfolded at the Caliche Ranch: Everyone missing or dead, and all the horses gone. With no reasonable explanation, the ranch hand was eventually tried and hanged for the killings, but not before he told his story.
The story my great, great grandad told my grandad, that my grandad told me, and I just told you.
It’s funny, how these things you hear in childhood stick with you. I still avoid horses, and try to stay inside on unusually foggy days. Seems a little strange, I know, but you can never be too careful…