In the most remote stretches of the countryside, where the mist lingers low and the night carries the weight of old memories, people still whisper a story — one too eerie to fade, too strange to be dismissed. They call it The Horse That Consumed Dusee — Plus Four.
It isn’t just a tale about a man and his horse. It’s a warning.
Dusee was a farmer whose life was stitched into the land itself. His days were steady and unhurried — tending soil, repairing fences, watching the seasons pass like the slow turning of clock hands. Everything remained ordinary until the day the horse appeared.
No one knew where it had come from. Some insisted it wandered down from the mountains after a violent storm; others said Dusee found it tied at the edge of the forest, waiting as though it had been delivered there on purpose. Whatever the origin, Dusee brought it home.
The creature was breathtaking — its silver coat gleamed like molten metal, its mane drifted like smoke, and every movement seemed unnaturally smooth, almost deliberate. What disturbed people most were its eyes. They weren’t the gentle brown of normal horses. They were black — not dark, but hollow, as if staring into them meant looking over a cliff with no bottom.
But Dusee didn’t mind. He had dreamt of owning a horse like that for years. He named it Mercy. The name alone made neighbors uneasy.
At first, Mercy behaved like any other horse — obedient, calm, powerful. But soon the villagers noticed peculiar things. It never ate grass. It never touched the water trough. Dusee claimed it didn’t need food. “It feeds on stillness,” he’d joke, though his eyes carried a distant, unfocused look — the expression of someone who had stared too long into something that stared back.
He began to lose weight, despite insisting he was fine. His voice grew quieter, his laugh fragile. Some nights, neighbors passing by saw him standing motionless beside Mercy long after midnight, both man and horse staring blankly into the dark as the wind curled around them.
Then, one morning, Dusee failed to appear in town. Another, still nothing. By the third day, two neighbors went to check on him.
They saw the horse first — standing alone in the field, shining in the dull morning light, its hooves sunk deep into dry soil as though rooted there. Its eyes looked larger, emptier. The men called out for Dusee, but the farm remained silent. When they went inside the barn, they found his boots placed neatly by the door, his coat folded over a stool, his tools still warm. But Dusee himself had vanished.
The only sign he’d left behind was a burned handprint seared into Mercy’s silver coat — not dirt, not paint, but scorched flesh embedded in the animal’s hide.
After that, Mercy remained in the field without moving. Days passed in complete silence. But each night, villagers began hearing something new — faint hoofbeats echoing through empty roads, crossing yards, brushing past darkened windows.
When a search party finally assembled, the horse was gone. Only four deep hoofprints remained — impressions that never faded or filled in. Some swore they faintly glowed, like dying embers.
Then came the part no one could explain: the “Plus Four.”
Within a week, four villagers vanished without a trace. No bodies. No signs of struggle. Just emptiness. They included a woodcutter, a widow, a boy who often brought Dusee bread, and a preacher who had tried to bless the fields where the horse once stood.
Some claimed the horse had taken them — not their bodies, but their essence, just as it had taken Dusee. Others believed it wasn’t a horse at all, but something ancient wearing a horse’s shape, feeding on presence rather than flesh.
But after the four disappeared, the mysterious hoofbeats stopped.
For a while, the tale became just another fireside legend. But every so often, someone swears they’ve seen something — a flicker of silver in the trees, a shimmer in the fog, the sharp ring of a hoof against stone where no horse walks.
One old trapper insisted the creature appeared to him near the marsh on a moonless night. He claimed it glided without touching the ground, its breath forming mist shaped like human faces. When he looked into its eyes, he didn’t see himself — he saw Dusee standing behind the horse, smiling faintly, as though waiting for him to blink.
The trapper fired at it, but the bullet slipped through like smoke. The horse didn’t react. It merely turned its head, and the air grew cold enough to frost his beard. By morning, the trapper’s fire still burned and his boots rested by a log — but he was gone.
Some say the creature moves between places — even between moments — feeding on the gaps people leave behind when they’re forgotten, grieving, or lost. Others say it remains tethered to Dusee, cursed to wander until something pure enough fills the hollow inside it.
The old villagers pass down a rule now, murmured to children before they grow old enough to doubt:
If you see a horse that doesn’t blink, don’t stare. Don’t follow it. Don’t speak its name.
Because that’s how it enters — through curiosity, through attention, through the smallest fracture in the human mind where logic slips and fear settles in.
The preacher’s widow once wrote something strange in her diary the night before she vanished:
“I dreamed of silver hooves. They walked through my home without sound. When they stopped by my bed, I heard Dusee whisper: Don’t look. It’s hungry.”
Her diary ended there.
No one in the village speaks the horse’s name anymore. They say silence keeps it dormant — that forgetting is the safest shield. But when the fog creeps in and the night grows too still, some swear they hear it again — the quiet, steady beat of hooves circling in the dark, patient, waiting.
They still call it The Horse That Consumed Dusee — Plus Four.
And if you listen long enough, the sound begins to feel less like hoofbeats and more like breathing — slow, deliberate, right behind you.
So remember the warning:
Beware the horse that doesn’t hunger for flesh, but for being.
Because it is patient.
And true hunger never dies.
