The Child Thief

33

Grief expands. If allowed, it can push out all other thought, consuming all other emotion until nothing else exists. Uncontrolled, it smothers clear thinking, can take a man close to madness. I had no time for it, so I pushed the grief into a corner of my mind and closed a door on it. If the child thief was coming, he might be on his way now, perhaps skirting the edge of the lake, staying within the forest, advancing on the place where I now sat holding my son. I had to act now.

There was no way of knowing if the child thief was going to follow me, or if he was too badly wounded to do so, but I had to make a decision, so I chose to wait for him. I would wait a while and, if he did not appear, I would make my way to the place where I’d last seen him. I tried to detach myself from what the child thief had done – the people he’d murdered and the fear with which he’d infected Dariya. I tried to take myself back to the days when it had been my job to stalk men, or lie in wait for them. I would do the same thing for this man. He was no different. He was just a man.

I had no time to bury Petro; that would have to wait until my job was done. Instead, I dragged my son’s body to a place where the trees grew closest, not looking at him as I did it. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want anything to distract me from what I had to do.

I dug away some of the snow at the base of a tree and put Petro into the dip, rolling him onto his front, with his chest on the higher section, so it looked as if he were using his elbows to raise his torso from the ground. I covered the rest of his body over with snow and found a straight branch to tuck in beside him, protruding as if it were the barrel of a rifle.

‘It’s just a body,’ I said, speaking in a whisper. ‘Not Petro. Just a body…’

When I was finished, I walked a few metres away into the forest and turned to see what I had done. From this distance it looked as if a hunter had concealed himself in the snow.

I took a branch from a tree close to me and used it to sweep across the surface of the snow as I returned to where Petro lay. It was intended to be a poor effort to disguise my tracks so the child thief would think I was tired and had become sloppy, that I was not a threat to him. My only advantage was that I knew what the child thief was capable of, but he knew nothing about me.

With that done, I climbed onto a low branch of the tree closest to Petro, first testing my weight on it to be sure it would support me. I looked down at my son, seeing only the top of his head and the stick which I had laid beside him. I raised my eyes and looked out into the forest for a moment, then turned and stretched to the next tree, climbing across to it, making my way through four or five trees without touching the ground, without leaving any trace of myself in the snow.

My intention was to drop down now that I was away from the place where Petro was concealed. I would cover myself in a similar way and wait for the child thief to come to where Petro lay, led there by my failed attempt to cover my tracks. But when I looked up, I saw that the oak whose branches now offered me support was tall enough and thick enough to give me a different kind of cover. Something better.

Two metres above the branch I was standing on, the tree split into three separate trunks, each with its own tangle of smaller branches, and the place where it split would give me the perfect place to conceal myself. My dark clothing would be well camouflaged against the bark and I would have a good view of the surrounding area. If the child thief came within a few metres of the place where Petro lay, I would see him.

I checked the rifle was secure on my shoulder and began to climb.

The sky was clouded grey, glimpsed through the branches above, and the sun was diffused behind it, giving away nothing, but I didn’t spend long looking up; my eyes were constantly moving, scanning the trees, expecting the slightest change in the forest; my ears tuned to the weakest sound, ignoring the faint wind that moved through the naked, tangled branches with the sound of rushing water. The occasional disturbance as a broken twig fell to the ground, bustling through the branches.

Somewhere to the right, the dark shapes of nests filled the trees, but they were silent except for the call of a single crow, either unaware of my presence or so used to me now that it bore no fear.

I sniffed quietly behind my scarf, breath moist against the wool preventing it from rolling out into the cold air and betraying me. I had barely moved since settling. Both legs were drawn close to my chest so I was in a semi-foetal position, leaning back against the thickest trunk, the rifle resting between the V-shape of the other two. If I turned my head, I could almost see all around, and that was the only movement I allowed myself. My legs were stiff with cramp, my back was aching from the base of my spine and the muscles were frozen stiff in my shoulders, but I didn’t need any of those parts of my body. All I needed was one good eye, something to steady the rifle and a finger with which to pull the trigger. And when I glanced at my hands, I saw they no longer shook.

But as time wore on and the sky greyed further, the temperature began to drop and I felt an easy numbness trying to overcome me. There was a heaviness in my eyelids and weariness lowered itself over me. I shook my head to stay awake, raised my eyebrows and stared so hard the cold air hurt my eyes and made them stream with cleansing tears. But none of those things made any difference now. My body and my mind needed rest. They needed to stop and they were threatening to do it right now.

My aches dulled to numbness. My thoughts began to empty. My muscles felt heavy. The crow’s incessant call faded to something barely noticed.

And then it stopped. The bird became silent. And in that silence I heard a single footfall in the snow.

The stillness that followed that first single footstep stretched for a long time. The child thief was close. I could feel him. As if he were something more than human. As if he were just breath that moved through the trees, a feral part of the forest that would always be there.

I pressed back against the trunk of the tree as if I might melt into it to find the perfect camouflage. My steady finger poised over the trigger of the rifle.

And then another footstep. Tentative. Slow. The gentle crush of snow beneath a boot. The crow called once more, a disturbed and irritable cry as it jumped from its perch, flitting out across the forest, a jitter of movement in my peripheral vision. I turned my head. Another footfall.

The grey sky was darkening further, an ethereal gloom descending over the forest, the faint shadows falling long across the forest floor. A breeze stirred the branches, wrapped itself around me before moving on, taking my warmth. And then there was movement. Not the natural movement of the shadows touched by the wind, but the lengthening and shortening of a shadow. The movement of a human being coming into my line of sight, just a few metres away.

The child thief, just below me, had skirted the lake as I had expected. He had made his way to this side, stalking deeper into the forest so he could come at me from behind the spot where we had been. He’d tried to outflank me, expecting me to be waiting for him, rifle trained on the open expanse of the lake.

I wanted to see his face. I wanted to know the face of the man who would steal a child and make a game of it, but the child thief’s body was turned away from me, only the back and side of his head were visible. A large hat of good fur was pulled low on his brow, but the flaps remained unrolled so his hearing would be unimpaired. His coat was long and dark.

I swivelled my rifle on its resting place so it was pointing in the child thief’s direction, and I leaned forward to sight through the scope. Closing my left eye, I watched the magnified form moving away, towards the spot where Petro lay. I willed him to turn around. I wanted to see his eyes when I took the shot. But the child thief continued forward.

I fixed the cross hairs on the back of his head.

My heart quickened, but I concentrated to control it. I inhaled through my nose, halting to keep the breath in my lungs so my whole body was still.

I tracked his movement with a gentle turn of the rifle.

I tightened my finger on the trigger and began to squeeze, waiting for the moment between heartbeats when my body would be most still.

The rifle kicked back against my shoulder and the child thief’s head jerked forward as the bullet pierced his skull and exited somewhere through his face, taking with it bone and tissue, spraying it across the snow in front of him. He dropped to his knees, his body falling forward so he went down face first with his hands by his side.

The sound of the gunshot evaporated leaving only a ringing in my ears. The smoke clung around my head, the smell of it strong in my nose, and then it too vanished and became nothing.

Immediately I drew back the bolt of the rifle, ejecting the cartridge. I drove another into place without pointing the barrel away from where the body lay. I wouldn’t take any chances with this man. I knew he was human, just a man, but Dariya’s talk of the Baba Yaga had stirred something primal in me.

I let my lungs empty in a rush and took in another great breath, my body hungry for the oxygen. And then I stopped. Something wasn’t right.

I had missed something important.

I stared at the body below, the stain of blood sprayed out in a fan, and tried to see what was missing.

And then I realised. There was no weapon.

The man I had shot was not armed.

I sat up, drawing the rifle away from the place where I’d supported it, and began to turn, knowing I’d been tricked.

The second shot that broke the peace of the forest was fired by the child thief. I saw him too late, propped against the trunk of a tree, resting the barrel of his weapon in the nook of a branch. He fired before I had time to sight on him, and my natural reaction was to flinch, to make myself small.

The bullet struck the bark beside me, showering it into tiny pieces, spitting into my eyes, stinging the exposed skin of my face. I turned my head in a sudden movement, shifting my body weight, one hand rising for protection. Beneath me, my feet slipped on the damp bark and I toppled backwards from the tree, a moment in space before I thumped to the ground, pain shooting along my spine. My own rifle, once the child thief’s, slipped, caught on a branch, then broke through and fell towards me, the butt plate of the stock smashing into my cheekbone in the place that Lermentov had struck me with the altar cross.

I felt a wave of nausea and a rolling blackness that wanted to take me into its arms, but I opened my mouth and shouted away the pain. I yelled at the forest and let the child thief hear my rage. I was not going to be taken. Nothing was going to take me. Nothing was going to stop me.

I forced myself to move, turning onto my side to push to a sitting position. Intense pain fired through my lower back as if a glowing bayonet had been forced between the vertebrae and stole my breath, but I had no time to rest, no time to recover. The child thief would be moving in on me now, coming to finish his game.

I struggled to a kneeling position and took up the rifle lying in the snow. My face throbbed where the weapon had struck me; flakes of bark gritted my eyes; my muscles and bones were battered and painful, but I pushed on, crawling to the base of the tree, edging my way around to look out at the place where I had seen the man. And there he was.

The child thief.

A movement in the forest. A dark shape coming slowly, advancing on my position. In his situation I would have been tempted to rush this spot; to get in close before my enemy had time to recover from his fall. But the child thief was calm and selfcontrolled, taking his time, looking for his moment, stepping from shadow to shadow, tree to tree.

I edged back, slipping onto my stomach and resting the rifle barrel across some fallen dead wood, pulling the stock into my shoulder. I put my right eye to the scope, leaving my left open to keep watching him. I pressed a painful cheek to the cold wooden stock and waited.

For a while I saw nothing. Everything was still. Somewhere behind me the crow cawed loud and raw as if it were angry with the day. Then something moved to the right of the place where I had seen my hunter. Only the slightest twitch, but it was enough to catch my eye. I turned the barrel of the rifle to point in that direction and waited for another sign.

And then the darkness moved. The shadowy edge of a large tree peeled away and stepped out into the clear for just one moment.

I closed my left eye and saw him through the scope. I stopped breathing. I stopped thinking. Now there was only the small circle of the world I could see through the lens, and there he was, captured in that single moment, stepping out from the shadow. Not the Baba Yaga that had clawed into my mind when the screams came on that first night of the hunt. For the first time he was not a ghost that could come and go in the darkness without leaving a trace. But a man. The man who had murdered my son.

The cross hairs were fixed squarely on the child thief’s chest, as if it had been his intention to step into my sights. I had no time to shift it. No time to aim anywhere else. And as the child thief stepped into the light, he stopped as if he sensed my aim was on him. As if the cold had frozen him right there where he stood.

He held a rifle in his right hand, resting it across the crook of his left as if he was incapable of holding it properly, and I knew I must have injured him when I fired at him across the lake. He stood hunched, his head jutting forward, and he turned to look in my direction, his face clear in the magnification of the scope.

And I knew him.

My finger froze on the trigger.

Thoughts rushed into my empty mind, jostling for space, crying out for attention. Images and words stumbled over one another and I grabbed at them as they passed, trying to fix on just one. This man was not the child thief. He couldn’t be. I knew this man. We had spent time as comrades in hardship, locked up together in the church in Sushne. I had not warmed to his insistent questioning about the war, but I had shared some of my darkest moments with the man who now turned to look at me in the magnification of the scope. But at the same time I knew he was the one. I saw it in his eyes. An instant of realisation and then indecision. The wide expression of a man who has been caught, followed by a sudden change as if he were torn between facing up to it or pretending once again to be something other than he was. And now I understood why this man had hidden among the other prisoners when Viktor and Petro had rescued us. I understood why Yuri had wanted to move on alone – because Dariya would have recognised his face.

Yuri Grigorovich stared, and I knew he was thinking he had only two options. He could no longer pretend to be anything other than what he was. I had seen that look on his face; I had seen his true nature. The child thief’s only choice now was to either raise his rifle and shoot or try for the cover of the closest tree. But he was injured and tired, and neither option would be easy for him. His game was over.

And when he began to turn, to raise his rifle at me, I shot him once in the chest.

I looked up as I ejected the cartridge, pushing the bolt back home, driving another into the chamber, and I saw Yuri fall back, losing his grip on the rifle. He went down, nothing more than a dark mark on the snow, and I sighted on him once more, ready to fire again, but there was no sign of movement.

I lay in the snow for many heartbeats, watching the shape through the scope. And when it moved, I tightened my finger on the trigger once more.

Yuri drew one leg up so his knee was pointing to the sky, and he brought his arms to his sides, pressing down to push himself up. But the effort was too great, and each time his head rose, his muscles and his strength deserted him. Each time he half sat up, his arms buckled and he collapsed again.

I watched him for longer still, letting him suffer. Then, keeping the rifle pointed at his shape, I struggled to my knees, working against the now dull pain in my back as I crossed the distance between us. My feet dragged through the deep snow, and I came to where Yuri lay.

I kicked his rifle away, touching the barrel of my own to the thick material of Yuri’s coat, and I stared down at him.

Yuri was still alive. I could see where the bullet had hit him, piercing the right side of his chest, and I guessed from the laboured breathing that his lungs were damaged. He was probably bleeding into them, slowly flooding them with the one thing that was supposed to keep him alive. He was drowning in his own blood.

He made a shallow rasping with each intake of cold air, and each exhalation was accompanied by a wet bubbling sound. His eyes were wide open and I could see fear in them. After everything he had done, Yuri was afraid of dying.

Blood came into his mouth and touched his lips, spilled from the corner and ran down his chin.

‘It was always you?’ I said.

Something like a smile passed Yuri’s lips.

I glanced back at the first man I’d shot, then turned and went to him. I rolled him over and saw he was one of the soldiers who had been guarding the column of prisoners. Anatoly, he had called himself. The young man who could hardly remember the face of his own wife.

‘And the other one?’ I said, going back to Yuri. ‘You killed him?’

Yuri blinked hard.

‘I don’t understand. Why would you do it? Why would you do any of it?’

Yuri opened his mouth further and attempted to form words, but his voice was quiet.

‘What? You want to say something?’

He nodded, so I crouched closer to him.

‘You were the best,’ he said.

‘What does that mean?’

Yuri closed his eyes. ‘The last one was good, but you were better.’

‘What does it mean? Why did you do this?’

‘Don’t you miss it?’ Yuri whispered. ‘The excitement of hunting another man? Fighting? Killing?’

‘No.’

‘Liar. It was in your actions when you followed me. In your voice when we were prisoners together. I see it now in your eyes.’ He stopped, his chest rising high, trying to take a breath into lungs that were drowning. ‘Being arrested was bad luck for me.’ His words caught in his throat and he coughed. A weak, wet sound.

‘Why did you go to Sushne? Why not stay in the hut? Why not wait for me?’

‘The soldiers.’

‘What about them?’ Then I understood. ‘You went home to rescue your own belongings. The man you killed, the one who came to the hut, he told you they were there. He knew you and he told you what was happening, so you murdered him and went to the village to get your things. But they caught you. They caught you.’ I shook my head at him. ‘After all that time, everything that happened, you were arrested by boys dressed as soldiers. You must have hated that.’ I laughed at the irony of it, let Yuri hear the mockery in my voice. ‘All those tricks meant nothing. Your clever game was broken by communist boys. All of it was for nothing.’

‘Not nothing. First the girl was in the village. Then you.’ Something like a smile came to his face. ‘I knew. I knew who you were but you knew nothing. And after. Among the other prisoners. You and her. It was… exciting. Knowing.’

‘Exciting? Torturing a little girl? That’s exciting to you? How many other children did you murder?’

‘Many. But she was going to taste so good.’ He turned his head away from me.

I stood and looked down at him, hating him. Then I kicked him, and it felt good, so I did it again, using whatever strength I had left. It was like kicking a sack of dirt, but it gave me release so I kicked him again and again, just as the villagers from Vyriv had kicked the stranger before they lynched him. I insulted him, shouted at him, and then I stopped and spat on him. ‘You killed my son.’

I put my rifle to Yuri’s forehead and looked into his eyes. ‘You killed my son.’

Something like a smile came back to Yuri’s lips. His breath rasped. ‘Kill me.’

‘Of course I’m going to kill you.’ I began to tighten my finger on the trigger, bracing for the kick of the rifle, for the loud report, for the result of shooting this animal in the head.

Yuri closed his eyes and smiled.

I stayed my finger on the trigger. ‘It’s what you want.’

He opened his eyes.

‘You want me to kill you.’

‘Yes.’

I took the rifle away. ‘It’s too good for you. Too quick. Maybe I should shoot your knees. Put bullets through your hips.’

I squatted beside Yuri and took out my knife. I used its keen edge to split his trousers from cuff to crotch and then leaned right in so my mouth was close to his ear. ‘Maybe I should strip the flesh from your legs, how about that?’ I shifted so that I could look into Yuri’s eyes. ‘Or I could scalp you.’ I put the blade against his forehead and pressed hard enough to bring blood. Isn’t that what you like to do to those poor children?’ I drew the knife across his skin. ‘You used them as bait in your dirty game, and when the fun was all finished, you scalped them and butchered them.’

Yuri blinked hard, squeezing his eyes shut and then opening them.

‘But I won’t do that.’ I took the knife away, wiping the blood on Yuri’s coat. ‘I’m not like you. I’m not a monster. But I am going to let you drown in your own blood. I’m going to let you die slowly. In pain.’

I sat down beside Yuri and took the packet of cigarettes from my pocket. I lit one and took a long drag. I put my head in my hands for a moment and thought it strange that I felt no satisfaction Yuri was going to die. I felt only sadness for those who had suffered at his hands. And there was a great emptiness in my heart that had once been filled by my son.

I looked at Yuri, watching the movement of his body as he drew breath and exhaled it. Drew and exhaled. Drew and exhaled. The rattle in his throat continued. The rasp of his approaching death.

When I next spoke, the smoke wafted through my teeth and from my nostrils. ‘I’m going to watch you die. I’m going to watch the life drain out of you, and then I’m going to bury my son.’

Close by, the crow alighted on a branch, growing more used to our presence. It called its harsh call and turned its head this way and that as if studying us.

‘And when you’re dead, the crows will eat your eyes. You’ll be a blind man in hell.’