by Amy Cross
“You don't look so smart now, do you?” he shouted triumphantly. “Who's the boss? Who's in charge? Me, that's who! You'd better believe it!”
Running out of pee, he let the last dribbles fall onto the front of his pants and then he slipped his manhood away, and then he stared at Garrett for a moment. He wanted to degrade the man some more, but he couldn't really think of anything worse than peeing on him so, finally, he stepped forward and grabbed Garrett's hand, forcing the fingers open and then taking back the gold coin.
“This is mine,” he explained, “and I'm going to use it to go home and show everyone they were wrong about me. Angelica Graft'll fall at my feet, she'll beg me to marry her. I suppose I might, if I'm feeling generous. She'll have to really beg, though. She'll have to make me really believe that she means it. I'll want her to be down on her knees for a while before I'm ready to accept what she's saying.” He sniffed. “I'm a generous man, though,” he added after a moment. I'm willing to accept her apologies, provided they're heartfelt, and then I suppose I'll have to marry her. It'll only be the right thing to do.”
For a moment, he was swept away by thoughts of prancing through his hometown in a fancy new suit, with Angelica Graft on his arm. Then again, he realized after a moment that she'd have to change her name if they married, that she'd be Angelica Munver. He imagined all the townsfolk watching him with a sense of awe, and he couldn't help but smile at the thought of everyone having to admit that they'd been wrong about him all along. Soon the fantasy began to grow, and in his mind's eye he saw himself sitting on some kind of throne in the old town square, while all the other residents – even his parents and his bully brothers – bowed down before him and begged for his mercy and generosity.
“He's so handsome,” he imagined one woman saying.
“I can't believe we didn't see him like this before,” another added in his mind. “We were so wrong. I hope eventually he'll be kind enough to forgive us.”
“Yeah, I'll show them,” he whispered. “That coin'll go a long way.”
As he spoke those words, however, a flicker of concern entered his thoughts. He didn't know the coin's value, and now he was starting to worry that it might not be enough. Obviously it was valuable, but he'd been disappointed in life before and now he feared that he was being set up for another failure. He looked down at the coin and told himself that something so shiny had to make him rich, but then slowly he realized that there was one thing that might be even better than possessing this coin.
Possessing two coins.
He turned and looked at the window.
In the distance, out there in the dark of the snowy night, the faint outline of the cart could just about be seen. Munver thought back to the two bodies, and then to Garrett's raging anger. Was he wrong, or had Garrett – at least once – mentioned the existence of two coins? That would make sense, given that there were two bodies. The hooks of greed were already starting to tug at Munver's heart as he stepped closer to the window and placed his hands on the cold glass panes, and he was growing more certain by the second that there must be another coin out there, held tight in the hands of the dead woman.
Now that... That would surely be enough to make him really rich.
Thirteen
The wind was really picking up now, and Munver had to push hard to even get the cabin's door open. He slipped outside, and the door immediately slammed shut behind him, and the thick snow crunched beneath his feet as he waded around to the cabin's side. He knew he could – and perhaps should – wait until morning, but he wanted to get that second coin now. He wanted to be sure that he was rich.
As he made his way to the cart, Munver felt snow blasting against him, almost as if the elements were trying to hold him back. This only reinforced his determination, however, so he kept going until suddenly he felt something tugging at his right leg. Looking down, he struggled to see much in the darkness, but the glow from the window afforded him just enough light to see something caught around his knee. Reaching down, he found that he'd become entwined in the thick chain that hung from the front of the cart, the same chain that Garrett had used to pull his load.
Muttering a few cuss words under his breath, Munver struggled for a couple of minutes to get free. The chain was heavy, and he really had to twist a little to loosen his leg, but finally he was able to start making his way around the cart's side.
“They're gonna look at me like they should've been looking at me all along,” he said, trying to warm himself with thoughts of his imminent revenge. “They're gonna regret the day they ever made fun of me.”
Reaching the rear of the cart, he immediately saw the dead woman's feet. The candle – now extinguished, of course – remained between her legs, but Munver had no thoughts right now of resuming the thaw. Perhaps tomorrow, although he supposed he'd be on his way from the valley as soon as the storm passed. No, right now he was completely focused on the task at hand, so he climbed up onto the cart and began to lean down, peering between the woman's fingers in the hope that he might find that second coin.
The first hand revealed nothing, so he turned to the second.
Only now, as the wind continued to howl all around him, did Stuart Munver notice that the dead man was gone.
He stared at the spot where the man's corpse had been, and he felt a sudden sense of shock in his chest, but there was no doubt about the matter at all. The man, who previously had been on his side with a hand on the woman's body, had completely disappeared.
Spotting something close to his knee, he looked down and saw the finger that he'd snapped away from the man's hand earlier, when he'd freed the first coin. The finger remained, then, but the rest of the body was gone.
Munver looked around, convinced that the man's body must simply have fallen away somehow. He thought back to the start of Garrett's angry attack, and he tried to work out whether Garrett might have moved the body or hidden it somehow. Reaching past the woman, he pulled the covers all the way back, hoping to find that the man had simply slid to the cart's forward end, but all he found were a couple more bottles of whiskey. As the covers flapped loudly in the wind, Munver looked over the sides of the cart, then over the back, but still there was no sign at all of the dead man.
“What kind of game is this?” he muttered, trying to make sense of what was happening. “I won't be tricked. I'm not easily scared, either.”
He tried to understand what was happening, but then he told himself that there was no point. The man's body didn't matter anymore, so he crouched down and began to examine the woman's second hand. This proved more difficult than the first, since her fist was closed, but after a moment he realized he could just about see something glinting deep in the palm of her hand, almost entirely obscured by her fingers. Was it a second coin? Getting a good look was impossible, so he began to try forcing her fingers open.
“Come on,” he whispered under his breath, but these fingers did not crack away as easily as those of the man. They were curled more tightly, holding their prize more securely. “It's mine, damn it. I want it.”
No matter how he tried, however, Munver just couldn't get the hand to open and release its precious coin. Exasperated, he worked for several more minutes, and then he sat back and stared at the hand and tried to come up with some other, smarter plan.
And then, slowly, he realized he could hear footsteps nearby, crunching through the snow.
He turned and looked toward the cabin. Snow was falling heavily in the darkness, but there was no sign of anybody moving about. The footsteps had stopped now, but he was sure he'd heard two or three just a moment ago. Could Garrett somehow still be alive? The thought terrified Munver, and it took a couple of minutes before he was able to convince himself that, no, of course Garrett hadn't miraculously revived. The man was dead, that much was certain.
“Stop getting yourself all spooked,” Munver said out loud, hoping to make himself a little braver, and then he looked back down at the woman's hand.
Afte
r a moment he grabbed the wrist and tried to crack that part of the woman's arm free, then he shifted around and starting using his knee. If he could break the hand away from the body, he reasoned, he could then take it inside and heat it directly by the fire, and then soon enough the coin would have to come loose. It was a foolproof plan, but it all hinged on him being able to break the wrist and so far he was having no luck at all. Finally, with a plaintive cry of frustration, he pulled back and tried to come up with another idea, and then – filled with a sudden burst of fury – he kicked the cart's side as hard as he could manage.
“Okay, calm down,” he told himself. “Just you calm down. You're not gonna let them stop you now, you're gonna do this.”
He waited, trying desperately to be smart, and then he remembered the saw.
When he'd first headed out to the wilderness, he'd brought only a few items that he could fit into a sack on his back. He'd very nearly not brought the saw at all, but at the last moment he'd figured it might be useful to have at least a few tools. Since then, the saw hadn't been used at all, but now he supposed it might well cut through the woman's frozen wrist. For a moment he tried to work out whether there was any reason this plan shouldn't work, but actually it was beginning to seem like a stroke of genius.
“I knew it,” he said with a grin, as he began to clamber down from the rear of the cart. “There ain't nothing that can hold me back. It's fate. Destiny. I'm gonna be rich.”
He almost slipped in the snow, but finally he turned to make his way back toward the cabin. After just a couple of struggling paces, however, he stopped as he saw the silhouette of a man standing just a few feet away.
For a fraction of a second, Munver feared that somehow Garrett had survived the stabbing, but quickly that fear went away. The man before him was quite clearly not Garrett, since he was a little taller and more muscular and also, it seemed, completely naked. Had a stranger wandered through the snowstorm to the cabin? After all this solitude, had two visitors suddenly arrived on the same day. Munver stared, not knowing what to do or say, but then some deeper inclination made him look down at the silhouette's hands, and he saw to his horror that one of the man's fingers was quite clearly missing.
The same finger that Munver had snapped off earlier in the night.
“What?” Munver whispered, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what was happening. “No. What? What? There's no -”
Before he could finish, the figure took a slow, faltering step forward, crunching the snow beneath his feet in the process.
“No!” Munver shouted, pulling away and, in the process, falling back and landing in the snow.
Panicked, he scrambled to his feet and raced around the other side of the cart. Pure, unadulterated fear had gripped his soul and he ran like an animal, scrambling with ever-increasing desperation as he tried to get back to the sanctuary of the cabin. He cried out, he huffed and puffed, but finally he reached the cabin's rear wall and then he looked over his shoulder to see whether he was being followed.
For a moment he saw no-one, but then the man stepped into view.
Crying out, Munver turned and hurried away, fumbling his hands along the cabin's frozen wall as he tried to get around to the door. He was starting to whimper now and there were tears in his eyes, but eventually he reached the next side and he grabbed the door. After pulling it open, he stumbled inside and then slammed the door shut again, and then he slid the makeshift wooden block into place. This was as close to a lock as the door possessed, but it at least made Munver feel a little safer as he stepped back and stared at the door with a growing sense of horror.
He hadn't seen that.
It had been a trick of his imagination, or of the light.
The man, he hadn't been walking about out there, it was impossible. He was dead.
Then, turning to look at the window, Munver saw to his horror that a human figure was slowly making its way around toward the door. In that moment, fear exploded in his chest, like a plant that went from seed to full bloom in the blink of an eye. He even let out a little whimper.
Fourteen
“No no no no no,” Munver whispered, backing away still further from the door until he bumped his shoulders against the opposite wall. “This isn't happening.”
He swallowed hard, before looking over at the chair by the fireplace and seeing that at least Garrett's dead body remained where it should be. That at least was some small comfort, although it left the question of who actually was outside. His mind was spinning, but Munver tried to take charge of his thoughts and he told himself that there couldn't possibly be anyone else out there.
Looking at the window, he was relieved to see that the man could no longer be seen.
He waited, trying to force the panic back down, trying to tell himself – and make himself believe – that the supposed man hadn't been there at all. Perhaps, he reasoned, this was some kind of trick set by Garrett, one last little joke at his expense. Well, he wasn't going to have that, not at all, and after a moment he stood up straight and took a deep breath and told himself that he wasn't going to run around all scared like a coward.
Suddenly the door shuddered as something tried to pull it open from the outside, and Munver let out a terrified yelp as he ducked down behind the table.
He heard the door shudder again, and then the only sound was the wind outside.
Not daring to move a muscle, Munver peered through the legs of the table and saw that the door was still shut. The wooden bolt was still in place, too, so no-one was going to be getting through. Had the shudder just been caused by a particularly strong gust of wind? That was possible, he figured, and he tried to convince himself that he was just letting himself get easily spooked. He wasn't quite brave enough to get up from behind the table, not yet, but he did start to feel just a little more at ease as he realized that there might well be a perfectly normal explanation for all the -
Suddenly something knocked hard against the door, then again, and Munver began to whimper as he pulled further back against the wall.
He was so scared now, his whole body was shaking and his teeth were chattering. He'd seen the man's hand, with its missing finger, and he was starting to try to work out how the frozen man could somehow have come back to life. Even if that were possible, why would he be after Munver?
“I never did anyone any wrong,” he whispered to himself, as tears began to run down his face. “I'm just trying to get by, is all. I ain't doing any more than that. Everyone's the same!”
He waited.
He listened.
Suddenly there was another loud, ominous bang at the door, and Munver tried to press himself even more firmly against the door.
“This isn't fair,” he whimpered. “Why is this happening to me?”
He looked over toward Garrett's body, and then he spotted the rifle resting against the far wall. In an instant, Munver realized that he could save himself, so he crawled around the side of the table, past Garrett's chair, and over to the wall. Gasping with relief, he grabbed the rifle and checked that it was loaded, and then he began to crawl back to his previous hiding place behind the table.
Before he could get there, there was another loud knock at the door, and this time Munver turned instinctively, aimed the rifle, and fired.
The blast shook the rifle in his hands and sent the butt slamming into his chin. Munver cried out and dropped the weapon, but then he looked at the door and saw that he'd blasted a small hole right in the center. Despite the pain in his jaw, he listened for any clue that he'd managed to kill the man out there, but instead he merely heard the howling wind. Still, the hole in the door was in a perfect spot to hit someone on the other side, and Munver told himself that he had good odds of having struck his target.
He listened.
And then, breaking the silence, there came another knock.
“Damn you!” Munver hissed, grabbing the rifle and aiming again, but this time not firing. He only had a few shots left, and he didn't
want to waste any of them. Better, he told himself, to wait until he had a good view of the man, and then to blast his head clean off his shoulders. That'd show him.
He waited.
The wind continued to blow, rattling the roof.
“This isn't really happening,” Munver whispered. “I know how things work, and this isn't how it's supposed to be. Frozen dead people stay frozen and dead. This is all in my mind. I've been up here alone too long, that's all. This is Garrett's fault.” He turned and scowled at the dead man in the chair. “You put this fear in my head!” he snarled. “You made me scared, but I'm gonna be brave and you're gonna rot and Angelica Graft's gonna -”
Before he could finish, there was another knock at the door.
Startled, Munver turned and fired the rifle again, this time keeping a better hold against the kickback. His aim wasn't quite so good, however, and he watched in horror as the wooden bolt was blasted apart.
“No!” he screamed, dropping the rifle and rushing forward before the door could swing open. Reaching up, he grabbed the handle and pulled tight, but as he looked up at the bolt he saw that it was completely destroyed.
Why, he wondered, did he always have such bad luck?
The wind was still howling on the other side of the door, causing the wood to shake slightly, and Munver held the door's handle tighter than he'd ever held anything in his life. His teeth were still chattering and his mind was awash with fear, but he told himself that this was still all just a figment of his imagination. And as the second passed with no further knocking sounds, he began to wonder whether perhaps the worst of the horror was over. Had he been right all along? Had he gone a little mad following Garrett's death, or perhaps following the savage beating he'd received? Yes, that seemed to make sense.
“Watch yourself,” he remembered the man in the bar saying as he gave him the map all that time ago. “A man can go a little crazy out there all on his own.”
