Revolver

by Marcus Sedgwick

  Anna nodded dumbly.

  “Lying bitch,” Wolff snarled. “How stupid do you think I am? Boy, you got some rope in that storeroom of yours?”

  Sig knew they had. Lots of it. It hung on a hook underneath the shelf where the coffee tins were kept. And behind the coffee tins …

  He nodded.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Then go and get it.”

  He waved the gun at the door to the room, to the storeroom beyond it, and Sig hurried. His heart began to race before he’d even left the room; he could almost hear Einar’s gun calling to him now. Though he couldn’t see clearly what he should do, with a brief but sudden shock, Sig knew that somewhere during the night he had stopped deciding whether to use the gun or not. He had made up his mind, and there was only one question that remained; whether he’d get the single chance he needed.

  Before he knew it he was in the hall, opening the door into the storeroom.

  He knew he didn’t have long. Wolff would expect him straight back, or he’d know something was wrong.

  Sig stood in the near dark, and his heart thumped even harder in his chest, as he wondered if he could actually take the gun out of its box, walk next door, and shoot Wolff.

  It sounded so easy, but his pounding heart told him it was not. Wolff had his gun in his hand, a gun he had fired many hundreds of times, no doubt. Sig had only ever fired a gun once, that time on his birthday. Even with the slight surprise, the chances were that Sig would wind up dead and then Anna, too.

  He was wasting time.

  He pushed the coffee tins aside and grabbed the Colt’s box. He turned to the door and set it on the lid of a barrel of dried beans that stood there, trying to get a bit more light.

  Then he had an idea. He reached up to the hook and took down a large coil of rope. He’d carry it in front of him, and it would conceal the gun for a crucial second, and then, he just had to pull the trigger. Just once.

  He turned back to the door and saw Wolff framed in the doorway.

  “What’s keeping you?”

  “N-nothing,” stammered Sig, desperately trying not to look at the Colt box. It was inches from Wolff, and yet in the gloom, he hadn’t seen it. Wolff kept glancing back into the cabin to keep an eye on Anna, too.

  “Got the rope?”

  He peered back into the darkness. Sig stumbled out of the storeroom.

  “It’s dark in there,” he muttered, trying to excuse the time he’d taken. A few seconds too many, that was all.

  And if he had hidden the gun under the coil of rope, what then? Sig pushed the thought away. The chance had gone.

  Back in the cabin, Wolff sent Sig to stand by the far wall, while he motioned with the revolver for Anna to sit down again.

  Keeping one eye on Sig, Wolff placed the gun on the floor beside Anna’s chair, out of the reach of her foot. He took the coil of rope and began to wind it tight around her wrists, tying them to the back of the chair, then continuing to loop the rope around her waist and the back of the chair.

  He leaned right into her as he did and pulled violently on the rope, so that she gasped a couple of times. That seemed to make Wolff pull even harder, and he lingered, enjoying the act of binding her. His hands pawed her body, and his fingers stroked her dress here and there as they went, pushing into the soft flesh underneath.

  Anna shut her eyes, and Sig swore silently under his breath.

  Then it was over.

  Her whole body was bound fast, her back to the chair back, her legs to the chair’s legs.

  Wolff dragged the chair into the middle of the room, well away from any possible object or aid, so that she faced the window.

  Then he seemed to change his mind, and he rotated it ninety degrees, so that Anna sat looking at the body of her father on the table.

  “To remind you not to do anything foolish,” Wolff said.

  He looked at Sig.

  “Put your gloves on, boy,” he snapped. “We’re going out on the ice.”

  At the door, Sig turned and looked despairingly at his sister.

  But she was not looking at him. Instead, as Wolff pushed Sig through the door, she called to him.

  “You killed my mother, didn’t you?”

  Wolff stiffened.

  “I never had the pleasure of knowing your mother,” he said, and then they were gone.

  33

  Moon Day, early morning

  You cannot see the future. You cannot hear what has not yet been said, nor do the days that have yet to be have any place in the huddled collection of memories which fight for your attention.

  And yet as Sig left the cabin that morning with Wolff and set off across the frozen lake, he could feel the presence of things that were about to become reality, and it scared him so much that he became short of breath.

  It was a bright morning but cold enough to chill a man’s soul, and nothing stirred. Nothing. They tramped down from the porch, sending a large icicle crashing onto the boards beside them. Fighting against the relentless assault from the cold, they pulled their coats tight as they went, Sig in front, Wolff behind. He still held the gun, now under a blanket he’d thrown over his shoulders to swathe his upper body. His greatcoat swung out beneath like the skirt of a dress, and all in all Wolff looked like a deadly scarecrow.

  “Far?” he barked at Sig.

  Sig looked across the ice. There was no snow falling, and he fancied he could even see the spot from here, a small brown smudge on the ice a way out, though it was hard to be sure.

  “Half a mile. Maybe a mile.”

  “We’ll take your dogs,” Wolff said, and Sig nodded.

  It seemed a lifetime since he and Anna and Nadya had hurtled back up the slope from the lake with Einar’s body on the sled, and then his sister and stepmother had taken the dogs back into Giron.

  They were pleased to see Sig now but looked tired, and when they saw he had still not brought them any food, they began to howl and whine.

  “Shut them up,” Wolff barked. “Or I shoot them.”

  Sig comforted the four dogs as best he could and began to harness them. They were working dogs and the feel of the harness pleased them, enough to take their minds off food for a while longer. It was a job that should have been easy, and in warmer weather would have been so, but in the extreme cold it became a long and torturous job as he fumbled with stiff leather straps and brass buckles with his clumsy gloved hands.

  “Hurry,” grunted Wolff angrily from behind him. Sig didn’t even have to look to know that the revolver was pointing at the back of his neck. Somehow he could feel it.

  “Quiet there. Shh now,” he cooed to Fram, the lead, and as she fell silent, so did her team.

  Sig fixed the harness to the sled and took Fram by her collar to lead the dogs out of the dog hut.

  After a short run down to the shore, open ice lay before them.

  Sig drove the team, standing on the runners at the back, and Wolff sat backward on the empty bed of the sled, facing Sig. The blanket covered him like a shroud, but there was an angle, a lump in the blanket, and Sig knew it was the gun.

  It reminded him of something his father had once told him about guns and very cold weather, but he couldn’t exactly remember the details. It was something to do with taking a gun from a very, very cold place into the warm, but maybe it was the other way around. He wished he could remember, but he did recall his father saying that if you did this, the metal of the gun would “sweat,” as condensation formed on its surface, and that then the gun could rust or seize up or even misfire. But he had no idea whether this happened in seconds or minutes or days.

  If Wolff had no gun … well, that would even things up a little. Just a little.

  Sig cracked the whip, gently once, in the air above Fram’s nose. She was a good dog and was away immediately, heading straight onto the ice.

  If Wolff showed any concern at suffering the same fate as Einar, he didn’t show it. He was almost nonchalant as he rode like a backwar
ds-facing Buddha on the frozen water, his head lolling from the jolting of the sled.

  Sig’s fears were also more pressing than the possibility of the ice breaking, as he kept one eye on his dogs and the other on the gun under the blanket. But as they came closer to the brown smudge he’d seen from the shore, and saw it was indeed Einar’s stuff from the sled, he found himself picturing his father’s terrible end again.

  The cold ate at them both now, despite the years each had spent in the miles north of the Arctic Circle. Sig felt weak from hunger; he had had barely any food. Lack of sleep made him feel sick, and the freezing air grabbed his lungs with every breath, every one a lungful of ice crystals, sucking his body heat away some more.

  Wolff stared at Sig, his eyes unblinking.

  Sig’s hands clung to the ganglines, but in reality he was not guiding the dogs. Fram knew where they were going, to a small disturbed patch in the ice, slightly clearer of snow, and the few things that lay there.

  Sig pulled them in slightly, and even as he did, the ice gave a warning, a menacing creaking sound that chilled his heart. His eyes darted about to this side of the sled and that, waiting for a telltale splinter to open up, but none came and the creaking was behind them.

  They came to the bundles on the ice, and the dogs stopped without Sig having to make them.

  “Here?” Wolff said, craning his neck.

  He grunted, then motioned with his gun at Sig, telling him to move away from the sledge. He didn’t want to be stranded on the ice and give the boy a head start back to the cabin.

  Sig understood and dropped the lines over the back of the sledge, then watched Wolff spin and haul his bulk from his sitting position. He stood and edged his way across the ice.

  “Good,” he said.

  There was the leather satchel, just as Sig had said, lying on the ice with its mouth open. A few papers were spilled in the snow, some stuck to the ice now, others maybe had blown away.

  Wolff bent to pick up the bag, then tried to gather some of the loose leaves of paper. But though his gloves were thin enough to allow his fingers to fit the trigger guard of a Colt, they were too thick to grasp rigid sheets of paper from the lake ice.

  While he scrabbled with the papers, he seemed to forget Sig, and Sig himself had seen something else.

  He was looking at the small pile of matches again; the tiny sticks of wood that could have saved his father’s life, but hadn’t. Then he saw what he had missed in the panic of finding Einar. A book. A black, leather-bound book, lying in the snow, near the tumble of matches.

  It was their Bible, the Bible that had been his mother’s, and Sig saw it was that which Einar had tried to burn to save his life.

  The Bible. Why the Bible? It lay on its open front, the edge of a few pages twitching in the slight breeze from the head of the lake, and Sig understood what his father had been trying to do. Those thin pages, thin, thin like wafers, would have been the easiest to catch alight, and with those burning, Einar might just have had the chance of staying alive.

  But the Bible had survived, and Einar had not.

  On an impulse Sig bent over and using both hands, scooped the book from the ice, closing its cover.

  Immediately Wolff’s eyes were on him.

  “What’s that, boy?”

  Sig held it up for him to see.

  “Bible,” he said, and suddenly from nowhere, Sig found he had more strength than he thought. Maybe it was just the touch of fate brushing his heart, but he found he didn’t care if Wolff put a bullet in him there and then.

  “My mother’s Bible,” he added. “I want it.”

  Wolff glared at him, perplexed, then turned away, and Sig stowed the Bible into the gaping outer pocket of his coat as greedily as if it had been the gold Wolff was searching for.

  Suddenly there was a loud groan under their feet, as the ice began to complain about their presence. It subsided quickly, but then another crack came from a few feet away.

  “Time to go,” Wolff said, and Sig nodded.

  They hurried from the scene, Wolff clutching his paper treasure, and Sig his.

  The Bible felt like the last link to his parents. It had been his mother’s pride, that beautiful black leather-bound book. On the front, the words “HOLY BIBLE” were stamped in gold leaf, and the edges of the pages were also rimmed with gold. He remembered how the book shone in the candlelight when Maria read from it.

  More than anything else, it meant his mother. And though she and Einar had argued over what lay inside its pages, just as Einar and Nadya would later, Einar had come to treasure it after her death, keeping it more preciously than anything that was theirs, save perhaps the Colt.

  One summer day a year or so ago, Sig had come in from swimming in the lake to find his father working at the cabin table with the Bible, some fresh paper, and a pot of hot glue.

  “This old thing’s coming to pieces,” Einar had said. “Needs some care and attention.”

  Nadya and Anna had come in then too, and Nadya had smiled to see what Einar was doing. She stood behind him while he finished repairing the endpapers, strengthening the cover, then planted a kiss on the top of his head.

  “You’re a good man, Einar,” she said.

  Einar had laughed, and waved the finished Bible at Sig.

  “As good as the men in here, eh son? Maybe!”

  Sig smiled.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Something seemed to occur to Einar then.

  “Even the dead tell stories,” he said. “Don’t I always say that? Yes? And this book is full of them. Full of them both. Dead men and stories, dead men and stories. You just have to know how to listen.”

  It seemed to amuse him, and for the rest of that day, there had been nothing but harmony in the Andersson house.

  34

  Moon Day, morning

  God must have smiled on the man and the boy that morning, on the sinner and the innocent, as they made their way back across the ice. Or maybe God wasn’t watching. Either way, the ice held, despite frequent warning cracks, sounding like distant gunfire.

  Sig ran the dogs as hard as he dared, hoping they would tread lightly on the ice, that their speed would be enough to see them across even a genuine crack. Wolff seemed lost in a world of his own, rummaging through the leather bag, rifling through the papers inside, though on the jolting sled and with gloved hands, Sig doubted he could have read much, if anything, of what lay within.

  And if they got back to the cabin, and the papers were all worthless, no bank drafts, or statements of account. What then?

  What would Wolff do then?

  Yet things were not to turn out that way, because there was a surprise for Wolff and Sig when they got back to the cabin.

  Wolff pushed Sig up the slope in front of him, anxious to be back in the warm, curious to see what secrets Einar’s papers held. For the first time, doubt had crept into his mind. Supposing Einar’s children were telling the truth? Supposing the old goat had spent it all, or lost it over the years? Supposing the papers held nothing but empty words and symbols? Well, he would take something with him, he knew that much. He wouldn’t leave empty-handed.

  Sig opened the cabin door, took two steps inside, and stopped dead. Hope leapt into his heart, as Wolff came in behind him and saw the empty chair and the loose bundle of ropes scattered around its feet.

  Anna was nowhere to be seen.

  “Damn girl,” Wolff said, and whirled around, dropping his bundle, expecting to be attacked at any second.

  When it didn’t come, he swore again and swung a fist at Sig, catching the side of his head. The blow sent Sig reeling, and he was immediately sick on the floor. As he rolled away from the mess, Wolff straddled him, one foot either side of his body. His arm pointed at Sig’s head, and at the end of his arm was the revolver. Sig felt something under his hand. The Bible had fallen out of his pocket as he’d dropped to the floor.

  “Where is she?” Wolff hissed.

  Sig tried to scr
abble backward on the floor, but Wolff put a hefty boot on his chest.

  “Where is she?”

  He pulled the hammer of the gun back.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” The words spilled out of Sig.

  Wolff blinked slowly once, and Sig closed his eyes.

  There was a crash from behind them. Something had fallen off a shelf in the store room, and in two paces Wolff crossed the room and ducked into the dark.

  Sig scrambled to his feet, but before he was even halfway upright, Wolff was back, with Anna clutched by the neck in one big gloved paw. Sig’s heart sank. Why hadn’t she got away? But instantly he realized what she’d been doing in the store, and he felt sick again.

  Wolff hurled Anna across the room, away from him. Biting off his gloves with his teeth, he flung them to the floor, and now they saw him really angry.

  He advanced, waving the gun at them, stamping on the floorboards with his heavy boots.

  “No more games!” he screamed. “Where is my gold?”

  But neither of them answered, because they knew there was no gold for him to have.

  “Tell me!” Wolff yelled, and then, “Or I kill you both!”

  Still crouching on the floor, Anna put her arm around Sig.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t find it.”

  Sig knew what she meant, what she’d been looking for, and hadn’t found. She hadn’t found it because Sig had moved it to sit on the barrel of beans by the door.

  “What?” Wolff snapped. “What’s that? You couldn’t find what? Is the gold in there? Is that it?”

  Anna hung her head.

  “No. Not gold.”

  “Then what? Tell me or I shoot you.”

  A seed of a thought planted itself in Sig’s mind. No. It was more than a seed. It was the birth of something greater, something born from a lifetime of watching and waiting, and without knowing quite why, Sig knew this was his moment. Maybe it was desperation, maybe something more, but there was definitely something wrong with what was going on.