Revolver (12 page)

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Authors: Marcus Sedgwick

BOOK: Revolver
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Moon Day, morning
G
od 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 scrabble 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.
We're dead anyway, he thought. We're dead anyway.
“Why don't you?” he said.
Wolff turned from Anna to Sig.
“What?” he said, snarling.
“Why don't you shoot?” Sig said. “You keep threatening to. Why don't you?”
He got to his feet.
“Sit down!” Wolff thrust the gun at Sig, but Sig stayed standing.
“Shoot me,” he said, as calm as the depths of the forest. For a brief, strange but wonderful moment he was filled with elation.
Wolff hesitated for a second, then smashed the revolver into the side of Sig's head.
He went down, his eyes saw nothing more.
Moon Day, morning
D
oes God turn his eyes away when bad things happen? Or does he watch, wondering at how his creation unfolds? Does he shake his head in sorrow? Or does he smile?
Sig lay on the floor of the cabin, not moving.
Anna screamed.
“You've killed him! You … You've killed him!”
She wailed and tried to scramble across the floor to Sig, but Wolff moved into her path, squatting down in front of her.
“I hope so,” he drawled.
She slapped him viciously across the face, so that her hand stung, and yet Wolff seemed almost not to notice.
“Now then,” he said, and Anna saw the darkness come into his eyes. She began to stumble away, staggering to her feet as she went, but Wolff was on her.
“Please …” Anna began.
“What?” mocked Wolff. “Please don't kill me? After ten years, ten years of waiting. Of hunting and travelling and freezing and almost damn-well dying, and you don't have my gold? Please don't kill me? Oh, I'm not going to kill you. Not yet. I want something for my trouble.”
Anna felt the back of her calves press against the edge of the bed, and Wolff towered in front of her.
“Not yet,” he whispered, as he pushed her backward.
Anna began to cry, as terrible memories flooded back.
“You killed my mother!” she screamed. “You killed my mother!”
Wolff paused, gazing at the girl on the bed in front of him.
“Come now,” he said, licking his lips. “Let's not speak of the snow that fell last year.”
Moon Day, morning
N
ot feeling anything, not hearing anything, Sig nonetheless opened his eyes and what he saw made him want to howl.
Not just Anna lying on the bed, with Wolff standing over her, tugging at his waistband. Not just the shape of his father's corpse under the blanket, not the pool of his own blood in which he lay, flowing freely from the wound to his head.
Even the dead tell stories. Stories of lies, and lies of stories, and lying, lying in blood, Sig leaked his life out, glaring at the man who told him that the dead can speak. His own dead now, his father, lying no more, but lying frozen on the table.
It made him want to howl.
But he didn't.
As he saw Wolff stroke one hand up the length of Anna's leg, he turned away and bolted for the door.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Wolff spin around, but nothing would stop Sig now. He flung himself around the frame of the door and into the storeroom.
The gun box was gone, but immediately he saw it on the floor—that had been the sound that had given Anna away, as she'd clumsily knocked it to the floor, the very thing she'd been looking for. Its contents were strewn across the floorboards.
He grabbed the revolver, and heard steps coming across the cabin.
But the gun was not kept loaded. He needed cartridges, and they had spilled. He fumbled for them frantically, and sent them clattering away from him.
He tried again, but there was only time to snatch one of the little brass tubes from the floor.
He flicked the chamber gate open with shaking hands, slid the cartridge in, snapped the cylinder around into place, and stood.
The door darkened.
“Get back!” Sig screamed, and Wolff froze where he was.
“Get back!” Sig yelled again, and this time Wolff edged back into the cabin, his own gun leveled at Sig's chest.
“What are you doing?” Wolff said evenly, but Sig ignored him, kept edging him back into the room.
“Keep going,” he said. “Anna, are you all right?”
Anna got up from the bed, smoothing her skirts, her
eyes meeting Sig's then opening wide as she saw the gun in his hands.
“What are you doing with that, boy?” Wolff asked again. “That old piece of your Pappa's? You going to hurt somebody with that?”
“Be quiet, Wolff,” Sig said, pointing the gun straight toward him. “Anna, come away from him.”
“Now wait a minute,” Wolff said. “Wait a minute.”
“What's wrong with your gun, Wolff?” Sig said, his breath coming in nervous gasps. Once more he watched himself as if from outside, heard himself speak as if it were someone else speaking, and as he did, he felt his strength growing and his voice becoming calmer. “What's wrong with your gun? You've been waving it around an awful lot. But I don't think you're going to use it, are you? I think there's something wrong with it. Isn't that right? Because otherwise I think we'd both be dead by now.”
Sig saw in the silence which followed that he was right. A fury swept into Wolff's eyes as he realized he'd been found out, and it seemed he would paw the floor like a bull in barely contained rage.
“What happened to it? Did the cold get to it? Did you let it get too cold? Did it rust when you stayed at some inn someplace? You should leave a gun outside when it's been in the cold. You should know that.”
He stared straight into Wolff's eyes, and though Wolff held his gaze, Sig no longer felt afraid.
Wolff smiled.
“Smart boy,” he said. “Just like your damn father. Too damn smart.”
Wolff lowered his hand, and when it was pointing at the floor, he let his useless barrel-rusted gun drop to the floor, where it lay like a dying beast, no hint of danger left about it.
“Anna,” Sig said. “Are you all right? Did he touch you?”
Anna moved over to Sig.
“I'm okay,” she said. “All right.” But she wouldn't look at Wolff.
“How did you get free?” Sig asked. “Nadya's here, isn't she?”
Anna nodded.
“I couldn't tell you. Not in front of him. She left just before you got back. She's gone for help. Proper help, this time.”
“Good,” Sig said. “Now, I want you to go after her, catch her up. Take the dogs and catch her up.”
“Sig …”
“Please, Anna, do as I say.”
Sig didn't take his eyes off Wolff, but he spoke urgently and insistently to Anna.
“Please. For my sake. For your sake. For Pappa,” he paused. “For Mother. Do as I ask. Please?”
Anna waited a long time before answering and even then her answer was only a nod.
She went to the door, pulling gloves and a coat on.
“Sig,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Remember your mother. Remember her, remember what she would tell you now.”
“Listen to your sister, boy,” Wolff whispered. “She's right. Once you pull that trigger, your life will never be the same again. It won't just be my life you're ending, boy.”
But Sig didn't answer, didn't answer either of them, and Anna shut the door behind her.
She was halfway across the snow towards the dog huts, when she heard the shot.
A single shot, which rang out across the whole of the frozen valley, from the cabin to Giron.
The echo of the shot came back, shaking the snow from the tops of the trees, and the ravens took wing.
Moon Day, morning
L
ove.
Faith, Hope, and Love. That was what Maria had tried to teach her children, but she had died too soon to finish their education.
In some move of the hand of fate, or maybe of God, Nadya had entered their lives to finish that teaching, but still, these are lessons for which you have to provide your own answers. That much, Sig had learned.
In the cabin, Sig stood staring at the tip of the barrel of his father's old Colt. The smoke from the black powder cartridge curled into the air. He breathed deeply. To pull the trigger, or not to pull the trigger? It was such a tiny act, such a small difference between doing it and not doing it. So small a choice, was there really any difference at all? And yet there was, and he had chosen to pull the trigger. It was easy.
Wolff sat on the floor, against the wall, the wall that now bore a blasted hole almost a foot wide in its surface, about two feet away from Wolff's head.
“Why?” Wolff asked. “You could have won.”
He stood up.
“You could have won. Why did you miss?”
Sig smiled.
“My mother's children are not murderers,” he said, and handed the empty gun to Wolff. Without another word, he turned and walked toward the cabin door.
Wolff stared at him open-mouthed, and then at the gun in his hands.
His left hand moved to the string of shiny new cartridges clipped into a belt around his waist, and with almost childlike glee he eased one out of the leather and slid it into Einar's old gun.
Sig heard him do it.
He had reached the door and opened it.
He didn't falter as he heard Wolff thumb the hammer back on the revolver. It clicked into place and Sig knew that it was held back from falling onto the primer only by a tiny sliver of metal.
He prayed, but he didn't pray to God.
He prayed to his mother; he prayed that she wasn't wrong to preach the path of peace.
He prayed to his father; he prayed that his father had known what he was talking about when he said that you should never put a powerful new smokeless cartridge into an old gun like theirs.
He heard the trigger grate. There was a second deafening bang as the gun roared into life again, some of the roof splintered down onto Sig, and with it came a scream of wild pain. The gun had blown apart, taking half of Wolff's hand off with it.

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