Dan Smith - The Child Thief

He held up his gloved hands to show the people what they’d done. He shook his head at them. ‘Is this what you want?’ he shouted over their chanting. ‘Blood?’

‘Yes,’ someone yelled back. ‘Blood.’ It wasn’t the answer he had expected. Josif had wanted to shame them, but the people had moved beyond that emotion. They were angry and they were becoming frenzied. There was an approaching wickedness that threatened to harm all of them, and this was the only thing they had to aim their anger at. They had found something upon which to focus all their dark emotions, and their collective mood was moving them to act without reasoned thought. If there was to be any chance of stopping them, I knew I had to break them apart, restore their individuality if they were to see sense.

I fired a second shot and pointed my pistol at the crowd. ‘Move away. Now. I want you all to leave my home.’

‘You’re going to shoot us?’ Dimitri asked.

‘I’ve shot many men. You’d be no different.’

‘And women? You’ve shot women too, Luka?’

I didn’t reply.

‘And you’d shoot us ?’ Dimitri looked behind him. ‘Your friends and neighbours? To save a man you don’t even know?’ Now he showed me the defiant expression of a victor and he pointed to the corner of the house. ‘In front of your own daughter?’

Petro was standing far back from the crowd, with his arm around Lara, pulling her close as if for protection. She in turn had squeezed herself into the folds of his coat as her older brother watched with interest. I held a hand out to them, indicating they should remain where they were.

‘What about you, Dimitri?’ I turned my attention back to my brother-in-law. ‘You want to drag that man out into a mob? In front of your wife? What does Svetlana think of this?’

‘She wants to protect the children as much as I do.’

‘Then where is she now?’

‘Where she should be. With our daughter.’

I shook my head. ‘Don’t do this, Dimitri. Please. Don’t do this. We’re still human.’

Dimitri stepped forward so the barrel of the pistol was against his chest, but it wasn’t the act of a brave man. It was the act of a coward who knew he’d won. I had shot men in this way before – pressed the barrel of a gun against the cloth of their coat and fired right through them – felt their bodies become heavy and watched them fall aside. But Dimitri knew I wouldn’t shoot him in front of my wife and daughter. There was nothing more I could do to save the man in my home.

I lowered the pistol, putting my free hand against Dimitri’s chest. ‘Don’t do this.’ But I knew I’d lost my ability to control this situation. Dimitri had weakened me and now he looked down at my hand, shoved it aside and pushed past me. Others followed him, the chanting beginning again as Natalia’s own kin poured in to defile our home.

‘Put it down, Viktor,’ I heard Dimitri say, and I nodded to my son, who was standing beside Natalia, the revolver held out in front of him. Viktor lowered it and moved to protect his mother.

I continued to protest as the villagers lifted the stranger from his resting place. I appealed to each of them, pulling them back, trying to make them see what they were doing. It was as if I were trying to wake them from a trance, and they neither saw nor heard me, and I knew I was beaten even as I went on pleading with them.

They put their hands under the stranger’s arms and they pulled him up, his head lolling to the side. People crowded in to touch him, to carry him, to be a part of what was happening. The blankets that fell from his body were cast aside and they saw his nakedness. His bloated belly. Skin tight around his ribs, clinging to the bones. His legs so thin, his arms without any fat on them.

Seeing him like that, I knew the man was close to death. Perhaps, with food and rest and warmth, he might survive, but otherwise he was already almost gone.

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked as they set upon the stranger.

‘What needs to be done.’ Dimitri gestured to those who were holding the emaciated man and they dragged him to the door, his feet trailing the floor. The man made no effort to help himself. He didn’t even make a sound.

‘We should help him,’ I said. ‘Look at him. This man needs our help.’

‘We don’t help child-murderers,’ Dimitri answered before turning to follow the others out of my home. ‘Not in Vyriv.’

‘Stop this.’ Josif remained by the front door as the men dragged the outsider into the snow. ‘Please. Stop this now.’ His nose was still bleeding, the blood running across his lips and down his chin, following the line of his neck. ‘Stop.’

But their furore was high. There was no stopping them now.

I hurried out and beckoned to Petro and Lara, telling them to come inside at once. Lara went straight to her mother. Her eyes were wide with confusion and fear. Tears welled and fell across her cheeks. She held her mother tight, wrapping her arms around her waist and burying her face in her stomach.

‘We have to stop them,’ Josif said, standing in the doorway. ‘Luka?’

‘What can we do?’ I said. ‘You saw them.’

‘There must be something.’

‘Would you have me shoot them?’

‘No.’

‘Then what else? You’re the man of words, Josif. What else can we do? You heard me try to reason with them, but a crowd like that? That feeling? It’s powerful.’

The crowd had passed through our gate and was now at the centre of the village, beneath the old tree.

The man was in a bundle on the ground and I knew he wouldn’t last long. He might even be dead already.

They were shouting at him, spitting on him. These were people I had known since the end of the civil war but now I hardly recognised them. They were no longer men and women; they were a pack of wild beasts, savage and raw.

I pushed the door shut behind me, to spare my daughter the sound and sight of people beyond their own control. Even Dimitri was holding up his hands now, trying to bring them to order, but he had stirred a beast. He had awakened the animal that slept in these people and there was no soothing it now.

When the first kick landed on the stranger’s bony ribs, a cheer went up. Another kick, another cheer. Then feet came in from all angles, prodding at him, striking him. People who had never harmed a person in their lives were aiming tentative blows, becoming more confident, more intoxicated by the crowd.

And I watched from my doorstep.

I watched as a rope was thrown over one of the tree’s strongest boughs. Thick and rough and black. The living wood dusted white and crystal on its leeward side. I watched as it was tied off and a crude noose was formed. And I watched as the starving man’s head was slipped through the thick rope and he was hoisted into the air. His body didn’t resist. His untied arms didn’t struggle. His legs didn’t kick. He simply rose into the air like a bag of grain and he swung, his body rotating slowly on the rope as the last of his life escaped into the cold air.

A naked man hanging from a naked tree.

With death came a stiff silence. Their mania was now in a trough; their madness fallen into a hush of contemplation and realisation. It was done. The intoxication had passed and reality had slipped back into their world.

They stood and watched as if they were one. Heads inclined upwards to gape at what they had done, breath tangible in the air around them. They huddled close to one another, feeling the weight of their actions, before their humanity returned to them, wanting to distance them from this and from each other. The first of them to step back was a woman at the edge, Akalena Vernadsky. She crossed herself and turned to walk along the road from the place where she had sung traditional songs last summer. She looked at the ground and trudged the frozen mud.