Dan Smith - The Child Thief

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 .’