After 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.