Mo Hayder - Pig Island

'Sssh!'

'Joe, I want to go. Let's go.' She grabbed at my T-shirt, trying to haul me to my feet. 'NOW! Please, I want to go home.'

Well, that was the choke point, of course. For the Psychogenic Healing Ministries, the moment Sovereign came fleeing across the gorge, crying and stumbling and covered with dust, I was instantly elevated to most-hated-individual status. By the time I'd given up waiting for the creature to re-emerge and had gone after her, the posse had arrived. They were watching us from high up on the graffiti ledge, and when Sovereign saw her parents she raced towards them, crawling up the streambed, scraping her knees bloody, throwing herself, sobbing, into her father's arms. Benjamin stared at me accusingly over her head. As I climbed wearily up the last few feet Blake came forward and looked me in the eye.

'I am so out of patience with you, Joe,' he muttered. 'As soon as the mist lifts I'm taking you back to the mainland.'

So there I was, the social equivalent of dogshit, excommunicated to Blake's cottage, waiting for the weather to lift. But he wasn't getting his wish: by nightfall the mist was still there, the island still shrouded like a ghost ship, and I was stranded, lying on my bed, empty supper plate on the floor. Downstairs they'd mounted a guard — Blake and the Nigerian missionary — in case I tried another great escape. As darkness fell outside the window I closed my eyes, my fingers resting on the lids, and tried to replay the few seconds of rustling wood, the way I'd replayed the tourist's video time and again. How had Dove done it? I went through every imaginable Frankensteinian scenario: Dove in mad-scientist garb, galvanizing a shaved animal tail with an electric shock; Dove plotting in his lab over a cleverly engineered robot limb, maybe wrapped in meat. There wasn't an end to my imagination on this one.

At ten I heard them spend a long time going round the house, dragging furniture about. By eleven the cottage was silent, and when I went downstairs I found a chest of drawers pushed up against the back door, the Nigerian asleep on a Zed Bed next to it, Blake in a chair next to the front door, like a sentinel. I stood looking at him for a while, his chest rising and falling. He was clutching an iron fire poker to his stomach — he must have thought he might have to batter me. Me, half his age and twice his size. I held up my hand to say a silent goodbye, feeling a moment's pity for him — for his fear and for his ambition.

The drop from my bedroom window wasn't bad. I lowered myself to a dangle under the sill, then kicked off, landing OKish on the grass, my kit banging on my back. Outside, like a silent sign from the sky, I was doing the right thing: the mist was beginning to clear, leaving a cold, moonlit night. As I headed off, wire-cutters at the ready, the only sound was the waves crashing distantly on the beaches. From time to time, going alone through those woods, across the gorge with its ghostly piles of drums, I broke into a soft whistle to keep my spirits up. Dead girlie of me. There was an explanation for what I'd seen behind the tree, I just couldn't think what it was.

By midnight I was back at the place where me and Sovereign had stopped. The smell of the rotting pigs' heads was stronger than it had been earlier. I began to walk along the perimeter, flashing the torch beam into the trees on the other side of the fence and sniffing the air. Dove's land was very quiet, only a vague, vague squeak coming from somewhere deep inside, like the sound of rusting machinery moving in a breeze. The mine? I wondered. The old slate mine? I walked for more than five minutes, and must have been nearing the end of the gorge because I could hear the sea from beyond a bluff ahead of the fence. I thought about a decomposing body, about Malachi lying in the trees, his hands folded on his chest like he did in his prayers. I pulled off my sweatshirt, tied it round my nose and mouth, hauled the wire-cutters from the kit and went straight through the grass towards the fence, ready to go.

Like I said, the big thing with me is that I'm not a superstitious guy — nothing much rattles me. Which was why, as I got close to the fence and felt all the hairs on my arms and face stand up, bristling, at once, I paused, taken aback. I stared down at my hands, turning them over and holding them up so that the moon lit the hairs. What sixth sense had touched that off? Not like me — not like me at all. I peered through at the trees beyond the fence. No movement — nothing except the creak of machinery. And the wind had died to a breeze, so it wasn't that stroking my pelt the wrong way. Frowning, I opened the cutters, reached for the fence, and as the blades met, the answer came hard on the heels of the current, static electric field, you stupid fuck, a millisecond too late — five, six, seven hundred volts and fuck knew how many amps, spasming my pectorals and slamming my biceps up so hard that my arms shot out sideways, kangarooing me backwards across the rocks, slipping helplessly, my sandal strap snapping, the wire-cutters flying in a hot silver arc above my head.

SEE. Static electric field — makes your hairs stand up.

I lay on my back in the grass, like Scouser Tommy in army shorts, with my arms out to the sides where they'd fallen, only my eyes moving, tracking the clouds going across the stars and wondering about the heaven that half the world believes is beyond them. It's a warning, old boy, a warning for the very dense. My nerves are dying, I thought, and the idea made me huff out a breath of laughter — the first clue that I'd live. OK, I thought, not dying, but breaking — my first nervous breakdown. My first electric shock. It burns a path through you. A big path of burned meat that they never know about until they cut you open on the slab. That's what Finn reckons. That they can put a finger right through it and see which way the electricity went, just the way they can put a pen through a bullet path in a wall.

It was my left foot that came to life first. First my left foot, then a travelling, crackling wave of warmth — and now it was my left leg and the left side of my body. The fingers on my left hand flexed and I could feel my nose and ears twitch. Then, suddenly I could cough. With an effort I rolled sideways, on to my side, and spat into the heather, my right arm hanging like a length of dead meat against my back — like it had nothing to do with me. I raised my chin stiffly and looked around. I must have been lying on my back for a long time. Hours. The moon had moved and there was the beginning of a pink light in the east. Dawn. I wrenched my head sideways and stared over my shoulder at the fence. No warning. Military-compound gear and not a single high-voltage sign for the whole of the stretch I'd walked.

'Hoo hoo,' went something from the other side of the fence. 'Hoo hoo.'

I froze, all the hair on my body standing up like a cat's.

'Hoo hoo.'

With my good leg I treadmilled myself round on the ground so I was facing the enclosure. The trees were dark, harlequined in shadow. Above me, one of the pigs' heads, with its ever-moving halo of flies, looked down at me. I tucked my chin in and squinted painfully, arrows going up my neck. A rustle. A break of a twig. Then silence. I held my breath.

'Haven't they told you …?'

My pulse rocketed. I scrabbled round like a beached fish, flailing on the ground trying to face the direction of the voice. Someone was in there — a few feet inside the fence. I could see him: a pale, bloated shape down among the trees, low, like he was crouching. A pair of eyes moved rapidly in the darkness.

'Didn't they warn you about me?'

It was him. I knew, straight off. I could see a foot in a worn-out trainer and a white hand clamped round the handle of something. A weapon. Every instinct said I was in deep fucking shit. It was something about that froggy crouch — like he was thinking of pouncing. I thrashed like crazy on the ground, trying to get a response out of my body. When nothing would move I lay back, panting hard.