Mo Hayder - Pig Island

'Didn't they tell you? Don't you know about -'

He broke off and there was a long pause. His breathing got louder, more congested, like an old man's, and I could feel his interest tighten and close on me. This is it, I thought, panicking. He knows who you are. He got to his feet. I tensed, expecting his face at the fence, but instead he went backwards, disappearing between the trees. His huge body moved heavily against the branches. There was a crack of twig and a faint rustle, then nothing. The world went silent.

With all my energy I forced myself on to my side and stared into the dark space he'd left, heart thudding like a train, wondering if I'd imagined seeing him in there. The rocks, grass and trees were motionless. After what seemed like for ever, when nothing in the trees moved, and I'd been lying there so long that it was like the world had ticked a degree or two further into morning, I took a deep breath and, with all the strength I could find, pushed myself clumsily into a slumped sitting position.

I sat there, blinking in the pink dawn, digging my good fingers into my right biceps, trying to wake it up. I looked to my side, down the long expanse of fence. Silence. Was there a gate in the fence to let him out on to my side? Was that where he was heading? My rucksack — fuck knew where that had got to, but my torch was lying on the ground about ten feet away, its dying beam lighting up the sparse heather. And there, glinting in the beam, the wire-cutters. I swivelled round, propelling myself on my arse, like a baby that hadn't learned to walk, scraping my legs in the rough heather. Wire-cutters. Get up, Oakesy, old mate. Do it now. Get the fuck up and get to them. I grabbed my numb right leg, moved it to one side out of the way and rolled clumsily on to my good left knee. 'Come on. Come on.' Somehow I got my left foot under me and straightened the leg, my right leg dragging uselessly. But I didn't have the strength or balance to get any further. The effort had half killed me and I couldn't get upright. I had to stay there, arse in the air, staring at my grazed kneecaps, swaying a bit, trying not to faint. Wondering whether to throw myself on the ground in the direction of the wire-cutters.

I saw him between my legs. Upside down and silhouetted against the pink sky. He crested the hill calmly, at his leisure, a huge shadow, like a mountain, blocking my vision. I had a moment where I couldn't move, where I was frozen, clocking all these details. He was massive, wearing something threadbare and filthy, and over the years he'd grown himself man-breasts. There was no strap-on tail dangling between his legs. But he was carrying an axe. Yeah, I thought, my leg going weak. It is an axe. An axe.

'Come on,' I hissed at my kneecaps. 'Straighten up, you fuckers.' But I couldn't. I'd lost it. I had to stay there like a fucking hairpin, swaying from side to side and shivering like I was drunk, while he came calmly up behind me. He didn't change his pace or run or bulldozer me, he just walked up to me and casually bumped into me from behind.

I couldn't stop myself: I went down, landing face first in the grass, my hands under my stomach, the sound of my nose crunching echoing through my head. A noise barked out of my mouth. 'Uhhh.' I lay for a second, head spinning, face mashed against the earth, a long rope of bloody mucus drifting out of my nose, like it was attaching me to the ground. ' Uhhhhohjesusuuh .'

He got down on his knees behind me and gently, methodically, manoeuvred his body so he was lying on top of me, all his weight on my back, breathing against my neck like he wanted to fuck me. I lay there, heart hammering, forcing myself to breathe in and out with his weight on me, too scared to move, waiting to see what he was going to do. But he did nothing, just lay there on top of me, in this weird, kind of companionable way, with his face turned sideways so it lay against my cheek. A strand of his hair fell down the side of his face, just in the field of my vision. It looked about a hundred feet thick.

I flexed the fingers on my left hand feebly. You can probably still move, old mate, I told myself. I clenched my mouth a few times, trying to get my jaw to click. You probably can. I swallowed the blood that trickled down the back of my throat. If I rolled my eyes back I could just see the beam of the torch. The wire-cutters were right next to it. On top of me, Dove stiffened.

'Whad?' My voice came out of me thick and loud, like I had a heavy cold. 'Whad you doing?'

'Your peace of mind,' he whispered. 'Remember your peace of mind, Joe Finn? Well, now I'm fucking with it. I'm fucking with your peace of mind, Joe.'

He pushed himself off me and I rolled sideways, lungs sucking up air, arms coming up convulsively. He grabbed the axe, and before I could even begin to sit up he was swinging it down, blunt side first. I made a weak grab for it, blindly, my left wristbone colliding with the head and getting a slippery grip for a second before he hefted it away and I dropped back, my hands bleeding, the world rocking and bucking all around me.

And that was it. Bang bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down on my head. And, bang, bang, down went old Oakesy. Not dead, of course. But pretty fucking close.

It was three weeks before I got back on to Cuagach. I never stopped thinking about it, not once. All the time I was lying in bed, too weak to get up, half asleep, half dreaming about Dove's Beelzebub, I never once stopped thinking about how to get revenge on the gobshite. Turned out he'd given it to me good. He'd split a big chunk of my scalp away and fractured my skull. Not an open fracture, no bits of bone forced into the brain tissue, but bad enough — a three-inch-long hairline fault in the 'parietal bone', whatever the fuck that is. And, bad fracture or good fracture, he took out a large chunk of my memory too. What I remember about the first forty-eight hours is almost nothing.

Christ knows how I got back to the community. Probably Blake raised the alarm, came over and found me lying on my back in the heather where Dove had left me, flies circling above my face like planes in a stacking pattern over Heathrow. I've got flashes of being carried through trees, and of being so cold my bones were shaking: I remember the taste of blood too, and every five minutes puking all over myself (try getting the human stomach to tolerate uncooked blood: it just won't do it). I know that at one point I was taken somewhere freezing and dark and laid out like the dead on a stone floor for what seemed like fucking-ever while Blake and Benjamin argued nearby, their voices echoey, like we were in a tomb: Blake wanting to call the police on Dove — saying this was attempted murder — and Benjamin screaming like a girl that he wanted nothing to do with it: 'We should never have had a journalist on Cuagach in the first place!' Eventually someone — I imagine it was Blake — must have put me in the boat and got me to the mainland (he didn't take the card out of my camera — you never really know who's on your side, do you?), because the trusty lobsterman found me at six o'clock the next morning, lying under a blanket on a jetty outside Croabh Haven.

Later Lexie said, when she opened the door to find me standing supported by the lobsterman in the doorway, my left hand cupping the right like a dead animal, my head caked with blood, puke all over my T-shirt, the first words out of my mouth were 'Bolt-cutters, Lex. Insulated handles. I need you to get me some.'

She thought I'd had a stroke, seeing my face, and I've still got a memory of the Hallowe'en mask I saw when she held up a mirror to me: the right side of my face had slackened, like melted candlewax, and my right eye was hanging so loose I could see the red bottom of my eyeball. Sometimes that face comes to me still, mixed in with all the other nightmares. But I refused point-blank to go to the police or the hospital — I wasn't having the police coming along and arsing it all up before I'd had a chance to get back to the island — and over the next few days, whenever I had the strength to speak, me and Lex argued about it. They all ended as class arguments, just like we always had, her raging around the room throwing her arms in the air and mourning the upper-class husband she should have married: 'I don't believe this! You've never trusted the police because you and Finn grew up little criminals and you think we're all living in some Orwellian bloody dictatorship where you can't trust the authorities — and because of this perfectly reasonable thinking, you're not going to report an attempted murder.'