Read Online Pig Island by Mo Hayder - Free Book Online Page B

the frame back into the pile and straightened, brushing off his hands. “Malachi prayed that night. He prayed hard with the other disciples to find strength. We sat at that kitchen table, where you and I were sitting just now, the three of us talking to him, holding his hands … Holding his hands, but trying, in our own ways, Joe, to hold his heart. Even with God’s love we couldn’t persuade him to keep his vows. After twenty-four hours he put Asunción into the boat and took her to a hospital on the mainland.”
    “Even though that was against what the Psychogenics stood for?”
    “Even though that was against everything we stood for.” He gazed down at the floor, his arms out a bit at his sides, and then, like he was disappointed not to see Asunción and Malachi’s ghosts marked out on the carpet, he dropped his hands and looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. “Believe me, Joe.” He touched his heart with his little finger. “It didn’t make me happy, what came next.”
    “Why? What came next?”
    “At first we didn’t see him. Not for weeks. When he did come back he was alone—torn apart. The boy was just torn apart. Came in and sat at that table and poured his heart out to me: how badly he felt to have broken his vow, how it had been too late anyway—the Lord had called the tiny baby to His side, stillborn it was, and Asunción was refusing to come back to the island. She didn’t want anything to do with the Positive Living Centre or the PHM, and after what happened maybe you couldn’t blame her.” He stopped then, his finger tapping his forehead and his eyes lowered, like he was too choked to continue.
    “But he’s still here? In the village?”
    Blake shook his head. “No,” he said, in a tight voice. “He couldn’t stay in the community, not after that. He was too—too ashamed of his weakness.” He took a deep breath. “But the island was his home, of course.”
    “So he stayed?”
    “He found himself an old miners’ barracks over by the slate mine. Three miles away. On the south tip of Cuagach. The side facing the sea. Sometimes a shop in Bellanoch does supply runs for him, but he doesn’t speak to them or even see them. He’s completely isolated.” Blake went to the curtain, drawing it back and opening the window. He leaned out, looking up at the cliff face, his breath clouding the air. It was silent and hollow out there, and mist was beginning to come down, shifting across the cold stars above. “We’ve carried on his teaching, but we haven’t seen him in the village for twenty years. Twenty years he’s been out there. Twenty years on his own.”
    I came to stand next to him, opening the other window and ducking to stick my nose out, staring up to where the cliff rose hard into the night. I tried to picture the island stretching out between here and the south tip—miles of uninhabited land, poking into the sea like a finger. So, Malachi, you live with the pigs, I thought. And do you cut them up too?
    “What’s he getting up to over there, then, Blake?” I murmured. “What did the tourist photograph that day?”
    When Blake answered his voice was so low that I had to strain to hear. “Something has gone very wrong for Malachi. Things are happening at that end of Cuagach I try not to think about too hard.”
     
     
    There was a full moon that night, and the air was so crystalline, so salty and cool that, lying in my bed in the cottage next to the firth, I could have been in my tomb. I stayed awake listening to the wind picking up outside, thinking of the trees on the slopes above, leaning and bending in the wind, about all the secret places their movements revealed. Malachi Dove, alive and only three miles away. I kept coming back in my mind to the path I’d been walking up when Blake had stopped me— Where does that go, then, Blake? Where does that path go ? When at last I gave up trying to sleep and slid out of bed the display on my mobile phone read 02:47.
    I hauled