Free The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill

he said, handing it over. ‘Here’s Instalment Two.’

Wolf
    i
    You open your eye.
    The light is so dazzling, you close it instantly.
    Then you try again, this time very cautiously. The process takes two or three minutes and even then you don’t open it fully but squint into the brightness through your lashes.
    You are in bed. You have wires and tubes attached to your body, so it must be a hospital bed. Unless you’ve been kidnapped by aliens.
    You close your eye once more to consider whether that is a joke or a serious option.
    Surely you ought to know that?
    It occurs to you that somehow you are both experiencing this and at the same time observing yourself experiencing it.
    Neither the observer nor the experiencer is as yet worried.
    You open your eye again.
    You’re getting used to the brightness. In fact the observer notes that it’s nothing more than whatever daylight is managing to enter the room through the slats of a Venetian blind on the single window.
    The only sound you can hear is a regular beep.
    This is reassuring to both of your entities as they know from the hospital soaps it means you’re alive.
    Then you hear another sound, a door opening.
    You close your eye and wait.
    Someone enters the room and approaches the bed. Everything goes quiet again. The suspense is too much. You need to take a look.
    A nurse is standing by the bedside, writing on a clipboard. Her gaze moves down to your face and registers the open eye. Hers round in surprise.
    It is only then that it occurs to you that they usually come in pairs.
    You say, ‘Where’s my other eye?’
    At least that’s your intention. To the observer and presumably to the nurse what comes out sounds like a rusty hinge on a long unopened door.
    She steps back, takes a mobile out of her pocket, presses a button and says, ‘Tell Dr Jekyll he’s awake.’
    Dr Jekyll? That doesn’t sound like good news.
    You close your eye again. Until you get a full report on the spare situation, it seems wise not to overtax it.
    You hear the door open and then the nurse’s voice as she assures the newcomer that your eye was open and you’d tried to talk. A somewhat superior male voice says, ‘Well, let’s see, shall we?’
    A Doubting Thomas, you think. Feeling indignant on the nurse’s behalf you give him a repeat performance. He responds by producing a pencil torch and shining it straight into your precious eye.
    Bastard!
    Then he asks, ‘Do you know who you are?’
    You could have done with notice of this question.
    Does it mean he has no idea who you are?
    Or is he merely wanting to check on your state of awareness?
    You need time to think. Not just about how you should respond tactically, but simply how you should respond.
    You are beginning to realize you’re far from certain if you know who you are or not.
    You check with your split personality.
    The observer declares his best bet is that you’re someone called Wilfred Hadda, that you’ve been in an accident, that leading up to the accident you’d been in some kind of trouble, but no need to worry about that just now as it will probably all come back to you eventually.
    The experiencer ignores all this intellectual stuff. You’re a one-eyed man in a hospital bed, he says, and all that matters is finding out just how much of the rest of you is missing.
    You make a few more rusty hinge noises and Dr Jekyll demonstrates that the tens of thousands spent on his training have not been altogether misused by saying, ‘Nurse, I think he needs some water.’
    He presses a button that raises the top half of the bed up to an angle of forty-five degrees. For a moment the change of viewpoint is vertiginous and you feel like you’re about to tumble off the edge of a cliff.
    Then your head clears and the nurse puts a beaker of water to your lips.
    ‘Careful,’ says Jekyll. ‘Not too much.’
    Bastard! He’s probably one of those mean gits who put optics on spirit bottles so they know exactly how much booze