Pig Island

1

The alarms first went off in my head when the landlord and the lobsterman showed me what had been washed up on the beach. I took one look at the waves breaking and knew right then that cracking the Pig Island hoax wasn't going to be the straightforward bit of puff I'd expected. I didn't say anything much for a few minutes, just stood there, probably scratching the back of my neck and staring, because something like that… well, it's going to get you thinking, right? However much of a big guy you think you are, however much you reckon you've seen in your life and however lairy you are about the mad stories that go round, looking down at something like that splashing around your shoes, it's going to make you scratch a bit. Why didn't I listen to those alarm bells, turn right round and walk away from the whole thing there and then? Don't. Just don't. I stopped asking myself that question a long time ago.

That summer what they called the 'devil of Pig Island' video had already been around for a couple of years. Disturbing thing, it was. Genius hoax. And trust me, I know hoaxes. It had been shot on a sunny morning by a tourist out on a boozy sightseeing tour of the Slate Islands, and when it hit the public the whole country went off on one, whispering about devil worship and general bad shit happening on the remote island off the coast of west Scotland. The story might have run and run, but the secretive religious group that lived on the island, the Psychogenic Healing Ministries, wouldn't give interviews to the press or respond to the accusations, and with nothing to fuel it the story died. Until late August last year when, after two years of nothing, the sect decided to break the silence. They cherry-picked one journalist to stay with them on the island for a week to see how the community lived and to 'discuss the widespread accusations of Satanic ritual'. And that canny old git of a journalist? Meet me. Joe Oakes. Oakesy to my mates. Sole architect of the biggest self-fuck on record.

2

'Seen the old video, have you?' said the lobsterman. It was the first time we'd met and I knew he didn't like me. There were only four of us in the pub that night: me, the landlord, his dog and this moody old shite. He sat in the corner huddled up against the wood panelling, puffing away at his rollies, shaking his head when I started asking about Pig Island. 'Is that why you're here? Fancy yourself a devil-wrangler?'

'Fancy myself a journalist.'

'A journalist no less!'

He laughed, and looked up at the landlord. 'Did ye hear that? Fancies himself a journalist!'

The place had that leery feel you sometimes get in these struggling local holes — like any minute a fight's going to kick off behind one of the fruit machines even though the place is half empty. There were two alehouses in the community — the tourist one, with its picture window overlooking the marina, and this one for the locals, up a cliff path in the soggy trees. Stained plaster walls, stinking carpets and dingy, sea-dulled windows that stared out to where Pig Island lay, silent and dark almost two miles offshore.

'They'll not let you on the island,' said the landlord, as he wiped down the bar. 'You know that, don't you? There's not been a journalist on that island in years. They're as mad as kettles out on Pig Island — won't let a soul on the island, much less a journalist.'

'And if they did let you on,' said the lobsterman, 'God, but there's not a soul in Craignish will take you out there. No, you won't catch any of us gaun out to auld Pig Island.' He squinted through the smoke out of the window to where the island lay, just a dark shape against the gathering gloom. His white beard was nicotine-stained, like he must've been drooling in it for years. 'No. Not me. I'd sooner go through the old hag's whirlpool, pure fatal or not, than go round Pig Island and come face to face with auld Nick.'

One thing I've learned after eighteen years in this trade is there's always someone who gains from supernatural phenomena. If it isn't money or revenge it's just good old-fashioned attention. I'd already been to Bolton to interview the tourist who'd shot the video. He had nothing to do with the hoax: poor beer-bloated sod couldn't see past the next Saturday-afternoon league tables, let alone set up something like that. So who was gaining from the Pig Island film?

'They own the island, don't they?' I said, twisting my pint of Newkie Brown round and round in the circular beer stain, looking at it thoughtfully. 'The Psychogenic Healing Ministries. I read that somewhere — they bought it in the eighties.'

'Bought it or stole it, depending on your position.'

'Was an awful fool, the owner.' The landlord leaned on the bar with both elbows. 'An awful fool. The pig farm goes belly up and what does he do? Lets all the farmers in Argyll dump their dodgy chemicals out there. Ended up a death pit, the place — pigs all over the island, old mine shafts, chemicals. In the end he has to give it all away. Ten thousand pounds! They could have stole it from him, it'd be more honest.'

'You won't like that,' I said, in a level, casual voice. 'People coming from the south and buying up all the property round here.'

The lobsterman sniffed. 'Doesn't bother us. What we don't tolerate is when they buy a place, then lock themselves away and get up to all their queer rituals. That's when it bothers us — them hunkering down out there, consorting with the de'il, doing nothing but eating babies and giving each other a rare auld peltin' whenever they've a mind to.'

'Aye,' said the landlord. 'And then there's the smell.'

I looked at the landlord. I wanted to smile. 'The smell? From the island?'

'Ah!' he said, throwing the tea towel over his shoulder. 'The smell.' He fished under the bar for a giant bag of crisps and opened it, shovelling a fistful into his mouth. 'Do you know what they say? What they say is the signature smell of the devil? The smell of the devil is the smell of shite — that's what it is. Now, you go to anyone out there-' He jabbed a crisp-covered finger at the window. Crumbs confettied on to his T-shirt. '- out on Jura or in Arduaine, and they'll all tell you the same thing. The smell of shite comes off Pig Island. There's no better proof of their rituals than that.'

I studied him thoughtfully. Then I turned and looked across the dark sea. The moon was out and a wind had come up and was whipping branches against the windowpane. Beyond our reflections, beyond the image of the landlord standing under the lighted optics, I could see an absence — a dark space against the night sky. Pig Island.

'They piss you off,' I said, trying to picture the thirty-odd people who lived out there. 'They do their fair bit to piss you all off.'

'You're right about that,' said the landlord. He came to the table and sat down, setting the crisps in front of him. 'Do their fair bit to piss us all off. They're not well liked — not since they fenced off that nice bit o' beach on the south-east of the island and stopped the young folk from Arduaine going out with their boats. They'd only be wanting a wee game of footy or shinty in the sand, the weans, Godsake, no need to be so stern about it, is my opinion.'

'Not your perfect neighbours.'

'No,' he said. 'They're not.'

'Where I come from, you behave like that you're asking for a hiding.'

'So you're starting to see my point.'

'If it was me I'd be trying to think of how to make their lives difficult.'

'We've been tempted!' The landlord laughed. He licked his fingers carefully, then put them to his eyes, like tears of mirth had gathered there. 'I don't mind telling you. Been tempted. Put some paraffin in their bottles of bevvy, maybe.'

'You know, if it was me, I'd — I'd — I don't know.' I shook my head and looked at the ceiling, like I was searching for inspiration. 'I'd probably try and set up some kind of… dodgy rumour. Yeah.' I nodded. 'I'd set up a hoax — spread a couple of rumours around.'

The landlord stopped laughing and rubbed his nose. 'Are you saying we're making it all up?'

'Aye. Takin' the piss, are ye?' The lobsterman sat forward, suddenly flushed. 'You takin' the piss? Is that what your message to us is?'

'I'm just saying,' I met his eyes seriously, looking from him to the landlord and back, 'it's got a smell about it, hasn't it? I mean, devil-worshippers? Satan walking the beaches of Pig Island?'

The colour in the lobsterman's face paled very slightly. He crushed the rollie in the ashtray and stood, drawing himself up to his full height. He took a few deep, fighting breaths, and looked unsteadily down at me. 'Laddie, tell me. Are you a man who is easily shocked? You're a big man, but I reckon you're one who'd shock easy. What do ye think?' he said to the landlord. 'Is he? Is he a man who'd go in a funk if he saw something peculiar? Because that's how it looks from where I stand.'

'Why?' I said, putting the glass down slowly. 'Why? What are you going to show me?'

'If you're so clever you don't believe what we're saying, then come with me. We'll see what kind of a hoax is gaun on.'

Pig Island, or as it's called in Gaelic Cuagach Eilean, lies in the small cup of sea at the edge of the Firth of Lorn, caught like a precious stone in a setting between Luing, Jura and Craignish Peninsula — like it's been placed to block the entry to the Sound of Jura. It's a weird shape: like a peanut from above, covered in grassland and dense trees, a wide rocky gorge running down the middle. Once, before the pig farm and the chemical dumping, there'd been a slate mine operating in the south of the island, with a community of miners and a regular ferry. But by the time I got there Pig Island was almost totally cut off. Once a week the Psychogenic Healing Ministries sent a small boat to collect supplies. It was their only contact with the world.

I knew a bit about that part of Scotland — wrote bits and pieces about it from time to time. But my bread and butter was debunking work. One of the things that comes as birthright to a Scouser is knowing the stripe of bullshit when you see it and I'm a natural sceptic, a full-blown non-believer: a Scully, a James Randi, an out-and-out hoax-buster. I've flown round the world chasing zombies and chupacabras, Filipino faith-healers and beasts in Bodmin; I've used glass vials to collect dripping milk from the breasts of Mexican virgin statues — and in that time I've worked up a hard skin. But even I had to admit there was something odd-looking about the Psychogenic Healing Ministries' island. If you were going to believe in devil-worship you'd picture it happening somewhere remote and sea-wreathed like Pig Island. That night, as we jolted and bumped along a dark path that led to the end of the peninsula, I stared out of the window at its dark, desolate shape and for a moment or two there I had to tell myself not to be an old tart about it.

The landlord had crammed me into the back seat of the lobsterman's beat-up rust-bucket of a car. We left the dog in the pub: 'Because he's a mad rocket when he comes out here,' said the landlord, as the car pulled off the road on to a thin, muddy beach. 'Makes him crazy and I'm not putting him in a paddy just because you won't take my word for something.'

We got out of the car and I paused. I hadn't been out on the lash or anything, but I'd sunk a fair old few in the pub and it felt good for a moment to fill my lungs with the night air. The beach was silent, and there was already a breath of autumn in the air. It was gone eleven but Craignish was so far north the sky was still edged with blue. You'd almost think that if you stood on tiptoe and squinted you'd see the land of the midnight sun peeping at you from over the horizon, maybe a reindeer or a polar bear on a giant mint.

'See the pipe?' The lobsterman walked away to the south, totally steady in spite of the whisky, his old shoes leaving dull prints in the mud, his moon-shadow long beside him. 'The wee stank over there?' He was pointing to the long, low shape of a sewage pipe straddling the beach ahead. 'You get the conditions right — a nice westerly, an ebb and a spring tide — then everything from out at Pig Island gets washed up, not in the loch or even on Luing, where you'd expect it, but here, on this side of the peninsula. Most of it gets caught on the other side of that pipe.'

The landlord hung back, giving me a dubious look. His face was a little pinched seeming in the moonlight. He turned up his collar like it was suddenly dead cold out there. 'Sure you're ready for this?'

'Yeah. Why not?'

'It's not for the faint-hearted, what's caught up under that pipe.'

'I'm not faint-hearted,' I said, looking down the beach at the lobsterman. 'I've seen everything there is to see.'

We walked for a while in silence, only the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, and the tinkle of a halyard on a boat moored somewhere out in the sea. The smell hit me first. Even before I saw the lobsterman hesitate at the pipe, looking down on the other side, before I saw him shaking his head and leaning over to spit out something in the sand, I knew it was going to be one of those stomach-turners. One of those times I'd regret the last pint. I took a breath and swallowed, tapping my pockets as I got nearer, hoping I'd find a stray bit of chewy or something to take the taste away.

'Worse is it?' said the landlord, approaching the lobsterman. 'Got worse?'

'Aye — there's more. More than there was last week.'

I held my T-shirt up to my nose and peered down on the other side of the pipe. Dark shapes bobbed and buffeted in a yellowish foam. Meat. Decaying chunks of flesh — impossible to tell in the slime where one piece ended and the next began. The breaking waves forced them into the crevice under the pipe, tangled them in ribbons of tasselweed. Decomposition gas fizzed from under the raised flaps of skin, sending bubbles to the surface.

'What the fuck's this?'

'Pig meat,' said the lobsterman. 'Dead pigs. Killt in one of them rituals on Pig Island and been washed off the island.'

'Police have seen it,' the landlord said, 'and they've not cared to do anything about it — can't prove where it's coming from and, anyway, a few dead pigs aren't hurting anyone, is their manner of thinking.'

'Dead pigs?' I looked up at the mouth of the Firth. The moon picked out the silvery tips of waves as far as the eye could see — to where Pig Island peeped round the end of Luing, silent and hunched, like a dozing beast. 'All of this is dead pigs?'

'Aye. That's what they say.' The landlord puffed out a series of short, dry laughs — like the world never ceased to amaze him. 'That's what the police say — everything here is just pig meat. But you know what I think?'

'What do you think?'

'I think that when it comes to the lovers of Satan you can never be too sure.'

3

Let's think about my mistakes with the whole Pig Island thing. Well, the first one was letting my wife come to Scotland with me. What was I thinking? I've had to stop punching myself in the face about it, because you have to find ways of hanging on to a bit of sanity, so I say whoever was to blame, Lexie was there with me. Course, I didn't know she was there for her own reasons, didn't know she had something on her mind. I thought she was totally made up with her job — a receptionist at a London clinic — besotted by the media-whore neurosurgeon who ran the place (you guessed I don't like him, right?). The last thing I expected was for her to want to leave London. But one minute I say, 'I'm coming to Scotland,' next thing she's on the web looking for holiday cottages.

She found a crappy one-bed bungalow on Craignish Peninsula that my budget stretched to. It was hot and unventilated and Lexie slept restlessly. The night I got back from the beach she was already in bed, turning over in her sleep, whimpering and pushing at the pillow. I got in silently and lay next to her, staring up at the ceiling. Tomorrow I'd be on Pig Island. I needed to think about what I was chasing. I was going to have to play it dead carefully. Going to have to concentrate, be ready for anything.

The Psychogenic Healing Ministries wanted me at their Positive Living Centre on Pig Island because of Eigg, the little Hebridean island fifty miles to the north. They hadn't said it, but I knew it anyway. On Eigg the tenants had raised the money to buy the island from the owner. They got donations from everywhere, all over the country — even the National Lottery. Booted old Schellenberg and Maruma out. And how did they manage that? Good publicity. Simple as that. Someone was there to spread their story to the world. And that someone was me. I'd been there — helped break the story in the press. How I saw it now was the Psychogenic Healing Ministries probably had some legal hassle they wanted to raise money for. Thought I could help. If they'd known I had history with their founder, Pastor Malachi Dove, if they'd known that eighteen years ago I'd written an article on him under the name Joe Finn, that he'd been so arsed off about it he'd tried to sue me for libel, I'd never have got even a little bit close to Pig Island. But, like I said, canny bastard, me.

I lay awake half the night ticking off kit in my head: MP3 player, camera, batteries, spare camera card, phone … Didn't get to kip until three in the morning and the next day I was on edge. After breakfast, when I'd packed and was ready to set off for Pig Island, I got the laptop out one last time.

I never had found out what came first — the rumours that the Psychogenic Healing Ministries were practising Satanism, or the video. But when the public saw it they made up their mind it was an image of the devil, brought down on to Pig Island by the Satanic ritual of the PHMs. A great steaming pile of bollocks, naturally, but even I had to admit there was something dead creepy about the video.

First of all, it wasn't trick photography. It had been through every AV specialist unit in the country, passed every test, been torn apart frame by frame, but even with all that gadgetry thrown at it, it kept coming up clean over and over again. Whoever had cooked up this little bit of chicanery hadn't used trick photography: something had definitely been on the island beach that hot 18 July two years ago.

That morning I played it again on my laptop. I sat forward on the edge of my seat, concentrating hard. I'd seen it a thousand times and knew every frame. It started off kind of ordinary, with the camera lingering on the horizon out to sea, tilting gently as the single-engined boat bobbed on the waves in the Firth of Lorn. I dragged the RealPlayer toggle to the bit where a shout went up on the boat. This was the exact moment when one of the other tourists saw something moving on the island. A few indistinct shouts came from the TV — a lot of camera movement as the surprised tourist whipped the videocam sideways, taking in one or two shocked faces on the boat, then focused across the bay on an indeterminate line of green-brown — the seaward shoreline of Pig Island. Someone close to the camera spoke. The words were totally unintelligible because of the wind on the soundtrack, but the BBC unit had added sub-titled dialogue to my copy: 'What in fuck's name is that?'

This was the important bit. You could feel the guys on the boat inching forward in curiosity, staring at the beach where a creature no one could put a name to moved ponderously through the foliage at the water's edge. It stood at about five foot eleven; the BBC technicians figured this out from comparative measurements using sun and trees. In most ways it appeared like a naked human being — the video showed its back from the waist down; the upper half was concealed in shadow. Except it wasn't human. There was something dangling from the base of its spine. Estimated to be about two feet in length, the same battered brown flesh as the body, it looked just like a fleshy tail. It banged once on the back of the creature's legs as it moved.

Even in that stifling bungalow, with the sun coming through the picture windows, lying in great squares on the dingy patterned carpet, and Lexie a few yards away in the kitchen, I got this crawl of discomfort across my skin. I leaned nearer to the TV and stared at the wavery brown line of empty beach, the camera holding steady on the island in case the beast reappeared. A full three minutes elapsed until the tourist gave up waiting and turned the camera back to the other men on the boat. They stood at the gunwales, all four of them in their Bolton Wanderers shirts, holding the stanchion line and staring in silence at the spot on the beach where the creature had been.

The people at the BBC reckoned it was an actor, someone in a costume. Their AV unit had worked on the Bluff Creek Bigfoot film, and they thought this video had some of the same hallmarks: Sasquatch, as we all knew, was just some guy in a Hollywood gorilla suit — and the technicians decided that was probably what was happening in the Pig Island film. The problem was, because the video was taken from a boat about two hundred yards offshore, because the 'creature' emerged from the trees at frame 1,800 and had disappeared into the foliage by frame 1,865 (at a rate of thirty frames per second that meant a shade over two seconds), and because the movement of the boat had the picture jumping all over the place, the Beeb couldn't get a good enough image to analyse it any closer. They could only say what it appeared to be.

Half beast. Half human.

'I'll put your lighter in the rucksack,' said Lexie, suddenly, from the kitchen. 'I'm putting it in the front pocket.'

I paused the video and turned to look at her. She was standing at the table, her hair held back in the Alice band she'd got for her snobby job, and a pair of shorts I had a vague idea I was meant to notice. I didn't answer her straight off. Her voice was kind of casual, but both of us knew how serious she was. I'd 'given up' smoking months ago and I reckoned I'd hidden the occasional sneaky rollie pretty well. Except now there was the lighter.

I watched while she zipped up the rucksack.

'It was in your jacket pocket,' she said, reading my mind.

'I got it for the stove. There's no pilot.'

'Yeah,' she said, laughing. 'You're so transparent.'

I laughed too. Just a bit. 'Transparent or not — I used it for the stove.'

'OK,' she said lightly. 'OK. I believe you. You're so believable.' She set her tongue at the back of her front teeth and smiled up at the ceiling. Her smiling made the sinews in her neck stand out. She'd got skinny recently. I waited a few more moments to see if we were going to pursue this. Not dropping the smile or taking her eyes off the ceiling, in that same high voice she goes: 'And there was tobacco in the shorts you had on yesterday.'

'You're going through my pockets now?'

'Yes. My husband lies to me about smoking so I go through his pockets.' She dropped her chin then and met my eyes and I saw she'd flushed a deep purplish colour — like her cheeks were bruised. 'My husband thinks I'm stupid. So I have to fight back.'

The most important thing about me and my marriage was I didn't fancy my wife any more. I'd known it for months and done nothing about it — it's one of those things you can stick in the back of your mind and ignore if you're clever enough. But, and this is true, I cared about her. Weird fuck I was, I did still care for her. And I cared, in some rusty old-fashioned way, about fidelity. Back in London half my friends were already blasting their way through first, second divorces: I was the sanctimonious one, believed in thick and thin, wasn't going to end up in a frigid, three-minute-egg of a marriage. Touche, Joe Oakes, you pious arse. This'll teach you.

I stood slowly and went to stand in the kitchen doorway, looking at her. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I am.'

She didn't move for a moment. Then her shoulders slumped and she let out a sigh. 'That's OK,' she said, shaking her head and holding out the rucksack to me. 'It can't be easy, giving up.'

'No, but I'm working on it.' I pulled on the rucksack. 'Believe me.'

She forced a smile. 'I've put some water-bottles in, at the bottom, and some factor ten.' She smoothed down the rucksack straps across my chest and, finding an imaginary stain on my T-shirt, wet her finger and rubbed at it. A compulsive neatnik, Lex, this grooming, this shrimping, was her way of showing I was forgiven. 'Now,' she said. 'I know it's your turn to cook tonight, but you'll be exhausted, so I'll do a pasta salad. Avocado, bacon, olives. It'll save if you're late.'

'Lexie,' I said, 'I told you. Didn't I? I said I didn't know if I'd be back tonight. I told you this. Remember? I said I could be out there a few days.'

She bit her lip. 'A few days?'

'We talked about it. Don't you remember? I said I'd probably have to stay over and you said you'd be all right on your own.'

'Did I? Did I say that?'

'Yes.'

She shrugged. 'Well, don't worry about it. I mean I'd've loved some time with my husband on our holidays, and obviously I'd rather not be in this place on my own.' She opened her hands to indicate the bungalow. She'd hated it at first sight. She'd booked it but turns out to be my fault it was so shitty. 'But, don't worry, it's all right, I'll be all right.'

'Lex. I said it was work, remember?' Remember how I said it was-'

'Please!' She cut me off, holding up her hand in the air. 'Please don't. Please just go. I'll be fine.'

'I'll call you. If there's a signal out on the island I'll call you. I'll tell you how it's going — when I'll be back.'

'No,' she said. 'Don't. Really — don't. Just… just go. Do your thing.' She drummed her fingers on the table, not looking up at me. 'Go on,' she repeated, when I didn't turn to go. 'Just go.'

I sighed and touched her shoulder, opened my mouth to say something, then thought better of it. I tightened the rucksack and left, not bending to kiss her goodbye, quietly closing the kitchen door behind me. That was how it went, these days. Outside I stopped. At the end of the bungalow's long, rhododendron-crowded driveway the land opened into a funnel. There, basking in the glittering sea, was Pig Island.

4

'Rage against the Philistines of science. Do not allow the arrogance of the medical community to rape and subdue your natural self-healing powers. Wrest control over your life.'

The Psychogenic Healing Ministries, volume 14,

chapter 5, verse 1

The Psychogenic Healing Ministries would say my problems with Lexie were all about my godlessness. They'd say that if I only opened my heart to the Lord, that if I'd only grow towards his cosmic love, in no time I'd find myself growing back towards Lexie. And she'd grow towards me too. I'd never been to the Positive Living Centre on Pig Island, but I knew more than I needed about what the PHM would say about me and Lex. I knew their philosophies like I wrote them myself.

What happened between me and their founder, Pastor Malachi Dove, all starts back in Liverpool twenty years ago. It's the mid-eighties. Liverpool's the unemployment capital of Europe, and my cousin Finn is the closest thing to a God I know. He's a charm bird, totally does not look like my cousin with his blond, mosh-pit hair and ratty nose. The Kurt Cobain of Toxteth. He's the first in our family to get into university and he comes home summer holidays to Self-pity City talking like a Londoner. He tells us all about university and the birds he's shagged. He's going to be a journalist, travel the world. Everyone hates him. Me — I think I can see the sun shine when he bends over.

It's probably the girls that do it for me, because by the next year I've got a place at UCL and I'm ready to follow him down south. Me and Finn together, I'm thinking, the copping potential is unlimited. Then something happens. Something that changes the course of our lives. Finn's ma gets cancer.

Now, I've always really liked his ma, always thought she was totally sound. Actually, what I've always thought is, she's clever. But what does she do, good Catholic girl, when she's told she's dying? She refuses chemo. She scoffs down shark cartilage and flower remedies by the lorryload. She visits Lourdes. She ends up selling the house and trailing some faith-healer around the United States. His name is Pastor Malachi Dove. He believes in NO MEDICAL INTERVENTION. He believes in the power of prayer and positive thinking. Two months later she comes back to Toxteth and dies in agony in a hospice in Ormskirk. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.

For me and Finn, religion's what you get twatted for. Aled up on a Saturday night it'll be Everton and Liverpool, or Papes and Prods that starts the fight. And seeing Finn's ma die like that gives us a rage for Pastor Malachi Dove that won't go away. We get copies of Charisma magazine and find he's in the south-west US. With the money Finn's ma leaves we get on the next flight to New Mexico. We think we're gonzos. Bad Boys doing the Right Thing.

Oral Roberts has just told the world God will kill him if the congregation doesn't stump up eight million and Peter Popoff's just been outed on The Johnny Carson Show. We spend about a week on the breakaway-church circuit, trailing all these characters around the south-west, getting to know how it works: we meet rapture partisans, pretri-bulationists, preterists, post-wrathers and the midtribbers. We go to deliverance ministries and take part in prayer chains. Slowly we're narrowing it down to our target. And in July it happens. We meet Pastor Malachi Dove. Chief minister and founder of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries Foundation.

It's in a convention centre in Albuquerque. Air-con because it's hot as hell outside. Finn and me, we're about as out of place as you can get: there's me in my beanie and striker's donkey jacket, Finn in his Big Kahuna T-shirt and a mincy little Italian-style zip-up bag that would get him a good twatting in Seaforth; here it contains a loaded tape recorder and mic. We sit in row T, thinking everyone's staring at us. Thinking everyone knows for sure why we're there.

The first surprise is the stage. It's kind of empty and clinical. Feels like a hospital theatre, not a church. The helpers, all women, are a cross between angels and theatre technicians: eighth Dan judo pants and gleaming white plimsolls on bare feet. On stage a stretcher is wheeled up to a screen with a blue sky projected on it. Me and Finn sit there muttering between us, all ready to start snickering. Then Malachi Dove comes on stage and we get surprise number two.

First off, he's not American, he's English. (From Croydon, we find out later, son of a paperclip salesman.) And he's dead normal, not dressed in some huckster's suit: he's wearing a corduroy jacket and he looks more like a young teacher at a public school, with his soft, boyish good looks and thatch of blond hair flopping down over his forehead. Rimless specs on a tip-tilted nose and you can see his tendency is to get fat, not mean. Years later, when Leo DiCaprio is famous, me and Finn turn to each other and go, 'Malachi Dove. Malachi Dove and Leo. Separated at birth.''

Malachi Dove doesn't bound on stage. He comes on quietly, sort of shuffling, clearing his throat and tucking the specs in his jacket pocket, like he's going to deliver a theology lecture. He sits on a little stool and looks seriously and thoughtfully into the dark auditorium while the place erupts: cheers, hoots, promises of undying love echoing off the walls. He waits till the noise dies down. Then he moves the microphone to his mouth, clumsily, banging it on his nose. He grins at the mistake. 'Uh — sorry,' he goes. 'Technology's not my strong point.'

The audience erupts again, applauds like crazy.

He holds up his hands modestly. 'Look … let me explain who I am.' The congregation goes quiet. The assistants take their seats at the edge of the stage. Malachi Dove waits. Then he fixes the audience with his pale eyes. There's silence in the place now. 'Whatever you think,' he says, 'we are all religious. We may believe in different prophets. My prophet is Jesus. Yours may be … I don't know, Muhammad perhaps? Or Krishna? Some of you may think you have no prophet at all, and that, too, is fine. We don't check your faith at the door.'

A murmur of laughter goes round the hall. They know that twinkle in his eye, that ironic twitch of a smile.

'But one thing is sure. We all believe in the same God. I know your God. And you know my God. Maybe by a different name, but you know him.' He breaks off and grins again, throwing a hand at the audience, like they just told him a risque joke. 'OK, don't panic. I'm not going to quote the Bible at you.'

More laughter. Finn nudges me. He's got the mic poking out of the little zip-up bag now, like the nose of an animal, pointed in the direction of the stage. We're waiting for the wackiness to start so we can get outraged. On stage Malachi holds up his empty hands. He makes a great pantomime of studying first one bare palm, then the other.

'Nothing special about these hands. Is there? Just your average pair of hands. I don't pretend to have power in them. I can't send a lightning bolt from them. I know all about my hands because I, like you, have not been content to believe what the tent-show evangelists tell me. I have made it my business to study the subject. Did you know, for example, that a soldier in the victorious army will survive wounds that can kill a soldier in the defeated army? Did you know that? Do you understand the dance of chemicals in your body? Your body …'

He points a finger into the audience. He's smiling, and maybe he's already got to me on some level, because I ignore this sudden image I get in my head that he's not a human but a husky dog, staring into my eyes from the stage.

'Your body can heal itself. It has the knowledge. It only needs the right chemicals. Since the day I left my parents' home I have never crossed the threshold of a medical professional. And I never will!' He looks at his hands again, one at a time, like they're a mystery to him. 'My faith allows me to channel my endorphins. And with a faith this strong I can channel it to you, too.'

'What crap,'' Finn mutters.

'What bukkakes,' I say. We both shake our heads. But we're subdued, and we're not meeting each other's eyes. We've both got a glimpse of what Finn's ma saw in Pastor Malachi Dove. Straight off when the lights come on, a healing line forms in the aisle going to the stage. The disabled are wheeled out and helped on to the stage by relatives. One of Malachi's helpers takes them by the arm: Asuncion (we find out her name from the crowd), a total vision of horniness with her hair in a long squaw plait snaking down the back of her white judo jacket, keeps production-lining these invalids up on to the stage, keeping a hand on their arms, holding them back until Malachi is ready. Then she nudges them forward, half lifting them, half talking them up on to the stretcher where they lie on their backs staring up at Malachi, who stands above them, back to the audience, both hands on the stretcher, resting his weight there, his head bowed and eyes closed, like he's waiting for a migraine to go. He doesn't pray. He just waits. No hellfire. After a few moments he places his hand on the body part and closes his eyes again. Then he lifts his hands and whispers something to the patient, who gets up and leaves. Or is helped away by relatives.

'Go on,' whispers Finn, nudging me. 'Go on. Get up there.'

I get up and join the queue. I feel like a twat because I'm the tallest. All I can see in front and behind and to the side of me are Sunday hats, little blue and pink feathers quivering in the netting. After about half an hour waiting I'm up on the stage under the heat of the spotlights. Malachi glances at me, and for a moment, seeing my height and my strength, he hesitates. But if he thinks it's a trick he hides it.

'What's your name?'

'Joe.'

'What part of you has brought you here tonight, Joe? What part of your body?'

'Bowels,' I say, because that's how Finn's ma went and it's the first thing that comes into my head. 'It's a cancer. Sir.'

I get on the stretcher, thinking about Finn sniggering in the audience. Malachi stands above me, head bent, eyes closed, sweat coming out from under his blond thatch. I register the pores in his cheeks. I see he's wearing face powder or foundation. Suddenly I'm totally interested in what he's going to say.

After what seems like for ever, he raises his head and frowns at me. 'How did they know?' he goes, in a hushed voice. 'How could they tell? When it's so small, how could they tell?'

I swallow. Suddenly I don't want to laugh any more. 'When what's so small?' I say. There's a lump in my throat. 'When what's so small?'

'The tumour. It's less than a centimetre across. How did they even know it was there?'

'What happened?' Finn says.

I've come off stage. I'm covered with sweat and my head's throbbing. 'Two weeks,' I mutter. I sit there sweating, rubbing my stomach under my jeans waistband. 'Two weeks. Then I come back to a prayer meeting, and I'm going to pass the tumour.'

'Pass the tumour? What the fuck does that mean, "pass the tumour"?' Then he stops. He's seen my face. 'Oakesy?' he goes, suddenly concerned. 'Oakesy, what is it?'

'I dunno,' I mutter, getting unsteadily to my feet. 'I dunno. But I want to get out of here. I think I want to speak to a doctor.'

The next ten days are a blur. I go from health professional to health professional. Finn trails along behind me, bemused and worried. I eat up half my aunt's inheritance trying to get a primary-care practitioner to refer me for a cancer test on the grounds a faith-healer has told me I'm dying. I end up stumping up for a faecal occult blood test in the Presbyterian hospital. The doctor, I remember, is called Leoni. It's in grey pastel letters on her badge. I remember staring at her name while she reads me the results, my heart banging in my ribcage.

Negative. No tumour. No cancer. Did I really believe what an evangelical preacher told me? She's got pity in her voice.

Well, that does it for me. If I hated him for what he did to Finn's ma, now I've got big fucking rocks in my head for Pastor Malachi Dove. By the time we go back to the Psychogenic Healing Ministries prayer meeting I want to do one thing: kill him.

This time we're in Santa Fe. The stage looks the same. Asuncion's in an embroidered baptism shift, and when she spots me in the queue again — almost shaking, I'm so fucking pissed off — she takes my hand and leads me back through the crowd. 'Where are we going?' I can see the exit door approaching. 'What's happening?'

She doesn't answer. She just leads me, with this totally surreal calm, through the back door of the chapel and left through a door into the toilet block.

'Move your bowels, please,' she goes, pointing to one of the toilets.

'What?'

'Move your bowels to complete the treatment.'

I stand there stunned, looking from the bog seat to her then back again. 'I can't just-'

'I think you'll find it easier than you expect.'

I stare at her for a long time. I'd like to slap someone right now, but even at eighteen I'm clear enough to see a story when it comes my way. My hands hover on my belt. 'What about you? Where are you going to be?'

'I've seen it several times before.'

'You're going to watch? You have to be-' I break off. She's looking at me with one of those faces that doesn't need any words — eyebrows slightly raised, chin tilted down, arms crossed. An SS guard, may as well be. Her mouth is closed in a firm line: Argue all you want, it says. I'm not budging. I sigh. 'OK, OK. Just stand back a bit, for Christ's sake.' I unbutton my trousers, pull down my shorts and sit on the toilet, elbows on my bare knees, hands dangling, looking up at her. 'Well,' I say, after a while. 'I told you, nothing's going to happen-'

Before I know it, Asuncion's conjured a wad of toilet paper out of thin air and is thrusting it down under my arse, forcing it up against me. There's a moment of uncomfortable slithering as I struggle, 'What the fuck do you think you're — get your hand out of-' and an unfamiliar wet, cold sensation around my arsehole. Then she steps away, pushing her hair triumphantly out of her eyes, the tissue bunched in her fingers.

'You fucking lunatic!' I go. 'What was that about?'

'The tumour,' she says, holding the paper under my nose, making me recoil at the fucking awful smell. A wad of something black and slimy sits in the petal-white tissue, something that smells of putrefaction and death. 'You passed it.'

'Here,' I say, making a grab for it. But Asuncion is too quick. She whips it out of reach and spins on her heel, throws open the cubicle door and stalks out. 'Hey — stop.' I follow, hopping, skipping and almost tripping over my unbuttoned trousers, trying to do up my belt and flies at the same time as push open the doors she's slamming her way through. In the hall as I catch up with her she's making a triumphant entrance, hand held high, titanic smile like a boxing-match ring girl, me stumbling after her as she marches up the aisle. Up ahead the pastor's staging a shocked pause in the proceedings, his eyes widening dramatically at the procession approaching him. 'Asuncion,' he calls. 'Why the interruption?'

She mounts the stage. Dove uses his hand dramatically to cover his lapel mic and leans over so she can whisper in his ear — his eyebrows lifting almost to his blond hairline as he pretends to be amazed, delighted by what she's saying. He lifts his eyes to mine with a smile and he's half got his hand out ready to pull me victoriously on to the stage when he sees the expression in my eyes. His face falls.

'What're you fuckers up to?' I mount the steps two at a time. Under my feet the stage shakes a little. 'Give me that fucking thing.'

'Joe?' he says. 'What's the problem? What's the-'

'Give me that.' I make a grab for the tissue. 'Show me what you wankers are doing.' Asuncion gasps and tries to wrench her hand away. A feedback scream shoots through the microphones, but I hold on tight to her wrist. The congregation jump to their feet, faces frozen and shocked. I dig my fingernails hard into Asuncion's skin — don't stop just because she's a woman — and get her to release the tissue.

'Joe!' Malachi rips his microphone off his lapel. 'Joe!' He puts a hand on my arm, so close I can smell his face powder. He tries to turn us away so our backs are to the audience and he can talk confidentially. He's sweating now. Looking at what's in my fist and sweating. 'Leave the stage now, Joe,' he goes, licking his lips and putting his fingers out, itching to grab the tissue off me. 'Give me the tumour and leave the stage. Whatever your problem I'll speak to you off stage. Just give me the-'

He makes a move for my hand but I shake him off. 'Listen, you little shit,' I hiss. I turn and put my face close to his. 'I'd like to kill you. If I could get away with it, I'd kill you. Remember that.'

And that's it. I'm off, striding out of the hall with my prize, joined by Finn in the aisle. Outraged little black women hit us with their navy blue handbags as we go.

The tumour turns out to be a putrefying chicken liver. 'Probably been left to rot for a coupla days,' says the Environment Department in Santa Fe. 'Where the hell did you boys get this little beauty?' It's such a great story I'm over the fucking moon. We've got him. Pastor Dove is ours.

But funny how life goes, isn't it? because Finn, the one who started the Albuquerque crusade, the one who was going to be a journalist, suddenly goes cold on it. He loses his heart to some girl he's met in a tequila bar, follows her home to Sausalito, California, and spends the next couple of years as a surfer dude. He gets himself sun damage and a phoney West Coast accent. When he comes back to the UK he publishes a surf mag for a while and ends up a literary agent in London. Turns out I'm the only one with a hard-on for getting Pastor Malachi Dove knobbed.

I take up my university place in London, and start casting around for a mag to take the chicken-liver article. But before I can place it, a rumble comes out of the New Mexico desert. The Psychogenic Healing Ministry is in crisis. The IRS are reviewing its tax-exemption status; Malachi Dove is admitted to hospital, suffering from manic depression. And then the proverbial shit hits the fan. The dominoes really start to fall: he's under suspicion of torching the house of a state trooper who's given him a speeding ticket; some of his female disciples go to the press — he banned them, they say, from bringing sanitary towels into ministry headquarters. He says feminine hygiene products are medical intervention; they say he does it to humiliate them, that he's a misogynist.

'I asked myself difficult questions when I was at my lowest,' Dove tells a journalist on the Albuquerque Tribune, when he gets out of hospital. 'I asked the Lord if He would, in His grace, take me to be by His side. The answer was no, but what was revealed to me was that I will control my death. My death will be significant to the human race.'

'We're talking about suicide,' goes the journalist. 'The Bible says it's a sin.'

'No. It says, "Thou shalt not kill." The translation is faulty. The Hebrew says, "Thou shalt not murder."'

'I didn't know that.'

'Well, now you do. Every Sunday I will pray. I will ask if my time is here.'

'And when the time comes, how will you do it? Hanging?'

'Not hanging, and not jumping. As a Christian those methods have connotations of guilt for me. Relating to the death of Judas Iscariot.'

'Pills?'

'I don't take medication of any sort.'

Probably at this point he's sussed that whatever method of suicide he comes up with, it's going to put his manifesto under the glass, because after that he changes the subject. Ends the interview. There's a photo of him attached to the article and he looks fucking appalling. He's piled on weight and it's gone round his shoulders, neck and chest. His thatch of hair is yellow against his skin, which is red from either blood pressure or the New Mexico sun, and the only thing I can think when I see the photo is: Christ — looks like someone's peeled the bastard's face.

In London I work all the depression-suicide stuff into the article and sell it, at last, to Fortean Times. Maybe I have a premonition, who knows? because I publish under a pseudonym: Joe Finn. Two weeks after it comes out the Fortean Times gets a solicitor's letter. We're all in the shit. Pastor Malachi Dove is going to sue us all: the Fortean Times and, most of all, the heretic who dares to call himself a journalist, Joe Finn.

5

I was meeting my contact from the Psychogenic Healing Ministries at the convenience store in Croabh Haven where he came weekly to collect supplies for the community. As I walked I tried to imagine what sort of ritual would have a community discarding pig offal into the sea. No wonder they've got you down as Satanists, I thought, turning my eyes to the island. What are you getting up to out there then, you bunch of nutsos? What're you messing with?

Suddenly and brilliantly, the trees opened on to the vista of Croabh Haven. I stood for a moment, blinking in the brightness, thinking how different it all looked from last night, how difficult it was to square this picture-pretty marina, its glittering yachts and SUVs, with the swill of rotten meat next to the sewage pipe only half a mile up the shore.

The heart of the marina was the convenience store on the green, surrounded by vehicles gleaming in the sun, a dairy truck and tourists to-ing and fro-ing, lazy in their flip-flops, clutching carrier-bags full of fresh tomatoes and lettuce and Hello! magazine, seabirds pecking at ice-lolly wrappers on the grass. A guy in a striped butcher's apron was stacking boxes at the rear of the shop and inside, in the cool, a dimpled, smiling girl in a yellow halterneck served holidaymakers at the cash desk, loading their purchases into bags.

I'd never seen Blake Frandenburg before. He was one of the original settlers on Pig Island twenty years ago and I knew his name, but not his face. When none of the men in striped polo shirts and canvas hats approached me, I wandered the shop for a while, picking up odd extras I might need for the next few days: no Newkie Brown so a bottle of Stolichnaya in case I was on Pig Island for a long time, a few sticks of menthol chewing-gum (thinking of the smell last night again) and some Kendal mint cake, because you never knew what they'd feed you in those places. These are people who can get by on green tea and glasses of their own urine, don't forget.

I was at the cash desk, half-way through paying, when the shop girl paused. She lifted her chin and looked over my shoulder out of the window and, with a muttered ''Scuse me,' slipped silently out from behind the desk. I turned to see what had got her attention. There was nothing outside, just the neatly clipped green and beyond that bright pennants fluttering on the masts. At that moment a large woman in shorts and a bikini top came barrelling across the grass towards the shop, sweating and ushering in front of her a young boy, both of them casting anxious glances over their shoulders in the direction of the jetty. The shop girl stepped to the door and held it open for the woman to come inside, holding the child firmly, her hands covering both his ears. 'That's it, good boy. Inside. Good lad.'

The shop girl closed the door and raised the blind slightly, so that she could stand with her nose to the door and stare out. The large woman stood next to me, peering out of the window, mopping her neck, the child pressed into her hip. Outside, next to the green, a couple had parked their car. They had both opened their doors and the woman had one sandalled foot resting on the Tarmac when something made them change their minds. First the foot disappeared back inside, then the doors closed. You could hear the distinctive double clunk of a central-locking system engaging. Behind me, other shoppers had slowly turned to see what was happening and now a long silence descended on the shop. I was about to say something when, from nowhere it seemed, a face appeared on the other side of the glass.

'Holy Christ!' blurted the fat woman. 'He's insane.' At the back of the shop a small girl squealed with fear and hid behind her mother's legs.

The face pressed itself into the glass, its nose distorted, the eyes pulled open to show the pink inner rims, the lips pressed away from gums like a skull.

'Booh!' it said. 'Booh! Run! Run from the bogeyman!'

And that was how I met Blake Frandenburg, the first of the thirty or so members of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries I'd encounter over the next few days.

He turned out to be even weirder-looking without his face pushed against a glass pane: he was miniature and suntanned with a very tight, thin skull that looked like it had been squashed sideways in a vice. His skin was rough and scarred, like a shark's, and he was dressed like he belonged halfway between a Florida hotel and a golf course: a yellow shirt and tie, white shorts, his feet in shin-high socks and pale laced-up golf shoes. When he first shook my hand outside the convenience store it was like holding the skeleton of a very dried-up fish.

'Sorry about the bogeyman thing.' He gave me a nervous grin. 'But I really want to impress this on you, Joe, they push you to it. They really do. It's been like this from scratch — they ain't done nothing but be antagonistic.' He was from the States, and when he spoke he smiled constantly with one side of his mouth — like the other side was paralysed — showing those white teeth you only ever get on a Yank. 'The things they say about us. If you want my opinion, it's just plain antagonistic.''

'They say you're Satanists. That's what they say about you.'

His fixed smile didn't waver. He continued shaking my hand, nodding up and down, up and down, nervously searching my face, like he wasn't sure if there was a sly joke going on or not. His palms were sticky with sweat. Just when it seemed it was going to go on for ever, he took a sudden step back, releasing my hand like it was hot. 'Sure,' he said. 'Sure. We'll get to that later.' He ran his palms down the front of his shirt — to smooth it or clean them, I wasn't sure — and shot me another quick flash of teeth. 'All in God's good time, all in God's good time.'

That edgy, noncommittal cheerfulness turned out to be Blake's thing. He kept it up all the way across the firth to the island, giving me cheery facts and figures about PHM: how many people it reached through its website, how they'd built generators and cared for the land, and worshipped daily. 'We live in Paradise, Joe. Thirty of us, living in Paradise. Only five people have left in twenty years and you'll see why. You, Joe, even you won't want to leave.'

I sat in the bows, facing the island, the cuffs on my shorts rolled up a bit to get some sun on my white, city-boy knees, watching the settlement on Pig Island gradually reveal itself to me: a vague pale line on the north shoreline, slowly blooming into a spit of sand: indeterminate patches of colour above it, which wavered and crystallized into twenty or more cottages huddling together, their windows reflecting back the morning sea like mirrors. Apart from the cliff that rose above the community, crowned with trees, the settlement didn't look very sinister now I could see it close up — not the place of devil-worshippers. Each cottage had once been painted a different ice-cream colour, like the seafront at Tobermory, but they had faded now and stood, like dying flowers, facing a central green. The only God-squad thing was a towering stone cross in the centre of the grass — Celtic, medieval, pagan-looking, and as we got closer I saw just how fuck-off enormous it was. At least forty feet tall. Taller than our house back in Kilburn.

The dory was quick. Even loaded down with a week's supplies it was a little sea rocket — the water slipped quickly away under us, oily engine fumes lacing the air. Blake nosed it into a small gap between the rocks and a jetty. Overhead was a trot-line with a pulley that he pulled down and clipped on to the bowline. He worked quickly, killing the motor and moving the fenders around so the boat didn't jostle against the rock. On the jetty I helped him unload the boat, stacking everything — the tinned stuff and the fresh milk, crates of vegetables and (oh, sweet relief) a healthy stash of Guinness tinnies and gin — into a large handcart. I pushed it for him because that was only fair, big hairy old me and tiny-guy him, and I followed him in silence up the narrow path that led away from the jetty, looking at the way the knotty veins in his calves pulsed black with the effort of climbing.

At the top of the path I dropped the cart and stopped, staring at the huddled settlement. It was like a novelty golf course with its neatly trimmed green and paths running off in different directions — like you'd expect a cuckoo-clock woman to wheel out on tracks any second. Set just behind the front row of cottages, where the land rose, was the roof of a long breezeblock building that looked a bit like the sort of community halls that sprang up everywhere in the seventies. Against it the cottages looked even more run-down, with their weathered roofs, the same greenish-grey as the earth, only freckled in places where a slate had been recently replaced. And it was silent. Not a sign of life except for the two of us.

'Here,' said Blake, pointing to the grass. 'Wait here. I won't be long. Please don't leave the green. For your own safety, please stay here on the grass.' Before I could stop him he headed away up a path, glancing left and right as he went, his golf shirt flapping against his skinny back.

At first I stood for a while in the centre of the lawn, staring at the place he'd disappeared. Then, when I realized he wasn't coming back, I turned and looked around. With the exception of the waves breaking on the beach below, nothing moved. Everything stood still and hot and silent in the midday sun. The curtains in all the windows were tightly closed against the heat, and beyond their roofs rose the highlands, thick with trees. The west coast of Scotland is poxy with midges and I could imagine what it was like between those trees — thick with the fuckers, probably.

I went and stood in the shadow of the cross, pulled the mobile out of the rucksack, looked at it and thought, Shit, Lex, I'm sorry. No signal. Typical. I walked to the edge of the green to see if I could catch anything there. Nothing. I walked all round the grass, staring at the screen, holding the phone at arm's length, standing on tiptoe, standing on rocks, and then, when I still couldn't get a signal, I put it in my pocket and sat down again. I stared back at the mainland for a while, at the Craignish Peninsula, green and foamy and indistinct in the bright sea, a flash of silver where the marina was. Why was Blake making me wait? Probably a test to see if I'd stay where he put me. And, of course, me being working-class, as Lexie would point out, the exam ethic never does come easy: I just couldn't stay still. After about five minutes I had to get up. I had a lot to do in my time on Pig Island.

Weird to think that the letter I got twenty years ago was written on this island. Dove had sold the ministry's assets, given a whack to the IRS and come scurrying back to the UK, a handful of devoted disciples with him. He bought Pig Island and founded the Positive Living Centre.

'The only thing to mar my happiness,' he said in the letter, 'is the arrogance of certain members of the press. I remember you quite well, Mr Finn. I remember you in Albuquerque, and that you said you'd like to kill me. You should know that I will be in control of the end of my life. It will be a more beautiful, spectacular and memorable end than someone of your calibre could comprehend. And be glad! You will know when it happens! Because when I take my life I intend to take your peace of mind with me. I will, Mr Finn, in the final hour, run rings around you.'

The Fortean Times was not pleased. 'You'll end up selling space on the hatch, match and dispatch column at the Crosby Herald,' said Finn happily, while the magazine's legal department was girding its loins for a fight. But the summons never came. We waited. We all held our breath. Nothing happened. Weeks went by. Months. After almost a year my curiosity got the better of me. I wrote to the PO box on the letter asking if Malachi was going to pursue the 'conversation raised in your last letter'. No reply. I waited weeks and wrote again. 'Looking forward to hearing from you.' Still no reply. On it went, letter after letter, and nothing but silence from Pig Island. Eventually, after six months, I got a curt little note from the treasurer: 'Dear Mr Finn. Sorry to inform you, but Pastor Dove is no longer with us.'

'No longer with us,' I asked Finn. 'What does that mean?'

'Dunno. Topped himself, probably. And if he's dead I'm glad.'

'He said his death was going to be memorable. Remember? Said we'd all know about it. Me especially. Said he was going to take my peace of mind with him.'

'Well?' said Finn. 'Has he?'

I paused. 'Don't think so. Don't feel any different. I mean, I'd like to know how he killed himself. I'd like to know if he went back on his manifesto, how he made it memorable, cos I always had this idea it was going to be somewhere public, you know? Somewhere everyone would see him. He's a showman.'

'You'll have to find his body. That's the only way to find out.'

'Yeah. And I think it's out on some shag-awful island in Scotland.'

After that I went on for twenty years as a freelance journalist, but I never really took one eye off Pig Island. I did my paranormal work, and hackwork by the yard, but if anything came up on the Western Isles of Scotland, I'd be there. Which is how I came to do the Eigg revolution. And how I got invited, at last, on to Pig Island. Weird to think of Dove's body out there somewhere on this silent island. Weird to think what the Ministries might have done with his body. Built a mausoleum, maybe. Or left it lying in state for people to come and see, like Lenin or Jeremy Bentham. In a glass box somewhere out in those trees.

6

I crossed the clipped lawn in silence and set off along a small path that passed the backs of the cottages. Everything was neat and ordered — wheelie-bins lined up neatly against walls, a large recycling bin with flies circling its opening, and a shed where a ride-on mower sat with its bonnet folded open, piles of yellow gas tanks stacked beyond it. Nothing odd there. The path left the cottages, entered the trees. I could feel in the back of my legs that the land had begun to climb slightly.

Over the years I'd done a lot of work in the States, trailing evangelists, watching mad-haired women in housecoats draw UFOs in trailerpark dust — and that morning on Pig Island I was suddenly reminded of a wood I'd visited on that long trip. It was in Louisiana, just outside Baton Rouge, and I was interested because the local residents had had the shits put up them by someone sneaking into the wood at night and decorating all the trees for a half a square mile with tiny, ruby-eyed voodoo dolls. I only found out later that a killer had been operating in those woods at the same time. A killer of children. No one ever worked out for sure if the dolls were connected with the murders, or if they were completely coincidental, but they stuck with me. From then on I couldn't go into woods anywhere on the planet without remembering the red points of light reflected in their eyes, and wondering if the killer had put them there — or if he'd been watching me that day as I walked around. It all came back to me now, like a shiver: the whisper of Spanish moss and live oak, the faint twang of a stringed instrument.

I hesitated, feeling the hair go up on the back of my neck, and turned slightly to look back. Only a few yards below me Blake had appeared silently on the path. His hand was up in a friendly wave.

'Hi, Joe. Hi. Good to see you.' He flashed me his ratty, lopsided smile. 'Do you recall, Joe, I asked you to wait on the green?' He laughed. 'Didn't I ask you to wait? Didn't I?'

I wanted to grin back, laugh, maybe slap him on the back like a buddy and say, 'Yeah, but you didn't really expect me to wait, did you? You set a test like that, what do you expect?' and that was nearly what I did. But the professional came back at me: Don't bollix it up, Oakesy, old mate.

'I thought you'd forgotten.'

He wagged his finger. 'You'll find we're very friendly, very friendly folk here at the Psychogenic Healing Ministries, Joe, but please believe that we have rules for your own protection.' He raised his eyebrows and flashed me another smile. 'We do it because we care, Joe. We want you to enjoy your time here, not regret it. Now, won't you join me for lunch?'

He led me back towards the cottages, his hands outstretched to show me the community — like he was trying to sell it to me. 'We'd like to get to know you,' he said, grinning over his shoulder, as we came back to the green and crossed it. He slipped down a path that led along the side of the breezeblock building, still speaking over his shoulder. 'We'd like you to stay with us and to get to know us. We want you to feel you're part of our family.' At the head of the path he paused, holding out his hand with a theatrical flourish. 'This way,' he said, with a wink — as if to say, 'I just know you're going to LOVE this!'

I stepped forward and turned the corner and saw, arranged at two trestle tables, thirty faces gleaming up at me. Dove's followers. One or two of them half rose from their seats, grinning broadly, not sure what the etiquette was — and from somewhere at the back someone applauded timidly. The tables were loaded down with food; a breeze moved among it, lifting festively coloured napkins and tablecloths, ruffling blouses and rocking the massive enthusiastic sign strung above their heads: 'WELCOME TO CUAGACHEILEAN!!!!'

'Joe,' Blake said, holding out his hand to indicate the diners, 'Joe Oakes. Meet the Psychogenic Healing Ministries. Welcome to our family!'

It was probably only then that I really believed no one on Pig Island had linked me to Joe Finn of twenty years ago, the great nemesis of Malachi Dove.

Everyone knows the story about Aleister Crowley, right? The one about when the 'Great Beast' Crowley tried to raise Pan? Well, it's dead simple. It goes like this: Crowley's disciples locked him and his son, McAleister, in a room at the top of a Parisian hotel, promising that under no circumstances would they re-enter the room until morning, whatever noises they heard. They waited downstairs, huddled together and wrapped in blankets because the hotel had gone inexplicably cold. All night they listened in horror as the ritual upstairs unfolded in a series of bangs, shouts and splintering of wood. Usual shite. At last, at daybreak, when silence had fallen, they ventured cautiously upstairs to find the door locked, the room silent. When they broke down the door they saw Crowley's ritual had been a success. His son McAleister lay dead at one side of the room and on the other crouched Crowley, naked, bloodied and gibbering. He needed four months in a lunatic asylum before he could speak again.

Well, it's famous, as stories go. Only problem is, it didn't happen. It's just a myth, just part of Crowley's impulse for self-promotion and showmanship. That's what Satanists are, in general — a bunch of theatrical types whose main aim, IMHO, is to get a crafty shag. So what was I expecting of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries? I can't remember exactly — but probably the usual shite: Gothic robes, altar rites, chanting in the trees at sundown. What I didn't expect were these ordinary, mostly middle-class people, dressed, on the whole, like they were off for a spot of shopping on a Saturday afternoon.

'You see, Joe, we're quite normal,' said Blake, showing me to my seat. 'We're not going to eat you!'

'No,' laughed one of the other diners. 'Or try to convert you!'

And that was supposed to be the first impression I got — normality and sunny wholesomeness through and through, from the gingham tablecloth to the homey food: thick-crusted quiches sprinkled with chives, misshapen pork pies, large institutional metal bowls of potato salad. There was even wine in cloudy-looking carafes placed at intervals down the table, and everywhere I looked I saw pleasant-faced people grinning back at me, sticking out their hands and saying, 'Hi, Joe!' But no matter what they did, I couldn't help it, that REM song kept chuntering away through the old grey matter: 'Shiny happy people'. Something a bit sinister about anyone that happy… 'Shiny happy people'. And the fucking sunshine, too. Sunshine in a bottle. That was what they wanted me to think.

What they were doing was staging this totally elaborate game of musical chairs. My neighbour kept changing every ten minutes. Everyone who sat next to me did this dead intense PR job on the community, working their nuts off to tell me about how much hard work went into maintaining the Positive Living Centre, how much love and honest brain-power had gone into Cuagach Eilean.

'Everything's done with total, like, sensitivity to the environment — we recycle, don't use pesticides or herbicides, we celebrate what Gaia and the Lord give us through Cuagach Eilean. We want to repay them in some small way. Those trees over there? The tall ones? Planted by us.'

'The more we love the soil the more it repays us. We grow all our own fruit and vegetables. If I say it myself, when it comes to size and taste our vegetables can give Findhorn's a run for their money.'

'See the refectory building? I made the windows. I was a carpenter by trade before I came here, through God's grace. It's all timber from renewable sources — some of it from Cuagach herself. I'm working on new doors for the cottages now.'

There was a tall African guy in a dashiki, who told me he'd arrived in England as a missionary to spread the word of the Lord to the British: 'This proud nation that has forgotten God.' (Get that? A Nigerian bringing Christianity to us — what a turn of the tables is that?) But no one had mentioned Dove's name yet, which I thought was kind of odd. I waited long enough so that when I spoke it'd sound like normal curiosity. Then I said, 'What happened to your founder, Malachi Dove? I don't see him here.'

The missionary was smiling at me, and when I said the name his smile got a little fixed, his eyes a little distant. But he didn't stop beaming. 'He's gone,' he said, with a fake cheerfulness. 'He left years ago. He lost his way.'

'Suicide,' I said. 'Story goes he had a thing about suicide.'

He didn't blink. The smile got tighter, wider. 'He's gone,' he repeated. 'Long time now. Lost his way.'

'Thank you for asking about Malachi.' Blake was suddenly at my side. He put a hand on my elbow to turn me away from the missionary. 'Our founder, Malachi, the messenger. We hold his name dear, though many have forgotten it.'

'I did some homework and seems like he topped himself.' I looked across the table at the bloodless faces of the women eating, one of them methodically working a piece of gristle out of her teeth with a broken fingernail. 'Can't think why. On this Paradise.'

'No, no, no.' He flashed me that cookie-cutter smile — the one the missionary had just wheeled out for me. 'Our founder is not yet with the Lord.'

I paused. Now this was interesting. 'He's alive?'

'Oh, yes.'

'Then where the hell-' I stopped. 'Then where is he?'

'He's — he's gone. Gone, a long time ago.'

'Where? New Mexico?'

Silence.

'London?'

'Gone,' he repeated, the smile fixed, a veil coming down behind his eyes. 'Thank you, Joe, for your interest. In God's good time I will tell you all you wish to know about Malachi Dove. All in God's good time.'

While the sun crossed the zenith and the shadows of the trees on the cliffs moved like the hands on a clock, I met at least half of the community: big-chested men in denim smocks and Birkenstocks, who put their heads sympathetically on one side when they spoke; an elderly ex-professor of theology in wire-framed glasses, who had located the fresh-water well they used and created the pumping system that fed the community; serious-faced girl students in flowery skirts, who could talk intensely for hours about the theory behind the Psychogenic Healing Ministries.

I've got a trick, a way of nodding and keeping up the small-talk while another part of me detaches and floats free. I was smiling and nodding but inside I was off, unravelling what Blake had said: Malachi not dead. Was that why I still had my peace of mind? How had he just slipped off the radar like that? If he'd started up another ministry somewhere else I'd have known about it. I thought of all the places he could have gone, the connections he had. He was from London. Weird if he'd been living in the same town as me for the last twenty years.

Whatever had happened to their founder it wasn't on the minds of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries members. Once you tuned into it, it was as plain as anything. There was something else happening here. There was a division. Trouble in Paradise.

At the far end of the table a group of about eight people sat morosely, not making the effort to come and introduce themselves. I noticed them whispering nervously among themselves, and some couldn't resist glancing over their shoulders up at the cliff when they thought I wasn't watching. Blake saw I'd clocked them. He took his glass, patted my arm, and said, 'Come on. Let me introduce you to the Garricks. It'll have to happen sooner or later.'

Benjamin Garrick, the centre's treasurer, was a tall, pinched-looking man with a severe haircut and a buttoned-up grey shirt. His wife, who sat to his right, was big-boned, man-faced, dressed in a kingfisher blue kaftan and headscarf, gingerish ringlets peeking from the headscarf. They nodded, they greeted me, but I wasn't welcome. You could just tell. Susan Garrick especially would've liked to see me dead. She sat stiffly, pointedly averting her eyes, while her husband gave me stilted details of the community's financial situation, saying nothing, until about five minutes into the conversation she lowered her fork and sniffed the air. 'It's a southerly,' she said, the ringlets shivering and bouncing. 'We shouldn't have come out here if there was a southerly due.'

'Not now,' muttered a nearby woman in a battered straw boater.

Benjamin Garrick dropped his face, and subtly covered his mouth with his napkin, murmuring under his breath, 'Darling, let Blake deal with that.'

But she'd started something. Out of the corner of my eye I could see other women making faces and wrinkling their noses, one or two turning so their backs faced the cliff. I put down my fork and sniffed the air. There it was — the smell of something rotten. Dying vegetation? Or the community's septic tank? It was unmistakable — the smell that is the purest distillation of sickness and death. I thought about the rotting meat clotted behind the outlet pipe.

At the tables one or two of the women had pushed away their plates, others sat with unhappy expressions, trying to eat their potato salad. One pulled out a handkerchief and covered her nose.

'Hey,' said Blake, leaning over to them, using his knife to indicate their plates. He continued chewing, giving them a meaningful nod. They hesitated, and after a few seconds, wan expressions on their faces, bravely picked up their forks and pushed some food into their mouths, looking down at their plates as they chewed.

'What can you smell?' I said, leaning past Garrick so I could see his wife.

She shook her head and pinched her nose, glancing at Blake and muttering, 'Nothing, absolutely nothing,' under her breath.

'What is it?' I asked again, my eyes straying up to the clifftop where the sun was so strong it cut out the shapes of individual leaves, like cacti in the desert. 'Tell me.'

'All in good time,' Blake said, flashing me his reassuring smile. He lifted a carafe. 'More wine? We want you to enjoy yourself.'

'What's at the top of the cliff?' I said. 'I'll enjoy myself more if you tell me what you're all staring at.'

'You see?' Susan Garrick said abruptly, pushing back her chair and standing, her eyes locked on Blake. 'I told you he'd interfere. That's what journalists do. He's just going to tempt the-'

'That's enough, Susan,' said Blake. 'Hold your counsel.'

Benjamin put a hand on his wife's arm, drew her back to her seat. Slowly she subsided into the chair, staring red-faced at Blake as if she hated him more than anything in the world.

'Now,' Blake said with a smile, taking my arm and raising me kind of forcefully to my feet, 'come along, Joe. Let's show you the rest of our Paradise.'

7

As the afternoon wore on all my questions were answered the same way. Malachi is gone. Gone. He's left us. Blake will tell you everything in God's good time. While the meal was cleared away by two elderly men in blue cambric aprons, I was treated to a tour of the community. You know the kind of thing: the generator, the sewage system, the orchards and the bean rows. I was handed unripe plums from the trees and a fresh oyster shucked off the rocks near the jetty. I was dragged into a giant barn and made to watch while slate was passed through cutting equipment, turned, polished and rubbed with linseed oil to make the Celtic crosses the community sold on the mainland for an income. A contingent of people came with me everywhere, hovering at my elbow, eagerly pointing out how well they took care of the place. But wherever we went we stuck to the slopes at the bottom of the cliffs.

'Where are the pigs?' I asked Blake, as we entered a small forest and at last started to climb a path in the direction of the cliffs. By now we'd been going for over two hours and the welcome party had dwindled to him and a sullen teenage girl with toothpick-thin arms who'd offered to hold my camera bag while I took photos. 'It's called Pig Island, but I haven't seen any pigs.'

'Yes,' he said, taking my arm with a smile, 'but that's just a nickname. The real name is Cuagach Eilean. "Limping Island." Nothing to do with pigs.'

'So there are no pigs here?'

He paused — seemed about to answer. After a moment's thought his face cleared and he said cheerily, 'Look at this!' He headed off along a path that led away from the one we stood on, off into the dark of the woods. 'Here we are! We're coming to the real heart of our community.'

I followed him, and a few yards along the path we came to a weathered clapboard church half hidden in the trees ahead, only picked out by patches of sunlight. It had a rectangular tower ending in a small steeple and two stained-glass, Gothic-style windows, several panes replaced with clear glass. Over the years ivy had clung to it and been removed so you could see where the suckers had been painted over, leaving strange textures like tidewater along the walls. Standing in a patch of sunlight in the grass to the left of the doors was a life-sized crucifix — like the Celtic cross on the green, it was carved out of stone. An effigy of Christ, it had been clumsily made: Christ's face was like the weird Filipino iconography I'd photographed in Manila, the skin drawn back from his teeth, like a howling animal in agony. His body was pocked with small darts and other marks. When I shaded my eyes and studied them I saw they were a series of numbers scratched into the skin.

'The projected populations of every country in the world in the year twenty twenty,' said Blake. 'Because of medical intervention in the natural cycle of life and death we believe that these numbers are branded in Christ's flesh, that even now where He sits with His father, He feels the agony of the planet. Come in.' He held the door open for me. I saw cool flagged floors in the gloom, and caught a whiff of camphor, wood polish and red wine. 'Walk past Him, Joe. He looks at you with only love. Only love and compassion. Walk past Him. Come inside.'

I was a bit weirded out to go so close to the crucifix. It was almost my own height and so lifelike that going past its eyes was like being in the presence of the dead. I looked straight ahead and ducked into the gloomy vestibule to where Blake stood facing me in the semi-darkness.

'I want you to see this, Joe.'

I stood still until my eyes got used to the light. The two Gothic windows behind me dropped coloured light on to the flagstone floor, but the rest of the chapel was in shadow. It took me a moment to understand why. I turned and looked back at the doors and saw that the weatherboard steeple was only a fascia containing the small vestibule — the remainder of the chapel, which stretched out past Blake into the darkness, had been hewn deep into the cliff face. Everything, the altar, the pulpit, the vaulted ceiling, even the pews, was carved from grey-veined rock. It was one of the hottest days of the year, but the chapel was colder than a meat-locker.

'We did this,' said Blake proudly, his voice echoing round the walls, 'with hammers and chisels and our own sweat. Three years it took from start to finish. Fifteen of us working round the clock. Can you imagine the love, Joe, the love that goes into a project like this?'

I fumbled out my camera, handing the bag to the girl, and fired off a few shots, resting the camera on a pew for stability because I didn't want to use a flash. A wooden cross hung on the far wall and below it, painted in a gold-leaf arc that spread like sunrays across the walls, were the words: 'Leave the world when the Lord calls you. Resist not his will. Accept his grace and feel it grow within.' The altar was very large and probably, looking at the imagery, carved by the person responsible for the crucifix outside. 'What happens in here?' I said, moving between the pews.

'What happens in here?' Blake gave a nervous laugh showing his long teeth, like he couldn't believe I'd ask such a dumb question. He glanced to the girl and back, sharing his disbelief with her. 'What happens in most Christian chapels? We hold our prayer meetings and services.'

'Prayer meetings?' I lowered the camera. 'Services?'

He studied me with his pale eyes. 'That's what I said. Have you ever been to a Christian service, Joe?'

'Yes, Blake, I have. Will I be invited to one of yours?'

'Oh, you will. All in good time.'

I smiled at him then, holding his eyes. We were playing a game now, Blake and me, and we both knew it. 'That lock.' I nodded back to the big main doors. 'That's kind of a serious lock.' I'd noticed it when we first came in — a huge iron one that could be opened from either side. The key was on the inside and it was supplemented with bolts all the way up the interior of the door. The windows had no catches because they had been built not to open. For whatever reason, the PHM felt a need to lock this chapel, miles away from the mainland. 'Pretty secure. Feels like a bunker.' I gave him a sly wink. 'But I think that's something else you'll tell me about. All in God's good time?'

Blake drew himself up to his fullest height and took a deep breath. 'You'll stay with us tonight, won't you, Joe? I've got no plans to go to the mainland. There's a bed made up in my cottage.'

I gave a short laugh. 'Of course I'm going to stay, Blake. Of course.'

8

After the tour Blake let me off the leash for an hour to get some photographs in — I was allowed to go anywhere, as long as I didn't stray further up the slope towards the cliffs. He sent the teenage girl along as a chaperone. She carried the bag when I was shooting, held the reflector for me, and didn't say much until we were out of sight of the cottages. I was busy changing a lens when she crept up next to me and said, almost in my ear, 'They're on the other side of the island.'

I stopped and looked at her. Her face was very pale. Her eyes were watery and cold blue, like a swimming-pool.

'The pigs. You wanted to know about the pigs. And I was just saying, they're over there.' She rolled her eyes in the direction of the cliff face, nodding up there, as if she'd have liked to point but thought she might get caught doing it. 'Over there. All the way across the other side. But no one's going to, like, just let you go over there or anything.'

I lowered the camera. 'Why? What's over there?'

'I can't tell you that. We're not supposed to talk to you about it. Blake's going to tell you.'

I studied her. She had lank blonde hair pushed behind her ears and was so pale and thin it was pitiful, with spidery fingers and her feet like a skeleton's, blistered and sore, crammed into pink jelly sandals. 'And who are you?'

She grinned and wiped her hand on her shorts and held it out to me. 'I'm Sovereign. Yeah, I know, Sovereign. It's what my parents called me. Because I was, like, so valuable to the community when I arrived. Apparently.'

'You were born here?'

'Yeah, and this place is so not what I'm about. The day I turn eighteen I'm total history.' She made her hand into a plane and glided it out into the air, off towards the mainland. 'Bye-bye, toot toot, train — you won't see me for dust. Only four months now.'

'Who are your parents?'

'The Garricks. You met them. The ones with the sticks up their butts?'

'Yes. I met them.'

'I know what you're thinking — like, geriatric ward, yeah?' She grinned, showing a missing canine in her left jaw. No medical treatment, my mind flashed. 'They waited until they were thirty-eight before they had me, totally ancient. How gross is that? But that's how it is round here. Bunch of retards.' She stopped smiling and took a few moments to look at me, jiggling her legs a bit, chewing her thumbnail. 'You know, you don't look anything like a journalist.' She took her thumb out of her mouth. 'Anyone ever tell you that? I watch a lot of TV and I know what a journalist should look like and the first thing I thought when I saw you was, uh, like no way, he rully doesn't look like a journalist.'

I glanced down at my battered shorts, my big stained hands and sandals all dirty and fucked from walking everywhere. I had to smile. She was right — in spite of the psychology degree, the cushy detached house and the job, somehow I never had got the Merseyside docker out of my bones. I only did it once over the summer, helping my old man out, but it was in my family and stuck inside me like DNA. 'I know,' I said. 'I look like a docker.'

'Yeah, you do. You look like a docker.'

I snapped on the lens cap and studied her carefully. 'Sovereign,' I said, 'what goes on here? What happens in the church? What rituals was it made for?'

She laughed. 'I know what you're thinking. I know about the video. I told you: we see TV.'

'Then what is it? The thing on the beach. Who is it?'

'That depends on who you ask. One person says one thing, someone else says something else.'

'What about you? What do you say?'

'I say we're not Satanists. Nothing happens in the church except the usual shit. Prayer meetings, tambourines, Mum and Dad making total muppets of themselves. It's, like, so boring it's not true. And cold. Mum's stopped making me go, except on Sundays.'

'What about the locks on the doors? Those are some serious locks. Makes it look like they want to stop someone getting out.'

Sovereign blinked, confused. Then her expression cleared and she gave a short laugh. 'Duh, Joe!' She tapped her temple, as if to say, 'How stupid are you?' 'Not out! In. They're not trying to stop anyone getting out. They're trying to stop something getting in.'

'You're not going to answer any of the questions I want answered. You don't want to talk about your rituals or the rumours going round. Or about why everyone is so antsy about whatever's at the top of that cliff. Instead you're giving me a pretty good press release on how well the PHM is taking care of Cuagach Eilean.' I leaned across the table and helped myself to another shot of Blake's gin. It was late — nearly midnight — and we'd come back to his cottage after the evening meal in the refectory. We sat at the kitchen table near the window that faced the cliff. It was dark outside, and all we could see in the glass were our reflections — our faces lit from underneath by the small table lamp. Sovereign had given me clues: I needed Blake to give me the truth.

'And you know what?' I said, pushing back the bottle and settling in my chair, nursing the drink. 'It crosses my mind that this has only happened to me once before. Almost ten years ago. The Eigg revolution.'

Blake rested his head sideways on his thumb, a cigar burning between two outstretched fingers, and looked at me levelly. 'Yeah. And?'

'I was one of the journalists who broke the story. Got them the publicity they needed.'

Blake nodded silently, waiting for me to continue. I smiled at him. 'Malachi Dove's money bought this island, right? You moved here with him, but he's not here now — and no one wants to talk about him. So, I'm going to make a little leap of faith here, Blake, and call me forward, but I'm going to suggest you've got me out here on false pretences.' I pointed my finger at him, smiling slyly over the top of it. 'See, I don't think I'm going to hear much about Satanism. Or the video. What I think is that Malachi left you all here to go wherever it is he's gone — and you're insecure about that. You want to raise the money to buy Cuagach from him. You're not going to make it from selling those crosses so you've got to appeal for donations. You want me to do for Cuagach what I did for Eigg.'

'You're a sharp one, Joe.'

'Yes, Blake.' I downed the gin, put the glass neatly on the table in front of him and met his eyes. 'I am.'

There was a long silence. I wanted him to squirm a bit. After a long time he cleared his throat and lowered his eyes, tapping his cigar in the ashtray and shifting uncomfortably in the seat. 'We're cold out of luck here, Joe. Things have not been good.'

'It's OK.' I sighed. 'It's straightforward. You give me the story I want — that's the Satanism one — and I'll attach a sob message to it, get one of the nationals to run it as a feature and before you know it you'll have the nation crying with you. Is Dove ready to sell?'

'No. But if we can raise the legal fees and prove he's insane we can get him into something like the Court of Protection, here or in England. Get a judicial factor appointed, then we've got power of attorney and we can buy the island. We won't cheat him — we'll give him what he paid for it.'

'Insane?' I bent to light a cigarette, screwing up my eyes. 'On what grounds?'

'On the grounds he's practising Satanism on Cuagach Eilean.'

I paused. The lighter faltered and went out. I raised my eyes to Blake. He looked back at me steadily.

'I said on the grounds that he's practising Satanism on our-'

'I heard you.' I flicked on the lighter again, lit the cigarette and raised my head. 'He's still on Cuagach? Is that what you're telling me? He hasn't gone back to the States? London?'

Blake pushed back his chair with a loud, scraping noise. 'You'd better come through, Joe.' He beckoned me with his cigar. 'Come through here.'

We went into the corridor at the back of the house.

'I was one of Malachi's first disciples,' he said. 'Me and Benjamin Garrick and Susan, his wife. This cottage was the first place we built on Cuagach and this was our meeting room. I haven't had the heart to change it.'

He unlocked a heavy, planked door, switched on the light and let me into a small annexe to the house. It was built in the same stone as the rest of the cottage, with a small mullioned window, but it was cold and unswept — unlived in, the carpet thin and patchy. The walls were decorated with 1970s Malachi Dove tour posters and I walked slowly round the room, studying them: Dove on stage, a spotlight creating a halo behind him, a studio portrait of him, his chin resting on hands, looking into the camera with a frank, intimate expression. Another showed him laid out on his back, eyes closed, hands on his chest, like he was in his coffin. I peered at the picture carefully. He was bloated and old without his glasses. Under the photo were printed the words: 'When God calls me I will go to His side.'

'What's he doing?' I said. 'What is this?'

'He's praying. This position, on his back, was the only way he could concentrate. Still does, for all I know.'

I squatted down to sort through a stack of framed photos leaning against the wall. More pictures of Malachi Dove, but this time they all seemed to have been taken on the island. One showed him with a young Blake and the Garricks, arms linked and smiling into the camera. Behind them the cottages were all freshly painted. Mrs Garrick was ringleted in a piecrust-collar Laura Ashley dress. Only Malachi seemed wrong. He looked tired and flabby, his eyes distant behind his glasses. He wore a kaftan to disguise his weight gain, and there was something tight and shiny about his face, like maybe he'd had a lift.

'He looks ill.'

'He was agitated. He was suing a journalist in London. He was very depressed by it.'

'A journalist?' I didn't look up. Didn't want him to read my mind. I closed the stack of photos. 'When was this?'

'Nineteen eighty-six. But he never followed it up. Events stopped him.'

'These are the events you're going to tell me about?'

Blake leaned over and pulled from the stack of photos a gilt-framed one showing Dove with his arm round a woman in a drawstring Greek-style blouse. 'His wife,' said Blake, tapping the glass. 'Asuncion. A good Christian girl.'

Oh, Asuncion, I thought. Light of my life. So you married her. A reward for all those old ladies' arses she had to stick her hand up.

'They prayed for a child. But when it happened Malachi's faith collapsed.'

I raised my eyebrows. Blake shrugged. 'Yeah — I know. We didn't expect it, but Malachi was weaker than any of us thought. When Asuncion went into labour you could tell by the way she was breathing there was a problem. It was right here, in this room, it happened.' He pushed 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 Asuncion 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 Asuncion 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 Asuncion 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 on my filthy old army shorts, grabbed my rucksack, and crept down the stairs. The house was silent. The smell of our drinking session still hung in the kitchen and the two half-empty glasses stood on the table. At the back door there was a heavy torch on the worktop, a Post-it taped above it — Blake reminding himself to check the batteries. I took the torch and stepped out into the starry night, closing the door carefully behind me.

Outside it was cold. The cottages were frosty and shuttered-looking in the moonlight. The only light was an old-fashioned harbour lamp on the jetty, twinkling through the trees, and beyond it, high in the sky above the silver-capped firth, clouds were gathering in a shape like sprawling seaweed, one tendril snaking out to the island, the other angling down above the Craignish Peninsula where the bungalow was, like they were trying to connect the two landmasses. I pictured Lexie, curled up on the bed, her yellow pyjama top bunched up a bit to show her long back, her face pleated against the pillow. Sorry, Lex, my love, I thought, pulling out my mobile, checking it for a signal. Nothing. When we first met it wouldn't have mattered that I'd left her on her own — she'd have been out with her friends or in bed with a bottle of wine, watching all the shite TV I hated. But everything was different now. The way she talked about my job, these nights away were like me putting fingers into an open wound. Still, I thought, pushing the phone back into my pocket, someone has to do it. I hitched up the rucksack, and was about to set off along the path when a faint sound made me pause.

What the-?

I turned and stared at the dark, ragged shape of the cliff, darker than the sky. The sound had come from that direction. It had been so brief, so momentary and faint, I thought I must've dreamed it. You're hearing things, Oakesy, old mate. But then it came again — clearer this time, sending a neat finger of fear down my back. It was thin and lonely, very, very distant, and I knew instinctively it wasn't human. Instead — and I got this instant picture of the rotting meat under the sewage pipe — it sounded like a animal squealing. Or howling.

Pigs.

I looped my fingers into the rucksack straps and turned my face to the sky, standing still for a long time and straining to listen. But minutes passed and the sound didn't come again. The cliff face stood hard and silent, only the occasional toss and buffet of the trees disturbing it. At length, when it felt like I'd waited for ever, I hitched the rucksack up again and, casting occasional glances at the cliff, set off along the path, the torch shining on the ground ahead.

I turned on to the narrow lane that wound up into the woods, the memory of the one lousy family holiday I'd ever had coming back to me — a caravan in Wales — the brilliant treachery of being out at night as a kid, the pancake-grey luminescence of the road. Who'd have thought Tarmac could look so pale in the darkness? About a hundred yards past the maintenance shed the Tarmac gave way to earth and I was into the woods, climbing now. Up and up for a good ten minutes into the dark woods and for ages all I could hear were my footsteps and the thump of my heart. Then, dead sudden, the trees opened, the moon came out, and I was in a clearing.

I stopped. A wire fence stood in front of me, rising up against the stars. Tall. At least nine feet of it. Like something from a zoo. I stared at it for a long time. A zoo or Jurassic Park. In the middle of it, directly in the path, was a tall gate. It had a heavy-duty padlock, and even before I went forward and rattled it I knew it wasn't going to open. I stood for a few moments, shining my torch to left and right along the fence, to where it stretched uninterrupted into the darkness. Then I pressed the torch into a hole in the wire and shone the beam through it to where the path continued on, identical to the path I stood on, winding away, higher and higher into the trees.

'OK,' I muttered, thinking of the maintenance shed I'd passed the previous morning. 'This, dear Father in heaven, is why you invented wire-cutters.'

'Wait!'

I'd found the cutters in the shed and was half-way back to the gate when I heard the voice. I halted in my tracks, heart sinking.

'I said wait! What do you think you're doing?'

I turned, shoving the cutters into my pocket. Blake was running up the path behind me, flushed and puffing, an expression of outrage on his face. 'What in — in heaven's name do you think you're doing?'

'I'm having a look round.'

'No! You do not just "have a look round" on Cuagach. It's against the rules.' He caught up to me, and stood, breathing hard and shaking his head. He was wearing a sports jacket over a long purple T-shirt, his naked feet shoved hurriedly into unlaced trainers. 'You can't leave the community. Do you understand?' He switched on a pen torch and shone it into my face, then on to my rucksack, then up the path. 'Where were you going?'

'Over there,' I said amiably. 'Was just on my way to speak to Dove.'

'No, no, no, Joe!' He snatched at my sleeve, holding it between thumb and forefinger to stop me moving. 'Oh, no. You can't just go and speak to him. It's not a good idea. Not a good idea at all.'

I stared at the hand on my sleeve. 'Well, you know,' I said slowly, the instinct to thump him twitching briefly in my chest, 'maybe you're right — maybe it isn't a great idea. But I'm going to do it anyway.' I pulled my arm out of his grip and began to walk away.

'No!' he cried, starting to run again. I was going fast but he managed to insert himself on the path in front of me, holding out his arms and trotting backwards, trying to prevent me going any further. 'Over my dead body.'

I stopped and looked down at his scrawny legs, his weird, squashed skull. He weighed about half what I did. I shook my head, amused. 'You're not really saying you want to fight me?'

'Don't laugh at me,' he said savagely. 'Don't you dare laugh, boy. If I can't fight you then the others will. They'd be here in minutes.'

'Well, that sounds like a deal-breaker. It sounds like you don't want me to do your publicity after all.'

He paused and bit his lip. We regarded each other in silence, and after a few moments, without speaking, I pushed past him and continued up the path. At first I thought he was going to let me go. Then I heard his footsteps behind, running to catch up. I stopped.

'OK,' he said, panting hard. 'OK. I'll take you. But this path ends at the gorge, and that's where we stop.'

'The gorge?'

'Yes. It's impassable, totally impassable — especially with a storm coming.' Almost on cue the moon went behind a cloud, dropping us into darkness. 'See?' he said, switching on the torch and shining it on his own face, so he looked like a Hallowe'en pumpkin. 'I told you. There's a storm coming.'

'What can we see from the gorge?'

He shot his eyes up to the sky to where the tendrils of cloud were splitting like mercury, running away in fragments across the moon. 'If this moon holds,' he said, shadows flitting across his face, 'you'll see everything. Everything you need to see.'

I continued on to the gate while Blake went back to the cottage for the keys. When he came trotting back he was dressed in jeans and a turtleneck, a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. You could tell he was still pissed off with me. He unlocked the gates without a word and for a while we walked in moody silence, through the gates and up the path, cresting the cliff in the darkness, the only sound our footsteps and the wind stirring the branches around us. Clouds flitted across the moon, sending huge animal-sized shadows scuttling out of the trees, across the path under our feet, and disappearing back into the woods. Blake switched on his torch, and after about ten minutes so did I, occasionally turning the beam and shining it into the trees when the wind shook a branch or snapped a twig.

The further we went, the more anxious Blake got. He walked with his neck very stiff, his eyes scanning the woods at either side, occasionally looking over his shoulder, like he was checking nothing was making its way up the path behind us.

'Hey,' I said, when we'd been walking for more than half an hour. My voice sounded very loud. 'Are you nervous?'

'No,' he said, in a whisper, not looking at me, keeping his eyes on the woods. 'No. Why would I be?'

'Because of what's on the video.'

He glanced at me. 'That video is all a big misunderstanding.'

'A misunderstanding? I've seen it. There's some weird fucking creature on it, walking through these fucking forests. What kind of misunderstanding is that?'

At first he didn't answer. We kept walking and I was about to ask him again when he stopped, switched off his torch and looked up at me. 'Listen,' he whispered, standing very close. I could smell something bitter on his breath — like his fear was coming out as ketones. 'Let's get this straight. It was Malachi on the video.'

'Malachi?'

He held a finger up to quieten me. 'Yes. Malachi himself. Doing — I don't know, but doing something that means nothing to us, but everything to him.'

'What? In some fucking pantomime-cow costume with a-?'

'The idea-' he interrupted, casting glances up and down the path. 'The idea that you can — can conjure Beelzebub, or Pan or Satan, is garbage. You know that and so do I. It was Malachi in the video.'

'Except not everyone agrees with you. Do they?'

'Please,' he hissed. 'Keep your voice down.'

'Why are the Garricks so scared?' I whispered. 'Susan's crapping herself, thinking I'm going to start something, tempt something. Now, Blake, you might think it's Malachi on the video — but they don't. They think he's brought Satan to Cuagach, don't they?' I raised the torch briefly and shone it off into the tree-trunks, the beam distorting and making strange shapes and shadows. 'They think-'

'Sssssh!'

'They think there's something unhuman out there.'

'It was a big decision inviting you on to the island,' Blake put a hand on my torch and pulled the beam gently away from the trees. 'Some people are very superstitious — Benjamin and Susan and some others. They think that the less said about what is happening on Cuagach the better — that to talk about it to anyone outside could be… provocative.'

'Yeah. I got that bit.'

'Believe me, Joe.' He pushed his face close to mine. 'Believe me, there have been times today when I have questioned ever getting you involved. Now,' he switched on his torch again and aimed it down the path, 'let's get this over with.'

He began walking again, a bit faster now, like he wanted to put distance between himself and the words 'Beelzebub', 'Pan', 'Satan', like they'd hang there in the branches behind us — proof he'd uttered them.

I went after him down the silvery path, and had caught up and was about to speak again when I registered something pale and small sitting in the centre of the path ahead.

'What the-' I came to a halt and quickly swung the torch beam on it. It was small and hunched, stood about two feet high and wasn't moving. It had a shape like a very small human with its back to us. 'What the fuck, Blake?' I murmured, approaching carefully. I walked past it, turned and shone the beam into its face. 'A gargoyle?'

'Yes,' he muttered impatiently. 'They're supposed to-'

'I know what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to ward off the…' I let the sentence trail off and turned to look along the path ahead. It continued for a few yards, then was swallowed by the trees. Somewhere beyond it lay the gorge and Dove's house.

'I see,' I said, turning back to the gargoyle. It had weird glass eyes, like the voodoo dolls in Louisiana. 'It's blocking the path. The Garricks put it there. It's to stop the devil coming along this path, isn't it?'

'Leave it,' Blake whispered. 'We need to keep going. We're nearly there.'

He started off again, leaving me standing staring at the gargoyle, picturing Susan or Benjamin coming up here, positioning it to face the south, blocking the path. Christ, I thought, shooting a look into the dark trees, Dove had done a cracking job of convincing someone in the community the devil was real. Good enough to get them so scared they'd turned their church into a fortress in case they ever had to take shelter there.

I clicked off the torch and headed off after Blake, imagining the gargoyle's eyes watching my retreating back. The path descended for a while, the land on either side of it rising steadily, until I was walking in a narrow ravine. Then the path ahead opened dramatically to show the sky and the moon, swollen and drenching everything in its icy light, Blake standing in front of it, waiting for me. I came down the last few steps and stopped next to him, staring at Cuagach spread out below us.

'Jeee-sus,' I breathed. 'Jesus.'

We were standing on a long ledge about twenty foot from the top of an escarpment. The land dropped straight from our vantage-point about a hundred feet to what had the look of a very wide, dry riverbed studded with boulders as big as houses. About a third of a mile away it rose up again, marked by a distant line of trees. The gorge between the two slopes was as barren as a desert, unmarked by any shrub or tree, as otherworldly and lonely as a distant planet. Scattered among the boulders were odd brown shapes, reflecting an occasional glitter as clouds scudded across the moon. It took ages for me to understand what I was looking at.

'Barrels? Drums?' I said. 'Is that what they are?'

'This land was a chemical dump before we came here.'

I shot a few photos, then looked left and right along the ledge we stood on — at the ghostly squatting forms. 'More gargoyles.' They were planted at intervals of ten feet, all facing bravely across the gorge, their glass eyes glittering expectantly. Behind the ledge we stood on, the upper part of the escarpment formed a wall, and along its length ten-foot-tall letters had been sprayed in red paint that had dripped.

Get thee behind me, Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan.

'Jesus,' I said faintly, pulling out my camera, staring at the letters. 'Jesus fucking Christ. Someone here is really scared.' I squatted and fired off a few shots. Then I stood and faced across the gorge. The letters were so big they were difficult to understand this close up — they weren't designed to be read from the place we stood. They'd only be clear from a distance. Like if you were to stand in the tree-line on the other side of the gorge.

'That's it,' I said, staring at the trees. 'He lives over there, doesn't he? That's why you've got all this — this shit lying around up here.' I went to the edge of the gorge and squinted down into the darkness. 'Can we get down there? I want to go nearer.'

'No. The only way to get to Malachi's side of the island is in the boat and — don't lean over, please.'' He plucked at my shirt, trying to pull me back. 'Joe — please — this is very dangerous. If you went down there you wouldn't make it back alive. And any-way-'

I turned. 'Anyway what?'

He hesitated. His face in the moonlight was pale. He knew he'd said too much. 'Nothing. It's very dangerous. Very dangerous.'

'No.' I straightened and looked at him, a bit amused. 'No. You weren't going to say that. What were you going to say?'

'Nothing.'

'Yes, you were.'

'No,' he said firmly.

I sighed. 'Well, if you're not going to tell me I'll have to find out for myself.' I started off along the ledge, dodging the gargoyles, shining the torch at the edge, trying to find a place to clamber down the escarpment.

'Stop!'

I looked back at him. 'Only if you tell me what you were going to say.'

He paused, biting his lip, his eyes lowered, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. 'A non-harassment order,' he muttered, not meeting my eye.

'What? What was that?'

'I said a non-harassment order. Malachi took out a non-harassment order on us. He went to court for it.'

'He went to court?' I echoed. 'Oh, Blake,' I leaned a bit closer to him, giving him a faint smile, suddenly enjoying this, 'what did you do to deserve that?'

'Nothing. Malachi is very unwell. We've done nothing wrong.'

'So why'd he get a restraining order on you?'

'Because he is insane! Insane. We've done nothing wrong!' He paused, breathing heavily, wiping his face like it was difficult to control himself. He ripped his binoculars off his head, thrusting them out to me. 'There. Look. His place is a fortress.'

I let the camera dangle on my chest and lifted the binoculars, focusing, moving them through a kaleidoscope of landscapes: the side of a boulder, a pile of rusting drums, the yellow flash of a hazardous-substance label. The opposite escarpment was of a darker rock: it looked geologically totally different from the land we stood on — blacker and more compact. I raised the binoculars and found a consistent line at the point where the trees started and, above it, a faint impressionistic cross-hatched pattern.

'What's that? Another fence? He's got a fence just like you?'

'Yes.'

'And when did he put up that little beauty?'

'Two years ago. Can you see the video cameras? They're trained on us now, Joe.'

I moved the binoculars slowly. The fence ran the length of the top of the escarpment, and mounted in front of it, like H. G. Wells's tripods, were at least forty video cameras, all pointing out across the moonlit gorge, glinting at us like silent, unblinking eyes.

'If he picks us up on those video cameras then we're in breach of the order and we'll never get power of attorney.'

'This is your Gaza Strip wall? This is where it all happens?' I was about to drop the binoculars when they swept past something I couldn't put a name to. I quickly moved them back, the cross-hatching of the fence blurring with the movement, and-

'Blake? Blake, this is fucking weird shit.'

I was looking at a pair of eyes. Smeared and hollow. Below them a snout. A pig's head. Mounted on top of the fence. When I moved the binoculars to the right I found another — the same pushed-in features, the same hatch-like eyes, lolling tongue. I dropped the binoculars and stared out at the tree-line. Now I could see them — faint blobs of light, one after the other on top of the fence, lined up like heads on medieval battlements, one every ten feet or so just like the gargoyles on this side — stretching away into the distance. 'Where the fuck have they come from?'

'I told you — Malachi's very sick. He wants us to be scared.'

'And if I asked Benjamin Garrick, what would he say?'

Blake let his gaze drift out across the gorge. There was something resigned about his voice when he spoke. 'If you asked Benjamin he would say that Pan put them there. He would say that Pan can tear a living pig apart with his bare hands.'

9

The Garricks, it seemed, had a small following. They had convinced at least fifteen other members of the community that Pan was living on Pig Island, under Malachi's control. Or worse, not under it. Blake knew I wasn't going to be put off so the next morning he took me over to their cottage to speak to them. The storm he'd promised had arrived: overnight the island had been caught in a grey squall that sat like a cartoon cloud above it, circling it in grey mists and humid rains. When we set off at eleven, it seemed like the village had disappeared, only the dim orange glow of electric lights on in the cottages coming through the mist.

The Garricks lived at the end of the path that led down to the jetty. Once, their cottage had been painted peppermint green, but now it was faded almost to white, patched in places with grey filler and wet with condensed mist. It was the only cottage with a television set and the aerial rose, spidery, into the mist above the roof. We sat in the well-lit kitchen, with its cheerful gingham blinds, drinking steaming mugs of coffee and eating Susan's home-made brownies. Sovereign sat on the arm of the sofa in the adjacent room. She didn't speak but I was conscious of her watching me, an amused, knowing smile on her face. She was wearing a black Avril Lavigne T-shirt and a buckled, pleated miniskirt. Her long thin legs kept jiggling up and down, like she was dancing to a tune in her head.

I settled back and opened my notepad. The only way I can help you is if you tell me everything,' I said. 'We're going to talk about Malachi — and you're all going to tell me what you know.'

Susan Garrick flushed a very bright red. She looked from me to Blake and back again. 'I don't like this, Blake,' she said. 'I don't like this attitude. What happened to our agreement of March 2005?'

'Susan, there wasn't an agreement,' he said levelly. 'You said you wouldn't talk about it to outsiders, but I didn't make that promise. I'm acting in the interests of the whole community.'

'Well, I can't help it,' she said, running her hands over her arms where goosebumps had risen up. 'I can't help thinking that if Malachi knows we've talked about it he'll send that — that thing over here again. I'm not happy about provoking him.'

'Mr Oakes,' Benjamin said to me, 'do we have to do this? All we want is for you to tell our story. To tell how difficult it's been on Cuagach — but how devoted we are to it. We just want Malachi off the island so we can go over there and exorcize whatever it is he's tempted into living there.'

'Benjamin, Susan,' Blake put down his coffee and leaned across the table, taking their hands in his, 'Susan, Benjamin, this is important. Joe has told me that he won't do the story unless we talk about it.'

Susan stared at me. 'Is that true?'

'It's important to get the readers' interest,' I said, Joe-diplomat wise. 'They need to be drawn into a story.'

She looked at her husband, who shook his head and shrugged. 'Blake always does get his own way,' she said sullenly, dabbing at the few brownie crumbs on her plate. 'It's always been the same.' She turned her eyes to him. Her parrot-blue shirt made her face look old. 'If I speak, Blake, please try not to undermine me. I know you only do it because you're scared, but it wounds me.'

'I won't undermine you, Susan. Just tell yourself that if the public knows about Malachi's madness it can only strengthen our case.'

'But that's just it,' she said, appealing to me. 'He's not mad. He's evil. He's dabbling in things that no Christian should be in involved in and everyone, even Blake, knows it.'

'Dabbling?' I said. 'What's he dabbling in?'

She fixed me with her pale green eyes. 'Where there is light, Mr Oakes, there is darkness in equal measure. Let me put it simply: this is no madness. Malachi has learned how to summon the biforme.'

'The biforme?'

'Half man, half beast.' She lowered her voice and leaned a bit closer to me, searching my face accusingly. 'Why? Don't you think it's possible? Where do you think those mine shafts in the south lead to?'

I opened my mouth to answer. Then I closed it. Basic hack rule: never express doubt or ridicule. When someone says they've seen Elvis's face in the roof insulation, don't laugh. 'Mrs Garrick,' I said carefully, uncapping my pen and writing 'biforme' on the pad. I could feel Sovereign in the other room eyeing me, waiting to hear what I'd say. 'Blake suggests that the — the biforme on the video is Malachi himself. Disguised, maybe. He thinks that-'

'I know what Blake thinks,' she said crossly, 'but he hasn't seen that monster. And I have.'

'You've seen it?'

'Ah,' she said, pleased with herself. 'You see? I told you to take me seriously.' Smiling now, she got up and went to a drawer in the painted dresser that stood against the wall, returning to the table with a sheaf of papers. 'Almost three years ago, long before that wretched video came out.' She placed the papers in front of me. 'It was late. Everyone was already in bed and it was my turn to get the laundry from the kitchen. I was walking down that path over there…' She leaned forward and pointed out of the window in the direction of the refectory. The mist outside was rolling in thin spirals. '… when I had a feeling…' She hesitated. 'I had this dreadful feeling that I was…' She put her hand to the back of her neck, like she was reliving the moment. Grey shadows of raindrops on the window dribbled down her face like tears.

'Yes?' I murmured. 'You had a feeling that you were…?'

She coughed and shook her head. 'That I was being watched. All the hairs went up here — you know — on the back of my neck and I looked up and I saw it. Sitting in a tree, like a lion or something.'

'OK,' I said levelly. I put down my pen and picked up the top sheet, unfolded it and flattened it on the table. 'And this is…' I was looking at a charcoal drawing, slightly smudged and creased in places, but kind of skilfully drawn. Most of the paper was filled with sketched leaves, but a few branches showed through, and on one of these a carefully sketched human foot gripped the branch with the prehensile strength of a monkey. Squashed in next to it was a buttock and… Oh, Christ, I wanted to smile… a tail. Dangling down at least two feet below the branch.

'Can you see how it was sitting?' She lowered herself to a squat next to my chair, holding on to the table for balance. In the other room Sovereign blew air out of her nose, disgusted by her ma. 'See? Like this.' Susan lifted her blouse so that I could see her haunches in the brown leggings pressed down against the hiking boots and tweedy socks she wore. 'I could see all of this part.' She drew a vague circle round her foot and buttocks. 'From here to here. I couldn't see here — where the tail joined to the body — because it was hidden in the trees, but I could see the tail itself.'

'How long was it in the tree?' I picked up the next sheet. The same image, a slightly different scale.

'Not long after I screamed. It scuttled away.'

'We searched the whole of this side of the island,' said Benjamin. 'Couldn't find it. And, believe me, we looked.'

I riffled through the sheets, seeing the same image over and over again. 'The feet are human.'

'Yes — and all of it's got skin like a human, even the tail. Quite brown — you know, a sort of leathery brown. I saw it close enough to know.'

'It's latex. A clever costume,' said Blake. 'Malachi must have his reasons.'

'Well,' Susan said, straightening and putting her hands on the table, leaning forward to look Blake in the eye, 'answer me this, Blake. If it was a costume how did he make the tail move?'

'It moved?' I asked. 'What do you mean, it moved?'

'It twitched.' She used her hand to imitate a muscular flick. I thought immediately of a snake or a shark. 'You know, like a cat does.'

I dragged my eyes away from her hand and looked at Blake, waiting for an explanation. 'Look,' he said, impatiently, 'you can write it any way you like — it doesn't really matter what's going on over there. Just make sure that the message is clear. Malachi is behaving intolerably. He's insane. With enough contributions we can turn this island over to the people who care about it.'

'I want to know what else Susan's seen. You know about the pigs' heads on the fence?'

'Everyone's seen those,' said Benjamin. 'But there's more.' He turned in the chair to look to where Sovereign had been sitting in silence. 'Tell Mr Oakes what happened to you.'

But Sovereign wasn't paying attention to her father. She was smiling at me in that disconcerting, knowing way, like she was laughing at me, her feet in their pink plastic sandals tapping away distractedly. Benjamin turned and followed her gaze, as if it was a solid entity stretching across the room, and when his eyes landed on me his expression changed. 'Sovereign!' he said sharply, making her jump. 'Did you hear me?'

'What?' she said, blinking like she'd been asleep. 'What?'

'Tell Mr Oakes what you caught in the trap. The trap.'

Her face cleared. She smiled at me. 'After Mum saw — well, you know, after she saw all that weird stuff, I was like, my God, this is so cool, so I made this — this, like, trap thing.' She nodded out of the window. 'Out there in his forest. Because I'd, like, never seen Malachi, right? Only in photos, y'know? So I'm, like, I've really got to get to the bottom of this, see what this dude's up to, and so I went over there and dug a hole and I had it all covered up like some jungle thing — kind of cool, actually — and I left it for a few days. Then I went back.'

'Shall we show him what you found, Sovereign?' said Susan, getting to her feet and pulling a fleece from a peg on the door. She had changed since I first arrived in her kitchen: she had a victorious air to her, like she knew she was close to winning the argument. 'Shall we go to the freezers and show him?'

We took umbrellas. They didn't do much good — the rain was like a mist, atomized like we were standing near a jungle waterfall. It got into everything — our ears, our eyes. In the short walk to the refectory we were all covered with a fine dew.

'I'm so into photography,' Sovereign told me, as we walked. 'I'm the girl for you if you ever need someone to carry your bags, hand you lenses and shit. When I did the trap I had this totally wicked idea. I made this, like, tripwire thingy? Hooked it up to a camera — stuck the camera in the tree above the trap, so that if anything went into it I'd get a photo.'

'But Malachi ripped it down,' said Blake, as we stepped inside the refectory. 'He found it, didn't he?'

'Something ripped it down,' Benjamin said. 'We don't know it was Malachi. We haven't established who or what did it.'

'You should have seen that camera, Joe,' Sovereign said, shaking out her umbrella. 'I bet you've never seen a system like it. You'd be like, wow, this is so flare.' She led us through the refectory, where the trestle tables all stood, disinfected and shining, past the kitchen where the two men who always served dinner were moving around, rattling pans and plates, and into a side room. She switched on the light. Inside, three large chest freezers hummed quietly, and she rested her hand on one, looking at me, with a slight smile. 'This was what was in the trap. It totally does my head that there's a photo of it falling in on that camera he snatched.'

She lifted the freezer lid and a stale cloud of cold air floated up. We all gathered round. A pig lay on its side, half covered with drifts of flaky white ice. 'A pig,' she said, smiling at me with a glint in her eye. 'My very own pig. Do you like it?'

'Show Mr Oakes the other side,' said Benjamin. 'Come on — turn it over.'

She sighed and dug her hands into the ice, trying to get a grip on the huge creature. 'Well, help me, then.'

We all gathered round, plunging our hands in and rolling it on to its back. Its trotters stood up in the air, a frozen mixture of mud and grass caught in the clefts of its hoofs.

'On its side,' said Benjamin, and we hefted it up again, dropping it down with a crash, sending a fine spray of ice out of the freezer.

I peered at it, fumbling out my camera. In the centre of its flank, branded neatly into its flesh with something hot, was the symbol beloved of witches and soi-disant Satanists the world over: a pentagram. I rolled off a few shots of it.

'Blake,' I said, snapping on the lens cover when I was finished, 'the next thing is for me to get over there. I want to speak to Malachi.'

'It can't be done. The boat can't run in this weather. You'd be asking me to commit suicide.'

'You're not going over there at all.' Susan's big face was twitching with anger. 'By boat or otherwise. You know everything you need to know for your story. You must not, absolutely not, go over there and disturb him. It's the most dangerous thing you could do.'

10

In the end it was Sovereign who helped me. During lunch I left the table to get another notepad from Blake's cottage, and on the way back through the mist I heard someone hiss my name. When I backtracked a few paces I saw her standing between two cottages, one finger to her lips, beckoning me with the other hand. She had a denim jacket pulled round her shoulders and dark circles of makeup round her eyes, like she was going on a date. I glanced over my shoulders to make sure I wasn't being watched, then stepped into the alley.

'I'll take you over there,' she said, leaning forward eagerly. 'I know how to get to Malachi's side without the cameras seeing us. There's a blind spot.'

'You mean the boat?'

'No. Through the gorge. I've been looking at those cameras and I'm sure we can do it.'

'When?'

'Now.' She grinned, her eyes shining with excitement. She pointed to a rucksack that lay up against the cottage wall. 'Bottled water and walking-boots. It'll drive Mum 'n' Dad crazy, but I've got to live a little.'

I looked back over my shoulder down the narrow alley to the square of milky fog at the end. How long would it be before I was missed? Another ten minutes maybe? 'OK,' I said, bending to pick up her rucksack. 'But let's go quickly.'

'No — wait. I need some money.'

'Money?'

'Yes. Twenty quid and I'll do it.'

'What'll you do with twenty quid?'

'I'm saving up for when I leave. Twenty quid or forget it.'

'Jesus.' I thrust the rucksack at her and began patting my pockets for my wallet. 'You're a businesswoman, Sovereign, I'll give you that.'

'I know,' she said, her eyes on my wallet, as I found a couple of battered tenners and held them out to her. She grabbed them, like they might disappear, and shoved them into her jacket pocket. Then, instead of turning to go, she bit her lip and raised her eyes to mine. 'And something else.'

'What?'

'I want a quick feel too.'

I paused, the wallet half-way into my pocket. 'A what?'

'A feel. You know what I mean.' She glanced up to the end of the alley and leaned closer to me. I could smell her breath — a bit caramelly, like toffee. 'A quick grope.'

'Let me get this straight,' I said, kind of awed by her. 'You want a grope. And for that you'll take me through the gorge?'

'Yes.'

I pushed the wallet into my pocket. 'And what does that mean? I grope you, or you grope me?'

'Both.'

I gave a short, disbelieving laugh. 'You're joking, aren't you?'

'No,' she said. This time she was a bit uncertain. A bit hurt-sounding. 'I'm serious.'

'Come on,' I said. 'You can't be-' I stopped. Her face had dropped. All the bravado was dissolving. She looked suddenly smaller, like a kid, like she might cry. 'Sovereign?' I said. 'Sovereign, listen. It wouldn't be right.'

'What wouldn't be right?' she said, her lip trembling now. 'Why wouldn't it be right?'

'Because…' I held out my hands: do I have to spell it out? 'Because I'm thirty-eight, Sovereign. That's, what? More than twice your age.'

'I'm nearly eighteen.'

'You're nearly eighteen, and you're very pretty, Sovereign, but you — you can't go around saying things like that to men my age.'

'Why not?'

I looked up at the sky, lost for the answer. Me and Lexie had been together for five years. We'd kept our vows, but in my imagination I'd been unfaithful about a million times. I'm not going to lie: in my head I'd done it with boatloads of them — the businesswoman with the ibook next to me on a long-haul to California, the girl who wrapped up organic chicken in the butcher's in Kilburn, the nurse who once took my blood pressure when I had chest pains after a trip to Mexico. Even, strike me dead, some of Lexie's friends. The list was endless. And, card-carrying pervert me, some of those girls were Sovereign's age. Younger, maybe.

'Why?' she repeated, like she knew what I was thinking. 'What's wrong with it?'

'It just is,' I said lamely. 'And, anyway, I'm married.' I held up my hand, showing her my ring. 'It wouldn't be fair to my wife.'

Sovereign sniffed and pushed her hair behind her ears, biting her lip and staring at the ring. I could see tears in her eyes waiting to fall. 'It's so, 50 shit out here, Joe,' she said, in a shaky voice. 'There's no one — no one. I mean, who am I supposed to have it off with? Blake, for Christ's sake?'

I looked at her pityingly, resisting the impulse to put a comforting hand on her arm or shoulder. Things'll be better when you leave.'

'But it's four months? A tear broke and she pushed it away with her fingertips. 'And all I want is-' She paused, an idea striking her. 'Can't I at least smell you? That wouldn't hurt.'

'Sovereign-'

'I won't touch you, Joe, I promise. It's just — I don't even know what men smell like. I know what Dad smells like, but I want to know…' She hesitated. 'I want to know what you smell like.'

I glanced up along the alley. I'd been gone more than five minutes now. Soon Blake would start to wonder what had happened and here I was, trapped by a teenager who wanted to smell me. She was gazing up at me, her eyes big and wet. The whole baby-seal, no-fur campaign flashed through my head. I sighed, shook my head, thinking, I can't believe this is happening, and pulled off my sweatshirt. 'Be quick.'

She paused, looking at my chest in the T-shirt, running her eyes down to my bare arms. 'Yeah, I'm a manky old sod,' I said, looking down at her. 'Bath shy. Don't go thinking we're all this gamey.' She didn't answer. She pushed away the last of the tears and stepped forward, stopping just a pace away. I was ready to take a step back, thinking she was going to throw her arms round my neck, when instead she closed her eyes and pushed her face forward, inhaling deeply. I looked down at the skin showing through the thin hair, thinking how weird this must look, me with my chest forward, arms back, and Sovereign in front of me, moving her head in slow circles, a smile spreading across her face, breathing in like she was smelling fine wine and not my stale old body. Blissed-out ecstasy. How totally, totally sad — this girl, with all her swank and ballsy nature, sniffing a guy's dirty T-shirt in an alley. How was she going to cope when she left Cuagach? She thought she was totally sorted, streetwise, but she had no idea, no idea the fucking bunfight it really was out there.

'All right?' I said, ready to pull my sweatshirt back on. 'Get the picture?'

She stepped back, smiling dreamily, her eyes still closed. 'Yes. I get the picture.' She opened her eyes. 'Joe?'

'What?'

'I can't wait to get to the mainland. I think I'm going to love it.'

I stopped at Blake's cottage — still no sign of a posse ponying up and coming for me — and got my rucksack, shoving in my camera and some water. The wire-cutters were still at the bottom, but we didn't need them to get through the gate — Sovereign used a key she'd stolen months ago. She was in a good mood, light-hearted, and the trip was much easier than it had been the night before. Even with white fingers of mist sidewinding through the trees the path up to the gorge was smooth and unchallenging. We passed the first gargoyle.

'Mum's idea,' said Sovereign, giving it a dirty look. She skirted it like it might bite. 'You see them and think they're sane parents, but trust me, they've got secret freak bones a mile long. Sorry, but you can't take Mum seriously. I mean, all that stuff about the devil and mine shafts — I ask you.'

There're things she can't understand,' I said, keeping my voice low, I don't know why. I didn't want to discuss this on our way to Malachi's land. That's what ninety per cent of my work is about, thinking about things people can't explain.'

'There are things she needs to drama-queen off about, more like.'

We came out on to the ledge and suddenly the misty drizzle of the forest vanished, leaving the sky above the gorge hot, dry and cloudless. The land below looked parched, the light so bright you had to squint. Sovereign wasn't interested in the view, Malachi's escarpment, wavering in the heat. She took a right along the ledge and walked fast, breathing hard, waving her hands as she talked. 'That's why I put the pentagram on the pig. Never thought everyone would fall for it.'

I stopped in my tracks. 'What?'

She turned back to me. 'Don't look at me like that — I know I made things a whole ton worse, but I just had this, like, uncontrollable itch to freak her out.'

'And the pig?'

'Nope.' She shrugged, turning and starting up the slope again. 'That really did happen. Found it in the mantrap. And the stuff about the camera too — Malachi really did rip it down.'

'Is that why he got a restraining order on the village?'

'It wasn't just me, it was everyone coming over here and bugging him. But I think the trap was the worst. Think of it: I might have caught him wearing his strap-on tail.'

We went almost half a mile, dwarfed by the huge red letters at our side, until we reached a dried-up streambed cutting into the escarpment. 'Blake was lying when he said there was no way down,' she said. 'He just doesn't want you going across there and getting caught on Malachi's video.'

We half climbed, half slithered down the streambed, sending sprays of pebbles ahead of us. At the bottom you could feel how big the place was — the land seemed to go on for ever, chemical drums grouped in piles all over the place, rusting and falling apart, the yellow decals with their skull and crossbones flashing in the sun. Underfoot, the ground felt dead rubbery, like you might sink into it at any moment, and the few trees dotted around were dead and dried up, their naked branches fingering the sky like scorched scarecrows, one or two rattly dead brown leaves clinging to them.

Every now and then Sovereign paused and stared up at the video cameras on the far slope, her hand shading her eyes from the intense white light. 'I swear, Joe, if we get caught on camera Blake's going to kill us.' She kept stopping and starting, changing her mind and heading off at an angle, or even reversing her footsteps. It was so hot I had to keep wiping my face with the bottom of my T-shirt. But at last, when my watch told me two hours had passed, we slipped under the range of the video cameras and began to scale the opposite slope.

The fence glinted from between the trees above, the pigs' heads like strange, luminescent patches against the thick green leaf cover. It was a much gentler slope than on the centre's side, and it wasn't long before the parched yellow land began to give way to a slatier rock and vegetation: first, patches of heather and plantain, then stubby grass and the occasional wild flower. We arrived suddenly at the fence — before we knew it, it was less than ten feet ahead of us and rose at least fifteen in height. At the top, peering down at us from the trees, was a pig's head, a halo of flies circling it, like a stain in the air. Its eyes had been eaten away by decay and maggots, but the teeth were still there, big and bare, like polished bone. The smell that had drifted across the island the day before was stifling now. I cleared my throat and ran my tongue round my mouth. Malachi, oh, Malachi, I thought, is this where you get up to your little rituals, you mad old bastard?

'Hmmm,' said Sovereign, brazenly, looking up into the trees inside the fence to where hazes of midges wafted among the trees. A weak breeze came off the sea and ruffled the branches. 'You don't suppose he's put cameras inside the fence, do you?' She squatted down and craned her neck up at the tops of the trees, narrowing her eyes. 'Hello, Malachi, you old bonehead. Come and give it to us. Show us your strap-on tail.' Beyond the fence the undergrowth was so thick that I couldn't see more than a few feet — everything in there hung eerily still, like the heat of the day was trapped in the heavy leaves. There was no flicker of movement, just a low-level buzz of insect life deep in the trees that made me wonder about stagnant water.

'I've never been this close,' she said, 'not since he put the fence up. He might be dead for all we know, in the trees somewhere — decomposing.' She stopped. 'Joe?'

I didn't answer. I had straightened, my chin up, staring intently over her shoulder.

'What is it?'

I put a finger to my mouth, my eyes locked on the enclosure, and slowly, disbelievingly, turned my head a bit to one side, wondering if I was seeing a trick of the light. Past the alarm tripwires, beyond the heavy-duty fence, something paler than its surroundings lay on the ground. It was the size and shape of a large snake, and the colour of weathered human skin. It seemed to emerge from the leafy shadow of a large tree-trunk. The hair all over my body stood up like a cat's.

'Joe?' Sovereign was whispering. 'He's behind me, isn't he?'

I blinked. 'Yeah,' I whispered.

'He's watching.' She lowered her voice until it was almost inaudible. 'Isn't he?' She turned slowly and stared into the forest, to where the trees beyond the wire fence were silent and still, only the haze of insect life moving in patches through the shadows, while the strange piece of flesh lay inert on the ground. 'Oh,' she breathed. 'Oh.'

Silently I fumbled my camera out of the rucksack and crouched next to Sovereign, hastily fitting on the lens and pulling off the cover. Maybe flesh has a way of communicating its authenticity through channels and senses we don't know anything about — because I was certain, I'd have put money on it, we were looking at something living. I raised the camera and was focusing when, suddenly, the tail gave a small twitch. Just like a cat. It twitched again, and next to me Sovereign leaped to her feet, breathing hard.

'Fuck fuck fuck,' she hissed. 'Did you see that?'

Her voice alarmed the creature. The tail twitched again, then slid away into the trees and disappeared with a rustle, leaving nothing but leafy patches of shadow and sun.

'Shit,' I said, lowering the camera and staring at the place where it had been, trying to make sense of the light and shade.

Next to me Sovereign was backing away, whispering in a shaky voice, 'What the fuck was it? What was it?'

'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.

'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.

11

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.'

'Lex-'

'I for one was brought up to respect authority. It'll come back to haunt you, Oakesy, not reporting this. Listen to what I'm saying. It will come back to haunt you…'

She was far, far more pissed off with me than she was with Dove. The only time she stopped shouting was when she brought me food, or changed the sheets, or wiped the caked blood out of my hair and tried to tape together the two sides of my scalp. It was weird the mixture of affection and fury she lavished on me. On the second day — 2 September — she crawled naked under the sheets, her feet cold against my calf, and slid her hand on to my knob. I lay there in silence, my eyes closed, knowing I'd never get a hard-on in that state, and after ten minutes of lying there, neither of us speaking, she burst into tears and jumped out of bed, running out of the room and slamming doors. For the rest of the night I heard her in the living room, sobbing loudly — loud enough for me to hear it. Which, of course, I was supposed to do.

Even if I could've got out of bed I wouldn't have known what to say to her. I couldn't tell what I'd fallen in love with any more: Lexie or a particular black mini-skirt she was wearing the night I first met her. The mini-skirt, and the kind of distant look Finn got on his face when he saw her in it. I married her two months later — the bride and the Neanderthal are just coming up the aisle, the bride looks stunning in organdie, the Neanderthal has got his hand up her dress. Now my friends tell me they never liked her — now, not from the get-go. Cheers for the caveat, so-called mates. That night in the bungalow I lay there, staring at the ceiling, while she cried and cried. From time to time I heard her push open the living-room door. Probably poking her head out to check I was listening.

We had a couple of silent days after that. I watched a lot of TV. The owner of the bungalow came over and I negotiated two more weeks' rental. After ten days the paralysis and swelling had gone and I let Lexie take me to the hospital for X-rays, making up a load of old toss about a biking accident. Turns out Lex was a good nurse. All that time she spent at the clinic, I guess. The fracture was healing fine: I didn't need treatment or stitches. So, I ruffled my hair over the scar and began making plans to get back to Cuagach. I went to Lochgilphead and bought a pair of insulated heavy-duty bolt-cutters. Course, could I find one fisherman or boat-owner prepared to drop me on the south of the island and wait? Could I fuck. Eventually, after four days of searching, I found someone in Ardfern who was prepared to rent me a small outboard for a massive deposit. But just as I was all set to go the weather turned. Autumn had already descended on Scotland — the day I was carried off the island it seemed to pounce in an hour: one moment there was balmy Indian summer, the very next the temperatures dropped and there was even snowfall in the Highlands. Now it got worse. The winds picked up and howled round the coast; the sea threw itself at the beaches day after day. If I didn't want a battering on the rocks off Luing, I'd have to sit it out.

And what a wait it turned out to be. It was a week before I woke up to see chilly sunrays sparkling off the waves of the firth.

It's weird, but the clearest memory I have of Lexie during the whole sorry episode isn't what you'd think: it isn't any of the nightmare stuff, it's actually something kind of benign in comparison. It's from the morning she came down to the jetty to see me off. Even now it's as clear as anything. She was furious I was going back to Pig Island; she almost couldn't speak she was so angry, and I've got a perfect mental snapshot of her standing with one hand on her hip, pushing her sunglasses up her nose and staring out at the island because she couldn't bring herself to look at me. She'd had her hair cut in London before we left — and still a bit of suntan across her nose from the summer — and all in all she didn't look exactly like my wife that day, I thought, glancing at her sideways.

'Why don't you go back to London?' I said. 'Get a taxi and take the train.' She didn't answer. She shrugged and crossed her arms, keeping her attention on the island. I watched her for a moment, then got into the boat and started up the engine. 'There's cash in my computer case if you need it,' I called, as I slipped the bow line and the boat began to edge away. 'In the front pocket.'

She didn't bother waiting. When I got the boat out of the moorings and looked back at her, wondering briefly whether to make a romantic-guy display — take the boat back, leap ashore and kiss her without a word — she'd already turned away and was heading up the sea steps, and the moment was gone. C'est la vie, folks. I tapped out an irritated rhythm on the tiller arm as I watched her go. It goes to show you never can tell.

The tide was with me. I was washed straight out of Craignish loch into the firth, where whirlpools bounced tennis-ball-sized knots of foam on the surface and goats watched me from deserted islands. Spanish Armada goats: they'd been stranded on these islands for centuries, poor fuckers — and Sovereign thought she had it bad. It was rough for a while, and I had images of being sucked into the mighty Corryvreckan whirlpool, chewed up and spat out. But then I caught a drift of something and before I knew it the water was calm and the sea almost rolled me, like the gentle hands on a prayer book, around to the deserted side of Pig Island.

As I drew close to the shore I could see a small, derelict jetty, a white, salt-dried fishing-net tangled round it and pebble beaches stretching out as far as the eye could see. About a foot outside the tree-line stood a wire fence that must have been a continuation of the one in the gorge. Maybe it was there to stop the PHM landing by boat. Or maybe it was a cage to stop something getting out.

I tied the boat to the jetty, hefted the bolt-cutters on to my shoulder and stood for a moment, staring inland, past the fence, half expecting Dove to materialize out of the trees. There was silence, just the creak and yaw of the boat moving against the sun-bleached timbers of the jetty. After a while I picked up my kit and set off along the beach, trying to find somewhere secluded to make the break. A breeze had picked up: a cold, unnatural breeze with a fishy scent to it, which made the trees come alive, a lazy flex and sigh travelling the length of the fence. By the time I'd reached the rocks at the end of the beach it had turned into a strong wind that flattened my hair sideways and made my head ache in a way it would never have done before I got that tap on the head from Dove's axe. In the daylight it was nothing like the gloom of the last time I'd been up here, but it felt like the twigs and scraps of heather pirouetting in the wind were just the outriders of something more powerful coming out of the enclosure. I was glad of the weight of the bolt-cutters on my shoulder.

I approached the fence, stopping only inches away and holding up my hand, waiting for the crawling sensation of the electric field lifting the hairs in their beds. But this time they remained flat, not responding, only moved by the occasional blast of wind. There was none of the faint buzzing I remembered from last month and now it occurred to me that although I couldn't have broken the circuit I could have caused Dove to close down the supply so he could repair the damage.

I positioned my hands carefully on the insulated handles of the cutters, checking the way my thumbs lay along them. There was a chance the fence was dead, but that didn't stop my heart thudding like a pile-driver. I lowered the bolts, bringing them closer and closer and closer to the wire. I let them touch, ready to have them jolted out of my hands. But they didn't. They lay inertly, occasionally moving sideways in the wind, the sun winking white off the jaws. I shook my head and gave an ironic smile, half laughing at the sinking feeling in my chest. No excuse now, old mate… I ran the cutters down the fence in one movement to check for a rogue current, and when they landed with a bang on the floor, no sparks or jolts, I crouched and began to sever the wire.

Compared to Blake's snippers, the cutters went through the fence like a hot knife through butter. In less than three minutes I'd made a hole from top to bottom. If someone was watching me from in there, hiding in the trees, they weren't going to have any doubt about my intentions. I picked up the kit and stepped through, resting the cutters on my shoulder so I could either carry them comfortably or circle them down in one move, crack them out of the air like lightning.

The first thing that struck me about the forest was the pig dung. The pellets were everywhere, piles of them, some trampled, some perfectly oval and crusted like manufactured dog biscuits. I kept passing shallow grooves in the earth, wind-battered snarls of hog-hair caught on twigs and stones where the pigs had come to scratch themselves. Every time the wind changed direction I got a blast of a smell too — not the rotting pigs' heads, but digested grass and leaves.

Deeper in the forest the wind couldn't reach and for a while everything got weirdly still, the trees motionless, loaded with silence. I paused to get my bearings, ears roaring in the quiet. Ahead, between the trunks, I could see patches of sunlight, like there was a large clearing out there. I could make out shapes — a rusting old hopper, a blondin rope suspended high in the air with an old pulley dangling from it. The slate mine.

I poked my head out of the trees and checked the clearing for signs of life. Deserted. The pulley creaked back and forward in the breeze — the same eerie squeaking I'd heard from outside the fence. I picked my way across the mine, peering into shafts, giving the hopper a shove, making rust flake into the air. In the side of a rock face a shaft entrance was half concealed by a rusting water tank. It gave off a stink of decay, like a sewer — when I shone my torch into it I came face to face with a dead pig. I stared into its flat eyes for some time, thinking that it was a weird place for it to have crawled. It must have been pushed in. And it wasn't as decomposed as it smelt — it looked kind of fresh. Maybe this was one of Malachi's disposal places. I remembered what the Garricks had said, that he had access to hell through these shafts: I was thinking of crawling inside to dislodge it when something made me stop.

Someone was laughing.

I backed silently from the shaft, clicked off the torch and sat back on my haunches, looking around at the trees. It was a heinous laugh — like a cartoon witch's — echoing around the deserted rocky hollow. My skin tightened. The laughter stopped and another noise joined it — of someone speaking in a long, low, uninterrupted monologue. There was something about the quality — something so familiar that-

I stood slowly, a smile on my face. Television. I was sure of it. Somewhere up ahead, among the deserted rocks, a television was playing.

The house was like a large Victorian cottage — bizarre out here on its own in the woods. Maybe it was built for someone senior in the mine. It stood on a weed-cracked hard-standing; the paint had been allowed to peel and drop and the windows were mossed and dirty. But there were signs of life: lace curtains tacked up, oil drums stacked against the generator at the side and a television — an old black-and-white movie, from the Celia Johnson accents — playing beyond an opened downstairs window.

I stared at that window. Something about the lace curtains lifting on the cool breeze, something about the darkness inside — the way it seemed almost designed to suck in the attention — made every nerve ending sing out 'Trap'. Slowly I raised the bolt-cutters above my head. You're not the fucking Special Squad, old mate. Don't get your head stove in for nothing.

I approached, cautious step by cautious step, coming from a wide angle, meeting the house at the far end of the wall and sliding along with my back to it, conscious of the warmth of the bricks on the back of my neck. Hardly breathing now, cutters still raised, I bent slowly, slowly, to peer into the room. It was in disarray — filthy, crisps packets, dirty cups and empty yoghurt pots scattered around — the sunlight falling on sedimentary layers of dust. The back of the TV was to the window, and beyond it, facing me, was a sofa, worn shiny in the place opposite the screen. Beyond that another window, closed, its matching lace curtains hanging silent in the autumn sun, embroidered with dead-fly carcasses.

Using the tip of a finger I gently touched the door. It swung open to reveal the length of the tiled hallway. I took a step inside, my sandals sinking into the filth. In the room ahead the Neighbours theme tune started up, making me think incongruously of my soup-and-bread-roll lunches in Kilburn, when Lexie was out at the clinic and I was home working. I stood still and listened. Beyond the noise of the television, nothing stirred, only the occasional click of the net curtains moving in the breeze.

I stepped into the living room. It was small and clogged with furniture and rubbish. A reproduction of Blake's Christ hung above the fireplace, thick with dust, and in an alcove stood an almost life-size plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, the sort of thing I'd seen for sale in the Tijuana immigration lines, every inch of her painted a different colour, her cowl blue, her lips and cheeks red, her eyes a brilliant cornflower. She'd been draped with things — flower stems and tinsel trailed from her on to the floor. The house of a religious maniac, I thought. Just the sort of thing I'd-

Behind me something whirred to life.

The word trap trap trap went through me with a crack. I turned, bringing the cutters up ready to strike, expecting Dove or worse. But the living room was empty. In a plant pot on the windowsill a child's seaside windmill, lolling at an angle, had caught the breeze and was zipping round and round and round. I stared at it, blinking, as it speeded, slowed, speeded and slowed again, winding down with a lazy clickety-clickety-click, until I could see the individual colours, red and yellow, and at last came to a rather uncertain halt.

I didn't move. I stared at the windmill and let my heart thump out the remainder of the adrenaline. After a while I lowered the cutters. The house was still again, only the television still churning out its drama behind me. Clenching my teeth, I glanced at the pile of clothing in the hallway, then back at the windmill. Some of those clothes belonged to a child — there were a little girl's clothes in that pile. I entertained a brief, electrifying thought: that a child, or children, was here — maybe imprisoned. I raised my eyes to the ceiling, let the thought stay, and then, knowing that if I was going to keep sane I couldn't go forward in my imagination, I went into the front hall and started to search the cottage.

It turned out to be empty. Not a soul in the place. All I was getting from the cottage was that Malachi was as looped as they come. He had no regard for hygiene or civilization. And that maybe women, or a woman, or even children had been in the house at some time. One of the rooms was weirdly clean compared to the rest, a single bed made up neatly, curtains secured back, books lined up on the shelves. Where the occupants were now I didn't want to think. The second I was off this island I was calling the bizzies and getting them to check their missing-persons records.

You're a smart one, Oakesy. A smart one.

I stood at the edge of the clearing, my back to the cottage, breathing hard and wishing to Christ I hadn't let Lexie come to the marina. I hadn't had a chance to pick up any tobacco and, right now, I'd have given my kidneys for a tug on a rollie. I was staring at a trampled path that led away from my feet into the woods in the direction of the gorge, and I knew it had been walked along recently. The bad thing was that I was going to have to follow. On the heels of Dove's crooked beast. His biforme.

Time to drop this dread in my heart. I made a fist and knocked myself on the head with my knuckles. Get going, you fucking arse. I hiked up my kit, chucked the bolt-cutters on to my shoulder and set out.

The path wound and detoured, but I knew it was taking me in the direction of the gorge. The trees cloaked the air, warming it and deadening sound, making even my footsteps sound muffled. After half an hour I saw, glinting through the trees ahead, the fence. I picked up speed, sensing the gorge in the way the air had started to move. The wind would blow down the clefts in those rocks like through a tunnel. I could feel my sweatshirt and shorts starting to press against me, then flap and billow away, snapping and whipping around like sails. About twenty feet from the fence the trees cleared and I found I was standing on a stretch of grassland, the blades pressed down into random shapes with each gust. A dead pig lay next to the fence in a flat, deflated way, the shrunken skin lying tight and leathery against its ribs, the grass hugging it one moment, the next rolling back to reveal its mummified jaw and teeth. Something about its position made me think it had been thrown on to the ground, and then I noticed the black smudge on its snout — the stain of electrocution. I raised my eyes grimly to the fence, to where it glinted and creaked in the wind, and saw that a path had been trampled through the grass to a gate which stood open. My heart picked up speed.

I pulled up my kit, stepped over the pig's corpse and approached, looking out over the gorge. Someone or something had come through here recently.

The wind was blowing the dead trees, making them bow and scrape; the sun glinted off the old chemical drums. Almost a quarter of a mile away, above the PHM's scrawled message — Get thee behind me, Satan — the trees billowed and heaved, and for an odd moment that side of the island was almost as alien as this enclosure had once seemed. I looked behind me at the wind going through the trees, dipping in and blowing open holes in the leaf cover, revealing patches of different colours beyond, flashes of more trees and sky. There was no one on this side of the island and suddenly I was more sure of that than I had been of anything. I turned back to the gorge, gazing at the far escarpment, at the gate standing wide, and a weird feeling crawled across my skin, the words coming to me like a whisper: Dove's gone to the village. And he's taken his devil with him.

12

It took me three hours to cross the gorge. By the time I got to the edge of the community I had finished all my water and my tongue was a piece of raw meat in my mouth. There were blisters on my feet and an ache in my shoulder from carrying the cutters. I'd been on the island for four hours and the sun had dropped low in the sky. The wind, which in the gorge had twice set me off balance, had fallen quiet on this side of the island, almost like a memory, leaving my ears ringing and my face burning.

I came down the wooded path that led into the community and paused. The gate stood wide open. The shadows were getting long, evening wasn't far away, and there was an odd silence. An unearthly stillness. I rested for a bit, then headed through the gate, trying not to think about what it all meant. As I came down the wooded path, the rooftops appearing from out of the leaves, I knew something was wrong. Usually at this time of day there would be a prayer meeting, or someone busying across the green with a bowl of vegetables to be peeled, but now all I could see were empty windows and, beyond the cottages, the deserted green.

About a hundred yards to my right something moved. I became very still, concentrating. It was down near the ground, in a small, V-shaped depression, which continued in a straight line like a dried-up river, then disappeared between two cottages. It was something a bit paler than the surrounding grass. I took a few steps forward. It was a pig, snouting in the ground, its excited tail curling and uncurling like fishing bait. I approached silently, not wanting to disturb it. It was eating — its snout fixed in one spot while its hindquarters circled and shuffled and circled, trying to get a purchase on the food. I took a few more steps forward and-

'Shit.'

I shrank into the trees and sat down on the ground, staring blankly at it. The animal looked up in mild interest — not fear. It wasn't going to be scared away from this meal. Its snout was smeared with something that looked like vomit, but must be, I thought, my heart falling, the stomach contents of the human being it was eating. Fuck fuck fuck. I stared at the thin white foot in the pink plastic sandal. Sovereign?

'Oh, shit,' I said again, gripping hold of my ankles and dropping my head. Not much fazes me, it's true, but now I gave in to a violent fit of trembling.

It was the same with dogs, I remembered later. Dogs were omnivorous: they always went for the victim's stomach first, for whatever half-digested plants and seeds and nuts they found, before moving on to the meat and bone. Maybe man had done the same, back in his hunting days. After a long time I got up and began to gather up stones, feeling like I might keel over every time I bent down. I straightened, took aim and was about to start hailing stones at the pig when I wondered suddenly if I was being watched.

I lowered my hand, turned and studied the wood I had come through. My ears were buzzing, my head pounding. That gate was open. But there was no one here. Except a corpse. The pigs hadn't killed her — they're not predators — but had they been the ones who had ripped her to pieces like that? I rubbed my head hard with my knuckles, trying to dislodge the thought. I looked down at the cottages. Everything silent, motionless. The cafeteria block was only a hundred yards away — the sliding doors stood open, reflecting back the beginnings of a sunset. I couldn't see anyone in there.

More adult pigs appeared from the trees, the same blunt feeding expression in their eyes, and began to strip the flesh from Sovereign, pulling long lumpy strings from inside her, ripping at the silvery connective fascia. I watched, in a detached way, as one, a junior from its size, made do with a leg. It bit through the bones with a splintering noise, then trotted away almost jauntily with the foot, pink plastic sandal and all, into the trees where I could hear it gnawing for what seemed like for ever, choking and gagging on the plastic. I dropped the stones, pulled out my mobile and checked the display for the faintest chance that a signal had appeared on Cuagach overnight. But no, just the no-signal icon. Shit, I thought, pocketing the phone and rubbing my forehead, what now?

After a long pause, I sighed and got to my feet. I hefted up the bolt-cutters, hesitated. I wanted to run, but I didn't. I walked. I kept my eyes on the cafeteria, my ears open to the woods, the expanse of silent grass on either side of me, the bolt-cutters held at just the right angle if anything rushed me.

There is no such thing as the devil. No beast. No biforme…

Then what the fuck did that to Sovereign?

It was late and shadows were falling between the cottages. I got to the refectory windows and turned to check over my shoulder. The woods were totally silent: nothing moved. The sun was dropping below the treetops. I turned back and squinted into the gloom of the refectory. It was dark in there, shadows gathering in the corners and niches. All I could make out were the trestle tables, empty of any cutlery, the surfaces scrubbed clean and shiny with disinfectant, just like the community always left them after dinner. I opened the door and stepped inside, a brief glimpse of my reflection: an anxious face floating out at me, sunburnt, trails of sweat like pencil lines in the dirt. I closed the door behind me and stood for a bit, my eyes getting used to the gloom.

For almost thirty seconds I thought I was alone. The kitchen door at the far end was open a crack and I could see the plates all stacked, the tea-towels hanging in a line above the cooker to dry. I took a step forward, was heading towards it, when something made me stiffen. My hands tightened on the cutters. I turned, raising them, ready to defend myself. Blake was watching me from the shadows to my left.

He was sitting in his usual place at the head of one of the tables, his back to the big fireplace. Dressed in a neat polo shirt, with both hands placed flat on the table. His head was at a slight angle, a bit back and to the side. It took me a few thudding heartbeats to realize that he wasn't going to lurch at me, screaming and yelling. He was dead. His mouth was open, his neck sinews tightened up. The staring eyes were almost opaque and the bottom of his shirt was streaked with blood.

I didn't breathe. After a few moments, when I was sure that he wasn't going to snap his mouth closed and stand up, I lowered the bolt-cutters and approached, stopping about a foot away. I stared at him, hardly breathing. Then I bent to look at what he was sitting on, and I immediately saw how he had died. He was seated on a chair. The flesh of his stomach and half of his trousers were missing. I could see a splintered bone in the wound. Part of his pelvis? Something had ripped his stomach out. Your first thought: if this wasn't Cuagach, it would have been an accident with farm machinery.

I looked over my shoulder to the evening gathering on the grass outside the paned glass. Now I could see — Why didn't you notice that before? — a bloody trail that led here from the door, like Blake had been attacked outside and was already wounded when he staggered in here. Trying to escape from something… Unexpectedly my legs seemed to loosen in a way that I couldn't picture anatomically — I had to grab the table to get my balance and stop myself falling to the floor.

I blinked a few times, staring at my blurry reflection in the polished tabletop. What the fuck is going on here, old mate? What the fuck have you walked into? I wiped my forehead, raised my eyes to Blake again and across at the trail going to the door.

I pushed myself away from the table and went to the small window that opened on to the green. From here I had a clear view of the community, the landing-stage, the cottages, some with their curtains drawn. Everything was eerily still: nothing moved. The sea, which earlier had been white-capped, bouncing and alive, was calm now in the coppery evening light and I could just make out the mainland: a few lights coming on in a necklace strung out along the horizon, the sudden sweeping cone of car headlights on the coast road. Lower down, where the sea met the land, there was a pale smudge on the coast: Croabh Haven, where Lexie might even be sitting, watching the sun go down.

When there seemed nothing else to do I went to the kitchen. I put my face under the cold tap, rubbing myself clean of the leaves, dirt and sweat, drinking until I couldn't drink any more. Then I dried myself off with a tea-towel and went back into the refectory where Blake was sitting. I watched him for a moment, half expecting him to speak.

'Is there any way I can get out of this?' I said to him. 'Any way I can just fuck right off and not deal with it?'

I went to the sliding doors and stood there, something swooping helplessly in my chest, thinking about all the windows in the village that someone could watch me from. Is there any way you can just stay in here until it gets light? No. I closed the door behind me, took a deep breath, tightened my fingers round the bolt-cutters and stepped outside.

I walked. Controlled and in silence with the bolt-cutters at the ready, the only sounds the breaking of the tide on the rocks below and the creaky in-and-out of my own breath for company. I didn't look over my shoulder or away from the path. If I was being watched I was fucked if they were going to know I was scared. The lantern on the jetty wasn't lit as it usually was. I had to get very close to see that the boat was gone.

I stood for a while, staring down at the sea sloshing around under the trotline, my heart thumping deafeningly. Fuck, fuck fuck fuck. I turned, my back flat against one of the jetty piles, and looked back at the cottages. There were no lights on in any of the windows, no movement in the trees to my left: absolutely no sign of life. What now?

My choices were narrowing. I either had to get back to my boat on the other side of the island — through the gorge in the dark, not knowing what the fuck was wandering through the woods — or, and the idea was even worse, find somewhere in the village to lock myself up and stay there until daylight.

'Ha,' I said aloud, slithering down to sit with my back to a piling. I stared morosely at the freezing water. 'Or swim, old mate. Or swim.'

It was the cold that made me think of the chapel. I sat huddled on the jetty for a long time not knowing what to do, watching the sun go down over the cliff and pinprick stars sneak into the sky. The village was silent. Absolutely silent. What had been a chilly, sunny day, was turning into a freezing night, and a memory of that freezing cold chapel, locks on the big oak door, came to me. And I'd laughed when Sovereign told me they locked themselves in there to hide from something.

I got up awkwardly from my frozen position against the jetty piling and headed back up the path, going between the cottages like a shadow, slipping past windows. I could be silent when I wanted — even with my legs numb from the cold I could move like a cat. At a glance you'd say the community was totally undisturbed: through windows I got brief, half-lit glimpses of normality — stacked chairs, an old-fashioned computer, a bowl of fruit on the Garricks' kitchen table. All stood empty, perfectly preserved like dolls' houses with the furniture positioned only for appearance, not to be used. Behind the cottages the wheelie-bins were lined up in their usual places on the path, and in the maintenance shed the big ride-on mower sat as usual, its engine housing hinged open. Everything as normal. Until I got to the chapel. And that was when I began to learn about real fear.

A few yards up the path I came to an abrupt halt, my heart thudding noisily in my skull. The moon was sending flittery shadows of leaves across the clearing, and I knew instantly that something was dead wrong there. Instead of coming to safety I'd done the opposite: I'd stumbled into the heart of whatever had happened on Pig Island in my absence.

I slipped silently off the path, crept invisibly through the woods, and stopped, behind a tree, standing stock still, thinking I'd blend into the patches of moonlight. Twenty yards away the top of the spire hung crookedly against the stars, like a broken limb, like it had been hung on by something heavy. The crucifix next to the front door had toppled face first into the grass, one arm snapped off. There was a sound too. The sound of cave water plinking into the darkness.

When, after a long time, nothing had moved, I pushed myself away from the path and came so close to the chapel I could see the huge oak door. It had been destroyed, slashed and shredded, like a giant claw had been taken to it, nothing remaining but one or two lolling pieces of wood creaking outwards on the hinges. On the floor, half in and half out of the chapel, was a shape that some crude instinct in me recognized instantly, even in this low light. I breathed in and out a few times, my mouth open, flushing the shock out of my cells, waiting for my heart to stop hammering. I dropped my rucksack and fumbled out a torch. I wedged the bolt-cutters between my legs, took a deep breath and switched on the torch.

I aimed it at the open door, counting loudly in my head to keep myself steady, ready to dart back into the trees if the beam made something move. Nothing happened. I moved the light down on to the shape. A body. I could tell almost instantly that it was the Nigerian missionary. In his pyjamas — unmistakable with his tyre-like middle and his wedge-shaped limbs — he lay on his face, one of his legs turned out from the hip socket so it lay at a weird angle, the little toe snapped so it stood straight up like a finger pointing to the stars. His right arm was missing — ripped off just like Blake's belly. He looked like he'd been trying to crawl out of the chapel when he died.

I steadied the beam as intently as a marksman and forced myself to stare, keeping up the monotone counting, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three, trying to keep calm. I could smell him, I realized shakily, and it was much worse than the smell of the pigs because it was rawer. It was the smell of the sawdust in a butcher's shop, chill and coppery. And then it hit me what the sound was. Not water at all. Slowly, slowly, I raised the torch to the door.

The chapel was full of human flesh. Things caught in the shaky torch beam, things shivering, hanging from the walls and the light fittings. It was blood, not water, dripping on to the stone floor. I stood like a toy soldier, torch pushed out in front of me like it was a bayonet, frozen solid, my eyes taking it all in, heartbeat going bam bam bam bam in my temples. There was something on the back of one of the pews that looked like a face, torn off and dropped like one of those Salvador Dali clocks. I'd never known skin behaved like that — that a whole face can be peeled off like rubber. That face still jumps out at me in my sleep. Even today.

You let things like this into your head and you either start building walls to contain them or you lose it big-time. It's that simple. As I was standing there, all of a sudden all these fucking tears just dribbled out of me. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and waited for a few moments, studying the torch in my hands, eking out a few minutes pretending to myself that I was smoothing out the rubber casing on the handle. I hadn't cried in years, and it was weird, this feeling, because of how gentle it was: not violent or choking. More like there was a water-table in me that had got a bit full and was rising up behind my eyes. I clicked off the torch and stood in the dark, swallowing hard, still counting to myself, trying to keep it all together. I stopped when I got to two hundred and twenty and saw how pointless everything was. I turned and limped back to the refectory. Fuck knows why I went there — maybe because Blake was there. Maybe Blake dead was better than nobody at all.

'Don't know what to do for you, old mate,' I said, standing there in the dark, staring at his silent body. Suddenly I wasn't scared any more. I'd got past it. I knew I was going to die. 'I'm sorry.' Then, because I thought I was going to cry again, I went into the kitchen and wrenched out the cutlery drawer, with its knives and a heavy rolling-pin. I took the bolt-cutters into the corner and dragged a few things round me — a table, a steel pedal bin — a kind of barrier, and sat down to wait.

Didn't really know what I was waiting for. Morning to come? No. Not morning. I was beyond that. I was waiting to die.

13

It was a bit after midnight when I heard something. I'd been watching the stars moving through the window when it happened, listening to the waves on the shore for four hours and wondering about all the faiths and beliefs and lives I'd laughed at over the years.

There it was: a click or a shuffle from the refectory to my right. I sat bolt upright, my trance broken. The knife almost slithered from my fingers but I caught it, my hands sweating, hurriedly grabbed the bolt-cutters, moved aside the pedal bin and went silently to the door, my heart thudding. Careful not to make a sound I rested my ear against the door. I imagined Blake, sitting upright in the chair, his eyes wide, hands on the table. I imagined a beast next to him, rising up tall in the refectory, almost to the ceiling, pawing the ground. A sweat broke out all over my body. Another noise, slightly muffled, the kind of noise you'd expect if someone was sliding a chair back. OK, OK, I told myself. It's nothing. It's all going to be straightforward. Blake was dead. The noise was probably just a pig. Probably just a pig.

Except… you closed… the fucking door….

I shook my head, like something was clinging to my hair, took a breath and stepped out into the cafeteria, the bolt-cutters raised above my head. 'Come and fucking get it, Malachi,' I yelled, teeth bared. 'Come and fucking have it!'

I stopped. The sliding door stood slightly open, and beyond it the sweep of grass was grey in the starlight. Blake was exactly where he'd been, motionless in the dark, but now something tall and stooped was bending over him, its back to me. It was wearing an old and filthy man's coat and heavy boots, and dragging from under the coat, as it straightened from Blake's bloodied remains, was the tail. There was just time for a thought to flash at me, It's feeding, I've interrupted its meal, then it was gone, bounding away to the door, slipping away into the night.

I stood, paralysed, my mouth drooping. I was there for almost a minute, my hands above my head, not breathing or moving or blinking, only staring at the point in the darkness where it had disappeared. It wasn't Malachi. It wasn't Malachi in a strap-on tail. It was too tall and sinewy. My chest was about to burst. I let out all my breath at once, swung the cutters down and bolted after the beast.

At the top of the slope above the community I stopped and scanned the forest ahead. I had a good idea this chase was leading me back to the gorge. Even before I saw the dull shape moving away from me down the path, going rapidly through the trees and heading to the ledge, I knew I was going to end the night back at the mine. If I'd had any sense at all I'd've turned the other way and locked myself into the refectory. Lexie or the boat-owner would've raised the alarm eventually. But something was in me. Lex would've called it dumbness. I went forward.

I dropped myself over a boulder, down where the path snaked a few feet below, scattering gravel. I paused just long enough to get my balance, then I was off along the path, the bolt-cutters bumping along beside me. The thing was fast — it knew its way: I was getting glimpses of it ahead, moving unhesitatingly along paths through the trees, flowing kind of, like a ghost. I bolted noisily after it, branches breaking underfoot, up the path. I was covering ground fast — past the gargoyle, and suddenly, so suddenly it was like a flash of the moon, I burst out into the gorge, coming to a juddering halt on the ledge.

I stood there, panting hard, scanning the ledge, thinking I'd lost it. Then I saw it — a movement: a dull patch below me, a moving part of the rock that was slightly paler than the rest heading away into the gorge.

'You fucker!' I bellowed, looping the bolt-cutters round my neck so the jaws were hard against my throat, the handles sticking out over my shoulders like bony wings. I wasn't wasting time going across to the streambed: I was going straight down here. I turned my back to the drop and fell to my knees, throwing my feet out backwards into the darkness, over the Up. I paused for a second, my eyes screwed up, thinking about the drop below, feeling the fuck-awful thrill of adrenaline weaken my fingers. Just do it…

And I was off, dropping into the darkness, at best half crawling like a spider, at worst bumping and sliding for what seemed like miles, my T-shirt rucking up to my chest, the rocks and gorse tearing into my thighs and stomach. I was ripped to pieces, pouring blood by the time I hit the bottom, but I didn't stop. I was up, running into the gorge with that indistinct shape ahead of me, dodging the drums, my feet springing off the chemical skin. My heart wanted to burst out of my chest, my throat was raw flesh and my tongue was huge in my mouth. But I'd drop dead right here and now before I left the chase. On and on I went, my moon-shadow running along beside me companionably.

It was a lifetime before I got to the other side and threw myself at the slope, going at it like a lizard, legs and arms pumping up and down like pistons, using the sore inside of my calves to get traction, losing my grip every few feet and sliding back, grabbing on to gorse and heather to get purchase. At the top I allowed myself exactly one minute to rest — lying on my back, panting and sweating, counting the sixty seconds with metronomic severity. I was running with blood but my head was clear, my thinking tight as a drum. Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty — and I was up, dragging my feet a bit as I started, still bent over low with my arms hanging, but picking up speed until I was upright. Through the open gate. And there again, that wisp-like flash of something among the dark trees ahead. Proof that I was on it — still going. The air and the trees rushed past my face. I pumped my arms, 'FUCKING MOVE!' I screamed at my legs. 'Keep. Fucking. Going.'

Suddenly I was there, in the opening next to the cottage, coming to a juddering halt just in time to see the dull yellow movement of the beast disappearing round the corner, just in time to hear the door slamming, the sound of bolts being thrown.

I dropped my head and rested my hands on my thighs, shaking my head and spitting on the ground, waiting for my heart to stop pounding, for my lungs to stop stinging. It didn't matter now, no need to run. The fucker was mine — trapped in the cottage. When at last my legs had stopped trembling and I raised my head, I saw the window was being silently, secretively closed, a shadowy figure reaching out a hand under the lace curtain.

'NO,' I roared, launching myself at the house. 'No!' I grappled for the window. But I was too late: it had closed neatly and tightly against the frame. Furious, I jumped away, almost dancing with rage, swinging the bolt-cutters to one side and then back, in a perfect golfer's swing, straight into the pane. The glass shattered in a star shape, broken pieces tinkling down into the living room. Quickly I pulled off my sweatshirt, wrapped it round my fist, punched out the remainder of the glass and unhooked the window. I was inside in seconds, slithering through like a worm, falling on my shoulder, rolling on to my side in the scattered glass. With a clumsy, crabby motion, I pushed myself up into a crouch, squatting bright-eyed and alert, moving my head side to side in a series of jerks. I was alone in the living room.

The child's windmill on the shelf rotated creakily, like it was pleased to see me. Slowly, moving very quietly, I drew the bolt-cutters along the floor towards me and straightened. Around me the cottage had gone totally silent.

I went quietly to the wall, switched on the light, then stood very still in the centre of the room, trying to focus on all the air in the cottage, feeling its vibrations move along my skin. Nothing. No movement, and no sound. I turned, my head on one side, my skin crawling with concentration. Slowly I lifted my chin and looked up at the ceiling. Something had moved up there, only a few feet above my head, a subtle, infinitesimally small creak of a floorboard. I opened my mouth in a smile, breathing out, whispering softly, 'Ah, there. I've got you, ya beaut.'

Stealthily, the cutters at the ready, I moved towards the staircase. The night was absolutely silent now, a cobweb on the light-fitting above floating spectrally over my head, like a draught was coming through. I placed my hand on the banister and, slowly, slowly, testing every inch of every step, crept up the stairs. I paused at the top. I could see three doors ahead — two open and one, on the left, closed.

The word trap, trap came back to me, making my skin crawl. I ground my teeth, giving in to a moment's nerves, then inched forward along the corridor, stopping at the closed door, facing it with my feet a pace apart, solid — ready for something to come tearing out at me.

I took in five long, deep breaths. You can still walk away, mate…. raised the cutters above my head and, in one quick move, booted the door in. It flew open, a rush of stale air and darkness, and I saw the creature instantly. It was in the corner, its back to the wall, crying and shrinking away, its feet pedalling furiously. 'It', I saw instantly, was a 'she' — a woman in her teens or early twenties. Her hands were over her head, a terrified keening noise coming from her mouth.

'Who the fuck are you?' I stood with the cutters at the ready — out in front of me like a sword — ready to swing them if she moved so much as an inch towards me. My breathing was coming so rapidly that I had to stop between each word. 'I said, who the fuck are you?' When she didn't answer I made a fake lunge into the room, raising the cutters like I was going to attack. 'Tell me — NOW — tell me who you are. Who are you?'

'Don't don't don't!' She shrank back against the wall, her hands out to defend herself, her face streaked with tears and blood. She probably wasn't much past her teens with chopped-around black hair so short you could see the scalp in places. She had the underfed, dingy look of a thirteen-year-old boy on drugs. Whatever the tail trick was, she had either disposed of it or had it tucked neatly down beneath her. All I could see were the tops of her bare knees, crusted with hardened, white skin. 'Please don't!'

'Stand up!'

'I can't!'

'I said-' I made another lunge towards her '- stand up!'

'No!' she sobbed. 'No. I can't stand up.'

'Stand up or I'll hurt you.'

She shook her head and sobbed louder. I approached, my eyes on her hands, bending cautiously. Her nails were bitten, the tips of her fingers red and sore. Before she could see what I was doing I grabbed her right hand, wrenching it so high and so quickly that she was caught off balance. 'NO! No no — please please please.' She flailed, trying to grab me with her left hand, but I dropped the cutters and grabbed that too, yanking it up to meet the other, crunching the wristbones together.

'NOO! Leave me alone. Please DON'T! Let me go.'

'SHUT UP!' I slammed her hands into the wall above her head. 'Now, you're going to-' She wriggled, trying to kick me, to jerk her hands away. 'Stop that! Now just fucking stop struggling and stand the fuck up.'

'I can't.'

'Do it. Fucking do it.'

I rammed her hands against the wall again, harder now, and this time she stopped struggling. She raised her eyes to mine and we studied each other, both breathing hard. She had these swimmy, inflamed eyes the colour of mud, and a tilted-up, defiant nose.

'Well?' I was trembling so hard I could almost feel my teeth chattering. 'Are you going to stand up?' Her mouth moved shakily, but no words came out, only a scratchy murmur. I shook her again. 'Are you?'

'I–I will. I'll stand up if you don't hurt me.'

'I won't hurt you.'

She dropped her eyes, her whole body trembling, and shuffled her feet together, tucking them as tight under herself as she could. Pushing her head forward so her weight tipped over her toes, slowly, stiffly, she began to straighten. I raised her hands, lifting her, running them up the wall, drawing her up, my arms arching over her head. She was tall — almost six foot at a guess, and as she straightened I was aware that a part of her, something heavy and fleshy, didn't come with her and dropped heavily on to the floor. I could see it in the light coming from the hallway. I released her, grabbed up the cutters, and was back where I could see her properly.

'Don't move,' I said, holding up the cutters.

She dropped her face into her hands and stood pitifully in the centre of the room, her shoulders drooping. 'Don't kill me. Please don't kill me.'

'I'm not going to kill you, for fuck's sake.' I licked my lips. 'Take a step forward.'

She obeyed, not dropping her hands, shuffling forward dejectedly.

'That's it. Stop. Now… take your coat off.'

She unbuttoned it and let it fall. She was wearing a man's shirt that reached to her knees and you could see her arms and chest, thin as a young boy's. Her bare, muscular legs were crammed into a pair of lace-up boots. I took a sideways step, circling her, staring in silence at what dangled from under the shirt — like something she had deposited there: an obscene, fleshed growth, the skin pale, rather yellow in places. It hung loosely between her legs, all the way down to the floor, ending in an odd, spatulalike shape of flesh. I could see instantly it wasn't a trick. This belonged to her. There was a vein in the top of it that was pulsing from the effort of the chase.

'Please,' she begged, making a grab for it, trying to conceal it. 'Please don't look.'

I stared for a long time, not knowing what to do or say. I realized I was holding my breath. I let it out in a long sigh, shook my head. 'My God,' I muttered, lowering the cutters to my side. 'What the fuck is going on in this place?'

'I don't know — Idon't know. Please let me sit down — please!'

I nodded to the bed. 'Go on.'

She dropped down, pulling the coat over her. She arranged the duvet hurriedly, so that whatever the growth was, it was squashed out of view just behind her left leg, making her sit slightly tilted to one side. I stared at the place it was hidden, my mind racing. When I looked up I found her staring back at me, like she was saying, 'I can't do anything about it. It's not my fault.'

'Oh, Christ,' I said, a wave of tiredness taking my feet out from under me. I sat on the floor with a bump, rubbing my eyes. 'What is going on? Who are you?'

'Angeline,' she said. 'Angeline. I can't help it.'

'Angeline?' I said the name distantly, like it was the strangest name I'd ever heard. 'Angeline?' I frowned. There was an odd, muffled quality to her voice — something sticky about the consonants, something I couldn't place — like she wasn't used to speaking.

'Angeline?'

'Yes?'

'Are you deaf, Angeline?'

She shook her head.

'Not deaf?'

'No. I can hear you.'

I narrowed my eyes. 'And what the fuck have you been doing today? Eh?' I nodded to the window. 'What did you do to Sovereign? And to Blake? What was that all about then?'

She dropped her hands and blinked at me. 'What have I been doing?' she said, wiping her nose. 'No — not me. I haven't done anything.'

'Someone has.'

'Dad,' she said, hurriedly rubbing at the tears on her cheeks. 'My dad. He's gone crazy. There was an explosion and-'

'Dad?'

'I followed him. He waited until they were in the chapel and then he-' She wiped her nose with her shirt sleeve. 'He nailed them inside. He knows about explosives. He's always known how to blow things up. I saw it. I saw it all.'

'And who the fuck's your — Jesus Christ.' I dropped my hands disbelievingly. It was all coming straight now. What a mangled fucking truth. 'No shit,' I muttered. 'No shit. Malachi? He's your father?'

She stared back at me, her face closed and defensive. 'They couldn't get out. Are they going to think it was me?'