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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