Mo Hayder: Pig Island

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.