Even so, time was passing all too quickly, and so I set sail barely three months after I had first stumbled out into the dawn of a new world, my shirt soaked in another man’s blood.

I won’t belabour the trials and terrors of that first ocean voyage. Suffice to say that, when I finally reached American soil, it was a thousand kilometres farther south than I had intended. Powerful storms had taken their toll on my yacht, and I sailed her as far north as I could before she finally ran aground in heavy squalls, still a hundred kilometres south of Biddeford. After I struggled to shore, I worked my way through a variety of vehicles in order to drive the rest of the way.

The Haven, when I finally reached it, proved to be a sprawling ranch with numerous outbuildings, all contained within a tall security fence with cameras posted around the perimeter. I walked the last six kilometres there, moving only at night, grasping a rifle in both hands. I holed up in the cabin of an abandoned truck until the morning, watching the compound through binoculars, but it was clear there were absolutely no signs of life or movement. In fact, the Haven appeared to be just as empty and deserted as anywhere else.

I waited until the next evening before cutting my way through the fence and sneaking up towards one of the buildings. When I looked inside and saw long-dead corpses, I knew death had not spared the cultists after all. I had my answer for why no one had ever come looking for Marlon or Herschel.

The carnage extended throughout the rest of the compound. The main building, a two-storey structure that looked as if it had started out as some rich man’s summerhouse, had a makeshift barricade built across its front steps, while inside I found a cache of ampoules that seemed to have been deliberately smashed.

I explored further within, finding a dozen more corpses, their bony wrists secured with plastic ties. Judging by the tilt of their heads and the dark stains all around them, it was clear their throats had been cut.

After a while I figured out what had happened from bits and pieces of information: there had been a rebellion of some kind. The cult’s leaders had used the supplies of antidote to control their followers, dispensing it only to those who were in their favour. Anyone who didn’t toe the line, it seemed, simply died once the antidote stopped working. I found the evidence in the minutes of mob trials at which the former cult leaders had been found guilty of betraying their own stated principles, before undergoing immediate execution.