We then fell asleep.

By the time we woke up, the members of the cult had committed mass suicide. They had slit their own throats. I felt the same pang of disappointment I had last felt on the airplane when I missed the duty-free. Why did they eat their portion of the food if they planned to kill themselves anyway?

Sometimes I truly don’t understand people.

They were all dead except for the man whose hand had been mutilated by the spear earlier. He held the knife in his left hand. He was right-handed, so he couldn’t make the strong, clean cut his companions had carried out earlier. He kept wounding himself over and over again, but each wound only caused more pain, not death.

The German pensioners were standing by this final cult member.

‘Come and see, my dear!’ said the old man with a mirthful smile, a naughty twinkle in his eye as he watched the agony of the last survivor.

The old lady chuckled as she surveyed the bodies. The man knelt down to the cultist and spoke in flawless English. His words radiated glee.

‘Your faith is worth nothing,’ he said to the wounded man. ‘It was invented by a pulp writer to earn the money his fiction never brought him. He didn’t have the eyes to see the Nameless Lords himself, but he gave you eyes to see your own suffering. We often drank rum together when I was younger. I was the one who suggested he establish a church. How many miser­able bastards he has sent here to die – you can’t even count! And you know the best part?’

The old man leaned closer and whispered something into the dying man’s ear, then stood up, his joints cracking. He was visibly pleased with himself, and I was terrified of him.

The cult member looked at me, tears welling in his desperate eyes.

‘Help me, please!’ he begged. ‘Do it for me! Use the knife! I can’t stand this anymore. I can’t stand his words!’

I should have killed him. I should have pressed the blade into his flesh to end his suffering. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. It was none of my business, and I had my own imminent death to worry about anyway.

We carried on, leaving the corpses behind. The surviving cultist wailed like a deer with its bones broken in a forest trap. I almost took pity on him, but by that time I was far too exhausted to do anything about it.

Only then did we notice the dozens, if not hundreds, of corpses among the trees, their rotten fingers still clenching the ceremonial knife issued by the Magistrate. Apparently this spot is a fixture in the forest; cultists travel here to die, but their death signifies nothing. It is an empty gesture, which only made their selfish act of eating the last of the food even more annoying.