"It started with Lewis Harrison Wright, my great-grandfather," I say, making my way among the trees, picking safer, mossy areas to step on. "He preached in Bethlehem for ages. It was a small remote town back then. His father had preached there before him, and his grandfather, too. It was a tight knit community and Wrights had been its spiritual center for generations. Yet Lewis was different."

I pause and look back at Joshua who walks slowly, stepping into my footprints fading in the moss. Walking barefoot in a forest is never a good idea, but there's nothing we can replace his lost shoes with.

"So," I say, resuming my walking. "For Lewis, traditional religion wasn't enough. Sacred books were filled with murder, crimes, daughters seducing their fathers and such. He thought it wrong to let that 'filth' into the minds of his people. Religion, he thought, should give people a clear understanding of what's right. All that's outside of that is unacceptable and shouldn't even be mentioned." I push a low hanging branch away from my face. "Apparently, he was convincing and charismatic. The town having had been listening to Wright's preaching for generations, people started rallying about him. And in the next seventy something years, he transformed the town into a religious settlement."

"I can't believe everybody just went along with it," Joshua says.

"Well, people were more religious in those days. I believe some left, but most stayed. They were isolated—no television, and later no Internet. Even when they could technically have it, it wasn't allowed. "

"Oh? No entertainment whatsoever?"

"The entertainment was singing and storytelling. They just kept to themselves. Yet at some point, in late seventies, the news reports started to appear and a couple of documentaries brought attention to the settlement. Following Jonestown, the press was digging for such things, and, in a way, they created the Wrights as we know them. Some people were curious about Bethlehem, some outraged, some enchanted. Newcomers started to flock in."

"I heard some of it," says Joshua. "They use people labor on their farms and they're quite rich—the bosses, that is. Like, your uncle and the family."

I shrug. "It's a community. It's okay to work for your community."

"It's also okay to get paid."

"They have a place to live and food to eat and they have their needs met. They lead the pure life they came searching for. Bethlehem is not a place to earn money. It is a place to find meaning."

"By making a small bunch of weirdly-named people rich?"

His dwelling on the financial side of things is annoying. I knew he wouldn't grasp it. It's hard to explain this to someone who hasn't grown up at the Wrights' farms. I can tell him the facts, but I can't make him feel the goodness and the purity and the meaning behind it all. No matter what I say, he'll still see it as a place where a bunch of psychos live, not a refuge from the world that's wild and unpredictable.

"I didn't check their balance books," I say, "but, of course, the farms are growing, and the produce is selling –"

"And the labor is free," he chimes in.

"Yes, but the money is used to benefit the people of the community."

"Those of them who survive, that is."

I stop. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"We are running for our lives, aren't we?" He plods towards me and stops, too. "I heard that a bunch of families whose children had joined the Wrights sued your Uncle for brainwashing and stuff. Some people even went missing, didn't they? They'd been on the farms, and they left, as your uncle claimed, and then nobody heard from them again."

"People go missing all the time. It had nothing to do with the Wrights."

"Like we went missing tonight?" He spreads his hands, gesturing at the forest around us. "You said we should disappear—is that what those who managed to get away from Bethlehem did?" He peers at me. "Have you always known they've been killing people?"

His bluntness takes me off guard. As a child, I knew little about what was going on. Perhaps one of the reasons I left was the fear to eventually learn more than I wanted to.

"I never really knew," I say, "but I had... suspicions."

There were things that started to arrange themselves into a clearer picture only after I'd left the farms. Lying awake at nights, tired after my shift and yet unable to sleep, I've been trying to make sense of the memories that sneaked their way into my thoughts, gaining an eerie quality they hadn't have before.

People had gone missing, yes. Accidents had happened, yes.

I was about five years old when my aunt received the blue pill. There'd been much talking about her before that, but most of it I hadn't understood nor cared about at the time.

Auntie Mary kept to herself. She wasn't very cheerful, or nice to kids, so she was of little interest to me. She lived alone in one of those small two-rooms houses most of the families on the farms occupied. I only saw her at family dinners in the Main House—the mansion where Uncle and his closest circle of followers resided.

I remember stumbling into Uncle's office one day only to find a circle of adults in white robes with their hoods up, standing in a circle, my aunt sitting in a chair in the middle of it, tears running down her face. A little blue pill lay on her palm. I noticed that much before one of the figures in white spoke to me.

"Go play outside," it said in my father's voice.

"But," I said, relieved that the scary figures weren't a bunch of ghosts, "auntie is crying."

"Auntie isn't well, so we're trying to help. Go play outside."

I was more than happy to obey. Yet whatever help they'd been trying to provide hadn't worked, apparently, for we were notified the next day that Auntie died from a heart attack. Everybody was sad. I was, too, even though I didn't care about her much, but she was crying the last time I saw her, which meant she had been sad before she died, which felt unfair to me. Uncle spoke beautifully at her funeral, making everybody cry.

There was also that boy, Nathaniel. He was a bit weird, but he played with us, and all was fine until he hit puberty. Then he just started bothering girls a lot, peeking under their skirts, touching them and stuff. There was a lot of talking to him and about him, yet even Uncle couldn't get him to behave. It went on for a few months until one day Nathaniel went to the river and never came back.

It was strange that he had gone alone—he was usually following us everywhere. Also, it was strange that he'd drowned. He'd been a good swimmer. Yet he had, and as much as it saddened me at the time, I remember thinking that his death had saved Uncle the trouble of deciding how to deal with his behavior.

Years later, it occurred to me that perhaps Uncle had decided.

And of course, there was The Fire.

Until the age of twelve, we lived in 'children homes' and could only visit our parents on weekends. The last weekend wasn't too good—my parents kept arguing about something and getting quiet when I was around. Something was going on and they didn't tell me. So I was glad when the weekend was over and I could go back to my friends.

It was Tuesday night when the fire sirens woke us up. The darkness behind the widows glowed red. We weren't supposed to leave the room at night, but this was too unusual to miss, so I and a couple of other boys climbed out the window and went to investigate. I was excited at first, but as we got closer, my uneasiness grew. The commotion was coming from the direction of my parents' home. I tried to convince myself that it's probably not their place, and even when I realize that it was, I still hoped they had gotten away in time. It was a little two rooms house with large windows. How could they possibly not have?

Yet I couldn't see them anywhere.

It didn't take the firemen long to put the fire out and by then I was sitting behind the nearby bush, hiding from everyone, bawling my eyes out. I could hear them talk about removing the bodies. Then someone walked through the bushes, and sat next to me and put his hand around me. He was a big man and the firefighting gear made him even bigger, but the silent embrace felt reassuring, and, after a while, my crying subsided.

He sat with me until the nurses of the children's home came to take me back, and, despite the shock, I remember thinking I'd like to be like him one day, so big and reliable and always there when someone needs help. When I left, he gave me a sad smile, and I tried to commit his face to memory. Apparently, he has done the same for me, for years later, when he became Chief Lagana and I came looking for a job, I got it more easily than could have been expected.