At the other end of the recovery process is Andrew, who was recently liberated from Tariq’s group, and who is just now entering Meadow Haven. Andrew also spent two years with the group, but he seems far more impassive about his ordeal than Kerry does. He’ll call Tariq "an interesting fellow" and then laugh. He’ll talk about "the typical charismatic leader" and how "the Bible is very clear about forgiving those who wrong us." Even when describing the most depraved acts of Tariq’s reign, there is an air of detachment about Andrew, as though he were describing a novel. "I seem to have no gut reaction when I talk about the horrors that happened," he says.

Otherwise, Kerry and Andrew seem very much cut from the same cloth. Like Kerry, the 24-year-old Andrew has a blond-haired, blue-eyed wholesomeness about him. Like Kerry, he comes from a comfortable, mildly religious background. He, too, became enamored with Tariq’s religious zeal while attending his prayer meetings at Wheaton College, where his brother, Benji, went to school. And, like Kerry, he makes a mockery of the idea that people who join cults must be a bit slow in the head.

In fact, when Andrew first met Tariq, he was studying linguistics at Harvard, from which he graduated magna cum laude. "[Andrew is] absolutely brilliant," says Bob, "one of the smartest we’ve ever had. Which is a strength and a weakness. The upside is that he puts two and two together, he sees connections. But your emotions don’t always follow your head. You live in your heart. That is where life is lived out."

At times, Andrew’s dispassionate manner makes his story even more chilling. With something approaching wry amusement, he recalls one particular instance when Tariq subjected him to public humiliation. "Once he had me go out into Harvard Square and do what people from subcontinental India call the ‘Rooster Position,’" he says, crouching down on the floor to illustrate. "You put your hands under your legs and grab your ears like this. He made me do it for a half an hour."

Oddly, this occurred while Andrew and Tariq, who was then lurking around the Wheaton College campus, were separated by hundreds of miles. "He seemed to have a way of knowing whether I did things," Andrew says. "And I felt like he was God’s authority in my life, so I had to be honest with him. That’s where my Christian upbringing dealt me a blow."

A few months after the Harvard Square incident, Andrew went to visit Tariq in Illinois and found himself being pressured to sign a kind of kangaroo contract that would have committed him to the group for life. "I told him I didn’t want to join for life and he punched me in the face," Andrew says. "I’d never been punched in the face before, so for Tariq to do that was unthinkable. He actually had me pull down my pants and whipped my bare bottom, which is really humiliating and very unusual."

The abuse against Andrew and the other members of Tariq’s group increased in frequency and severity as time went on. It also got more and more bizarre. For a while, Tariq tried to fatten Andrew up by forcing him to eat "12 eggs for breakfast and six glasses of milk a meal." In Pakistan, Tariq accused Andrew of plotting to kill him. "He made me confess to the others," he says. "I had solitary confinement for three days, with no food, wondering if this was something I did." And then there was Maryland, the house of horrors.

"I have scars on my hands because he would beat us on the hands with a coat hanger a hundred times," Andrew says. "If I winced and showed weakness, he would start over. It was a plastic hanger, and if it broke, the jagged end would form divots in our hands. Kerry would have to take the broken end of the hanger and actually twist it into her cheeks, she had to twist it into her rear end. He would pull our hair out on a regular basis. We had fat lips, bruises. One time he punched me in the face repeatedly until I almost fainted."

For some reason, Tariq would often single out Andrew for special punishment. "I became bitter," he says. "I’d say, ‘You wait, he’s not going to stop with me.’" Andrew remembers the relief he felt when Tariq finally turned his wrath against a group member named Aaron, who responded by going home. "When Aaron left, because of the pounding on his kidneys, he was jaundiced. He was limping — we hit him repeatedly on the tailbone. He’d be kneeling on the floor and we’d kick him on the behind with our shoes on, or stomp on his back. He looked terrible. His hair was growing back in patches, he had lacerations from being whipped, he had no eyebrows."

But Aaron was at least limping away from Tariq. Andrew stayed with him for close to another year. "Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it?" he says with another of his incongruous laughs. "Every time I thought of leaving, Tariq would say, ‘Andrew, check your heart. What’s in your heart?’ I’d say, ‘Nothing.’ He’d say, ‘I know there’s something there.’ How could he know? It never occurred to me until I left the group that it could have been anything other than God. That to me was God’s confirmation that he wanted me to stay."

It was, of COURSE, Tariq who wanted Andrew to stay. And, like any cult leader worth his salt, he knew how to get his way. "Tariq had told us that if we ever left the ministry, God would plague us," recalls Kerry, "He would break our legs, He would make me lose my hair, have splotches all over my body, that everything in my life would be a miserable failure. Here I am believing in God, thinking this is going to come true. So what’s the use?"

This is one of the more-pressing questions Andrew will have to face over the next few months. It’s not the "How could he do this?" or the "Why did I do this?" that matters now; it’s the "What next?" Getting to the heart of this question may indeed be a long, emotional process, but the answer itself is actually quite simple. To some extent, Andrew already knows it. "I was at a Bible school," he says, recalling his last days with Tariq. "I remember the faculty were up on a stage. This guy in the back row gets up, goes to the bathroom, comes back, and sits down. For me, this was like a glass of cold water in the desert."

By this point, Andrew has already listed a half-dozen ways he finally found the will to leave Tariq — all of them concerning the power of prayer. But it was this simple act — someone going for a pee — that proved to be his ultimate inspiration. "You don’t understand," he says. "I couldn’t do that. I had to say, ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’ Sometimes Tariq would come and wait at the door. Just to be able to decide to leave the room and come back. I wanted that."

But then, sudden freedom, like sudden light, can be a jarring, disorienting thing. Surely it must be a little scary, being out here in the middle of nowhere, with no friends, no family, and all these memories welling up inside you. "It’s not frightening at all," Andrew says. "I feel great." With this, he disappears along one of Meadow Haven’s dim hallways. Bob and Judy are out. The house is desolate. Quiet as a crypt.

N.B.: Tariq is currently holed up somewhere in Texas. Unless he is arrested or, less likely, sees the error of his ways, he will keep trawling America’s college campuses for fresh recruits. Right now, as far as anyone knows, there is only one person left in his cult: Andrew’s twin brother, Benji.