2011 – Mysterious Island

The waves splash over your face and the stars glint in the sky above as consciousness returns to you unevenly.

Of the night you recall only the distress call of your steamship, the lifeboats lowered, clinging to a railing as the deck suddenly takes on an angle impossible to negotiate.

The middle of the ocean. Not a land mass for a thousand miles – none charted, anyway – and sinking slowly. Then the freezing black water, a lonely plank to cling to.

And now here. Where, exactly? All alone. No, not alone…

Pushing yourself to your feet, clothing in tatters, the surf about your ankles, you see man-made markers, bones arranged as warnings, a pathway lit by dimly smoldering torches, pounding drums in the distance arising like the awareness of your own heartbeat. Death in the air.

The kind of island the psychotically disturbed Dr. Brüntodt disappeared to, say the stories. How easy to forget they’re only stories when you’re an unwanted intruder, shivering in the night.

Steel yourself. Make your way cautiously up the path toward the buzzing nerve center of this mysterious island. You smell it in the air – peril lies around every corner, ready to rush at you from the darkness. Howls and shrieks and the grinding of terrible machinery. You are not safe.