by Tim Lebbon
Another impact, closer, and a shadow fell over him, blocking out the sun as completely as an eclipse. As the surface of the water shimmered and then stilled again, Chapman saw what looked like a mountain standing behind him.
That thing! His heart fluttered and then pounded. The ground shook once more. Turning his head slightly he saw the giant ape kneeling close to the lagoon bank less than a hundred feet from him.
It’ll see me it’ll know me it’ll eat me and then—
Chapman breathed deep and slow, trying to compose himself. It hadn’t seen him yet. The large rock he’d sat against was shielding most of his body. He still had a chance. Just stay still, stay quiet…
The ape scooped a huge handful of mud and water from the lagoon bank and began slathering an open wound on its forearm. Chapman froze in surprise, looking at his own arm, and the wound there that was troubling him. Something about that moment bit deep.
We did that to him, he thought, and for the first time since arriving he saw the beast as something other than a monster, and an enemy.
The ape paused, then looked directly at him. Its eyes changed. Its face wrinkled as it drew in a huge, snorting sniff. It reached out the mud-covered hand, crawling closer along the bank, reaching past Chapman’s rock—
—and then plunging its hand into the lagoon, right up to its elbow. Waves splashed and washed against the shore, and Chapman took the opportunity to push himself backwards, hugging the rock and desperately hoping it would shield him enough.
The beast withdrew its hand clasping a massive tentacled limb, suckers puckering at the open air. Water thrashed as more tentacles lashed out from the deep and wrapped around its arm, then the ape stood to its full height, pulling with all its strength.
A squid partially emerged from the water. This was a true giant, far larger than any Chapman had ever seen or even heard of before, perhaps eighty feet from tip of tentacles to the end of its tail. It was a powerful creature. Several limbs remained hooked onto something beneath the surface as the ape tugged and wrestled to haul it out. Water churned in the violent struggle, turning dark as the squid released sprays of thick black ink that spattered down around and over Chapman. It stank, a heavy viscous fluid that stuck to his clothes as thick as tar.
One of the squid’s tentacles lashed out across the rock Chapman was hiding behind. Even the tip was as thick as his arm, and it whipped him across the legs, a heavy wet impact. He cried out, voice lost amidst the fight between these two behemoths. Then he heard a sickening crunching sound, and risking a look around the rock he saw the ape chewing down on the squid’s head. Its skin ruptured, head burst, spilling a sick stew of rank fluids, sticking in the ape’s fur and forming a thick slick across the lagoon’s surface.
Chapman curled against the rock and waited for it to all go away. He was moaning softly, listening to the sounds of the giant ape eating. The tentacle end lying across his legs went limp, then was jerked away as the beast finished its meal.
He lay there for a while listening to the slurping, chewing sounds echoing across the lagoon. Squid blood and ink drifted across the surface like oil, and soon the scene became peaceful again, quiet, and when he chanced another glance around the rock the ape was gone, the squid was gone, and it was as if neither had ever been there.
“Shit,” Chapman muttered. “Shit.” He wanted nothing more than to get back to the crashed Sea Stallion.
SIXTEEN
Weaver was beginning to wonder whether she’d brought enough spare film cartridges. She was using thirty-six exposures, and already she’d filled six of them. She had maybe eight left to spare. Walking from the waterside and into the village, she saw sights she could have used eight rolls on barely without blinking.
The villagers, first of all. They all wore colourful clothing, much of it decorated with patterns and hues that were designed for camouflage against certain backgrounds. Some were jungle tinged, others pale as stone, yet more a muddy, dirty colour like jungle water. Men and women mixed together, seemingly equal. Whatever hierarchy existed here was not dictated by the sexes. Children ran around and played like children do, but even they wore smeared paint across their faces and naked torsos.
The village itself was fascinating. She’d seen similar stilted structures in Vietnam, built higher than potential flood levels, but these buildings were far more complex and sturdy. Their stilts were a mixture of timber and stone, and some of them covered three levels, often built into and around tall trees that might have been a thousand years old. They were also decorated with an array of highly coloured patterns, against which camouflaged villagers could stand and blend in. She wondered whether certain families chose particular colours and shapes.
She snapped photos, recording memories through the lens. The villagers did not react when she aimed the camera at them, neither posing, nor becoming agitated and turning away. They treated her camera like just another stranger. None of them seemed to react outwardly to anything, and she wondered just what they were thinking.
Beyond the village, further along the valley, was the wall.
It was the highest, largest structure they had seen by far, a massive conglomeration of stone and timber that effectively blocked off the valley past that point. It reminded Weaver of a tall dam, except that this appeared to be completely vertical. Huge stone blocks had been used to form the wall, along with timber infill structures in a couple of places that rose high and solid. Spiked areas—sharpened tree trunks, she guessed, set into stone pockets and protruding outward from the wall’s facade—gave the impression of a fortification.
Those same coloured streaks decorated the entire surface. They could not have been for camouflage, and she wondered if perhaps they had some ceremonial or superstitious meaning.
It was magnificent and daunting, and she had never seen its like before. She ached to get closer to make out more detail.
“Did they build that to keep out that thing we saw?” she asked.
“Kong,” Marlow said.
“It has a name?” Brooks asked.
“He has a name. And yeah, to them he does. But he’s not the one they’re trying to keep out.”
Weaver’s blood ran cold. There’s worse than Kong, she thought, and it was not an idea she wanted to verbalise, or a question she wanted to ask. She and Conrad shared a glance and she saw her fear reflected in him.
“They’re petroglyphs,” Brooks said, pointing at some of the symbols used on buildings and the wall.
“No,” San said, “it looks more like a written language.” She started examining the symbols, as if to distract herself from everything that had happened. Weaver wished she had something to offer a distraction other than the view through her camera lens, and the words of this man who had been here forever.
“Did you teach them these building techniques?” Brooks asked.
“Me? Teach them?” Marlow laughed. “That’s rich. That’s a real riot.”
“Who’s in charge here?” Conrad asked.
“Nobody,” Marlow said. “They’re a democratic collective. Pretty neat, really. They don’t own property, there’s no crime. They’re past all that. Thing is, see, with a place like this, whatever lands here stays here.”
Several much older villagers approached, dressed in the usual coloured clothes but with jewellery of complex designs hanging around their neck and from heavily pierced ears.
“It’s okay,” Marlow said to the elders. “These are my friends. They mean no harm.”
The elders only stared at him and the new visitors, saying nothing and giving very little away through their expressions. Yet Marlow seemed to glean some meaning from their minimal movements and silence.
“Good, good, thank you,” he said. He turned to Conrad. “They say you’re welcome to shack up here.”
“I didn’t hear them say anything at all,” Conrad said, and Weaver shared his confusion and suspicion. This mad guy could be making everything up as he went along.
“They don’t
speak much,” Marlow said, frowning as he tried to find words for what he meant to say. If he’d been here so long, perhaps his own language had lost some meaning. “It’s kinda nice, really. But once you’ve been here as long as I have, you get the message.”
“You can tell them we won’t be here that long,” Conrad said. “There are more of us out in the jungle, injured. Some dead.”
Weaver edged from foot to foot. She felt a stress building, not in Conrad’s words but in his demeanour. The others, too, were exuding tension. Nieves and Slivko held their guns down by their sides, but she saw their hands gripping that little bit tighter, knuckles whitening.
“We need to go that way.” Conrad pointed at the wall beyond the village.
The villagers reacted instantly. Though their expressions did not change, several of them brought up their spears, and others crouched down as if in preparation for a fight.
“Out there?” Marlow asked, afraid for the first time. “Oh no, they won’t let you go out there.”
“Won’t let us?” Nieves asked.
“Not after you kicked the hornet’s nest,” Marlow said. “Nope. They won’t let you past that wall.”
Nieves took a step forward, suddenly more threatening. “Wait a minute, won’t let us? You’re not serious. We can’t just stay here, we have to get off this rock. We have lives back home. I have a life. Tell them, we need to—”
“Thank them for their hospitality,” Conrad said, stepping forward and cutting Nieves off. Weaver realised that she’d been about to do the same. Nieves was losing it, and it was starting to feel like a mistake giving him a gun.
Nieves looked around and Weaver caught his eye. She shook her head.
“Get out of the office, they said,” he muttered. “See the world, have an adventure. Damn it, I need… I need…” He slumped and sat down on the hard ground, nursing the rifle across his legs.
A female villager approached, confident and quiet, and handed him a finely carved stone cup of water.
Nieves looked up, surprised. “Oh. Thank you.”
Weaver removed herself from their oddly poignant moment and took a photo of the standing woman handing the seated man a drink. Every one of these could win awards, she thought.
“They won’t hurt you,” Marlow said, looking around at the new arrivals. “They really won’t. Come on in, I’ll give you a tour of the village.”
“I’d rather see more of that,” Conrad said, pointing at the shipwrecked Wanderer.
“Oh, yeah. There’s a lot to see there. Okay, we’ll start there. Let’s go.” Marlow led the way, but Nieves held back, seated with the village woman. He seemed enrapt.
“I think maybe I’ll wait here,” he said.
Weaver took another picture.
They passed through the village and approached the grounded ship. It looked larger the nearer they got, not quite Athena’s size, but close. Weaver could see several rusted holes in its hull, and she wondered whether they had been torn there during the ship’s final moments, or had decayed over time since the wreck.
She also wondered what had happened to the Wanderer’s sailors and crew.
Marlow led the group—Conrad, Brooks, San, Slivko and a reluctant Nieves—in through one of these openings, up a small slope of wreckage, and into an interior hallway. Lit from several large openings above, the functional passageway had been carved and decorated over the years so that it barely resembled a ship’s interior at all.
Weaver used her flash to adequately illuminate the photos she took. She had begun to realise that she was documenting something amazing, unknown, and horrible, all probably for the first time ever. The images she was recording here were unprecedented. They were unique.
All she had to do was to survive and get them off this island.
She photographed Marlow again from behind as he was talking with Conrad. He looked fit and well, especially considering he’d been here for almost thirty years. Yet he still had much of his story to tell. She could sense Conrad’s caution, even though Marlow seemed only happy to see them.
“Far as I can tell, this ship washed up about a decade or so before I did,” the old pilot said. “Sits on top of a spring. The whole place is hallowed ground to them. Come on through, I’ll show you the main spring room. It’s sorta… spooky.”
Marlow wasn’t lying. Even on the approach to the spring room, a strange glowing light emanated from it, speckling the walls with luminescence and catching dust drifting on the air.
They entered the spring room, and for a moment Weaver forgot her camera. Perhaps it had once been one of the ship’s holds, or a high-ceilinged rec room, but everything about it had changed. Walls were contoured with crafted wood and dried mud and decorated with obscure shapes and images. The floor had been relaid in blocked stone, smoothed by decades of reverential footfalls. High up, the ceiling was open to the sky, but criss-crossed with heavy vines and hanging plants, making for an artificial forest canopy. At the room’s centre sat the well head. Raised a couple of feet from the floor, the well was almost perfectly round, and it emitted a strange phosphorescent glow that permeated the whole room.
While the others examined the well and its strange light, Weaver concentrated on the walls. There was something about the shapes there, the separate planks all painted with patterns, and how the colours interacted with the carvings and moulded mud. Shadow and light conspired. It was not hypnotic, but still the features drew her eye and levelled her concentration. She snapped photos, and in between she simply stared. Blinking slowly, letting her vision settle, she saw it at last.
These were not random shapes at all.
“Look at this,” she said, and Conrad and the others came over. After a few seconds they saw as well.
One of the main images showed Kong sitting on a giant stone throne. The seat was made from weirdly-shaped skulls, many of them as large as his. Its feet were bones that had to be thirty feet long. He even wore a crown of jagged teeth.
“Kong,” Weaver breathed, and the name itself held a strange power.
“The tribe thinks he’s a king, or even some sort of god,” Marlow said. “Sometimes I gotta wonder.”
“Must have missed that part of Sunday school,” Conrad said.
Brooks and San moved from side to side, pointing out new, more awful images. Weaver’s blood ran cold when she saw them. She was starting to have an inkling of just why that giant wall had been built across the villagers’ valley.
“I used to think this job was a wild goose chase,” Brooks said. “Another step in making a decent resume.”
“Instead, we’re making history,” San said.
“Or seeing it,” Weaver said.
“Kong keeps pretty much to himself, you know,” Marlow said. “But you don’t go into a man’s abode and start dropping bombs. You can’t blame him for what happened.”
“Isn’t it Kong that killed your friend?” Weaver asked, probing for more of the man’s story.
Marlow’s face went cold for the first time since they’d all met. “Not Kong,” he said, pointing at the other images. “It was them.”
The images and shapes across the wall were chilling, and the idea that they were real even more so.
Giant reptilian beasts, one with three heads. A crocodile fifty feet long. Snake-like monsters, slinking from holes in the ground and snapping towards the sun. Web-footed creatures, spikes along their backs spearing bloodied human shapes, diving into the ocean surrounding the island.
“If Kong’s god of the island, then the things that live beneath it are the demons,” Marlow said. “The villagers won’t talk of them, and I’ve never heard their real name. I just call them Skull Crawlers.”
“Why?” Conrad asked.
Marlow shrugged. “Because it sounds neat.”
“So why haven’t we seen them?” Conrad asked.
“Do we want to see them?” Weaver replied.
“No, you don’t.” Marlow’s voice carried a weight of grief and fear.
“They come from the vents, deep down beneath the island. That’s why you got Kong so mad. He keeps most of them at bay, down there where they belong, but you don’t wanna go and wake the big one.”
“Big one?” Brooks asked. He pointed at the horrific images. “What, these are the small guys?”
Marlow moved along the wall and pointed out an image none of them had seen yet. It was the most monstrous of them all, all fangs and claws, and fury.
“It’s as big as Kong!” San said.
“Bigger,” Marlow replied. “Never seen it, but I know it as the Skull Devil. Kong’s the last of his kind, but he’s not yet fully grown. Look.” He moved along to another image, this one a wide landscape painted on a shadowy corner of the spring room. It showed a lonely Kong, shoulders slumped, standing defiant in a battlefield of dead creatures like him, and Skull Crawlers torn apart by their mighty hands.
“He’s still a juvenile?” San asked.
“He’s pretty damn huge,” Slivko said.
“He’ll keep growing, if he survives,” Marlow said. “And he’d better. The villagers say if Kong ever went away, the big one would come up and overrun us all.”
“And that’s why they won’t let us leave,” Conrad said.
“After the entrance you made? Not likely.”
“Our extract team is coming to the north shore of the island in three days,” Conrad said. “We have to be there.”
Marlow raised his eyebrows. His bushy beard animated his face, and Weaver thought perhaps he’d never believed this possible.
“We’re not staying here, turning into…” Nieves said, nodding at Marlow. “No offence, man.”
“None taken,” Marlow said. “So you really have someone coming to meet you?”
“You’re welcome to come with us,” Weaver said.
Marlow shook his head. He seemed firm. “Nope. You won’t make it to the north shore in three days. No way. Not through the jungle.”
Conrad frowned, and Weaver looked around at the others, seeing their disappointment and fear. Then Marlow smiled and continued.
