Something’s definitely coming up from under the sand.
I’d been staring at the moving contorting patch of sand for what had seemed like hours. It could have been minutes but I had no way of knowing. The highly expensive Rolex watch which had once proudly adorned my wrist was now the property of some nameless Filipino fisherman. The sun hadn’t shifted position at all. It just hung in the cobalt blue sky glaring balefully down at the condemned man below. Hours, minutes or seconds, it didn’t really matter anymore. There was something forming from the heaving piece of beach and I was pretty certain that it wouldn’t be a mermaid or any of my neighbours on the island. Not that I’d seen them.
Whatever creatures I shared my new home with had long gone, perhaps sensing that something was about to invade their little slice of Earth. In the heavily forested interior of Sa Isla Mga Manap, animals, whose shadows I had seen and whose red, green; even amber eyes, had stared at me from the dark of the bush, were hunkering down, waiting for the cataclysmic battle to finish. I was ready.
The Game that had taken me across the world, leaving the corpses of loved ones tossed aside like broken bleeding dolls, was about to end on this little island miles away from civilization. I felt no regret about dying, only a small regret for not dying sooner, before all Hell had broken loose. Yet a part of me still wanted to live. I still had one more hand to play. Ever the gambler, even in the last moments of my time on Earth. I had made my plans for the final hand.
Being stranded on a tropical beach wasn’t the worst ending I could think of. There were worse places. This final hand could have gone down in some filth filled Mumbai alley, or in the basement of some grey crumbling Eastern European tenement block. At least, I’d be able to enjoy the sun on my face one last time before I played the Lis De Virtute….
A warm breeze whipped off the ocean, laden with the deep eldritch smell of salt, water and a hint of something decaying. In the stand of trees behind me, something cried. The sound carried across the beach and out onto the sea, scooped up by the salty breeze. I’d grown use to the strange throaty cackling. At times, it was answered by a loud hooting, other times by a howling that sounded almost human. Those sounds had scraped at my already raw nerves when I first arrived here. Visions of eyeless things, hairless and smooth, a multitude of eyes and teeth haunted my dreams in those early years. Isolation can do some funny things to you and here on the island, I was as alone as I ever could be. There were no crushing seas of humanity; just seaweed, the odd jittery crab, some birds that soon took their leave of the place and of course, my mysterious forest friends.
After a time I relaxed. The denizens of the jungles of Sa Isla Mga Mananap avoided me completely. I caught the odd flash of scaly skin, the glint of a tusk in the sun but that was the extent of it. Maybe I reeked of Death.
The ends of my blanket danced in the wind, jarring loose the memory of another time, another place - my wife and I, sitting on this very same blanket, as we watched the huge burnt orange sun sinking slowly into the Indian Ocean. I let a tear fall, surprised at the gentle outpour of emotion. It had been a long time since tears had fallen. I thought they had all been cried out.
The wind died down. The heat was bearable enough even without the breeze. Not that I cared much. Any discomfort was well deserved, and it would be nothing compared to what awaited me on the other side if I overplayed my hand. The sand began to contort more vigorously, taking the shape of different faces screaming. Some I recognised; others were strangers to me, perhaps the faces of those unfortunates who, like me, went for the easy path to power and glory, only to find stinking death and pain unending on the other side.
It had been a long torturous road from the late night gambling dens of Birmingham to the gleaming glitz of Monte Carlo. I might have played it all so differently if I had truly known what I was up against. I laughed to myself, a soft broken sound. You didn’t need to be a gambling man to guess how many other poor misguided fools had said that before taking part in the Game.
