Braless games

Here is the original post. Rather innocuous, it details a video Nerd City had made regarding the recent SSSniperwolf drama.
The OP OP started this chain of events by asking about the lore behind Nerd City, and why there is some animosity towards his channel.

Commentor 1: "I'm a bit out of the loop on Nerd City, what exactly did he do?"
Commentor 2: "All I'm familiar with is he got really into NFTs. He made a whole video talking about this huge NFT scam and how these guys were manipulating gullible people into buying low quality worthless crap, and then he ended it with, "And that's why you should all buy my NFT's, which are actually good because I'm definitely not scamming you."

Little did we know, this comment here had started a ticking time bomb. As if a Humvee driving through the deserts of the Arabian peninsula, unaware of what lurks beneath the sand, Nerd City stumbles upon this landmine of a comment 36 days later, and chaos ensues.

Nerd City: "Do you struggle with nuance in every subject, it's all just binary to you? What about genders, I bet you understand this spectrum, no?"

Completely incredulous to the fact that someone would reply to a pot 35 days stale, commentor 2 shares this embarrassing ordeal with youtubedrama. Now, everyone, grab your popcorn.
Some people can't even believe the entire ordeal is real

Link the post. Please. If this is real, genuinely sad to see. If you're reading this define Marxism genuinely wanna know what you're gonna say lmao
Its him. Doctor Downvote is an alias of his according to a Youtuber wiki. Link is here. Probably best not to poke the bear.
Oh, never. I'm more an observer type. But if he replied to a post that old, there's a non-zero chance he's searching for posts about himself specifically.

To say the bear had been poked would be an understatement. It seemed as if this bear had been stabbed. As if his name had been repeated three times in the dark, in front of a mirror, Nerd City is summoned to this comment section where he begins arguing with a subreddit of individuals seemingly genetically predisposed to suffer from a disliking of Nerd City.
While managing to call the entirety of the subreddit's inhabitants coordinating liars while simultaneously rejecting the claim that he is actively looking for content about him to complain about, Nerd City enters the playing field with this comment.

searched for a tweet about GoT I made and found this club of coordinating liars. I treat people how they treat me. If you’re respectful, I’m respectful back.

Some can't even believe what's happening and even concerned, and others are quite entertained

It genuinely is unhealthy behavior to respond to so many Reddit comments that are this old. Like, it suggests a deep seated issue when you lash out so aggressively at criticism like this. It lowkey makes me worried for your mental health if you’re this upset that ppl in a community disagree with you on something. I’d hate to see what happens if someone irl disagrees with you
Damn I just lost respect for you
Imagine being the guy who systematically destroyed Paul’s nft scam, and then just making your own. Gotta edge out the market, eh?

What kind of weird type of masochism is this? Too kinky for me bro
OP and friends speculate that Nerd City's erratic behavior may be due to unfortunate circumstances in his life.

I kinda don’t want people to argue with him, he might be going through a rough spot and I don’t want to poke the bear more than I already have. Now if he comes to this post and bitches, that’s just his fault, it’s fair game.
Yeah I can’t imagine this person is doing too hot in the other areas of their life if this is how they’re spending their time. Happy fulfilled people don’t do that. At least I’ve been told lol. Edit: oh I just realized that’s actually nerd city and not just some guy. I’d say my point stands even more in that case, I don’t know much about nerd city but no big YouTuber would be doing this shit if they weren’t like actively losing their mind.
He’s got a hot wife who helps him clown on instagram girls, you’d think he’d be living the dream life.
Does she come braless to give him sandwiches (not asked for) with chips as he gets a double kill bot lane tho?

The Bear responds to these accusations not with denial, but with a valiant effort to stand up for himself.

That’s true, but can’t I also defend myself against a mob of fibbers and jerks? I always punched back, this is normal for me when I’m active online.

OP responds by proposing an unheard of solution

Have you considered logging off?

One user speculates that Nerd City might delete his account following these recent events, to which he replies:

I’m not saying anything I would need to hide or delete. I’m on main and reading Reddit notifs while simmering at about 3/10 Annoyed. I’m not happy to read lies, and clapping back when people lie has become underrated IMO
Insane behavior is thinking you can lie in a public forum with other cowardly people tittering word salad exaggerations and not be held accountable. These threads are big enough now that I’ll keep coming and kicking your asses like my enemies until one of your mods starts censoring me.

In what appears to be one of the only comments featuring meaningful insight, there is to nobody's surprise no response from Nerd City

You put all your eggs in a hollow basket. You wanted the profits that came with branding/merchandising without any of the products for consumers; which sucks cause you clearly are someone who cares about their art and presentation with your upload frequency and quality of content. Sucks that it came at the cost of your sanity and creativity. You spent a year on some discount pop-art fit for 3.5g bags, on a quick bag that was late to the party.

When one commentor asks why Nerd City is in the comment section, he promptly responds with an answer.

I’m letting the liars know I found their little liar’s club. Holding it accountable, one might say\

One lone person attempts to stand up for Nerd City, upon which he immediately expresses gratitude

Why do people give nerd so much flack for the nft stuff, on the tbh podcast he seemed really genuine about the whole thing and said that it wasn’t a scam or anything they even had coffezila one an episode which would seem really stupid if nerd was actually scamming people
Thank you. Finally, a single brave person stands up and spits some facts.

The rest of the comment section legitimately just consists of back and forth discourse between Nerd City and other commentors that is basically just identical to what has already been displayed.
Potential flairs !!
If you're reading this define Marxism
He’s got a hot wife who helps him clown on instagram girls
Does she come braless to give him sandwiches (not asked for) with chips as he gets a double kill bot lane tho?
can’t I also defend myself against a mob of fibbers and jerks?\
I’ll keep coming and kicking your asses like my enemies until one of your mods starts censoring me.
I’m letting the liars know I found their little liar’s club
Having a zyn induced meltdown

As a huge Jaws fan I've studied a lot about Jaws along with studying the actors and actresses from Jaws...and what you are about to read is based on a 14 year research study based on Susan Backlinie.
Susan Backlinie...the first actress to play the first Victim in Jaws who became the ultimate scream queen was in a few other things than we thought. First off lets start off with some facts, She was a swimmer who was skilled enough to play a mermaid at the ''Weeki Wachee Springs State Park'' in 1965 to 1966...until afterwards she was then recognized by being a stunt woman by doing some dangerous stunt work in the present of dangerous animals like Lions, Cheetahs, cougars, and grizzly bears...and because of her great stunt work this led Steven Spielberg to hire her later on in Jaws, But other than being just a stunt woman she was also an ordinary actress by being part of certain roles that doesn't involve stunt work. She also did some modeling for magazines like penthouse and Mayfair and she would appear in some magazines from Asia.
https://preview.redd.it/2zhf150yxa0d1.jpg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9fcd80e81f66a20fea007a85d4789bdd188db4f2
https://preview.redd.it/inr7wpeboc0d1.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b29561dc5010494f7298a31b7d04bb46f227107b
Without most people knowing it she used one of her bears that she owned for sound designer ''Ben Burtt,'' to record the noises from the bear in order to create the Chewbacca growling sounds for star wars. And because Susan was also an animal trainer this gave her the opportunity to be on the set on Blade Runner 1982 with an ostrich.
https://preview.redd.it/35gojegl1b0d1.jpg?width=602&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e02228bddf3eae5f7cf35f1185263a380d3cdf54
https://preview.redd.it/7rfd7f0uwa0d1.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=60fadf92c2fece656d7294e6260b60b7ddf18fa9
And here is a few other things you may not know...she was in an episode of the 70s ''The incredible hulk'' including one episode of ''The Fall Guy'' from the early 80s, And she starred as one of the swimming divers within a musical scene from ''The Great Muppet Caper'' which was part of the Muppet franchise. She also worked on Men in black 2 although you don't see her within the movie but you hear her voice within the background saying ''Newton...Newton is that you? ''...''would you like some mini pizza?''...also hear her talking to Agent K in the background and quote said ''Are you one of newton's friends from group therapy?''.
https://preview.redd.it/knuz8osy4j0d1.png?width=534&format=png&auto=webp&s=ab9af2945e0770ec0b33f2ea440856239317efcf
https://preview.redd.it/zdw926w3xa0d1.jpg?width=959&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2dd455e9360681669ccc7cca3a89b3c16796a0c1
https://preview.redd.it/1nimynlnij0d1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=8617be693b61ac69c3fcebbacea129794b3938b0
Susan made a cameo scene for a movie ''Two Minute Warning 1976'' which is about a crazed sniper is set to kill spectators at an L.A. Coliseum football championship game and the police race against time to eliminate him, during one scene we see Susan within the Coliseum on a screen of her posing for the cameras but what we did not see from Susan within the movie is that she took her top off which revealed that she was braless...and she showed her bare chest to the audience buy trying to put on a show for them...we don't know if this was her being herself or if this was a deleted scene but photos were taken when this happened that made it to magazines at the time.
https://preview.redd.it/sjm1yhh8xa0d1.jpg?width=1156&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dd735fd340dcfee99ebbef7960ecd9d202ba5b4c
Let's talk about her Iconic scene from Jaws...the death of her character was such a shock to the audience it made the audience spread false rumor's by people saying that she actually died during the scene but we know that did not happen...and people pointed out that when she screamed ''It Hurts'' it made the viewers believe that she was in real pain although we are not 100% certain if she was or wasn't in real pain during the scene...rumors say it was just part of the act that she did so darn well and within the documentaries of this movie they mentioned that she did practice before the scene by putting water at the back of her throat without swallowing and trying to scream at the same time...and when she was ready to film the death scene she basically wore a harness with cables while in the water and the crew on the shoreline didn't tell her when she would be yanked back and forth so that her terrified reactions from the jolting would be genuine...and because her reactions looked genuine this is what made the viewers spread false rumors about her during the death scene...but also the death scene encouraged hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of people at the time to not swim in the waters which is something that still happens till this day for people who just watched Jaws for the first time...and in my opinion when Susan was around she deserved a medal for this because she possibly saved many lives by encouraging people to not swim in deep waters where there would be risks...this is what makes Susan one of the most or greatest scream queen of all time because not only she's just a scream queen but a hero.
https://preview.redd.it/tvy37p9mxa0d1.jpg?width=627&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0e7a6b577503d8636e00293537a452547efc22d7
https://preview.redd.it/kvvh4w1y7j0d1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a1942c0cab051524762ba3d8f07addc015df70cd
2 years later after 'Jaws' she once again put back on her scream queen mode in another movie called ''Day of the Animals 1977'' but this time she wasn't eaten by a shark but this time getting attacked by a real cougar within an intense scene which she survived from that moment until later on within the movie she was killed off by these real huge eagles where she was getting eaten and dragged off by a cliff by these eagles where we see her scream to the top of her lungs then die, And another 2 years after that in 1979 she put on another decent performance from another movie directed by Steven Spielberg called ''1941'' which was a spoof of world war 2 and within this movie she recreated her iconic jaws moment that was a parody of Jaws...after that she had done 4 more roles then there was an announcement that Susan had retired from stunt work in 1982 which finished her off being in movies and shows although she showed up in little projects after that like being in Documentaries based on movies she starred in and that little moment in men in black 2 where we only hear her voice...but mind you it's a possibility that she may had been in more projects that are waiting to be discovered.
https://preview.redd.it/leiedsxqxa0d1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b43ec5cf1aba0c10b00a3c349f85c27c81b6dc42
https://preview.redd.it/dfxsi336bj0d1.jpg?width=1276&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a24e74c1dcc8c39466e5a117152f614b227dfee5
So yeah if any of these stories are new to you then go ahead and share these stories about Susan to other people just as I've shared it to you because she is after all a Legend. And as I've managed to collect tons of rare photos of Susan over the years I'll share one photo that I have for you guys which you can see below...I'm sure she's now in a paradise looking something like this or better. RIP Susan Backlinie
https://preview.redd.it/rq6nb0kz1b0d1.jpg?width=1068&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=178c712d0041b451a39cdbe1cb09502e73792c70
list of Susan Backlinie's known roles

• The Fall Guy 1982
• Catalina C-Lab 1982
• The Great Muppet Caper 1981
• ''Steven Spielberg's 1941'' 1979
• Quark 1978
• Day Of The Animals 1977
• A stranger in my forest 1976
• Two Minute Warning 1976
• The Quest 1976
• The Grizzly & the Treasure 1975
• JAWS 1975
• Men In Black 2'' 2002
• The Incredible Hulk 1978 -1982
• Blade Runner 1982

Let me guess: these two are just rolling out of bed after spending the entire night fighting at the Hilton.
I envision is thusly:
After returning from a day of foot in mouth disease, the usual poor dress sense and the crazy eyed mic grabs, they finally returned to the Presidential Suite at the Hilton.
Friar Ginger Tuck threw tantrums over Nutmeg’s appalling lack of etiquette and how he was pulled aside and told to get the wife in line. Nutmeg was screaming that none of this is her fault. The RF never properly prepared her for Royal tours. It’s (insert name here) fault that it’s all going wrong.
They surreptiously snort a few lines then drink up the mini bar before getting online to admire the popularity of themselves. Screams of anguish were heard all the way to the lobby as they witnessed the following:

• Thousands of comments by every day Nigerians wanting the grifters gone and wanting to know how much this is costing them.
  
• The realization that their long lost “sister” is mostly white.
  
• Her boobs flapping in the breeze as braless, she literally starts jumping with the children (and her other child Ginger).
  
• Criticism for inappropriate dress from both a practical standpoint and from a protocol and social etiquette standpoint.
  
• Extreme side eye from a savvy bunch of Nigerian teens whose bullshit-o-meter was firmly in the red.
  
• Their assistant who also did absolutely no research as to custom & etiquette and who summarily attempted to push the armed forces, who Ginger is trying to court and vise versa for the next Olympic Games, out of the way so Misan and Netflix could get their shots.
  
• The above causing a minor diplomatic row and angering the Nigerian Armed Forces.
  
• Ginger and Nutmeg being called neo-colonial cosplayers.
  
• A mic grab with a nonsensical story about a possible girl child who was saying things and explaining concepts well outside of her development range.
  
• Ginger telling a man with his leg blown off that he’ll be back on his feet soon (😮) and that he should name his artificial leg.
  

The argument became even more heated with blame placing. As the maids passed by all they could hear was yelling by Ginger and threats to go home from Nutmeg.
These two couldn’t manage a chook raffle much less a formal business tour.

So my friend Phil is telling me how he can’t get a date how he loves women and how they’re always giving him looks so I ask him what kind of looks so he winces at the beautiful braless young woman passing by at that particular propitious moment giving her a look of such longing and longevity that she returns his look with a look that kills his entire family tree from the roots to the unimagined blossoms of the great grandchildren shriveling on his shriveling bough and I think I’ve diagnosed his problem now and I think of quoting some lines from Rilke but on second thought I think a sports metaphor might serve him better so I steer the conversation round to basketball and the three second rule which says you can only stand inside the key for three seconds before they blow the whistle they’re just blowing the whistle on you Phil for breaking the three second rule for standing there with your eyes popping out like basketballs it’s a game like any other I tell him then I ask him if he wants to score and now that I have his attention I throw in those lines from Rilke I tell him that beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear and the reason we adore it so is that it serenely disdains to destroy us and he winces again and this time it’s at the beauty of those lines or maybe their truth which hits him like a three-pointer now that Rilke hits all the way from Germany at a distance of a hundred years
Link to the original: https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=8591.html

Bro when I tell you she was everything I wanted, I fucking mean it. Here’s the story of the first night that I had with my girlfriend (now ex). So it started as we were getting off our shifts at pizza hut and we were bored and so I invited her to my place. When we got there we decided to play some games and at the time it was probably around 9 or 10 at night. We were fucking up some Minecraft and at some point we got bored and so we both got on the bed. We were just on our phones scrolling endlessly, and eventually she turned over and so I thought: alright she's gonna take a nap. 5 minutes later I hear in a really shy and quiet voice: “Come here,” and so I ask her how she wants me to come there and she grabs my and pulls me to her back. I swear at that moment I was bricked up bro like that shit was such a turn on to me. As we were laying there, in my room, enshrouded in darkness, we just laid there for about half an hour and we were just talking about some of her past and about her past relationships and how she was treated kind of badly. As she was saying all of this I really tried to understand what she was saying, I did feel for her and at the time I knew she had feelings for me and she knew I had feelings for her. She eventually pulled me closer to the point that my hand was over her bra so we were spooning. I felt that she wanted something from me at that point and so I made my move. I asked if she could remove her bra. She did so. At this point we were laying there with her braless, and my hand was on her breast, it was the first time I've touched boobs and so I had a hard-on the size of the Eiffel tower and maybe she felt it but I don't know if she did because I made sure my lower body was further away from her and so she pulled her shirt up so I could feel the bare skin and I felt the nipples and they were hard. I asked if I could see her tits and she turned over and used the dim light from her phone to show me, I was immediately enthralled at this point. I asked if I could play with them a little bit. She climbed on top of me and took off her shirt, grabbed my hands, and put them on her exposed nipples. I played with them pretty well. Every time I squoze her nipple she would jump a bit and I found it really cute and kind of turned me on. Maybe 30 minutes have passed where I'm doing nothing but playing with them. Her honkers were size 34DD and so they were quite the handful. I asked if I could suck them and she seemed a little shocked, but said yes. I started sucking you know. I would circle the nipple with my tongue and I would suck it like a thick shake through a straw. I sucked them and pinched them and just enjoyed myself for over 2 hours. Her sister called and said that she was hungry and wanted a subway sandwich. We ended things there, she put everything back on and we headed to subway. On the drive there we didn't talk about much, we really only talked about her past and how that was the first time something like that happened for her. I found that really weird because for as long as I can remember I've always wanted to do stuff like that. We secured the sandwich and headed back to her house. Halfway through the trip back I noticed her acting a bit different, I asked her what was up and she said that it would embarrass her, I said that nothing she told me would make me feel like she’s weird or anything of that sort, she looked at me in the eyes and said that she was the wettest that she had ever been and really wanted more. When we got back to her house she went inside and gave her sister the sandwich, I went back home and not even five minutes later she called me and told me to come pick her up and to take her back to my place so we could continue. I picked her up and we went back to my place, when we got there nothing really changed, I asked if she would let me have her tits again and she got naked and climbed back on top of me, I started playing with them again. Maybe another 20 minutes go by and she stops me and asks if we could do some other things. She laid on her back and I put my arm around her shoulder and put my hand on her tit. She had her arm behind my head acting like a pillow positioning my face towards her breast so I could still suck them. I was sucking them and playing with the other one, eventually, I slid my hand down to her other pair of lips. I had never felt smokin’ shawty this way and so I didn't really know how to pleasure her, I didn't know about the clit or anything at that time. I just slid my finger in, she jumped pretty hard and made a really sexy and fucking amazing sounding moan. With her hand she covered her mouth as I kept fingering her. We did that for an hour, by the end of it I had 3 fingers inside of her and she was shaking really hard. She grabbed my arm and told me she couldn’t take it anymore so I stopped. We laid there, she climbed on top of me and asked me if I had ever kissed anyone before. I hadn't had my first kiss yet so I told her that, she just leaned in and kissed me. We started making out and I played around with her a little while longer. I saw that it was around 6 in the morning and I knew that I had to take her home. I stopped her and asked if she wanted to go home which she reluctantly said she had to. We got ready to go and I got to see them titties for one last time. Before we left she hugged me and asked if I wanted to be her boyfriend to which I said WOWZERS REALLY? YESS!!! We started dating on June 19th the day after fathers day. While we were driving to her place we talked about what happened and she said that was the first experience she had like that and how most guys would just go straight to sex, she also mentioned that no one really tried to make her feel good before. I found that a little shocking because she had 3 past relationships at that point so it was a shocking to me that they all just wanted sex. She also mentioned that she felt Mr. Sex Jr while she was on top of me which I got a little flustered by. When we got to her house, I got out, gave her a hug and kiss, and said goodnight. On my way back home I came across my grandpa driving down the street so I rolled down my window and started talking to him. I told him that I just got my first girlfriend and he was happy for me. When I got home I saw that she texted me that she had a good time and how she missed me already, which I found to be adorable. That night was probably the best night I've had in my life so far, and I wouldn't change a thing about it. It was such a good memory to look back on and every time I think of it I just smile. I'm sad now that it's over but I really enjoyed all the moments we had together. I found out the next week that she had physical scabs around her nipples, I felt so bad. I loved her.

My wife is the hottest, sexiest, most beautiful woman in the world. She is an incredible mother to our children (4 and 8months). We have been together for 14 years, married for 6 and it feels like I am more attracted to her than ever. I can’t even walk in the room anymore when she is breast feeding to ask a question or see if she’s ok just because it arouses me to the point where I can’t contain myself. I get excited just from looking at her. When she greets me with a kiss when I get home I just go absolutely crazy. If the kiss lasts any longer than half a second I am aroused to the point where I likely need a new pair of underwear. If she even touches me to tap me on the shoulder I feel electricity flowing through my body and I instantly get turned on. I find her most attractive in pajamas and can’t help but stare at her behind as she walks around the house. It’s jaw dropping and just thinking about her braless in pajamas drives me wild. I hung a mistletoe in the kitchen around Christmas and I’ve just refused to take it down cause I can always claim a kiss and some light touching cause mistletoe. But I actively have to work to contain my urgers to feel her up because our son always sees us kissing and wants a family hug. If I know she’s about to shower, I will linger before I watch tv or play video games just to catch a sneak at her beautiful body. I can look at pictures of us from our early days of dating or selfies or her on yoga pants and get more excited than I do from watching porn. I love my wife to the point where she is just all I think about. She just turns me on to the point that I have to touch myself just thinking about her.
The problem is that my obsessive attraction doesn’t match her current sex drive. Our love life has predictably taken a hit with a 9 month pregnancy and 8 months of breast feeding. On top of that a needy toddler. She is up some nights rocking the baby back to sleep anywhere from 2-3 hours some times. Her excellent care makes her so much more desirable. I’m so turned on by her every move that I try to pursue sex frequently and am often met with rejection cause she’s tired or not in the mood. It has caused some contention in moments but we have always worked past it. I just can’t help myself and how much I want to pleasure her cause of how hot she is. But when she does engage, it’s such great sex that it’s all I think about and just want more. I don’t know how to navigate these feelings of wanting more when she only has so much to give. I went from being her #1 to putting my needs aside for my children. I’ve been managing and our marriage is healthy with all kinds of communication and understanding. I hope we get some of our intimacy back because it’s even better now than before we had kids. She says it’s just a phase and to stay patient, which I will do but it’s so hard to be so attracted and in love and want to express myself and sometimes get shot down lol
I guess I’m just wondering if there are any other men who are madly in love with their wife like me. I see non-stop threads about cheating spouses and I just could never see myself or my wife wanting someone else. I am in my prime and good looking but I could never imagine cheating just cause we’re in a bit of a sexual drought. We have both seen our parents fall out of love as they got older and both vowed that we want to be the opposite. The couple who’s still in love as they get older together and raise a family. I just had to share some of my thoughts cause I lurk and read a lot of negativity in other relationships.

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Island Fury
by
Al Bruno III
The following document was written by Peter LaRoche and was found during the Boggs International survey of the island of Kuen-Yuin. (11.5462° N, 162.3522° E)
***
It's the golden rule of Hollywood. The writer always gets the shaft. The producers get all the money; the actors get all the fame, the director gets to put his vision on the screen, and the people behind the scenes get paid and don’t have to give a damn but the writer? The writer pours his guts out onto the page, and if he's lucky, he sees twenty percent of what he wrote make it through the Hollywood grinder. If he's really lucky, he gets paid what he's worth.
That's my story in a nutshell. A month ago, I was in a mansion, sipping margaritas and talking about art to a woman I had been a little bit in love with for years. Now I'm alone, locked in a supply shed, and listening to her scream. I'm writing this with a ballpoint pen on a forty-something-year-old notebook. I'm trying to get it all down while there's still sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.
Someone has to know what happened here, and I guess that’s you.
Let me begin at the beginning.
It was a year after my graduation from Pratt University when I decided to move to Hollywood and make my fortune. I had already sold a pair of spec scripts and a few short stories to some literary magazines. The spec scripts had fallen through, and the literary magazines had mostly been purchased by the contributors, but I was young and stupid. Within a few months of my arrival in Tinsel Town, I was working in retail part time and not making nearly enough to cover my expenses.
I started looking for other ways to use my writing talent to earn cash. You know, ad copy, non-fiction articles for in-flight magazines, movie novelizations, and the occasional bit of erotica for Monarch Magazine’s Lusty Letters To The Editors.
What, did you think those were real?
Word of mouth that I was fast, cheap, and slightly smutty brought me to the attention of Olympus International Cinema.
You may not have heard of Olympus International Cinema, but trust me, if you’ve ever been channel surfing at three in the morning, you’ve at least glimpsed one of their productions.
Heart of Sharkness, Bikini Bar Mitzvah, The Adventures of Cosmo and Quack, Reggie and the Reckless Reptile, Sword Damsels In Space, Beach Blanket Beasts, The Cannibal Cloud of Daytona, The Butcher Brigade, Foxes In Boxes, and of course Tombs of the Blonde Dead. Olympus International Cinema was responsible for all those films and more. Each one featuring a cast of naive starlets and faded celebrities.
The studio was owned by former Monarch Magazine Duchess of the Year Lori Sandovar. If you are of a man of a certain generation the mere mention of her name will send blood rushing to all the right places.
Unbeknownst to most people, the lovely raven-haired Miss Sandovar wasn’t just a performer in several of Olympus International Cinema’s direct-to-video extravaganzas; she was also the owner and producer. She’d inherited the studio from her third husband. It had been a pretty rinky dink operation back then, mostly making training and educational films, but she turned the company into something very different and very profitable.
Lori was responsible for plucking yours truly from literary oblivion and making me Olympus International Cinema's wordsmith of choice. Those were her words, not mine, by the way.
I’ll never forget the day she asked me to work for her; she said she loved my writing. She even had a copy of a literary magazine one of my stories had appeared in. She asked me to autograph it. How could I not fall in love with her a little after that?
She never really paid me what I was worth but there’s something to be said for steady employment. Working for her wasn’t easy; she was as driven and ruthless as she was beautiful and limber. I was, at times, turning out a script every two months, and they weren’t always great, but she always accepted them. She was a lot nicer to me than she was to her other writers. And actors. And directors. And craft services.
Olympus International Cinema’s newest project was a film called Island Fury. The script was written by yours truly, and it was to be a sex comedy that takes a hard left turn into horror in the third act. The plot was like this: during World War II, a handsome American Pilot crash lands on an uncharted island populated by sexy lesbian goat farmers. Lewd logic quickly ensues, and suddenly, the women are all fighting, then gently grinding, over our hero.
Unfortunately, in the throes of their lust, the women have forgotten their pledge to sacrifice some of their livestock to the creature that lives on the island with them. A stop motion monstrosity to be added later called Ezerhodden the Harvest Fiend.
Lori was very specific about how she wanted this film to be made, and she was painfully specific about the script. I was still re-writing the damn thing on my trusty Smith Corona typewriter when we dropped anchor near the deserted island she’d chosen for filming.
The island she’d chosen was a little flyspeck of a place, too unimportant to be claimed by anyone. It was half jungle and half beach and not much of anything else. She’d scouted it out months earlier, and the night she’d half cajoled, half ordered me to travel with her team to the location, she’d shown me some Polaroids of the place. It was overrun with albino goats and dotted with strange little statues. They were a bit Easter Island, a bit Aztec, and a whole lot of H.R. Geiger.
Do you remember making shrunken apple head dolls in school? Do they still do that? Well, if you do, remember that is just what they looked like. Desiccated little stone faces scowling gleefully.
The privately chartered ship that brought us there was called the Polaris. It was a cargo vessel that was at least seventy years past its prime and boasted a crew of six men who looked like cousins.
Close cousins, if you know what I mean.
Our team consisted of one disgraced director, two cameramen, one lighting guy, one sound guy, five wannabe actresses of varying enhancement, one beefy bonehead straight off the casting couch, one tired, profoundly out-of-place scriptwriter, and lastly, a producer who was also one of the performers.
It took six trips on a pair of inflatable rafts to get everyone and our equipment to the island. The director, Geoff James, came on the last trip, and from the moment he set foot on the beach, he started yelling at the cameramen and rushing the cast to get ready. Wishing to avoid his coked-up wrath, the performers got busy. Our small team meant that they had to take care of their own makeup and costumes.
If you can consider furlined bikinis and an Air Force surplus jumpsuit costumes.
The cameramen worked hard to make use of the natural light and accentuate the strange beauty of the landscape while simultaneously keeping the piles of goat scat out of the shot.
You must be wondering why the Hell I was there. Lori had said she wanted a friend along, saying she wanted someone with half a brain to talk to while waiting for her scenes. I gotta say hearing her call me a friend was simultaneously thrilling and disheartening all at once.
A month ago she had called me other things. I wondered if it had just been the Margaritas talking.
Either way, I was standing there trying not to cringe as the pretty young cast mangled my precious dialogue. The director rarely did second takes, even when soft-core sensation Claudia Tate looked directly at the camera or when thick-headed thespian Bobby Burns mispronounced the word “Women.”
Did I mention the writer always gets the shaft?
As the skinny-dipping scene segued into a bout of mud wrestling, I excused myself to explore the island. You may find it hard to believe but watching people film other people having simulated sex is about as exciting as your average class in technical writing.
The island was strange. I know I said this before, but I don't think I've quite gotten across to you how strange. Pale, pink-eyed goats were everywhere. They watched me pass through their territory with dull-eyed curiosity. There were clouds of bloated black flies buzzing around here and there. The air was filled with this faint, sickly-sweet smell, just strong enough to tickle your gag reflex but not strong enough to be recognizable. I had been wandering for an hour or so when I spied a figure crouching up ahead. It was perfectly still, staring at me. I froze, my breath catching in my throat before I realized that it was another one of those weird statues.
It was about three feet tall, almost child-like in proportion. The head was wrinkled and misshapen. A strange symbol had been carved onto its forehead, a triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center. Despite the dry weather, the stone was clammy to the touch.
Yes, I touched the thing, don't ask me why.
"It's a grave marker,” Lori spoke softly from behind me. After a brief startled squeal, I turned to see her in her hiking boots, cutoff shorts, and a t-shirt with the logo for White Brains On Toast. They were her favorite band. She’d even appeared in one of their music videos.
I said, "Shouldn't you be working?"
“Pia wanted to do her big scene early,” she said.
This was Pia Winters’s first movie. A former exotic dancer, she was newly upgraded with massive breast implants that she was eager to show off.
“I didn’t write her a big scene.”
“I know, but Geoff has this weird idea where he wants to see her grinding against a palm tree,” she approached the statue with a kind of awe, “I figured I’d let him get it out of his system so I could explore a little."
I asked, “What the Hell is up with this place? We could have just shot in the Philippines for a lot less.”
“This is better. Can’t you feel the atmosphere?”
“It smells like someone died here."
“Someone died everywhere,” With a mischievous grin, she patted the statue on the head and started trudging deeper into the jungle.
I followed her, swatting at the sickly, low-hanging branches, “How did you hear about this place?”
“From my late hubby’s gambling buddies.”
“Where did he-" I slipped on a mossy cluster of stones and fell on my face, "Damnit!"
"Peter!" she was at my side, helping me to sit up.
“Damnit." I said again.
“Clumsy," She laughed, brushing off my face.
I hoped the dirt would hide my blushing, “I was watching your backside instead of where I was going.”
“You should have used that line in the script,” she stood back up and started walking again. "Come on, not much further. There's something I want you to see."
Not much further turned out to be an hour of walking, mostly uphill. Occasionally, one or two of those goofy goats would follow and keep pace with us, only to wander off into the jungle after a little while. It was miserably hot, and there wasn't even the slightest trace of a breeze. In case you hadn't already guessed, we writer types usually aren't in the best of shape. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but for every Ernest Hemingway, you have about twenty other vaguely gourd-shaped men like me.
I did my best to keep pace with her and distracted myself from being out of breath by remembering the night she invited me over to her place. The night she cooked me steak while I made strong margaritas.
At first, I'd said no to the whole proposal. I prefer to write adventures, not have them. Besides, I was planning on devoting some more time to my novel in progress, The Black Rider. It was a Western epic in the tradition of Lonesome Dove but with ninjas. I'd been working on it for almost seven years, and it was about halfway done.
After a good meal and lively conversation, we made love on her couch. I know. I know. It sounds ridiculous, but just believe me. I’m going to die, or worse, at sundown. I have no reason to pad out my sexual resume. Needless to say, after that, I was all in on the project.
As we made our way through the jungle, we passed by another dozen or so of those ugly little statues before we reached what was once a military base. It wasn’t much of a military base, mind you, just a rusted old Quonset hut and a handful of rotting olive-colored tents. It looked like the exterior set from M.A.S.H. had gone to Hell.
There was also even a Jeep, its tires flat, its body half-eaten by corrosion, and curious goats. It was parked in front of the dilapidated supply shed that would soon become my prison.
"What is this?” Even though the place was obviously long abandoned, I spoke in hushed tones.
"It was an army base during the Second World War. An entire platoon of men was stationed here. All but one of them died under mysterious circumstances."
“But of course.”
"Come on then." She started walking again, "The best part is up ahead."
I swung my arms in a gesture as sarcastic as it was wide, "Better than all this?"
She laughed, "Shut up and march."
"Yes ma'am!" I saluted. To my surprise, she took my hand as she led me back into the jungle. “Tell me more about these lawn gnomes from Hell.”
She flashed me that grin of hers again, then paused before one of the grotesque effigies, "The people of this island were the last stronghold of the cult of Ezerhodden.”
“Wait wait wait.” I said, “Ezerhodden is a real thing?”
“Yup. They had some very primal religious beliefs."
“Oh, they were Baptists.”
“Dork.” She punched me lightly in the arm and continued, “Every six years, they would hold a ceremony called ‘Grovulche.’ The entire community would paint their hands with goat blood and hunt each other through the jungle. It is kind of like a game of tag. The six winners of the contest would then be brought back to the village where they would play another game using symbols carved on pieces of petrified bark.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”
“Nope. Now five losers of this game were called the Zaartua. They would have their hair and teeth pulled out and then be buried alive beneath one of these.” She tapped the statue, “The winner would be taken to the Mouth of Ezerhodden and, after a ceremony called the Six Wounds Of Love, would be blessed with either wisdom, power, or life.”
I shook my head, “And where did you learn all this?”
“I read it in a book called The Nine Rebel Sermons. It was written by a Catholic missionary who visited the island in 1722. I got that from my late hubby’s gambling buddies too.”
I raised an eyebrow, “Ever thought about hunkering down with a Jane Austen novel?"
“Read 'em all. Come on. More to see.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Another hour of walking brought us to a clearing. The knee-high pale-green grass undulated slowly back and forth. In the center of the clearing was the squat stone rim of a well. It was made from the same material as those ugly statues. Strange hieroglyphics were carved all along the sides; there was the familiar triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center, but there were other symbols there, too.
Trembling with either terror or excitement, Lori approached it, “This is it. Just like the book said, The Mouth of Ezerhodden.”
The nauseating odor that permeated the island was stronger here; in fact, I was sure this was the source of it. Imagine the smell of a butcher shop mixed with the stink of an open sewer, then add a dash of the scent of your grandma's house. She drew closer, I followed, and it didn’t take me long to realize that the tall grass was hiding dozens of dead goats. Most were skeletons; some were pretty fresh. “This can’t be real. If it was someone would be here already, there would be archeologists …documentary crews …tourists.”
She paused thoughtfully, “Can you imagine how this would look in camera?”
“Come on Lori, people aren’t going to watch this movie to see spooky old ruins. They want to see boobies and monsters. In that order."
She was at the edge of the well now. She peered down into the depths of the well. “Maybe I want to make a more lasting impression on the world.”
I risked a glimpse down into the murky depths. The air wafting up the stone shaft was hot. There was this thick, sloshing noise down there. Something glistened in the shadows. My heart started to pound, I turned away, and I was violently sick.
When I was done, I begged, “Please, can we go back now?”
“Poor thing,” she got me to my feet and led me back to the boat just as it started to rain. She was quiet and thoughtful the whole way back.
We found the director looking ragged and pissed off. He immediately started to complain about the film’s big star just up and disappearing, but Lori waved him off.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we called it a day and retired to the Polaris’ cramped quarters. Lori turned in early, and the rest of us spent the night, swapping stories, smoking cigarettes, snacking on breakfast bars, and drinking cheap wine. After a few raucous hours, I boozily decided to turn in. Lori had a little cabin all to herself near the front of the ship. I considered knocking on her door, but thought better of it. Instead, I lay down on my designated bunk and let the sounds of falling rain and lapping ocean lull me to sleep.
The dream that came to me came with a strange stomach-churning feeling of deja vu.
I was standing in the middle of the street in a ruined city. I wandered for a time, utterly alone and lost. In the distance, I could hear a rhythmic thudding; like an army on the march, there was a disjointedness to the cadence, giving a sense of something broken.
And then I saw them, a crowd moving down the street, wizened figures in tuxedos, their heads were bald, their faces set in toothless grins. They carried an elaborate, jewel-encrusted litter on their shoulders. It pitched and yawed with their movements.
The figure riding in the litter wore a goat-like mask with long curved horns. A symbol was carved on the forehead, a diamond with a dot in the center. The figure spied me and began to sing sweetly. The words made no sense, but the voice was familiar as the telltale sting of a paper cut.
I snapped awake.
My pillowcase was soaked with sweat; I spent a few panicked moments trying to remember where I was and why I was there. The gentle rumble of my cabin-mate Bobby Burns snoring helped me get my bearings.
I checked my watch. It was almost 3 AM. I tried to relax and go back to sleep, but when I closed my eyes, all I could still see was the dream, vivid and bright. So, I got on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed up onto the deck. It had stopped raining, and the sky was cloudless. The full moon looked swollen and was tinged with green. It was bright enough to read by. Leaning on the aft railing, I stared at it for a while and ran the events of the nightmare over and over in my head, examining and interpolating them until they had lost their disturbing qualities.
After a while, I became aware of this thumping, sloshing noise. It was coming from right below me. Visions of The Creature from the Black Lagoon started bubbling to the surface of my mind. I looked down and saw one of the two inflatable rafts the Polaris crew was using to shuttle us back and forth to the island.
But there had been two.
Where was the other one?
Something about it began to worry me. Had it become untethered and floated away? If so, how long would it take for us to shuttle the talent and equipment back and forth with just one boat? I took a stroll from one end of the boat to another in hopes of spotting the thing. No such luck. So I decided to head up to the bridge and let the captain know.
Halfway there, a member of the crew stepped out of the shadows. He had a hunting knife in his hand and he gestured wildly with it as he spoke, “What you do here? Crew only on deck at night! You go down below.”
I choked and blundered over my words, “I think… you see… I…”
"You get down below!” his breath was rank with alcohol, and the something else I couldn't place. Something vaguely unsavory.
“Yeah,” I said, “I get the idea…crew only. Listen, one of your boats is missing…”
"We know." He gave me a gentle poke with the point of his knife to signal the conversation was over. Then he turned and made his way to the bridge, “You go back to sleep. We take care of everything."
I retreated down below, cringing and frightened. I didn’t like the way he talked to me. I didn’t like this island. I didn’t like any of this. I went right to Lori’s cabin and knocked on her door. There was no answer. There was no answer.
Freaking out just a little bit more, I tried the door handle; it wasn’t locked, so I stepped inside. All her clothes and things were still in her suitcase. There were papers strewn about the bed and a thick old book lying on the pillow. I glanced at the title, I Nove Sermoni Ribelli.
I picked it up and flipped through it. Was this the Nine Rebel Sermons? Was this thing really over 250 years old? As I flipped through the pages, wondering at the tiny print and grotesque illustrations, a slip of paper fell out. It was Lori’s handwriting, and it this is what it said;
“The pit was the length and width of a man. From it the avatar of Ezerhodden rose up from the Screaming Nowhere. It was pale and fierce and was a salamander in its extremity. It looked upon the world of man but spoke to the stars. It cast runes upon the stones that blasphemed against death. From within his mouth he feasts on the beloved.”
”What are you doing in here?"
My breath caught, and my hand flew to my chest. It was Lori, ”Having a heart attack thank you very much. Haven't you ever heard of knocking?"
"Peter. You're in my room." She brushed past me. Her sneakers and jeans were caked with mud, one of her fingernails was cracked.
“Oh… Yeah.”
Heedless of my presence, she began to get undressed, slipping the light blouse over her head. She was braless as always, "Was there something wrong?"
"No, it’s just that I was - I am - worried about you." It all seemed so stupid now. Was I really going to tell her that I got spooked because I had a bad dream? I decided to go with more Earthly concerns, "I don't trust the crew of this boat. I think they're up to no good."
She kicked off her shoes, "You're being paranoid."
"One of them waved a knife at me!"
Groaning with exasperation, she sat me down on the bed with a good hard shove, "I know what's really bothering you."
I tried to keep eye contact, but my eyes kept wandering, "Lori, I’m serious. None of this feels right.”
"This is really about what happened back at my place, isn't it?" She strolled over and closed the door to her cabin, shucking her stained jeans on the way back. "You think I only slept with you to get you to help me out."
"Yes. I mean no. I mean-”
"Peter . . . " she caressed my face, ". . . I care about you. More than you realize."
"Can't you see-" she shut me up with a kiss. Her books and notes ended up on the floor, along with the comforter and the sheets.
If I close my eyes, I can still remember how her nails felt on my skin, the way the broken one hurt just a little, and how it made me shiver. When it all ends I’m going to try and keep that moment in my mind, use it to block out everything else. I doubt it will be enough to keep me from screaming.
After it was over, we lay together on the bed, and she spoke in a whisper, "I'll tell you something I haven't told anyone else. This is my last movie.”
Then we were silent. Sleep came soon enough.
The morning found the missing boat back where it belonged. I made a joke to Lori about the captain using it to go fishing. She didn’t laugh.
The day's filming went pretty well. There was plenty of sunlight, and Bobby Burns managed to get through his lines without sounding like a brain-damaged robot.
When he and Lori started working on their ‘love scene’ I had to walk away. I knew I had no right to be possessive or jealous, that this was just acting. But I still had to be somewhere else.
To keep my mind occupied, I tried to piece through my experiences here. If it all had been a movie, what kind of movie would it be? I kept wandering until I found another one of the statues.
For some reason, the face of it was covered with black flies. They buzzed away as I approached. The symbol on the forehead of this one was a circle with an open semicircle at the top and an X at the bottom. There was a dark, gummy-looking ruby-colored substance smeared across it. I stared at it for a long while.
By the time I got back to the others, Lori's scene was over, and Claudia Tate was working on some topless close-ups. Geoff James had decided her soliloquy would play better if she popped her top halfway through. Decisions like this was why he made the big bucks.
When that scene wrapped one of the lighting guys happened to glance out onto the horizon and asked, "Hey! Where the hell is the boat?"
That's right kids, the Polaris had set off without us. I heard a mocking voice in my head, “We take care of everything.”
The sun was beginning to set, and things quickly degenerated into a full-scale panic. We had no shelter, no supplies, no food, no nothing. As the old song said, “…not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be…”
Lori took charge and led us through the jungle to the abandoned military base. At the very least, it was a roof over our heads. After some brief discussions about signal fires and searching for food, the cast of Island Fury settled down in the main Quonset hut for the night. Not one of the twelve of us gave even the slightest thought to posting someone on guard duty.
After all, this is a deserted island, right?
After hours of sleep, I awoke to find myself lying next to the key grip and the best boy. I cautiously got up and walked gingerly around the cast and crew. Sickly moonlight shone in through the windows of the Quonset hut. I searched the slumbering shapes for some sign of Lori but couldn’t see her.
I had to relieve myself, and it seemed like a good idea to do my business at the edge of the camp. I stumbled over jutting roots and prickly brambles until I was at the tree line. Then, I did what came naturally. It wasn't until I was finished that I noticed the toppled statue.
Half concealed by a mound of freshly disturbed Earth, it lay on its back, gaping at the stars. I drew closer, wondering if I should try to set it right. I touched the stone. It was warm and clammy. Not cold like before. I wondered who had done this, a clumsy actor or a belligerent goat. Maybe it had fallen over on its own?
A sudden creeping sensation up the back of my neck alerted me to the fact I wasn't alone. A twig snapped. I turned, "Lori will you please stop sneaking up on --"
The shape before me was human but withered; its leathery-looking skin was a muddy gray, its bald head was marked with old scars, and its toothless mouth gaped. In its left hand, it held a goat horn; one end was bloodied, the other sharpened to a point.
The Zaartua! Then I was running through the jungle, fumbling blindly through the trees and bushes. Every statue I came across was askew or toppled over. Dead goats were everywhere, their throats slit, their horns removed.
Somehow my wild flight brought me to the clearing with Ezerhodden’s Well. The stench was worse now. The air was filled with a thick sloshing. I risked a glance backward; a pair of Zaartua were shambling after me like they had all the time in the world. The only noise they made was the crackle of their dead joints flexing.
I let them get a little closer and then feinted around them and doubled back into the jungle. I found my way back to the camp, hoping for safety in numbers. What I found made me stop dead in my tracks.
Damn that full moon. How I wish it had been cloudy that night, that the shadows had been dark and long enough to hide the carnage.
The Zaartua had made quick work of the cast and crew of Island Fury. I saw Claudia Tate, her flesh hanging torn and loose as she staggered and swayed with the animal urge to survive. Her tormenter shuffled behind her, content to watch her die slowly.
There was the high-pitched screaming of Bobby Burns. The Zaartua swarmed over where he had fallen. They raised their makeshift blades and brought them down again and again.
Geoff James was backed into the wall of the Quonset Hut, swinging one of the boom mikes wildly, trying to hold off his attackers, but there were too many of them.
Blood. Howls of terror. The Zaartua were relentless in their bloodlust. Soon enough, I was surrounded and screaming for mercy.
"No!" I heard Lori shout.
I turned on my heel to see her standing in the clearing. The captain and his machete-wielding mates flanked her.
"He isn't for you." She said, and with that, mummified shapes brushed past me, looking for fresh prey.
“Lori?" I tried to find words, but my mind and my body were too exhausted.
"Lock him in the supply shed,” She nodded to the Captain, her tone threatening. “Treat him gently."
I didn't resist as I was marched to the supply shed. A brand new padlock had been installed on the door. I heard it click into place once I was alone in the dark. I whispered, “Help.” to no one in particular and then curled into a ball on the floor.
The next morning Lori came to see me. She had a handful of breakfast bars in her hand.
"Hungry?" she asked.
"No." I doubted I'd ever be hungry again.
She knelt beside me; instinctively, I withdrew from her proximity. "Ezerhodden is real, Peter. He made me promises."
"You did all this?"
"He spoke to me in my dreams. He knew my desperation and revealed to me his need.”
"Stop talking like that!" I flashed with anger, “You’re a B-Movie actress, not Anton LeVey."
“Every sixth year Ezerhodden crawls closer to our world. He casts avatars out from the Screaming Nowhere, but someday he will truly walk among us." She closed her eyes and shuddered, “Then the true Harvest will begin as was prophesied.”
"Why are you doing this?"
"I have ovarian cancer." There were tears in her eyes, "I found out three months ago."
“No… that’s not…” Now there were tears in my eyes, but we were both beyond weeping.
She said, “It's too far gone for the doctors to do anything. It’s in my bones and my spine.” “Oh my God Lori…”
“Ezerhodden has promised me new life.”
I thought of the Zaartua, “You can’t want to be turned into one of those… one of those things!”
“There are other ways and forms,” she kissed my forehead and stood. “All I have to do is submit to the Six Wounds of Love.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question, but I had to ask, “What is that?”
“The Zaartua will scar me five times, each deeper than the last, then… then I will take someone beloved to me to the Well of Ezerhodden and surrender them to the avatar that dwells within.” She closed the door behind her. There was a rustle as the padlock was put back into place.
I went crazy for a little while after that. Trashing the place, looking for something to help me escape. Screaming all the while. I found a hammer and smashed out the windows, but they were too small for me to get through. I thought about using it, or maybe a screwdriver for a weapon, but what good would that do against those things?
Finally, I found this notebook in one of the lower drawers. Some soldier from back in the day had been using it to keep track of inventory, so I decided to put pen to paper one last time and let the world know what happened here.
That brings us full circle.
It’s dusk now. I’ve been listening to the sound of Lori’s screams all day, but now she’s quiet. The ritual of the Six Wounds must be drawing to a close.
My heart is sick to think of her in pain. I want to hate her, but I just can’t. When they finally come for me I am going to try and reason with her one last time. But I’m not holding out much hope for a ‘Love Conquers All’ Hollywood ending.
Like I said before, the writer always gets the shaft.
***
None of the cast or crew of Island Fury were ever found. There is no record of any ship matching the description of the Polaris.

Island Fury
by
Al Bruno III
The following document was written by Peter LaRoche and was found during the Boggs International survey of the island of Kuen-Yuin. (11.5462° N, 162.3522° E)
***
It's the golden rule of Hollywood. The writer always gets the shaft. The producers get all the money; the actors get all the fame, the director gets to put his vision on the screen, and the people behind the scenes get paid and don’t have to give a damn but the writer? The writer pours his guts out onto the page, and if he's lucky, he sees twenty percent of what he wrote make it through the Hollywood grinder. If he's really lucky, he gets paid what he's worth.
That's my story in a nutshell. A month ago, I was in a mansion, sipping margaritas and talking about art to a woman I had been a little bit in love with for years. Now I'm alone, locked in a supply shed, and listening to her scream. I'm writing this with a ballpoint pen on a forty-something-year-old notebook. I'm trying to get it all down while there's still sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.
Someone has to know what happened here, and I guess that’s you.
Let me begin at the beginning.
It was a year after my graduation from Pratt University when I decided to move to Hollywood and make my fortune. I had already sold a pair of spec scripts and a few short stories to some literary magazines. The spec scripts had fallen through, and the literary magazines had mostly been purchased by the contributors, but I was young and stupid. Within a few months of my arrival in Tinsel Town, I was working in retail part time and not making nearly enough to cover my expenses.
I started looking for other ways to use my writing talent to earn cash. You know, ad copy, non-fiction articles for in-flight magazines, movie novelizations, and the occasional bit of erotica for Monarch Magazine’s Lusty Letters To The Editors.
What, did you think those were real?
Word of mouth that I was fast, cheap, and slightly smutty brought me to the attention of Olympus International Cinema.
You may not have heard of Olympus International Cinema, but trust me, if you’ve ever been channel surfing at three in the morning, you’ve at least glimpsed one of their productions.
Heart of Sharkness, Bikini Bar Mitzvah, The Adventures of Cosmo and Quack, Reggie and the Reckless Reptile, Sword Damsels In Space, Beach Blanket Beasts, The Cannibal Cloud of Daytona, The Butcher Brigade, Foxes In Boxes, and of course Tombs of the Blonde Dead. Olympus International Cinema was responsible for all those films and more. Each one featuring a cast of naive starlets and faded celebrities.
The studio was owned by former Monarch Magazine Duchess of the Year Lori Sandovar. If you are of a man of a certain generation the mere mention of her name will send blood rushing to all the right places.
Unbeknownst to most people, the lovely raven-haired Miss Sandovar wasn’t just a performer in several of Olympus International Cinema’s direct-to-video extravaganzas; she was also the owner and producer. She’d inherited the studio from her third husband. It had been a pretty rinky dink operation back then, mostly making training and educational films, but she turned the company into something very different and very profitable.
Lori was responsible for plucking yours truly from literary oblivion and making me Olympus International Cinema's wordsmith of choice. Those were her words, not mine, by the way.
I’ll never forget the day she asked me to work for her; she said she loved my writing. She even had a copy of a literary magazine one of my stories had appeared in. She asked me to autograph it. How could I not fall in love with her a little after that?
She never really paid me what I was worth but there’s something to be said for steady employment. Working for her wasn’t easy; she was as driven and ruthless as she was beautiful and limber. I was, at times, turning out a script every two months, and they weren’t always great, but she always accepted them. She was a lot nicer to me than she was to her other writers. And actors. And directors. And craft services.
Olympus International Cinema’s newest project was a film called Island Fury. The script was written by yours truly, and it was to be a sex comedy that takes a hard left turn into horror in the third act. The plot was like this: during World War II, a handsome American Pilot crash lands on an uncharted island populated by sexy lesbian goat farmers. Lewd logic quickly ensues, and suddenly, the women are all fighting, then gently grinding, over our hero.
Unfortunately, in the throes of their lust, the women have forgotten their pledge to sacrifice some of their livestock to the creature that lives on the island with them. A stop motion monstrosity to be added later called Ezerhodden the Harvest Fiend.
Lori was very specific about how she wanted this film to be made, and she was painfully specific about the script. I was still re-writing the damn thing on my trusty Smith Corona typewriter when we dropped anchor near the deserted island she’d chosen for filming.
The island she’d chosen was a little flyspeck of a place, too unimportant to be claimed by anyone. It was half jungle and half beach and not much of anything else. She’d scouted it out months earlier, and the night she’d half cajoled, half ordered me to travel with her team to the location, she’d shown me some Polaroids of the place. It was overrun with albino goats and dotted with strange little statues. They were a bit Easter Island, a bit Aztec, and a whole lot of H.R. Geiger.
Do you remember making shrunken apple head dolls in school? Do they still do that? Well, if you do, remember that is just what they looked like. Desiccated little stone faces scowling gleefully.
The privately chartered ship that brought us there was called the Polaris. It was a cargo vessel that was at least seventy years past its prime and boasted a crew of six men who looked like cousins.
Close cousins, if you know what I mean.
Our team consisted of one disgraced director, two cameramen, one lighting guy, one sound guy, five wannabe actresses of varying enhancement, one beefy bonehead straight off the casting couch, one tired, profoundly out-of-place scriptwriter, and lastly, a producer who was also one of the performers.
It took six trips on a pair of inflatable rafts to get everyone and our equipment to the island. The director, Geoff James, came on the last trip, and from the moment he set foot on the beach, he started yelling at the cameramen and rushing the cast to get ready. Wishing to avoid his coked-up wrath, the performers got busy. Our small team meant that they had to take care of their own makeup and costumes.
If you can consider furlined bikinis and an Air Force surplus jumpsuit costumes.
The cameramen worked hard to make use of the natural light and accentuate the strange beauty of the landscape while simultaneously keeping the piles of goat scat out of the shot.
You must be wondering why the Hell I was there. Lori had said she wanted a friend along, saying she wanted someone with half a brain to talk to while waiting for her scenes. I gotta say hearing her call me a friend was simultaneously thrilling and disheartening all at once.
A month ago she had called me other things. I wondered if it had just been the Margaritas talking.
Either way, I was standing there trying not to cringe as the pretty young cast mangled my precious dialogue. The director rarely did second takes, even when soft-core sensation Claudia Tate looked directly at the camera or when thick-headed thespian Bobby Burns mispronounced the word “Women.”
Did I mention the writer always gets the shaft?
As the skinny-dipping scene segued into a bout of mud wrestling, I excused myself to explore the island. You may find it hard to believe but watching people film other people having simulated sex is about as exciting as your average class in technical writing.
The island was strange. I know I said this before, but I don't think I've quite gotten across to you how strange. Pale, pink-eyed goats were everywhere. They watched me pass through their territory with dull-eyed curiosity. There were clouds of bloated black flies buzzing around here and there. The air was filled with this faint, sickly-sweet smell, just strong enough to tickle your gag reflex but not strong enough to be recognizable. I had been wandering for an hour or so when I spied a figure crouching up ahead. It was perfectly still, staring at me. I froze, my breath catching in my throat before I realized that it was another one of those weird statues.
It was about three feet tall, almost child-like in proportion. The head was wrinkled and misshapen. A strange symbol had been carved onto its forehead, a triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center. Despite the dry weather, the stone was clammy to the touch.
Yes, I touched the thing, don't ask me why.
"It's a grave marker,” Lori spoke softly from behind me. After a brief startled squeal, I turned to see her in her hiking boots, cutoff shorts, and a t-shirt with the logo for White Brains On Toast. They were her favorite band. She’d even appeared in one of their music videos.
I said, "Shouldn't you be working?"
“Pia wanted to do her big scene early,” she said.
This was Pia Winters’s first movie. A former exotic dancer, she was newly upgraded with massive breast implants that she was eager to show off.
“I didn’t write her a big scene.”
“I know, but Geoff has this weird idea where he wants to see her grinding against a palm tree,” she approached the statue with a kind of awe, “I figured I’d let him get it out of his system so I could explore a little."
I asked, “What the Hell is up with this place? We could have just shot in the Philippines for a lot less.”
“This is better. Can’t you feel the atmosphere?”
“It smells like someone died here."
“Someone died everywhere,” With a mischievous grin, she patted the statue on the head and started trudging deeper into the jungle.
I followed her, swatting at the sickly, low-hanging branches, “How did you hear about this place?”
“From my late hubby’s gambling buddies.”
“Where did he-" I slipped on a mossy cluster of stones and fell on my face, "Damnit!"
"Peter!" she was at my side, helping me to sit up.
“Damnit." I said again.
“Clumsy," She laughed, brushing off my face.
I hoped the dirt would hide my blushing, “I was watching your backside instead of where I was going.”
“You should have used that line in the script,” she stood back up and started walking again. "Come on, not much further. There's something I want you to see."
Not much further turned out to be an hour of walking, mostly uphill. Occasionally, one or two of those goofy goats would follow and keep pace with us, only to wander off into the jungle after a little while. It was miserably hot, and there wasn't even the slightest trace of a breeze. In case you hadn't already guessed, we writer types usually aren't in the best of shape. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but for every Ernest Hemingway, you have about twenty other vaguely gourd-shaped men like me.
I did my best to keep pace with her and distracted myself from being out of breath by remembering the night she invited me over to her place. The night she cooked me steak while I made strong margaritas.
At first, I'd said no to the whole proposal. I prefer to write adventures, not have them. Besides, I was planning on devoting some more time to my novel in progress, The Black Rider. It was a Western epic in the tradition of Lonesome Dove but with ninjas. I'd been working on it for almost seven years, and it was about halfway done.
After a good meal and lively conversation, we made love on her couch. I know. I know. It sounds ridiculous, but just believe me. I’m going to die, or worse, at sundown. I have no reason to pad out my sexual resume. Needless to say, after that, I was all in on the project.
As we made our way through the jungle, we passed by another dozen or so of those ugly little statues before we reached what was once a military base. It wasn’t much of a military base, mind you, just a rusted old Quonset hut and a handful of rotting olive-colored tents. It looked like the exterior set from M.A.S.H. had gone to Hell.
There was also even a Jeep, its tires flat, its body half-eaten by corrosion, and curious goats. It was parked in front of the dilapidated supply shed that would soon become my prison.
"What is this?” Even though the place was obviously long abandoned, I spoke in hushed tones.
"It was an army base during the Second World War. An entire platoon of men was stationed here. All but one of them died under mysterious circumstances."
“But of course.”
"Come on then." She started walking again, "The best part is up ahead."
I swung my arms in a gesture as sarcastic as it was wide, "Better than all this?"
She laughed, "Shut up and march."
"Yes ma'am!" I saluted. To my surprise, she took my hand as she led me back into the jungle. “Tell me more about these lawn gnomes from Hell.”
She flashed me that grin of hers again, then paused before one of the grotesque effigies, "The people of this island were the last stronghold of the cult of Ezerhodden.”
“Wait wait wait.” I said, “Ezerhodden is a real thing?”
“Yup. They had some very primal religious beliefs."
“Oh, they were Baptists.”
“Dork.” She punched me lightly in the arm and continued, “Every six years, they would hold a ceremony called ‘Grovulche.’ The entire community would paint their hands with goat blood and hunt each other through the jungle. It is kind of like a game of tag. The six winners of the contest would then be brought back to the village where they would play another game using symbols carved on pieces of petrified bark.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”
“Nope. Now five losers of this game were called the Zaartua. They would have their hair and teeth pulled out and then be buried alive beneath one of these.” She tapped the statue, “The winner would be taken to the Mouth of Ezerhodden and, after a ceremony called the Six Wounds Of Love, would be blessed with either wisdom, power, or life.”
I shook my head, “And where did you learn all this?”
“I read it in a book called The Nine Rebel Sermons. It was written by a Catholic missionary who visited the island in 1722. I got that from my late hubby’s gambling buddies too.”
I raised an eyebrow, “Ever thought about hunkering down with a Jane Austen novel?"
“Read 'em all. Come on. More to see.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Another hour of walking brought us to a clearing. The knee-high pale-green grass undulated slowly back and forth. In the center of the clearing was the squat stone rim of a well. It was made from the same material as those ugly statues. Strange hieroglyphics were carved all along the sides; there was the familiar triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center, but there were other symbols there, too.
Trembling with either terror or excitement, Lori approached it, “This is it. Just like the book said, The Mouth of Ezerhodden.”
The nauseating odor that permeated the island was stronger here; in fact, I was sure this was the source of it. Imagine the smell of a butcher shop mixed with the stink of an open sewer, then add a dash of the scent of your grandma's house. She drew closer, I followed, and it didn’t take me long to realize that the tall grass was hiding dozens of dead goats. Most were skeletons; some were pretty fresh. “This can’t be real. If it was someone would be here already, there would be archeologists …documentary crews …tourists.”
She paused thoughtfully, “Can you imagine how this would look in camera?”
“Come on Lori, people aren’t going to watch this movie to see spooky old ruins. They want to see boobies and monsters. In that order."
She was at the edge of the well now. She peered down into the depths of the well. “Maybe I want to make a more lasting impression on the world.”
I risked a glimpse down into the murky depths. The air wafting up the stone shaft was hot. There was this thick, sloshing noise down there. Something glistened in the shadows. My heart started to pound, I turned away, and I was violently sick.
When I was done, I begged, “Please, can we go back now?”
“Poor thing,” she got me to my feet and led me back to the boat just as it started to rain. She was quiet and thoughtful the whole way back.
We found the director looking ragged and pissed off. He immediately started to complain about the film’s big star just up and disappearing, but Lori waved him off.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we called it a day and retired to the Polaris’ cramped quarters. Lori turned in early, and the rest of us spent the night, swapping stories, smoking cigarettes, snacking on breakfast bars, and drinking cheap wine. After a few raucous hours, I boozily decided to turn in. Lori had a little cabin all to herself near the front of the ship. I considered knocking on her door, but thought better of it. Instead, I lay down on my designated bunk and let the sounds of falling rain and lapping ocean lull me to sleep.
The dream that came to me came with a strange stomach-churning feeling of deja vu.
I was standing in the middle of the street in a ruined city. I wandered for a time, utterly alone and lost. In the distance, I could hear a rhythmic thudding; like an army on the march, there was a disjointedness to the cadence, giving a sense of something broken.
And then I saw them, a crowd moving down the street, wizened figures in tuxedos, their heads were bald, their faces set in toothless grins. They carried an elaborate, jewel-encrusted litter on their shoulders. It pitched and yawed with their movements.
The figure riding in the litter wore a goat-like mask with long curved horns. A symbol was carved on the forehead, a diamond with a dot in the center. The figure spied me and began to sing sweetly. The words made no sense, but the voice was familiar as the telltale sting of a paper cut.
I snapped awake.
My pillowcase was soaked with sweat; I spent a few panicked moments trying to remember where I was and why I was there. The gentle rumble of my cabin-mate Bobby Burns snoring helped me get my bearings.
I checked my watch. It was almost 3 AM. I tried to relax and go back to sleep, but when I closed my eyes, all I could still see was the dream, vivid and bright. So, I got on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed up onto the deck. It had stopped raining, and the sky was cloudless. The full moon looked swollen and was tinged with green. It was bright enough to read by. Leaning on the aft railing, I stared at it for a while and ran the events of the nightmare over and over in my head, examining and interpolating them until they had lost their disturbing qualities.
After a while, I became aware of this thumping, sloshing noise. It was coming from right below me. Visions of The Creature from the Black Lagoon started bubbling to the surface of my mind. I looked down and saw one of the two inflatable rafts the Polaris crew was using to shuttle us back and forth to the island.
But there had been two.
Where was the other one?
Something about it began to worry me. Had it become untethered and floated away? If so, how long would it take for us to shuttle the talent and equipment back and forth with just one boat? I took a stroll from one end of the boat to another in hopes of spotting the thing. No such luck. So I decided to head up to the bridge and let the captain know.
Halfway there, a member of the crew stepped out of the shadows. He had a hunting knife in his hand and he gestured wildly with it as he spoke, “What you do here? Crew only on deck at night! You go down below.”
I choked and blundered over my words, “I think… you see… I…”
"You get down below!” his breath was rank with alcohol, and the something else I couldn't place. Something vaguely unsavory.
“Yeah,” I said, “I get the idea…crew only. Listen, one of your boats is missing…”
"We know." He gave me a gentle poke with the point of his knife to signal the conversation was over. Then he turned and made his way to the bridge, “You go back to sleep. We take care of everything."
I retreated down below, cringing and frightened. I didn’t like the way he talked to me. I didn’t like this island. I didn’t like any of this. I went right to Lori’s cabin and knocked on her door. There was no answer. There was no answer.
Freaking out just a little bit more, I tried the door handle; it wasn’t locked, so I stepped inside. All her clothes and things were still in her suitcase. There were papers strewn about the bed and a thick old book lying on the pillow. I glanced at the title, I Nove Sermoni Ribelli.
I picked it up and flipped through it. Was this the Nine Rebel Sermons? Was this thing really over 250 years old? As I flipped through the pages, wondering at the tiny print and grotesque illustrations, a slip of paper fell out. It was Lori’s handwriting, and it this is what it said;
“The pit was the length and width of a man. From it the avatar of Ezerhodden rose up from the Screaming Nowhere. It was pale and fierce and was a salamander in its extremity. It looked upon the world of man but spoke to the stars. It cast runes upon the stones that blasphemed against death. From within his mouth he feasts on the beloved.”
”What are you doing in here?"
My breath caught, and my hand flew to my chest. It was Lori, ”Having a heart attack thank you very much. Haven't you ever heard of knocking?"
"Peter. You're in my room." She brushed past me. Her sneakers and jeans were caked with mud, one of her fingernails was cracked.
“Oh… Yeah.”
Heedless of my presence, she began to get undressed, slipping the light blouse over her head. She was braless as always, "Was there something wrong?"
"No, it’s just that I was - I am - worried about you." It all seemed so stupid now. Was I really going to tell her that I got spooked because I had a bad dream? I decided to go with more Earthly concerns, "I don't trust the crew of this boat. I think they're up to no good."
She kicked off her shoes, "You're being paranoid."
"One of them waved a knife at me!"
Groaning with exasperation, she sat me down on the bed with a good hard shove, "I know what's really bothering you."
I tried to keep eye contact, but my eyes kept wandering, "Lori, I’m serious. None of this feels right.”
"This is really about what happened back at my place, isn't it?" She strolled over and closed the door to her cabin, shucking her stained jeans on the way back. "You think I only slept with you to get you to help me out."
"Yes. I mean no. I mean-”
"Peter . . . " she caressed my face, ". . . I care about you. More than you realize."
"Can't you see-" she shut me up with a kiss. Her books and notes ended up on the floor, along with the comforter and the sheets.
If I close my eyes, I can still remember how her nails felt on my skin, the way the broken one hurt just a little, and how it made me shiver. When it all ends I’m going to try and keep that moment in my mind, use it to block out everything else. I doubt it will be enough to keep me from screaming.
After it was over, we lay together on the bed, and she spoke in a whisper, "I'll tell you something I haven't told anyone else. This is my last movie.”
Then we were silent. Sleep came soon enough.
The morning found the missing boat back where it belonged. I made a joke to Lori about the captain using it to go fishing. She didn’t laugh.
The day's filming went pretty well. There was plenty of sunlight, and Bobby Burns managed to get through his lines without sounding like a brain-damaged robot.
When he and Lori started working on their ‘love scene’ I had to walk away. I knew I had no right to be possessive or jealous, that this was just acting. But I still had to be somewhere else.
To keep my mind occupied, I tried to piece through my experiences here. If it all had been a movie, what kind of movie would it be? I kept wandering until I found another one of the statues.
For some reason, the face of it was covered with black flies. They buzzed away as I approached. The symbol on the forehead of this one was a circle with an open semicircle at the top and an X at the bottom. There was a dark, gummy-looking ruby-colored substance smeared across it. I stared at it for a long while.
By the time I got back to the others, Lori's scene was over, and Claudia Tate was working on some topless close-ups. Geoff James had decided her soliloquy would play better if she popped her top halfway through. Decisions like this was why he made the big bucks.
When that scene wrapped one of the lighting guys happened to glance out onto the horizon and asked, "Hey! Where the hell is the boat?"
That's right kids, the Polaris had set off without us. I heard a mocking voice in my head, “We take care of everything.”
The sun was beginning to set, and things quickly degenerated into a full-scale panic. We had no shelter, no supplies, no food, no nothing. As the old song said, “…not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be…”
Lori took charge and led us through the jungle to the abandoned military base. At the very least, it was a roof over our heads. After some brief discussions about signal fires and searching for food, the cast of Island Fury settled down in the main Quonset hut for the night. Not one of the twelve of us gave even the slightest thought to posting someone on guard duty.
After all, this is a deserted island, right?
After hours of sleep, I awoke to find myself lying next to the key grip and the best boy. I cautiously got up and walked gingerly around the cast and crew. Sickly moonlight shone in through the windows of the Quonset hut. I searched the slumbering shapes for some sign of Lori but couldn’t see her.
I had to relieve myself, and it seemed like a good idea to do my business at the edge of the camp. I stumbled over jutting roots and prickly brambles until I was at the tree line. Then, I did what came naturally. It wasn't until I was finished that I noticed the toppled statue.
Half concealed by a mound of freshly disturbed Earth, it lay on its back, gaping at the stars. I drew closer, wondering if I should try to set it right. I touched the stone. It was warm and clammy. Not cold like before. I wondered who had done this, a clumsy actor or a belligerent goat. Maybe it had fallen over on its own?
A sudden creeping sensation up the back of my neck alerted me to the fact I wasn't alone. A twig snapped. I turned, "Lori will you please stop sneaking up on --"
The shape before me was human but withered; its leathery-looking skin was a muddy gray, its bald head was marked with old scars, and its toothless mouth gaped. In its left hand, it held a goat horn; one end was bloodied, the other sharpened to a point.
The Zaartua! Then I was running through the jungle, fumbling blindly through the trees and bushes. Every statue I came across was askew or toppled over. Dead goats were everywhere, their throats slit, their horns removed.
Somehow my wild flight brought me to the clearing with Ezerhodden’s Well. The stench was worse now. The air was filled with a thick sloshing. I risked a glance backward; a pair of Zaartua were shambling after me like they had all the time in the world. The only noise they made was the crackle of their dead joints flexing.
I let them get a little closer and then feinted around them and doubled back into the jungle. I found my way back to the camp, hoping for safety in numbers. What I found made me stop dead in my tracks.
Damn that full moon. How I wish it had been cloudy that night, that the shadows had been dark and long enough to hide the carnage.
The Zaartua had made quick work of the cast and crew of Island Fury. I saw Claudia Tate, her flesh hanging torn and loose as she staggered and swayed with the animal urge to survive. Her tormenter shuffled behind her, content to watch her die slowly.
There was the high-pitched screaming of Bobby Burns. The Zaartua swarmed over where he had fallen. They raised their makeshift blades and brought them down again and again.
Geoff James was backed into the wall of the Quonset Hut, swinging one of the boom mikes wildly, trying to hold off his attackers, but there were too many of them.
Blood. Howls of terror. The Zaartua were relentless in their bloodlust. Soon enough, I was surrounded and screaming for mercy.
"No!" I heard Lori shout.
I turned on my heel to see her standing in the clearing. The captain and his machete-wielding mates flanked her.
"He isn't for you." She said, and with that, mummified shapes brushed past me, looking for fresh prey.
“Lori?" I tried to find words, but my mind and my body were too exhausted.
"Lock him in the supply shed,” She nodded to the Captain, her tone threatening. “Treat him gently."
I didn't resist as I was marched to the supply shed. A brand new padlock had been installed on the door. I heard it click into place once I was alone in the dark. I whispered, “Help.” to no one in particular and then curled into a ball on the floor.
The next morning Lori came to see me. She had a handful of breakfast bars in her hand.
"Hungry?" she asked.
"No." I doubted I'd ever be hungry again.
She knelt beside me; instinctively, I withdrew from her proximity. "Ezerhodden is real, Peter. He made me promises."
"You did all this?"
"He spoke to me in my dreams. He knew my desperation and revealed to me his need.”
"Stop talking like that!" I flashed with anger, “You’re a B-Movie actress, not Anton LeVey."
“Every sixth year Ezerhodden crawls closer to our world. He casts avatars out from the Screaming Nowhere, but someday he will truly walk among us." She closed her eyes and shuddered, “Then the true Harvest will begin as was prophesied.”
"Why are you doing this?"
"I have ovarian cancer." There were tears in her eyes, "I found out three months ago."
“No… that’s not…” Now there were tears in my eyes, but we were both beyond weeping.
She said, “It's too far gone for the doctors to do anything. It’s in my bones and my spine.” “Oh my God Lori…”
“Ezerhodden has promised me new life.”
I thought of the Zaartua, “You can’t want to be turned into one of those… one of those things!”
“There are other ways and forms,” she kissed my forehead and stood. “All I have to do is submit to the Six Wounds of Love.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question, but I had to ask, “What is that?”
“The Zaartua will scar me five times, each deeper than the last, then… then I will take someone beloved to me to the Well of Ezerhodden and surrender them to the avatar that dwells within.” She closed the door behind her. There was a rustle as the padlock was put back into place.
I went crazy for a little while after that. Trashing the place, looking for something to help me escape. Screaming all the while. I found a hammer and smashed out the windows, but they were too small for me to get through. I thought about using it, or maybe a screwdriver for a weapon, but what good would that do against those things?
Finally, I found this notebook in one of the lower drawers. Some soldier from back in the day had been using it to keep track of inventory, so I decided to put pen to paper one last time and let the world know what happened here.
That brings us full circle.
It’s dusk now. I’ve been listening to the sound of Lori’s screams all day, but now she’s quiet. The ritual of the Six Wounds must be drawing to a close.
My heart is sick to think of her in pain. I want to hate her, but I just can’t. When they finally come for me I am going to try and reason with her one last time. But I’m not holding out much hope for a ‘Love Conquers All’ Hollywood ending.
Like I said before, the writer always gets the shaft.
***
None of the cast or crew of Island Fury were ever found. There is no record of any ship matching the description of the Polaris.

Island Fury
by
Al Bruno III
The following document was written by Peter LaRoche and was found during the Boggs International survey of the island of Kuen-Yuin. (11.5462° N, 162.3522° E)
***
It's the golden rule of Hollywood. The writer always gets the shaft. The producers get all the money; the actors get all the fame, the director gets to put his vision on the screen, and the people behind the scenes get paid and don’t have to give a damn but the writer? The writer pours his guts out onto the page, and if he's lucky, he sees twenty percent of what he wrote make it through the Hollywood grinder. If he's really lucky, he gets paid what he's worth.
That's my story in a nutshell. A month ago, I was in a mansion, sipping margaritas and talking about art to a woman I had been a little bit in love with for years. Now I'm alone, locked in a supply shed, and listening to her scream. I'm writing this with a ballpoint pen on a forty-something-year-old notebook. I'm trying to get it all down while there's still sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.
Someone has to know what happened here, and I guess that’s you.
Let me begin at the beginning.
It was a year after my graduation from Pratt University when I decided to move to Hollywood and make my fortune. I had already sold a pair of spec scripts and a few short stories to some literary magazines. The spec scripts had fallen through, and the literary magazines had mostly been purchased by the contributors, but I was young and stupid. Within a few months of my arrival in Tinsel Town, I was working in retail part time and not making nearly enough to cover my expenses.
I started looking for other ways to use my writing talent to earn cash. You know, ad copy, non-fiction articles for in-flight magazines, movie novelizations, and the occasional bit of erotica for Monarch Magazine’s Lusty Letters To The Editors.
What, did you think those were real?
Word of mouth that I was fast, cheap, and slightly smutty brought me to the attention of Olympus International Cinema.
You may not have heard of Olympus International Cinema, but trust me, if you’ve ever been channel surfing at three in the morning, you’ve at least glimpsed one of their productions.
Heart of Sharkness, Bikini Bar Mitzvah, The Adventures of Cosmo and Quack, Reggie and the Reckless Reptile, Sword Damsels In Space, Beach Blanket Beasts, The Cannibal Cloud of Daytona, The Butcher Brigade, Foxes In Boxes, and of course Tombs of the Blonde Dead. Olympus International Cinema was responsible for all those films and more. Each one featuring a cast of naive starlets and faded celebrities.
The studio was owned by former Monarch Magazine Duchess of the Year Lori Sandovar. If you are of a man of a certain generation the mere mention of her name will send blood rushing to all the right places.
Unbeknownst to most people, the lovely raven-haired Miss Sandovar wasn’t just a performer in several of Olympus International Cinema’s direct-to-video extravaganzas; she was also the owner and producer. She’d inherited the studio from her third husband. It had been a pretty rinky dink operation back then, mostly making training and educational films, but she turned the company into something very different and very profitable.
Lori was responsible for plucking yours truly from literary oblivion and making me Olympus International Cinema's wordsmith of choice. Those were her words, not mine, by the way.
I’ll never forget the day she asked me to work for her; she said she loved my writing. She even had a copy of a literary magazine one of my stories had appeared in. She asked me to autograph it. How could I not fall in love with her a little after that?
She never really paid me what I was worth but there’s something to be said for steady employment. Working for her wasn’t easy; she was as driven and ruthless as she was beautiful and limber. I was, at times, turning out a script every two months, and they weren’t always great, but she always accepted them. She was a lot nicer to me than she was to her other writers. And actors. And directors. And craft services.
Olympus International Cinema’s newest project was a film called Island Fury. The script was written by yours truly, and it was to be a sex comedy that takes a hard left turn into horror in the third act. The plot was like this: during World War II, a handsome American Pilot crash lands on an uncharted island populated by sexy lesbian goat farmers. Lewd logic quickly ensues, and suddenly, the women are all fighting, then gently grinding, over our hero.
Unfortunately, in the throes of their lust, the women have forgotten their pledge to sacrifice some of their livestock to the creature that lives on the island with them. A stop motion monstrosity to be added later called Ezerhodden the Harvest Fiend.
Lori was very specific about how she wanted this film to be made, and she was painfully specific about the script. I was still re-writing the damn thing on my trusty Smith Corona typewriter when we dropped anchor near the deserted island she’d chosen for filming.
The island she’d chosen was a little flyspeck of a place, too unimportant to be claimed by anyone. It was half jungle and half beach and not much of anything else. She’d scouted it out months earlier, and the night she’d half cajoled, half ordered me to travel with her team to the location, she’d shown me some Polaroids of the place. It was overrun with albino goats and dotted with strange little statues. They were a bit Easter Island, a bit Aztec, and a whole lot of H.R. Geiger.
Do you remember making shrunken apple head dolls in school? Do they still do that? Well, if you do, remember that is just what they looked like. Desiccated little stone faces scowling gleefully.
The privately chartered ship that brought us there was called the Polaris. It was a cargo vessel that was at least seventy years past its prime and boasted a crew of six men who looked like cousins.
Close cousins, if you know what I mean.
Our team consisted of one disgraced director, two cameramen, one lighting guy, one sound guy, five wannabe actresses of varying enhancement, one beefy bonehead straight off the casting couch, one tired, profoundly out-of-place scriptwriter, and lastly, a producer who was also one of the performers.
It took six trips on a pair of inflatable rafts to get everyone and our equipment to the island. The director, Geoff James, came on the last trip, and from the moment he set foot on the beach, he started yelling at the cameramen and rushing the cast to get ready. Wishing to avoid his coked-up wrath, the performers got busy. Our small team meant that they had to take care of their own makeup and costumes.
If you can consider furlined bikinis and an Air Force surplus jumpsuit costumes.
The cameramen worked hard to make use of the natural light and accentuate the strange beauty of the landscape while simultaneously keeping the piles of goat scat out of the shot.
You must be wondering why the Hell I was there. Lori had said she wanted a friend along, saying she wanted someone with half a brain to talk to while waiting for her scenes. I gotta say hearing her call me a friend was simultaneously thrilling and disheartening all at once.
A month ago she had called me other things. I wondered if it had just been the Margaritas talking.
Either way, I was standing there trying not to cringe as the pretty young cast mangled my precious dialogue. The director rarely did second takes, even when soft-core sensation Claudia Tate looked directly at the camera or when thick-headed thespian Bobby Burns mispronounced the word “Women.”
Did I mention the writer always gets the shaft?
As the skinny-dipping scene segued into a bout of mud wrestling, I excused myself to explore the island. You may find it hard to believe but watching people film other people having simulated sex is about as exciting as your average class in technical writing.
The island was strange. I know I said this before, but I don't think I've quite gotten across to you how strange. Pale, pink-eyed goats were everywhere. They watched me pass through their territory with dull-eyed curiosity. There were clouds of bloated black flies buzzing around here and there. The air was filled with this faint, sickly-sweet smell, just strong enough to tickle your gag reflex but not strong enough to be recognizable. I had been wandering for an hour or so when I spied a figure crouching up ahead. It was perfectly still, staring at me. I froze, my breath catching in my throat before I realized that it was another one of those weird statues.
It was about three feet tall, almost child-like in proportion. The head was wrinkled and misshapen. A strange symbol had been carved onto its forehead, a triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center. Despite the dry weather, the stone was clammy to the touch.
Yes, I touched the thing, don't ask me why.
"It's a grave marker,” Lori spoke softly from behind me. After a brief startled squeal, I turned to see her in her hiking boots, cutoff shorts, and a t-shirt with the logo for White Brains On Toast. They were her favorite band. She’d even appeared in one of their music videos.
I said, "Shouldn't you be working?"
“Pia wanted to do her big scene early,” she said.
This was Pia Winters’s first movie. A former exotic dancer, she was newly upgraded with massive breast implants that she was eager to show off.
“I didn’t write her a big scene.”
“I know, but Geoff has this weird idea where he wants to see her grinding against a palm tree,” she approached the statue with a kind of awe, “I figured I’d let him get it out of his system so I could explore a little."
I asked, “What the Hell is up with this place? We could have just shot in the Philippines for a lot less.”
“This is better. Can’t you feel the atmosphere?”
“It smells like someone died here."
“Someone died everywhere,” With a mischievous grin, she patted the statue on the head and started trudging deeper into the jungle.
I followed her, swatting at the sickly, low-hanging branches, “How did you hear about this place?”
“From my late hubby’s gambling buddies.”
“Where did he-" I slipped on a mossy cluster of stones and fell on my face, "Damnit!"
"Peter!" she was at my side, helping me to sit up.
“Damnit." I said again.
“Clumsy," She laughed, brushing off my face.
I hoped the dirt would hide my blushing, “I was watching your backside instead of where I was going.”
“You should have used that line in the script,” she stood back up and started walking again. "Come on, not much further. There's something I want you to see."
Not much further turned out to be an hour of walking, mostly uphill. Occasionally, one or two of those goofy goats would follow and keep pace with us, only to wander off into the jungle after a little while. It was miserably hot, and there wasn't even the slightest trace of a breeze. In case you hadn't already guessed, we writer types usually aren't in the best of shape. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but for every Ernest Hemingway, you have about twenty other vaguely gourd-shaped men like me.
I did my best to keep pace with her and distracted myself from being out of breath by remembering the night she invited me over to her place. The night she cooked me steak while I made strong margaritas.
At first, I'd said no to the whole proposal. I prefer to write adventures, not have them. Besides, I was planning on devoting some more time to my novel in progress, The Black Rider. It was a Western epic in the tradition of Lonesome Dove but with ninjas. I'd been working on it for almost seven years, and it was about halfway done.
After a good meal and lively conversation, we made love on her couch. I know. I know. It sounds ridiculous, but just believe me. I’m going to die, or worse, at sundown. I have no reason to pad out my sexual resume. Needless to say, after that, I was all in on the project.
As we made our way through the jungle, we passed by another dozen or so of those ugly little statues before we reached what was once a military base. It wasn’t much of a military base, mind you, just a rusted old Quonset hut and a handful of rotting olive-colored tents. It looked like the exterior set from M.A.S.H. had gone to Hell.
There was also even a Jeep, its tires flat, its body half-eaten by corrosion, and curious goats. It was parked in front of the dilapidated supply shed that would soon become my prison.
"What is this?” Even though the place was obviously long abandoned, I spoke in hushed tones.
"It was an army base during the Second World War. An entire platoon of men was stationed here. All but one of them died under mysterious circumstances."
“But of course.”
"Come on then." She started walking again, "The best part is up ahead."
I swung my arms in a gesture as sarcastic as it was wide, "Better than all this?"
She laughed, "Shut up and march."
"Yes ma'am!" I saluted. To my surprise, she took my hand as she led me back into the jungle. “Tell me more about these lawn gnomes from Hell.”
She flashed me that grin of hers again, then paused before one of the grotesque effigies, "The people of this island were the last stronghold of the cult of Ezerhodden.”
“Wait wait wait.” I said, “Ezerhodden is a real thing?”
“Yup. They had some very primal religious beliefs."
“Oh, they were Baptists.”
“Dork.” She punched me lightly in the arm and continued, “Every six years, they would hold a ceremony called ‘Grovulche.’ The entire community would paint their hands with goat blood and hunt each other through the jungle. It is kind of like a game of tag. The six winners of the contest would then be brought back to the village where they would play another game using symbols carved on pieces of petrified bark.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”
“Nope. Now five losers of this game were called the Zaartua. They would have their hair and teeth pulled out and then be buried alive beneath one of these.” She tapped the statue, “The winner would be taken to the Mouth of Ezerhodden and, after a ceremony called the Six Wounds Of Love, would be blessed with either wisdom, power, or life.”
I shook my head, “And where did you learn all this?”
“I read it in a book called The Nine Rebel Sermons. It was written by a Catholic missionary who visited the island in 1722. I got that from my late hubby’s gambling buddies too.”
I raised an eyebrow, “Ever thought about hunkering down with a Jane Austen novel?"
“Read 'em all. Come on. More to see.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Another hour of walking brought us to a clearing. The knee-high pale-green grass undulated slowly back and forth. In the center of the clearing was the squat stone rim of a well. It was made from the same material as those ugly statues. Strange hieroglyphics were carved all along the sides; there was the familiar triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center, but there were other symbols there, too.
Trembling with either terror or excitement, Lori approached it, “This is it. Just like the book said, The Mouth of Ezerhodden.”
The nauseating odor that permeated the island was stronger here; in fact, I was sure this was the source of it. Imagine the smell of a butcher shop mixed with the stink of an open sewer, then add a dash of the scent of your grandma's house. She drew closer, I followed, and it didn’t take me long to realize that the tall grass was hiding dozens of dead goats. Most were skeletons; some were pretty fresh. “This can’t be real. If it was someone would be here already, there would be archeologists …documentary crews …tourists.”
She paused thoughtfully, “Can you imagine how this would look in camera?”
“Come on Lori, people aren’t going to watch this movie to see spooky old ruins. They want to see boobies and monsters. In that order."
She was at the edge of the well now. She peered down into the depths of the well. “Maybe I want to make a more lasting impression on the world.”
I risked a glimpse down into the murky depths. The air wafting up the stone shaft was hot. There was this thick, sloshing noise down there. Something glistened in the shadows. My heart started to pound, I turned away, and I was violently sick.
When I was done, I begged, “Please, can we go back now?”
“Poor thing,” she got me to my feet and led me back to the boat just as it started to rain. She was quiet and thoughtful the whole way back.
We found the director looking ragged and pissed off. He immediately started to complain about the film’s big star just up and disappearing, but Lori waved him off.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we called it a day and retired to the Polaris’ cramped quarters. Lori turned in early, and the rest of us spent the night, swapping stories, smoking cigarettes, snacking on breakfast bars, and drinking cheap wine. After a few raucous hours, I boozily decided to turn in. Lori had a little cabin all to herself near the front of the ship. I considered knocking on her door, but thought better of it. Instead, I lay down on my designated bunk and let the sounds of falling rain and lapping ocean lull me to sleep.
The dream that came to me came with a strange stomach-churning feeling of deja vu.
I was standing in the middle of the street in a ruined city. I wandered for a time, utterly alone and lost. In the distance, I could hear a rhythmic thudding; like an army on the march, there was a disjointedness to the cadence, giving a sense of something broken.
And then I saw them, a crowd moving down the street, wizened figures in tuxedos, their heads were bald, their faces set in toothless grins. They carried an elaborate, jewel-encrusted litter on their shoulders. It pitched and yawed with their movements.
The figure riding in the litter wore a goat-like mask with long curved horns. A symbol was carved on the forehead, a diamond with a dot in the center. The figure spied me and began to sing sweetly. The words made no sense, but the voice was familiar as the telltale sting of a paper cut.
I snapped awake.
My pillowcase was soaked with sweat; I spent a few panicked moments trying to remember where I was and why I was there. The gentle rumble of my cabin-mate Bobby Burns snoring helped me get my bearings.
I checked my watch. It was almost 3 AM. I tried to relax and go back to sleep, but when I closed my eyes, all I could still see was the dream, vivid and bright. So, I got on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed up onto the deck. It had stopped raining, and the sky was cloudless. The full moon looked swollen and was tinged with green. It was bright enough to read by. Leaning on the aft railing, I stared at it for a while and ran the events of the nightmare over and over in my head, examining and interpolating them until they had lost their disturbing qualities.
After a while, I became aware of this thumping, sloshing noise. It was coming from right below me. Visions of The Creature from the Black Lagoon started bubbling to the surface of my mind. I looked down and saw one of the two inflatable rafts the Polaris crew was using to shuttle us back and forth to the island.
But there had been two.
Where was the other one?
Something about it began to worry me. Had it become untethered and floated away? If so, how long would it take for us to shuttle the talent and equipment back and forth with just one boat? I took a stroll from one end of the boat to another in hopes of spotting the thing. No such luck. So I decided to head up to the bridge and let the captain know.
Halfway there, a member of the crew stepped out of the shadows. He had a hunting knife in his hand and he gestured wildly with it as he spoke, “What you do here? Crew only on deck at night! You go down below.”
I choked and blundered over my words, “I think… you see… I…”
"You get down below!” his breath was rank with alcohol, and the something else I couldn't place. Something vaguely unsavory.
“Yeah,” I said, “I get the idea…crew only. Listen, one of your boats is missing…”
"We know." He gave me a gentle poke with the point of his knife to signal the conversation was over. Then he turned and made his way to the bridge, “You go back to sleep. We take care of everything."
I retreated down below, cringing and frightened. I didn’t like the way he talked to me. I didn’t like this island. I didn’t like any of this. I went right to Lori’s cabin and knocked on her door. There was no answer. There was no answer.
Freaking out just a little bit more, I tried the door handle; it wasn’t locked, so I stepped inside. All her clothes and things were still in her suitcase. There were papers strewn about the bed and a thick old book lying on the pillow. I glanced at the title, I Nove Sermoni Ribelli.
I picked it up and flipped through it. Was this the Nine Rebel Sermons? Was this thing really over 250 years old? As I flipped through the pages, wondering at the tiny print and grotesque illustrations, a slip of paper fell out. It was Lori’s handwriting, and it this is what it said;
“The pit was the length and width of a man. From it the avatar of Ezerhodden rose up from the Screaming Nowhere. It was pale and fierce and was a salamander in its extremity. It looked upon the world of man but spoke to the stars. It cast runes upon the stones that blasphemed against death. From within his mouth he feasts on the beloved.”
”What are you doing in here?"
My breath caught, and my hand flew to my chest. It was Lori, ”Having a heart attack thank you very much. Haven't you ever heard of knocking?"
"Peter. You're in my room." She brushed past me. Her sneakers and jeans were caked with mud, one of her fingernails was cracked.
“Oh… Yeah.”
Heedless of my presence, she began to get undressed, slipping the light blouse over her head. She was braless as always, "Was there something wrong?"
"No, it’s just that I was - I am - worried about you." It all seemed so stupid now. Was I really going to tell her that I got spooked because I had a bad dream? I decided to go with more Earthly concerns, "I don't trust the crew of this boat. I think they're up to no good."
She kicked off her shoes, "You're being paranoid."
"One of them waved a knife at me!"
Groaning with exasperation, she sat me down on the bed with a good hard shove, "I know what's really bothering you."
I tried to keep eye contact, but my eyes kept wandering, "Lori, I’m serious. None of this feels right.”
"This is really about what happened back at my place, isn't it?" She strolled over and closed the door to her cabin, shucking her stained jeans on the way back. "You think I only slept with you to get you to help me out."
"Yes. I mean no. I mean-”
"Peter . . . " she caressed my face, ". . . I care about you. More than you realize."
"Can't you see-" she shut me up with a kiss. Her books and notes ended up on the floor, along with the comforter and the sheets.
If I close my eyes, I can still remember how her nails felt on my skin, the way the broken one hurt just a little, and how it made me shiver. When it all ends I’m going to try and keep that moment in my mind, use it to block out everything else. I doubt it will be enough to keep me from screaming.
After it was over, we lay together on the bed, and she spoke in a whisper, "I'll tell you something I haven't told anyone else. This is my last movie.”
Then we were silent. Sleep came soon enough.
The morning found the missing boat back where it belonged. I made a joke to Lori about the captain using it to go fishing. She didn’t laugh.
The day's filming went pretty well. There was plenty of sunlight, and Bobby Burns managed to get through his lines without sounding like a brain-damaged robot.
When he and Lori started working on their ‘love scene’ I had to walk away. I knew I had no right to be possessive or jealous, that this was just acting. But I still had to be somewhere else.
To keep my mind occupied, I tried to piece through my experiences here. If it all had been a movie, what kind of movie would it be? I kept wandering until I found another one of the statues.
For some reason, the face of it was covered with black flies. They buzzed away as I approached. The symbol on the forehead of this one was a circle with an open semicircle at the top and an X at the bottom. There was a dark, gummy-looking ruby-colored substance smeared across it. I stared at it for a long while.
By the time I got back to the others, Lori's scene was over, and Claudia Tate was working on some topless close-ups. Geoff James had decided her soliloquy would play better if she popped her top halfway through. Decisions like this was why he made the big bucks.
When that scene wrapped one of the lighting guys happened to glance out onto the horizon and asked, "Hey! Where the hell is the boat?"
That's right kids, the Polaris had set off without us. I heard a mocking voice in my head, “We take care of everything.”
The sun was beginning to set, and things quickly degenerated into a full-scale panic. We had no shelter, no supplies, no food, no nothing. As the old song said, “…not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be…”
Lori took charge and led us through the jungle to the abandoned military base. At the very least, it was a roof over our heads. After some brief discussions about signal fires and searching for food, the cast of Island Fury settled down in the main Quonset hut for the night. Not one of the twelve of us gave even the slightest thought to posting someone on guard duty.
After all, this is a deserted island, right?
After hours of sleep, I awoke to find myself lying next to the key grip and the best boy. I cautiously got up and walked gingerly around the cast and crew. Sickly moonlight shone in through the windows of the Quonset hut. I searched the slumbering shapes for some sign of Lori but couldn’t see her.
I had to relieve myself, and it seemed like a good idea to do my business at the edge of the camp. I stumbled over jutting roots and prickly brambles until I was at the tree line. Then, I did what came naturally. It wasn't until I was finished that I noticed the toppled statue.
Half concealed by a mound of freshly disturbed Earth, it lay on its back, gaping at the stars. I drew closer, wondering if I should try to set it right. I touched the stone. It was warm and clammy. Not cold like before. I wondered who had done this, a clumsy actor or a belligerent goat. Maybe it had fallen over on its own?
A sudden creeping sensation up the back of my neck alerted me to the fact I wasn't alone. A twig snapped. I turned, "Lori will you please stop sneaking up on --"
The shape before me was human but withered; its leathery-looking skin was a muddy gray, its bald head was marked with old scars, and its toothless mouth gaped. In its left hand, it held a goat horn; one end was bloodied, the other sharpened to a point.
The Zaartua! Then I was running through the jungle, fumbling blindly through the trees and bushes. Every statue I came across was askew or toppled over. Dead goats were everywhere, their throats slit, their horns removed.
Somehow my wild flight brought me to the clearing with Ezerhodden’s Well. The stench was worse now. The air was filled with a thick sloshing. I risked a glance backward; a pair of Zaartua were shambling after me like they had all the time in the world. The only noise they made was the crackle of their dead joints flexing.
I let them get a little closer and then feinted around them and doubled back into the jungle. I found my way back to the camp, hoping for safety in numbers. What I found made me stop dead in my tracks.
Damn that full moon. How I wish it had been cloudy that night, that the shadows had been dark and long enough to hide the carnage.
The Zaartua had made quick work of the cast and crew of Island Fury. I saw Claudia Tate, her flesh hanging torn and loose as she staggered and swayed with the animal urge to survive. Her tormenter shuffled behind her, content to watch her die slowly.
There was the high-pitched screaming of Bobby Burns. The Zaartua swarmed over where he had fallen. They raised their makeshift blades and brought them down again and again.
Geoff James was backed into the wall of the Quonset Hut, swinging one of the boom mikes wildly, trying to hold off his attackers, but there were too many of them.
Blood. Howls of terror. The Zaartua were relentless in their bloodlust. Soon enough, I was surrounded and screaming for mercy.
"No!" I heard Lori shout.
I turned on my heel to see her standing in the clearing. The captain and his machete-wielding mates flanked her.
"He isn't for you." She said, and with that, mummified shapes brushed past me, looking for fresh prey.
“Lori?" I tried to find words, but my mind and my body were too exhausted.
"Lock him in the supply shed,” She nodded to the Captain, her tone threatening. “Treat him gently."
I didn't resist as I was marched to the supply shed. A brand new padlock had been installed on the door. I heard it click into place once I was alone in the dark. I whispered, “Help.” to no one in particular and then curled into a ball on the floor.
The next morning Lori came to see me. She had a handful of breakfast bars in her hand.
"Hungry?" she asked.
"No." I doubted I'd ever be hungry again.
She knelt beside me; instinctively, I withdrew from her proximity. "Ezerhodden is real, Peter. He made me promises."
"You did all this?"
"He spoke to me in my dreams. He knew my desperation and revealed to me his need.”
"Stop talking like that!" I flashed with anger, “You’re a B-Movie actress, not Anton LeVey."
“Every sixth year Ezerhodden crawls closer to our world. He casts avatars out from the Screaming Nowhere, but someday he will truly walk among us." She closed her eyes and shuddered, “Then the true Harvest will begin as was prophesied.”
"Why are you doing this?"
"I have ovarian cancer." There were tears in her eyes, "I found out three months ago."
“No… that’s not…” Now there were tears in my eyes, but we were both beyond weeping.
She said, “It's too far gone for the doctors to do anything. It’s in my bones and my spine.” “Oh my God Lori…”
“Ezerhodden has promised me new life.”
I thought of the Zaartua, “You can’t want to be turned into one of those… one of those things!”
“There are other ways and forms,” she kissed my forehead and stood. “All I have to do is submit to the Six Wounds of Love.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question, but I had to ask, “What is that?”
“The Zaartua will scar me five times, each deeper than the last, then… then I will take someone beloved to me to the Well of Ezerhodden and surrender them to the avatar that dwells within.” She closed the door behind her. There was a rustle as the padlock was put back into place.
I went crazy for a little while after that. Trashing the place, looking for something to help me escape. Screaming all the while. I found a hammer and smashed out the windows, but they were too small for me to get through. I thought about using it, or maybe a screwdriver for a weapon, but what good would that do against those things?
Finally, I found this notebook in one of the lower drawers. Some soldier from back in the day had been using it to keep track of inventory, so I decided to put pen to paper one last time and let the world know what happened here.
That brings us full circle.
It’s dusk now. I’ve been listening to the sound of Lori’s screams all day, but now she’s quiet. The ritual of the Six Wounds must be drawing to a close.
My heart is sick to think of her in pain. I want to hate her, but I just can’t. When they finally come for me I am going to try and reason with her one last time. But I’m not holding out much hope for a ‘Love Conquers All’ Hollywood ending.
Like I said before, the writer always gets the shaft.
***
None of the cast or crew of Island Fury were ever found. There is no record of any ship matching the description of the Polaris.

Island Fury
by
Al Bruno III
The following document was written by Peter LaRoche and was found during the Boggs International survey of the island of Kuen-Yuin. (11.5462° N, 162.3522° E)
***
It's the golden rule of Hollywood. The writer always gets the shaft. The producers get all the money; the actors get all the fame, the director gets to put his vision on the screen, and the people behind the scenes get paid and don’t have to give a damn but the writer? The writer pours his guts out onto the page, and if he's lucky, he sees twenty percent of what he wrote make it through the Hollywood grinder. If he's really lucky, he gets paid what he's worth.
That's my story in a nutshell. A month ago, I was in a mansion, sipping margaritas and talking about art to a woman I had been a little bit in love with for years. Now I'm alone, locked in a supply shed, and listening to her scream. I'm writing this with a ballpoint pen on a forty-something-year-old notebook. I'm trying to get it all down while there's still sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.
Someone has to know what happened here, and I guess that’s you.
Let me begin at the beginning.
It was a year after my graduation from Pratt University when I decided to move to Hollywood and make my fortune. I had already sold a pair of spec scripts and a few short stories to some literary magazines. The spec scripts had fallen through, and the literary magazines had mostly been purchased by the contributors, but I was young and stupid. Within a few months of my arrival in Tinsel Town, I was working in retail part time and not making nearly enough to cover my expenses.
I started looking for other ways to use my writing talent to earn cash. You know, ad copy, non-fiction articles for in-flight magazines, movie novelizations, and the occasional bit of erotica for Monarch Magazine’s Lusty Letters To The Editors.
What, did you think those were real?
Word of mouth that I was fast, cheap, and slightly smutty brought me to the attention of Olympus International Cinema.
You may not have heard of Olympus International Cinema, but trust me, if you’ve ever been channel surfing at three in the morning, you’ve at least glimpsed one of their productions.
Heart of Sharkness, Bikini Bar Mitzvah, The Adventures of Cosmo and Quack, Reggie and the Reckless Reptile, Sword Damsels In Space, Beach Blanket Beasts, The Cannibal Cloud of Daytona, The Butcher Brigade, Foxes In Boxes, and of course Tombs of the Blonde Dead. Olympus International Cinema was responsible for all those films and more. Each one featuring a cast of naive starlets and faded celebrities.
The studio was owned by former Monarch Magazine Duchess of the Year Lori Sandovar. If you are of a man of a certain generation the mere mention of her name will send blood rushing to all the right places.
Unbeknownst to most people, the lovely raven-haired Miss Sandovar wasn’t just a performer in several of Olympus International Cinema’s direct-to-video extravaganzas; she was also the owner and producer. She’d inherited the studio from her third husband. It had been a pretty rinky dink operation back then, mostly making training and educational films, but she turned the company into something very different and very profitable.
Lori was responsible for plucking yours truly from literary oblivion and making me Olympus International Cinema's wordsmith of choice. Those were her words, not mine, by the way.
I’ll never forget the day she asked me to work for her; she said she loved my writing. She even had a copy of a literary magazine one of my stories had appeared in. She asked me to autograph it. How could I not fall in love with her a little after that?
She never really paid me what I was worth but there’s something to be said for steady employment. Working for her wasn’t easy; she was as driven and ruthless as she was beautiful and limber. I was, at times, turning out a script every two months, and they weren’t always great, but she always accepted them. She was a lot nicer to me than she was to her other writers. And actors. And directors. And craft services.
Olympus International Cinema’s newest project was a film called Island Fury. The script was written by yours truly, and it was to be a sex comedy that takes a hard left turn into horror in the third act. The plot was like this: during World War II, a handsome American Pilot crash lands on an uncharted island populated by sexy lesbian goat farmers. Lewd logic quickly ensues, and suddenly, the women are all fighting, then gently grinding, over our hero.
Unfortunately, in the throes of their lust, the women have forgotten their pledge to sacrifice some of their livestock to the creature that lives on the island with them. A stop motion monstrosity to be added later called Ezerhodden the Harvest Fiend.
Lori was very specific about how she wanted this film to be made, and she was painfully specific about the script. I was still re-writing the damn thing on my trusty Smith Corona typewriter when we dropped anchor near the deserted island she’d chosen for filming.
The island she’d chosen was a little flyspeck of a place, too unimportant to be claimed by anyone. It was half jungle and half beach and not much of anything else. She’d scouted it out months earlier, and the night she’d half cajoled, half ordered me to travel with her team to the location, she’d shown me some Polaroids of the place. It was overrun with albino goats and dotted with strange little statues. They were a bit Easter Island, a bit Aztec, and a whole lot of H.R. Geiger.
Do you remember making shrunken apple head dolls in school? Do they still do that? Well, if you do, remember that is just what they looked like. Desiccated little stone faces scowling gleefully.
The privately chartered ship that brought us there was called the Polaris. It was a cargo vessel that was at least seventy years past its prime and boasted a crew of six men who looked like cousins.
Close cousins, if you know what I mean.
Our team consisted of one disgraced director, two cameramen, one lighting guy, one sound guy, five wannabe actresses of varying enhancement, one beefy bonehead straight off the casting couch, one tired, profoundly out-of-place scriptwriter, and lastly, a producer who was also one of the performers.
It took six trips on a pair of inflatable rafts to get everyone and our equipment to the island. The director, Geoff James, came on the last trip, and from the moment he set foot on the beach, he started yelling at the cameramen and rushing the cast to get ready. Wishing to avoid his coked-up wrath, the performers got busy. Our small team meant that they had to take care of their own makeup and costumes.
If you can consider furlined bikinis and an Air Force surplus jumpsuit costumes.
The cameramen worked hard to make use of the natural light and accentuate the strange beauty of the landscape while simultaneously keeping the piles of goat scat out of the shot.
You must be wondering why the Hell I was there. Lori had said she wanted a friend along, saying she wanted someone with half a brain to talk to while waiting for her scenes. I gotta say hearing her call me a friend was simultaneously thrilling and disheartening all at once.
A month ago she had called me other things. I wondered if it had just been the Margaritas talking.
Either way, I was standing there trying not to cringe as the pretty young cast mangled my precious dialogue. The director rarely did second takes, even when soft-core sensation Claudia Tate looked directly at the camera or when thick-headed thespian Bobby Burns mispronounced the word “Women.”
Did I mention the writer always gets the shaft?
As the skinny-dipping scene segued into a bout of mud wrestling, I excused myself to explore the island. You may find it hard to believe but watching people film other people having simulated sex is about as exciting as your average class in technical writing.
The island was strange. I know I said this before, but I don't think I've quite gotten across to you how strange. Pale, pink-eyed goats were everywhere. They watched me pass through their territory with dull-eyed curiosity. There were clouds of bloated black flies buzzing around here and there. The air was filled with this faint, sickly-sweet smell, just strong enough to tickle your gag reflex but not strong enough to be recognizable. I had been wandering for an hour or so when I spied a figure crouching up ahead. It was perfectly still, staring at me. I froze, my breath catching in my throat before I realized that it was another one of those weird statues.
It was about three feet tall, almost child-like in proportion. The head was wrinkled and misshapen. A strange symbol had been carved onto its forehead, a triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center. Despite the dry weather, the stone was clammy to the touch.
Yes, I touched the thing, don't ask me why.
"It's a grave marker,” Lori spoke softly from behind me. After a brief startled squeal, I turned to see her in her hiking boots, cutoff shorts, and a t-shirt with the logo for White Brains On Toast. They were her favorite band. She’d even appeared in one of their music videos.
I said, "Shouldn't you be working?"
“Pia wanted to do her big scene early,” she said.
This was Pia Winters’s first movie. A former exotic dancer, she was newly upgraded with massive breast implants that she was eager to show off.
“I didn’t write her a big scene.”
“I know, but Geoff has this weird idea where he wants to see her grinding against a palm tree,” she approached the statue with a kind of awe, “I figured I’d let him get it out of his system so I could explore a little."
I asked, “What the Hell is up with this place? We could have just shot in the Philippines for a lot less.”
“This is better. Can’t you feel the atmosphere?”
“It smells like someone died here."
“Someone died everywhere,” With a mischievous grin, she patted the statue on the head and started trudging deeper into the jungle.
I followed her, swatting at the sickly, low-hanging branches, “How did you hear about this place?”
“From my late hubby’s gambling buddies.”
“Where did he-" I slipped on a mossy cluster of stones and fell on my face, "Damnit!"
"Peter!" she was at my side, helping me to sit up.
“Damnit." I said again.
“Clumsy," She laughed, brushing off my face.
I hoped the dirt would hide my blushing, “I was watching your backside instead of where I was going.”
“You should have used that line in the script,” she stood back up and started walking again. "Come on, not much further. There's something I want you to see."
Not much further turned out to be an hour of walking, mostly uphill. Occasionally, one or two of those goofy goats would follow and keep pace with us, only to wander off into the jungle after a little while. It was miserably hot, and there wasn't even the slightest trace of a breeze. In case you hadn't already guessed, we writer types usually aren't in the best of shape. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but for every Ernest Hemingway, you have about twenty other vaguely gourd-shaped men like me.
I did my best to keep pace with her and distracted myself from being out of breath by remembering the night she invited me over to her place. The night she cooked me steak while I made strong margaritas.
At first, I'd said no to the whole proposal. I prefer to write adventures, not have them. Besides, I was planning on devoting some more time to my novel in progress, The Black Rider. It was a Western epic in the tradition of Lonesome Dove but with ninjas. I'd been working on it for almost seven years, and it was about halfway done.
After a good meal and lively conversation, we made love on her couch. I know. I know. It sounds ridiculous, but just believe me. I’m going to die, or worse, at sundown. I have no reason to pad out my sexual resume. Needless to say, after that, I was all in on the project.
As we made our way through the jungle, we passed by another dozen or so of those ugly little statues before we reached what was once a military base. It wasn’t much of a military base, mind you, just a rusted old Quonset hut and a handful of rotting olive-colored tents. It looked like the exterior set from M.A.S.H. had gone to Hell.
There was also even a Jeep, its tires flat, its body half-eaten by corrosion, and curious goats. It was parked in front of the dilapidated supply shed that would soon become my prison.
"What is this?” Even though the place was obviously long abandoned, I spoke in hushed tones.
"It was an army base during the Second World War. An entire platoon of men was stationed here. All but one of them died under mysterious circumstances."
“But of course.”
"Come on then." She started walking again, "The best part is up ahead."
I swung my arms in a gesture as sarcastic as it was wide, "Better than all this?"
She laughed, "Shut up and march."
"Yes ma'am!" I saluted. To my surprise, she took my hand as she led me back into the jungle. “Tell me more about these lawn gnomes from Hell.”
She flashed me that grin of hers again, then paused before one of the grotesque effigies, "The people of this island were the last stronghold of the cult of Ezerhodden.”
“Wait wait wait.” I said, “Ezerhodden is a real thing?”
“Yup. They had some very primal religious beliefs."
“Oh, they were Baptists.”
“Dork.” She punched me lightly in the arm and continued, “Every six years, they would hold a ceremony called ‘Grovulche.’ The entire community would paint their hands with goat blood and hunt each other through the jungle. It is kind of like a game of tag. The six winners of the contest would then be brought back to the village where they would play another game using symbols carved on pieces of petrified bark.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”
“Nope. Now five losers of this game were called the Zaartua. They would have their hair and teeth pulled out and then be buried alive beneath one of these.” She tapped the statue, “The winner would be taken to the Mouth of Ezerhodden and, after a ceremony called the Six Wounds Of Love, would be blessed with either wisdom, power, or life.”
I shook my head, “And where did you learn all this?”
“I read it in a book called The Nine Rebel Sermons. It was written by a Catholic missionary who visited the island in 1722. I got that from my late hubby’s gambling buddies too.”
I raised an eyebrow, “Ever thought about hunkering down with a Jane Austen novel?"
“Read 'em all. Come on. More to see.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Another hour of walking brought us to a clearing. The knee-high pale-green grass undulated slowly back and forth. In the center of the clearing was the squat stone rim of a well. It was made from the same material as those ugly statues. Strange hieroglyphics were carved all along the sides; there was the familiar triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center, but there were other symbols there, too.
Trembling with either terror or excitement, Lori approached it, “This is it. Just like the book said, The Mouth of Ezerhodden.”
The nauseating odor that permeated the island was stronger here; in fact, I was sure this was the source of it. Imagine the smell of a butcher shop mixed with the stink of an open sewer, then add a dash of the scent of your grandma's house. She drew closer, I followed, and it didn’t take me long to realize that the tall grass was hiding dozens of dead goats. Most were skeletons; some were pretty fresh. “This can’t be real. If it was someone would be here already, there would be archeologists …documentary crews …tourists.”
She paused thoughtfully, “Can you imagine how this would look in camera?”
“Come on Lori, people aren’t going to watch this movie to see spooky old ruins. They want to see boobies and monsters. In that order."
She was at the edge of the well now. She peered down into the depths of the well. “Maybe I want to make a more lasting impression on the world.”
I risked a glimpse down into the murky depths. The air wafting up the stone shaft was hot. There was this thick, sloshing noise down there. Something glistened in the shadows. My heart started to pound, I turned away, and I was violently sick.
When I was done, I begged, “Please, can we go back now?”
“Poor thing,” she got me to my feet and led me back to the boat just as it started to rain. She was quiet and thoughtful the whole way back.
We found the director looking ragged and pissed off. He immediately started to complain about the film’s big star just up and disappearing, but Lori waved him off.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we called it a day and retired to the Polaris’ cramped quarters. Lori turned in early, and the rest of us spent the night, swapping stories, smoking cigarettes, snacking on breakfast bars, and drinking cheap wine. After a few raucous hours, I boozily decided to turn in. Lori had a little cabin all to herself near the front of the ship. I considered knocking on her door, but thought better of it. Instead, I lay down on my designated bunk and let the sounds of falling rain and lapping ocean lull me to sleep.
The dream that came to me came with a strange stomach-churning feeling of deja vu.
I was standing in the middle of the street in a ruined city. I wandered for a time, utterly alone and lost. In the distance, I could hear a rhythmic thudding; like an army on the march, there was a disjointedness to the cadence, giving a sense of something broken.
And then I saw them, a crowd moving down the street, wizened figures in tuxedos, their heads were bald, their faces set in toothless grins. They carried an elaborate, jewel-encrusted litter on their shoulders. It pitched and yawed with their movements.
The figure riding in the litter wore a goat-like mask with long curved horns. A symbol was carved on the forehead, a diamond with a dot in the center. The figure spied me and began to sing sweetly. The words made no sense, but the voice was familiar as the telltale sting of a paper cut.
I snapped awake.
My pillowcase was soaked with sweat; I spent a few panicked moments trying to remember where I was and why I was there. The gentle rumble of my cabin-mate Bobby Burns snoring helped me get my bearings.
I checked my watch. It was almost 3 AM. I tried to relax and go back to sleep, but when I closed my eyes, all I could still see was the dream, vivid and bright. So, I got on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed up onto the deck. It had stopped raining, and the sky was cloudless. The full moon looked swollen and was tinged with green. It was bright enough to read by. Leaning on the aft railing, I stared at it for a while and ran the events of the nightmare over and over in my head, examining and interpolating them until they had lost their disturbing qualities.
After a while, I became aware of this thumping, sloshing noise. It was coming from right below me. Visions of The Creature from the Black Lagoon started bubbling to the surface of my mind. I looked down and saw one of the two inflatable rafts the Polaris crew was using to shuttle us back and forth to the island.
But there had been two.
Where was the other one?
Something about it began to worry me. Had it become untethered and floated away? If so, how long would it take for us to shuttle the talent and equipment back and forth with just one boat? I took a stroll from one end of the boat to another in hopes of spotting the thing. No such luck. So I decided to head up to the bridge and let the captain know.
Halfway there, a member of the crew stepped out of the shadows. He had a hunting knife in his hand and he gestured wildly with it as he spoke, “What you do here? Crew only on deck at night! You go down below.”
I choked and blundered over my words, “I think… you see… I…”
"You get down below!” his breath was rank with alcohol, and the something else I couldn't place. Something vaguely unsavory.
“Yeah,” I said, “I get the idea…crew only. Listen, one of your boats is missing…”
"We know." He gave me a gentle poke with the point of his knife to signal the conversation was over. Then he turned and made his way to the bridge, “You go back to sleep. We take care of everything."
I retreated down below, cringing and frightened. I didn’t like the way he talked to me. I didn’t like this island. I didn’t like any of this. I went right to Lori’s cabin and knocked on her door. There was no answer. There was no answer.
Freaking out just a little bit more, I tried the door handle; it wasn’t locked, so I stepped inside. All her clothes and things were still in her suitcase. There were papers strewn about the bed and a thick old book lying on the pillow. I glanced at the title, I Nove Sermoni Ribelli.
I picked it up and flipped through it. Was this the Nine Rebel Sermons? Was this thing really over 250 years old? As I flipped through the pages, wondering at the tiny print and grotesque illustrations, a slip of paper fell out. It was Lori’s handwriting, and it this is what it said;
“The pit was the length and width of a man. From it the avatar of Ezerhodden rose up from the Screaming Nowhere. It was pale and fierce and was a salamander in its extremity. It looked upon the world of man but spoke to the stars. It cast runes upon the stones that blasphemed against death. From within his mouth he feasts on the beloved.”
”What are you doing in here?"
My breath caught, and my hand flew to my chest. It was Lori, ”Having a heart attack thank you very much. Haven't you ever heard of knocking?"
"Peter. You're in my room." She brushed past me. Her sneakers and jeans were caked with mud, one of her fingernails was cracked.
“Oh… Yeah.”
Heedless of my presence, she began to get undressed, slipping the light blouse over her head. She was braless as always, "Was there something wrong?"
"No, it’s just that I was - I am - worried about you." It all seemed so stupid now. Was I really going to tell her that I got spooked because I had a bad dream? I decided to go with more Earthly concerns, "I don't trust the crew of this boat. I think they're up to no good."
She kicked off her shoes, "You're being paranoid."
"One of them waved a knife at me!"
Groaning with exasperation, she sat me down on the bed with a good hard shove, "I know what's really bothering you."
I tried to keep eye contact, but my eyes kept wandering, "Lori, I’m serious. None of this feels right.”
"This is really about what happened back at my place, isn't it?" She strolled over and closed the door to her cabin, shucking her stained jeans on the way back. "You think I only slept with you to get you to help me out."
"Yes. I mean no. I mean-”
"Peter . . . " she caressed my face, ". . . I care about you. More than you realize."
"Can't you see-" she shut me up with a kiss. Her books and notes ended up on the floor, along with the comforter and the sheets.
If I close my eyes, I can still remember how her nails felt on my skin, the way the broken one hurt just a little, and how it made me shiver. When it all ends I’m going to try and keep that moment in my mind, use it to block out everything else. I doubt it will be enough to keep me from screaming.
After it was over, we lay together on the bed, and she spoke in a whisper, "I'll tell you something I haven't told anyone else. This is my last movie.”
Then we were silent. Sleep came soon enough.
The morning found the missing boat back where it belonged. I made a joke to Lori about the captain using it to go fishing. She didn’t laugh.
The day's filming went pretty well. There was plenty of sunlight, and Bobby Burns managed to get through his lines without sounding like a brain-damaged robot.
When he and Lori started working on their ‘love scene’ I had to walk away. I knew I had no right to be possessive or jealous, that this was just acting. But I still had to be somewhere else.
To keep my mind occupied, I tried to piece through my experiences here. If it all had been a movie, what kind of movie would it be? I kept wandering until I found another one of the statues.
For some reason, the face of it was covered with black flies. They buzzed away as I approached. The symbol on the forehead of this one was a circle with an open semicircle at the top and an X at the bottom. There was a dark, gummy-looking ruby-colored substance smeared across it. I stared at it for a long while.
By the time I got back to the others, Lori's scene was over, and Claudia Tate was working on some topless close-ups. Geoff James had decided her soliloquy would play better if she popped her top halfway through. Decisions like this was why he made the big bucks.
When that scene wrapped one of the lighting guys happened to glance out onto the horizon and asked, "Hey! Where the hell is the boat?"
That's right kids, the Polaris had set off without us. I heard a mocking voice in my head, “We take care of everything.”
The sun was beginning to set, and things quickly degenerated into a full-scale panic. We had no shelter, no supplies, no food, no nothing. As the old song said, “…not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be…”
Lori took charge and led us through the jungle to the abandoned military base. At the very least, it was a roof over our heads. After some brief discussions about signal fires and searching for food, the cast of Island Fury settled down in the main Quonset hut for the night. Not one of the twelve of us gave even the slightest thought to posting someone on guard duty.
After all, this is a deserted island, right?
After hours of sleep, I awoke to find myself lying next to the key grip and the best boy. I cautiously got up and walked gingerly around the cast and crew. Sickly moonlight shone in through the windows of the Quonset hut. I searched the slumbering shapes for some sign of Lori but couldn’t see her.
I had to relieve myself, and it seemed like a good idea to do my business at the edge of the camp. I stumbled over jutting roots and prickly brambles until I was at the tree line. Then, I did what came naturally. It wasn't until I was finished that I noticed the toppled statue.
Half concealed by a mound of freshly disturbed Earth, it lay on its back, gaping at the stars. I drew closer, wondering if I should try to set it right. I touched the stone. It was warm and clammy. Not cold like before. I wondered who had done this, a clumsy actor or a belligerent goat. Maybe it had fallen over on its own?
A sudden creeping sensation up the back of my neck alerted me to the fact I wasn't alone. A twig snapped. I turned, "Lori will you please stop sneaking up on --"
The shape before me was human but withered; its leathery-looking skin was a muddy gray, its bald head was marked with old scars, and its toothless mouth gaped. In its left hand, it held a goat horn; one end was bloodied, the other sharpened to a point.
The Zaartua! Then I was running through the jungle, fumbling blindly through the trees and bushes. Every statue I came across was askew or toppled over. Dead goats were everywhere, their throats slit, their horns removed.
Somehow my wild flight brought me to the clearing with Ezerhodden’s Well. The stench was worse now. The air was filled with a thick sloshing. I risked a glance backward; a pair of Zaartua were shambling after me like they had all the time in the world. The only noise they made was the crackle of their dead joints flexing.
I let them get a little closer and then feinted around them and doubled back into the jungle. I found my way back to the camp, hoping for safety in numbers. What I found made me stop dead in my tracks.
Damn that full moon. How I wish it had been cloudy that night, that the shadows had been dark and long enough to hide the carnage.
The Zaartua had made quick work of the cast and crew of Island Fury. I saw Claudia Tate, her flesh hanging torn and loose as she staggered and swayed with the animal urge to survive. Her tormenter shuffled behind her, content to watch her die slowly.
There was the high-pitched screaming of Bobby Burns. The Zaartua swarmed over where he had fallen. They raised their makeshift blades and brought them down again and again.
Geoff James was backed into the wall of the Quonset Hut, swinging one of the boom mikes wildly, trying to hold off his attackers, but there were too many of them.
Blood. Howls of terror. The Zaartua were relentless in their bloodlust. Soon enough, I was surrounded and screaming for mercy.
"No!" I heard Lori shout.
I turned on my heel to see her standing in the clearing. The captain and his machete-wielding mates flanked her.
"He isn't for you." She said, and with that, mummified shapes brushed past me, looking for fresh prey.
“Lori?" I tried to find words, but my mind and my body were too exhausted.
"Lock him in the supply shed,” She nodded to the Captain, her tone threatening. “Treat him gently."
I didn't resist as I was marched to the supply shed. A brand new padlock had been installed on the door. I heard it click into place once I was alone in the dark. I whispered, “Help.” to no one in particular and then curled into a ball on the floor.
The next morning Lori came to see me. She had a handful of breakfast bars in her hand.
"Hungry?" she asked.
"No." I doubted I'd ever be hungry again.
She knelt beside me; instinctively, I withdrew from her proximity. "Ezerhodden is real, Peter. He made me promises."
"You did all this?"
"He spoke to me in my dreams. He knew my desperation and revealed to me his need.”
"Stop talking like that!" I flashed with anger, “You’re a B-Movie actress, not Anton LeVey."
“Every sixth year Ezerhodden crawls closer to our world. He casts avatars out from the Screaming Nowhere, but someday he will truly walk among us." She closed her eyes and shuddered, “Then the true Harvest will begin as was prophesied.”
"Why are you doing this?"
"I have ovarian cancer." There were tears in her eyes, "I found out three months ago."
“No… that’s not…” Now there were tears in my eyes, but we were both beyond weeping.
She said, “It's too far gone for the doctors to do anything. It’s in my bones and my spine.” “Oh my God Lori…”
“Ezerhodden has promised me new life.”
I thought of the Zaartua, “You can’t want to be turned into one of those… one of those things!”
“There are other ways and forms,” she kissed my forehead and stood. “All I have to do is submit to the Six Wounds of Love.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question, but I had to ask, “What is that?”
“The Zaartua will scar me five times, each deeper than the last, then… then I will take someone beloved to me to the Well of Ezerhodden and surrender them to the avatar that dwells within.” She closed the door behind her. There was a rustle as the padlock was put back into place.
I went crazy for a little while after that. Trashing the place, looking for something to help me escape. Screaming all the while. I found a hammer and smashed out the windows, but they were too small for me to get through. I thought about using it, or maybe a screwdriver for a weapon, but what good would that do against those things?
Finally, I found this notebook in one of the lower drawers. Some soldier from back in the day had been using it to keep track of inventory, so I decided to put pen to paper one last time and let the world know what happened here.
That brings us full circle.
It’s dusk now. I’ve been listening to the sound of Lori’s screams all day, but now she’s quiet. The ritual of the Six Wounds must be drawing to a close.
My heart is sick to think of her in pain. I want to hate her, but I just can’t. When they finally come for me I am going to try and reason with her one last time. But I’m not holding out much hope for a ‘Love Conquers All’ Hollywood ending.
Like I said before, the writer always gets the shaft.
***
None of the cast or crew of Island Fury were ever found. There is no record of any ship matching the description of the Polaris.

Island Fury
by
Al Bruno III
The following document was written by Peter LaRoche and was found during the Boggs International survey of the island of Kuen-Yuin. (11.5462° N, 162.3522° E)
***
It's the golden rule of Hollywood. The writer always gets the shaft. The producers get all the money; the actors get all the fame, the director gets to put his vision on the screen, and the people behind the scenes get paid and don’t have to give a damn but the writer? The writer pours his guts out onto the page, and if he's lucky, he sees twenty percent of what he wrote make it through the Hollywood grinder. If he's really lucky, he gets paid what he's worth.
That's my story in a nutshell. A month ago, I was in a mansion, sipping margaritas and talking about art to a woman I had been a little bit in love with for years. Now I'm alone, locked in a supply shed, and listening to her scream. I'm writing this with a ballpoint pen on a forty-something-year-old notebook. I'm trying to get it all down while there's still sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.
Someone has to know what happened here, and I guess that’s you.
Let me begin at the beginning.
It was a year after my graduation from Pratt University when I decided to move to Hollywood and make my fortune. I had already sold a pair of spec scripts and a few short stories to some literary magazines. The spec scripts had fallen through, and the literary magazines had mostly been purchased by the contributors, but I was young and stupid. Within a few months of my arrival in Tinsel Town, I was working in retail part time and not making nearly enough to cover my expenses.
I started looking for other ways to use my writing talent to earn cash. You know, ad copy, non-fiction articles for in-flight magazines, movie novelizations, and the occasional bit of erotica for Monarch Magazine’s Lusty Letters To The Editors.
What, did you think those were real?
Word of mouth that I was fast, cheap, and slightly smutty brought me to the attention of Olympus International Cinema.
You may not have heard of Olympus International Cinema, but trust me, if you’ve ever been channel surfing at three in the morning, you’ve at least glimpsed one of their productions.
Heart of Sharkness, Bikini Bar Mitzvah, The Adventures of Cosmo and Quack, Reggie and the Reckless Reptile, Sword Damsels In Space, Beach Blanket Beasts, The Cannibal Cloud of Daytona, The Butcher Brigade, Foxes In Boxes, and of course Tombs of the Blonde Dead. Olympus International Cinema was responsible for all those films and more. Each one featuring a cast of naive starlets and faded celebrities.
The studio was owned by former Monarch Magazine Duchess of the Year Lori Sandovar. If you are of a man of a certain generation the mere mention of her name will send blood rushing to all the right places.
Unbeknownst to most people, the lovely raven-haired Miss Sandovar wasn’t just a performer in several of Olympus International Cinema’s direct-to-video extravaganzas; she was also the owner and producer. She’d inherited the studio from her third husband. It had been a pretty rinky dink operation back then, mostly making training and educational films, but she turned the company into something very different and very profitable.
Lori was responsible for plucking yours truly from literary oblivion and making me Olympus International Cinema's wordsmith of choice. Those were her words, not mine, by the way.
I’ll never forget the day she asked me to work for her; she said she loved my writing. She even had a copy of a literary magazine one of my stories had appeared in. She asked me to autograph it. How could I not fall in love with her a little after that?
She never really paid me what I was worth but there’s something to be said for steady employment. Working for her wasn’t easy; she was as driven and ruthless as she was beautiful and limber. I was, at times, turning out a script every two months, and they weren’t always great, but she always accepted them. She was a lot nicer to me than she was to her other writers. And actors. And directors. And craft services.
Olympus International Cinema’s newest project was a film called Island Fury. The script was written by yours truly, and it was to be a sex comedy that takes a hard left turn into horror in the third act. The plot was like this: during World War II, a handsome American Pilot crash lands on an uncharted island populated by sexy lesbian goat farmers. Lewd logic quickly ensues, and suddenly, the women are all fighting, then gently grinding, over our hero.
Unfortunately, in the throes of their lust, the women have forgotten their pledge to sacrifice some of their livestock to the creature that lives on the island with them. A stop motion monstrosity to be added later called Ezerhodden the Harvest Fiend.
Lori was very specific about how she wanted this film to be made, and she was painfully specific about the script. I was still re-writing the damn thing on my trusty Smith Corona typewriter when we dropped anchor near the deserted island she’d chosen for filming.
The island she’d chosen was a little flyspeck of a place, too unimportant to be claimed by anyone. It was half jungle and half beach and not much of anything else. She’d scouted it out months earlier, and the night she’d half cajoled, half ordered me to travel with her team to the location, she’d shown me some Polaroids of the place. It was overrun with albino goats and dotted with strange little statues. They were a bit Easter Island, a bit Aztec, and a whole lot of H.R. Geiger.
Do you remember making shrunken apple head dolls in school? Do they still do that? Well, if you do, remember that is just what they looked like. Desiccated little stone faces scowling gleefully.
The privately chartered ship that brought us there was called the Polaris. It was a cargo vessel that was at least seventy years past its prime and boasted a crew of six men who looked like cousins.
Close cousins, if you know what I mean.
Our team consisted of one disgraced director, two cameramen, one lighting guy, one sound guy, five wannabe actresses of varying enhancement, one beefy bonehead straight off the casting couch, one tired, profoundly out-of-place scriptwriter, and lastly, a producer who was also one of the performers.
It took six trips on a pair of inflatable rafts to get everyone and our equipment to the island. The director, Geoff James, came on the last trip, and from the moment he set foot on the beach, he started yelling at the cameramen and rushing the cast to get ready. Wishing to avoid his coked-up wrath, the performers got busy. Our small team meant that they had to take care of their own makeup and costumes.
If you can consider furlined bikinis and an Air Force surplus jumpsuit costumes.
The cameramen worked hard to make use of the natural light and accentuate the strange beauty of the landscape while simultaneously keeping the piles of goat scat out of the shot.
You must be wondering why the Hell I was there. Lori had said she wanted a friend along, saying she wanted someone with half a brain to talk to while waiting for her scenes. I gotta say hearing her call me a friend was simultaneously thrilling and disheartening all at once.
A month ago she had called me other things. I wondered if it had just been the Margaritas talking.
Either way, I was standing there trying not to cringe as the pretty young cast mangled my precious dialogue. The director rarely did second takes, even when soft-core sensation Claudia Tate looked directly at the camera or when thick-headed thespian Bobby Burns mispronounced the word “Women.”
Did I mention the writer always gets the shaft?
As the skinny-dipping scene segued into a bout of mud wrestling, I excused myself to explore the island. You may find it hard to believe but watching people film other people having simulated sex is about as exciting as your average class in technical writing.
The island was strange. I know I said this before, but I don't think I've quite gotten across to you how strange. Pale, pink-eyed goats were everywhere. They watched me pass through their territory with dull-eyed curiosity. There were clouds of bloated black flies buzzing around here and there. The air was filled with this faint, sickly-sweet smell, just strong enough to tickle your gag reflex but not strong enough to be recognizable. I had been wandering for an hour or so when I spied a figure crouching up ahead. It was perfectly still, staring at me. I froze, my breath catching in my throat before I realized that it was another one of those weird statues.
It was about three feet tall, almost child-like in proportion. The head was wrinkled and misshapen. A strange symbol had been carved onto its forehead, a triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center. Despite the dry weather, the stone was clammy to the touch.
Yes, I touched the thing, don't ask me why.
"It's a grave marker,” Lori spoke softly from behind me. After a brief startled squeal, I turned to see her in her hiking boots, cutoff shorts, and a t-shirt with the logo for White Brains On Toast. They were her favorite band. She’d even appeared in one of their music videos.
I said, "Shouldn't you be working?"
“Pia wanted to do her big scene early,” she said.
This was Pia Winters’s first movie. A former exotic dancer, she was newly upgraded with massive breast implants that she was eager to show off.
“I didn’t write her a big scene.”
“I know, but Geoff has this weird idea where he wants to see her grinding against a palm tree,” she approached the statue with a kind of awe, “I figured I’d let him get it out of his system so I could explore a little."
I asked, “What the Hell is up with this place? We could have just shot in the Philippines for a lot less.”
“This is better. Can’t you feel the atmosphere?”
“It smells like someone died here."
“Someone died everywhere,” With a mischievous grin, she patted the statue on the head and started trudging deeper into the jungle.
I followed her, swatting at the sickly, low-hanging branches, “How did you hear about this place?”
“From my late hubby’s gambling buddies.”
“Where did he-" I slipped on a mossy cluster of stones and fell on my face, "Damnit!"
"Peter!" she was at my side, helping me to sit up.
“Damnit." I said again.
“Clumsy," She laughed, brushing off my face.
I hoped the dirt would hide my blushing, “I was watching your backside instead of where I was going.”
“You should have used that line in the script,” she stood back up and started walking again. "Come on, not much further. There's something I want you to see."
Not much further turned out to be an hour of walking, mostly uphill. Occasionally, one or two of those goofy goats would follow and keep pace with us, only to wander off into the jungle after a little while. It was miserably hot, and there wasn't even the slightest trace of a breeze. In case you hadn't already guessed, we writer types usually aren't in the best of shape. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but for every Ernest Hemingway, you have about twenty other vaguely gourd-shaped men like me.
I did my best to keep pace with her and distracted myself from being out of breath by remembering the night she invited me over to her place. The night she cooked me steak while I made strong margaritas.
At first, I'd said no to the whole proposal. I prefer to write adventures, not have them. Besides, I was planning on devoting some more time to my novel in progress, The Black Rider. It was a Western epic in the tradition of Lonesome Dove but with ninjas. I'd been working on it for almost seven years, and it was about halfway done.
After a good meal and lively conversation, we made love on her couch. I know. I know. It sounds ridiculous, but just believe me. I’m going to die, or worse, at sundown. I have no reason to pad out my sexual resume. Needless to say, after that, I was all in on the project.
As we made our way through the jungle, we passed by another dozen or so of those ugly little statues before we reached what was once a military base. It wasn’t much of a military base, mind you, just a rusted old Quonset hut and a handful of rotting olive-colored tents. It looked like the exterior set from M.A.S.H. had gone to Hell.
There was also even a Jeep, its tires flat, its body half-eaten by corrosion, and curious goats. It was parked in front of the dilapidated supply shed that would soon become my prison.
"What is this?” Even though the place was obviously long abandoned, I spoke in hushed tones.
"It was an army base during the Second World War. An entire platoon of men was stationed here. All but one of them died under mysterious circumstances."
“But of course.”
"Come on then." She started walking again, "The best part is up ahead."
I swung my arms in a gesture as sarcastic as it was wide, "Better than all this?"
She laughed, "Shut up and march."
"Yes ma'am!" I saluted. To my surprise, she took my hand as she led me back into the jungle. “Tell me more about these lawn gnomes from Hell.”
She flashed me that grin of hers again, then paused before one of the grotesque effigies, "The people of this island were the last stronghold of the cult of Ezerhodden.”
“Wait wait wait.” I said, “Ezerhodden is a real thing?”
“Yup. They had some very primal religious beliefs."
“Oh, they were Baptists.”
“Dork.” She punched me lightly in the arm and continued, “Every six years, they would hold a ceremony called ‘Grovulche.’ The entire community would paint their hands with goat blood and hunt each other through the jungle. It is kind of like a game of tag. The six winners of the contest would then be brought back to the village where they would play another game using symbols carved on pieces of petrified bark.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”
“Nope. Now five losers of this game were called the Zaartua. They would have their hair and teeth pulled out and then be buried alive beneath one of these.” She tapped the statue, “The winner would be taken to the Mouth of Ezerhodden and, after a ceremony called the Six Wounds Of Love, would be blessed with either wisdom, power, or life.”
I shook my head, “And where did you learn all this?”
“I read it in a book called The Nine Rebel Sermons. It was written by a Catholic missionary who visited the island in 1722. I got that from my late hubby’s gambling buddies too.”
I raised an eyebrow, “Ever thought about hunkering down with a Jane Austen novel?"
“Read 'em all. Come on. More to see.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Another hour of walking brought us to a clearing. The knee-high pale-green grass undulated slowly back and forth. In the center of the clearing was the squat stone rim of a well. It was made from the same material as those ugly statues. Strange hieroglyphics were carved all along the sides; there was the familiar triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center, but there were other symbols there, too.
Trembling with either terror or excitement, Lori approached it, “This is it. Just like the book said, The Mouth of Ezerhodden.”
The nauseating odor that permeated the island was stronger here; in fact, I was sure this was the source of it. Imagine the smell of a butcher shop mixed with the stink of an open sewer, then add a dash of the scent of your grandma's house. She drew closer, I followed, and it didn’t take me long to realize that the tall grass was hiding dozens of dead goats. Most were skeletons; some were pretty fresh. “This can’t be real. If it was someone would be here already, there would be archeologists …documentary crews …tourists.”
She paused thoughtfully, “Can you imagine how this would look in camera?”
“Come on Lori, people aren’t going to watch this movie to see spooky old ruins. They want to see boobies and monsters. In that order."
She was at the edge of the well now. She peered down into the depths of the well. “Maybe I want to make a more lasting impression on the world.”
I risked a glimpse down into the murky depths. The air wafting up the stone shaft was hot. There was this thick, sloshing noise down there. Something glistened in the shadows. My heart started to pound, I turned away, and I was violently sick.
When I was done, I begged, “Please, can we go back now?”
“Poor thing,” she got me to my feet and led me back to the boat just as it started to rain. She was quiet and thoughtful the whole way back.
We found the director looking ragged and pissed off. He immediately started to complain about the film’s big star just up and disappearing, but Lori waved him off.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we called it a day and retired to the Polaris’ cramped quarters. Lori turned in early, and the rest of us spent the night, swapping stories, smoking cigarettes, snacking on breakfast bars, and drinking cheap wine. After a few raucous hours, I boozily decided to turn in. Lori had a little cabin all to herself near the front of the ship. I considered knocking on her door, but thought better of it. Instead, I lay down on my designated bunk and let the sounds of falling rain and lapping ocean lull me to sleep.
The dream that came to me came with a strange stomach-churning feeling of deja vu.
I was standing in the middle of the street in a ruined city. I wandered for a time, utterly alone and lost. In the distance, I could hear a rhythmic thudding; like an army on the march, there was a disjointedness to the cadence, giving a sense of something broken.
And then I saw them, a crowd moving down the street, wizened figures in tuxedos, their heads were bald, their faces set in toothless grins. They carried an elaborate, jewel-encrusted litter on their shoulders. It pitched and yawed with their movements.
The figure riding in the litter wore a goat-like mask with long curved horns. A symbol was carved on the forehead, a diamond with a dot in the center. The figure spied me and began to sing sweetly. The words made no sense, but the voice was familiar as the telltale sting of a paper cut.
I snapped awake.
My pillowcase was soaked with sweat; I spent a few panicked moments trying to remember where I was and why I was there. The gentle rumble of my cabin-mate Bobby Burns snoring helped me get my bearings.
I checked my watch. It was almost 3 AM. I tried to relax and go back to sleep, but when I closed my eyes, all I could still see was the dream, vivid and bright. So, I got on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed up onto the deck. It had stopped raining, and the sky was cloudless. The full moon looked swollen and was tinged with green. It was bright enough to read by. Leaning on the aft railing, I stared at it for a while and ran the events of the nightmare over and over in my head, examining and interpolating them until they had lost their disturbing qualities.
After a while, I became aware of this thumping, sloshing noise. It was coming from right below me. Visions of The Creature from the Black Lagoon started bubbling to the surface of my mind. I looked down and saw one of the two inflatable rafts the Polaris crew was using to shuttle us back and forth to the island.
But there had been two.
Where was the other one?
Something about it began to worry me. Had it become untethered and floated away? If so, how long would it take for us to shuttle the talent and equipment back and forth with just one boat? I took a stroll from one end of the boat to another in hopes of spotting the thing. No such luck. So I decided to head up to the bridge and let the captain know.
Halfway there, a member of the crew stepped out of the shadows. He had a hunting knife in his hand and he gestured wildly with it as he spoke, “What you do here? Crew only on deck at night! You go down below.”
I choked and blundered over my words, “I think… you see… I…”
"You get down below!” his breath was rank with alcohol, and the something else I couldn't place. Something vaguely unsavory.
“Yeah,” I said, “I get the idea…crew only. Listen, one of your boats is missing…”
"We know." He gave me a gentle poke with the point of his knife to signal the conversation was over. Then he turned and made his way to the bridge, “You go back to sleep. We take care of everything."
I retreated down below, cringing and frightened. I didn’t like the way he talked to me. I didn’t like this island. I didn’t like any of this. I went right to Lori’s cabin and knocked on her door. There was no answer. There was no answer.
Freaking out just a little bit more, I tried the door handle; it wasn’t locked, so I stepped inside. All her clothes and things were still in her suitcase. There were papers strewn about the bed and a thick old book lying on the pillow. I glanced at the title, I Nove Sermoni Ribelli.
I picked it up and flipped through it. Was this the Nine Rebel Sermons? Was this thing really over 250 years old? As I flipped through the pages, wondering at the tiny print and grotesque illustrations, a slip of paper fell out. It was Lori’s handwriting, and it this is what it said;
“The pit was the length and width of a man. From it the avatar of Ezerhodden rose up from the Screaming Nowhere. It was pale and fierce and was a salamander in its extremity. It looked upon the world of man but spoke to the stars. It cast runes upon the stones that blasphemed against death. From within his mouth he feasts on the beloved.”
”What are you doing in here?"
My breath caught, and my hand flew to my chest. It was Lori, ”Having a heart attack thank you very much. Haven't you ever heard of knocking?"
"Peter. You're in my room." She brushed past me. Her sneakers and jeans were caked with mud, one of her fingernails was cracked.
“Oh… Yeah.”
Heedless of my presence, she began to get undressed, slipping the light blouse over her head. She was braless as always, "Was there something wrong?"
"No, it’s just that I was - I am - worried about you." It all seemed so stupid now. Was I really going to tell her that I got spooked because I had a bad dream? I decided to go with more Earthly concerns, "I don't trust the crew of this boat. I think they're up to no good."
She kicked off her shoes, "You're being paranoid."
"One of them waved a knife at me!"
Groaning with exasperation, she sat me down on the bed with a good hard shove, "I know what's really bothering you."
I tried to keep eye contact, but my eyes kept wandering, "Lori, I’m serious. None of this feels right.”
"This is really about what happened back at my place, isn't it?" She strolled over and closed the door to her cabin, shucking her stained jeans on the way back. "You think I only slept with you to get you to help me out."
"Yes. I mean no. I mean-”
"Peter . . . " she caressed my face, ". . . I care about you. More than you realize."
"Can't you see-" she shut me up with a kiss. Her books and notes ended up on the floor, along with the comforter and the sheets.
If I close my eyes, I can still remember how her nails felt on my skin, the way the broken one hurt just a little, and how it made me shiver. When it all ends I’m going to try and keep that moment in my mind, use it to block out everything else. I doubt it will be enough to keep me from screaming.
After it was over, we lay together on the bed, and she spoke in a whisper, "I'll tell you something I haven't told anyone else. This is my last movie.”
Then we were silent. Sleep came soon enough.
The morning found the missing boat back where it belonged. I made a joke to Lori about the captain using it to go fishing. She didn’t laugh.
The day's filming went pretty well. There was plenty of sunlight, and Bobby Burns managed to get through his lines without sounding like a brain-damaged robot.
When he and Lori started working on their ‘love scene’ I had to walk away. I knew I had no right to be possessive or jealous, that this was just acting. But I still had to be somewhere else.
To keep my mind occupied, I tried to piece through my experiences here. If it all had been a movie, what kind of movie would it be? I kept wandering until I found another one of the statues.
For some reason, the face of it was covered with black flies. They buzzed away as I approached. The symbol on the forehead of this one was a circle with an open semicircle at the top and an X at the bottom. There was a dark, gummy-looking ruby-colored substance smeared across it. I stared at it for a long while.
By the time I got back to the others, Lori's scene was over, and Claudia Tate was working on some topless close-ups. Geoff James had decided her soliloquy would play better if she popped her top halfway through. Decisions like this was why he made the big bucks.
When that scene wrapped one of the lighting guys happened to glance out onto the horizon and asked, "Hey! Where the hell is the boat?"
That's right kids, the Polaris had set off without us. I heard a mocking voice in my head, “We take care of everything.”
The sun was beginning to set, and things quickly degenerated into a full-scale panic. We had no shelter, no supplies, no food, no nothing. As the old song said, “…not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be…”
Lori took charge and led us through the jungle to the abandoned military base. At the very least, it was a roof over our heads. After some brief discussions about signal fires and searching for food, the cast of Island Fury settled down in the main Quonset hut for the night. Not one of the twelve of us gave even the slightest thought to posting someone on guard duty.
After all, this is a deserted island, right?
After hours of sleep, I awoke to find myself lying next to the key grip and the best boy. I cautiously got up and walked gingerly around the cast and crew. Sickly moonlight shone in through the windows of the Quonset hut. I searched the slumbering shapes for some sign of Lori but couldn’t see her.
I had to relieve myself, and it seemed like a good idea to do my business at the edge of the camp. I stumbled over jutting roots and prickly brambles until I was at the tree line. Then, I did what came naturally. It wasn't until I was finished that I noticed the toppled statue.
Half concealed by a mound of freshly disturbed Earth, it lay on its back, gaping at the stars. I drew closer, wondering if I should try to set it right. I touched the stone. It was warm and clammy. Not cold like before. I wondered who had done this, a clumsy actor or a belligerent goat. Maybe it had fallen over on its own?
A sudden creeping sensation up the back of my neck alerted me to the fact I wasn't alone. A twig snapped. I turned, "Lori will you please stop sneaking up on --"
The shape before me was human but withered; its leathery-looking skin was a muddy gray, its bald head was marked with old scars, and its toothless mouth gaped. In its left hand, it held a goat horn; one end was bloodied, the other sharpened to a point.
The Zaartua! Then I was running through the jungle, fumbling blindly through the trees and bushes. Every statue I came across was askew or toppled over. Dead goats were everywhere, their throats slit, their horns removed.
Somehow my wild flight brought me to the clearing with Ezerhodden’s Well. The stench was worse now. The air was filled with a thick sloshing. I risked a glance backward; a pair of Zaartua were shambling after me like they had all the time in the world. The only noise they made was the crackle of their dead joints flexing.
I let them get a little closer and then feinted around them and doubled back into the jungle. I found my way back to the camp, hoping for safety in numbers. What I found made me stop dead in my tracks.
Damn that full moon. How I wish it had been cloudy that night, that the shadows had been dark and long enough to hide the carnage.
The Zaartua had made quick work of the cast and crew of Island Fury. I saw Claudia Tate, her flesh hanging torn and loose as she staggered and swayed with the animal urge to survive. Her tormenter shuffled behind her, content to watch her die slowly.
There was the high-pitched screaming of Bobby Burns. The Zaartua swarmed over where he had fallen. They raised their makeshift blades and brought them down again and again.
Geoff James was backed into the wall of the Quonset Hut, swinging one of the boom mikes wildly, trying to hold off his attackers, but there were too many of them.
Blood. Howls of terror. The Zaartua were relentless in their bloodlust. Soon enough, I was surrounded and screaming for mercy.
"No!" I heard Lori shout.
I turned on my heel to see her standing in the clearing. The captain and his machete-wielding mates flanked her.
"He isn't for you." She said, and with that, mummified shapes brushed past me, looking for fresh prey.
“Lori?" I tried to find words, but my mind and my body were too exhausted.
"Lock him in the supply shed,” She nodded to the Captain, her tone threatening. “Treat him gently."
I didn't resist as I was marched to the supply shed. A brand new padlock had been installed on the door. I heard it click into place once I was alone in the dark. I whispered, “Help.” to no one in particular and then curled into a ball on the floor.
The next morning Lori came to see me. She had a handful of breakfast bars in her hand.
"Hungry?" she asked.
"No." I doubted I'd ever be hungry again.
She knelt beside me; instinctively, I withdrew from her proximity. "Ezerhodden is real, Peter. He made me promises."
"You did all this?"
"He spoke to me in my dreams. He knew my desperation and revealed to me his need.”
"Stop talking like that!" I flashed with anger, “You’re a B-Movie actress, not Anton LeVey."
“Every sixth year Ezerhodden crawls closer to our world. He casts avatars out from the Screaming Nowhere, but someday he will truly walk among us." She closed her eyes and shuddered, “Then the true Harvest will begin as was prophesied.”
"Why are you doing this?"
"I have ovarian cancer." There were tears in her eyes, "I found out three months ago."
“No… that’s not…” Now there were tears in my eyes, but we were both beyond weeping.
She said, “It's too far gone for the doctors to do anything. It’s in my bones and my spine.” “Oh my God Lori…”
“Ezerhodden has promised me new life.”
I thought of the Zaartua, “You can’t want to be turned into one of those… one of those things!”
“There are other ways and forms,” she kissed my forehead and stood. “All I have to do is submit to the Six Wounds of Love.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question, but I had to ask, “What is that?”
“The Zaartua will scar me five times, each deeper than the last, then… then I will take someone beloved to me to the Well of Ezerhodden and surrender them to the avatar that dwells within.” She closed the door behind her. There was a rustle as the padlock was put back into place.
I went crazy for a little while after that. Trashing the place, looking for something to help me escape. Screaming all the while. I found a hammer and smashed out the windows, but they were too small for me to get through. I thought about using it, or maybe a screwdriver for a weapon, but what good would that do against those things?
Finally, I found this notebook in one of the lower drawers. Some soldier from back in the day had been using it to keep track of inventory, so I decided to put pen to paper one last time and let the world know what happened here.
That brings us full circle.
It’s dusk now. I’ve been listening to the sound of Lori’s screams all day, but now she’s quiet. The ritual of the Six Wounds must be drawing to a close.
My heart is sick to think of her in pain. I want to hate her, but I just can’t. When they finally come for me I am going to try and reason with her one last time. But I’m not holding out much hope for a ‘Love Conquers All’ Hollywood ending.
Like I said before, the writer always gets the shaft.
***
None of the cast or crew of Island Fury were ever found. There is no record of any ship matching the description of the Polaris.

Island Fury
by
Al Bruno III
The following document was written by Peter LaRoche and was found during the Boggs International survey of the island of Kuen-Yuin. (11.5462° N, 162.3522° E)
***
It's the golden rule of Hollywood. The writer always gets the shaft. The producers get all the money; the actors get all the fame, the director gets to put his vision on the screen, and the people behind the scenes get paid and don’t have to give a damn but the writer? The writer pours his guts out onto the page, and if he's lucky, he sees twenty percent of what he wrote make it through the Hollywood grinder. If he's really lucky, he gets paid what he's worth.
That's my story in a nutshell. A month ago, I was in a mansion, sipping margaritas and talking about art to a woman I had been a little bit in love with for years. Now I'm alone, locked in a supply shed, and listening to her scream. I'm writing this with a ballpoint pen on a forty-something-year-old notebook. I'm trying to get it all down while there's still sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.
Someone has to know what happened here, and I guess that’s you.
Let me begin at the beginning.
It was a year after my graduation from Pratt University when I decided to move to Hollywood and make my fortune. I had already sold a pair of spec scripts and a few short stories to some literary magazines. The spec scripts had fallen through, and the literary magazines had mostly been purchased by the contributors, but I was young and stupid. Within a few months of my arrival in Tinsel Town, I was working in retail part time and not making nearly enough to cover my expenses.
I started looking for other ways to use my writing talent to earn cash. You know, ad copy, non-fiction articles for in-flight magazines, movie novelizations, and the occasional bit of erotica for Monarch Magazine’s Lusty Letters To The Editors.
What, did you think those were real?
Word of mouth that I was fast, cheap, and slightly smutty brought me to the attention of Olympus International Cinema.
You may not have heard of Olympus International Cinema, but trust me, if you’ve ever been channel surfing at three in the morning, you’ve at least glimpsed one of their productions.
Heart of Sharkness, Bikini Bar Mitzvah, The Adventures of Cosmo and Quack, Reggie and the Reckless Reptile, Sword Damsels In Space, Beach Blanket Beasts, The Cannibal Cloud of Daytona, The Butcher Brigade, Foxes In Boxes, and of course Tombs of the Blonde Dead. Olympus International Cinema was responsible for all those films and more. Each one featuring a cast of naive starlets and faded celebrities.
The studio was owned by former Monarch Magazine Duchess of the Year Lori Sandovar. If you are of a man of a certain generation the mere mention of her name will send blood rushing to all the right places.
Unbeknownst to most people, the lovely raven-haired Miss Sandovar wasn’t just a performer in several of Olympus International Cinema’s direct-to-video extravaganzas; she was also the owner and producer. She’d inherited the studio from her third husband. It had been a pretty rinky dink operation back then, mostly making training and educational films, but she turned the company into something very different and very profitable.
Lori was responsible for plucking yours truly from literary oblivion and making me Olympus International Cinema's wordsmith of choice. Those were her words, not mine, by the way.
I’ll never forget the day she asked me to work for her; she said she loved my writing. She even had a copy of a literary magazine one of my stories had appeared in. She asked me to autograph it. How could I not fall in love with her a little after that?
She never really paid me what I was worth but there’s something to be said for steady employment. Working for her wasn’t easy; she was as driven and ruthless as she was beautiful and limber. I was, at times, turning out a script every two months, and they weren’t always great, but she always accepted them. She was a lot nicer to me than she was to her other writers. And actors. And directors. And craft services.
Olympus International Cinema’s newest project was a film called Island Fury. The script was written by yours truly, and it was to be a sex comedy that takes a hard left turn into horror in the third act. The plot was like this: during World War II, a handsome American Pilot crash lands on an uncharted island populated by sexy lesbian goat farmers. Lewd logic quickly ensues, and suddenly, the women are all fighting, then gently grinding, over our hero.
Unfortunately, in the throes of their lust, the women have forgotten their pledge to sacrifice some of their livestock to the creature that lives on the island with them. A stop motion monstrosity to be added later called Ezerhodden the Harvest Fiend.
Lori was very specific about how she wanted this film to be made, and she was painfully specific about the script. I was still re-writing the damn thing on my trusty Smith Corona typewriter when we dropped anchor near the deserted island she’d chosen for filming.
The island she’d chosen was a little flyspeck of a place, too unimportant to be claimed by anyone. It was half jungle and half beach and not much of anything else. She’d scouted it out months earlier, and the night she’d half cajoled, half ordered me to travel with her team to the location, she’d shown me some Polaroids of the place. It was overrun with albino goats and dotted with strange little statues. They were a bit Easter Island, a bit Aztec, and a whole lot of H.R. Geiger.
Do you remember making shrunken apple head dolls in school? Do they still do that? Well, if you do, remember that is just what they looked like. Desiccated little stone faces scowling gleefully.
The privately chartered ship that brought us there was called the Polaris. It was a cargo vessel that was at least seventy years past its prime and boasted a crew of six men who looked like cousins.
Close cousins, if you know what I mean.
Our team consisted of one disgraced director, two cameramen, one lighting guy, one sound guy, five wannabe actresses of varying enhancement, one beefy bonehead straight off the casting couch, one tired, profoundly out-of-place scriptwriter, and lastly, a producer who was also one of the performers.
It took six trips on a pair of inflatable rafts to get everyone and our equipment to the island. The director, Geoff James, came on the last trip, and from the moment he set foot on the beach, he started yelling at the cameramen and rushing the cast to get ready. Wishing to avoid his coked-up wrath, the performers got busy. Our small team meant that they had to take care of their own makeup and costumes.
If you can consider furlined bikinis and an Air Force surplus jumpsuit costumes.
The cameramen worked hard to make use of the natural light and accentuate the strange beauty of the landscape while simultaneously keeping the piles of goat scat out of the shot.
You must be wondering why the Hell I was there. Lori had said she wanted a friend along, saying she wanted someone with half a brain to talk to while waiting for her scenes. I gotta say hearing her call me a friend was simultaneously thrilling and disheartening all at once.
A month ago she had called me other things. I wondered if it had just been the Margaritas talking.
Either way, I was standing there trying not to cringe as the pretty young cast mangled my precious dialogue. The director rarely did second takes, even when soft-core sensation Claudia Tate looked directly at the camera or when thick-headed thespian Bobby Burns mispronounced the word “Women.”
Did I mention the writer always gets the shaft?
As the skinny-dipping scene segued into a bout of mud wrestling, I excused myself to explore the island. You may find it hard to believe but watching people film other people having simulated sex is about as exciting as your average class in technical writing.
The island was strange. I know I said this before, but I don't think I've quite gotten across to you how strange. Pale, pink-eyed goats were everywhere. They watched me pass through their territory with dull-eyed curiosity. There were clouds of bloated black flies buzzing around here and there. The air was filled with this faint, sickly-sweet smell, just strong enough to tickle your gag reflex but not strong enough to be recognizable. I had been wandering for an hour or so when I spied a figure crouching up ahead. It was perfectly still, staring at me. I froze, my breath catching in my throat before I realized that it was another one of those weird statues.
It was about three feet tall, almost child-like in proportion. The head was wrinkled and misshapen. A strange symbol had been carved onto its forehead, a triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center. Despite the dry weather, the stone was clammy to the touch.
Yes, I touched the thing, don't ask me why.
"It's a grave marker,” Lori spoke softly from behind me. After a brief startled squeal, I turned to see her in her hiking boots, cutoff shorts, and a t-shirt with the logo for White Brains On Toast. They were her favorite band. She’d even appeared in one of their music videos.
I said, "Shouldn't you be working?"
“Pia wanted to do her big scene early,” she said.
This was Pia Winters’s first movie. A former exotic dancer, she was newly upgraded with massive breast implants that she was eager to show off.
“I didn’t write her a big scene.”
“I know, but Geoff has this weird idea where he wants to see her grinding against a palm tree,” she approached the statue with a kind of awe, “I figured I’d let him get it out of his system so I could explore a little."
I asked, “What the Hell is up with this place? We could have just shot in the Philippines for a lot less.”
“This is better. Can’t you feel the atmosphere?”
“It smells like someone died here."
“Someone died everywhere,” With a mischievous grin, she patted the statue on the head and started trudging deeper into the jungle.
I followed her, swatting at the sickly, low-hanging branches, “How did you hear about this place?”
“From my late hubby’s gambling buddies.”
“Where did he-" I slipped on a mossy cluster of stones and fell on my face, "Damnit!"
"Peter!" she was at my side, helping me to sit up.
“Damnit." I said again.
“Clumsy," She laughed, brushing off my face.
I hoped the dirt would hide my blushing, “I was watching your backside instead of where I was going.”
“You should have used that line in the script,” she stood back up and started walking again. "Come on, not much further. There's something I want you to see."
Not much further turned out to be an hour of walking, mostly uphill. Occasionally, one or two of those goofy goats would follow and keep pace with us, only to wander off into the jungle after a little while. It was miserably hot, and there wasn't even the slightest trace of a breeze. In case you hadn't already guessed, we writer types usually aren't in the best of shape. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but for every Ernest Hemingway, you have about twenty other vaguely gourd-shaped men like me.
I did my best to keep pace with her and distracted myself from being out of breath by remembering the night she invited me over to her place. The night she cooked me steak while I made strong margaritas.
At first, I'd said no to the whole proposal. I prefer to write adventures, not have them. Besides, I was planning on devoting some more time to my novel in progress, The Black Rider. It was a Western epic in the tradition of Lonesome Dove but with ninjas. I'd been working on it for almost seven years, and it was about halfway done.
After a good meal and lively conversation, we made love on her couch. I know. I know. It sounds ridiculous, but just believe me. I’m going to die, or worse, at sundown. I have no reason to pad out my sexual resume. Needless to say, after that, I was all in on the project.
As we made our way through the jungle, we passed by another dozen or so of those ugly little statues before we reached what was once a military base. It wasn’t much of a military base, mind you, just a rusted old Quonset hut and a handful of rotting olive-colored tents. It looked like the exterior set from M.A.S.H. had gone to Hell.
There was also even a Jeep, its tires flat, its body half-eaten by corrosion, and curious goats. It was parked in front of the dilapidated supply shed that would soon become my prison.
"What is this?” Even though the place was obviously long abandoned, I spoke in hushed tones.
"It was an army base during the Second World War. An entire platoon of men was stationed here. All but one of them died under mysterious circumstances."
“But of course.”
"Come on then." She started walking again, "The best part is up ahead."
I swung my arms in a gesture as sarcastic as it was wide, "Better than all this?"
She laughed, "Shut up and march."
"Yes ma'am!" I saluted. To my surprise, she took my hand as she led me back into the jungle. “Tell me more about these lawn gnomes from Hell.”
She flashed me that grin of hers again, then paused before one of the grotesque effigies, "The people of this island were the last stronghold of the cult of Ezerhodden.”
“Wait wait wait.” I said, “Ezerhodden is a real thing?”
“Yup. They had some very primal religious beliefs."
“Oh, they were Baptists.”
“Dork.” She punched me lightly in the arm and continued, “Every six years, they would hold a ceremony called ‘Grovulche.’ The entire community would paint their hands with goat blood and hunt each other through the jungle. It is kind of like a game of tag. The six winners of the contest would then be brought back to the village where they would play another game using symbols carved on pieces of petrified bark.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”
“Nope. Now five losers of this game were called the Zaartua. They would have their hair and teeth pulled out and then be buried alive beneath one of these.” She tapped the statue, “The winner would be taken to the Mouth of Ezerhodden and, after a ceremony called the Six Wounds Of Love, would be blessed with either wisdom, power, or life.”
I shook my head, “And where did you learn all this?”
“I read it in a book called The Nine Rebel Sermons. It was written by a Catholic missionary who visited the island in 1722. I got that from my late hubby’s gambling buddies too.”
I raised an eyebrow, “Ever thought about hunkering down with a Jane Austen novel?"
“Read 'em all. Come on. More to see.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Another hour of walking brought us to a clearing. The knee-high pale-green grass undulated slowly back and forth. In the center of the clearing was the squat stone rim of a well. It was made from the same material as those ugly statues. Strange hieroglyphics were carved all along the sides; there was the familiar triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center, but there were other symbols there, too.
Trembling with either terror or excitement, Lori approached it, “This is it. Just like the book said, The Mouth of Ezerhodden.”
The nauseating odor that permeated the island was stronger here; in fact, I was sure this was the source of it. Imagine the smell of a butcher shop mixed with the stink of an open sewer, then add a dash of the scent of your grandma's house. She drew closer, I followed, and it didn’t take me long to realize that the tall grass was hiding dozens of dead goats. Most were skeletons; some were pretty fresh. “This can’t be real. If it was someone would be here already, there would be archeologists …documentary crews …tourists.”
She paused thoughtfully, “Can you imagine how this would look in camera?”
“Come on Lori, people aren’t going to watch this movie to see spooky old ruins. They want to see boobies and monsters. In that order."
She was at the edge of the well now. She peered down into the depths of the well. “Maybe I want to make a more lasting impression on the world.”
I risked a glimpse down into the murky depths. The air wafting up the stone shaft was hot. There was this thick, sloshing noise down there. Something glistened in the shadows. My heart started to pound, I turned away, and I was violently sick.
When I was done, I begged, “Please, can we go back now?”
“Poor thing,” she got me to my feet and led me back to the boat just as it started to rain. She was quiet and thoughtful the whole way back.
We found the director looking ragged and pissed off. He immediately started to complain about the film’s big star just up and disappearing, but Lori waved him off.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we called it a day and retired to the Polaris’ cramped quarters. Lori turned in early, and the rest of us spent the night, swapping stories, smoking cigarettes, snacking on breakfast bars, and drinking cheap wine. After a few raucous hours, I boozily decided to turn in. Lori had a little cabin all to herself near the front of the ship. I considered knocking on her door, but thought better of it. Instead, I lay down on my designated bunk and let the sounds of falling rain and lapping ocean lull me to sleep.
The dream that came to me came with a strange stomach-churning feeling of deja vu.
I was standing in the middle of the street in a ruined city. I wandered for a time, utterly alone and lost. In the distance, I could hear a rhythmic thudding; like an army on the march, there was a disjointedness to the cadence, giving a sense of something broken.
And then I saw them, a crowd moving down the street, wizened figures in tuxedos, their heads were bald, their faces set in toothless grins. They carried an elaborate, jewel-encrusted litter on their shoulders. It pitched and yawed with their movements.
The figure riding in the litter wore a goat-like mask with long curved horns. A symbol was carved on the forehead, a diamond with a dot in the center. The figure spied me and began to sing sweetly. The words made no sense, but the voice was familiar as the telltale sting of a paper cut.
I snapped awake.
My pillowcase was soaked with sweat; I spent a few panicked moments trying to remember where I was and why I was there. The gentle rumble of my cabin-mate Bobby Burns snoring helped me get my bearings.
I checked my watch. It was almost 3 AM. I tried to relax and go back to sleep, but when I closed my eyes, all I could still see was the dream, vivid and bright. So, I got on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed up onto the deck. It had stopped raining, and the sky was cloudless. The full moon looked swollen and was tinged with green. It was bright enough to read by. Leaning on the aft railing, I stared at it for a while and ran the events of the nightmare over and over in my head, examining and interpolating them until they had lost their disturbing qualities.
After a while, I became aware of this thumping, sloshing noise. It was coming from right below me. Visions of The Creature from the Black Lagoon started bubbling to the surface of my mind. I looked down and saw one of the two inflatable rafts the Polaris crew was using to shuttle us back and forth to the island.
But there had been two.
Where was the other one?
Something about it began to worry me. Had it become untethered and floated away? If so, how long would it take for us to shuttle the talent and equipment back and forth with just one boat? I took a stroll from one end of the boat to another in hopes of spotting the thing. No such luck. So I decided to head up to the bridge and let the captain know.
Halfway there, a member of the crew stepped out of the shadows. He had a hunting knife in his hand and he gestured wildly with it as he spoke, “What you do here? Crew only on deck at night! You go down below.”
I choked and blundered over my words, “I think… you see… I…”
"You get down below!” his breath was rank with alcohol, and the something else I couldn't place. Something vaguely unsavory.
“Yeah,” I said, “I get the idea…crew only. Listen, one of your boats is missing…”
"We know." He gave me a gentle poke with the point of his knife to signal the conversation was over. Then he turned and made his way to the bridge, “You go back to sleep. We take care of everything."
I retreated down below, cringing and frightened. I didn’t like the way he talked to me. I didn’t like this island. I didn’t like any of this. I went right to Lori’s cabin and knocked on her door. There was no answer. There was no answer.
Freaking out just a little bit more, I tried the door handle; it wasn’t locked, so I stepped inside. All her clothes and things were still in her suitcase. There were papers strewn about the bed and a thick old book lying on the pillow. I glanced at the title, I Nove Sermoni Ribelli.
I picked it up and flipped through it. Was this the Nine Rebel Sermons? Was this thing really over 250 years old? As I flipped through the pages, wondering at the tiny print and grotesque illustrations, a slip of paper fell out. It was Lori’s handwriting, and it this is what it said;
“The pit was the length and width of a man. From it the avatar of Ezerhodden rose up from the Screaming Nowhere. It was pale and fierce and was a salamander in its extremity. It looked upon the world of man but spoke to the stars. It cast runes upon the stones that blasphemed against death. From within his mouth he feasts on the beloved.”
”What are you doing in here?"
My breath caught, and my hand flew to my chest. It was Lori, ”Having a heart attack thank you very much. Haven't you ever heard of knocking?"
"Peter. You're in my room." She brushed past me. Her sneakers and jeans were caked with mud, one of her fingernails was cracked.
“Oh… Yeah.”
Heedless of my presence, she began to get undressed, slipping the light blouse over her head. She was braless as always, "Was there something wrong?"
"No, it’s just that I was - I am - worried about you." It all seemed so stupid now. Was I really going to tell her that I got spooked because I had a bad dream? I decided to go with more Earthly concerns, "I don't trust the crew of this boat. I think they're up to no good."
She kicked off her shoes, "You're being paranoid."
"One of them waved a knife at me!"
Groaning with exasperation, she sat me down on the bed with a good hard shove, "I know what's really bothering you."
I tried to keep eye contact, but my eyes kept wandering, "Lori, I’m serious. None of this feels right.”
"This is really about what happened back at my place, isn't it?" She strolled over and closed the door to her cabin, shucking her stained jeans on the way back. "You think I only slept with you to get you to help me out."
"Yes. I mean no. I mean-”
"Peter . . . " she caressed my face, ". . . I care about you. More than you realize."
"Can't you see-" she shut me up with a kiss. Her books and notes ended up on the floor, along with the comforter and the sheets.
If I close my eyes, I can still remember how her nails felt on my skin, the way the broken one hurt just a little, and how it made me shiver. When it all ends I’m going to try and keep that moment in my mind, use it to block out everything else. I doubt it will be enough to keep me from screaming.
After it was over, we lay together on the bed, and she spoke in a whisper, "I'll tell you something I haven't told anyone else. This is my last movie.”
Then we were silent. Sleep came soon enough.
The morning found the missing boat back where it belonged. I made a joke to Lori about the captain using it to go fishing. She didn’t laugh.
The day's filming went pretty well. There was plenty of sunlight, and Bobby Burns managed to get through his lines without sounding like a brain-damaged robot.
When he and Lori started working on their ‘love scene’ I had to walk away. I knew I had no right to be possessive or jealous, that this was just acting. But I still had to be somewhere else.
To keep my mind occupied, I tried to piece through my experiences here. If it all had been a movie, what kind of movie would it be? I kept wandering until I found another one of the statues.
For some reason, the face of it was covered with black flies. They buzzed away as I approached. The symbol on the forehead of this one was a circle with an open semicircle at the top and an X at the bottom. There was a dark, gummy-looking ruby-colored substance smeared across it. I stared at it for a long while.
By the time I got back to the others, Lori's scene was over, and Claudia Tate was working on some topless close-ups. Geoff James had decided her soliloquy would play better if she popped her top halfway through. Decisions like this was why he made the big bucks.
When that scene wrapped one of the lighting guys happened to glance out onto the horizon and asked, "Hey! Where the hell is the boat?"
That's right kids, the Polaris had set off without us. I heard a mocking voice in my head, “We take care of everything.”
The sun was beginning to set, and things quickly degenerated into a full-scale panic. We had no shelter, no supplies, no food, no nothing. As the old song said, “…not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be…”
Lori took charge and led us through the jungle to the abandoned military base. At the very least, it was a roof over our heads. After some brief discussions about signal fires and searching for food, the cast of Island Fury settled down in the main Quonset hut for the night. Not one of the twelve of us gave even the slightest thought to posting someone on guard duty.
After all, this is a deserted island, right?
After hours of sleep, I awoke to find myself lying next to the key grip and the best boy. I cautiously got up and walked gingerly around the cast and crew. Sickly moonlight shone in through the windows of the Quonset hut. I searched the slumbering shapes for some sign of Lori but couldn’t see her.
I had to relieve myself, and it seemed like a good idea to do my business at the edge of the camp. I stumbled over jutting roots and prickly brambles until I was at the tree line. Then, I did what came naturally. It wasn't until I was finished that I noticed the toppled statue.
Half concealed by a mound of freshly disturbed Earth, it lay on its back, gaping at the stars. I drew closer, wondering if I should try to set it right. I touched the stone. It was warm and clammy. Not cold like before. I wondered who had done this, a clumsy actor or a belligerent goat. Maybe it had fallen over on its own?
A sudden creeping sensation up the back of my neck alerted me to the fact I wasn't alone. A twig snapped. I turned, "Lori will you please stop sneaking up on --"
The shape before me was human but withered; its leathery-looking skin was a muddy gray, its bald head was marked with old scars, and its toothless mouth gaped. In its left hand, it held a goat horn; one end was bloodied, the other sharpened to a point.
The Zaartua! Then I was running through the jungle, fumbling blindly through the trees and bushes. Every statue I came across was askew or toppled over. Dead goats were everywhere, their throats slit, their horns removed.
Somehow my wild flight brought me to the clearing with Ezerhodden’s Well. The stench was worse now. The air was filled with a thick sloshing. I risked a glance backward; a pair of Zaartua were shambling after me like they had all the time in the world. The only noise they made was the crackle of their dead joints flexing.
I let them get a little closer and then feinted around them and doubled back into the jungle. I found my way back to the camp, hoping for safety in numbers. What I found made me stop dead in my tracks.
Damn that full moon. How I wish it had been cloudy that night, that the shadows had been dark and long enough to hide the carnage.
The Zaartua had made quick work of the cast and crew of Island Fury. I saw Claudia Tate, her flesh hanging torn and loose as she staggered and swayed with the animal urge to survive. Her tormenter shuffled behind her, content to watch her die slowly.
There was the high-pitched screaming of Bobby Burns. The Zaartua swarmed over where he had fallen. They raised their makeshift blades and brought them down again and again.
Geoff James was backed into the wall of the Quonset Hut, swinging one of the boom mikes wildly, trying to hold off his attackers, but there were too many of them.
Blood. Howls of terror. The Zaartua were relentless in their bloodlust. Soon enough, I was surrounded and screaming for mercy.
"No!" I heard Lori shout.
I turned on my heel to see her standing in the clearing. The captain and his machete-wielding mates flanked her.
"He isn't for you." She said, and with that, mummified shapes brushed past me, looking for fresh prey.
“Lori?" I tried to find words, but my mind and my body were too exhausted.
"Lock him in the supply shed,” She nodded to the Captain, her tone threatening. “Treat him gently."
I didn't resist as I was marched to the supply shed. A brand new padlock had been installed on the door. I heard it click into place once I was alone in the dark. I whispered, “Help.” to no one in particular and then curled into a ball on the floor.
The next morning Lori came to see me. She had a handful of breakfast bars in her hand.
"Hungry?" she asked.
"No." I doubted I'd ever be hungry again.
She knelt beside me; instinctively, I withdrew from her proximity. "Ezerhodden is real, Peter. He made me promises."
"You did all this?"
"He spoke to me in my dreams. He knew my desperation and revealed to me his need.”
"Stop talking like that!" I flashed with anger, “You’re a B-Movie actress, not Anton LeVey."
“Every sixth year Ezerhodden crawls closer to our world. He casts avatars out from the Screaming Nowhere, but someday he will truly walk among us." She closed her eyes and shuddered, “Then the true Harvest will begin as was prophesied.”
"Why are you doing this?"
"I have ovarian cancer." There were tears in her eyes, "I found out three months ago."
“No… that’s not…” Now there were tears in my eyes, but we were both beyond weeping.
She said, “It's too far gone for the doctors to do anything. It’s in my bones and my spine.” “Oh my God Lori…”
“Ezerhodden has promised me new life.”
I thought of the Zaartua, “You can’t want to be turned into one of those… one of those things!”
“There are other ways and forms,” she kissed my forehead and stood. “All I have to do is submit to the Six Wounds of Love.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question, but I had to ask, “What is that?”
“The Zaartua will scar me five times, each deeper than the last, then… then I will take someone beloved to me to the Well of Ezerhodden and surrender them to the avatar that dwells within.” She closed the door behind her. There was a rustle as the padlock was put back into place.
I went crazy for a little while after that. Trashing the place, looking for something to help me escape. Screaming all the while. I found a hammer and smashed out the windows, but they were too small for me to get through. I thought about using it, or maybe a screwdriver for a weapon, but what good would that do against those things?
Finally, I found this notebook in one of the lower drawers. Some soldier from back in the day had been using it to keep track of inventory, so I decided to put pen to paper one last time and let the world know what happened here.
That brings us full circle.
It’s dusk now. I’ve been listening to the sound of Lori’s screams all day, but now she’s quiet. The ritual of the Six Wounds must be drawing to a close.
My heart is sick to think of her in pain. I want to hate her, but I just can’t. When they finally come for me I am going to try and reason with her one last time. But I’m not holding out much hope for a ‘Love Conquers All’ Hollywood ending.
Like I said before, the writer always gets the shaft.
***
None of the cast or crew of Island Fury were ever found. There is no record of any ship matching the description of the Polaris.

​
The following document was written by Peter LaRoche and was found during the Boggs International survey of the island of Kuen-Yuin.
***
It's the golden rule of Hollywood. The writer always gets the shaft. The producers get all the money; the actors get all the fame, the director gets to put his vision on the screen, and the people behind the scenes get paid and don’t have to give a damn but the writer? The writer pours his guts out onto the page, and if he's lucky, he sees twenty percent of what he wrote make it through the Hollywood grinder. If he's really lucky, he gets paid what he's worth.
That's my story in a nutshell. A month ago, I was in a mansion, sipping margaritas and talking about art to a woman I had been a little bit in love with for years. Now I'm alone, locked in a supply shed, and listening to her scream. I'm writing this with a ballpoint pen on a forty-something-year-old notebook. I'm trying to get it all down while there's still sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.
Someone has to know what happened here, and I guess that’s you.
Let me begin at the beginning.
It was a year after my graduation from Pratt University when I decided to move to Hollywood and make my fortune. I had already sold a pair of spec scripts and a few short stories to some literary magazines. The spec scripts had fallen through, and the literary magazines had mostly been purchased by the contributors, but I was young and stupid. Within a few months of my arrival in Tinsel Town, I was working in retail part time and not making nearly enough to cover my expenses.
I started looking for other ways to use my writing talent to earn cash. You know, ad copy, non-fiction articles for in-flight magazines, movie novelizations, and the occasional bit of erotica for Monarch Magazine’s Lusty Letters To The Editors.
What, did you think those were real?
Word of mouth that I was fast, cheap, and slightly smutty brought me to the attention of Olympus International Cinema.
You may not have heard of Olympus International Cinema, but trust me, if you’ve ever been channel surfing at three in the morning, you’ve at least glimpsed one of their productions.
Heart of Sharkness, Bikini Bar Mitzvah, The Adventures of Cosmo and Quack, Reggie and the Reckless Reptile, Sword Damsels In Space, Beach Blanket Beasts, The Cannibal Cloud of Daytona, The Butcher Brigade, Foxes In Boxes, and of course Tombs of the Blonde Dead. Olympus International Cinema was responsible for all those films and more. Each one featuring a cast of naive starlets and faded celebrities.
The studio was owned by former Monarch Magazine Duchess of the Year Lori Sandovar. If you are of a man of a certain generation the mere mention of her name will send blood rushing to all the right places.
Unbeknownst to most people, the lovely raven-haired Miss Sandovar wasn’t just a performer in several of Olympus International Cinema’s direct-to-video extravaganzas; she was also the owner and producer. She’d inherited the studio from her third husband. It had been a pretty rinky dink operation back then, mostly making training and educational films, but she turned the company into something very different and very profitable.
Lori was responsible for plucking yours truly from literary oblivion and making me Olympus International Cinema's wordsmith of choice. Those were her words, not mine, by the way.
I’ll never forget the day she asked me to work for her; she said she loved my writing. She even had a copy of a literary magazine one of my stories had appeared in. She asked me to autograph it. How could I not fall in love with her a little after that?
She never really paid me what I was worth but there’s something to be said for steady employment. Working for her wasn’t easy; she was as driven and ruthless as she was beautiful and limber. I was, at times, turning out a script every two months, and they weren’t always great, but she always accepted them. She was a lot nicer to me than she was to her other writers. And actors. And directors. And craft services.
Olympus International Cinema’s newest project was a film called Island Fury. The script was written by yours truly, and it was to be a sex comedy that takes a hard left turn into horror in the third act. The plot was like this: during World War II, a handsome American Pilot crash lands on an uncharted island populated by sexy lesbian goat farmers. Lewd logic quickly ensues, and suddenly, the women are all fighting, then gently grinding, over our hero.
Unfortunately, in the throes of their lust, the women have forgotten their pledge to sacrifice some of their livestock to the creature that lives on the island with them. A stop motion monstrosity to be added later called Ezerhodden the Harvest Fiend.
Lori was very specific about how she wanted this film to be made, and she was painfully specific about the script. I was still re-writing the damn thing on my trusty Smith Corona typewriter when we dropped anchor near the deserted island she’d chosen for filming.
The island she’d chosen was a little flyspeck of a place, too unimportant to be claimed by anyone. It was half jungle and half beach and not much of anything else. She’d scouted it out months earlier, and the night she’d half cajoled, half ordered me to travel with her team to the location, she’d shown me some Polaroids of the place. It was overrun with albino goats and dotted with strange little statues. They were a bit Easter Island, a bit Aztec, and a whole lot of H.R. Geiger.
Do you remember making shrunken apple head dolls in school? Do they still do that? Well, if you do, remember that is just what they looked like. Desiccated little stone faces scowling gleefully.
The privately chartered ship that brought us there was called the Polaris. It was a cargo vessel that was at least seventy years past its prime and boasted a crew of six men who looked like cousins.
Close cousins, if you know what I mean.
Our team consisted of one disgraced director, two cameramen, one lighting guy, one sound guy, five wannabe actresses of varying enhancement, one beefy bonehead straight off the casting couch, one tired, profoundly out-of-place scriptwriter, and lastly, a producer who was also one of the performers.
It took six trips on a pair of inflatable rafts to get everyone and our equipment to the island. The director, Geoff James, came on the last trip, and from the moment he set foot on the beach, he started yelling at the cameramen and rushing the cast to get ready. Wishing to avoid his coked-up wrath, the performers got busy. Our small team meant that they had to take care of their own makeup and costumes.
If you can consider furlined bikinis and an Air Force surplus jumpsuit costumes.
The cameramen worked hard to make use of the natural light and accentuate the strange beauty of the landscape while simultaneously keeping the piles of goat scat out of the shot.
You must be wondering why the Hell I was there. Lori had said she wanted a friend along, saying she wanted someone with half a brain to talk to while waiting for her scenes. I gotta say hearing her call me a friend was simultaneously thrilling and disheartening all at once.
A month ago she had called me other things. I wondered if it had just been the Margaritas talking.
Either way, I was standing there trying not to cringe as the pretty young cast mangled my precious dialogue. The director rarely did second takes, even when soft-core sensation Claudia Tate looked directly at the camera or when thick-headed thespian Bobby Burns mispronounced the word “Women.”
Did I mention the writer always gets the shaft?
As the skinny-dipping scene segued into a bout of mud wrestling, I excused myself to explore the island. You may find it hard to believe but watching people film other people having simulated sex is about as exciting as your average class in technical writing.
The island was strange. I know I said this before, but I don't think I've quite gotten across to you how strange. Pale, pink-eyed goats were everywhere. They watched me pass through their territory with dull-eyed curiosity. There were clouds of bloated black flies buzzing around here and there. The air was filled with this faint, sickly-sweet smell, just strong enough to tickle your gag reflex but not strong enough to be recognizable. I had been wandering for an hour or so when I spied a figure crouching up ahead. It was perfectly still, staring at me. I froze, my breath catching in my throat before I realized that it was another one of those weird statues.
It was about three feet tall, almost child-like in proportion. The head was wrinkled and misshapen. A strange symbol had been carved onto its forehead, a triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center. Despite the dry weather, the stone was clammy to the touch.
Yes, I touched the thing, don't ask me why.
"It's a grave marker,” Lori spoke softly from behind me. After a brief startled squeal, I turned to see her in her hiking boots, cutoff shorts, and a t-shirt with the logo for White Brains On Toast. They were her favorite band. She’d even appeared in one of their music videos.
I said, "Shouldn't you be working?"
“Pia wanted to do her big scene early,” she said.
This was Pia Winters’s first movie. A former exotic dancer, she was newly upgraded with massive breast implants that she was eager to show off.
“I didn’t write her a big scene.”
“I know, but Geoff has this weird idea where he wants to see her grinding against a palm tree,” she approached the statue with a kind of awe, “I figured I’d let him get it out of his system so I could explore a little."
I asked, “What the Hell is up with this place? We could have just shot in the Philippines for a lot less.”
“This is better. Can’t you feel the atmosphere?”
“It smells like someone died here."
“Someone died everywhere,” With a mischievous grin, she patted the statue on the head and started trudging deeper into the jungle.
I followed her, swatting at the sickly, low-hanging branches, “How did you hear about this place?”
“From my late hubby’s gambling buddies.”
“Where did he-" I slipped on a mossy cluster of stones and fell on my face, "Damnit!"
"Peter!" she was at my side, helping me to sit up.
“Damnit." I said again.
“Clumsy," She laughed, brushing off my face.
I hoped the dirt would hide my blushing, “I was watching your backside instead of where I was going.”
“You should have used that line in the script,” she stood back up and started walking again. "Come on, not much further. There's something I want you to see."
Not much further turned out to be an hour of walking, mostly uphill. Occasionally, one or two of those goofy goats would follow and keep pace with us, only to wander off into the jungle after a little while. It was miserably hot, and there wasn't even the slightest trace of a breeze. In case you hadn't already guessed, we writer types usually aren't in the best of shape. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but for every Ernest Hemingway, you have about twenty other vaguely gourd-shaped men like me.
I did my best to keep pace with her and distracted myself from being out of breath by remembering the night she invited me over to her place. The night she cooked me steak while I made strong margaritas.
At first, I'd said no to the whole proposal. I prefer to write adventures, not have them. Besides, I was planning on devoting some more time to my novel in progress, The Black Rider. It was a Western epic in the tradition of Lonesome Dove but with ninjas. I'd been working on it for almost seven years, and it was about halfway done.
After a good meal and lively conversation, we made love on her couch. I know. I know. It sounds ridiculous, but just believe me. I’m going to die, or worse, at sundown. I have no reason to pad out my sexual resume. Needless to say, after that, I was all in on the project.
As we made our way through the jungle, we passed by another dozen or so of those ugly little statues before we reached what was once a military base. It wasn’t much of a military base, mind you, just a rusted old Quonset hut and a handful of rotting olive-colored tents. It looked like the exterior set from M.A.S.H. had gone to Hell.
There was also even a Jeep, its tires flat, its body half-eaten by corrosion, and curious goats. It was parked in front of the dilapidated supply shed that would soon become my prison.
"What is this?” Even though the place was obviously long abandoned, I spoke in hushed tones.
"It was an army base during the Second World War. An entire platoon of men was stationed here. All but one of them died under mysterious circumstances."
“But of course.”
"Come on then." She started walking again, "The best part is up ahead."
I swung my arms in a gesture as sarcastic as it was wide, "Better than all this?"
She laughed, "Shut up and march."
"Yes ma'am!" I saluted. To my surprise, she took my hand as she led me back into the jungle. “Tell me more about these lawn gnomes from Hell.”
She flashed me that grin of hers again, then paused before one of the grotesque effigies, "The people of this island were the last stronghold of the cult of Ezerhodden.”
“Wait wait wait.” I said, “Ezerhodden is a real thing?”
“Yup. They had some very primal religious beliefs."
“Oh, they were Baptists.”
“Dork.” She punched me lightly in the arm and continued, “Every six years, they would hold a ceremony called ‘Grovulche.’ The entire community would paint their hands with goat blood and hunt each other through the jungle. It is kind of like a game of tag. The six winners of the contest would then be brought back to the village where they would play another game using symbols carved on pieces of petrified bark.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked, “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”
“Nope. Now five losers of this game were called the Zaartua. They would have their hair and teeth pulled out and then be buried alive beneath one of these.” She tapped the statue, “The winner would be taken to the Mouth of Ezerhodden and, after a ceremony called the Six Wounds Of Love, would be blessed with either wisdom, power, or life.”
I shook my head, “And where did you learn all this?”
“I read it in a book called The Nine Rebel Sermons. It was written by a Catholic missionary who visited the island in 1722. I got that from my late hubby’s gambling buddies too.”
I raised an eyebrow, “Ever thought about hunkering down with a Jane Austen novel?"
“Read 'em all. Come on. More to see.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Another hour of walking brought us to a clearing. The knee-high pale-green grass undulated slowly back and forth. In the center of the clearing was the squat stone rim of a well. It was made from the same material as those ugly statues. Strange hieroglyphics were carved all along the sides; there was the familiar triangle inside a circle with a vertical line through the center, but there were other symbols there, too.
Trembling with either terror or excitement, Lori approached it, “This is it. Just like the book said, The Mouth of Ezerhodden.”
The nauseating odor that permeated the island was stronger here; in fact, I was sure this was the source of it. Imagine the smell of a butcher shop mixed with the stink of an open sewer, then add a dash of the scent of your grandma's house. She drew closer, I followed, and it didn’t take me long to realize that the tall grass was hiding dozens of dead goats. Most were skeletons; some were pretty fresh. “This can’t be real. If it was someone would be here already, there would be archeologists …documentary crews …tourists.”
She paused thoughtfully, “Can you imagine how this would look in camera?”
“Come on Lori, people aren’t going to watch this movie to see spooky old ruins. They want to see boobies and monsters. In that order."
She was at the edge of the well now. She peered down into the depths of the well. “Maybe I want to make a more lasting impression on the world.”
I risked a glimpse down into the murky depths. The air wafting up the stone shaft was hot. There was this thick, sloshing noise down there. Something glistened in the shadows. My heart started to pound, I turned away, and I was violently sick.
When I was done, I begged, “Please, can we go back now?”
“Poor thing,” she got me to my feet and led me back to the boat just as it started to rain. She was quiet and thoughtful the whole way back.
We found the director looking ragged and pissed off. He immediately started to complain about the film’s big star just up and disappearing, but Lori waved him off.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we called it a day and retired to the Polaris’ cramped quarters. Lori turned in early, and the rest of us spent the night, swapping stories, smoking cigarettes, snacking on breakfast bars, and drinking cheap wine. After a few raucous hours, I boozily decided to turn in. Lori had a little cabin all to herself near the front of the ship. I considered knocking on her door, but thought better of it. Instead, I lay down on my designated bunk and let the sounds of falling rain and lapping ocean lull me to sleep.
The dream that came to me came with a strange stomach-churning feeling of deja vu.
I was standing in the middle of the street in a ruined city. I wandered for a time, utterly alone and lost. In the distance, I could hear a rhythmic thudding; like an army on the march, there was a disjointedness to the cadence, giving a sense of something broken.
And then I saw them, a crowd moving down the street, wizened figures in tuxedos, their heads were bald, their faces set in toothless grins. They carried an elaborate, jewel-encrusted litter on their shoulders. It pitched and yawed with their movements.
The figure riding in the litter wore a goat-like mask with long curved horns. A symbol was carved on the forehead, a diamond with a dot in the center. The figure spied me and began to sing sweetly. The words made no sense, but the voice was familiar as the telltale sting of a paper cut.
I snapped awake.
My pillowcase was soaked with sweat; I spent a few panicked moments trying to remember where I was and why I was there. The gentle rumble of my cabin-mate Bobby Burns snoring helped me get my bearings.
I checked my watch. It was almost 3 AM. I tried to relax and go back to sleep, but when I closed my eyes, all I could still see was the dream, vivid and bright. So, I got on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed up onto the deck. It had stopped raining, and the sky was cloudless. The full moon looked swollen and was tinged with green. It was bright enough to read by. Leaning on the aft railing, I stared at it for a while and ran the events of the nightmare over and over in my head, examining and interpolating them until they had lost their disturbing qualities.
After a while, I became aware of this thumping, sloshing noise. It was coming from right below me. Visions of The Creature from the Black Lagoon started bubbling to the surface of my mind. I looked down and saw one of the two inflatable rafts the Polaris crew was using to shuttle us back and forth to the island.
But there had been two.
Where was the other one?
Something about it began to worry me. Had it become untethered and floated away? If so, how long would it take for us to shuttle the talent and equipment back and forth with just one boat? I took a stroll from one end of the boat to another in hopes of spotting the thing. No such luck. So I decided to head up to the bridge and let the captain know.
Halfway there, a member of the crew stepped out of the shadows. He had a hunting knife in his hand and he gestured wildly with it as he spoke, “What you do here? Crew only on deck at night! You go down below.”
I choked and blundered over my words, “I think… you see… I…”
"You get down below!” his breath was rank with alcohol, and the something else I couldn't place. Something vaguely unsavory.
“Yeah,” I said, “I get the idea…crew only. Listen, one of your boats is missing…”
"We know." He gave me a gentle poke with the point of his knife to signal the conversation was over. Then he turned and made his way to the bridge, “You go back to sleep. We take care of everything."
I retreated down below, cringing and frightened. I didn’t like the way he talked to me. I didn’t like this island. I didn’t like any of this. I went right to Lori’s cabin and knocked on her door. There was no answer. There was no answer.
Freaking out just a little bit more, I tried the door handle; it wasn’t locked, so I stepped inside. All her clothes and things were still in her suitcase. There were papers strewn about the bed and a thick old book lying on the pillow. I glanced at the title, I Nove Sermoni Ribelli.
I picked it up and flipped through it. Was this the Nine Rebel Sermons? Was this thing really over 250 years old? As I flipped through the pages, wondering at the tiny print and grotesque illustrations, a slip of paper fell out. It was Lori’s handwriting, and it this is what it said;
“The pit was the length and width of a man. From it the avatar of Ezerhodden rose up from the Screaming Nowhere. It was pale and fierce and was a salamander in its extremity. It looked upon the world of man but spoke to the stars. It cast runes upon the stones that blasphemed against death. From within his mouth he feasts on the beloved.”
”What are you doing in here?"
My breath caught, and my hand flew to my chest. It was Lori, ”Having a heart attack thank you very much. Haven't you ever heard of knocking?"
"Peter. You're in my room." She brushed past me. Her sneakers and jeans were caked with mud, one of her fingernails was cracked.
“Oh… Yeah.”
Heedless of my presence, she began to get undressed, slipping the light blouse over her head. She was braless as always, "Was there something wrong?"
"No, it’s just that I was - I am - worried about you." It all seemed so stupid now. Was I really going to tell her that I got spooked because I had a bad dream? I decided to go with more Earthly concerns, "I don't trust the crew of this boat. I think they're up to no good."
She kicked off her shoes, "You're being paranoid."
"One of them waved a knife at me!"
Groaning with exasperation, she sat me down on the bed with a good hard shove, "I know what's really bothering you."
I tried to keep eye contact, but my eyes kept wandering, "Lori, I’m serious. None of this feels right.”
"This is really about what happened back at my place, isn't it?" She strolled over and closed the door to her cabin, shucking her stained jeans on the way back. "You think I only slept with you to get you to help me out."
"Yes. I mean no. I mean-”
"Peter . . . " she caressed my face, ". . . I care about you. More than you realize."
"Can't you see-" she shut me up with a kiss. Her books and notes ended up on the floor, along with the comforter and the sheets.
If I close my eyes, I can still remember how her nails felt on my skin, the way the broken one hurt just a little, and how it made me shiver. When it all ends I’m going to try and keep that moment in my mind, use it to block out everything else. I doubt it will be enough to keep me from screaming.
After it was over, we lay together on the bed, and she spoke in a whisper, "I'll tell you something I haven't told anyone else. This is my last movie.”
Then we were silent. Sleep came soon enough.
The morning found the missing boat back where it belonged. I made a joke to Lori about the captain using it to go fishing. She didn’t laugh.
The day's filming went pretty well. There was plenty of sunlight, and Bobby Burns managed to get through his lines without sounding like a brain-damaged robot.
When he and Lori started working on their ‘love scene’ I had to walk away. I knew I had no right to be possessive or jealous, that this was just acting. But I still had to be somewhere else.
To keep my mind occupied, I tried to piece through my experiences here. If it all had been a movie, what kind of movie would it be? I kept wandering until I found another one of the statues.
For some reason, the face of it was covered with black flies. They buzzed away as I approached. The symbol on the forehead of this one was a circle with an open semicircle at the top and an X at the bottom. There was a dark, gummy-looking ruby-colored substance smeared across it. I stared at it for a long while.
By the time I got back to the others, Lori's scene was over, and Claudia Tate was working on some topless close-ups. Geoff James had decided her soliloquy would play better if she popped her top halfway through. Decisions like this was why he made the big bucks.
When that scene wrapped one of the lighting guys happened to glance out onto the horizon and asked, "Hey! Where the hell is the boat?"
That's right kids, the Polaris had set off without us. I heard a mocking voice in my head, “We take care of everything.”
The sun was beginning to set, and things quickly degenerated into a full-scale panic. We had no shelter, no supplies, no food, no nothing. As the old song said, “…not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it's primitive as can be…”
Lori took charge and led us through the jungle to the abandoned military base. At the very least, it was a roof over our heads. After some brief discussions about signal fires and searching for food, the cast of Island Fury settled down in the main Quonset hut for the night. Not one of the twelve of us gave even the slightest thought to posting someone on guard duty.
After all, this is a deserted island, right?
After hours of sleep, I awoke to find myself lying next to the key grip and the best boy. I cautiously got up and walked gingerly around the cast and crew. Sickly moonlight shone in through the windows of the Quonset hut. I searched the slumbering shapes for some sign of Lori but couldn’t see her.
I had to relieve myself, and it seemed like a good idea to do my business at the edge of the camp. I stumbled over jutting roots and prickly brambles until I was at the tree line. Then, I did what came naturally. It wasn't until I was finished that I noticed the toppled statue.
Half concealed by a mound of freshly disturbed Earth, it lay on its back, gaping at the stars. I drew closer, wondering if I should try to set it right. I touched the stone. It was warm and clammy. Not cold like before. I wondered who had done this, a clumsy actor or a belligerent goat. Maybe it had fallen over on its own?
A sudden creeping sensation up the back of my neck alerted me to the fact I wasn't alone. A twig snapped. I turned, "Lori will you please stop sneaking up on --"
The shape before me was human but withered; its leathery-looking skin was a muddy gray, its bald head was marked with old scars, and its toothless mouth gaped. In its left hand, it held a goat horn; one end was bloodied, the other sharpened to a point.
The Zaartua! Then I was running through the jungle, fumbling blindly through the trees and bushes. Every statue I came across was askew or toppled over. Dead goats were everywhere, their throats slit, their horns removed.
Somehow my wild flight brought me to the clearing with Ezerhodden’s Well. The stench was worse now. The air was filled with a thick sloshing. I risked a glance backward; a pair of Zaartua were shambling after me like they had all the time in the world. The only noise they made was the crackle of their dead joints flexing.
I let them get a little closer and then feinted around them and doubled back into the jungle. I found my way back to the camp, hoping for safety in numbers. What I found made me stop dead in my tracks.
Damn that full moon. How I wish it had been cloudy that night, that the shadows had been dark and long enough to hide the carnage.
The Zaartua had made quick work of the cast and crew of Island Fury. I saw Claudia Tate, her flesh hanging torn and loose as she staggered and swayed with the animal urge to survive. Her tormenter shuffled behind her, content to watch her die slowly.
There was the high-pitched screaming of Bobby Burns. The Zaartua swarmed over where he had fallen. They raised their makeshift blades and brought them down again and again.
Geoff James was backed into the wall of the Quonset Hut, swinging one of the boom mikes wildly, trying to hold off his attackers, but there were too many of them.
Blood. Howls of terror. The Zaartua were relentless in their bloodlust. Soon enough, I was surrounded and screaming for mercy.
"No!" I heard Lori shout.
I turned on my heel to see her standing in the clearing. The captain and his machete-wielding mates flanked her.
"He isn't for you." She said, and with that, mummified shapes brushed past me, looking for fresh prey.
“Lori?" I tried to find words, but my mind and my body were too exhausted.
"Lock him in the supply shed,” She nodded to the Captain, her tone threatening. “Treat him gently."
I didn't resist as I was marched to the supply shed. A brand new padlock had been installed on the door. I heard it click into place once I was alone in the dark. I whispered, “Help.” to no one in particular and then curled into a ball on the floor.
The next morning Lori came to see me. She had a handful of breakfast bars in her hand.
"Hungry?" she asked.
"No." I doubted I'd ever be hungry again.
She knelt beside me; instinctively, I withdrew from her proximity. "Ezerhodden is real, Peter. He made me promises."
"You did all this?"
"He spoke to me in my dreams. He knew my desperation and revealed to me his need.”
"Stop talking like that!" I flashed with anger, “You’re a B-Movie actress, not Anton LeVey."
“Every sixth year Ezerhodden crawls closer to our world. He casts avatars out from the Screaming Nowhere, but someday he will truly walk among us." She closed her eyes and shuddered, “Then the true Harvest will begin as was prophesied.”
"Why are you doing this?"
"I have ovarian cancer." There were tears in her eyes, "I found out three months ago."
“No… that’s not…” Now there were tears in my eyes, but we were both beyond weeping.
She said, “It's too far gone for the doctors to do anything. It’s in my bones and my spine.” “Oh my God Lori…”
“Ezerhodden has promised me new life.”
I thought of the Zaartua, “You can’t want to be turned into one of those… one of those things!”
“There are other ways and forms,” she kissed my forehead and stood. “All I have to do is submit to the Six Wounds of Love.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question, but I had to ask, “What is that?”
“The Zaartua will scar me five times, each deeper than the last, then… then I will take someone beloved to me to the Well of Ezerhodden and surrender them to the avatar that dwells within.” She closed the door behind her. There was a rustle as the padlock was put back into place.
I went crazy for a little while after that. Trashing the place, looking for something to help me escape. Screaming all the while. I found a hammer and smashed out the windows, but they were too small for me to get through. I thought about using it, or maybe a screwdriver for a weapon, but what good would that do against those things?
Finally, I found this notebook in one of the lower drawers. Some soldier from back in the day had been using it to keep track of inventory, so I decided to put pen to paper one last time and let the world know what happened here.
That brings us full circle.
It’s dusk now. I’ve been listening to the sound of Lori’s screams all day, but now she’s quiet. The ritual of the Six Wounds must be drawing to a close.
My heart is sick to think of her in pain. I want to hate her, but I just can’t. When they finally come for me I am going to try and reason with her one last time. But I’m not holding out much hope for a ‘Love Conquers All’ Hollywood ending.
Like I said before, the writer always gets the shaft.
***
None of the cast or crew of Island Fury were ever found. There is no record of any ship matching the description of the Polaris.