Chapter 4: The Temple of Flayed Skin

Chapter 4: The Temple of Flayed Skin

The retreat was a blind, crashing stampede. There was no procedure, no tactical formation, only the frantic, primal urge to flee the deep green nightmare of the island's interior. Branches whipped at their faces like thorny lashes, and vines snatched at their ankles, threatening to pull them down into the suffocating mulch of the forest floor. The memory of the moss-filled skull was a spur, driving them onward. Every shadow held the shape of a sharpened stake, every dark patch of earth threatened to give way to a waiting pit.

Leo’s lungs burned, a raw fire in his chest. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, panicked rhythm that had replaced the slow, measured drumbeat of the night before. Or perhaps, a terrified part of his mind gibbered, it was the same rhythm, just sped up to match their flight. He could feel the weight of the small, spiral-faced idol in his pocket, a cold, heavy stone of guilt dragging him down. He had touched their magic, stolen their god, and now the forest itself seemed to be rejecting them.

Beside him, Marcus stumbled, letting out a choked sob. The young tech’s face was a mess of scratches, his eyes wide with a terror that had burned away all his former bravado. He was just a kid, Leo realized, a kid who had believed in the absolute power of code and signal, now running from a horror carved from wood and bone.

It was Harlock's voice that kept them from scattering completely. "This way! To the beach! Keep moving!" The Captain was a bull, crashing through the undergrowth, his face a mask of grim determination. He was running not just from the pit, but from his own catastrophic failure of command.

Then, through the tangled lattice of leaves, Leo saw it: a sliver of brighter light. The sound of the surf, a gentle, rhythmic hiss, grew louder, a promise of open space and breathable air. With a final, desperate push, they burst through the treeline and onto the familiar black sand of the cove.

For a single, glorious second, there was only relief. The vast, open sky above and the endless gray sea before them felt like a pardon. Their tents stood exactly where they’d left them, two small domes of civilization against the encroaching wilderness. They staggered to a halt, hands on their knees, gasping in the salty air.

It was Riggs who saw it first. He had stopped a few paces onto the sand, his rifle still held at the ready, his body utterly rigid. He wasn't looking at the sea or the sky. He was staring at their camp.

Leo followed his gaze, and the relief in his chest curdled into ice. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. The camp had been visited. In the center of the space between their two tents, where nothing had stood before, was a new structure.

It was a totem, of sorts, maybe ten feet tall. A grotesque effigy assembled from thick, dark branches lashed together with wet-looking vines. It was crude, brutish, but built with a clear and terrible purpose. And hanging from its topmost cross-beam, stretched taut like a gruesome flag, was a large, rectangular sheet of something pale and leathery.

Aris Thorne made a small, strangled noise. "What... what is that hide? It's not from any animal I can identify..."

Leo knew. He knew with a certainty that made bile rise in his throat. He took a hesitant step closer, his boots sinking into the sand. The sheet was translucent in the thinning afternoon light. It was skin. Cured, scraped, human skin.

And on the right side of the ghastly banner, still horribly visible, was the faded, blue-ink image of a ship’s anchor, entwined with a mermaid. A sailor’s tattoo.

The breath went out of Marcus in a ragged wheeze. He stumbled back, his hands flying to his mouth as he dry-heaved onto the sand. This wasn't a warning. It was a declaration. It was a testament to what had happened to the last people who had landed on this shore.

Their horror was so absolute that it took them a moment to notice the rest of the scene. At the base of the skin-totem was a flat, wide rock that hadn't been there before. An altar. And laid out upon it, like offerings to a malevolent god, were the shattered remains of their connection to the world. The satellite phone was in pieces, its screen a spiderweb of cracks. The emergency beacon, their ultimate lifeline, had been systematically smashed with a rock, its advanced circuitry exposed and mangled.

But it was the thing standing guard over the altar that finally broke Leo’s mind.

It was a six-foot-tall idol, carved from the same dark, oily wood as the figurine in his pocket. It was a larger, more terrifying version of his secret. Its body was a crude, powerful humanoid shape, but its head was a massive, perfectly carved spiral that seemed to draw the light into its depths, a vortex of polished wood. And where its eyes should have been, two discs of polished mother-of-pearl had been set into the wood. They didn't reflect the light; they seemed to generate their own cold, dead luminescence. They glittered with an ancient, knowing intelligence.

They were watching.

The idol seemed to pulse with the island's profound silence. It was the source of it, the heart of the great, watchful hush. Leo’s hand flew to his pocket. The small carving felt searingly hot against his thigh, a brand marking him as a thief in the presence of a god. He could feel the gaze of those mother-of-pearl eyes settle on him, see through the fabric of his pants, and recognize its stolen child.

"They were here the whole time," Harlock whispered, his voice hollowed out with dawning comprehension. The drumming in the night wasn't a discovery; it was a celebration. They had been watching them land, watching them set up their fragile camp. They had waited until the team was deep in the jungle, lured by the false hope of recovering the drone, and then they had come down to the beach to deliver their message.

They hadn't just destroyed their camp. They had remade it into a temple. A temple dedicated to the crew's own impending destruction.

Leo looked from the smashed beacon to the flayed skin, to the all-seeing eyes of the spiral-faced god. He looked at the vast, empty ocean stretching to the horizon. It was no longer a path to freedom. It was the wall of a cage. The beach was not a sanctuary. It was the center of the trap. The trees behind them, the rocks on either side of the cove, the very water at their feet—it was all part of the killing ground.

They were trapped.