Tim Lebbon - Kong - Skull Island

“You can tell them we won’t be here that long,” Conrad said. “There are more of us out in the jungle, injured. Some dead.”

Weaver edged from foot to foot. She felt a stress building, not in Conrad’s words but in his demeanour. The others, too, were exuding tension. Nieves and Slivko held their guns down by their sides, but she saw their hands gripping that little bit tighter, knuckles whitening.

“We need to go that way.” Conrad pointed at the wall beyond the village.

The villagers reacted instantly. Though their expressions did not change, several of them brought up their spears, and others crouched down as if in preparation for a fight.

“Out there?” Marlow asked, afraid for the first time. “Oh no, they won’t let you go out there.”

“Won’t let us?” Nieves asked.

“Not after you kicked the hornet’s nest,” Marlow said. “Nope. They won’t let you past that wall.”

Nieves took a step forward, suddenly more threatening. “Wait a minute, won’t let us? You’re not serious. We can’t just stay here, we have to get off this rock. We have lives back home. I have a life. Tell them, we need to—”

“Thank them for their hospitality,” Conrad said, stepping forward and cutting Nieves off. Weaver realised that she’d been about to do the same. Nieves was losing it, and it was starting to feel like a mistake giving him a gun.

Nieves looked around and Weaver caught his eye. She shook her head.

“Get out of the office, they said,” he muttered. “See the world, have an adventure. Damn it, I need… I need…” He slumped and sat down on the hard ground, nursing the rifle across his legs.

A female villager approached, confident and quiet, and handed him a finely carved stone cup of water.

Nieves looked up, surprised. “Oh. Thank you.”

Weaver removed herself from their oddly poignant moment and took a photo of the standing woman handing the seated man a drink. Every one of these could win awards , she thought.

“They won’t hurt you,” Marlow said, looking around at the new arrivals. “They really won’t. Come on in, I’ll give you a tour of the village.”

“I’d rather see more of that,” Conrad said, pointing at the shipwrecked Wanderer .

“Oh, yeah. There’s a lot to see there. Okay, we’ll start there. Let’s go.” Marlow led the way, but Nieves held back, seated with the village woman. He seemed enrapt.

“I think maybe I’ll wait here,” he said.

Weaver took another picture.

They passed through the village and approached the grounded ship. It looked larger the nearer they got, not quite Athena ’s size, but close. Weaver could see several rusted holes in its hull, and she wondered whether they had been torn there during the ship’s final moments, or had decayed over time since the wreck.

She also wondered what had happened to the Wanderer ’s sailors and crew.

Marlow led the group—Conrad, Brooks, San, Slivko and a reluctant Nieves—in through one of these openings, up a small slope of wreckage, and into an interior hallway. Lit from several large openings above, the functional passageway had been carved and decorated over the years so that it barely resembled a ship’s interior at all.

Weaver used her flash to adequately illuminate the photos she took. She had begun to realise that she was documenting something amazing, unknown, and horrible, all probably for the first time ever. The images she was recording here were unprecedented. They were unique.

All she had to do was to survive and get them off this island.

She photographed Marlow again from behind as he was talking with Conrad. He looked fit and well, especially considering he’d been here for almost thirty years. Yet he still had much of his story to tell. She could sense Conrad’s caution, even though Marlow seemed only happy to see them.

“Far as I can tell, this ship washed up about a decade or so before I did,” the old pilot said. “Sits on top of a spring. The whole place is hallowed ground to them. Come on through, I’ll show you the main spring room. It’s sorta… spooky.”

Marlow wasn’t lying. Even on the approach to the spring room, a strange glowing light emanated from it, speckling the walls with luminescence and catching dust drifting on the air.

They entered the spring room, and for a moment Weaver forgot her camera. Perhaps it had once been one of the ship’s holds, or a high-ceilinged rec room, but everything about it had changed. Walls were contoured with crafted wood and dried mud and decorated with obscure shapes and images. The floor had been relaid in blocked stone, smoothed by decades of reverential footfalls. High up, the ceiling was open to the sky, but criss-crossed with heavy vines and hanging plants, making for an artificial forest canopy. At the room’s centre sat the well head. Raised a couple of feet from the floor, the well was almost perfectly round, and it emitted a strange phosphorescent glow that permeated the whole room.

While the others examined the well and its strange light, Weaver concentrated on the walls. There was something about the shapes there, the separate planks all painted with patterns, and how the colours interacted with the carvings and moulded mud. Shadow and light conspired. It was not hypnotic, but still the features drew her eye and levelled her concentration. She snapped photos, and in between she simply stared. Blinking slowly, letting her vision settle, she saw it at last.

These were not random shapes at all.

“Look at this,” she said, and Conrad and the others came over. After a few seconds they saw as well.

One of the main images showed Kong sitting on a giant stone throne. The seat was made from weirdly-shaped skulls, many of them as large as his. Its feet were bones that had to be thirty feet long. He even wore a crown of jagged teeth.

“Kong,” Weaver breathed, and the name itself held a strange power.

“The tribe thinks he’s a king, or even some sort of god,” Marlow said. “Sometimes I gotta wonder.”

“Must have missed that part of Sunday school,” Conrad said.

Brooks and San moved from side to side, pointing out new, more awful images. Weaver’s blood ran cold when she saw them. She was starting to have an inkling of just why that giant wall had been built across the villagers’ valley.

“I used to think this job was a wild goose chase,” Brooks said. “Another step in making a decent resume.”

“Instead, we’re making history,” San said.

“Or seeing it,” Weaver said.

“Kong keeps pretty much to himself, you know,” Marlow said. “But you don’t go into a man’s abode and start dropping bombs. You can’t blame him for what happened.”

“Isn’t it Kong that killed your friend?” Weaver asked, probing for more of the man’s story.

Marlow’s face went cold for the first time since they’d all met. “Not Kong,” he said, pointing at the other images. “It was them.”

The images and shapes across the wall were chilling, and the idea that they were real even more so.

Giant reptilian beasts, one with three heads. A crocodile fifty feet long. Snake-like monsters, slinking from holes in the ground and snapping towards the sun. Web-footed creatures, spikes along their backs spearing bloodied human shapes, diving into the ocean surrounding the island.

“If Kong’s god of the island, then the things that live beneath it are the demons,” Marlow said. “The villagers won’t talk of them, and I’ve never heard their real name. I just call them Skull Crawlers.”

“Why?” Conrad asked.

Marlow shrugged. “Because it sounds neat.”

“So why haven’t we seen them?” Conrad asked.