Happy New Year, everyone and welcome to chapter 12.

An enormous thanks to my editors and supports who have made this, and my other series, what they are. Lets hope 2023 continues to be as fruitful as the last few months of 2022 have been.

Anyway, one with the story

********

As Amy had predicted, the next day was long and tiring, made even more tiring by the lack of sleep the night before. The time spent listening to Dr. Walker in the bunker had taken a few hours, the time spent fucking Amy to within an inch of her ability to walk had stretched that time even further, and the rest of the night was marked by the complete inability to sleep. Dr. Walker's account was pretty worrying, but it was Amy's sudden change that really bothered me. We were in the room with the voice recorder when she reverted back to her non-lucid state, yet she had no memory of anything she had heard.

That little contradiction plagued my mind all day. Freja, the Goddess of lust and sexual desire, had seemed so genuine; I had trusted her so implicitly that I had immediately left the vision with her and done my level best to impregnate not one but two of the women I was stranded on this Island with. There was still a huge part of me that wanted to believe her, even if it was only because her explanation excused the fact that I had basically taken advantage of these women. Now, though, I was starting to wonder. Dr. Walker had changed during the times he was recording, not once, but twice. Shifting from what seemed to be a lucid, logical, worried medical expert into the same lust-driven madman that I had become so many times. That voice, the one he had used to command the women he had been on this very island with, was so obviously identical to the voice I had felt leave my lips to command Hayley and Robyn at the lake that it sent a shiver up my spine.

Yet, according to Dr. Walker, that voice, or at least the control that it represented, was a threat to the lives of everyone on this island.

Then there were the other contradictions. Amy had followed me into the bunker the previous night, and she had not only been able to see the room with the recorder in it, but she had also shared my concern and joined me in listening to it. But only a few hours earlier, Hayley had told me that she was having a lucid moment but still couldn't see the room despite being only a few feet away from its entrance.

Then there was the fact that the voice had been conspicuously silent since we had found the bunker. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake the feeling of concern and apprehension from my mind; I needed to hear more of the doctor's story.

The day was a blur. Filled with the mundane and menial tasks of clearing out the rest of the large interior room and gathering supplies to fill it with. Katie and one of the Zoe/Caroline twins spent the morning finishing their repairs to the mattresses. They repaired twenty of them in total, but they were both even more surprised than I was with how well they had survived the decades of waiting in the bunker. I suppose the lack of exposure to the open elements and sunlight prolonged their life expectancy well past anything that could be normally expected of them.

Louisa, Hannah, and Ray's other brunette twin kept bringing arm-fulls of soft grass to the pile just inside the gun emplacement until late afternoon, by which time it had grown to about ten feet tall and just as wide around the base. They guessed it would take a week or two to dry out enough to be used to stuff the mattresses, but they were happy with their efforts.

Hayley, Robyn, Liz, Amy, Ray, Tom, and I finished hauling the scrap furniture out of the bunker and into the junk pile before taking the long walk back to the beach to carry back the clothes and other useful items that had been pulled out of the luggage. There was some conversation to pass the time, a lot of it trying to tackle the problem of how to maintain a light source within the bunker's room without starting a larger fire or killing us all from smoke inhalation, but I kept myself out of most of it. I was simply too preoccupied. My mind couldn't multitask the minutiae of idle chit-chat while it struggled with the mysteries bouncing around inside it.

People noticed; Hayley most of all. But they accepted my explanation that I'd not slept well and was feeling a little worse for wear. A soft smile and a gentle squeeze of her hand were enough to put her mind at ease and with Hayley convinced, the others didn't press the issue either. All of them seemed to understand what had happened between Amy and me the night before, but no big deal was made of it, and nobody - even jokingly - suggested that my nocturnal activities with our Island's medical professional were the cause of my lethargy.

Realistically, there was only one way to get out of this funk, and that was to get back to that room and listen to the rest of what Dr. Walker had to say. The problem with that was that the sun seemed to be taking its sweet-ass time moving through the sky. Every single hour dragged out to rage-inducing durations.

"Jesus fucking Christ," I found myself thinking as I watched the sun finally touch the top of the western mountains. "It has been sunset for at least a week now! Hurry the fuck up and get dark!"

It felt like I could have hit two birthdays in the time it took the light to finally start fading and the group to start to settle down. The longevity of the day and the hard slog that everyone had put into making this bunker into something of a home base had wiped all the usual energy out of the group. Tom and Louisa didn't even bother moving to their normal spot away from the rest of us before Louisa was sleeping, her head resting on Tom's shoulders as he dozed off too. The girls, this time including Amy and Liz, cuddled into me and each other and quickly fell asleep. Ray and his brunettes were the last to succumb to the efforts of the day, talking quietly just inside the gun emplacement, but soon their voices faded away to nothingness as they, too, drifted off.

Almost every fiber of my being wanted to join them, to cuddle into the heap of soft feminine flesh, close my eyes, and lose myself to sleep. I was exhausted beyond measure. Yet, after waiting long enough to ensure I was the last one awake, my impatient mind pulled me to my feet and dragged me back towards the bunker... and answers.

********

"Doug is dead." The doctor's voice was hollow and weak; I could feel the exhaustion and the pain filling every syllable that echoed through the speakers. "It's been months since the last time I was here. Grace followed through on her promise. She didn't say anything, but I knew she was suspicious after finding me in here last time, and she made sure that I was never alone after that. So much has happened since the last time I recorded. But I think I have a little time to lay it all out.

Under Grace's orders... I assume because she suspected I was having lucid moments more than she realized and wondered if the others were having the same... the other team was pulled out of the airfield and brought back to the bunker. Doug, Richard, Sally, the two aides and the four women who were with them - although one of them was now with Richard - all joined us at the main base. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. The reason for keeping them isolated from each other was now a moot point considering that none of the people who had been here before us were being kept in the holding pens anymore, and the tests had pretty much stopped.

Everything became about sex.

A few days after the other staff returned, Grace herded up all of the women who had become pregnant by men no longer alive and took them to the hospital with Sally. I don't know how she knew who the fathers were, but she knew that she was pregnant with my child, and so was Susan. Sally was carrying Doug's child, and Sylvia was carrying Richards. The other three women from their group were pregnant too, but one of them had been knocked up before the aides arrived and was taken to the hospital with the others.

Richard was put on guard at the door. Jesus, he was like a robot. I can't imagine what Grace did to him, but it was like his personality was just... gone. He wouldn't answer when spoken to, he would only guard that door, and the one time I tried to get in, he damn near broke my arm. I should point out here that Richard was a rifleman in the 1st Marines. That man hit the beaches of Guadalcanal and survived the duration of Peleliu. He is not someone you fuck with. I didn't try to get into the hospital again after that, but the women were in there for more than a week.

In the meantime, the rest of the women seemed to be going out of their way to keep me occupied. The lucid moments were still coming, but they were just as erratic and unpredictable as before. Every time I had a moment, I was with one of them. Every night, at least two of the women would come to my room and lock the door behind them, fuck me to exhaustion, then wake up the next morning and fuck me again until someone came, knocked on the door, and we would go about our day. When lucid, I knew I was a prisoner, but the rest of the time, it all seemed so normal. I loved every single one of the women that had imprinted onto me without question, and spending time with them was the most natural thing in the world.

When the women finally came out of the hospital they... I don't know how to say it any other way... but they weren't pregnant anymore. Grace and Sally had terminated every pregnancy fathered by someone who wasn't alive anymore. It was against every code of ethics that a medical professional holds dear. It was abhorrent, there was nothing medically wrong with any of those children or their mothers, and she killed them all anyway. It was cold-blooded murder. I'm not anti-abortion by any means, but that is not what this was. This was the same clinical disregard for life that the Nazis possessed.

And none of us noticed.

At least until my next moment. I felt sick to my stomach, but it was like trying to remember a bad dream. It's like anything and everything that would make us angry, or upset, or even mildly unhappy, becomes increasingly hard to recall, be that our memories of home, the names of loved ones, or the murder of unborn children.

Three of the women who had been in the hospital joined me that night, and I fucked every single one of them until we all passed out. They had been so long without my seed that they were practically frantic with need, and it was my duty to sate them. The following night, Grace stayed with me to "thank" me for performing so well.

I can still feel her body against mine; I can still... no... I need to stay focused! Think of Doug, dammit, remember what they did to him.

Doug. I didn't know it before then, but almost everyone, except maybe Grace, was having these lucid moments as well; it's just that I was never lucid when they were, or I didn't notice if they were, and the same went for them when I was lucid. That morning with Doug changed all that. Doug, Sally, Betty, and I were asked to go to the river to collect water. Betty and Sally were in full froth that day. They were acting like the harlots you read about in the stroke mags we read during the war. They were doing everything in their power to drive us crazy, but neither Doug nor I were biting, so they decided to put on a girl-on-girl show for us. I was distracted. I had realized that, if my math was right, my son's birthday was that week, and I missed him terribly. I'm not sure what Doug was thinking about, but it was clear he wasn't really in the mood either. Eventually, we both just fucked them so we could get back on task. It will forever be to Doug's credit that he spoke first.

"You're here too, aren't you?" He asked me. I know exactly what he meant; I almost wept with relief, knowing that I wasn't alone. We knew we had to talk quickly. We had no idea how much time we would have, but I told him about the room with the recording equipment in it, and we decided that we would leave each other notes, communicating without the others noticing.

By the time we were halfway back to the bunker, he was gone again, and I wasn't long behind him.

It was a little over a week before the first note appeared in the drawer of the desk here. It turned out that Doug had been having much more lucid moments than I had and had quietly been continuing his research into the infection. He had noticed Grace's suspicion of me and tried to be as careful as he could in carrying it out.

His notes were meticulous, but his conclusions were worrying. Whatever was controlling us was acting with a high degree of sentience. This wasn't like rabies, as we had originally thought before we arrived on the island; this was more like brainwashing. What was more worrying was that he suspected there was not one source of control.

There were two.

Grace had been talking about "the Goddess" for months by now, and when I thought about it, she seemed to go out of her way to ensure everyone was cared for and happy. As long as we were trying our best to procreate, we were living lives that most of us would have considered a fantasy. An idyllic island with people we were in love with, not a care in the world aside from semi-regular reports back to Pearl, constant sex, and the occasional need to gather supplies.

But there was a darker side to the control as well, like the termination of those pregnancies, the behavior of Col. Williams, and the deaths of the people who had been removed from this Island. Very little of that could be blamed on Grace. It wasn't only her that pulled them into the hospital, Sally helped, and more than that, the women themselves seemed more than happy to undergo the procedure. Doug hypothesized that there was something else going on. He just wasn't sure how to categorize it.

Our back and forth went on for a few weeks. We would both note our observations and detail any tests we had been able to perform during our lucid moments. Then one day, a third person joined in. I don't know who it was, but I guessed that Doug had clued them in, and they seemed to have a much better grasp on things than we did.

Most importantly, they had performed tests on the various plants on the island, specifically the red flowers that seem to cover vast, huge swathes of the open land here. Botany is not my subject of expertise, but apparently, there is something very strange about the pollen of this plant in that it acts more like bacteria than that inanimate plant stuff. Whoever it is, they promised to investigate further.

Doug, in his notes, was becoming more and more concerned with the two variations of control over us. He started asking about "the dark-haired woman." Neither our third partner nor I had any idea what he was talking about, but we all noticed that our lucid moments were becoming less frequent.

A few days later, I saw her.

I wasn't lucid, it wasn't one of those moments, but I saw her. Since his role as hospital guard had ended, Richard had been mating furiously with his woman, Sylvia, between carrying out his normal duties. But one day, I walked into the mess, and he was just sitting there, talking to this dark-haired woman as if he had known her all his life. She was touching his arm and preening for him while Sylvia watched on, smiling. The woman was ... she was beyond beautiful. She was the walking, talking personification of all things womanly. She was perfect. I could feel her drawing me in, I wanted nothing more than to talk to her, but - for whatever reason - I didn't.

The next day she was with Betty and Susan. The day after that, she was with Sally. She just seemed to appear out of nowhere, interact with a few people, and then vanish. She was like a ghost. Anytime she was around, she was the center of the world to whoever she was spending time with, but as soon as she vanished, it was like we all forgot about her.

On the fourth day, Doug confronted the group. He stood in the middle of the room and yelled at all of us, asking who she was and why none of us were concerned with some random person inexplicably turning up on the Island. I don't think they saw me; I was in the hallway, but the dark-haired woman just stared at him. Jesus, her eyes... they were... they were evil.

Richard lunged for him, pinning him to the ground before the rest of the women piled on as well. They dragged him down the other hallway and outside and held him down. He was kicking and screaming. I knew it was wrong, there was something in the back of my head screaming at me to put a stop to it, but my body didn't want to listen. Betty, Susan, Sally, and Sylvia pinned him to the dirt, and Richard....

Richard smashed his head in with a rock.

He just kept hitting him and hitting him until there was nothing left. They turned his skull into wet mulch. His legs were still twitching when the attack stopped. They tossed his body into the sea and went back to their meals as if nothing had happened. My god, Richard was eating his rations with Doug's blood and brains still all over his hands, all over his clothes, all over his face. Fuck, all of them were caked in it.

What was worse, I joined them. I had watched, I had seen it happen, but my mind refused to allow me to acknowledge it. I could still hear his screams and the grunts as Richard turned his skull to mush... They killed him. And I was sitting there with them, eating and chatting, as if nothing had happened.

And then that night, Sylvia asked if I had seen him. Fuck, she had helped hold him down! AND I SAID NO!!

The voice faded for a second, the silence broken by the sounds of soft sobbing. "My God, I think he was married, I... I can't remember anything about him. It's only been a few days, and I can hardly remember his face. Were there others? Have we killed other members of our team and just forgotten about it? If this ever gets back to his wife, I need her to know how sorry I am...

I... wish I could take it back. Whatever is happening here, the dark-haired woman is evil. If you see her, don't question her, and don't draw attention to yourself. They will kill you if you do. I need to go now. I need to compose myself before the others get back.

I'm so sorry, Doug.

The speakers clicked off.

I blinked at the shadowy outline of the recorder for the few seconds it took for Dr. Walker's voice to return. I racked my brain; I know my memories, just like everyone else's, were being messed with, or at the very least, I had more than enough grounds to doubt their reliability. But I could not remember seeing a dark-haired woman aside from the ones who had landed on this island with us.

There was another click, and Dr. Walker started talking again, but this time it was different. He was panting, his breathing coming heavily enough to almost distort the words he was trying to say. The man was terrified.

"This will be my last recording. I think I am going to die today. I need to get this down quickly before they get through the door."

There were a series of loud bangs through the speakers, the echoes of something heavy hitting the solid steel door that guarded the entrance to this room.

"It has been eight months since Doug's death, and most of the women have given birth now. I have another five children, with three more on the way. Sally is pregnant again too; she imprinted onto Richard after they killed Doug. I don't think any of them even remember him anymore. But the third person contributing to our notes was Susan. She cracked the whole thing wide open. If you survive this, it will be thanks to her. Mother found out about her research this morning. Richard and the others killed her too. They lynched her! They tied a rope around her neck, threw it over a branch of a tree down by the river, and pulled on it until she stopped kicking. There was nothing I could do.

But stupidly, I tried anyway. We still had our sidearms from when we first arrived. I shot Richard... hit him right between the eyes. Betty and Sally charged me. I shot them too. I... I don't know if I killed them or not. But then I ran. I need to get this out quickly, the door isn't going to hold for long, and I can feel Mother trying to get back into my head.

Doug was right. There ARE two entities at work on this Island. One is the Goddess; she is only interested in sex and procreation. As long as you give her what she wants, she will make your life a living paradise, but if you fight it... bad things can happen. As bad as that may sound, she is the "good" entity. The other one is much, much worse. I have called her the "dark-haired woman," but whatever her real name is, she wants us to call her Mother. She is the antithesis of the Goddess.

If the Goddess is all about sex and lustful desires, Mother wants conflict and jealousy. She has been trying so hard to split the group into factions and make us fight amongst ourselves. You cannot let her win.

I know this is vague, and I wish I had the time to explain this properly, but beating time is a losing fight, and I am out of it. There are things you can do to tip the scales in your favor, though. First of all, you need to understand what is happening to everyone. The Goddess is a bonafide spiritual presence. She can only appear to you - or to Grace, in our case - in certain places on the Island. Specifically places close to water. She will help you if you let her. I wish I had been more trusting of Grace when she told me; maybe she would still be alive, too, and maybe the Goddess would answer my prayers.

Mother is different. Mother is a parasite, a prion, a protozoa; SHE is the infection. Susan was right. She is linked, somehow, to the red flowers found in the grasslands. Stay as far away from them as you can. The more time you spend around them, the stronger her control becomes. Once enough of that pollen gets inside you, it starts to take over.

This is why you need to pay attention to how other people act, or how YOU act when the control takes over again. It's different with mother. You will know it when you feel it, but it is more... hostile, it is aggressive, It strives to divide the group rather than to work together. Someone will be trying to start fights, or will be pulling other members of the group further away from the rest of you. She does NOT like being called out for it, so if you notice it, try to get to the person she is trying to infect, don't bother with the person already infected, they are already lost.

If you feel it in you, there are ways to beat her. Don't fight her, not directly. She feeds off the adrenaline that fighting her control produces. That makes her stronger. The more you fight her, the easier it will be for her to take control. Instead, swim with the current, let her take you. Her control is much more intense than the Goddess's, but it is also much shorter. The more you fight it, the stronger she gets, so if you don't fight, she has less power to maintain her control over you.

We were lucky, all of our team here were medical experts and we were able to work out what was happening. I have no way of knowing if the next visitors to this island will have the same skill set, so I am leaving this record in case you don't. Our research has been hampered, as yours will be, by the fact that once infected, people seem to be completely oblivious to ANYTHING that could draw attention to the control being exerted over them. Even when confronted by categorical, unequivocal evidence that they are being controlled, they simply can't see it. It's like the analytical centers of their brains just switch off. More than that, anyone who is under a form of control has to be treated as if they were the enemy. Anything you say to them can be passed onto whoever is controlling them. If that is mother...

On the upside, everyone will be able to process it normally during their lucid moments. If you organize a way to communicate, you can fight this. I wish I had known that sooner. We could have had our whole team working on this instead of just three of us. Also, neither the Goddess nor Mother can read your mind. What you do when you are lucid is beyond their ability to see. They cannot see your memories of it afterward, but do NOT make the mistake that Doug made. Do not draw attention to your lucidity unless you are absolutely certain that the person you are with is lucid too. If you announce yourself to someone who is being controlled, the entity controlling them will know about it. The Goddess doesn't seem to care, but if Mother sees you as a threat, she WILL kill you.

If you see a dark-haired woman, don't react. Just do what everyone else is doing. It doesn't matter what it is. I cannot stress this enough. Do what you need to do to stay undetected. I'm almost certain that Richard and Slyvia fucked her. If that's what it takes, do it.

I don't have time to explain everything, there is just too much to say. But our notes are in the desk drawers here. I have locked the drawers and hidden the key in the hospital. It is under the leg of the third bed from the door on the left side of the room. Everything you need to know is written in there, along with all the information we could find about the members of our expedition. Please let our families know what happened to us. Don't let us die for nothing.

There was a large crash in the background of the recording as, assumedly, the door to the room was smashed open. "Good luck," the Doctor whispered into the mic before his assailant spoke.

The female voice that started to talk was as terrifying as it was haunting. It was like a thousand whispers had been layered on top of each other and then jammed through a voice synthesizer. "Simon. You are a difficult man to find."

"Only when I don't want to be found."

"Hmmm, yes. It would seem you are quite resistant to my control. Why is that?"

"I'm not telling you shit! I'm not giving you anything you can use to do this again. You are going to stay trapped here forever."

"So brave, so noble," The female voice laughed condescendingly. "But you are the last adult male on the island after you killed poor Richard. What do you think happens to the others when it becomes impossible to breed them."

"I didn't kill Richard; you did. Just like you killed Doug, and Susan, and Grace."

"They were traitors!" the voice spat.

"They were soldiers!" Walker replied defiantly. "And I know you are going to kill the others. But if it means you stay trapped here, then they won't be dying for nothing!"

"Oh, you say that with such conviction. But what about the children? So young, so innocent. I will make it slow, you know. I will make them suffer. I will drag out their deaths until... Well, I'm sure you can imagine. So what about them? Are they soldiers too?"

There was a long pause. Only the sound of Dr. Walker's heavy breathing drifted from the speakers.

"There is another way." the woman said. "You can come home. Surrender your mind to me, and I promise no harm will come to any of the people on this Island. The women you love, the children you have fathered, they will be safe."

There was another long pause before Dr. Walker spoke again.

"I hope the hell that you find is one of your own making. Fuck you!"

"Pity. Goodbye Simon"

A loud bang rang out. It was impossible to mistake it for anything other than a single gunshot before the telltale signs of a body slumping to the ground filled the room. The chair, the equipment, the entire room had been left undisturbed since that night, meaning that Dr. Walker had died almost exactly where I was sitting. My eyes unconsciously shifted to the dark stain on the wall. It wasn't the mark of water ingress as I had originally thought.

It was a decades-old blood stain. It was all that remained of Dr. Walker.

There was silence for a few long minutes before a voice drifted through the speakers. Sobbing quietly as she spoke. "I'm sorry Simon. I tried to fight her. I really did. She made me watch as she killed you... as I killed you. She said it was my punishment for not knowing you were working against her. But I knew... I am working against her too. I will protect our children, all of them, I promise. I love you. I won't let your death be in vain. If I get home, I will tell your family that you died a hero. I will tell them of the man you were. Goodbye, my love."

With another click, the speakers fell silent again. I listened for another half an hour or so, just in case there was something a little further on, but nothing else came. I looked down at the desk on which the recording equipment was placed, three drawers were set beneath it on the right-hand side, and sure enough, all of them were locked.

I would need to find the hospital tomorrow, and with it, the key that opened those drawers. I took a deep breath and stood, casting one more look at the dark stain on the wall before turning to the door.

I froze as a giggle wafted along the corridor, followed by a voice that sent a chill down my spine.

"Oh, it's so good to be back," A voice like a thousand whispers layered on top of one another echoed past the door. "And once again, outside the territory of Freja and her meddling. This time will be different. Don't you agree, my dear?"

I ducked to the side of the room's entrance as a familiar-shaped shadow skipped girlishly past the doorway and onwards toward the large room. "Yes, Mother." a normal woman's voice replied, both voices coming from the same person as they disappeared into the darkness. "But I don't understand. Why is he so resistant to you?"

"He is different, my child," the voice replied. "His devotion to service and the way he thinks makes his mind difficult to infiltrate. He will return your affections, he may even be a good companion to you, but unless he can be converted, he will have to be dealt with eventually."

Shit! Were they talking about me? Who the fuck was speaking? I knew that shadow, but in the darkness, I couldn't make out which of the girls it was.

"What about the others?"

"They are all perfect, my love. Once they have all been brought into the fold, it will be easy to start the next phase of my plan."

"And what is that?"

"Patience, my child," the voice said. "You have not completed your task yet. Concentrate on that before you worry about what comes next."

"Yes, Mother."

"Mmmm, Good girl."

"What more do you want of me?"

"You are eager to serve, aren't you?"

"I need my life to have meaning," the woman's voice replied, barely above a whisper. Fuck! Why couldn't I recognize it? "There is no greater meaning than the one you have given me."

"Mmmm, that's right. Tomorrow, I want you to stay close to this Dan."

"Do you think he will be a problem?"

"Not as much as your man, but I fear he has been touched by the Goddess already. He has been infuriatingly difficult to access. Only time will tell."

Something sank into the pit of my stomach. If I was not the same person as "her man," then that meant that either Ray or Tom was in serious danger. I badly wanted to sneak after the shadow, even if only to catch a glimpse of her and find out who it was. But I had heard the callousness in her voice on the recording. I had heard the final moments of Dr. Walker's life. The defiance in his voice, as inspiring and heroic as it may have been, was in no way a match for the resolve in hers. I needed to be very, very careful.

"Come," the voice said. "Let me see how much of my former home is still standing."

"Yes, Mother. I will follow where you lead."

With that, the shadow, and the voices, drifted off into the darkness of one of the main room's connected tunnels. After waiting a few more minutes to make sure I wouldn't be seen, I slipped silently out of the comms room, back down the tunnel, and rejoined the pile of my girls.

In moments I was buried under a web of cuddling arms as the group reformed around me. I tried to stay awake, I wanted to see who returned to the group. I needed to know who the source of this danger was. But sleep was drawing in on me fast.

"My love, do not fear." Freja's voice echoed around me as my eyelids started to succumb to the weight on them. "I am watching you, I am with you. Come to see me tomorrow. Come alone if you are able. I will explain all that I can."

My eyes fell shut, and the world drifted away.

********

And that is a wrap for chapter 12.

What explanations will Dan find when he next sees Freja? Will he go alone, or will he be forced to take a friend or two? And who is the mysterious shadow in the darkness? What are they planning, and what do their plans mean for the rest of the islanders? Stay tuned next week to find out.

Yes, that was done in my best 70s gameshow host voice.