“It’ll be just like LOST,” my agent encouraged me, “Mixed with Survivor, except that you won’t have to crash-land first, and it’s going to be REALLY real, you won’t have a whole foodservice crew just off camera.”

He was more right than he knew, really; we were air-lifted to this island through god-awful storms, and I was a little surprised we didn’t crash. People started disappearing before the end of the first week, and it didn’t take long before none of us could trust one another.

I struck out for the far side of the island, but I feel like something’s been watching me. Last night I felt all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, even though it was so warm that it was dusk, with no cloudcover to keep the heat in, and I was still sitting in front of my cookfire with my shirt tied around my waist. Casually as I could I reached out to poke the fire and grabbed the end of one of the longer branches sticking out of it.

I didn’t hear anything, but there was a bit of a prickling breeze. I stood with a yell, brandishing the flaming stick over my head like I was some kind of viking with a freaking broadsword – staring right at this huge, roiling amorphous dark cloud. It shifted and boiled this way and that, and then arched over to reach past me, broadening like a hand, and then collapsing around the stick that had gone still up behind me.

The fire went out.