JUST OUT THERE UPON THE BEACH

By Steve Seinberg and Meriades Rai

An unnamed island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, South Pacific Ocean, 600km off the coast of Chile

The clock strikes twelve, and moondrops burst
Out at you from their hiding place
Like acid and oil on a madman’s face
His reason tends to fly away…

“Ah, Isidora, my love. Sixty years on, and I shall never tire of these beautiful sunsets.”

Josef Schwartz poured his wife another glass of Viña Ochagavia Chardonnay Grand Reserva 1851 and settled back in his recliner, his gaze trained upon the distant horizon. The Pacific ocean was a rich cobalt blue, sparkling with gold and scarlet fire beneath the reddening sky, and the white coastal sands that ringed the island burned so bright it was difficult to imagine the approaching darkness that would soon douse them in indigo shadow. Night fell quickly out here, and deeply, but Josef had convinced himself that he could hold back the dying of the light for so long that he now genuinely believed it.

In sixty years, a man could convince himself of so many things…

Isidora Schwartz slumped in her chair, as she ever did, unspeaking. Her husband regarded her sadly but no less fondly. He missed her company but understood that it was difficult for her to communicate these days; she’d lost her spark since falling ill, but she was still Isidora, Isidora, enchanting and faithful Isidora. He owed her everything. He would have gone mad without her, all this time, and with such a burden of greatness on his shoulders.

“But now the sand’s become a crust, and most of you have gone away,” he murmured, thinking back on how many acquaintances he’d seen perish over time. It was only he and Isidora left now. He reached out and held her hand as he sipped at his wine, refusing to dwell on such melancholic reverie. The fact that he could feel no warm skin beneath his touch, only the cold and desiccated bone that remained where flesh had long since rotted away and been picked clean, didn’t register in his heart.

Death was a sorrowful state, of course. But at least it was only temporary.

Josef lingered for a few more minutes, then drained his glass and stood, absently smoothing the crease from the otherwise crisp white linen of his shirt and slacks. The sand was still warm beneath his bare feet, the air sultry but beginning to cool. There were no dark clouds drifting in as the sun began to disappear but there was something of an oncoming storm, some electrical charge on the air, that caused Josef’s hair to prickle on the back of his neck. He stared out at the horizon, tight-lipped.

“You are not welcome here,” he murmured in German, his blue eyes piercing as he scrutinized the advance of the unseen tempest. “Be warned.”

Then he turned and began to trudge up through the gently sloping dunes that marked the interior perimeter of the island beach, heading towards the thick bank of green and black foliage that rose like a barrier before him. The island was small, barely more than two miles across, but the jungle was thick at its heart and the mountainous terrain rose swiftly and peaked with a jagged ridge of volcanic rock and soil and scrub. Josef rarely had cause to venture deep into the undergrowth, his immediate destination nestled just behind the curtain of the closest trees. This residence was a modest yet nonetheless breathtaking chateau of eighteenth century Austrian Baroque architecture embellished with more modern Art Nouveau stylings, and it was all the more incongruous in this Pacific island setting because it was no crass reproduction; for all intents and purposes, this was the very same chateau where Josef had been born and had spent his childhood, in Rosenheim, Bavaria in the 1930s.

The original chateau had burned down a short time after the end of the war but Josef had recreated the building piece by piece through memory… and through the use of arcane artifacts he didn’t truly understand but which he had collected over time, and which he now guarded jealously.

It was because of this esoteric collection, housed in a special vault beneath the chateau, that Josef Schwartz believed he could revive Isidora’s fleshless corpse and once again take his beloved wife into his arms, just as he had recreated his childhood home from nothing. It was because of these artifacts that Josef, now some eighty years old, instead resembled the lean, handsome, golden-haired fellow he had appeared at twenty-five… and it was because of these mysterious magics that Josef was convinced he could stand against any opportunistic adversary who might see fit to try and steal away what now belonged to him.

Josef paused at the edge of the trees and glanced back once more towards the darkening skies above the empty ocean, a figure of purest white silhouetted against the black. His eyes were cold, his smile the slit of a dagger’s edge.

“Come then, storm,” he whispered. “And you shall find me waiting…”

The Tower of Shadows
Los Angeles, California

What’s that in the corner?
It’s too dark to see.
What’s that noise I’m hearing?
Who’s that calling me?

“…Shroud.”

The mysterious man in black known as the Shroud was clearly distracted.

Who’s that calling me…?

“Shroud!”

That seemed to get his attention: Cylla Markham, the ferocious cyborg called Scylla, was not one to go mincing daintily around the concerns of others, not when there was pressing business at hand.

“My employer,” she said, indicating the gentleman seated next to her at the Shroud’s luxurious conference table, “is talking to you. Pay some attention, huh?”

Scylla’s employer, the ruthless corporate tycoon named Thomas Fireheart, regarded the Shroud with a mixture of amusement and annoyance that, combined with the cool elegance of his custom-tailored suit and his slicked back hair, had him looking like one of Satan’s own Cabinet members.

“Yes,” the Shroud invited Fireheart, trying to shake off whatever random thought had been occupying his mind. “You were saying…?”

Fireheart leaned ever so slightly forward, bars of light and shadow slipping across his form as fading sunbeams spilled down through the latticed skylight above them all. “I was saying that we four have come together to deal with a specialized and yet ultimately still rather mundane drug distribution ring… and yet suddenly you’re referencing things like spirits and arcane artifacts. The why of it all remains unclear to me. How do such things have any bearing whatsoever on an organization that manufactures and markets a recreational substance – even one derived from the unique blood of your associate here?” Fireheart indicated the Shroud’s recent houseguest and ally, Dr. Michael Morbius, whose red eyes gazed balefully back, unblinking.

The Shroud stared at Fireheart in silence for several long moments, and then finally gave answer: “Better to just let them have their say. It will be more firmly and quickly convincing from them.”

“’Them?’”

“The spirits that I spoke of, Ms. Markham.”

“Call me Scylla. And we already saw you do some fancy visual tricks with those ‘shadow-constructs’ of yours the other night, so how do we know this won’t just be more of the same?”

“For one thing, you all have highly enhanced senses, so I believe you would see through any ruse I might attempt to perpetrate here. For another thing… your employer is not exactly inexperienced when it comes to spirits. Ask him what he thinks after my contacts have had their say.”

At mention of this last statement about himself, Fireheart’s annoyance clearly began to wax, even as his amusement waned. “I’m not certain if you’re making light of my experiences or not, Shroud, but I warn you to tread most carefully in this territory.”

“I’m the last person to make light of anything, Mr. Fireheart. It’s not in my nature. I meant what I said: their arrival is now imminent, so go ahead and ask them about the Beyonder if that will help to convince you. They have apparently encountered each other before, and mentioned that this might be of some interest to you.”

Fireheart, also the feline super-human known as the Puma, didn’t exactly growl at that, although his were-cat self suddenly seemed somehow vastly closer to the surface than it had only moments before. “I mean it: have a care, Shroud…”

Scylla seemed concerned. “Boss? What’s he–?”

Suddenly the air in the corner of the room seemed to silently roil. Two voices began to issue forth from the area. One was intensely precise, bearing words so perfectly formed they might have been machine-stamped on an assembly line; the other’s voice seemed ragged and variable, its attributes changing with each syllable it uttered. The trait the two seemed to share most strongly was an insistence on completing the other’s sentences.

“We care not for–”

“–demands placed upon us by such as you. We are not–”

“–to be summoned like underlings. You–”

“–are to be instruments of our will… not–”

“–the other way around.”

“Our apologies,” the Shroud answered, the others already grasping that the unearthly voices were in no way a part of some parlor trick being played upon them by their host in black. “But before they will feel any comfort in committing to this effort, my companions need reassurance that only by obtaining the twin halves of the object of power called the Gemini Key will we have a chance at destroying the Serum substance and the infrastructure established to manufacture and distribute it. Please tell them, if you would…”

The voices paused, somehow conveying agitation through their silence, as if adopting facial expressions despite having no visible faces. They allowed several labored moments to creep by, and then they broke the stretching silence.

“We can say for certain that–”

“–unless you four do as we have instructed, and retrieve for us–”

“–the twin halves of the Key… and do this before our adversary can–”

“–then all will be lost. Our very existence–”

“–will suffer catastrophic change. As will yours. This, we promise you. Do–”

“–our words here–”

“–sufficiently convince? Or shall we grant you a small taste–”

“–of the oblivion that shall befall you–”

“–should you fail in this task that we set before you…?”

Surprisingly, it was Thomas Fireheart, the Puma who first spoke in new support of the path of action counseled by the mysterious voices from beyond.

“No need for apocalyptic visions. I have seen my share, and I recognize presences that exist outside the domain of mortal man when I encounter them.” He turned to the Shroud. “As you said, I am not inexperienced in this.”

Cylla Markham tried to say something, cleared her throat, and then took a second try at it. “If you’re on board with this, boss, you know I have your back, but…”

Fireheart nodded at her, and then turned back fully to regard the dark corner of the room from which the voices had issued. “I don’t know exactly who you are or what you ultimately represent, but I have some inklings as to your… magnitude, at least. I am convinced to participate in this endeavor. We both are,” he added, indicating the fierce cyborg warrior who served as his driver and soldier, and Scylla shrugged, then nodded as well.

All eyes turned toward Dr. Morbius, silent as the grave until now. “I feel I’m falling down in a deep, dark pit… but I, too, will add my efforts to the quest,” he told them, his voice like the audio equivalent of parchment. “If the road to the destruction of the Serum drug runs through Hell itself, I will traverse it.”

“Excellent,” one of the two voices told them – the ragged one that sounded like a chorus of demented souls all spliced together. “The Shadow-Walker has been given–”

“–the locations of interest. Our adversary’s current hiding place. The island stronghold. And the temple that lies–”

“–in ruins. You will accomplish this mission. Or you will spend eternity regretting–”

“–your failure to do so.” This other voice: somehow so like the sound of binary code being read aloud by a celestial machine. “Away with you now. And do not dare–”

“–to summon us again–”

“–until you reach your mission’s end…”

All four of the people in the room could sense the departures of the unseen presences who had spoken to them, and the air in the corner of the room subsided again until it was just a patch of normal black shadow adjacent to a swatch of diminishing sunlight.

“Questions…?” The Shroud waited politely for a moment, or was perhaps just making a point.

The other three worked their mouths a bit without much result, their eyes mirroring the same semi-overwhelmed, still-processing state.

“Good. We’d best be on our way. My private transport awaits, and while it’s one of the faster crafts to be found this side of outright sorcery, we do have a ways to travel: the ‘island stronghold’ you just heard mention of is situated off the Chilean coast, so… miles to go before we sleep.”

He strode from the room, and still a bit numbly, the others roused themselves and followed…

An unmarked aircraft, approaching an unnamed island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, South Pacific Ocean from the southeast

“Is there something you want to ask me, Slick…?”

Jalome Beacher shrank back into his seat, startled. He’d been convinced that the man opposite him had been sleeping, else he wouldn’t have spent the past ten minutes staring at him so obviously; now, however, Jack Russell was leaning forward just enough for his wakeful countenance to be unmistakable. He was a swarthy rogue, all unkempt russet hair and stubble, with bright, amber eyes beneath a pronounced brow and with a wiry yet athletic body clad in faded white shirt and jeans. He smelled of animal. For Jalome, an earnestly well-groomed and narcissistic fellow, it was like sharing air with a vagrant.

“I was wondering,” Jalome said, recovering his composure smoothly, “what kind of werewolf you were.”

Jack’s nostrils flared. “What kind…?”

“Yeah. Like, you’ve got your mutant shape-shifters, and your extraterrestrial half-breeds, and your magic types, and your genetic experiments—”

“Jalome!”

Jalome looked abashed as the woman seated beside him snapped his name in admonishment. Cleo Nefertiti regarded Jack coolly, a half-smile of apology teasing her lips, and Jack inclined his head towards her in turn. Cleo shifted languidly in her seat, her long, bare legs crossed and one hand resting on her upper knee below the hem of the figure-hugging white-and-jade shift that formed her costume. Her eyes were shining, a contrast to the raven black of her hair and the dusky softness of her skin. She looked beautiful, Jalome noted, even more than usual. Radiant. And Jack, the casual predator in human mask, he’d certainly noticed. When he smiled at Cleo his teeth glinted rather hungrily, but she didn’t shy away like some poor rabbit; instead her body was responding to the attention, and to Jack’s animal magnetism. Jalome scowled.

“My form of Lyncanthropy is a disease,” Jack snarled, without bothering to glance back at the man he was answering. “A hereditary affliction I can trace back to the late eighteenth century, when an ancestor of mine had the misfortunate to get involved with Count Dracula.”

Jalome snorted. “Dracula? Oh, come on…”

“There’s a whole other world you’re obviously not familiar with, Slick,” Jack said. “A dark side, a long way distant from your street scams and costumed capery. You’d better get used to that reality real quick… because that’s the kind of territory we’re heading towards right now: Where strange shapes light up the night… writings appear on the wall… curtains part and landscapes fall…”

“Uh-huh. Well don’t you worry, Lon Chaney Jr. You stick to guest-starring in Abbott and Costello flicks, because my girl and me, we’re well stocked with garlic and holy water. Right, doll?”

Jalome turned and grinned at Cleo, but she didn’t respond, other than to sigh in dismay. Jalome faltered. Man, what the hell was eating her…?

“Settle down, folks. I want to go over the mission parameters one last time.”

Silver Sablinova strode along the aisle, brandishing a small white device that resembled a television remote control but which in reality was obviously nothing of the sort. As her three colleagues looked on she flicked her wrist and used the device to trigger a three-dimensional holographic projection in mid-air, a process they’d all witnessed before but which was no less impressive a second time around. Jalome especially looked on with appreciation, being a self-professed connoisseur of all things technologically nifty, and in the twenty-four hour period since he and Cleo had made Silver’s acquaintance he’d been unfailingly impressed by the Symkarian woman’s array of resourceful gadgetry. The craft the four of them were presently occupying – a curiously delightful vessel somewhere between a fighter jet and a flying saucer that resembled an egg with wings – was a perfect example of such advanced engineering, not least in the way it had traveled halfway around the globe, from eastern Europe to the west coast of South America, utilizing some wild form of anti-gravity tech instead of regular fuel. It was good to know that even gritty mercenary types were environmentally aware.

Silver flicked her wrist again to slowly rotate the holographic projection, indicating their imminent destination with her other hand. The schematic was of an island, accurately rendered through the art of sonic and thermal imaging, but Silver had already warned them that some of the specs were likely to be skewed.

“We’re still experiencing significant energy interference, but nothing on the standard electromagnetic scale,” she reminded them in her distinctive Balkan accent. “As Slyde intimated, we’re talking different territory here. Supernatural fluctuations we can’t even begin to categorize. We’re going into this one relatively blind, but we can pinpoint our primary location – this building here – and thermal signature scans suggest there’s a solitary target and no more.”

“Not all adversaries generate heat,” Jack growled. Silver nodded ruefully.

“True enough. Listen, this assignment is outside the parameters of the missions I normally accept, and being honest, I’m already regretting taking it on. This island? It doesn’t sit right with me, and the closer we get the more that feeling of disquiet intensifies. But we’re here now. Josef Schwartz has something our sponsor wants, and I want Schwartz. We keep this as simple as we’re allowed to: we get in, we get what we want, and we get out. My pilot will keep the craft on hand, even if we ultimately need to abort. Any questions?”

“Just a statement,” Jack said, quietly. “I don’t care anything about Schwartz himself, or this Gemini Key you’re here for. I’m part of this because I’ve heard of Schwartz; his name’s cropped up more than once in the circles I move in. Rumor has it that he’s gathered himself quite the collection of arcane relics, and one of those relics is supposedly a cure for my condition. That’s my motivation. I’ll watch your back for as long as it suits me, but that cure is more important to me than any of you. So long as you understand that.”

Jalome snorted. Silver said nothing, her exquisite features as inscrutable as ever. Only Cleo nodded, her expression somber but a smile still flickering at her lips.

“We appreciate your candor,” she said.

“Like arse we do,” said Jalome, looking hurt. Cleo ignored him.

The interior chamber of the craft was abruptly galvanized by a low, steady beeping. At the head of the aisle, Silver Sable disengaged the hologram with one final flick of the wrist and stood to attention, hoisting a rifle of futuristic design on a strap about her shoulders and then inspecting the utility belt slung about her sharp hips.

“Leave your differences behind, people,” she snapped. “And check your chutes. We’re on the island approach and we bail in five minutes.”

Jalome, Cleo and Jack glanced at one another, now unified in mute surprise.

“Check our what now?” Jalome cried. “Wait a minute, no-one said anything about parachutes…”

An unmarked aircraft, approaching an unnamed island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, South Pacific Ocean from the northwest

The Shroud’s frighteningly advanced black aircraft whistled across the surface of the Pacific Ocean like a stone skipped personally by the very hand of God. The trip from Los Angeles – a journey of more than five thousand miles – had taken the small group of newfound allies less than two hours, prompting Cylla Markham, a career pilot herself, to whoop upon takeoff and wonder aloud “if they’ll ever be able to patch up the sound barrier!” The Shroud had consented to let her take the controls for part of the flight, and it was the first time since she’d been introduced to the somber Dr. Morbius back in LA that her face-plated visage had played host to anything resembling a smile.

“A thundercloud in a two-lane sky…” she’d named herself a bit cryptically, drawing something like bemusement from the Shroud, while she showcased her considerable skills.

As Morbius would have gladly told her, however, all good things must come to their ends, and as small rocky atolls began to appear below, heralding the group’s approach into the Juan Fernandez Islands, Cylla’s employer, the ever-sinister Thomas Fireheart, made his way toward the cockpit and requested that she switch places with him so he might converse up front with the Shroud. This of course meant she would be obliged to sit in the passenger section with Morbius, which seemed to be a seating arrangement any party planner worth their salt in the slightest would have recognized as a set-up for disaster.

“I trust that the two of you will be able to remain cordial back here until we land.” Fireheart phrased this as if speaking to both Cylla and Morbius, but his cyborg soldier understood that by ‘the two of you,’ the Puma really meant ‘the one of you, Cylla.’ She bit down on a grimace, and nodded at him.

“No worries. We’re all professionals here,” she assured him, while casting a withering glare at Morbius.

Once she seated herself, and Fireheart had joined the Shroud up front, however, Morbius elected to disregard her visual cues and attempt conversation.

“I once worked briefly alongside another cyborg, Ms. Markham.”

“Um… hooray for you…?”

“He was a merging of the human and the machine, just as you are yourself.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what ‘cyborg’ means, there, quiz kid.”

“Aside from that general shared trait, though, you and he are very different. His designated codename was Deathlok – do you know of him?”

Cylla, shrugged and grunted, looking out the windows on her side of the passenger section. “Heard the name. Maybe. It’s not like we all hang out together at some cyborg bar, you know.”

“Deathlok’s flesh was in a constant state of semi-decay, whereas yours is quite healthy and robust.”

“If you start licking your fangs and looking at me like I’m turning into a cartoon pot roast, I’m kicking your ass, mission or no mission.”

“Deathlok was also bonded to a separate computer unit sized and shaped and placed on his person much like a backpack. He spoke with it almost continuously. You, on the other hand, seem to have no such arrangement.”

“We seem to be slowing for imminent touchdown here, so if you have a point, hurry up and make it, okay?”

“My point is that just as you may shun the kinship of others of your kind, and just as you may be unique even when compared with various cyborg specimens in your peer group, I, too, have as little to do with my vampiric contemporaries as possible, and beyond the general commonalities, I, too stand apart and unique from them.”

“Meaning what – I shouldn’t get on you so much for being a stinking bloodsucker? I should forgive you all that and learn to love you for your specific Morbius-ness?”

“You overstate things for what you believe to be comical and cutting effect, but the truth is, Ms. Markham, that in many ways, you and I share strong common bonds that our respective fellows do not.”

“Are you trying to say…?”

“I am saying that in spirit and in circumstance, yes – Cylla – you and I are very much alike.”

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me. Just how in the name of all that’s–”

They were interrupted by the clipped tones of the Shroud breaking in over the jet’s intercom system. “Touchdown: two minutes. Prep for landfall.”

She finally turned to face Morbius, her eyes brimming with outraged questions.

“I’m afraid,” he told her, “this discussion will have to be continued…”

Despite the obscuring faceplate, Cylla’s expression managed to be rather ominous indeed…

An unnamed island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, South Pacific Ocean, the southern shore

Night fell swiftly out here in the archipelago, those beautiful sunsets bleeding out to be replaced by a cloak of inky darkness. The ocean turned black and cold, the mountainous jungle terrain blacker still, and everything settled into a hypnotic sway of gently rolling waves upon the shore and the scour of a westerly sea breeze through the foliage, all punctuated by the odd animal cry. This was a desolate place, not a place for man or woman…but they came anyway.

Silver Sable and her three colleagues drifted down to the beach on parachutes based on a special SHIELD tactical forces template and incorporating advanced glide technology, designed to guarantee a lower rate of descent and enhanced steering capability even for a novice. For all Jalome Beacher, the criminal opportunist Slyde cared, one parachute was much like another, and for a man who so readily embraced such an extreme lifestyle played out at high and dangerous velocity he was surprisingly anxious about the whole experience.

“I’m used to being in control,” he explained, after he and his four companions were safely back on terra firma and disentangling themselves from their harnesses and spools of nylon cord. “I’m a control freak, I’ll admit it. You see me skating at a rate of knots, instinctively judging speed and angle, and you see someone reckless, right? Devil-may-care? But the trick is, I’m always in control. Freefalling from the sky over the middle of the ocean? That’s—”

“I’m really not interested, sweetie,” Silver said, discarding her chute and shouldering her rifle. “The only thing I care about is whether you were telling the truth about being able to glide over all manner of terrain, not just sidewalks and rooftops. Is this sand going to cause you difficulty?”

Jalome grimaced behind his mask, a hyper-smooth white sheath coated with the same frictionless substance as the rest of his augmented speed-skater’s gear and ridged with a pair of silver wraparound goggles. “Give me something real beneath my feet and set me loose,” he snapped. Silver nodded curtly.

“Good,” she murmured, her husky Symkarian cadence all the more pronounced when she lowered her voice. “For now, then, let’s skip the chatter and concentrate on scoping out our target location.”

Yes, boss, Slyde thought, uncharitably managing to rhyme boss with bitch in his head. Beside him, Cleo – the enchanting Asp – smirked and gave her lover a pat on his super-sleek ass. Further along the beach, Jack Russell slunk in the shadows, his head raised towards the indigo heavens. The moon was little more than a quarter dime amidst the powdering of distant stars and strings of silver-edged cloud, but – contrary to popular legend – he didn’t require a full moon to be able to trigger his physical transformation into the beast.

Moon crazy, summer of changes… let the night shine on.

Hunkering down now, shedding his shirt and loosening the belt on his jeans, Jack curled his back and turned away from his audience, willing the change upon him. His muscles rippled and his skin burned and tore as he was beset by a sudden surge of hair growth, and there was a sickening splintering of bone and tissue as his limbs began to lengthen and his face distort, taking on a more canine appearance – or, to be more precise, lupine.

Jack Russell was becoming the wolf. The Werewolf.

Asp and Slyde looked on, each both fascinated and horrified, while Sable concentrated instead on the task at hand. Her blue eyes were narrowed behind her snow-white fringe as she scanned the darkness, her skin prickling with anticipation. It was a sensation she normally associated with being watched, but in this instance that wasn’t entirely accurate. It was more a case of being…evaluated. Prepared for.

“Schwartz knows we’re here,” she said, evenly.

“I can smell him,” the Werewolf snarled, his guttural voice recognizable as belonging to Jack but now much deeper, more primal. “And other things. This island’s crawling with unpleasantness. Something familiar too…”

“Familiar?”

The Werewolf raised his muzzle, creating a frightening and unnatural profile where silhouetted against the starry skies. He was so tall now, so wide on his furry haunches, so powerful. Slyde shrank back, and Asp seemed far less spellbound by her companion’s animal presence now, much to her lover’s unspoken relief.

“I.. .don’t know what it is exactly,” the wolf growled eventually. “A scent that shouldn’t be here. Impossible things. Just… be prepared for anything.”

“That’s what’s kept me alive so long,” Silver said, hefting her rifle. She pointed towards the edge of the jungle up ahead. “The building the resonance scans delineated is immediately past those trees, some kind of chateau. That’s where we’ll find Schwartz… and the Gemini Key. Let’s go, people.”

As the four companions moved off across the moonlit sand, all was still about them…but then, slowly at first but then with more purpose, the shadows began to shift. There was a scuttling of dead crabs, the flinch and splinter of driftwood, the whispering kiss of palm leaves, the scrape and clatter of rock upon rock…

…there was movement…

…and then, hesitantly but with a malignant purpose that wouldn’t be denied, the island golems began to rise.

An unnamed island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, South Pacific Ocean, the western shore

“Okay, I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting to find out here on this little rock, but this was definitely not it.”

Scylla stood just ahead of her comrades, having taken point once the Shroud had anchored his hyper-technological super-jet just offshore in stealth mode, and they’d waded up onto the beach. The strip of sand around them was a wide silvery band in the post-sundown sparkle of the first few stars, and the sighing Pacific was a field of black away behind it.

The focus of Scylla’s scrutiny was a tableau both baffling and rather morbid.

Two beach chairs, recliners, sat side by side in the sand, set up to allow any occupants to gaze out across the sea, and a small table filled the cozy gap between them. One of the chairs was empty, but the other housed a white skeleton that lolled senseless to their approach. On the table sat a mostly empty bottle of wine, and two glasses, one of which had been drained but for a few drops remaining at the bottom, while the skeleton’s hand tickled the stem of the other, making it appear for all the world as if the bony thing had just paused in its evening libation as their little group had approached.

Scylla seemed to be the only one of the newcomers inclined to speak: “So is this thing alive and just not moving, or did somebody else pour that wine?”

“I believe,” the Shroud told her, “that this is a garden-variety skeleton, and that someone else – most likely the owner of this place, or a member of his staff if he has one – must have been out here recently.”

“Pretty weird idea of good company, huh?”

The Puma spoke up, Thomas Fireheart fully transformed now into his feline alter-ego: “I agree with the Shroud. This is just an inert pile of bones. We should proceed to our destination.”

“Righteous,” Scylla declared, rubbing her hands together in apparent anticipation. “Come on, come on, through the stations of night…”

The small assembly of adventurers left their bizarre and silent welcoming committee fondling its wineglass, and pressed onward into the beginnings of the thick jungle foliage up ahead.

As physically capable as they all were, it took only a scant few minutes for them to reach the outskirts of the marvelous Baroque chateau that they knew not only housed the island’s odd resident, but would also be the site where they might find the object of their quest: the mystical item purported to be one half of the article of power known as the Gemini Key.

Worries about perimeter defenses seemed largely unfounded, however, as the group found themselves free to stroll unchallenged right up to the structure itself. All four of them probed with their various heightened perceptions, but they found nothing to indicate any danger in breaching at least the outermost shell of the building. With nods of assent from both the Puma and the Shroud, Scylla silently pulled open one of the twin doors in the recessed entryway to which they had gravitated.

Only when the door stood open, and they had stepped inside the skin of the house, did they hear the sounds of commotion emanating from somewhere deeper inside.

“Combat?” Scylla mouthed the question at her employer, and the Puma nodded, his scowl brutal to behold.

Morbius cocked his head oddly to one side. “That scent,” he whispered, so low he could scarcely hear himself. “Is it… a golem?”

“What – that creepy little thing in those ‘Lord of the Rings‘ movies?” Scylla was baffled.

“I am unfamiliar with the works in question,” Morbius told her. “I refer to a creature fashioned out of clay or rock or wood and then animated through sorcerous means. I have encountered them before, and they are not to be taken lightly, if indeed that is what presents itself here.”

“What presents itself here,” Fireheart broke in, “is a diversion. The Shroud’s spirit-associates mentioned an adversary in this hunt, and it seems most likely to me that it must be exactly this adversary we’re hearing now, engaging with the owner of this place and his defenders. It would be too great a coincidence for anyone else to be here. I suggest we locate this ‘Gemini Key’ article and make off with it while the two groups are occupied with one another.”

“It’s only half of the Gemini Key,” the Shroud stated, “but aside from that distinction, I agree.” He gestured for the group to follow, and he started off in a direction that seemed destined to take them toward, but ultimately alongside and past, the epicenter of the uproar they were hearing. Every so often, the corridors they traveled would shake as if with seismic activity, and they could hear the occasional shouting voices and bestial roars. After one especially large tremor ran through the hallway with such force that they were obliged to pause for a moment and concentrate on simply keeping their footing, several of the voices grew louder.

“This way, quickly!” hissed the Puma. “Someone–”

He had intended to say “approaches,” but the statement was rendered moot when the someone in question broke into the passageway from a connecting corridor no more than fifteen or twenty meters ahead of them.

Four someones, to be more precise. The newly arriving figures resolved themselves. Their apparent leader was a beautiful, athletic woman with long, snow-white hair who waved two evil-looking pistols about and glittered in a figure-hugging, silver bodysuit. Another woman, equal beautiful, dark and sultry, and garbed in jade and white, followed her. A man in a bizarre, pale skin-suit that covered him entirely from head to toe skimmed alongside this second woman as if he were a skater and the simple stone floor were ice, the eyepieces of his suit goggling out at the world. And a moment behind them, the fourth and final figure was that of some kind of man-beast, something that, much like the Puma, was humanoid, yet muscular and clawed and covered with a pelt of thick, rich fur. Something struck this furred form from behind, and it turned and roared at its attacker, reached just beyond the edge of the juncture of the two passages, beyond what the Shroud’s group could see, and struck viciously at whatever had assaulted it, then it took hold of something and gave a mighty tug…and was rewarded for its efforts with something that looked like a manlike arm torn free from whatever torso had been its home.

“Jack?” The Shroud and Morbius seemed to be naming the furry creature simultaneously. They then looked at each other for a moment, each seeming surprised that the other might also be acquainted with the wolflike fellow.

“Shroud? Morbius?” The creature seemed to be debating whether to toss aside the bodiless arm it had just liberated or to keep it and use it as a cudgel.

“Shroud?” asked the white-haired woman in silver.

“Sable,” answered the Shroud.

“Sable,” Fireheart intoned.

“Puma?” the white-haired woman acknowledged.

The man in the slick skin-suit inclined his goggled head toward the woman in green and white, whose hand he was now holding. “Say, sweetness, do you feel kinda left out here, or is it just me?”

To the man’s surprise, however, his dusky-skinned companion was staring at Morbius with wide eyes, recognition obvious in her expression.

“Michael…?”

“Okay,” said Scylla with some menace, and taking a purposeful couple of steps toward the other group despite the fact that there seemed to be imminent violence just around the corner that was driving them away from that compass point. She cast a quick glance back over one shoulder toward the Puma. “I thought the job was boosting a magic key, not having a key-party with a bunch of super-mooks. Boss, just tell me who to smite, so we can get out of here, okay…?”

Pressed from behind them by whatever forces the house’s owner had marshaled against them, the group led by the woman in silver had no choice but to suddenly charge the Shroud’s cadre.

The two small squads met with a crash of thunder, and then the onrushing resident powers rounded the far bend and came on as well, entering the fray like the fall of an empire…

NEXT: Silver Sable and her coalition on one hand, versus the Shroud and his crew on the other… the defending forces of mad Josef Schwartz, long-lived Nazi and accumulator of arcane curiosities, on yet a third hand… and even room for a couple more new faces put in an appearance! The race for the Gemini Key hits high velocity in Agents Of Gemini #3…