After days in the jungle, I came upon a tower,
black as darkness, ivy creeping up its walls.
It smelled of thousands of years-worth of death
and turned my stomach in knots from the energy it gave off.
Someone stood by the door, wearing a brown gown,
hooded so I couldn’t see his face for the shadow.
He held a staff carved from ebony wood,
the handle crafted from gold bought in the Orient,
the foot covered in rubber from the Malay lands.

I approached with caution knowing this man meant no good,
an ill omen for sure, the only kind that dwells in these places.
The wind gusted at my back, forcing my march to quicken,
growling at me for delaying what seemed inevitable.
This is a land of horror; I knew before I left home,
but the promise of riches and freedom consumed me,
my all-too-human greed getting the better of me.
There was nothing here for me, but I was too far gone.

That horrific creature never took chase when I fled the ship,
instead, he stayed aboard, dining on my friends.
I looked back now and again, making sure he stayed,
and I wished I had not, seeing the flesh fly, bouncing off the sails,
the arm of my neighbour entwined by one of the ropes.
The man in the gown grabbed my shoulders hard,
pulling me out of my memories and back to the tower,
rising like a monolith to some old forgotten gods.

I followed him inside, the base of the tower as dark as death,
the flame on the wall doing little to combat the slimy black,
but doing just enough to illuminate the first few steps
of a spiralling staircase ascending into god-knows-where.
The man in the gown draped a wet cloth on the top of his staff
and lit it on the fire on the wall and gave it to me.
As I took it, he told me to climb in a voice I had heard before,
the voice of the creature that attacked and killed my friends.

Up I climbed, the man in the robe close behind me,
whispering incantations to a god that hid in darkness,
a god that lay in wait at the denouement of these stairs,
a god that chose me for something I could not fathom.
The shadows the fire cast kept me on edge,
sometimes I would gasp for breath when one moved too quick,
too unnatural to be caused just by my dancing fire.

The stairs ended in a rotten oak door with iron brackets,
a handle of brass and a peephole like an old man’s eye,
a cloud of cataracts caused by years of neglect,
like that eye had seen too much and was better off unseeing.
The door opened slowly without any interaction from me,
a blast of wind blowing out the flame on the staff.
The man in the robe grabbed it from my hands
and with a swift kick to my backside, I stumbled through the doorway.
I could hear his footsteps rush back down as the door closed,
creaking a presage until my only exit had shut.
The smell of its breath invading my nostrils and clung to my eyes,
as its own eyes blinked out from the dark like fiery orbs,
its teeth blinding white with speckled blood by the gum line.
It laughed at me, and I knew I was just a game to it,
for it spoke only four words and those words followed me,
from the ship, along the beach and through this jungle deep.
It looked me straight in the eyes and once again those words,
Run, it said.
I am hungry, it said.