Chapter 8
Back at the villa, Cassidy sat in shock as Apricot paced through the living room, pressing her phone to her ear.
He came to the island to have a good time, and he died because those shadows …
Cassidy shook the thought away, but it wouldn’t leave.
He was just trying to live life to the fullest and he died. And he was so young, not much younger than me.
She chewed on her lip. That had been her before she’d stopped drinking, and yet she couldn’t revel in that decision. All she could do was imagine Ryan’s body, falling over the edge again and again …
That thing pushed him and now he’s gone and shattered on those rocks. It all happened so quickly and now he’s dead. It could have been any of us. It could be me. That thing was in our villa. What if I die on this island?
Newspapers don't give the full story. The media will say things like "fall from a rocky cliff" and people think that they understand what a death like that looks like.
They imagine some shot from a movie where an actor is very much alive atop jagged rocks at the bottom of a pit with blood streaming gently from their head and mouth.
Even if they can bring themselves to imagine something more gory and supposedly true-to-life, they still can't quite imagine what it's like to actually see a person alive and falling, and stopping suddenly, the contours of their body distorted by the unforgiving rocks and sand.
They can't imagine the sounds of a body hitting the rocks.
The movies don't really convey how bodies are just made of meat and bones and don't stand a chance against gravity and stone.
They don't show how a person's skull can explode upon impact at the right angle and their brain is a bloody mass that used to be thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams. Maybe they'll understand, conceptually, but they can't know.
“Where the fuck is Daisy?” Apricot cried and tossed her phone into the cushions of the couch. She sounded like a frayed nerve, which was exactly how Cassidy felt. She ran her hands through over her braids again and again and then turned to Cassidy. “Are you sure you saw what you said you saw?”
Cassidy nodded. “I’m positive there was someone else up there with him, but I couldn’t see who it was in the dark. They just looked like a shadow.”
“Okay, but that doesn’t make any sense,” Apricot said, continuing to pace. “How can you see a shadow in the dark?”
“It’s like they were darker than darkness … like that thing that we saw—”
“Don’t say it,” Apricot said, and then the tears did come. “Don’t say it.”
It’s like that thing that was in our villa.
“What are we going to do, A?” Cassidy asked instead.
Apricot shook her head, her hands still locked on her braids. “I dunno. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to find Daisy and just go home.”
Cassidy used her own phone to try again and again to call someone, anyone.
But Daisy never returned either of their calls or even texted, and her phone’s reception seemed to fail whenever Cassidy tried to call someone back home.
Apricot dug her phone out of the couch cushions and tried to determine Daisy’s phone’s location, but the app found nothing.
They curled up on the couch together, Apricot’s head in Cassidy’s lap as Cassidy undid her braids and brushed her hair.
They waited for the festival to make a statement and announce plans to send the attendees home, but none ever came.
Apricot cried herself to sleep just before sunrise, but Cassidy was too anxious to sleep and too tired to drive herself as crazy as Apricot.
Besides, one of them needed to stay awake in case one of those shadow people came back.
She covered her friend with the comforter from her room and then hooked her phone up to charge and brought her laptop to the breakfast table.
She was able to find the accounts of other people who had seen Ryan fall.
Other people wanted answers and were calling for the organizers to address the incident, including the guy who started the fight at the waterfall.
Although she found him on Twitter, where he linked to a blog that seemed to talk a lot about conspiracy theories and how the government knew ghosts were real but kept it from us for some reason, it seemed like his main content was on YouTube under UrbEx Mike, where he posted videos of playing video games and exploring abandoned buildings.
The video he made about the island was already up, but he’d made two videos about the festival prior to the one posted that morning.
Cassidy clicked on the first video of the series.
Once it loaded, it opened on Mike in a gaming chair at home.
“Hey all, if you’re new here, I’m UrbEx Mike.
I like to explore dangerous places in games and in real life to see if they’re dangerous or just a front for something bigger, and I just got a wild opportunity dropped into my lap.
This morning, I got an email inviting me to a music festival. Let me show it to you.”
In the video, Mike showed his desktop in a picture within picture function and Cassidy saw the exact email she’d received only days ago.
“Okay, so this looks like a scam, right? Total Dumpster Fire Fest, right? So, I went to their website.” In the picture in picture, Mike clicked on a tab in his web browser on the festival’s website.
“Nothing here to really convince me it’s not a terrible idea.
They’ve got pictures and stuff, which could be faked, but then look at this. ”
He clicked on a video on the browser, and it began to play. Voices of artists scheduled to play the festival piped through Cassidy’s speakers from Mike’s video, expressing their excitement for the shows.
“I dunno about you guys, but that’s pretty convincing to me.
Like, I don’t think Madonna plays unless she’s getting paid—we’ve all seen video of her coming late to her own shows, like, to get her committed to something seems like you’ve worked pretty hard.
So, yeah, either this is a deep fake of Madonna and other people who could sue the asses off of these people, or it’s legit.
Which, I’m pretty sure it’s legit now. So, then I started digging deeper, and check this out. ”
Mike opened up another tab and showed the festival’s Instagram page.
He clicked on another video, which Cassidy recognized as the big promo video that all the celebrities were reposting in the days before everyone arrived.
It showed the island from above, close up shots of food cooking on grills, and drink glasses toasting above tiki bar tables.
“I used the flyover drone shot to find this island, and get this: They’re calling it Island X, but its official name is Twin Cay of the Bahamas.
So, I did some digging on this place to see who owns it now and no one knows.
” Mike’s jaw dropped like he was in shock from his own revelation.
“There isn’t much information about this place, but I put links below for what I could find on it.
For my own personal safety, you guys know I wouldn’t normally link to the places I’m going.
But already since I opened this email and started digging, I’ve seen hundreds of people talking about getting the same email, so I think that I actually need to share this in the interest of safety. ”
Cassidy scrolled down and opened the articles in separate tabs.
“Basically, though, what I’ve found is that the island has passed through a bunch of owners who have tried to do different things with it, but they’ve all ended in failure.
Here’s the thing: Even right now I can’t figure out who owns this island.
I can’t figure out who is behind this festival all of my searching has led me to a dead end of shell companies.
This does seem pretty legitimate on the surface, but it gets really sketchy the more you look into it.
And if you haven’t heard anything about these emails, they’re pretty weird, too.
It appears to be an extremely exclusive invite, but not to A- or even B-list celebrities necessarily.
Lots of influencers and content creators of different kinds have received them.
And I’ll be honest, I think I’m going to go ahead and book a spot on the island, but it’s because I want to do some investigating.
If you’ve gotten an email and you’re looking to have a good time, I would be very careful.
Online creators are an easy target for scammers, so this whole thing could be an elaborate way to mock or hurt a lot of people.
Maybe I’m wrong, and I guess we’ll see. If you haven’t already, hit that subscribe button so you can be notified when I post my next video about this whole Island Xperience thing. ”
The comments underneath the video echoed some of what the muscular man was shouting at UrbEx Mike at the waterfall, but Cassidy couldn’t follow the drama.
Of course you’re going to make this into a bigger story than it is, too.
How hard do you think it would be to SWAT this guy while he’s on an island in the Bahamas?
Sketchy, but not spooky. GHOSTS AREN’T REAL.
Mike’s next video was basically just a montage of his travels to the island, a walkthrough of his tent and the surrounding area, and clips from last night’s show.
All of it concluded with him saying that so far everything seemed above board but that he hadn’t explored all of the island yet and he wanted to go into the wooded area on the north side of the island.
Cassidy scrubbed through the third video, familiar with most of its contents since she’d seen Mike filming at the waterfall.
The footage was dark, and she was glad that she was unable to make out herself or Apricot.
Dark figures emerged from the poorly lit scene when the scuffle broke out, and then the shot suddenly cut to Mike speaking to the camera.