She was convinced she was still dreaming when she opened her eyes to a perfect, cloudless sky that filled her vision completely. The roar of something loud echoed in her ears, a cycle of sighs and gasps that suggested the breathing of some great beast, but the breeze against her cheeks was light and steady unlike the rhythm of the sounds.
Her head felt strange, so she didn’t even attempt to move immediately, simply blinking up into the brilliant sky and trying to get a sense for her surroundings. A few green fronds danced across her view as the wind gusted over her face and she recognized the leaves as a palm tree. That seemed wrong for some reason. She didn’t live in a place that had palm trees. Did she?
Groaning and holding her head tenderly, she tried to roll to her side and felt the ground give strangely beneath her. It was damp and cloying and she had trouble pushing herself into a sitting position without sinking deeper into the earth. Not dirt, she realized as she looked down and got a better look at the white grains, holding up a hand to her face for closer inspection. Sand. She registered the source of the noise in her peripheral vision and saw warm, tropical water reaching from the beach just beyond her feet to the distant horizon, rolling waves lapping at the shore with every crash of sound.
The air was hot and humid, but the steady breeze from over the ocean made her feel a chill as she looked around and realized that she didn’t recognize anything around her. She was alone as far as she could tell on a narrow strip of dazzling beach. A long wooden dock extended out into the ocean nearby, but there were no boats attached to the end. Sheer cliffs rose up on the other side of the dock, blocking the horizon from view in that direction, and the top was dense with jungle foliage similar to the greenery marching along the horizon at the other end of the beach. But there were a series of stone steps cut into the hill behind her, and since it was the closest thing she could find to a path, she decided to follow it.
Her headache was improving steadily and the fog was slowly clearing from her thoughts, but her body felt stiff as if she had been lying on the beach for some time. Stumbling a bit as she struggled to find her feet, she brushed sand off her backside and noticed that she was wearing a white jumpsuit of some kind. It looked like a uniform and fit her poorly, but it had a name stitched into the left breast: Olivia.
Was that her name? It felt right somehow even if it didn’t feel familiar. With that realization, she discovered that her arrival on this beach wasn’t the only thing she couldn’t remember. Her memory was a blur, color, sound and emotion with no context or grounding, and even those fragments were dissolving the more she tried to make sense of them. If Olivia was not her name, she had no way of knowing.
Rubbing at her hair to shake the sand loose, she wondered if she had hit her head or something. A concussion might explain her memory loss, but she didn’t find any tender spots on her head or anything else to indicate that was the cause of her problem. Shaking her head, she decided to climb the stairs in the hope that she would find something at the top that would make sense to her.
The palm trees gathered close around the path, but the stone path ended in a broad clearing at the crest of the hill. A vivid green, manicured lawn spread out before her, and beyond that a stone patio with white canvas sun loungers, a wooden deck and a hulk of a house towering above everything else. The sprawling mansion was designed with the look of a plantation house with a wraparound porch and brightly colored shutters and it was in excellent repair. She didn’t know what she had expected to find at the end of the path, but it certainly hadn’t been something that looked so much like civilization.
Olivia woke with no memory of where she was or how she had gotten there.
She was calm at first. The reassuring whisper of the ocean in her ears greeted on waking along with a pleasant breeze on her overheated skin and the cool sand between her toes. She drifted happily for a while before the inevitable tug of worry began to assert itself. It started as mere curiosity. While she recognized the sounds and sensations of a beach, she didn’t have an specific memories attached to them. She couldn’t remember ever visiting one before. Beach vacations weren’t her thing—or at least she didn’t think they were. That was when she realized that something was wrong. She knew her name, and a few things about herself, like her preference for city vacations and museum visits, but facts about her history were foggy at best.
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Worried now, she fought the sleep that was still clinging to her stubbornly and tried to pry open her eyes. Finally managing to force them open long enough to get a glimpse of her surroundings, she took in as much information as she could before they slid shut again. The sun was directly overhead, obscured by the fronds of a massive palm tree, flickers of light flashing brilliantly into her eyes when the fronds stirred in a gust of wind. Blinking rapidly, she slowly regained control of her vision and pushed herself up on her elbows. The beach was white as a pearl and perfectly smooth other than a single set of footprints that led to where she was sitting. The water was an intense turquoise in the bright light, the sort of unnatural hue that was so vivid that it almost looked radioactive. Peering down, she saw that she was dressed in a vertical blue and white striped shirt and khaki capris. A pair of red sandals nestled neatly on the sand beside her.
She picked up the sandals and pulled them on, wavering a bit as she tried to stand up. Her equilibrium was off and she had to lean against the trunk of the palm tree to maintain her balance when she was upright. Taking deep breaths as panic pounded through her veins, she stared at the waves and the endless horizon until she could get her breathing under control. While she didn’t know much about herself, she did know she didn’t like feeling helpless.
Making a quick assessment of her situation, she tried to clear her mind by listing facts in an orderly way and using logic to conquer her fear. She was on the shore of either the ocean or a very large lake. Based on the quality of the light and the heat, she suspected she was close to the equator and the smell of brine in the air suggested salt water. So, ocean probably. She didn’t know why but her instincts also said island rather than mainland.
Pushing herself off of the tree, she began walking unsteadily across the sand, following the footprints toward an opening in the jungle foliage that crowded close around the beach. A steep, rocky path wound its way through the dense vegetation, paved with ancient stones and broken in many places. Still trying to regain her balance, Olivia followed the path with caution, pausing occasionally to catch her breath in the humid air and gather her courage. Unfamiliar noises echoed through the jungle as various creatures scampered or crawled through the underbrush and chirped or slithered among the trees. While she didn’t think she’d ever been in an environment like this one before, she realized she knew quite a lot about it. How the rain dripped down through the leaves and different kinds of vegetation grew at different layers of the canopy. The kinds of insects you could find in such jungles depending on the region, as well as all manner of reptiles and mammals. She wasn’t sure what her profession was, but she knew enough about nature to be a biologist.
Knowing what kinds of life she could expect to find in the jungle did nothing to calm her nerves and her senses narrowed with claustrophobia the farther she walked from the shore. Then she saw a clearing ahead and a new sort of fear dawned on her. She longed to be free of the cloying jungle, but she didn’t like the idea of being exposed to predators out in the open either. Approaching the edge of the clearing with caution, she was shocked when she saw fine grasses beyond the exit, mowed to a civilized length and neatly trimmed around the stone path which had become much more orderly and maintained.
She paused at the opening and looked across a manicured lawn to the hulking eyesore on the hill above. The mansion looked as if it had been designed by M.C. Escher, all abstract angles and blind corners, floors and wings of the house built at odds with each other and pinned together by shards of concrete and steel. Many of the surfaces were decorated with interlocking patterns of wood. There wasn’t a traditional design element to be seen so she couldn’t attach it to any particular nation or style. But considering this made her realize that she knew an awful lot about architecture too. What was her career? Did she even have one? Or was she one of those lifelong students, too obsessed with gathering esoteric knowledge to stop learning long enough to apply any of it?
She waited a long time before approaching the house, watching the tinted windows for any hint of motion inside, but the only movement she saw was the stirring of the grass in the wind. Sighing deeply, she decided that she could be waiting there all day and not see anything that made her decision any easier. And the house looked invitingly cool compared to the muggy jungle.
Steeling herself for whatever lay beyond the shade of the overgrowth, she stepped onto the path and into the full heat of the sun. Nothing jumped out to attack her on the first step or the second so she kept going at a swifter pace. The yard was completely silent and still. If she hadn’t been so on edge she might have found it peaceful.
Walking toward the menacing structure ahead, she told herself that she would have to confront whatever was inside sooner or later and it would be better to jump in with both feet and just get it over with than wait around for it to find her. She could tell patience was not one of her strengths.
