Night on Terror Island by Philip Caveney

scuffed-leather jacket. He talked in a kind of growl, gritting his teeth as he spoke. A pretty blonde woman seemed to be leading an argument against him.
    ‘And I’m telling you, Captain Holder, that I have documents going back hundreds of years that testify to the existence of such an island. The ancient tribes called it “The place of the monsters!”’
    That was enough for Rose. She could not for the life of her understand why anybody would want to watch a scary film. She turned back from the window and her attention was caught by something beside the projector – something that was covered by a big black sheet.
    Down at the front, Kip was enjoying the film. This part was known as ‘the set-up’ and he knew that it was important to get the first half-hour right, in order for the audience to accept all the fantastical things that would follow.
    The blonde actress, Kara Neetly, was playing Dr Tamara Flyte, an anthropologist (whatever that was). She had chartered a yacht belonging to Captain Dash Holder – played by tough-guy actor Clint Westwood – and ordered him to take her and her team of two scientists out to look for a mysterious island that she’d been reading about for years. But Captain Holder was convinced that all the old stories were just a bunch of myths and that there was nothing out here but ‘more water’. It was night time and they’d been searching for ten days now, without success. They had all gathered in the cabin for an emergency meeting.
    ‘This is a wild-goose chase,’ growled Captain Holder. ‘I don’t know why I ever agreed to this trip.’ His deep snarling voice made him sound like he was permanently constipated.
    ‘But you
did
agree to it,’ said Dr Flyte. ‘And as long as I’m paying your wages, you’ll do as I say.’
    ‘No way, lady. It’s over when I say it’s over.’
    The rest of the team looked on in anxious silence. They comprised of Tad Baxter, a young research assistant who wore his hair long and spent all his time cracking bad jokes, and Jade Callahan, a pretty brunette who seemed to take every opportunity to wear as few clothes as possible.
    The film cut to a long shot of the yacht ploughing through the water. It was late afternoon, the sun very low on the horizon. Captain Holder’s first mate, Sam, an elderly man in a yellow raincoat, stood at the tiller, helping himself to gulps of whiskey from a hip flask. He wasn’t taking very much notice of what was going on around him – but the ominous music that was slowly building to a climax was enough to tell Kip that something bad was about to happen.
    Rose reached up on tiptoe to pull the sheet aside. It fell away, revealing an odd-looking piece of machinery, which seemed to consist of a round wooden platform on a set of metal rails. There was also a funny-shaped lump of glass on an upright pole. She wondered if this was what Kip and Mr Lazarus had been talking about.
    She reached out a hand to touch the round wooden thing and it moved under her fingers, gliding smoothly forward an inch or so. She stopped it and pulled it back a little, gazing at it with interest. She noticed the marks of a couple of footprints on the pale wood and guessed that you were supposed to stand on it. She pushed it gently forward, to see if anything would happen. Almost immediately, a beam of light was reflected into the glass shape and this angled sharply down to illuminate the platform with a fierce white glare. She pulled it back again and stared at it for a moment, trying to puzzle out what it did. She wasn’t sure why, but she thought that a person was supposed to stand on the platform and then slide forward into the light, though she couldn’t see any point in actually doing it.
Perhaps
, she thought,
it would make her look like a dancer in a spotlight, the kind of thing she liked to watch on TV. Why not try it, slide into the light and take a bow? After all, what harm could it do?
She thought for a moment and then came to a