Time passes—days, weeks, who knows—and I am at last down to my final log. I position myself behind this last log and to the left; it lies beyond my reach, where the hooded man will feel comfortable.

Soon, I feel his glacial presence slither behind me; gooseflesh prickles my neck but I don’t flinch. The hooded man’s advance is painfully slow, like an old man climbing a high tower. I wonder if he senses the strategy that’s formulated in my mind. Presently, the hooded man stands at my side.

He pauses to drop the wood, and I use this moment to strike. I shoot to my feet and grab hold of the log I’ve buried in the sand—the loose sand that moves like a wave—which parts easily. My movements are precise, thanks to my daily exercises done to pass time, and I twirl around, clench the log as tight as my grip allows, and whip my arms around with all my strength, aiming for the hooded man’s head. He senses my movement, but the logs in his hands slow his reaction and prevent a counter.

The hooded man’s wood drops and a hand reaches towards me as my log arcs through the air. Luckily, my weapon makes first contact, a cracking blow to the cranium whose sound ripples across the abysmal darkness like a crash of lightning in a tropical storm. The cloaked figure screeches and reels, the mist remaining in the air where his head was, while he drops to the ground, just right of the white-hot embers. I haven’t a second to waste; I leap atop the hooded man, push his injured head towards the coals. I want to hurt him, I want him to scream for mercy.

But he doesn’t scream or even resist as I shove his face into the flames. His hood is ablaze now, and he lets out a sickly laugh, a high-pitched shriek of a hyena. The sound is terrible, but I must get answers.

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“Who are you!? Why am I here!?” Suddenly his shriek shifts to a low bellow, a sound that shakes the air, vibrates the sand; I’ve never heard a laugh so loud. But more than that, the timbre is familiar. Where have I heard this before? The hooded man keeps laughing, deafening as the front row of a heavy metal show; it takes all my strength not to cover my ears in agony. His laugh shifts to a squeal, a high-pitched giggle that I associate with one person alone. It can’t be.

The fire has burned his hood away. I yank him out of the fire, turning him over on his back, and I see that it is not in fact a hooded man, but a hooded woman, a ghastly woman who puts a pit in my stomach. I stagger back and release the woman, certain that my mind is playing tricks on me. I am going insane from isolation; it must be.

Otherwise, something much more horrible than insanity has occurred. For in front of my eyes, I see the woman I loved, the woman whose life I thought I was saving by tending this fire for years or decades or centuries. It is Margaret, but not the Margaret I knew. Her hazel eyes are red, vile and deep with fury. Her radiant smile has turned sardonic, twisted into a shape beyond my recognition. Her auburn hair is gone, she lies bald on the ground, face half burned from the embers.

“Wh—” I start, stepping further back into darkness.

“Hello, Michael,” she snivels in that unnatural tone that pours like syrup into my surroundings. Then, before I can ask any questions, the mist that was left behind when I smashed her returns to her head. In the instant before it clouds her face once more, I see the face morph into something else, some anonymous blob, and I realize that it wasn’t my wife; how could it have been? The hooded man rises, backhands me with a skeletal arm, knocking me to the ground.