Another slide showcases a series of Watson’s own notes.

“We checked out entries from the diary she kept. She talked about strange dreams and hearing voices in her head—we’ll keep those details as filler. She referred to Cortes’s journal as ‘The Book’ constantly, talking about it like it was the Bible. Said she’d been guided to this place from America. Like the god was going to give her powers if she carried out sacrifices for him. The irony was that when we first got her diary, no one had any idea what she was talking about. We hadn’t found Cortes’s journal yet—not until Mr. Hemslock suggested that we talk to the museum in Cebu where she’d worked, see if she’d been obsessing over any of their artifacts.”

“And I was right,” Hemslock says, with some satisfaction.

“What happened next plays out like some B-grade horror movie,” the writer continues. “She gathered some like-minded expats she’d brainwashed into believing her claims, stole the Cortes journal, kidnapped a local woman, and then made for Kisapmata. Allegedly, none of the cultists survived. None of their bodies were found, either.

“I want to highlight something else we found in Cortes’s journals, and then again with Alex Key’s, the fifth victim. Some info on Key—he’s an expat who’d been living in Cebu for ten years. Married a local, but disappeared when he came under suspicion after she was murdered. He was an avid scuba diver, so he was familiar with the islands and knew the lore, according to neighbors. Told them he wanted to explore Kisapmata one day, once the restrictions were lifted. Could explain why his body was found here. His death wasn’t pretty, either—he’d been cut in half. Recovered his journal near his corpse but the entries were mostly the ravings of a madman. But here’s what’s unusual.” Another click of the mouse, and new text pops up on the wall.

He who offers the sacrifice controls the Godseye.

The first to feed,

the second to seed,

the third to wear,

the fourth to birth,

the fifth to serve,

the sixth to lure,

the seventh to consume,

the last to wake.

“We found this riddle in both his and Cortes’s journals. Key’s is mostly incomprehensible, but the similarity of his entry to the Spaniard’s indicates he must have found something inside the cave.”

“In the last meeting you said that you’d only found Cortes’s journal a couple of months ago,” Producer Three says. “Hemslock found it at that same museum in Cebu that Watson had worked at, right? But Key’s been dead for four years. How’d he know what that Spaniard had written centuries before?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Since then, we’ve used Cortes’s to formulate most of our theories regarding how these deaths are selected. The people here do believe that helping the god with these sacrifices endows his helpers with supernatural abilities. They think it’s how Lapulapu was able to control these islands for so long. Cortes himself wrote about how Lapulapu killed some local criminal to appease the god—the first to eat. Another entry mentions a corrupt chieftain sacrificed during a time of drought, which he took to mean as the second to seed. And if that tree corpse is Cortes himself, then he’d be the third to wear.”