Alan Wake

The ground trembled.

Two men emerged from behind a pile of logs. They too were wreathed in shadows, just like Stucky, darkness crawling over their faces. One of the men whipped off to the side, flanking Wake, the other came straight at him.

Wake drew the revolver, the gun shaking in his grip.

The flanking man moved quicker than the other one; he was a bulky logger wearing high-laced boots and overalls, a double-sided ax in his hand. The one coming right at him carried an enormous crowbar, which he tapped softly into the palm of his other hand. Wake pointed the gun at him. Shot him in the heart. No effect. The hunter was closer now, Wake backing up. He turned the flashlight on the hunter, hoping to see him more clearly, and the man shrank from the light, threw his arm over his eyes. Wake kept the flashlight on the hunter, and his blood-caked clothes seemed to crackle and smolder. Wake shot him. He shot him in the face and the hunter’s whole body flared brightly for an instant, then dissolved into dying motes of light. Wake heard footsteps, dodged, and caught the breeze from the logger’s ax as it swooshed past, missing him by inches. He turned the flashlight beam back on the logger. He flinched, darted away.

For minutes the two of them danced around the logging yard, feinting and counter-feinting. Wake tried to get away, stumbling, tried to make it through the gate on the other side, but the logger was quick and knew the terrain better. Twice he surprised Wake, once jumping down from a pile of lumber, the blade chunking into a pile of 2?4s, so close that Wake gagged at the sour smell of the man. Wake drove him back with the flashlight, but the beam alone was not enough to dissolve the logger, and Wake’s shots were wild, missing him entirely. He had only one bullet left in the revolver now, and no time to reload before the man was on him.

Wake edged toward a clear area of the camp, someplace where the logger would have to confront him directly. He turned the flashlight off. No telling how long the batteries would last. The sound of crickets rose again and Wake’s hands were slick with sweat. He kept turning around, looking into the darkness. He almost didn’t see him in time, the logger visible only as a deeper darkness in the night. It was the moonlight that gave him away, the glint of moonlight off the upraised ax. Wake shone the flashlight on the man, saw the logger’s outline contract in the light, and shot him. The man flared, then dissolved like the dying moment of a fireworks display, leaving nothing behind but fading shadows. No ashes. No bones. No clothes. No ax. No evidence that the logger had ever been there. Wake went over to make sure, sifted the sawdust between his hands. Nothing.

There was a buzzing in Wake’s ears louder than the crickets, a long, undulating sound that was the mournful cry of madness. Wake had never fired a gun outside a pistol range, and even then had only done it as research for his books rather than pleasure. Now he had just killed two men… or two whatever they were, and if he thought too much about it he was going to be sick. He reloaded the pistol, hands fumbling. He dropped two bullets in the sawdust, retrieved them, and blew them clean before inserting them in the chambers. He was going to need every bullet.

Alice looked through the viewfinder, lining up the shot. Cauldron Lake was breathtaking. Something caught her eye: a figure standing in the shadows behind the cabin, like a thin woman in a black dress. She lowered the camera and looked again — no one there, just a collection of bushes that looked vaguely human. She shook her head and laughed.

CHAPTER 6

WAKE STUMBLED DOWN the trail out of the logging camp, looking over his shoulder every few steps to see if he was being chased. Nothing and nobody there. He stopped under a flickering overhead light, catching his breath. Whatever those things were, they didn’t like the light. He was safe here.

He turned off his flashlight, rested one hand on the rail fence that ran partially along the ridge. The trail led through an opening in the fence, winding steeply down into the forest. Wake could see the glow of the gas station in the distance. Stucky’s gas station, its owner hopefully now lying under the bulldozer at the bottom of the ravine.

What had Stucky been doing here?

He lingered in the light, knowing that he needed to go down through the forest to reach the gas station, but unwilling to leave the comfort of the light. He glanced back up the trail to the logging camp, gripping the revolver so hard it made his hand hurt.

Still unwilling to start down the path into the darkness, Wake pulled out the crumpled manuscript page from Departure that he had found in the trailer.

The page described a character fighting the same enemies that had attacked him in the logging camp, a character who discovered that it took light to strip away the enemies’ protective darkness and kill them with gunshots. Enemies that disappeared after dying, leaving not a trace behind.

Wake shivered under the light, not sure if he was in shock from fighting for his life, or from the fact that these manuscript pages that he kept finding, pages from a novel he didn’t remember writing, seemed to be true. Taken. That’s what the page called the creatures who had attacked him, an indication that the men they had been before were now absent. Fathers, sons… they were gone now. Taken over. The monsters Wake had killed in the logging yard had been just like that, their movements stilted, their eyes black pits devoid of humanity.

Wake took another long look at the glow from Stucky’s gas station, trying to fix the direction he needed to travel in his head. Once he entered the forest, he wouldn’t be able to see it, not all the time anyway, and there were a lot of trails to choose from. He’d have to do the best he could. The time to seek perfection was when he was sitting at his desk, typing away. This was real.

Funny, that last thought. Yesterday he would have said that it was what he created sitting at his desk that was real, not… this. Even though he hadn’t written a word in years, he still thought of his fictional world as more real than the one he woke up to every morning. Not anymore. He kicked at the gravel, sent stones skittering into the darkness. This was the real world. The one Alice had been stolen from.

Wake left the light and started cautiously down the steep path, struggling not to slip on the loose gravel. The moonlight thinned out as the trees thickened around him. He stopped and listened. Looked back. The overhead light flickered through the trees. Last chance, Wake. You could run back there and wait under the light until morning. Stay safe.

He had intellectually understood Alice’s fear of the dark, remembered his own night terrors as a child, afraid of what lurked in the closet or under his bed. His mother had comforted him with a placebo, and he had treated Alice’s fear the same way, considered it a simple phobia, no more grounded in reality than being scared of butterflies or Friday the 13th. Not anymore. It took an effort to stop his teeth from chattering as he looked around at the night.

Wake finally understood that he had been right as a child, that the darkness truly did shelter all manner of evil. No wonder the first great discovery of humanity had been fire. Not simply for heat, or because cooked meat tasted better than raw, but for light. To light the night and keep darkness at bay, that was the only law, the beginning of wisdom, but Wake didn’t have that luxury. He couldn’t stay in the light. Not if he was going to get Alice back.

Wake started walking. He was a lot of things: erratic and short-tempered and egotistical, selfish even, but he was no coward. When it came to Alice, there was nothing he wouldn’t do, no risk too great that he wouldn’t take if it would save her. He could hear a rushing river nearby, the dampness permeating the air. He used his flashlight sparingly, not sure how long the batteries would last, knowing only that he would need it again if he were attacked.

He still had no idea what he was going up against. These men… these Taken, once men, loggers, hunters, Stucky himself, who owned the gas station and rented cabins, what had happened to them? What was the darkness that protected them, wrapped around them in an oily cocoon? Wake had questions, but no answers. He kept walking, on high alert, listening, but there was only the wind in the trees and the sound of the river, growing