Alan Wake

onto the floor:

RULE #1: DON’T GO OUT AT NIGHT.

RULE #2: KEEP THE LIGHTS ON!

RULE #3: ALWAYS REMEMBER THE LANTERN.

DON’T STEP ON SHADOWS.

CHECK THE BULBS, CHANGE THE BULBS.

THE BULBS NEED CHANGING.

I MISS YOU TOM.

I CURSE YOU THOMAS ZANE.

INSURANCE.

“Oh, this is a real confidence builder,” Barry muttered before Breaker shushed him.

Wake knew what Barry meant. He also had doubts about Weaver. Wake had only encountered the Dark Presence a little over a week ago, and it was all he could do to hang on to his sanity; Weaver had been living this way for years… for decades, living in a world where darkness attacked, and the dead walked again, where something old and powerful lingered under a mountain lake, waiting for its time to come. This was Wake’s world now too, a world where a writer could change reality, where a writer who couldn’t write anymore created horrors to save the woman he loved. If Weaver was still sane after all this time, she was doing better than he would have.

Weaver stopped in front of a six-foot access plate set into the wall, opened it up. She stepped inside the water pipe. The entire length of the pipe was strung with lights, not a shred of darkness visible. “Well?” Weaver hefted her lantern from the opening. “Are you coming?”

Wake joined her in the pipe, heard Breaker and Barry follow.

“You’re sure this is the way, Miss Weaver?” said Breaker.

“You look a lot like my Tom, Mr. Wake,” said Weaver, shuffling forward, their footsteps echoing. “Perhaps that’s because you’re both writers.”

“Yes… yes, I would imagine,” said Wake, glancing back at Breaker.

“I had such a crush on Tom,” said Weaver, continuing on, “such a beautiful man. I was jealous of Barbara. There was a part of me, a tiny part, that was a little glad when she had the accident.” She sighed, her steps slowing. “And then Tom started writing and he woke the darkness up.” She turned and looked at Wake. “He tried to bring Barbara back, just the way you’re trying to bring your wife back, but you can’t. The witch looked like Barbara, but it wasn’t. Barbara was sweet. There are no free rides, Mr. Wake.”

“Not if you write what the darkness wants you to write,” said Wake. “The trick is to make a few changes, small changes that the darkness won’t notice until it’s too late.”

Weaver held up the lantern, peered into Wake’s eyes. “Yes… yes, small changes… a way out of the nightmare, a secret passage.” She nodded. “Perhaps you’re smarter than Tom was. He tried to undo what he had written, but all he could think of was to erase himself, erase Barbara, erase everything he had written out of the world. The darkness was so angry with him, but Tom, my darling Tom… he was gone.”

Wake reached for her, but she had already turned around and was walking down the pipe, moving faster now.

“You’re famous, aren’t you, Mr. Wake?”

“Sort of,” said Wake.

“Very famous,” said Barry.

“My Tom was famous too,” murmured Weaver, “and after-wards no one even knew who he was. He left only one thing behind, one thing that he put in my care, in case it happened again. Insurance. He trusted me, or perhaps used me a little. Tom knew how I felt about him, he knew I wouldn’t refuse him. So, I built the Well-Lit Room and put it there. It’s been waiting for you, Mr. Wake.”

Weaver stepped out of the end of the pipe. The three of them followed her to the end of the corridor, where a massive door confronted them, thick as a bank vault. Light spilled out into the corridor from the interior of the room as Weaver slowly swung the door open. She held the lantern high as she backed inside. “All aboard!”

Barry rolled his eyes.

Wake stepped into the room, Breaker right behind him, then Barry.

“I told you,” said Weaver. “I needed a safe place for what Tom gave me.”

The room must have originally been a storage area, but Weaver had fixed it up. There must have been a thousand different lamps inside. Heavy-duty electrical cables snaked across the floor, connecting everything together. Not one inch of the room was in shadow. There was no place where the darkness could get a foothold. In the middle of the room, under the brightest light, was an old cardboard box, open to the light.

“I’ve looked after the Well-Lit Room for many, many years now,” Weaver said proudly. “The power is fail- safe, fed directly off the dam’s turbines, and all the bulbs are numbered and changed regularly based on their make and model.”

“Riiiiiiiight,” said Barry.

Breaker elbowed him.

Weaver nudged the box toward Wake. “Take it. Then I won’t need to worry about the room anymore, because bulbs 6 and 33 and 118 need changing soon, and I don’t want to climb up the ladder to change them. Take it, Mr. Wake, because it’s very late and I’m tired.”

Wake leaned over and slowly looked into the box. Inside was a page from a novel and an old light switch. He picked up the page. It wasn’t from one of his books; it was from one of Thomas Zane’s, his name printed on the upper right corner. Barely able to breathe, Wake read the page.

Alan, seven years old, would fight sleep to the bitter end. When he did sleep, he soon woke up, screaming, the nightmares fresh in his mind. One evening, his mother, sitting by his bed, offered him an old light switch. She called it the “Clicker” and flicking the switch would turn on a magical light that would drive the beasts away. To imbue the talisman with all possible power, she added that it had been given to her by Alan’s father. Alan never knew him, and anything of his took on mythical proportions in his mind. With the Clicker firmly in his hand, Alan finally slept like a baby, safe from harm. Now, almost thirty years later, Alan thought of this, as he stood on the rim of Cauldron Lake, the Clicker in his hand. He took a deep breath and jumped.

Wake put the page down as though it might explode.

Barry peeked into the box, saw the Clicker.

“That’s what we came all the way out here for? Geez, Al, there was a hardware store in Bright Falls.”

Wake picked up the Clicker, his mind reeling, trying to make sense of it. He flipped it on, flipped it back off.

Wake’s mother had given him the Clicker when he was seven years old, exactly as Zane had written it. The whole page was straight out of Wake’s life, everything from the father that Wake had never known to his frantic insomnia. Wake had never written about it… but Zane had. Two years ago, Wake had given his childhood talisman to Alice in hopes of helping her overcome her own fear of the dark. Now here it was, lying in a cardboard box under the Bright Falls Dam. The same light switch. The same two wires coming from the back of it, insulation worn off in places from Wake’s childhood rubbing. He turned the Clicker over in his hand. Wake would recognize it anywhere. How had it gotten here?

“What’s wrong, Alan?” said Breaker.

Cynthia Weaver said Zane had written himself out of existence to prevent the Dark Presence from achieving its awful goal, erased himself and all of his works, as though they had never been. Save for this single page. Wake had revived Zane somehow in his hour of need, restored Zane to life while Wake typed away in Bird Leg Cabin. Zane had been Wake’s escape hatch, his means of setting himself free, his only hope to get Alice back from the Dark Presence… but Wake had no memory of giving Zane knowledge of his own history, no memory of giving him possession of the Clicker. Even if he had, Cynthia Weaver had said that the Clicker had been lying in the cardboard box for decades.

“Al? You okay, buddy?” said Barry.

The question… and Wake hated that he kept coming back to it, no matter how hard he resisted, was whether Thomas Zane was a handy creation of Alan Wake… of whether Wake was a creation of Thomas Zane.