Alan Wake

One of them had used the other to fight the Dark Presence. One of them was going to finish the fight.

“We’ve both been touched by the darkness, young man,” said Weaver. “Thomas saved us both with light. But the darkness stays with you, leaves a stain. I miss him so… miss him so badly.”

“I know exactly what you mean, Miss Weaver,” said Wake.

“Then you tell me what she’s raving on about,” said Barry.

Wake tucked the Clicker into his jacket. He looked from Barry to Breaker. “I know what I have to do to save Alice.”

Zane could feel the poems, taking form, shaping things. As he experimented, he imagined he could almost feel the power surging through the keys of the typewriter. It exhilarated him, but there was fear, too. If not for his young assistant, Hartman, he would have given it up. But Hartman convinced him otherwise. He, too, had a way with words.

CHAPTER 26

“TAKE IT, YOUNG man,” said Cynthia Weaver, pressing a flare gun into Wake’s hand as he stepped out of the power plant. “Where you’re going, you’ll need a bright light.”

Wake nodded his thanks as Weaver slid the heavy door to the outside slowly shut. Through the narrowing gap, he could see Breaker and Barry watching him. Breaker was still upset, but Barry tried to make the best of it, waving at Wake as the door clanged shut.

Wake turned around, stopped and checked his watch. He held it to his ear and shook it. Checked again. Didn’t make sense. It was still hours before dawn, but the sun was already up. It wasn’t daylight, not exactly, but the sun glowed through a clotted haze somewhere between light and darkness. Had switching on the Clicker for that brief instant inside the Well-Lit Room actually caused the sun to rise? Not for the first time… not for the last, Wake wondered if he was insane, still lying in a hospital bed at Hartman’s clinic, or slumped over the wheel after the car crash, head bleeding, or worse, lost with Alice at the bottom of the lake.

Wake turned up the collar of his coat and started walking toward Cauldron Lake. When in doubt, keep walking. If he started trying to make sense of everything that had happened to him in the last week he’d never get anywhere. Keep walking. The lake was miles away, but if he hurried he might get there before nightfall. Even the dim sunlight would be a huge advantage against the Dark Presence. He started toward an access road that led to the power plant, moving down the rocky slope, the loose shale cracking under his boots. He put the flare gun away. He could see the wreckage of the helicopter, the rotor snapped off, the windscreen spiderwebbed with cracks. They had been lucky, and Breaker had been good. He was on the access road now, making better time.

Wake kept walking. It seemed like he had been walking for days, walking ever since he lost Alice, crisscrossing the woods from the logging camp to Stucky’s to the silver mine. He had looked for her every place but where she was. That ended tonight. That ended now. He touched the Clicker in his jacket pocket. The Clicker was the key to the cabin, the way to save Alice.

“I’m going back to the lake,” Wake had said in the Well-Lit Room. “I’m going to write an ending to the story. An ending on my own terms.”

“Why can’t you just write it here?” Barry had said.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Wake had said.

Breaker had stepped forward. “I’m ready when you are.”

Wake had shaken his head.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Breaker. “You can’t do it alone.”

“I’m sorry, Sarah,” Wake had said, “it’s the only way it can be done.”

Breaker had seen his face and backed off. She still didn’t agree with him, but she wished him luck anyway. Barry had hugged him, then wiped away tears, embarrassed, said Wake better come back alive, he needed the commission. Cynthia Weaver hadn’t tried to stop him or dissuade him. She knew.

Barry had surprised Wake with his toughness. Probably surprised himself too. “Come to Bright Falls!” said the tourist brochure that Alice had brought home. “Discover Nature! Discover Yourself!” The tourist bureau was going to have to come up with a new campaign. If there still was a Bright Falls when this was over.

Wake slowed. Something was wrong. Something else. He kept glancing up at the sky and it seemed that he could actually see the sun moving, the murky light noticeably fading. He trotted down the access road, pushing himself, trying to outrace the day. He caught a break as he rounded a turn, a big break in the form of a Bright Falls Dam maintenance truck. No one in it of course, the keys still in the ignition. The Dark Presence must have gathered Taken from all over the area, the dam maintenance man, hunters, miners, loggers, sending all of the Taken in on last night’s assault of the town. Or was it this night’s assault. It was hard to know anymore.

Wake started the truck and floored it, the vehicle slewing across the access road, kicking up gravel as he sped toward the lake. Every few minutes he peeked up through the windshield to check the progress of the sun as it roared across the sky. Even driving flat out, he wasn’t going to make it to the lake before nightfall. It was already dusk, shadows creeping across the trees, the road… the world.

In the distance, Wake could see Bright Falls already in darkness. Perhaps it had always been in darkness, the false daylight unable to reach it. Lights flickered in the town, generators dying, running out of fuel as the shadows gathered around it, blacker than the night.

A sharp pain lanced through Wake’s head as the darkness howled over the town. He rubbed his temples as the storm raged down the abandoned streets, the winds so powerful that the suspension bridge over the river actually seemed to be swaying. The Dark Presence was busy with the town, had kept the sunlight away, and maybe, just maybe it was too busy to be aware of him approaching the lake. That’s the way he would have written it anyway. Wake smiled to himself. He was counting on a book he didn’t remember writing, a book without an ending. Well, Wake was always quick at the typewriter once he tapped into the words.

Wake touched the Clicker in his jacket for reassurance, but was afraid to try it out again. The light it gave off might alert the Dark Presence, and he needed the element of surprise. You played your ace in the hole too soon, you lost. Simple as that.

It was dark now, dark as it should have been, the sunlight just a memory. The lake was close. Wake kept the headlights off. The stars had come out, but he didn’t need starlight or moonlight to navigate. Like Weaver had said, once the darkness touches you, it lingers, it leaves a stain. Wake felt the pull of the lake and could have found his way there with his eyes closed.

Wake turned the truck off to the side of the road, walked the last few yards onto a rocky promontory above the lake. He had to remind himself to breathe. The lake was black and dead, perfectly calm, but there was a low resonance to it, a humming, so that the stars reflected on its flat surface looked like they were being torn apart, scattered and lost to the darkness. Wake could see Bright Falls in the distance, the town nearly covered in shadows now, the lights going out one by one. Soon there would be nothing left to distract the Dark Presence, and it would turn its attention back to Wake. If it hadn’t already.

He had to write the ending, his ending, but the only way to do that was to get to the ghost island, walk into Bird Leg Cabin, and start typing. That’s what Thomas Zane had done, but he had made a profound mistake—Zane didn’t realize that a writer couldn’t just write whatever he wanted. There were rules that had to be followed. After Zane’s girlfriend, Barbara Jagger, drowned in the lake, Zane thought he could simply write her back into existence. It didn’t work that way. Zane brought something back, something that wore Jagger’s face, but it wasn’t her. Wake knew better. The writer wasn’t God. He couldn’t create something out of nothing—he had to continue the story.

Clouds drifted over the lake, black and ominous, bringing on a cold wind that whipped Wake’s jacket, set it flapping on his frame. The shadows would be coming soon. He touched the Clicker in his pocket again, his talisman, the hairs on the nape of his neck prickling. The Dark Presence was stirring, had become aware of him. The time to fix things, the time to make things right was running out. He shivered on the shore of the lake as the