Alan Wake

middle of the road, a man caught in the headlights, blinking in the glare. The Diver lifted one hand…

“Alan!” screamed Alice.

Wake awoke from the nightmare gasping, out of breath, feeling like his lungs were filled with sand. He sat in the driver’s seat of their car, dazed, his forehead throbbing from where he hit his head on the steering wheel. The airbag hadn’t deployed. Call Barry and tell him to get a lawyer, sue somebody. Not funny. Snap out of it, Wake. His mouth tasted of blood. No Alice. He called her name, the sound croaking out of his dry lips.

“Alice!” he called again as he pushed open the door, staggering out, the sound of glass from the broken window tinkling onto the blacktop like shards from his heart.

He looked around, trying to get his bearings. An illuminated sign for Stucky’s Gas Station loomed on the roadway above, the cone of light reaching down around him. He was on a rocky ledge. The car had crashed through the guardrail of the winding mountain road and gone over the edge, stopped only by a tree on the ledge below. Lucky thing too, otherwise it would have plunged straight down the mountain.

Even now the car hovered on the brink, the tree splintering. Steam escaped from the radiator and he didn’t feel lucky. Stars sparkled through the steam, stars stretching across the sky, and as far as they reached, they couldn’t find Alice either. He pulled out his cell phone. Nothing. He shook it. The battery was dead. He resisted the impulse to smash it to pieces on the rocks. From one nightmare to another and no end in sight.

Wake rubbed his eyes, but it was hard to focus, like trying to see underwater, and for a moment he had to fight not to fall back into the dream of being lost in the lake, searching for Alice. He dimly remembered the cabin on the island, Bird Leg Cabin squatting in a nest of sharp branches, the image fading now, until he wasn’t sure if that had been a dream too. Wake balled his fists, rejected the idea. No. He didn’t know how he had gotten here. Had no memory of the drive, or of the crash. All he knew, all that he was utterly certain of, was that something had happened to Alice. Something terrible.

Wake walked around the crashed car. The cliff back to the road was too steep to climb up. It might be hours before another car came along, and no guarantee that the driver would notice the broken guardrail.

The car’s trunk had sprung from the impact, their suitcases popped open from the impact of the crash. Wake bent down on one knee, touched Alice’s clothing, her sweater, her favorite pink silk blouse. He held the blouse for a few moments, fingering the delicate fabric, then folded her clothes as best he could before replacing them in the bag.

Wake picked up a hardback book from the suitcase. The Creator’s Dilemma, by a Dr. Emil Hartman. He had never seen it before, but the blurb on back cover said Hartman specialized in helping artists with creative problems at his clinic. Sure you do, doc. He remembered the fight with Alice in the cabin after she told him about making an appointment for him to meet with Hartman. His cheeks flushed with the memory, seeing the concern in her face, Alice worrying about his insomnia, his sudden rages. He shouldn’t have jumped all over her for trying to help. He was an idiot, a thin-skinned idiot. If he had just nodded, said thanks but no thanks, he wouldn’t have stormed out, and Alice might still be with him. Instead he was here, stuck on the side of a mountain, the car wrecked and Alice missing.

Wake pawed through the rest of their things, smelling Alice’s perfume on her clothes. He slowly picked up a small framed photo of the two of them on vacation three years ago. They were lying on a white sand beach in Malta, holding up umbrella drinks for the camera, both of them tanned and happy in the sun. Wake hadn’t wanted to go, but Alice had ignored his excuses and made the arrangements. He was glad she had. It had been a good time, his books doing well, the writing coming easily. No fights. No arguments. Just the two of them, happy and together. He carefully tucked the photo into his jacket, slung the suitcase into the trunk. It made his chest hurt thinking about those days in the sun.

Get moving, Wake. Impossible to climb back up to the road. The narrow path down the mountain led into the dark forest, but there was no other way to reach Stucky’s gas station, and that was his best bet for finding help. It would be a long hike, but they’d have a phone he could use at least. Wake tore off a nearly blank page from Hartman’s book, scrawled a note in case someone came by: “Wife missing. Gone through the woods to gas station for help. Alan Wake.”

He tucked the note under one of the windshield wipers, jumped back as the tree supporting the car groaned, cracked, and gave way. The tree and then the car fell down the cliff.

Wake jumped back and watched the car tumbling end over end in a shower of sparks as it bounced off the rocks. He felt oddly detached somehow, as though viewing a movie of a car crash rather than seeing one, hearing one. He shook his head. He wished that he could wake up alongside Alice and have everything be fine, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet. Not until he found her. He started down the rugged path, almost slipped, and barely caught himself. As he entered the forest, he got one last glimpse of the gas station, and then it was lost to the darkness.

A raven cawed somewhere up ahead, and its cry was answered by others, an unkindness of ravens on all sides. Wake kept moving, sticking to the main trail, hoping that would lead him to the gas station. He could barely see at first, but after a few minutes his eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through the trees. The woods smelled of pine and cedar, and the damp smell of rotting vegetation. The trail dipped and twisted, split into three forks, and he stopped, heart pounding so loudly he couldn’t separate it from the sound of crickets, which started up again, louder now, rising and falling. He couldn’t tell if the sound was outside or inside his own head.

He looked around as though the sound came from someplace other than his own thoughts. He rubbed the spot on his forehead where he had banged his head in the crash, the wound still leaking. That must be a good sign. Probably right there in the First Aid section of the Boy Scout manual: when experiencing a traumatic head injury, take comfort if it keeps oozing blood, because that means you’re not losing your mind after misplacing your wife. No merit badge for you, Wake.

The woods whispered around him, leaves brushing against each other, and the sound was like insects rising from the earth, sheets of beetles shiny and hard. He checked his watch. It felt like he had only just entered the forest, but over an hour had passed since he left the crash site. He wondered how long he had been standing here, unsure of how to proceed.

Wake took the right-hand path, afraid that if he didn’t start moving he would still be in this exact same spot when the sun came up. He started trotting, but quickly faded as the path started uphill. Better to save his strength and keep up a brisk walk. No telling how long it would take to get there.

A raven shrieked, startling him. Wake slipped on loose gravel, banged his knee. Cursing, he limped forward.

A bright light flared from behind a rocky outcropping up ahead. Wake called out, rubbing his knee as he approached. The light seemed to flicker.

“Anybody there?” Wake approached cautiously. “Hello?”

The light died.

Wake stepped past the outcropping of rock. Two sheets of white paper fluttered to the ground, gleaming, and Wake thought of angels’ wings. He rubbed his head again, disoriented, the papers’ glow fading as they settled into the weeds. Paper didn’t fall from the sky… except when the air force wanted to alert the civilian population to an imminent bombing attack. EVACUATE THE CITY. YOUR LIVES ARE IN DANGER. HEAD FOR THE HILLS.

Wake stumbled, caught up in an avalanche of thoughts, struggled to turn his mind off. He forced himself to calm down, to focus. He picked up the typewritten pages and tried to read them. He moved away from the surrounding trees, using the moonlight to see better, frowning at what he saw.

The pages were from a manuscript. A work in progress. Departure, the title of the book he intended to write, a book he had been unable to write even a page of. Just the title was all he had, but somebody… somebody had already started work on it. Wake squinted at one of the pages and checked again to make sure. It was just too weird. There it was, though. At the bottom right corner: Wake//page 2.

Wake’s legs wobbled so badly that he had to hold on to a tree for support, his fingernails clawing at the bark, as though assuring himself that this tree, this one thing was real. He must have really banged his head, because none of this made sense. He took a deep breath, straightening up, and pushed his hair back with one hand. He started reading. His hands were shaking by the time he was finished, but he read every word. The manuscript page described a man walking through the woods at night… a man attacked on that walk by an ax murderer. “Blood dripped from the blade of the ax, blood black as