Rick Burroughs - Alan Wake

“A muse?”

“You have so much work to do,” said Rose, settling deeper into her chair. “There’s no shame in needing help. No shame… You just need to open yourself up, allow someone else…”

Wake set his mug down on the coffee table. “Rose?”

“You’re really here,” said Rose, playing with her hair. “It just seems so strange. Alan Wake, sitting on my couch like a normal person.”

Wake glared at Barry. “We’re wasting our time. She doesn’t have anything.”

Barry smacked his lips. “Remind me… remind me again what we’re doing here?” he said, slurring the words. “I thought…” He pitched forward and collapsed onto the floor.

Wake stood up, unsteady, sloshing coffee across his hand. He knew he had burned himself, but he couldn’t feel it. The mug was heavy, too heavy to hold anymore. He watched as it fell from his grip, falling slowly, slowly, so very slowly onto the carpet. He looked at Rose.

Rose watched him. She was different now. Shadows flickered briefly across her features, the darkness playing peekaboo with him, her eyes… her eyes were lost, gone someplace out of reach.

Wake wanted to go, wanted to get out of there and take Barry with him, but it was getting dark in the trailer. Too dark to see or move or anything else. He knew he should fight. Make a run for the door. But it was soooo far away. Better to conserve his strength. He flopped back on the soft couch, let the darkness slide over him.

Wake didn’t know how long he had been there, but eventually he saw a light in the distance. A tiny light in the darkness, but moving fast toward him.

It was the deep-sea diver again, the same one who had come to him in his dream on the ferry. The dream with the hitchhiker who was trying to kill him. A hitchhiker who wouldn’t die. The Diver had tried to help him, had reached out to him in the dream, insistent, warning him about the darkness, even building a bridge for him where the old one had fallen down. Then Alice’s voice had inserted itself into the dream, and she was gently shaking him, telling him to wake up, the ferry was pulling into Bright Falls, and it was beautiful, everything she hoped it would be.

Bright Falls. Yes. He and Alice in a little cabin on the lake… Wake struggled toward consciousness, but it was like swimming through glue.

It’s coming for you , said the Diver, shining the light on Wake. It’s hiding in my Barbara’s skin and I’m too weak to stop it .

“I’m trying,” murmured Wake, fighting to wake up. “I’m doing my best.”

I know , said the Diver.

“Do you… do you know where Alice is?” said Wake.

You need to turn on the lights , said the Diver.

“It’s not easy,” breathed Wake.

You have to do it , said the Diver, fading now. It’s the only way .

Wake watched the Diver disappear, seeing something else now, something moving in the darkness, a deeper shadow. The roaring came now, louder and louder, loud as a freight train.

Wake pulled back but there was no place to go, no place to hide.

The woman in the black veil appeared from the darkness. The woman from the diner, enveloped in shadows. She breathed them in and out.

“I promised I’d come visit you and your lovely wife,” she said.

“Go… away,” said Wake.

“You must finish what you started,” hissed the woman in the black veil.

“Leave me… alone,” said Wake.

“You must finish your work,” said the woman. “I insist.”

Wake remembered the Diver’s repeated advice: Turn on the light . Yes, turn on the light.

“Don’t keep me waiting,” threatened the woman.

Wake awoke with a gasp. He was on the floor of the trailer’s bedroom. Rose’s bedroom. Even in the dark, he could still make out the movie star posters plastered across the walls, the mobile of unicorns and stars floating above her bed.

The woman in the black veil stood over him, smiling, and the darkness billowed out of her like an icy undersea current. She bent down, gently touched his cheek, and shadows flickered in front of him. No… not all the shadows were in front of him. For an instant, just a brief instant, he felt the shadows inside of him.

“Back to work, boy ,” ordered the woman in the black veil.

Wake scrambled to his feet; hit the light switch on the bedroom wall. He blinked in the bright light. Alone in the room. He clung to the wall, hearing a roar outside the trailer. It rattled the windows before fading into the distance, and it seemed to Wake that the roar was a fast freight train charging through the night, carrying his hopes for Alice away with it. Carrying his sanity as well.

He staggered out of the bedroom and into the living room, still dizzy. He flipped the overhead light on there too, the pole lamp, the reading lamp. He would have lit up the whole park, the whole world if he could.

Barry lay sprawled on the couch. Rose sat in a corner of the kitchen, arms wrapped around her knees, slowly rocking back and forth.

Wake checked his watch. After midnight. He had less than twelve hours until he was supposed to meet the kidnapper and hand over the manuscript. It had always been a futile hope. He hadn’t even been able to write a paragraph. His only hope had been to pick up the completed manuscript from Rose, and that had been a lie. Part of him had always known it was a lie, but he had wanted to believe it was the truth. Rose having the manuscript was his best chance to get Alice back, so it had to be true. That’s the way good lies worked. You had to want to believe them. Instead, Rose had drugged him and Barry, and cost Wake a day. A day he couldn’t get back.

He watched as Rose rocked herself, crooning softly, and tried to understand why she had done it. Did she blame him somehow for what had happened to Rusty? No, she couldn’t know that. At the moment Rose didn’t look like she knew anything. She seemed hollow… absent.

“Rose?”

No response.

Wake remembered the Diver from his dream, and the woman with the black veil. It had seemed real. As real as any waking moment. What had Barry been talking about as they walked to the trailer? A writer… Thomas… Zane. Thomas Zane, a writer like Wake. A diver, Barry had said. The island he lived on was named Diver’s Isle by the locals. Zane’s cabin the very same cabin Wake and Alice had been in.

Wake sat down on the couch, his legs wobbly. Zane was dead, drowned in Cauldron Lake along with his island, along with his lover, Barbara. Now Zane had returned, appearing to Wake, helping him against the darkness. But who was the woman in the black veil? Wake wasn’t sure what to believe, what was dream and what was truth, but he and Alice had been guided to Bird Leg Cabin by the woman in black, and that’s where Alice had been kidnapped.

Barry groaned.

Wake shook him. “Come on, we have to get out of here.”

Rose kept rocking, clutching her knees, eyes downcast.

There was no way Wake was going to satisfy the kidnapper’s demands. No way he could deliver a manuscript. It was time to call Sheriff Breaker. Wake had met the kidnapper last night; now, he could give Breaker a description. The man had been on the ferry when they arrived in Bright Falls; someone else would have seen him. It was best that Wake keep quiet about the Diver and the woman in black; Breaker would consider that proof positive that he had lost his mind. She already had doubts about him because of the missing week and the vacation cabin that had sunk over thirty years ago. Truth be told… Wake had his doubts too. All he knew was that Alice had been kidnapped. He would tell the sheriff about the kidnapper, the phone call, the plan to meet with him tomorrow at noon. Maybe he and the sheriff could surprise the man at the coal mine. Wake had nothing to lose now. There was no chance of bartering the manuscript for Alice’s safe return.