“During your stay, I recommend Nordic walking!”
Wake made a break for it, heard Stucky land heavily behind him, but didn’t look back.
“Proven health benefits!”
The office was just ahead. A sign on the outside wall declared: 87 DAYS SINCE A WORK-RELATED ACCIDENT. THINK! SAFETY FIRST. Wake scrambled up the steps, taking them two at a time. He threw open the door, slammed it behind him, and locked it.
The ax blade crashed through the door, barely missing Wake’s face. The ax squeaked, glinting in the light, as Stucky twisted it free.
Wake pushed a file cabinet over, blocked the door as the blade slammed through it again. He looked frantically around the office, grabbed a heavy metal flashlight off a desk strewn with time cards and Styrofoam coffee cups. A revolver was visible in a half-opened drawer. The hunter’s rifle had been useless against Stucky, but Wake snatched it up anyway, emptied a box of ammo into his jacket pocket too. He heard Stucky walk away from the door, lurching down the stairs.
Wake picked up the telephone, praying for a dial tone. Yes! He dialed 911. While the phone at the other end rang, he bent down, picked up a paper from the floor. Another manuscript page for Departure. Of course. Bread crumbs for Hansel and Gretel, only Gretel was missing. He stuffed the page in his pocket, angry now as the 911 line continued to ring. “Answer the goddamned—”
“Deputy Janes, Bright Falls Sheriff’s Station, how may I—?”
“I need help! I’m in—”
“Sir, what’s the—?”
The line went dead. Through the window, Wake could see the phone line dangling from the pole outside, torn loose. He looked up when he heard an engine roar to life. A bulldozer rumbled toward the trailer, smoke belching from the exhaust pipes of the diesel engine.
The trailer rocked as the bulldozer slammed into it. The trailer lurched, windows shattering. The lights went out.
The trailer backed up, took another run, full-throttle this time. The blade of the bulldozer punched through a wall of the office, the engine revving as it slowly pushed the trailer toward the ravine. One wall buckled as the trailer tore free of its foundation, digging furrows in the earth as it was pushed closer and closer to the edge of the ravine.
Wake made his way to the back door of the trailer. It was stuck. He kicked it until it flung open and he leapt out.
He was lying with his face in the sawdust, heart pounding, as the trailer tumbled over the edge, the bulldozer roaring after it. There was complete silence for a moment or two before Wake heard the bulldozer crash onto the rocks far below.
He sat there, trying to catch his breath, trying to make sense of what had happened. Stucky had killed a hunter, then tried to kill him. No reason for any of it, but Stucky was dead now, had to be dead. Wake was out of danger. His heart still pounding, Wake reached into his jacket and pulled out the manuscript page he had grabbed from the desk in the trailer.
The Taken stood before me. It was impossible to focus on it… It was bleeding shadows like ink underwater, like a cloud of blood from a shark bite. I was terrified. I squeezed the flashlight, willing the Taken to not come any closer. Suddenly something gave and the light seemed to shine brighter.
Wake got up slowly, legs wobbly. The page… the page seemed connected to his fight with Stucky. “Bleeding shadows…” That’s what Stucky had looked like, the essence of darkness. Wake turned on his flashlight, the light soothing. Light and darkness. But the word in the manuscript… Taken. Taken by what?
Wake walked unsteadily through the gap in the fence torn by the bulldozer and peered over the edge of the precipice. The bulldozer was dimly visible, lying upside-down at the bottom of the ravine, its headlights still on.
A raven cawed from somewhere in the darkness, the sound echoing, and Wake turned, walked back into the logging camp. He could see the glow of the gas station through the trees, still far away, but closer. There would be a phone there, maybe an attendant working late.
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 louder now.
The woods suddenly shook.
“What the…” Wake put his hands to his head, trying to block out the sound, a roaring in his ears, like something awakening after a long sleep, something enormous. He staggered, the sound ending as abruptly as it started, the woods utterly still now, silent except for the sound of a bird shrieking in the distance.
He moved forward, dazed, walked off the path and into the weeds. He stopped, seeing a boulder to his right, splashed with glowing paint, the words RAISE HIGH THE LANTERN dribbling across the surface of the rock. He looked around, realized he was on the brink of walking off the ledge into the river far below. He stepped back from the edge, heart pounding. Have to be careful out here. Careful of everything.
Wake noticed the path wound back the way he had come. If he was going to reach the gas station, he was going to have to cross the river. There was no bridge. None that he could see anyway, but there was a huge fallen tree that reached from one side of the river to the other. Wake walked over to the tree. It looked slippery with moss and lichen, but he put one foot on the thick trunk. He could just walk across it. Plenty of room, if he were Indiana Jones or Tarzan. He looked back toward the logging camp. Still time to retreat to the overhead light and wait until dawn, Wake. No one would know.
Of course he would know, and that was enough. He put the pistol into one pocket of his jacket, slipped the flashlight in the other. He stepped up onto the log. Bounced a little. The log probably weighed a ton. It wasn’t going anywhere. One slip, however, and Wake would be falling a couple hundred feet to the river and the rocks below. Too scared to take a deep breath, he slowly started across the log, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker. The bark of the log was rough, bits flaking off with every step, drifting down. In the movies they always warned people in this kind of situation not to look down, but how was he supposed to cross without looking where he was stepping? He tried to focus on his feet, swaying slightly as he moved.
Halfway across, away from the surrounding trees, it was lighter and he made the mistake of letting his attention stray to the river itself, the water dark and swirling, reflecting the stars overhead. It made Wake dizzy, stars above, stars below, and Wake caught somewhere in between. Alice… she was someplace else.
He imagined her sinking into Cauldron Lake, the water like black glass, Alice getting smaller and smaller as she fell into darkness. He felt he might be sick. Legs shaking, Wake was forced to crawl on his hands and knees across the log, told himself not to look at the river or the stars or anything else but the other side. That was the way to find Alice. He kept going.
When he finally crawled off the log and onto solid ground, he lay there panting, eyes closed. He would have liked to stay like that, pretend this was all a dream, a nightmare, a horror story his mind had cooked up without telling him. But it wasn’t and he couldn’t stay here.
Wake got up. He felt better now, as though every challenge met, every fear conquered, made him stronger. He had to be strong. There was a path here, one that led in the direction of the faint glow in the trees. Stucky’s gas station.
He snapped on the flashlight. Nothing. Fighting back panic, he shook the flashlight, tried it again. The beam shot into the trees. He switched it off, glad that it was working again, but there was a certain uneasiness now. He no longer trusted the light. He looked back, half-expecting a logger, a Taken, to be sauntering across the log twirling a double-bladed ax. He was alone though. For now.
The trail was easy to follow, and he saw more rocks splashed with luminous paint. Some of the messages on the rocks warned about the darkness or encouraged staying in the light, some simply showed an arrow pointing the path that should be followed. Wake wondered who had left the markings, but he had other priorities now. He made good time, trying not to use the flashlight. He told himself he was saving the batteries, but part of him felt the light alerted the Taken to his presence. Best to keep going in the dim light of the moon and stars.
Bushes rustled up ahead and Wak
e jerked, plastering himself against one of the trees that lined the path. He stayed there, trying not to breathe, trying to quiet his heart. More rustling in the underbrush. Chipmunks, squirrels gathering nuts for winter… Wake would settle for a ravenous grizzly bear being out there. Anything other than what he had encountered back at the logging camp.
The wind kicked up, carrying the sound of water splashing from the river, that and a manic, distorted voice.
“Sparkling River Estates. That’s where I go when I want something special to eat.”
It was Stucky. Wake hurried along the path, trying to put some distance between himself and the river.
“Paul makes the best hotdogs in the state!” crooned Stucky, closer now. “Belly Buster is the best no contest. Monster Dog is second best.”
Wake ran. He could see the light from the gas station through the trees. He tripped on a root, sprawled across the path and scrambled up, hands scraped. He pulled the revolver and the flashlight from his jacket, started running again.
“Never touch salad though,” babbled Stucky, his voice distant now, fading. “Man like me needs a hefty meal to get through the day.”
Wake ran on, the path twisting and turning through the trees, branches brushing against him as he raced headlong through the forest. The gas station was in view now, just beyond a patch of trees. He was breathing hard, panting, not trying to be quiet, just trying to put as much space between him and Stucky as possible. All he had to do was get to the lights of the gas station and—
Stucky stepped out of the shadows ahead, right in the middle of the path, backlit by the light from his gas station, his face crawling with darkness. “You got to change your oil more often,” he wheezed, slapping an enormous pipe wrench into the palm of his hand.
Alan Wake Page 5
