“Al!” shouted Barry, the Hawaiian shirt rippling in the wind like a flag.
“Keep going!” called Wake over the sound of the storm. “I’ll find another way out!”
Shadows slowly filled the room, a deeper darkness flowing down the stairs like a tide of diesel oil. Wake raced across the room, dodging furniture and a shadowy carpet that tried to wrap itself around his legs. Once he accidentally stepped into a small puddle of black goo that had oozed up through the hardwood floor. He felt the strength drain from him as though his bones had turned to water, felt a searing headache twist through his skull. The worst part wasn’t the pain or the nausea, though, it was the voice in his head, the voice pleading with him not to go, to stay. Alice’s voice.
Wake tore himself away, staggered free of the goo, almost collapsing. He kept going. He didn’t believe the voice anymore, not when it told him to stay with the darkness.
The twilight was feeble now, cut through with lightning flashes, but it was enough illumination for Wake to find his way across the room, enough to reach a small side door out of Cauldron Lake Lodge and onto the grounds.
Wake ran down the stone steps. He could hear the windows of the lodge blowing out behind him.
“Over here, Al! I found my car!”
Wake saw Barry pressed against the other side of the locked security fence that surrounded the lodge property.
“Al, go through the maze,” called Barry. “The parking lot is on the other side. My car is still there!”
Wake stood outside the formal entrance to the hedge maze, hedges at least eight feet tall. Great thing for Hartman to install at his little mental institution. A little R and R for the patients. Nothing like frustration, fear, and an overwhelming sense of helplessness to make a person with psychological problems cling to their doctor. He wobbled on his feet, thought twice about entering the maze.
“It’s not that hard,” shouted Barry. “You can do it!”
“Like I have a choice,” Wake muttered. He looked back at the lodge, saw it covered in shadows, the darkness flaring as it crawled over the roof, the balconies, dripping down the walls. Wake turned away and hurried into the maze.
It was dark in the maze, darker than the twilight, and Wake needed his flashlight. The batteries were weaker now. He took the first right-hand turn, then a left, trying to maintain a sense of direction.
The wind had died, the loudest sound in the maze was the crunching of his feet on the gravel path and his own heavy breathing. The maze was unkempt, the hedges overgrown; weeds poked through the gravel, the patches of gray slate flagstones were cracked, and there was trash in the corners. He bumped into the bushes. Snapped on the light. A dead end.
He retraced his steps and took the opposite turn at the next intersection. A wheelbarrow was overturned, its cargo of potted plants dead and shriveled. Wake half expected to come upon a skeleton at the next turn, a patient who had attempted to navigate the maze and never made it out.
Another dead end.
Wake tried to stay calm, but it wasn’t easy. He turned off the flashlight for a moment, needing to prove to himself that he could do it, that he wasn’t afraid. If he gave in, if he let the fear take hold, he would end up racing back and forth until he collapsed from exhaustion. He had come too far to give in to the fear now. He could be scared later. He could curl up into a fetal position, suck his thumb, and beg for a blankie some other time. After he found Alice. Wake stood there, looking around in the moonlight, trying to decide which way to go.
A horn sounded. Three short beeps. Wake grinned. Leave it to Barry to try and help him find his way out.
Wake did his best to follow the Barry’s periodic horn beeps, but it seemed like he was going around in circles. He took a left, kept walking, then took the next right.
He didn’t remember how long he had been searching for a way out of the maze, when he noticed something odd. His footsteps on the gravel path were… echoing, which was crazy.
Wake walked on. Stopped. Started walking again. The sound was definitely doubled. It wasn’t until he heard the low guttural voice that he realized what was really happening. He wasn’t alone in the maze. Someone was tracking him. You don’t sleep for a few days, you miss the clues, Wake, he told himself. He switched the flashlight on, took out the pistol, and ran.
Beep beep beep! It sounded like Barry was just a few rows over.
Wake took a right, a right, tripped over a broken ceramic birdbath, and sprawled face-down in the gravel, the flashlight going out as it skidded away from him.
“You can have the TV on, if you don’t fight about the channels!” The voice came from the other side of the hedge, a manic voice, the words oddly inflected.
Wake quietly fumbled around for the flashlight, the gravel was noisy under his fingers.
“You get two pills in the morning and then you’ll be nice and calm all day long.” The voice was moving the same direction that Wake was going, but the Taken had made a mistake. That row led to a dead end. Wake had time to get out.
Eager now, Wake scuttled forward on his hands and knees, sweeping around for the flashlight.
“What are you doing out of bed? Doctor Hartman will be so disappointed!”
That voice… it shouldn’t be where it was. Wake’s hand closed over the flashlight, and he shined it upwards, saw a man covered in shadows scuttling atop the hedges.
The man launched himself off the hedges, landed heavily in front of Wake. “Three pills in the evening, and you’ll sleep like a baby.”
There was something in his hand.
Wake turned the flashlight on the man, saw the shadows smolder before the light went out. Time enough for him to see that it was Birch, had been Birch, anyway, and he was holding a pair of hedge clippers. Wake beat the flashlight against the palm of his hand, as the Taken advanced, the clippers going snip, snip, snip.
“Stop struggling!” Snip, snip, snip. “We’re all friends here. This is just part of the therapy.” Snip, snip, snip.
Wake smacked the flashlight against his hand harder and harder, trying to get it to work.
Snip, snip, snip, closer now, as Birch crunched across the gravel.
Wake whacked the flashlight and the light blazed. Blinking, he shined it directly in Birch’s face, the Taken close enough to touch.
It winced, the shadows sliding away, falling away, shimmering in the light. Wake kept the flashlight on the Taken as he shot it in the face. Shot it again and again, until it dissolved like dust motes sparkling, and Wake remembered the dust he had seen this morning, waking up with Hartman standing over him. He wondered where Hartman was now. Wondered if he was a Taken now too.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeep!
The sound shook Wake out of his reverie, started him moving again. He heard someone behind him again. No… more than one. He skidded around a turn, digging in, sprinted down the right-hand path.
Beep beep beep.
Wake could hear voices of the other Taken behind him, others lost in the maze, hopping hedges. He burst out of the row, saw the exit and Barry in the parking lot, waving to him from the car.
Beeeeeeeeep.
Wake almost tore off the door on the passenger’s side in his haste to get inside.
He sat there panting, unable to catch his breath as Barry drove away. Feeling an itch at the back of his neck, Wake suddenly turned around.
A Taken stood just inside the maze, watching the car, watching Wake, the creature covered so thickly with darkness that whoever he had been was unrecognizable now.
Wake glanced in the rearview mirror as Barry drove out of the parking lot. The Taken still stood there, as though he had all the time in the world.
When Thomas Zane fell for Barbara Jagger, it happened fast. She was young, vibrant and beautiful, full of life. He had never been a very happy man, and without any seeming effort she had changed all that. Zane felt good for the first time in his life. Everything she did was another piece of a jigsaw puzzle he hadn’t even known he’d been mis
sing. And best of all, she made the words flow, strong and sharp. She was his muse.
CHAPTER 18
THE STORM BEAT against the windshield, the wipers of Barry’s rental car barely able to keep up with the pelting rain. Trees loomed on both sides of the narrow road, the headlights boring a tunnel of light through the darkness.
“Al, you sure you don’t want me to drive toward the nearest Leaving Bright Falls, Come Back Soon! sign?”
“You really want to leave?” said Wake.
Barry shook his head. He looked tiny in the red parka that he had put back on. “Not a chance,” he admitted. “Ever since I got here, I’ve spent half my time so scared I want to piss myself, and the rest of the time I’ve never felt more alive.”
“Welcome to my nightmare,” said Wake, listening to one of Hartman’s tapes through an earpiece. He held up the microcassette player, switched it to speaker.
Now, Mrs. Wake, can you tell me about Alan’s problems? It was Hartman’s voice, dripping with false concern.
He’s more and more out of control, doctor, said Alice. The parties, the late nights, and he’s so angry all the time—
Wake switched off the speaker. “This is how Mott fooled me in the sheriff’s station. I wasn’t listening to Alice on the phone; Hartman cut up her conversation with him and Mott played it back to me. They never had her.”
The storm whipped the trees around them, sent leaves across the road, dancing in the headlights. Barry cursed softly, wiped condensation off the inside of the windshield.
Wake waved the manuscript at him. “These new pages, they connect a lot of the dots, the random details. Listen to this,” he said, holding up a page.
In spite of its human mask, to describe the Dark Presence as intelligent would have implied human qualities on something decidedly inhuman. Nonetheless, it found the one spot in the diner that was dark enough. Some light spilled into the corridor, ravaging it, but it took the pain, horrible as it was. The writer would soon fix that. He would be coming to the one place where it still had power.
“Get it?” said Wake. “Alice and I were supposed to rent the cabin from Stucky, but the woman in black met me at the diner instead. She gave me the key to the Bird Leg Cabin instead. A cabin that doesn’t even exist anymore. That’s the one place the darkness still has power. It’s like I said, Hartman and Mott never had Alice, but the darkness… the darkness does.”
“Sure, I get it.” Barry watched Wake out of the corner of his eyes. “Tell me again, who’s the woman in black? I thought that was the woman who betrayed John Dillinger to the cops.”
“That was the lady in red,” said Wake. “Are you messing with me? Because I’m not in the mood, Barry.”
“Relax, Al, I’m just trying to take the edge off. This hasn’t been a stroll in Central Park for me either.”
“I know.” Wake shrugged. “The woman in the black veil didn’t just send Alice and me to the wrong cabin. She was the one I saw standing over me in Rose’s trailer… the same one who snatched Mott at Cauldron Lake. Her name is Barbara Jagger.”
“Barbara who?”
“Thomas Zane, the writer… Barbara Jagger was the woman he loved,” said Wake.
“I remember now,” said Barry. “The locals told me about her. They said she drowned in Cauldron Lake forty years ago, just before the island sank.”
Wake nodded. “She did… but she’s back now. Sort of.” He pulled out one of the mud-smeared pages, started reading.
For decades, the darkness that wore Barbara Jagger’s skin slept fitfully in the dark place that was its home and prison. Hungry and in pain, it dreamed of its brief nights of glory when the poet’s writing had called it from the depths. The two rock stars had momentarily stirred it from the deep sleep again, but when it sensed the writer on the ferry, the darkness opened its eyes.
“That’s some good stuff,” said Barry. “There’s a book in there somewhere. Departure though, I’m not sure about that title. Maybe… The Dark Place. How about that?”
“You’re missing the point,” said Wake, exasperated. “The darkness wore Barbara Jagger’s skin. It’s not really her. It’s the way the Dark Presence interacts with our world. The poet who had called it up before… I think that’s Thomas Zane, and the two rock stars…” Wake had to force himself to talk slowly. “The two rock stars, that’s got to be the Anderson brothers, the heavy metal rockers that Hartman kept at the lodge—”
“You said they were nuts, Al.”
“Can you blame them?” said Wake. “If you had been touched by the Dark Presence, wouldn’t you be nuts afterwards?”
Lightning flashed behind them.
“Look, the pages are more than a book,” insisted Wake. “They’re… real. They’re actually happening. Alice was never kidnapped. She’s trapped in the darkness at the bottom of the lake, but she’s not dead.” He pulled out another page.
Alice had screamed until she had no voice left to scream. Around her, the darkness was alive. It was cold and wet and malevolent and without end. She was a prisoner, trapped in the dark place.
Barry glanced over at him, then back at the road. The thunder from the lightning flash caught up with them, shaking the car.
The terror would have burned her mind out, read Wake, his voice too loud, but one thing made her hang on: she could sense Alan in the dark. She could hear him. She could see the words he was writing as flickering shadows. He sensed her too. He was trying to work his way to her. He looked up at Barry. “I can bring Alice back, I can find her.”
Barry lightly tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel. “Al… I love you, buddy, you know that, and nobody respects your work more than me, but do you ever think, maybe… you give yourself too much credit?”
“It’s all about the work,” said Wake, “it always has been.” He leaned closer, as though the surrounding darkness might overhear them. “There’s something special about this place. The lake does something to the works of art created here. It makes them come true, but there’s a catch: whatever this Dark Presence is, it twists the work to its own malignant purposes. That’s why Hartman specialized in treating creative types—he wanted them to come here so he could control them, so he had the power.”
“That didn’t work out so well for him, did it?” said Barry. “The sounds that poor bastard made on the other side of his office door…” He shuddered.
“Save your pity,” said Wake. “Hartman and Mott made me waste time thinking they had Alice. And he’s been using everyone at that clinic for years. They got what they deserved.”
“He fished you out of the lake when the darkness was pulling you under,” said Barry. “He bragged to me about it, trying to make me think he was a hero or something.”
“Hartman saved me because he thought he could use me,” said Wake. “He knew a lot about the Dark Presence, but he didn’t understand how strong the darkness was, how greedy.” He felt his face flush, his skin burning. “The darkness… it’s using my manuscript to take over everything, people, things, the lodge itself. I just read it to you, Barry. The darkness used Thomas Zane. It used the Anderson brothers. Now it’s using me. The Andersons tried to tell me, but with all the drugs Hartman pumped into them, they were too far gone to say it clearly. But they wrote it down. They said they left me a message at their farm. Odin told me at the lodge. We… we just need to go there and find it.”
“When did the Andersons get a chance to go to the farm and leave you a message?” said Barry.
“Hartman gave them almost free rein,” said Wake. “They were by themselves in the diner when Alice and I first came to town. They didn’t have anything that Hartman wanted; the Dark Presence had squeezed them dry years earlier.”
“Just give me directions,” sighed Barry. “Always wanted to go to a farm. See where bacon and eggs come from.”
“You still think I’m crazy?” said Wake.
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” said Barry, “but then I’m going along for the ride, so I guess that mak
es me crazy too.”
“Oh, yeah. Certifiable.”
The headlights caught something in the middle of their lane, an unrecognizable smear of hair and blood on the blacktop. Barry veered over to avoid it, his jaw tightening. “I just want to state for the record, that you owe me big time for this.”
“The record?” teased Wake. “Is this a legal proceeding? Should I have an attorney present?”
“I’m just saying that my fifteen percent doesn’t cover this kind of thing,” said Barry, trying to hide a smile. “When this is over, you’re going to buy me a tanning bed, and I’m gonna turn it up to Supernova and live inside it. No more Dark Presence. No more Taken. It’s going to be high noon in Barry’s world 24/7.”
“You’ve got a deal.” Wake hesitated. “Thanks, Barry. Thanks for sticking with me.”
“Just tell Alice what a good guy I am when we find her, okay? Maybe she won’t get that look on her face when I show up at the apartment.”
“Thanks for the when, not the if,” said Wake.
“Don’t go all Oprah on me,” said Barry. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“I know,” said Wake.
“I was kidding,” said Barry. “Don’t go beating up on yourself.”
“I don’t have to,” said Wake. “It’s on tape.” He held up the microcassette player.
Alan’s more out of control all the time, doctor, said Alice. The parties, he’s so angry all the time— Wake fast-forwarded the tape. Alan doesn’t really sleep, and the work… well, he’s not writing, at all. He sits there for hours and just gets more and more frustrated. He fast-forwarded it again. You need to be careful with him, doctor. Alan’s not just going to listen to you and cooperate. He’s the most stubborn man I’ve ever met. Wake stopped the tape.
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