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Alan (V.O.): It was all about me, this performance the Dark Place was putting on, but I had no control over it. I knew how utterly lost I was. The payphone was ringing again. The mystery caller was back at it. I had to find out more.
Unknown Caller: Alan Wake? Do you know who I am?
Alan: How the fuck could I?
Unknown Caller: Whoa! There’s that famous temper! Lucky thing I’m not a paparazzi!
Alan: You keep jerking me around, refusing to tell me who you are.
Unknown Caller: You remember? You—? Oh, fuck me! Alan, Alan, Alan, listen, listen! Tell me. How much do you remember? Did you visit Parliament Tower? Did you find anything there?
Alan: Yeah. Alice is in danger. Scratch is reaching out to her. And there’s another manuscript. Not “Initiation”. “Return”. I saw the title page. I don’t remember writing it.
Unknown Caller: “Return”? Oh man, this is what we are after. Scratch can’t have it. Our survival, the survival of the fucking cosmic everything, depends on this. Come to me. Oceanview Hotel. I left my room key for you, it’s right there on the payphone. Remember, the Dark Place works in loops and rituals. If the waves keep pushing you away, you just need to find another way in. We go with the flow of this ocean. Catch you soon, brother.
Alan (V.O.): The Oceanview Hotel. A suspicious invitation to a shady meeting. Right on the money for the hardboiled genre this whole city was built upon. The Oceanview Hotel. My destination. The story I was building was fragile, constantly under attack. There was no time to waste. The Dark Presence was only a step behind me.
Alan (V.O.): A loop that delivered me back to the street. What had the mystery caller said? “If the waves keep pushing you away, you just need to find another way in.” With only dream logic to lead me to the hotel, I looked to the neon signs for guidance.
Alan: Casey!
Casey: You’re the killer. The Cult leader. It’s in your eyes.
Alan: No! You’ve got the wrong man. It’s Scratch! There’s no time to lose.
Casey: You’re going nowhere.
Alan: Haaa.
Casey (V.O.): I was dead tired. I just wanted it to be over. It was all my fault. I’d had this dark place in my head for so long. Sometimes I’d forget the pain was there. Like it was the way you were supposed to feel. I was not in a dark place. I was the dark place, the source of it all, the vessel. Me and the writer, we were the same.
Alan (V.O.): The place kept pushing me under, getting into my head, poisoning me with darkness. I had to find a way to escape before it was too late. Too late again.
Unknown Voice: (humming)
Tim: Hey, Alan. How’s the memory doing?
Alan: Sorry, who are you? Kidding. Good to see you, Tim.
Tim: Ha ha. You had me going.
Alan: Cozy place you’ve got here.
Tim: You know, your disappearance from Bright Falls is still the only thing folks talk about. Well, that and Deerfest. Is this where you ended up back in 2010?
Alan: You know about that?
Tim: I am the sheriff of Bright Falls. Or I was.
Alan: Are you related to Sarah Breaker? She was the sheriff of Bright Falls back in 2010.
Tim: Yeah, she’s my cousin. I had a police sketch made of Door based on my dreams. I sent it around and Sarah recognized the face from an old case file from the eighties. I moved out there to look into it and became sheriff after she left to join the Feds.
Alan: So Deerfest is still a thing?
Tim: Oh yeah. It’s bigger than ever. I got zapped here right before it was about to happen.
Alan: Funny. Me too. What was in the case file about Door?
Tim: Not a lot of details in it. A local man named Warlin Door went missing near Cauldron Lake. Eyewitnesses claim he was struck by a bolt of lightning and just vanished. I never found any official records of a Warlin Door living in town, or anywhere. Another dead end.
Alan (V.O.): I could see the Oceanview Hotel. I was getting close. The lights affected where the door led to.
Alan (V.O.): I could use that shotgun.
Alan (V.O.): The room was empty except for the projector. More games. Was the film a message waiting to be played?
Zane: In this temple of shadow and mist there’s a window in the floor and a door in the ceiling. There is no knowing am I standing still or running or kneeling.
Alan: You’re the one who’s been calling me?
Zane: Indeed. I am Tom Zane. Welcome to the House of Zane!
Alan: Zane? The poet? The diver? You look like me. How the hell…?
Zane: Or maybe you look like me. You handsome devil. The diver was a beloved character I played in one of my films. I’m a filmmaker! A celebrated auteur!
Alan: I need answers. Why is “Return” so important? What—
Zane: Alan, you always get worked up like this. Come on, I’ll fix you a drink! You and me, Alan, we’re in this together. Two artists collaborating, remember? Crafting the keys to our escape. Your magnum opus, “Return”, and its companion piece, my film. Sharing our life-altering visions, a melding of higher minds… Dreaming up our transcendental work of art. Here, in this room.
Alan: I need the Clicker!
Alan: It’s “Return” because… We return.
Zane: And that is how the magic happened.
Alan: Enough of this bullshit. Alice is in danger. I need another murder site. To go further. Back to Parliament Tower. Scratch is—
Zane: Your wife is safe, back in the real New York, but Scratch is reaching for her through an Overlap. “Return” is the key to escaping the Dark Place. You need to get it before that freak does. There is a murder site here in the hotel. Let the waves of your writing carry you there. Ah!
Jesse: Hello?
Zane: They’re on to us. If anyone asks, you were never here.
Alan (V.O.): Thomas Zane had ended our talk in what felt like a paranoid fit. I had what I needed from him. There was another murder site in the hotel, to guide me further toward my escape. I had to write my way to it. An idea nagged at me. I could almost reach it.
Casey (V.O.): Whispers from the police radio kept me awake at night. The word through the ether: a murder in the backdrop of a play featuring a murder cult. How meta can you get, he said, looking knowingly at the camera. I could sense the Cult of the Word in this, and their leader, Mr. Scratch. Rumored to be Alan Wake, the writer who’d gone missing years before.
Alan (V.O.): The hotel was a perfect setting for a Casey story. I was on the right path. I would start at the entrance lobby. The entrance hall set the mood. Where everyone had come in: the victim, the murderer, the detective. An idea, clear as a vision, waited for me here.
Casey (V.O.): So you were the director of this play?
Ed (V.O.): Yeah, that’s me. Our performance of “The Cult” was cursed from the pre-show ritual on. “The Cult” is an immersive theatrical experience.
Casey (V.O.): Uh-huh. You’re gonna have to walk me through what that means.
Ed (V.O.): Immersive theater. A play where the audience can participate, spread across this hotel. “The Cult” is a legend. The only written copy of the manuscript lost, the play is passed on as oral tradition between theater companies. Each company only performs it once. The play was said to have special power. We were like kids playing with a Ouija board. But when you call for the devil, he will come.
Alan (V.O.): “The pre-show ritual”. That’s it. Set it up. Start from the beginning. My writing was affecting reality. Layers upon layers. A play about a murder cult infiltrated by a real murder cult. The ballroom was where the pre-show ritual was held.
Alan (V.O.): The room at the end of the corridor was closed off. It felt significant. Something terrible would happen there. The troupe were busy building their own wicker man, where they themselves would be sacrificed.
Alan (V.O.): The prop room had been changed from room 104 to room 225.
Alan (V.O.): This is where they gathered before the play. This is where it began. Another vision, another idea.
Cultists (V.O.): This is the ritual to lead you on.
Casey (V.O.): Why set up a play in a hotel? Why in this hotel?
Ed (V.O.): ‘Cuz the rent is cheap. Nah, the Oceanview was perfect for this. It’s said to be haunted. Dark stories about murder, death, suicide. Supposedly an actual cult once performed an unspeakable ritual to summon… something in the ballroom. Did we summon the same thing, tapped into something horrifying? It seemed like it was part of the play, but it wasn’t. Does that sound crazy?
Casey (V.O.): You don’t want to ask me about crazy, kid.
Alan (V.O.): A haunted hotel. Yes. It’s a trope for a reason.
Unknown Voice: (humming)
Alan: Hey, Tim. New map, huh?
Tim: Yup. I’ve never been to New York, but I can tell you this ain’t it.
Alan: I heard you humming again.
Tim: Yeah, I can’t get this song out of my head. A real earworm. I hear it in my dreams.
Alan: I know that song you keep humming. It’s the theme from Night Springs.
Tim: That old sci-fi show?
Alan: Sci-fi horror anthology. I used to write for it, a long time ago.
Tim: It sounds a bit nuts, but I think the song’s connected to Door. Or it’s my subconscious telling me this is all pretty out there.
Alan (V.O.): The ballroom would be the stage of a key scene in the play. The scene here had changed. The cult in the play was called the Cult of the Tree. With their deer masks, they were the backwoods echo of the Cult of the Word’s urban horror. It’s getting real, all right. I recognized my Writer’s Room on the stage.
Casey (V.O.): Nice set you got here. What was the scene in this room?
Ed (V.O.): This is what we called the Writer’s Room. In the play it’s where the Devil rewrites reality while God is asleep. The Devil was our star role. I got a big-time celebrity to play him. And he was method acting the role to perfection. He never broke character, always wore the cult mask. His name was scratched out on the posters.
Casey (V.O.): And who was this mystery celebrity? Let me guess, Alan Wake?
Ed (V.O.): I wish I could tell you, but turns out there were masks upon masks. Whoever he really was, shit got weird when he was around. Some of the crew joked that we’d actually hired the devil to play himself.
Casey (V.O.): Mr. Scratch as the devil. He was born to play the role.
Alan (V.O.): I had to agree with Casey on that. This thread would create something terrible in the scene, but it’s what the story needed. This is not my writing. It’s Scratch, mocking me.
Alan (V.O.): This was not the ritual murder site I was looking for. This had just been an appetizer before the main course.
Alan (V.O.): The story was affecting the scene. This was dark, but the story had to be dark. The devil’s path up the staircase was draped in blood. The shadows faded back into darkness. I felt the presence of a new idea here.
Casey (V.O.): Mr. Scratch, if that’s who the actor of the Devil was, had stayed in the hotel. Asking around at reception got me a room number: 666. He had requested that room specifically. The devil had a sense of humor, or he really didn’t. It was funny either way. According to the director, the actor hadn’t mingled with the rest of the cast. He had only come out for the play, always in character.
Alan (V.O.): Scratch had been here. I could sense his presence lingering in the room. I was about to have another killer idea.
Casey (V.O.): Okay. Let’s talk about the murder victim, the lady who was killed in the climax of the play.
Ed (V.O.): The leading lady. It was an honor to get to work with her. A “grand dame”, for sure. She went back a long time. Kept insisting she had seen the long-lost, original script of the play. She’d been with its mysterious writer, his muse. That was her role in the play, the Muse.
Casey (V.O.): She was staying in room 108? Where the murder happened?
Ed (V.O.): The set of the final scene, right. The Devil comes, an unstoppable force, crashing through the hotel, through each scene, executed with devastating mastery, all leading up to him meeting his Muse. Turns out he knew her. He had only joined the play to get to her.
Casey (V.O.): To murder her.
Alan: Not you again! Shit! Get away! Get the fuck away from me!
Alan (V.O.): I had to reach the light ahead. To hide from the Dark Presence.
Alan: Made it. I made it. Ha!
Alan (V.O.): The Dark Presence had come for me, drawn to the story I was writing as it grew darker. The Muse was the murder victim. The final scene took place in room 108. The scene changed with the story.
NYPD Officer 1 (V.O.): I’ve had enough of that freaking gumshoe dick asking too many freaking questions, not letting us proper police take care of it.
NYPD Officer 2 (V.O.): This is our chance to make the powers-that-be happy. We’ll be set for life, part of the inner circle.
NYPD Officer 3 (V.O.): Amen to that, partner. I like it. And so will the fraternity, the club, the Word, our dear friends with many names.
NYPD Officer 4 (V.O.): The way I see it, it was a lone nutjob, a junkie out of his mind on some fancy new designer drug.
NYPD Officer 2 (V.O.): Open and shut case. All we got to do now is to dump the evidence from room 108 in the usual place in the alley.
Alan (V.O.): Soon, what had happened here would be just another urban legend. No one would know the truth. Except for the Cult. And Casey. The dirty cops would make sure none of this could be traced back to their diabolical masters hiding in the dark. This was dark, but the story had to be dark.
Alan (V.O.): The devil walked through the hotel, dragging the whole place to hell with him.
Alan (V.O.): This was the murder site. There was a record at the bottom of the bathtub, beneath the body. Somehow it was important. Another step. Somehow I was closer to home. Closer than ever before.
Alan: It’s you again. The FBI agent. Saga Anderson. I’m closer now. I can feel it. You helped me get closer to escaping.
Saga: Wake… still trapped?… The Clicker. We can…
Alan: You know about the Clicker? It can help us. I destroyed the Dark Presence with it last time. You can help. You can find it. You must find it!
Saga: … I can get it to you… I have to understand. Did you write… the story?
Alan: Alice is in danger. I have to stop Scratch. I have to find “Return”. I need to get back to my apartment. I am writing a story to get through. “Initiation”. It’s the only way.
Saga: … the story! … you can do that… You can… write…
Alan (V.O.): It lasted only for a moment. Like two planets passing in orbit. Saga Anderson was helping me, helping me go deeper, closer to escape, somehow. I had to trust her. Parliament Tower. I had to get back to my apartment, my study. I had to find the manuscript of Return.