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“Alan, what we talk about, what we understand … it’s all up to you. Doesn’t matter what I know. Matters what you believe.”

Alan fell silent. He hated Seth.

“Alan, you gotta get it together. You have to stop this thing. You think you’re the first guy this ever happened to? You’re not.”

Alan kept hearing Bart in his mind. Saw his struggling form, hammered against the entry wall, yelping helplessly. Saw his father beaten unconscious. Wanda, bleeding between the legs, thrust back into another rape trauma.

“And you have to do it alone.”

“Then, I’ll go somewhere where this prick will never find me.”

“It’s
you.
Where you gonna go?”

“Then, I’m dead. My own creation is more powerful than I am.”

“You’ve let it get too big. Part of you is stronger than another part … but part of you is smarter.”

“… so, what do I do? Challenge it to a goddamn debate?”

“Kill the character.”

Alan was gripping his forehead. Becoming furious.
“How
, Seth? I tried to write Barek as a nicer character and I told you, that thing raped my stepmother …” He coughed; empty pain. “… tried to kill my father to force me to stay on the show. Killed my dog. It’s insane!”

“It wants to live. It’s protecting its life. That’s all it was ever doing.” A touch of irony. “You’d do the same thing.” Anchored calm. “If this was a script, know what the conflict would be?”

Bitterness. “… man versus Nielsen ratings?”

“How about two people who both want control of the same life.”

“… how does it end?”

“Cancellation.”

As Alan listened, Seth began to describe the murder. How Alan should do it; in exact, minute detail. Alan memorized it all, finally asked Seth if he would help; he was too weak to fight alone.

“Nothing I can do. I’ve done my work.” A last suggestion. “Alan … keep a good thought.”

Seth hung up.

Alan tried to get some rest, as Seth had suggested; he would need strength to fight and kill the Creature. But he couldn’t close his eyes and after half an hour, called Seth back. An old woman answered. When Alan asked for Seth, there was dead silence.

“Is this a joke?” she said.

Alan didn’t understand; told her he’d just spoken with Seth. She began to anger and Alan couldn’t understand what she was saying, words muffled. She finally blurted out hurt words. “Seth is dead!” She fell silent. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Alan didn’t move. Spoke slowly. “But I spoke with him … I met him. He visited me … to help me.”

“He had a heart attack!”

“When did he have a heart attack? What time?”

“Time?” she repeated irritably. “I can’t remember that far back. It’s been fifteen years …” She hung up and Alan stared at the phone.

His blood ran cold. He instantly realized he’d created the man he’d spoken with, just as he’d created the Creature. He’d needed Seth so badly, he’d taken everything he knew about him, from the book he’d read, and brought him into material form.

He now understood why the first meeting with Seth had been so vague, so infuriating. At that point, Alan’s own understanding of what Seth had written about was equally vague. From that talk had come only instincts; mostly Alan’s. Once he began to truly understand what Seth had been writing about, once the truth solidified, the conversations changed. Seth sounded
more specific; exact. It was Alan’s mind accepting; comprehending.

Everything was a circle. Seth had said thoughts were everything. So had Eddy. Alan finally understood.

It was time.

T
he black-and-white exited the studio and jammed down the Hollywood Freeway with the Creature in back.

They had subdued it with force after it fought both officers. It screamed, telling them it wasn’t trespassing, no matter what anyone had said. It said Alan had given it permission to live on the set. They said he had a problem since Alan was the one who’d called.

“You can call your attorney when we get you to the station.”

The Creature said nothing. It stared out the window, watching L.A. writhe as the squad car exited on Silver Lake. Watching human wreckage, loitering in jungle faces. Watching ruin and despair. Streets infected by poison monsters; pimping death. The things it despised. The things it wanted to kill.

It grabbed metal mesh, covering window, furious, staring out. It could do nothing to fight the horror-squalor and felt sick inside. As the car sledded to a red light, the Creature began throwing up, though there was nothing inside. The two officers turned and saw a hunched body, collapsed on the floor, making noises.

“… he’s bullshitting,” said the taller one.

The shorter one stared. “I don’t know.”

“Hey, man, what’s the matter with you?”

The Creature looked up, looking near death.

“… please help me.”

A
lan was stopped at the studio gate at two-thirteen in the morning.

The Aston rumbled and the guard peered closer, grasping his clipboard. Alan was in some unbalanced trance; lost in exhaustion, saying he was there to do rewrite work on his series. He tried not to look directly at the guard who froze a statue face, looking curiously.

Alan knew the man could see the eerie snow that fell inside him and smiled thinly, saying he was just coming down with something.

The sky dripped water, though it was almost eighty-five out; a muggy storm steaming L.A. alive. The Aston was waved through and howled through the dead lot, headlights caroming off dream city.

It passed Hitchcock’s former office and did a hairpin where the Universal Tour Trams stopped to empty tourists
into the funny makeup show. To either side, soundstages rose up like canyon walls. Huge promo art was painted on the side of each, advertising the latest movies and series the studio had going. Enormous actors’ faces grinned, bloated and frightening.

Alan’s production building was a quarter mile ahead; the suite of decorated offices financed by the incredible success of “The Mercenary”; a mosque built on decimal point madness. His body felt starved; empty.

He skidded in front of the WHITE ENTERTAINMENT building and killed the headlights as drizzle fell, razor thin. He sat in silence, feeling bleak and clammy. He tilted the mirror down, looked at his milky face. Bedlam pain swirled in his mind. Should he turn back? He knew he didn’t even have the energy or strength to defend himself.

It’s why he’d brought the gun.

He pulled it from his inside jacket pocket and decided he had to go through with this. Everything else had failed; been pointless. It was painfully obvious to him, now. Trying to change the show. Get it cancelled. All useless.

It was time to fight; blood with blood.

Alan knew the Creature had the overwhelming amount of the vitality they both shared and he was at a terrifying disadvantage. Freud had talked about it; the distribution of essential energy. What the id and superego shared. What they should both be drawing from equally. In Alan’s world, all that was gone. Inside out. He felt the Möbius imbalance hollowing him out.

He got out of the car, moved heavily through humid
rain, toward the three-story soundstage door. His shoes were drenched by puddles and driving rain stabbed his skin. He pulled open the heavy door and entered, leaning for a moment in the entrance, head spinning.

Inside, air hung stale; icy. The silent soundstage was dark, looming. Every standing set used on “The Mercenary” stood, waiting for lights and cameras and reasons. It was all there.

Everything Alan had created.

Barek’s dingy apartment. General Garris’s office. The hellhole cell Barek flashed back to; his POW days of torture and captivity. The room where he was strapped naked to a steel chair and electrically shocked, feet in buckets of water. The nightmare chamber that forged his stoic obsessions.

Beside it, oblivious to the proximity, was the bedroom Barek had had as a boy, growing up in Sacramento. Its baseball pennants and hot-rod posters watched over the room with haunting innocence. Directly beside the room were the cutaways of Barek’s helicopter and cargo plane, gray process screen behind them, waiting to receive images of sky.

It was all there; the character’s whole life, in idealized, symbolic fragments.

The makeup tables and mirrors sat motionless, ready to bring warpaint. Wardrobe racks hung with bloodied clothing; a murderer’s closet. Crates of gutted weapons, squatted uselessly, ready to create artificial death, fueled by blanks and dubbed sound. It was a vast crypt of illusion and lie. The places Barek had been; come from.

The place the Creature now lived. Where the police
had picked him up, after Alan called. Taken the Creature to jail. Away from here, from where it could stop Alan from doing what he had to.

Alan hit a light switch and banks of overhead lights went on; heating elements in a huge oven. He touched the gun reflexively and moved through the sets, still half-looking for the Creature. For some sign it was there, in its fictive home. Even though he knew it was locked up in a cage by now.

As he walked, the folding chairs with all the names of the production crew stood, legs crossed. The one that read A. E. BAREK, with its script pouch hanging to the side, was the fanciest, done in tooled leather; a gift from Alan.

He moved through the sets, feeling sick, helpless; kicking over furniture and yanking aside drapes. He was growing weaker. He knew it was only a matter of time before he wasted to nothing and the Creature siphoned everything. If he let it, it would take every piece of his life. Thoughts. Emotions. Memories. Like some thieving, metaphysical appetite, he could feel it eating his cells; the things he was.

On the floor, beside the bed in Barek’s apartment, Alan found several porno magazines and an empty package of steak from Vons with the blood licked off. He moved to the other sets. Nothing.

On a table was a stack of Xeroxed scripts.

Scripts.

Alan’s unconscious world seeking form. His feelings and insides shoving aside everything to become substance. The terrible fantasies and horrific, amoral realities. Pieces of the inevitable whole. He was afraid to look,
afraid of what it all meant. Filled with revulsion for himself. For what he’d created; what he’d released. What he’d been unable to detect within.

He began to open cans of flammable gel used to stage contained fires and poured the thick liquid everywhere, walking with the open cans, as if chalking a playing field for some grisly sport. Fumes gathered and the gel darkened floors, walls, and furniture. Alan walked to the stacked scripts, began to ball up pages, and lit them with a lighter. He threw the crumpled plots and speeches, and watched them burst into flame as they connected with the gel.

The apartment drapes began to burn, spreading to the thinly built facade walls and doors that shriveled black as flames swallowed; moved on.

Alan watched unnerved, as the sets erupted. Suddenly, there was a deafening noise as a car crashed through the soundstage wall, shredding the mattresslike insulation. Lemon beams raced at him and he dove from its path.

He was on the ground, not moving. Clutching his gun for protection. The engine blew pillows of exhaust, then died. There was no sound. Only rain, striking puddles and metal outside and the sound of sets burning. Alan belly-crawled to the driver’s door, stood slowly. He sleeved rain from the windshield and jerked back.

Inside, dyed by pulsing dash lights, two cops slumped, throats cut, eyes plucked out; a sadist’s surgery. One uniform shirt had been ripped away in the back and a message carved into one officer’s skin; crude and deep.

A. E Rules

As Alan stared, a jungle knife speared his shoulder and a deep hunter’s scream filled the soundstage. He looked up and the Creature was dropping from a catwalk, two stories up. It landed on him, with bared teeth, as fire rampaged from set to set.

As they struggled, Alan aimed and fired at the Creature. But he missed, only grazing its cheek. It wiped the diagonal line of blood on its face, kept coming at him. Panicked, Alan fired over and over, blinded by fire and fear, emptying the gun without hitting the Creature. He managed to pull the guard’s bloody knife from his own back pocket and jammed it into the Creature’s ribs. The Creature screamed, stiffened.

Alan felt the pain in his own torso; a ghostly repetition. He dug the fat blade in deeper and again felt the agony in his own body. The Creature rolled to one side, in anguish, and Alan ran, hearing the Creature’s heavy, booted steps chasing.

As it passed the burning bedroom it dimly recalled having slept in as a boy, it stopped and looked on in traumatized horror. Pain racked its features and the Creature bellowed loss and torment, trying to stop the fire; unable to touch it. Recalling a childhood which never existed and had no detail, gouged by emotion it couldn’t fathom. Standing in a room it never experienced. Never knew.

Alan ran from the huge building that glowed orange death as the door opened. His side ached and the sensation of a piercing blade making him look down again to check but see nothing. He clutched the tender midsection, dragged through deep ponds of rain, and began to realize it was more complicated than he’d considered. More fundamental.

The sets weren’t the key.

They were only a component. A layer. Only what the Creature instinctively reasoned was home. With fire, Alan had rendered it homeless; ravaged its history for now. But it wasn’t the key. He ran through the storm and suddenly understood what he must do.

Burning the sets was only superficial. The original film negatives would be where essence hid; where genetic codes rooted primary definitions. The negatives weren’t simply an animate photo album. They were the record of a maturing fetus.

The sky was lowering and as he groaned, he suddenly felt in Viet Nam, rain clouds dense with contaminants, ground seized by blinding mist. He ran toward his production building and couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead; smothered in nothing.

His breathing went down into body corridors filled with injured flesh and he could almost hear the weightless footsteps of guerilla snipers, hiding near. He imagined trip wires, everywhere he stepped, that would release sharpened pungi sticks, on contact, crucifying his flesh.