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Things were different, this time through the spiral. Alan was making progress, remembering more than he had before. Soon, he would be free of the Dark Place again, hopefully forever. But first, he had to go through another iteration of all this, through half-remembered plans and echoes of other selves.
When he’d done this long ago, in one of his earliest attempts to write himself out, he’d tried his best to save the people in his story. He was pretty sure that was often the case, although he didn’t always succeed.
After everything Alan had done to Casey as a character, both in the Dark Place and in his novels, he figured he owed the guy a break. Even if Casey was just the barest sketch of a person, a loose collection of noir clichés, Alan didn’t want to hurt him.
So, Alan had taken different routes through the Dark Place, avoiding the places where he’d killed Casey in the last iteration of the spiral. Casey’s investigation had led Alan through the story towards freedom, after all. Not killing him again seemed the least Alan could do.
That had maybe been a bad decision, given that Casey had just stumbled into the bar of the Oceanview Hotel while Alan was trying to sneak through it.
Alan ducked into the back, the way he’d come this time, and held his breath. Casey was dripping wet with rain, swearing under his breath as he dragged out a bottle of whiskey from behind the counter.
The door swung open again. A cultist in a deer mask came through and sat down next to Casey at the bar. “Rough day, Mr. Casey?”
“Fuck off,” Casey spat. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
“Apparently not. But I guess that’s the thing about being a fictional character.” The cultist laughed, spreading his arms. “You can always be brought back to life.”
“Great. So we can just do it all over again, and the crowd goes wild.” Even from Alan’s hiding place, barely able to see them, the bitterness on Casey’s face was plain. “Or Wake goes wild, anyway. I was looking for that bastard, but I couldn’t find him.”
“There are better things you could do with your time.” The cultist—Ilmo, Alan thought his name might be Ilmo—leaned over to Casey. “Like kissing me, for instance.”
Casey snorted. “Not in that fucking deer mask, buddy.”
“Oh yeah.” With a laugh, Ilmo pulled off the deer mask and tossed it down on the bar. “I forget I’m wearing it, sometimes. It’s been part of my role for so long. Maybe someday, I can take it off for good.”
“Don’t get your hopes up.” Casey took another drink of whiskey straight from the bottle. “There are no happy endings in this city.”
Ilmo took the bottle from him, and took a drink too. “Maybe someday, there will be.”
Casey gave a bitter, grating laugh that sounded like it was one more drink from becoming a sob. Then, he grabbed Ilmo by the jacket, yanked him closer, and kissed him hard.
Alan retreated, head spinning. That wasn’t just a loose collection of noir clichés. That was a person—two people—who had been suffering because of Alan’s writing. Like too many others had suffered.
Casey had gone through this too, over and over. So had Ilmo. And unlike Alan, neither one of them had any control over their destinies, any way to shape the way the story unfolded. They’d been forced to play their roles, this whole time. The Detective, and the Cultist.
But somehow, they’d become more than that. They’d developed a relationship, apparently. A loose collection of noir clichés couldn’t do that.
Alan couldn’t apologize to them for what they’d been through in his stories. If he tried, Casey would probably shoot him in the face. But there was something else he could do.
This story was still being written, after all. And as Alan finished the final chapters, he would make sure that happy endings were now possible, even in this city.