Steven Spielberg patted down his pockets for the millionth time since the drive from Merrick Farm to the house the film was using to depict Ray Ferrier's ex-wife's home on the other side of Howell Township.

"It's gone," he thought bitterly, struggling to ascertain just when he laid the thing down and where - something he rarely did since he valued thought of the medallion as one of the chief treasures of his life.

A small Jewish group had given him the medallion in thanks for his making of Schindler's List, and he had always seen it as a symbol of his success, and was a little superstitious about it, when he generally avoided such things as luck.

This was not the first time Spielberg had felt odd about this shoot. Something seemed to stir in the back of his mind from the first day he shot the scenes in Newark. This was not something he could put a finger on, but felt growing stronger and stronger until he half expected real aliens to leap out from the cracks in the sidewalk.

"This is all crazy," he told himself at one point. "The next thing you know I'll be making mountains out of mashed potatoes and shoving trash cans through my kitchen window."

The feeling got worse in Bayonne where he kept glancing up at the metal supports of the Bayonne Bridge seeking signs of dragons or gremlins.

Admittedly, Spielberg was nervous about this movie. Critics had not been kind to him despite his recent successes with films like Saving Private Ryan. And with his partnership with Paramount, he needed to make a film that the public was going to buy, no questions asked - if not as huge a hit as Jaws was then something new.

Spielberg had eyed War of the Worlds for years, and was more than a little put off by the fact that Independence Day got to it first.

He was also nervous about how much of this shoot had to take place in the public eye. He always admired Orson Wells' ability to keep the secrets of his set. But here in Bayonne there was a snooping local reporter delving out all of his secrets, and to call attention to the face was to risk making the problem worse.

"Perhaps I'm paranoid in believing I can't trust my own staff," he thought.

Spielberg had come a long way from his roots when he played with a camera for fun. During his early days as a successful movie maker, he made films he wanted often against the prevailing wisdom of the industry. He was one of the Young Turks along with friends like George Lucas determined to turn the movie industry on its head.

Yet for some reason, he felt as if the movie world turned him on his head, and he now found himself on a treadmill forcing himself to make movie after movie, searching for a repeat of that old feeling and that old sense of success. Yet with each new film, he seemed to move farther away from where he wanted, not closer, and he still couldn't figure out why.

With War of the Worlds, he hoped for a quick resolution, but this evaporated when he found that his star, Tom Cruise, had fallen in love, and might launch into a song and dance number at any moment, making what was supposed to be a horror movie into a romantic comedy.

Now, he found that he lost the medallion and must go back to the Merrick Farm site to find it.

He blamed Cruise. The actor has been so flighty off camera that Spielberg was on constant edge about it exploding on camera as well.

"Tom's not thinking straight, and it has infected me," Spielberg thought. "I keep forgetting things. I'm even imaging things. And worse, I've become distrustful of a wonderful and dedicated staff."

Although he knew he should send the crew back to search it out, he no longer completely trusted them, fearing that increased access to final filming site might expose more of his plans to the public.

"And one of them will likely pocket the medallion and turn it over to that snoopy reporter from Bayonne," Spielberg thought.

Even then, Spielberg felt a growing anxiety about returning to what most of his staff called "The Red Weed Site." There was something about all the red weed spread out across the landscape that gave even him the creeps - as if he had touched upon some truth in shaping those scenes that made his shadowy shapes from Newark and Bayonne seem more real.

Was there something H.G. Wells had delved up in his depiction that Spielberg should have been wary of?

Cruise, to his credit, noticed how upset Spielberg was and came over to ask what was wrong.

Spielberg told him about the medallion and how much it meant, which immediately prompted Cruise to volunteer to help go back and find it.

"I might be in love, but I'm still loyal," Cruise said, "unless you think I'm an alien or that snoopy Bayonne reporter in disguise."

"Isn't the Howell Township police chief supposed to escort you back to the helicopter?" Spielberg asked.

"Sure," Cruise said. "But he can wait here until we get back. We'll drive over with your security guy. I mean, unless you don't trust him either and then I can drive."

"Let you drive? After all I've seen of your talents behind the wheel in Bayonne? We'll take my guy. I can trust him and I know he can drive without hitting a tree."

"I never hit a tree I liked," Cruise quipped.

The bit of humor lifted Spielberg's spirits and little and made it a little easier to take the ride back to Merrick Farm to face woods filled with sprawling red weed prop. During the ride he told himself he should not let his imagination get out of hand.

Of course, part of the problem were the powerful images he played with in this film, images that recalled 9/11 and The Holocaust in ways few films had previously, and all this has shaped a strange reality in him, out of which imaginary monsters began to emerge. He has always been too close to his films, always investing too much of himself into them.

He was also living in a bad time when the shadow of a new oppression seemed to be emerging, an oppression he hoped his film could warn the public about.

Spielberg also knew that he was under a lot of strain.

These deals with Hollywood's mainstream studios have put a crimp in his style. Everything is a matter of keeping to budget and to narrow time constraints, not about the creative process of making movies.

Paramount has been particularly painful in hiss regard, pushing him to have his film ready by the beginning of the summer so as to maximize the profits. They also wanted to keep him from making the most expensive movie since The Lord of the Rings.

Was it any wonder that his is imagining evil spirits?

And then, of course, there was that snoopy reporter from Bayonne, who floats through his sets like a ghost, an unstoppable force that even the best security money can buy can't stop. Worse still, the reporter was so intuitive he seemed to look right inside Spielberg's head.

"He knows things he shouldn't know as if he's read the script," Spielberg thought. "No, worse than that, he knows things that aren't even in the script - things that I'm still thinking about."

One consolation to Spielberg was the fact that he would not likely have to remain on the Red Weed set long.

Pinching his eyes closed, he could almost track his actions while they shot earlier in the day, and seemed to recall pausing near an old shack to munch on some cookies between shoots. Cruise was yapping on about his new found love in a way that made Spielberg turn off his hearing and gauging from the loss of the medallion, he must have shut down some of his common sense as well.

"But I think the medallion is on the banister near the door," he thought.

But the moment the large black Escalade pulled up to the red weed site, the ill feeling returned, with such potency, he felt as if someone had punched him in the chest.

"Some dark force has been called to life by this ritual," he thought.

He, Wells and the magic of movie making had managed by accident to put together the necessary ingredients for some potent spell.

But what on earth had they called up? Or was it of the earth at all?

Even the love-sick Cruise seemed to notice, his nearly constant yammering falling silent as the vehicle came to a half. He stared out at the red weed as if he never saw it before, even though only a few hours earlier, he had acted out scenes with his co-star here.

"You know this place really is haunting," Cruise mumbled in perhaps the biggest understatement of his career.

Cruise's normally cheerful eyes grew red with the reflection and somewhere deep in his consciousness the first stirring of fear began, denting his puppy love as if Cruise suddenly saw some vision that neither he or Spielberg would escape the tangled webs of red weed they created.

Then, Spielberg wondered if leaving the medallion here had been an accident at all. Or was it the response to some subconscious command that would later call him back to this place.

Was there some deeper connection between him and the dark forced that swirled around this place as in his movie?

Was the making of War of the Worlds even his idea, since he had never made such an obvious remake of a movie before?

Then, the most primitive part of his brain - that part deeply rooted in human evolution - screamed for him to run.

At that exact moment, the engine died, leaving the black SUV to roll to a halt a few yards from where the red weed began. The smoke from the earlier shoot still lingered in the woods. But nothing else seemed to move - not even a breeze.

"What happened, Bill?" Spielberg asked his driver.

"I don't know, Mr. Spielberg," the driver said. "One minute she was humming along, the next minute she's dead. I had her checked before we started shooting to make sure nothing like this happened. But it did anyway."

"It's the cellinoid," Cruise said.

"Shut up, Tom," Spielberg said, annoyed at the humor now. "This isn't Bayonne, and this isn't the script. Bill, maybe you should call back to the house and get someone from the crew out here to help us."

Bill pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open.

"The phone's dead, too, Mr. Spielberg," Bill said.

"It's the cellinoid," Cruise said.

"Tom, please!" Spielberg growled, sounding a little too shrill.

The idea of being stranded around all that red weed had started a panic in Spielberg and he could not explain it.

"Check your watch, Bill," Spielberg said.

Bill did, then shook his head. "That's dead, too."

"Shit!" Spielberg ejaculated, his single word filling the car like a shot.

"It's the cellinoid," Cruise said again.

"Tom Cruise! If you say cellinoid one more time, I'll have Bill take it out of the engine compartment and hit you in the head with it. Let me think in peace."

"I was trying to be helpful," the hurt Cruise said.

"Well, be helpful by being silent," Spielberg said.

"Anything you say, you're the director," Cruise snapped and then fell into a moody silence.

Ignoring this, Spielberg sighed. "Whatever the reason for all this, we can't just sit here like this. One of us is going to have to hike back to the road and find a telephone - and now, it can't be you, Tom. In your frame of mind, you'll prance through the woods where some hunter will mistake you for an unstable deer and shoot you. And I'm not going to explain to Paramount, your sister or worse you're future wife why I let you loose when I knew better. And I certainly know better than to leave you alone here, so that means Bill will have to do."

"I get your pardon, Mr. Spielberg, but I don't like the idea of leaving either of you two here while I'm gone."

"Would you rather sit here and baby sit Tom while I walk."

"No, that wouldn't do either."

"So there you have it, either you go or nobody does. Frankly, I think we're as safe here as we'd be anywhere since no one in their right mind would wander out into this neck of the woods - unless it's that snooping reporter from Bayonne, and in that case, I would encourage the local hunters to shoot."

Bill sighed, got out, looked back once before he slammed the door, and then headed back the way they had come, his footsteps crunching the dead leaves.

Spielberg felt a bit relieved.

"At lease now someone will know where we are and come to get us," he thought.

Spielberg hated feeling helpless. That was half the reason he fought the studio system for son long. He liked the idea of controlling his own destiny, in shaping his own future, in putting his own vision on the screen. Perhaps he might even get back to that someday.

Mercifully, Cruise remained quite, emitting no more chatter about his future wife and how much he was in love. That stuff was all right for talk shows like Oprah, but not very good conversation for two men trapped in a disabled car.

But Cruise seemed overly intent in his stare, studying the sprawl of red weed Spielberg had ordered placed for those special shots late in the film, red weed special effects people would later bring to life in that magic way they had other such elements in other Spielberg films. These limp strands would take on a life of their own, turning into slithering, snake-like tentacles that would help make War of the Worlds into the summer blockbuster Paramount expected. Spielberg hoped such small details would help restore his reputation as a master of horror, something he achieved with sharks in Jaws, Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but never before with aliens.

"Everybody knows I have a soft spot in my heart for aliens," he thought.

"Can I speak now?" Cruise asked, still sounding hurt.

"Certainly, as long as it isn't about cellinoids," Spielberg said.

"Did you notice the red weed?" Cruise asked.

"What about the red weed?"

"It seems to be growing."

"Growing? That's impossible. It's dye and some kind of rubber compound. It can't grow."

"Well, it's doing something," Cruise said. "The stuff seems to be a lot closer to the car than when we first got here."

Spielberg leaned against the glass and squinted at the red vines, and to his shock, they did seem closer.

But that WAS impossible. That was part of the movie magic he had become master of, creating scenes, creating illusions, it could not come to life without him - and yet it seemed alive. ALIVE!

And as he stared out the red weed seemed to grow even closer, inching over the ground and out of the swamp he had created, thousands of small tentacles seeking to find their creator.

"Tom has to be wrong," Spielberg thought. "This is his light-headedness affecting me the way it did when I abandoned that medallion. But what's my excuse? I'm not suffering from puppy love."

Spielberg wanted to shake Cruise to make him wake up so Spielberg could wake up, too.

But the red weed eased closer now near the tires, now gripping the tires, now working up the fender.

Spielberg couldn't blame Paramount for this or even that snooping Bayonne reporter.

"Out of the car!" he screamed. "We don't want to get sealed in."

The ugly feeling told Spielberg that he had to act, that there would be no mercy, that this thing like the fictional aliens in his film would not stop until he and perhaps Cruise were annihilated.

"But why me?" he wondered, thinking of the snoopy reporter and the few Paramount executives who deserved this fate, and perhaps when he and Cruise got to safety, Spielberg would send invitations to both, with a handwritten note to the report that he should return here for a closer look at the red weed.

"Why invite you to a mere film premier when you can get a first hand experience," Spielberg thought with bitter satisfaction.

Cruise, of course, had fallen into another common mood indicative of love, and Spielberg had to shove him several times before the world-famous actor stirred out of his stupor to stumble out the passenger door.

By this time, the red weed was well up the driver side and over the front hood, tentacles touching the windshield wiper.

Outside, Spielberg shoved Cruise again to make him move farther from the SVU.

"Lord save us from love," Spielberg thought, although at the same time secretly envied Cruise stupor since it shielded him from the worst of the horror.

Spielberg also envied other aspects of Cruise's life, the firm faith never waning, when Spielberg sometimes had his own doubts, especially when confronted with issues like war, 9/11 and The Holocaust.

And each time Spielberg doubted his own faith, he became racked with guilt.

Life had so many unresolved issues, he thought, as he vaguely wished he could have cured his the way the boy Elliot had by having an ET come into his life.

Spielberg was like the scientist in that film, always waiting and wanting for ET to come into his life.

"But it looks like I'm getting the nasty alien instead of the one I wanted," Spielberg thought. "That'll teach me to work with Paramount. The next film I make will be something sensible like the slaughter of Jewish athletes at the 1972 Olympics."

"What now?' Cruise asked.

Panic began to sound in the film star's voice as he woke from the dream of love to discover himself in the middle of a nightmare.

Cruise had faced a million challenges in his life from a rootless childhood to dyslexia, yet neither he nor Spielberg had ever faced anything like this. Spielberg hoped they could both hold it together long enough to escape.

But escape where?

All around them the red weed crackled and grew, the rubbery fingers stealing over the landscape eating up the space to where Spielberg and Cruise stood.

Then things got worse.

Something that resembled a ship fog horn sounded in the woods and the ground shoot with the impact of something heavy.

Through the hazy wooded space, Spielberg made out coned shapes roughly the size of Volkswagens rising and falling like Jack's giant coming to retrieve the golden goose from Jack.

"That's impossible," Spielberg said, thinking of the closed sessions with artists in which he had worked out the look of the alien machines for his movie. And yet, here they came.

But what was one more impossibility in a string of impossibilities?

"We have to seek cover," Spielberg told Cruise.

"Where? We can't go back to the SUV. It's completely covered with red weed."

"That leaves the shack," Spielberg said, nodding his head towards the remains of what once might have served as a barn or woodshed, but had since deteriorated into a precarious collection of gray wood.

When scouting the location months earlier, Spielberg had found the remains charming because they reminded him of the shed where ET had first met with Elliott. Now it looked as frail as the ailing ET. But it was all they had.

As he and Cruise charged towards the door to the shed, Spielberg wondered which one of them was the hero in this tale, and whether this would a tale like his movie in which the hero won a moral victory but lost the war.

And how extensive was this phenomena? Was it a world wide event? Would they return to Bayonne, Newark, Boston or LA to find them all in ruins?

If so, what hope was there?

Never before had Spielberg felt such despair as this? His faith shook with each footfall across the woods.

Was this how the Jews felt as Europe fell? When the glass broke in the ghetto? When they mounted trains for transport to distant and deadly camps?

Where was God in all this?

As they stumbled through the door to the shed, Spielberg spotted something silver glittering on the banister amid cookie crumbs. The medallion? He snatched it up.

It felt cool to his touch, yet stirred something inside him, reminding him of something he had almost forgotten: that good men must make up for the deeds of the bad, working towards a greater good inspired by God, but never delivered to them by God.

God helps those who help themselves, Spielberg thought, recalling the old adage as if he had just made it up.

Inside, huddled against the waging storm outside, Cruised looked as scared as Spielberg felt. Yet there was a glow to his face, and concern, not fear in his eyes.

"I'm worried about her," Cruise told Spielberg in answer to Spielberg's stare. "If I knew she was all right, I would feel a lot better."

"Are you afraid to die?" Spielberg asked.

"Of course I'm afraid to die," Cruise said, then with a laugh, "but if I have to die, what better company could I have than the world's greatest movie director?"

"You ARE insane," Spielberg said.

"Of course I am. Aren't we all?"

Outside the storm waged out, yet oddly - though it shook the walls - it seemed to grow no worse, expending its fury on some other victim Spielberg hoped was not the rest of the world. Then after a time, the fury began to ebb , growing less and less until a strange silence reigned.

Neither Spielberg nor Cruise could move. Neither believed the silence was real.

Then from far away, a church bell rang.

It was among the oddest sounds Spielberg ever heard. He did not know how much time had passed or what day it was, but he was certain it could not be Sunday.

Sirens began to wail, filling the space the bells had vacated, and these grew louder until Spielberg realized they were coming in this direction.

Soon tires sounded over gravel, a crunching symphony inspired by a score of vehicles. Car doors slammed. People shouted. Among these was a voice Spielberg recognized as Bill's.

Spielberg leaped up and ran to the door to stare out. An altered landscape greeted him. The red weed, while not obliterated, was strewn about as if a blender had butchered it, pieces of it hanging from every tree limb, or floating in the water like bloodied fish.

"Mr. Spielberg," Bill shouted and rushed to Spielberg as he stepped out of the shed. "I was so worried."

"You were worried?" Spielberg muttered.

"Is Mr. Cruise all right?"

"We're both all right. Tom's inside snoozing. Don't wake him. He's had a hard night. How is the rest of the world?"

"The rest of the world? I don't get your meaning?" Bill said. "This place was hit hardest. Never saw such a storm before. Lightning bolts hitting the same spot again and again."

Spielberg shivered, but said nothing.

"And Paramount. They freaked out. They threatened World War Three if the Governor didn't call out the National Guard to come get you and Mr. Cruise. And here we are. Paramount's got a whole hospital waiting to receive you both in case you were hurt and moved the helicopter closer to take you there if there's a need."

"There's no need," Spielberg said.

"Then everything's fine?"

"It is now," Spielberg said, gripping the medallion tightly in his fist, silently promising to never let it out of his keeping again. "Let's get out of here. We have movies to make. But I'll tell you this. We're cutting some of the red weed scenes."