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Will Byers wakes up from a dream in the soupy, gloomy hours of the early morning with a feeling in his bones like a storm rolling in.
He fell asleep next to Eleven last night, the pair of them curled into one another in her bed. Now, her eyes are boring into him in the deep, wide and concerned, sat cross-legged on the bed. Will blinks up at her, a little breathless.
‘Are you okay?’ he asks.
El’s eyebrows furrow, her ever-serious expression growing more ever-serious. ‘You were crying,’ she says lowly. ‘I couldn’t wake you.’ Will frowns. His face doesn’t feel wet. He reaches a hand to check, but her expression grows pinched. ‘Not tears,’ she explains. ‘Crying noise.’
Will pushes himself up onto his elbows. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I had a nightmare. Sorry.’
Her face morphs then, fear and horror splitting open her expression. It’s sad how intimate he is with that look on her, knows in his bones how she feels. ‘Nose bleeds?’ she asks. ‘Headaches?’
‘No!’ says Will with a start, reaching out to touch her arm. But even as the word leaves his mouth he knows, somehow, from what he remembers from his dreams, from the images he saw, that it’s only a matter of time.
-
Here is the dream:
It is dark, but the dark, endless churning of an otherworldly storm. The sky cracks open overhead and burns deep, unsettling red. Will knows without even trying where he is: the field at the middle school, the place where the Mindflayer possessed him, even after he’d first escaped. He can hear, almost echoing around him, his childish screams denying the monster, reverberating like a ripple in the air, sound waves still echoing around him like a footprint left behind.
He looks to the sky. A shadow looms like a spider, haunting and huge. He shudders, closes his eyes, prays to open them back at home. When he opens them nothing has changed. He doesn’t understand. He can’t remember how he’s here, what he was doing right before this. He doesn’t even go to Hawkins Middle anymore – how did he get here?
The shadow spills forward, smoke unfurling in the sky. Will is frozen with fear, his heart beating hard in his chest. It’s happening again.
The monster reaches out a hand and Will braces for impact, to choke on toxic air.
‘So this is what it looked like when we gotcha, huh?’ asks someone behind him. Male voice, young, but not as young as Will. He knows it, has heard it bitching from the front seat of the Beemer in the year before his family moved away. ‘You know, I’ve seen it? Or, kinda, it’s hard to explain. He saw it, and I remember that he saw it.’
Will turns, eyes wide. Steve is stood behind him, hands on hips, face tilted up to the sky. He’s wearing sunglasses and a denim vest covered in band patches for musicians he definitely doesn’t listen to. He looks so unlike himself it’s alarming – the pallid tint to his tanned complexion certainly isn’t helping.
Above them, the Mindflayer hangs, unmoving. Like a video tape on pause.
‘Now memories,’ offers Will. ‘We called them now memories.’
‘Huh.’ Steve looks back at him, takes off his sunglasses. ‘Yeah, that’s sort of it, but not exactly. Now memories is like – like Eddie can see us having this conversation as it’s happening. I’m talking more like…’ He gestures with his RayBans, waving them in a circle as he thinks. ‘More like – oh. If I think about when I was reborn, Max wasn’t there, but she can see me remembering it. Or hear me. Turning her didn’t really help with the blindness, but that’s on me.’
There’s a lot to unpack there. That Steve said he’s been reborn, that Max is alive, but blind. Lucas had said, teary-eyed and shaking, that when Eddie and Steve had taken her, they’d looked like vampires, that Eddie had talked about Kas the Bloody Handed. Steve doesn’t look like a vampire now, he just looks kind of dead.
‘Then memories,’ says Steve. ‘They’re more like then memories.’
Will nods, peers back up at the sky, doesn’t bother to say that memories sort of come with the implication of being from “then” by definition. There are more pressing things at hand, like the smoke monster with one long tendril of black stretched out over their heads. ‘Is it not going to get me?’ Will asks. The Mindflayer stays where it is, a spider perched in the corner of the room, a looming threat of possibility.
‘Not yet,’ says Steve. ‘You have to be here for real for that to happen – but it’s the goal.’
Will thinks very hard again about what he remembers from before this. He spent the day with El, reading comic books. They watched a movie on Hopper’s old couch, painted the boarded up window with little flowers and trees so it still looked like the outside. He stayed for dinner, felt sick after eating Eggos. He’s – he’s asleep.
This is a dream.
He’s asleep in El’s bed, right next to her. He can feel the weight of his limbs, paralysed in REM sleep. It’s odd, disconcerting. And even as he focuses on it he can feel the ground underneath him shifting, a feeling like gravity taking hold of him. He’s been balancing on the back legs of a chair and the chair’s given way.
‘Hey, whoa, don’t wake up yet,’ says Steve, hands out. ‘I still want to chat.’
The universe rights itself, perhaps out of alarm, perhaps out of Will’s sudden shift in focus. Steve, moments later, takes a step forward until he’s stood shoulder to shoulder with Will, gazing up with him into the sky. It’s weird, that he’s here. That Will is dreaming about him, out of everyone.
‘Why are you here?’ asks Will. He looks across at Steve again, at his profile. Up close he can make out other details he couldn’t see before in the gloom. Steve is covered in bite marks. Some are old, scarred over, fleshy and puckered, silver slithers across his skin. Some stand out though, look more like fresh wounds. A distinct number of them are roughly the shape of a human mouth. The bruises on his neck are pretty obvious too.
Back after Steve and Dustin birthed their odd little brotherly bond with each other, Will had made a point of averting his eyes from Steve Harrington. He hadn’t quite figured out why yet, at that point, didn’t really know what made him so uncomfortable about looking directly at him. But there was one time where Steve had come to pick up Dustin after D&D, and offered Will and Lucas a lift as well, mostly out of politeness. Will sat in the back and couldn’t take his eyes off the image of Steve he could make out in the rear view, and the angry red welt on his throat. He’d seen bruises like that on Jonathan’s bare chest, after he and Nancy started dating, and ridiculed him for them like nobody’s business. But seeing a mark like that on Steve had made his stomach twist.
‘Are we going to address that thing on your neck at some point?’ Dustin had asked, blithely gleeful as ever. Will’s head shot around to stare at him, wide eyed.
‘There’s nothing to discuss,’ dismissed Steve shamelessly. ‘I still have a social life, despite what you brats have done to my reputation. I went to a party, I had a couple drinks, I made out with Sherry Peterson in a dark corner.’ He reached across the ruffle Dustin’s hair. ‘It’ll happen to you too, one day.’
Will had burned, ripped his eyes away, ashamed.
Now those marks are stark blue-black against Steve’s greying throat. Steve absently rubs his hand over one, on the very front of his neck, high and proud. ‘I was just going to scare you, give you a real nightmare, but you didn’t react the same as the others. You don’t react to fear like to used to, do you?’
He looks at Will, their eyes meeting, and it’s like something clicks in place in his head. This isn’t Steve Harrington. Looks like him, sounds like him, everything down to the mannerisms, the hands on his hips, the expression of vague disinterest when presented with Will. But it’s someone else in his body. No wonder he’s dressed so strangely.
‘I’m afraid of a lot of things,’ says Will. ‘I’m afraid of the Mindflayer.’
Steve hums, and when he speaks, something about his voice is different. Like he’s speaking but there’s another voice, deeper, underneath it. ‘Yes, that’s the name you gave it. He knows there’s a reason for that name, but he doesn’t understand the reference.’
‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ explains Will. He assumes Steve is talking about himself – the shift from first to third person is jarring.
‘Your little game. You gave me a name from it as well, another name I didn’t choose for myself.’
Ah. So Will’s talking to Vecna, then. He turns fully towards Steve/Vecna, crosses his arms, stands his ground. If it’s just a dream, and he knows it’s just a dream, he can end it before something goes wrong. ‘Why are you Steve?’ Will tries. ‘Can’t you be anyone?’
Steve/Vecna considers, head tilting to one side. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But this form seemed fitting.’ He brings a finger to his temple then, eyes wide. ‘He’s up here now, part of everything. I see him, he sees me. I know him to his very core, just like I know you, William.’
Will shakes his head. ‘And that’s why you gave me a nightmare?’
Instead of an answer, Steve begins to transform. Before his eyes the skyline behind Steve becomes crowded with bat-like things, leathery, beastly creatures screaming. And Steve’s face grows wrong, grows outwards, ears extending to a sharp point, jaw almost unhinging to fit the crowding, yellow fangs inside his mouth. His eyes flash the colour of the sky. His fingers grow dark with long, sharp talons and he reaches for Will. Will’s heart jumps, terror leaving him unable to run, to shy away from this thing that Steve’s become. He’s caught, Steve’s hand at his shoulder, claws sinking through Will’s skin.
So this is what Lucas meant by vampire.
‘I gave you a nightmare as a gift,’ says the thing that was Steve. ‘I want you to join us.’
‘No!’ croaks Will, and finds it in himself to rip away from that grip on his arm, stumble back a handful of steps.
The thing smiles, mouth too wide, teeth too long, too sharp. ‘You remind me of the other one, the girl I showed the end to,’ it says. ‘Nancy. I’ll show you the end too, like I did for her.’
Behind him, someone screams, ‘Will!’
Will turns sharply, heart in his throat. Mike is stood on the other end of the field, struggling desperately, wrapped up in vines. ‘Will!’ he screams, his voice breaking with terror. ‘Will!’
‘Mike!’ cries Will, and takes off at a dead run; screw Vecna, screw everything. Mike is being dragged to the ground, and even as he writhes and struggles the vines are winning, are twining around every last one of his limbs, bringing a vine to his face, to his mouth, to take him like they took Will.
‘Mike!’ screams Will.
The sky around him grows dark. As Mike is pinned to the ground the looming arm of the Mindflayer plunges downwards over them both, over Mike, and his body is swallowed by storm and smoke.
‘Mike!’ screams Will again, so hard he’s hoarse, and plunges headfirst into that twisting, swirling fog, searches and searches and screams for Mike. He can’t find him, can’t see anything, can’t find Mike, can’t find him, can’t –
-
Hawkins isn’t a ghost town, but it feels like it.
It’s weird, probably, that the Byers have moved back here at the end of things. People are leaving this little hell in droves, all afraid of what is opening up beneath their feet, what is darkening their doorways. There are monsters in Hawkins. They kill anyone caught unawares, and when they kill enough the ground opens up. But despite that, the Byers have returned, are back to face the end of things. It sort of feels right, actually. It started with Will. He’d like to be here when they end it.
Jonathan picks Will and El up from the cabin in Mum’s car. It’s a little after eight in the morning, but you can’t really tell from the colour of the sky. The middle of summer is overcast every day in Hawkins, sometimes to the point where the sky is so teaming with clouds that the sun is blotted out entirely. It’s going to be hot today, the kind of sticky heat that draws out, slow as molasses, both sweltering and somehow numb. All of Will’s clothes feel uncomfortably dry against his skin.
There’s a new gate cracked open in their path to the Wheeler’s house, out on Kerley. Jonathan has El radio the police station to warn them, let them know to set up road blocks. Some of the new gates will only stay open for a little while, but some of them just never close. No one really understands what the vampires do to open them. Just feed a lot, it seems.
It’s as Jonathan has swung around one side of town and is heading back in again that Will feels his nose dripping. He sniffs, not really paying attention, and wipes his face with the back of his hand. In his peripheral, the smear on the knuckle of his forefinger catches his attention. It’s red.
Will wipes the evidence of his nosebleed away quickly. The movement still catches Jonathan’s eye, next to him in the driver’s seat. ‘You okay, bud?’ he asks.
‘Yeah,’ lies Will. ‘Just sweaty.’
‘Aircon’s busted,’ says Jonathan, an apology. He glances across again though, double checking. ‘You sure? You look kind of peaky.’
Will nods. ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I just slept bad.’
‘Nightmare,’ offers Eleven from the back seat.
Jonathan’s face pinches. ‘Because of being back?’ he asks.
It’s not a stupid question. Hawkins is certainly nightmare inducing, especially as more vines, more hellish creatures spill through the gates. It feels like 1983 a little bit, that terrifying week. But it’s not, not really. Not yet, anyway.
‘I guess,’ says Will. His hand drifts, absent-mindedly, to the back of his neck, to the place where he always feels phantom eyes. He’s always lurking, the thing in the field at the Middle School, the thing that used to be Steve, the thing that seemingly rules over them. ‘His eyes are everywhere,’ says Will. Jonathan looks concerned, and so does Eleven, but it’s something they both know is true. The closer they are to danger, the closer they are to Vecna.
-
He dreams again that night, this time in his own bed. It’s a dream, but it feels like a memory. It is one, at least to start with.
His heart is pounding. Out of fear, and confusion, he’d run to the back shed in his childhood back yard, loaded the gun, and is now waiting for the thing outside. He’s terrified, scared for his life. Overhead the light grows brighter, and he hears chittering behind him, ominous and close like a whisper in his ear.
In the back of his brain, Will knows that trying to fight this thing will not help him. The Demogorgon can’t be stopped with guns. But the shed is small, and there’s nothing else here that can help him, and besides that, it’s too late. It’s what happened last time. He can’t let it happen again.
He fights off the fear in his chest, the screaming in his head to hide, and turns, stares at the shadow in the corner despite the light bulb overhead growing brighter and brighter, chasing all the other shadows away. What steps out makes him raise the gun a little higher, his hands shaking.
‘Whoa!’ says the thing approaching. But it’s not the Demogorgon. Will squints past the light and makes out the shape of a man, arms above his head. The nightmare skews his face, shadows falling hard across him even before the overhead light dims, but Will knows that voice, knows the shape of him. He’s pointing the gun at Mum’s dead boyfriend.
‘Hey,’ says Bob, ‘whoa there, let’s point that thing elsewhere before someone gets hurt.’
Will swallows, can’t help but lower the gun towards the floor. ‘Who are you?’ he asks, because he knows what kind of dream this is. It’s a repeat of a memory, a little too real, a little too visceral, and he’s a little too conscious for this to be anything but a warning.
‘It’s me,’ says Bob. ‘Bob Newby. Don’t you remember?’ Bob takes a step forward, arms still raised above his head. He’s wearing medical scrubs, a blue-green colour. ‘We talked in the car about telling the monster in your dreams to go away. Did you try it?’
Will nods, takes a step back. Bob takes a step forward.
‘I don’t know, buddy,’ says Bob, and it sounds kind, but it doesn’t feel kind. ‘If you’d really given it a go we probably wouldn’t be here.’
Will takes another step back. And another. Bob just keeps moving forwards.
‘You see,’ says Bob, and the voice that comes out of him now is his voice, but it also isn’t, something deeper, predatory underneath. ‘If you’d really done as I said, I wouldn’t have died.’
As he says this, a dark shape starts to blossom on the front of his scrubs. A pool of red so deep it’s almost back, stretching out across his stomach, leaching up towards his throat, down towards his groin. It drips down the front of his scrub pants, and something slick and grizzled starts tumbling from under the edge of his shirt, drags along behind him where it falls.
‘This is your fault, Will,’ says Bob. ‘You did this to me.’ He reaches up a hand, like a fucking zombie in a horror movie, and stumbles forward. He has blood on his hands, drooling out of his mouth. His guts keep spilling out of him, onto the concrete, and he slips on them as he reaches for Will.
Will stumbles back again, lands hard against the closed door and has nowhere else to go. He doesn’t think, he just points the gun up again and shoots. He hits Bob square in one shoulder, and Bob reels back, and then he shifts, as he stands up straight again, and then he’s not Bob, he’s Dad.
Oh, shit. Oh no.
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Dad barks. ‘Shooting the neighbours like that? Haven’t you done enough?’ He sounds wrong too, all twisted, his voice strange and deep. ‘Do you know how much trouble you’ve caused this family? You know I left because of you, right? Couldn’t bear the thought of having a faggot for a son.’
It’s weird, that that comment doesn’t frighten Will. It might have, a couple of years ago, but Jonathan knows now, even if Will hasn’t said the words exactly, and who gives a shit if Dad cares? Dad left them years ago and has been a useless asshole in Indianapolis not even trying to be Will’s father ever since.
‘I’m not afraid of you! Shut up!’ cries Will, and fires the gun again.
This time he hits Dad square in the chest, and he flops backwards like a rag doll, lands hard on his back on the floor. Will drops the gun, turns and wrenches the door open and runs like hell towards the back of the house. He flies up the back steps, yanks the door open, turns into the hallway at top speed, and runs straight into someone else.
He falls backwards, lands hard on his backside, and stares up. In the dark of his first home he is towered over by Max, her eyes white.
‘Max?’ Will chokes.
Max smiles and her teeth are sharp. ‘Long time, no see,’ she says. ‘How was California? Better than Hawkins, right?’
‘It was fine, I guess,’ says Will, and slowly pulls himself to his feet. Despite her eyes swallowed up with white, iris and all, completely blind, her face follows the movement. Will swallows down the alarm at that, but he can’t shift past the nagging feeling that this isn’t Max Mayfield. She’s as much Max as Steve was Steve in his last nightmare.
‘This is the night you were first taken, right?’ she asks. She leans sideways against the wall, crosses her arms. Like this is just a casual, regular conversation. But Will can see the tension under all of it, the thread of preparedness like a predator waiting to pounce.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘But I was alone, that time. Nobody around. Mum wasn’t even dating Bob yet, so I don’t know why you sent him to spook me.’
Max pouts in consideration, tips her head sideways and back up again. ‘Just testing you. Looking for your weak spots. The gay stuff frightened you a couple years back, it doesn’t anymore.’
Will isn’t going to give Max/Vecna the satisfaction of knowing that it still does, a little, just not out of his own father’s mouth. If it was one of his friends talking like that, then maybe. But Dad hasn’t done enough for his opinion to hold weight anymore.
‘Is this another one of those, “Join the dark side, Luke,” conversations again?’ he asks instead.
Max grins, teeth too sharp. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Have you thought about it?’
Oh, yeah, because it’s just so worth the contemplation. Will turns away, stares at the shadows on the wall. The longer he stares the less this place reminds him of home. Dreams are weird like that, wrong and right all in the same breath. ‘Did you give Max the opportunity to think about it?’ he asks. He turns back to Max and her grin has dropped, her teeth a little sharper.
‘Maxine was chosen,’ is all she says. Cryptic, eerily blank.
‘That’s not exactly convincing,’ says Will, and he’s not sure what it is that’s making him this brave. That he knows he’s dreaming and he can wake up at any minute. That Vecna has come to him twice wearing the faces of his friends, not even brave enough to show himself yet. That there’s clearly something more going on here, because he hasn’t just sent the vampires to come and collect Will, is trying to offer him a place by his side. Something about this is weird.
‘Ugh, fine,’ grunts Max/Vecna, arms crossed. ‘Perhaps this can convince you, then.’ And then she twists sideways, reaches out to wrap a fist in Will’s shirt front and points him to the end of the hallway. From the shadows comes a struggling figure, dragged forward, toes scraping across the hallway carpet. The figure whimpers, pained, and Will knows that sound. He recognises the shape of the person as it draws closer. He’s seen that floral undershirt before, the filthy white jeans, the shaved head. El looks defeated, face tear-stained and dreary.
‘Eleven,’ says Will. Max’s grip on him is too tight. He can’t break her grasp.
El just cries, chest heaving with sobs. After a moment she lifts into the air, body frozen. She screams, the sound blood-curdling.
‘Wait,’ says Will, ‘no –’
El’s leg jerks out, twisting in the wrong direction, and the bone makes a sharp, loud, snapping sound that Will feels in his chest. Her arm follows, and then her other leg, her fingers her ribs her spine her –
-
He hasn’t said anything and he can’t really put his finger on why. He knows he has to. He heard about what happened to Max, and the others – Chrissy and Patrick and Fred. He knows they all had seven days before they died. Before the nightmares became hallucinations became real. He doesn’t understand why Vecna’s doing it this way, though. There are gates all over Hawkins, and the monsters roaming free can seemingly open more, so why does he need Will to open another? Why does he need Will at all?
He tries to be quiet when he goes for the Tylenol bottle that morning. Runs the water in the sink to cover up the rattle. Mum and Jonathan don’t say anything at breakfast, so he thinks it must have worked. He’ll say something eventually. Just - it feels like a puzzle. It feels like he doesn’t have all the pieces yet. If Will says something he knows the others will try to make him stay awake, try to fix things for him. And it’s not that he doesn’t appreciate the help, it’s just that something about all of this feels different. Feels specific to Will.
Nancy is in the kitchen this morning too, nose buried in the newspaper, one hand around a mug of coffee. It’s weird that she’s here, but only because Will is aware that she and Jonathan have been fighting about college. Still, she half acknowledges him as he sits across from her, buttered toast stacked between them on the table. Mum gets up, moves away to get ready for work – because the Encyclopedia Britannica needs to be sold even at the end of things. After a long moment shuffling by the sink, Jonathan takes his leave too, awkward. And then it’s just Will and Nancy.
And, actually, if anyone can help with this puzzle without going full panic mode, it would be Nancy Wheeler.
‘Hey, Nancy?’ asks Will.
Nancy shuffles the newspaper slightly, lets it bend in the middle so she can make eye contact over top. She looks nothing like Mike, her whole body small and bird-like in direct comparison to Mike’s long, gangly reach. And yet, despite that, she and Mike have the same ability to make it seem like when their eyes are on you, they’re really, really listening. Nancy’s better at it, though. Maybe that’s just because Mike is usually a clueless idiot, even if Will is fond of him for it.
Nancy cocks an eyebrow. Will reaches out and takes a piece of toast. It’s his third. It’s half soggy and on its way to cold, but he kind of likes it that way.
‘If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell Jonathan?’
Nancy snorts, and for a split second she and Mike could be identical. ‘He can’t even look me in the eye right now,’ she says lowly, and it’s not a stab at Will’s brother, but not by much. She closes the paper, folds it in half and puts it down. ‘But yes, Will,’ she says, all serious, ‘you can trust me.’
Will nods, contemplative. Sends a glance over his shoulder, into the hallway. Looks back again. ‘When you – back at Spring Break,’ he begins, and Nancy’s posture goes rigid all over. Will winces, clears his throat. He can’t say the next part much louder than a whisper. ‘You – you had Vecna in your head, right?’
Nancy frowns, eyes sharp. ‘Only for a minute,’ she says. ‘He was trying to frighten me. It –’ and here her eyeline drops, her gaze going a little distant. ‘It worked,’ she admits, quietly.
Will only nods again, face pinched. But she’s already answered one of his questions. Vecna wanted to frighten her. It’s what he does. It’s why he’s been rooting around in Will’s head for old memories. ‘Did he – did he ask you anything? When he was in your head?’
The frown is back. ‘Why?’ she asks.
Will shrugs. His eyes slide away from hers, and he finds himself reaching forward, tearing his toast into buttery shreds. ‘No reason,’ he lies. ‘Just – I’d just been thinking about it, about Steve and Max and the whole – whole plan of attack for what’s coming. I guess I just wondered if it was a, “join us or die,” kind of thing, with you, maybe that’s what happened to the others.’
He’s quietly impressed with himself for lying so smoothly, honestly. It almost makes sense. It clearly does for Nancy too, because that creased look on her face goes sort of thoughtful, like she’s puzzling over the concept in her head. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘No, but I suppose that was before we shot a bunch of holes in him.’ Her hands drop from the table and Will can see from how her shoulders move that she’s smoothing her skirt out across her lap. It’s a subconscious thing, fixing her clothing like that. She’s always done it, now is no different. ‘I guess,’ she says, ‘I assumed it was revenge. An eye for an eye, or whatever. And that the hivemind was using them, the same way it did with the flayed. You think they chose to join Vecna?’
Will shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Maybe they didn’t choose to join him, exactly, maybe – I mean, you said he showed you your family dying, right? Maybe he did that to them, told them that it was join him or watch their loved ones die. If you were given that choice, you’d want to save them.’
‘Yes of course,’ says Nancy, but there’s a furrow in her brow, an expression on her face like she’s not saying everything. Will doesn’t have to prompt her though, to make the rest come out. ‘But then again,’ she says, ‘we are losing people left, right and centre. Max, and Steve. Eddie. Mike said the Sinclairs are talking about moving, and Robin isn’t taking my calls, and, well. When was the last time you talked to Dustin?’
Will’s heart sinks. Dustin.
‘I love my parents,’ says Nancy, solemn. ‘I love Holly. More than anything. But they don’t know about the Upside Down and no amount of preparing them for what’s coming will make them ready when it gets here. So, it’s unbearable but… we need the numbers, and I can fight. And if we lose… we’re all dead anyway, right?’
Will looks up at Nancy. There’s a rogue tear spilling down one cheek, slippery and fat, streaking through the makeup on her face. But she looks fiercely determined. This little woman, in her blousy cotton sundress and matching pumps, her hair pulled back so her fragile, bony shoulders are on display She’d call Vecna’s bluff. She’d keep fighting. Will thinks, grimly, that he understands her perspective entirely. And he understands better, in that moment, why he has no want to tell Mum or Jonathan or El what’s going on.
Nancy opens her mouth, pauses. Closes it again. Glances out into the hallway, the same way Will did, and Will watches her spend a minute peering that way like she’s waiting for Jonathan or Mum to burst out from around a corner. When it doesn’t happen, she finally turns back to Will, wipes that one tear from her cheek with shaking hands, and he knows, all of a sudden, that she has him figured out. He didn’t even have to tell her.
‘When did he give you the choice?’ she asks, voice low and even.
Will heaves a sigh, and it’s all relief. He feels like a puppet with its strings cut, but in the best way. Like he can finally breathe after being squeezed tight for too long. His limbs feel easy, loose. ‘Two nights ago,’ he says. ‘I had a nightmare. And then again, last night.’ Nancy nods, but Will cringes a little, because now that it’s coming out he’s ashamed to be admitting all of this. ‘I also had a nosebleed yesterday, and a headache this morning.’
Nancy huffs, shoulders dropping. ‘When were you going to say something?’ she asks.
Will shrugs. ‘Soon!’ he insists. ‘I just feel like there’s something I’m missing and I feel like if I could just… talk to Vecna again, maybe I can finally get to the bottom of why he keeps coming to me.’
Nancy is sat slumped in her chair, shaking her head. Her eyes are on the newspaper on the table between them, arms folded, but at the mention of Vecna she freezes, her whole body going rigid, like petrified wood. ‘That’s pretty unwise,’ she says, and her voice is slow, tinted dark around the edges. Hard, like all of her is brittle. ‘We barely survived him last time, with all of us fighting. What makes you think you can do it on your own?’
Will frowns. ‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘I’m not trying to take him on, I’m –’
‘Lying to everyone,’ cuts in Nancy, sharply, ‘letting yourself die. And for what, Will? Do you really think any of them want to save you again? They all forgot about you when you moved to California. Lucas was caught up in basketball. Dustin was caught up in Hellfire. Max was lost in her grief. And Mike only ever had eyes for Eleven. You’re not important enough to want to save.’
A bolt of fear jolts through Will where he sits. Nancy’s face is twisted up with anger, a cruel, empty snarl, her eyes bulging and blank. He feels like the world has tilted on its axis, that the lights above him have dimmed, and he knows, intrinsically, that this isn’t real. He’s dreaming – or having a hallucination. He’s probably sat at the kitchen table right now with his eyes rolled up in his head, Nancy shouting for help. Any second Jonathan’s going to come storming in with his tape player and the Clash playing so loud that the window glass shudders. But he can’t see that. He can’t hear it. Instead he’s trapped in his own mind, and Nancy’s changing before his eyes, shifting and growing, skin charring.
He can’t help it. He gets up from the table and runs.
The hallway to his bedroom is a short sprint, but he can hear Vecna approaching behind him, heavy footsteps and sick, wet squelching. El had described him once as looking barely like a man anymore, made up more of vines than of human flesh. The thought is horrifying, and even though Will would like to be brave, he doesn’t think he can be in the here and now. He should have said something sooner, told Jonathan what was going on.
‘William,’ calls Vecna, ‘you can’t hide from me.’
Will reaches his bedroom and rips the door open, slides through into the dark room and slams the door behind him. The room is swallowed in shadows, curtains pulled, not how he left it, but he leans against the door, panting. And then there’s a noise from the dark.
A figure steps out of the darkest corner of Will’s bedroom. It is a tall, hulking shape, broad and disfigured, a body mutilated by nature like grass spitting through a sidewalk or fungus growing on an animal corpse. Vecna’s human body is riddled with burns, flesh dead and dying, puckered and black and bloody, and all held together by slick vines, wet and wrong. His face is almost skeletal, and his arms are mismatched, one hanging longer than the other, claws growing from that hand. He’s not right, feels dead, like a ghost, but the feeling Will gets, the pricking at the back of his neck, kicks in right now, is so sudden and alarming it feels like fire running down his spine.
This is not how he expected to finally meet Vecna. Not in his shrouded bedroom on a Wednesday. Not in the dark in the middle of a waking nightmare part way through breakfast.
‘El said you were ugly,’ says Will, braver than he feels. ‘She was underselling you, though.’
‘Don’t waste your breath on insults,’ says Vecna, a low growl, and Will would be grinning smugly if he wasn’t terrified right about now.
Vecna takes another step forward into the room, and Will feels the bedroom door solid against his back. He has nowhere to go as Vecna reaches forward with his shorter arm, oddly human fingers. ‘You’ve avoided me long enough, William. I am going to swallow the world, and I want you by my side when I do.’
‘Me?’ blurts out Will.
If it’s possible for a skeleton to smile, Vecna achieves it, all stretched flesh and dull, blunt teeth. It looks all corroded, a half snarl. ‘Eleven thinks that she and I are the same, but she is wrong. You, however, are more alike to me than any other. You survived in my realm longer than any but me, hiding in plain sight as just a child. You recreated Hawkins in the moment of your taking with your childish mind, and it has remained standing all these years, waiting to welcome you home. You have great power, William Byers. Let me help you to unlock it. Let me help to guide you, and redefine the world by our own terms.’
‘By your terms,’ insists Will. ‘I like the world the way it is.’
Vecna makes a sound, a croaking rumble, and Will realises that he’s laughing. ‘I have been inside your mind, William. I know what you are. You are a bottom feeder. A bench sitter. You and your friends have no power, no influence, no strength. But you could be a spider: a predator far greater than any human. Join me.’ He raises his hand again, palm up, like he’s asking Will to take it.
‘I do that,’ says Will, ‘and then what? You destroy Hawkins? Kill my friends? You’ve already threatened it before.’
‘Hawkins will burn,’ says Vecna, hard and even. ‘All who live in it will fall so that Eleven is left alone, so that none are left to stand between me and ultimate power. It is your decision if their deaths are quick and painless or if they struggle and scream as I blot them out.’
From behind him comes a crunch, sickening and guttural, and then a scream – and Will’s heart jolts. He knows that voice.
The light overhead sputters to life, and over Vecna’s shoulder two figures are rising off the ground, bodies rigid, arms and legs locked.
‘Will!’ cries Mum. Next to her, Jonathan is struggling, teeth grit, fighting hard. There comes a hard, sharp pop, and Jonathan’s leg bends back the wrong way, and he screams this time.
‘Mum!’ yells Will, and goes to dart forward. Vecna beats him to it, though, turns his palm over, spreads his fingers. Will can’t move, feels like his lungs are locked in a vice. He is frozen, paralysed, can only watch. ‘Mum!’ he yelps, ‘Jonathan!’
There’s another snap that echoes through the air, and both of Mum’s arms give. ‘Will, wake up!’ she screams – but her mouth isn’t moving.
‘Will, come on!’ calls Jonathan – but his mouth isn’t moving either.
And then he hears it. Like his heartbeat, loud and insistent in his ears. Like his own lungs are breathing it out, like it’s coming from inside of him. Joe Strummer is singing.
His mother, his brother, they’re dying in front of him, but it isn’t real. He forgot that this wasn’t real. They’re alive, they’re in the kitchen, they’re trying to call him home. And, like the previous dreams, now he knows it he can feel it, too. He can feel his eyelids fluttering, his eyes blind. He can feel his body, locked in place, nothing but air underneath him. Mum and Jonathan aren’t the ones that are floating, Will is, and Jonathan is stood under him, arms wrapped around his legs like it might help, and Mum is screaming at him to wake up, and Nancy is on the phone, calling for Eleven.
Mum’s legs are broken, her ribs are caving in – and she’s in the kitchen, tears streaming down her face, furious and terrified and alive. Jonathan’s hips are crooked, his spine is bent the wrong way – and he’s trying to pull Will back down to earth – Will can feel his tears seeping into the back of his t-shirt as Jonathan mumbles along with the Clash.
‘Join me,’ says Vecna, and offering, a warning. ‘Take my offer and survive.’
Will’s eyes fly back to him, back to the monster who did all of this, has been doing it since the start. This man, who has been clawing at the world from his empire of dust, who’s been killing people and destroying lives, who took Barb from Nancy and Bob from Mum and Billy from Max and Eddie from Dustin. Who took Eddie and Steve and Max and turned them into twisted versions of themselves, who they don’t know if they can save? Who has been trying to destroy the world, and yet couldn’t beat an eleven-year-old boy? Couldn’t take Will the first time around, has to keep trying? Can’t even beat him because of a song?
Should I Stay or Should I Go is echoing in Will’s ears, flowing through him in waves. This man isn’t even big enough to beat The Clash. Will’s not going to let him destroy the world. What kind of surviving would that even be?
So, you’ve got to let me know, sings Joe Strummer, should I stay or should I –
Will opens his eyes and gravity rushes up to meet him. He drops like a sack of potatoes, Jonathan under him, arms wrapped around Will’s thighs. They both tumble to the ground, and Will lies on the kitchen floor, stunned, for a good couple seconds before he’s rushed by Mum and Nancy.
‘Will, baby!’ cries Mum, and starts pulling him up. She’s crying, openly weeping. Jonathan scrambles out from underneath Will and then the three of them are clinging to each other, crying and gasping and shaking. It feels good to be alive. It feels good to have his family close, and safe. The image of his mother and brother dying are going to haunt him forever, but now he knows what he can do to make sure it never, ever happens.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Will, and Mum squeezes him so tightly he feels like his lungs are going to pop.
‘Why didn’t you say something?’ she snaps, but she’s petting Will’s hair, softening the blow. ‘Why didn’t you tell me when you started having nightmares?’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Will again. ‘But it’s okay. I know how we can beat him now.’
He turns to Nancy, then, on her knees beside the bundle of Will’s family. She’s been crying, too, looks smalls and scared and lost. For once in her life she looks like a teenage girl, all the determination and shrewdness that makes her look like a woman peeled back. Her hands are shaking, and Will reaches out and takes one, squeezes it in thanks. ‘You saved me,’ he says.
Nancy huffs out a wet chuckle. ‘Barely,’ she replies.
‘It counts,’ Will insists. And then, ‘Is El still on the line?’
The phone lays forgotten behind them, cradle empty, the receiver left where Nancy had dropped it.
‘How do you –’ she says, and then glances over her shoulder at the landline.
‘Tell her I have a plan. We need everyone. Absolutely everyone.’
-
It starts with shouting.
Actually, it starts with the Hopper-Byers clan arriving on the Wheeler’s front doorstep that evening, a casserole no one will want to eat in Mum’s hands. Mrs Wheeler opens the door, looking a little harrowed, and Mike is hovering behind her like a frazzled mayfly, buzzing incessantly. ‘Joyce,’ says Mrs Wheeler warmly, and ushers the gang in.
‘Thank you so much for hosting, Karen,’ says Mum as everyone spills in around her. Jonathan makes a beeline for the stairs, Will and El step up to Mike, and Hopper takes over door duty, keeping eyes out for the others.
‘The more the merrier,’ insists Mrs Wheeler. ‘Especially if it finally clears up some of the things that have been going on around here,’ and then her eyes flit back over Mum’s shoulder, and she adds, pointedly, ‘Jim.’
‘Yeah, yeah, all in good time,’ replies Hop, waving her off.
‘What’s going on?’ hisses Mike to Will. Will shakes his head.
‘We finally getting word about those murderous thugs that think they’re vampires?’ asks Mr Wheeler as he waltzes in from the living room. He offers Hopper a handshake, and Hopper takes it. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t run into them on your way over, local radio said they’re out on Cornwallis tonight.’
El tugs at Will’s shirtsleeve and he turns towards her, away from Hopper detailing their alternate route through town, around the gates. Mike starts to clatter down the stairs, Will and El just behind, as Mr Wheeler says, much too jovially, ‘I’m surprised we haven’t got Nancy Reagan coming tonight too, what with all these satanic gang members on reefer moving into the neighbourhood.’
‘Ted!’ scolds Karen.
Will stops listening after that, the walls to the basement muffling boring adult chat. Besides, Mike is full of ants, squirming and nervous. ‘Mum said that everyone’s meeting,’ he says, soon as he reaches the basement floor. ‘Everyone, all the parents.’
El skitters down the stairs behind him, drops gracefully onto the sagging couch. Will takes the last few steps slower, stops at the foot of the stairs. Mike is floating between them, moving endlessly, restlessly like a computer game character.
‘Hop says it’s time to tell everyone,’ says El. ‘Everyone is coming.’
‘What!?’ cries Mike. ‘But we can’t tell my parents, they’re going to freak out!’
‘We’re going to what!?’ comes a screech from behind Will, at the top of the stairs. Will turns to see Dustin, face twisted in horror, eyes bulging as he jangles down into the room. ‘No way,’ he says. ‘No way, we can’t tell the parents.’
‘Mum knows,’ says Will, still peering up at Dustin, ‘and Hopper.’
‘My mum is too delicate for this!’ cries Dustin. ‘How is she going to defend herself against a demodog?’
Mike snorts. ‘I think she’d go the way of Mews,’ he says, sly.
‘That’s not funny!’ snaps Dustin. ‘We can’t just let them tell our parents, they’re all going to get killed sidelining us. They can’t handle this.’
‘Handle what?’ asks Lucas, at the top of the stairs, Erica just behind her. They skitter down the stairs into the room as Dustin explodes again.
‘The end of the world!’ cries Dustin, with gusto. ‘How do you feel about your mother versus twenty demobats?’
‘Why is my mum battling demobats?’ asks Lucas, stumbling forward, and then, ‘Wait, is that why we’re all here?’
‘We are?’ asks another voice, and then Robin is there too, Nancy and Jonathan on either side of her. ‘Oh shit,’ she says, glancing towards Nancy, ‘my parents are going to kill me.’
‘Never mind that,’ insists Dustin, ‘they’re going to have to reschedule it to after they take on the Upside Down and all get murdered because they don’t know what they’re doing.’
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ drawls Jonathan.
Will glances around. The Wheeler’s basement used to feel enormous before he moved to Lenora. But now, after everything, after his last growth spurt, with all of them crammed in – even with the party members who are missing – it feels small. Safe. Practically his whole life is here.
‘Guys,’ says Will, raising his voice over the cacophony. Everyone settles, eyes on him, and it’s strange, having the attention of the whole room. He’d grown used to being out of eyeline. ‘I have a plan,’ he says. ‘You’re not going to like it.’
That’s when the shouting starts.
It doesn’t stop again until Hopper storms in, voice raised above the din, calling for silence. He stands on the second to last stair, arms out like a conductor in front of an orchestra. They all turn towards him, musicians at the ready, their voices warmed up for round two.
‘I don’t know what’s going on down here,’ says Hopper, ‘but that’s enough. Whether you like it or not, it’s beyond time some legal adults got involved that aren’t just – Murray.’
Jonathan snorts. Nancy bites her lip, and Will grins at his knees.
‘You don’t have to like it, but it’s time your parents all knew what was going on – and I’m not taking arguments right now, Dustin, so tamp it down. This fight is getting bigger, we need all the help we can get. But if you’re underage I need you to sit this one out. That includes Eleven.’
There’s stony, sobering silence at that. Everyone takes it in, the frail, weathered tension, the hardest pill to swallow finally in their hands. Will can’t really imagine what it’s been like for the others to keep this all a secret, NDAs aside. It must be frightening. It must be a relief.
‘Now Jonathan,’ continues Hopper, ‘Nancy, Robin. As long as you’re 18, I can’t exactly stop you from helping out. And it probably won’t hurt to have a few more on the team that have gone up against this before. So you’re welcome to join the meeting.’
Across the room, Nancy’s shoulder’s drop with relief. ‘Good,’ she says, her voice all steely with determination. ‘I didn’t learn to shoot for nothing.’
‘Attagirl,’ grunts Hopper.
There’s a pause as Nancy, Jonathan, and Robin all peel away from the group and start heading up the stairs. Will watches them, but he can feel Mike practically boiling over next to him, Dustin on the other side all but biting his own hands to stop himself from saying something. Hopper’s expression is flat, though, daring any single one of them to cross him.
‘Keep the ranting and raving to a minimum, alright?’ says Hopper. His eyes slide over all of them: Erica, then Lucas, then Dustin, Will, Mike, and lastly El. ‘We don’t know if anyone is going to turn on Eleven when they find out what she can do, so I need you lot to not give anyone a reason to come down here. We don’t have Owens’ people to watch out for her tonight. That leaves you five.’ He turns to the party, to Erica. Weighs them up. And despite them being benched, here he gives them one last piece of trust, one last task to shoulder that no one else can: keep his daughter safe.
With that, Hopper turns and marches up the stairs. Mike, at least, has the decency to wait for the basement door to close behind him before he blows an absolute gasket. ‘This is bullshit!’ he cries.
He gets shooshed for his trouble.
It doesn’t take long before they hear the shouting from upstairs, all the parents furious as they learn about El and the Upside Down and the danger their children have been in. It’s now, while everyone’s distracted and distressed, bickering and anguishing at their fate, that Will sneaks away. He’s good at disappearing, good at fading into the shadows, good at being forgotten in the crowd, even amongst his friends. So it’s easier than saying goodbyes to just sneak away up the stairs, around the parents arguing in the living room, Hopper’s evidence sprawled across the coffee table, and through to the garage. He takes Mike’s bike, waits for an uptick in the noise to open the garage door, and then he’s out.
Nancy’s wrong, he thinks, as he pedals towards Mirkwood. He understands why she would choose to live, sacrifice a few to save many, but she’s wrong. Vecna had Will picked from the start. It was always supposed to be him that died to save everyone. Not that he thinks he’s going to die – not tonight, anyway. If he’s right, not at all. But that’s the risk he has to take. None of the adults back at the Wheeler’s, short of Mum, Hop, Murray and Alexei, can really be prepared for Henry Creel. And the four of them barely know what they’re facing.
And there is something sort of poetic about it all, really. Mirkwood is where Will was spooked off the road the first time he got dragged into the Upside Down. Now he pedals towards it like a mad man, ready to be spirited away again.
He finds the vampire coven on the side of the road at the intersection, perched around a car. The five of them are stock still as Will approaches, eyes trained on him like predators waiting to spring. As he gets closer, Will can see the way that all of them hold themselves, muscles taut, tense and ready and waiting. The one sat like a king on a throne on the roof of the car, all wild, dark curls and denim and leather, grins broadly, teeth glinting, and then his face morphs and his mouth keeps growing, and growing, teeth bunching and crowding inside. It’s monstrous and breathtaking, and it makes Will stop dead in the middle of the road.
So this is Eddie. Jesus, he is something else.
‘Will Byers, I presume,’ Eddie says, and leaps down, oddly cat-like, to his feet. Behind him, Max moves easily to take flank on his left, a handsome blonde boy in red flannel on Eddie’s right. Gareth, thinks Will, thinking back to the photo Dustin had shown him of Hellfire Club. Jeff and Ray fan out, hanging a little back like they’re waiting for Will to run. They all look different to the photo though. They look like Steve and Max did in Will’s dreams, like Billy last summer. Like they’ve been flayed, dead and wrong. It’s frightening in person. Will’s heart pounds hard in his chest.
‘I want to make a deal,’ says Will. ‘I want to take Vecna’s offer.’
The coven glance between themselves, something like excitement and manic glee bubbling between them.
‘We could just kill you,’ says Max, blind eyes turned towards him.
‘He won’t let you,’ says Will, not that he has any idea if it’s true.
He must be right though, because after a beat Eddie rolls forward, easy and unthreatening, and throws an arm over Will’s shoulders in camaraderie, swivels around so they’re both facing the other vampires. ‘Welcome to the team, little Byers,’ he decrees, starting in the direction of the nearest gate behind the car. ‘Most people are dying to get in, but you get to skip the queue.’
Max burst out loud with a noise of disgust. ‘Eddie, that’s horrible!’
Eddie chuckles, gleeful. If this is what he was like before he died, Will can understand why his friends liked him. He’s a clown, charismatic and silly. But even as they walk, the bike left in the middle of the intersection, Eddie starts tapping out a rhythm on Will’s shoulder, a repeating beat that Will instantly recognises. Tap tap tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap tap tap.
Will reaches up, easy, throws his arm back over Eddie’s shoulder as they walk, the others trailing behind them. He repeats Eddie’s message back to him, taps back the signal that Eddie’s been heard.
Lucas said, after Max was taken, that Eddie had called himself Kas the Bloody Handed. They all know, though, that Kas became the Betrayer by turning on Vecna. He was convinced, in the end. His sword spoke to him, told him to turn on Vecna, told him to kill Vecna. If Eddie has given himself the role of Kas, then he must think, somehow, that he has a chance to stop Vecna in his tracks, take him down, end all of this. He just needs a sword to help him.
Will is going to be that sword.