Chapter 2

Hawkins, Indiana, 9:50 p.m.

At the time the girls were arriving, their first priority was to find someplace to sleep. There were two real options—a bed and breakfast and a couple shifty-looking motels with average reviews on Yelp. Sands and Koren wanted to stay at the bed and breakfast, which looked much more pleasant online, but Scout reasonably pointed out that a motel would be much less likely to ask uncomfortable questions when a bunch of visiting teenagers stayed out late at night, so they chose one and went there.

The motel wasn't exactly dirty or creepy or anything—it was just somewhat worn-down, and a far cry from the dorm building back at Crossroads. But they would make do. Using the budget Crossroads had provided, they rented a room with two beds. (The twins would have no problem sharing.) The proprietor at the front desk was clearly curious, and Koren decided to take advantage of this to gather some information while the twins were bringing their luggage up to their room.

"What are three young gals like you doing visiting our small town at a place like this?" asked the woman, who had stress lines on her face and the first streaks of grey in her hair.

Koren leaned forward conspiratorially. "Oh, we just heard some rumors about what's been going on in Hawkins and thought, 'Hey, it's the weekend, let's take a look.'" Then she carefully judged the woman's reaction.

The woman tut-tutted and said, disapprovingly, "Don't go sticking your nose where it doesn't belong, now," but Koren got the impression that she was saying it more for form's sake than because she meant it. So she pushed on, bringing up their cover story.

"Oh, we won't, but I'd say our nose does belong here. You see, we're looking for a good story for our school newspaper, and this sounds like it could be good. We thought we might interview some of the people involved in the search party—oh, did you go?"

"No, these old bones wouldn't let me walk around that much, you understand."

"Of course! Don't worry about it, I'm sure there's plenty of people we can talk to. Maybe we'll even talk to Joyce Byers herself. There's got to be some reason she was sure her son was still alive one day but went to his funeral the next."

"Oh, you heard about that?"
"Only a little bit; I didn't really hear the details."

"It was a whole big thing! Joyce and her boy Jonathan were yelling at each other in the town square. Joyce kept saying she knew she sounded crazy, but she didn't care, she wasn't going to stop until she got her son back." The woman shook her head sadly. "Poor thing. The stress is really getting to her." Straightening up, she pointed at Koren. "Now don't you be going and making fun of the poor woman!"

"That's not what we're here for! But surely it can't hurt to listen to what she has to say? And if it makes a good story, even better."

"Well, I suppose."

Sands and Scout came down the stairs. "Koren, you ready?" Sands asked.

"We just finished talking, so I'm ready to go," Koren said.

"Go? Where are you going at this time of night? It's after 10 o'clock!"

"We thought we'd look around the woods where they were searching for a bit, get an idea of what it was like to be in the search party, maybe take a few pictures. Do you think you could tell us where they were searching?" Koren asked, unfolding a map on the counter.

"They found that poor boy's bike right here, and concentrated the search on that area." Pointing to another point of the map, the woman said, "But this here is the quarry where they found the body."

"Thanks," Koren said as she folded up the map and walked out the door, the twins following.

"Be careful, girls!" the woman called after them.

"Don't worry, we will," Sands said, flashing her a cheery smile.

"So, you find anything out with your gossiping?" Sands asked.

"Information gathering," Koren said pointedly. "And she was pretty useless, but at least she gave us a place for me to drop you off so you can start looking around. It's pretty close to the Byers house, just like I said it would be. I knew a 12-year-old wouldn't be biking that far from home. It's too late for you to go try the reporter thing with Joyce without looking like a total creep."

Scout leaned forward from the back seat to whisper in Sands's ear. Sands said, "Scout can use her enhanced hearing to try to listen for anything useful."

"Like I said. Total creep."

"Hey! We're not the ones going to dig up a grave!"

"I told you, we're here because somebody's claiming a dead body isn't actually a dead body. What kind of investigators would we be if we didn't check for ourselves? Now pay attention to that map, it's hard enough to watch the road and see street signs in this darkness. You better not make me miss our turn." The report on Hawkins had mentioned that the town was far enough from the rest of civilization that cell service didn't reach there yet, so the girls made a point of bringing their own magical communicators and a lot of maps and looking up the addresses of places like the Byers house and the cemetery before leaving Crossroads. The downside was, of course, that they were stuck navigating the old-fashioned way.

After a little bit more sniping between Sands and Koren and a lot more tense silence punctuated by Sands giving the occasional direction, they arrived at the location the motel proprietor had pinpointed as the start of the search for Will Byers. Sands and Scout grabbed their gear and got out, and Koren drove off to the cemetery.

When Koren was gone, Scout looked at her map until she found the shortest way through the woods to the Byers house. Then, she said quietly, "You hunt. I'll go listen."

"Alright, sounds good. Let's try to check in every fifteen minutes at least, and I'll let you know if I find anything interesting." Scout nodded her agreement and headed off.

Looking around with her flashlight for illumination, Sands examined the area around her more closely for clues, but she had a couple of problems. Firstly, their information wasn't extremely precise, so she had no real way of knowing whether or not this was the exact place Will had ditched his bike by the side of the road. Secondly, it had been several days since then, and a massive search party had tromped through the woods, covering up any evidence. Maybe if all three of them came back in the daytime they could find something, but even then, Sands was skeptical. Still, she had nothing better to do at the moment, since the rest of their potential lines of investigation either were being pursued by her classmates or involved talking to people, which they couldn't do until the next morning. Sands reported her lack of findings to the others and expanded her fruitless search into the forest slightly.

A couple of minutes later, Scout reported over the communicator, "Yelling."

"What? Is someone yelling in the Byers house?"

"No. In the forest. South of you, west of me."

"I'll go check it out. You going to come at it from the other direction?"
"Yes." Keeping her eyes and ears peeled as best as she could in the darkness lit only by the beam of her flashlight, Sands jogged into the forest at a steady pace.

As far as she could tell from the map, Scout had nearly made it to the Byers house when she picked up a very faint sound with her superhuman hearing. She had stopped moving to quiet her feet and listened intently. When she had heard it again, it had sounded like yelling, so she had called Sands before heading off towards the sound herself. She had a small amount of superhuman stamina, which let her keep up a light jog without getting too tired, but she couldn't run too fast in the dark through the forest without risking tripping, which would definitely slow her down.

Before too long, she was close enough that she could hear actual words instead of just distant yelling noises. It was a male voice yelling, "Nancy!" As she got closer, she could hear the desperation behind his words as he yelled for Nancy, and she wanted nothing more at that moment than to run as fast as she could, but she knew she shouldn't risk tripping, so she carefully maintained the same quick pace. Finally, Scout found the source of the voice just in time to see a teenager with light brown hair drag a brown-haired girl about Scout's age out of a slime-filled hole in a tree. As soon as the girl was out, the hole in the tree closed right before their eyes.

"Found them," Scout said into the communicator pin clipped to her shirt. Then, switching to the whole group channel, she said, "Found magic."

"What? Magic where?" Koren asked.

"Are you alright?" Sands asked.

"I'm fine. Busy."

"Good. I'll try to find you," Sands said, "but I don't know how well I'll be able to in a forest with no landmarks I know."

Meanwhile, the boy and the girl had been hugging each other tightly, the boy whispering comforting words as the girl sobbed into his shoulder. Finally, their breathing steadied and they pulled apart and looked up to see Scout. She froze in sudden terror.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?" the boy asked.

Scout was paralyzed, unable to speak. It had been a long time, almost longer than she could remember, since she had been put on the spot like this, left on her own to answer demanding questions from a complete stranger. The fact that she had to try to come up with a believable lie made it even worse.

Trying to gather up her courage, she reminded herself of her promise to Professor Dare that she would try to do something on her own this mission. She also reminded herself to focus on the mission—the boy and girl in front of her were the only witnesses to whatever strange magic involved the girl needing to be dragged out of a slimy, self-closing hole in a tree. The way the Bystander Effect worked, if they hadn't forgotten about the unnatural occurrence already, they would very soon, and so there was no time to wait for Sands to find them. Scout would have to interrogate them herself.

First, she answered one of the boy's questions. Pointing at him, she said, "Yelling." Then, she turned to the girl and forced out the words, "Why were you in the tree?"

They exchanged glances, clearly trying to decide how much to tell her. Then, the girl said, "There was a monster."

"We were hunting it," the boy said.

"Heretics?" Scout asked in surprise.

"What? Heretics? Is that what you said?" the boy asked.

"What does that mean?" the girl asked.

Scout's mind was racing. They said they were hunting a monster, but they had apparently never heard of "Heretics" in the context of "monster hunters." What did that mean? Scout shook off her confusion. She'd have to worry about it later. "What did it look like?" she asked.

"The monster?" the girl asked. Scout nodded. "It was tall, thin," the girl began shakily. "It had clawed hands, and…and no face. Just a giant mouth full of teeth." She shuddered, and the boy threw an arm over her shoulder and pulled her closer until she was calm again.

Then, the boy said, "Actually, we have a photo." He pulled a picture out of his coat and showed it to Scout in the light of a flashlight. Unfortunately, the picture was blurry and vague and didn't add much detail. Scout thought of all the Strangers she had heard of or learned about, but she couldn't think of any that fit that exact description or looked quite like what she saw in the picture. Or, rather, the description and image were vague enough that she could think of a number that could possibly fit. She'd have to talk to Sands about it later.

Scout crouched down to examine the tree the girl had come out of. As far as she could tell, the hole was completely closed up with no sign it had ever been there. She even tried pushing some magic into it just to see if anything would happen, but nothing did.

Oh well. She should at least get a record of the area. Keeping her back to the other two so they couldn't see what she was doing, Scout pulled a small silver and violet orb about the size of a golf ball from her pocket. She manipulated the Panoptic Analysis Window System, or PAWS, setting it up to cloak and scan the area within a five-foot diameter of her location, going all the way to the top of the tree, before returning to her pocket. If there was a clue she was missing, they would be able to examine it later.

Once the PAWS had cloaked, Scout turned back around and saw the other two looking at her curiously. "Closed," she said, gesturing at the missing opening in the tree.

"Yeah. Thank God I got back before it closed, or I'd still be stuck on the other side," the girl said.

"Other side?" Scout asked.

"It was like a slimy, disgusting version of the forest we're in, with little floating…seeds or something in the air. And the monster was there eating a deer we saw it take."

There was an awkward silence when the girl finished her account. As with any awkward situation Scout found herself in, this awkwardness multiplied inside her brain until she could do nothing but stand there and think about how awkward this was.

"So, who are you, and why were you in the woods to hear me yelling?" the boy asked. Scout found that now that the urgent task of gathering information was done, she found it nearly impossible to speak up. Finally, she managed to say one word.

"Reporter."

Thankfully, the girl was apparently able to piece together what she meant from the word and the school uniform. "Are you a reporter for a school newspaper or something?" Scout felt a bit hesitant to lie, but she still nodded. "And you came out here at night all alone?" Scout gave a helpless little shrug before realizing what the second part of the question had been. She shook her head and pointed at her best guess for her sister's direction.

"Sister."

"Your sister's out here too?" The girl said. Scout nodded.

"We should go find her. It's not safe," the boy said. Scout laughed a little internally at the thought that these Bystanders would be able to protect her sister, but didn't object. Finding her sister seemed like a good idea. And anyway, she wasn't entirely sure these were Bystanders. The Bystander Effect still didn't seem to have modified their memories. They didn't trigger her Stranger sense, but not every Stranger did. On the other hand, they looked human, so Scout thought it was more likely that they were somehow Heretics who didn't know anything about the Knowledge. The only times Scout had heard of the Bystander Effect taking this long to work on Bystanders was when they were still actively experiencing an abnormal situation, such as being flown around on a spaceship, but nothing like that was happening here as far as she could tell. They were just walking through the woods! Scout already had her senses peeled for any hint of her sister, but she made sure to pay attention to any potential danger as well.