.
10.
Mike couldn't get back into Nicole's bedroom window. He should have been able to, but every time he ran enough momentum up the wall and pulled, his weight turned his arms to jelly. It was as if he still had Barbara's glasses in his hand. He must have tried twenty times by now. "Will," he said to the window. "Will, I'm back. Are you still here? I can't climb in."
Will's dark head and bright eyes appeared in the corner. "I've seen you climb way higher things."
"I'm having a bad memory from the pool and the body. From the upside down. It's stopping me."
"So put it over there."
"Huh? Put it where?"
"You know, over there. You know where." Will looked down at him curiously. "Haven't you done it before?"
"No."
"Oh. Okay, well, it doesn't really matter where you put the memory, just put it there so it's not here."
"Well I need to think of somewhere." Somewhere like a trash can, or the big dumpster behind the school, or the sewer. Mike wanted to flush it all down the toilet.
"How about the fort in your basement? Put it in there."
"But I like it there." Mike didn't want Elle sleeping next to Barb's dead body, not even in his imagination.
"Then you should definitely put it there. I put mine in Jonathan's room. The worst parts dissolve after a while."
"Really?"
"Trust me, I know what I'm doing." Will put his hand out. "Need a boost?"
"That's okay, I can do the rest myself."
Will got out of the way.
Mike closed his eyes and pulled the pool to the front of his head. He picked out the leech, the smell, the sponge, the vanilla pudding, the rolling eyeball, the glasses and the dry ice, and held a deep breath on them. He backed away a few paces, balled them all up between his hands as if he was crumpling a piece of wastepaper, ran toward the window, threw the ball of paper into the fort, and in a puff of surprise, Elle caught it and pulled the bedsheet down over the door with a soft Burrrrp.
Mike tipped over the sill and into the room with plenty of momentum to spare, so he just kept moving. He closed the bedroom door on the yelling, he took Will's blanket off the bed and stuffed it along the crack under the door, he closed the window and dropped the bamboo blind, then he took the shade off the lamp. The lamp was dark but still hot, so he used his sweater sleeve as an oven mitt to unscrew the bulb and switched it out with the safelight from the nightstand drawer. He turned it on, put it on the floor and turned off the overhead light. The room turned red, except for a crack of white light coming in from the top of the door. Not quite good enough.
"What are you doing?"
"Making a dark room." Mike took off Nancy's backpack and put it by the lamp on the floor.
"You got the camera?"
"Yeah." Mike loaded the typewriter with a new piece of paper from the stack beside it and put it on the floor with everything else. "You said there's room under there?"
"Lots."
A few strands of Mike's hair got caught when he climbed under the bed but he let them rip out and just kept going until he was on his belly next to Will with his tools within reach. He pulled the red light under the bed near their faces, turning Will into a squinting devil. When he took the camera from the bag he discovered there was no latch on the back where he imagined one would be. "Do you know how to open it?"
Will reached over, pushed a button on the bottom, turned a crank on the top left around and around until Mike felt a click, and then pulled the crank's lever up. The back popped open and there was the film, all rolled up and waiting for Mike to do something he had always been told he should never, ever do: he tugged the tab sticking out of the canister and began to unwind the roll.
Will shuffled close and leaned on Mike's shoulder so he could see. "Christmas," he said. "Please don't wreck these."
"I'm not going to wreck them." Mike had forgotten negatives were in the negative. It was hard to tell what he was looking at. There was a bright red Christmas tree on a black background, a freakishly dark-faced Will with red hair holding big present, a light table with dark dishes, Will's mom with red hair and black teeth, some kind of black slop falling off a spoon. Mike rushed through Christmas morning and a closeup of a red sphere with black reflections all over it, and came upon a sideways picture of Jonathan laying spaced out on a pillow. Someone else had been behind the camera for this one.
"What are you looking for, anyway?"
The message in Mike's pocket reminded him, secret. "Clues," he said. Proof.
The next one looked alarmingly normal―it was as red as the others, but it wasn't in the negative. Elle stood in the middle of the Byers' front porch with a hat on her head and a gas mask in her hand. Mike brought the tiny image of her face as close to his eye as his focus would let him. She looked a little upset, but she was okay. She was definitely okay. Not only was she alive, she was okay. He kicked his feet around to keep his Christmas joy off his face.
Following an image of a black cloudy moon in a red sky, there she was again, and again, and again, walking down an overgrown road in a series of blurry shots that looked like they had been taken blind. The rest of the film was blank, unused. It was over but Mike's feet kept on bouncing, toes to floor and heels to bed, whunk whunk whunk.
"Is that Eleven? She's in here with Jonathan?"
"Yeah." Now that the news was out Mike could finally smile, and once he started he couldn't stop. "Don't tell anyone about her, okay? It has to stay a secret."
Nodding groovily, Will eased the camera and the ribbon of film from Mike's hands and began rewinding. "I know how to talk to them. We can ask her to use her superpowers to get Nancy's gun back from those jerks so everyone can leave."
"Uh huh." Mike grabbed the typewriter, and a loud noise exploded in the living room.
Jonathan looked up to the haloed flashlight moon for an answer to a question he couldn't articulate. A simpler one replaced it: "If this works, will it send me back?"
"Maybe."
While he kept his hopes low on purpose, practicality reigned. "Don't go into my room like you used to. Not unless the music's on―loud, on the stereo. I have to be by myself most of the time. It's not personal, it's just me, okay? Promise?"
"Promise. Don't tell Will. Or Mom. Secret."
"Promise. And it's okay if you mess up."
Elle's throat rattled. "No it's not."
"Listen."
She understood that what Jonathan meant by 'listen' was 'look at me.'
"Are you sorry? Do you really mean it?"
"Yes."
"Then it's okay if you mess up. Do your best."
She nodded, put her hand on him and waited for him to scare himself.
"Will it hurt?"
"Yes."
The thing churned out a cicaida's call at that, so Jonathan embraced it. It weakened. She had probably just lied to scare him anyway. It died out completely. "This could take a while," he said.
The spring he was eight, Jonathan had found a cloud of squirming tadpoles in a flooded ditch far from his house. When he reached into the water they bumped jelly kisses all over his curious hand, so he played a while, making friends. He wanted to take some home to watch them turn into frogs but he didn't have anything to put them in, and as he sat there pondering his predicament he spotted their mother―at least, he imagined it was their mother, and he imagined that although she was only the size of a bottlecap she would still make a cool pet. He took off his sock to use it as a bag and nudged her into it, and tucked the cuff of the sock into his back pocket with the toe dangling out so she wouldn't get squished. Then he rode his rusty bike home and headed straight for the shed to find a bucket.
In the shed, he took the sock from his pocket and pushed the toe up into the cuff to check the inside. Something had gone wrong. A pink veiny jelly ball the size of the frog's head had gotten stuck to the fibers near her mouth. Her eyesockets were empty. He buried her in the woods. Nine years later he was still ashamed.
Jonathan put himself inside the sock, where he knew Elle's best would not be good enough. She was just a nervous kid, not a surgeon, more likely to turn him inside out than help him. She was going to rip his throat out in ragged strips. Jonathan was about to die spewing bloody geysers onto this rotting nowhere-floor, ushered away to nothingness by the sobbing of a young girl forever changed by an innocent mistake.
At least you know it's coming.
Nancy's arm shot out from the forest porthole so Jonathan grappled with the memory, seizing the opportunity to fight the tug of war all over again. He crushed Nancy's slimy little hand in his. He cracked her shoulder. The closing burrow pinched in, strangling her around the middle, so he pulled harder, so hard he snapped her spine, tore her in two, dumped her intestines into the dirt and fell back holding her, half of her, her torso lighter than a toy, her blood like hot soup spilled in his lap, her stuffing strung up to what was left of her in the hole, entrails melding into meaty moss and biosludge.
He couldn't apologize to her. She didn't even know she had been wronged. As the confusion in her eyes turned to glass the monster in his middle surged to an uproar, which was a promise that Elle could save his life, which meant he might have a chance to wrap Nancy up tight in his arms and legs and keep her safe and whole again someday, which filled him with a shining silence purer than kindness.
Jonathan had failed, utterly.
"I wish you kept it a secret," he said. "I'd be able to stay scared if I didn't know how it worked." He put his headphones back on to magnify what was left of the noise, to chase it, to feed it, but as he stoked it―because he stoked it―it wisped to silence, extinguished. Trying to be afraid was futile. Aside from his exhaustion, Jonathan felt better than he had felt all day. It was awful. "It's not working. I can't stay scared."
"AAAHHHH!" Elle screamed in his face at the top of her lungs. The startle whipped up a prickling hum which they promptly killed with infectious laughter. If only the problem had been hiccups.
"This is the worst thing that could ever happen to me," Jonathan said, giggling.
"Forget."
"I'm trying." How could he forget something like this? By dying and coming back to life again as someone else, maybe.
"Try again."
The moment the mortician lifted the sheet.
When the iron door trapped Will in the oven it exploded into flames.
He ran from the car to find his mom half-eaten beside the hole in the living room wall.
No, no, no. Each exercise frightened him less than the one before it and he saw beauty in every horror: in the marble veining of Will's counterfeit corpse, in the stark incomprehensibility of sudden loss, in the fact that his half eaten mom could only have died from a thousand defense wounds because while everybody was made out of meat, Joyce Byers was jerky.
None of it was real. Jonathan liked horror movies. He couldn't bluff his way through this one.
A similar catharsis had surprised him back when he and Nancy sliced their palms open to lure their mark. The butchering itself still screeched nails across his memory's slate, but a numb tranquility had settled through him as soon as it was done. The only thing bothering him while they wrung their seeping fists onto the rug had been the discovery that he had given Nancy the sharper knife.
Oh shut up, no you didn't. I just pushed harder than you did.
Jonathan stroked his scar where it stretched a tight parallel between headline and heartline, the way he did most nights to put himself to sleep. He had picked at the stitches incessantly while it healed, scolding himself and defying himself the whole way, drawing blood like it was some kind of achievement, and now it would never go away.
What would flighty Aunt Darlene think of this? Her eldest great nephew was a true palmist's mutant now.
How dismal―no life line at all. Be sure he doesn't jump off any bridges, will you? It's a miracle he left the womb. Oh! Well, pardon me Joyce, my mistake to presume you would be interested in the shape of your own child's soul.
He would have to show it to her, give her a second chance to read him, if they ever visited the home again.
As much as his fresh cut had stung while he wrapped Nancy's in gauze, it tickled at the same time. The lips of the split had opened and closed playfully while he worked, eating up his anxieties by giving him somewhere to put them, steadying his grip and his focus. Nancy must have felt the same way, or close to it―they had scheduled a man-eating beast to arrive any minute and yet they just sat there on the sofa playing doctor and holding hands.
How had he lost her? How had he gotten so close, and then lost her?
Stupid question.
By the time Steve came to bash the door down, they were―well, Jonathan had been about to―anyway, they had tested Nancy's theory and the blood hadn't baited anything into the house but a worried almost-ex boyfriend. Then Nancy threatened to blow Steve's head off for his own good, everyone was freaking out and that was when the living room turned bottom up―
Elle pulled her hand away.
Another whining startle in Jonathan's middle, another involuntary wave of relief to smother it. "Sorry." The housing over his ears made his voice stuffy in his head. "I haven't figured it out yet."
Elle scrambled to her feet, stalked to the hallway and stood there staring down it with her knees bent and her arm curved at her side. Her hand curled into a white-knuckled fist.
"Is something here?"
"No."
"What happened?"
When Eleven turned to look at him only her head moved, as if she was a doll, an angry automaton doll.
"Bad," she said.
Her arm straightened. Her thumb stuck out. The first two fingers uncurled from her fist, and she pointed them straight at Jonathan.
His headphones popped and hissed.
―nonononononono you stupid bitch how could you do that to her oh my god how could you shoot her my god you dumb bitch―
This time the whine kept on rising.
―you dumb bitch she just wanted to get him back you dumb bitch and you―you―you―you stupid pointless psycho bitch―
A knuckle cracked in Jonathan's stomach. Then another. A handful. A firing squad. A plague of locusts.
―you bitch you bitch you bitch you bitch you fucking bitch oh my God Nancy―
He whipped his headphones to the floor. They smashed to pieces before Steve could become an ant in a tin can.
Eleven had already walked away.
Jonathan tipped forward from the wall, landed on his elbows and crawled for the door as though he could leave the broken monster in the corner behind him, but it only chased him off his elbows and onto his face. It licked flames into his nostrils and raged against the backs of his eyes, shaking his vision, smearing it with grease.
He coughed to jar his voice back to the right frequency.
Elle. Now. I'm scared now.
It didn't work.
god how could you shoot her my god you dumb
He had to get away from this tireless thing, from this hopeless, hateful, howling thing, but it was already inside his brain.
'You risked your life! And Nancy's!'
Jonathan couldn't think. He was shaking through a seive.
'What if this thing took you too?'
He was dissolving.
I wanted to tell you, I jus―
The weight of the cave pressed down on his shoulders, cozy and permissive, and evil.