Chapter Eight: The Pool

Being left alone with Nancy and Jonathan after Steve's bombshell is not how I intended to spend my afternoon. Having a crisis of faith because of D&D is not how I intended to spend any afternoon.

"We're here to ask you about that photo," Nancy begins. I'm taking the shortbread out of the pantry when we hear the slamming of car doors and the Camaro's unmistakeable roar.

"Is that . . ?" Jonathan says, and I'm rushing past him, through the entrance hall, bursting onto the porch into the bracing chill to see the Camaro take a right at the end of the drive. I cast around for Steve, who's nowhere to be seen. He must be with Billy.

I know where they're going. I know why they're going. I make my decision in a moment. I step back into the house and shut the door before Nancy and Jonathan can make it onto the porch. "What's happening?" she demands.

"Nothing," I reply. "It's fine. Seriously, don't worry about them. Let's go to the kitchen, I'll explain what Steve told us."

I've avoided Morell once today. I will avoid him again. Steve and Billy can handle themselves. The police will no doubt be en route if Morell has escaped. No use me kicking up a fuss, besides I don't think I could if I tried. I have no strength left. That half hour on the prairie has sapped me. My attempts at understanding, at consolidating, were far from enlightening.

God is real. So is the devil. But a Mind Flayer? Is that the shape the devil really takes – a big shadow monster from an alternate reality that possesses kids? I guess that could be a manifestation of him. The Bible says he comes to kill, steal, and destroy, that he sends his demons to possess people and drive them mad. Maybe there's something in Revelation about this, something our current understanding of the spiritual realm doesn't include. God and His universe are too big and mysterious to be fully understood by human minds, after all. People used to think that disease came from vapours when it was really bacterial infection. Who knows? Maybe Hell is a place full of weird spores and the devil is a giant shadow trying to take over our world.

Also, wasn't it, like, twelve-year-olds who named it the Mind Flayer? I bet the Pope, or a Tibetan monk, or someone before D&D was created, would have interpreted a giant alternate dimension monster differently. It's all a matter of context.

Thus ran the frantic pace of my thoughts as the chill set in and seeped through and I shivered until Nancy and Jonathan arrived. I slogged along the furrow I had made in the snow and a single Bible verse came to mind, and it brought comfort of a hard, absolute kind.

Everything under Heaven belongs to me.

And so consoled in a place of heavy acceptance, worn through and half-frozen, I gave up understanding and fell back on years' worth of training in friendly helpfulness, learnt from school and church and Mrs Moore. It keeps me moving without thinking too hard. Cups of peppermint tea and the shortbread Mr Smith left in my pantry are distributed. Nancy rubs Jonathan's back when they sit side by side, a move as easy as breathing. I sip tea and it burns my tongue.

First, before getting to the elephant of Billy's comment, the niceties of semi-strangers entering a person's home for the first time must be addressed.

Ahem. What's up with the haunted house vibe?

It's easy to rattle off the history of the place – built in 1882 by W.J. Morell, headmaster of Hawkins College before the scandal, bought by my parents in the fifties and restored to its late 19th century glory, yada yada yada.

I chatter about long-held and long-dismissed renovations ideas. "First I want to clear out all the downstairs rooms. I'll keep the piano and the dining room furniture. Everything else will end up in a bonfire." The armrest of the loveseat snaps in a flurry of sparks in the fireplace. "Then it will be the harder job of cleaning and sanding off the old varnish. I won't be able to paint until spring when it's warm enough for the paint to dry."

"What are you hoping to do with it once it's renovated?" asks Nancy.

"Hope Mom and Dad don't come back and disown me?" My chuckle is forced and they know it and I chew shortbread to push past the awkwardness. It doesn't work. My retreat into forced hospitality is failing.

Nancy's thin face gets more pinched. She and Jonathan share a look that I've seen a thousand times – the one of abject curiosity but enough social grace to know asking about my parents' abandonment is not polite.

"It's all right," I dismiss. "I haven't heard from them in years." Ten years, yesterday, to be exact.

"I don't think I ever met your parents," Nancy says carefully. "They own hotels, don't they?"

"Strange Places," I affirm. "Novelty themed." And very lucrative if the newspapers and magazines in the school library are telling the truth, not that I've ever seen a cent of it.

"What were they like?" Jonathan queries, jumping on his girlfriend's bandwagon.

"Can't really remember." Distant. Cold. Spent more time talking to project managers and listening to classical music than paying attention to whatever Kato and I were doing. Kato joined debate teams and wrote essays about world politics and society's downfall, while I went to church camps and sang in the choirs and read as many books as I could get my hands on. Our few intersections as siblings were presenting ourselves if ever guests came and expected to see the children in a family of four.

If I was unhappy, I didn't know it. The church ladies gave me hugs and the pastors told me God had a bright future in store and the kind middle-aged men asked me whether I'd lost another tooth yet. Jermaine and I spent hours watching true crime documentaries at his house. Kato didn't comment on my stealing books from his shelves that were too old for a child. I was eight – I was proud of my parents for working hard and trusting Kato and I to be more or less independent despite being far too young. They were out of the house a lot, tripping around the country to find new projects. It was the way of life. No one ever told me there was anything wrong with it.

Then it did go wrong – really wrong – and there was nothing I could do about it.

I remember they left the week before Thanksgiving. Kato told me later the trip was to see an old hotel in the Rockies, built in the twenties but left to decay because of the rash of unfortunate accidents on the property. It was a step up from their usual ventures in old property restorations, which had been focused on private homes up to then. Being eight, this meant nothing to me. What mattered was that their trip kept going, and going, and going.

Thanksgiving was spent with the Moores. Christmas came and went, marked only by my singing in the church choir for the morning service. I missed the church New Year's party and Kato was in Indianapolis with his friends. As the clock ticked past midnight into 1975, I huddled in a cocoon of blankets and listened to Mom and Dad's old house groan. Something terrible must have happened to them. The hotel collapsed, they're trapped in rumble, snow tumbling upon the debris and freezing their bodies and they will be trapped, like cavemen, to be unearthed a hundred years later by journalists.

That was the night I first believed they died in those blasted Rockies. I have believed it with half my heart ever since, despite glossy six-page spreads in Restoration Digest.

We received a letter a few days into January that Kato abruptly burned, along with every photo of my parents – and there weren't many, it wasn't in keeping with the house's aesthetic to have family portraits on the walls – and locked the doors on the second floor. "They're not coming back," he told me.

"Are they dead?" I whispered.

"It would be better if they were."

He never expanded on that and his look of loathing stopped me ever asking. I unlocked the second floor bedroom door once, a week after he left, to collect some of our mother's clothes, and then relocked it and never went back in.

Time kept ticking. Mr Smith came with our groceries. Jermaine Clutha's parents, or the Moores, or Kato, with our father's abandoned VW Beetle, gave me rides to school and to church until I was strong enough to bike the fifteen miles. On the face of it, not much changed besides me learning to do the washing and the cooking and the cleaning a little earlier than my classmates, and the Moores told the old chief of police that they would keep an eye on us, and then Hopper when he arrived in '76. The biggest change was when the Moores hit eighty in 1979 and the routine switched from them coming to ours after church to me going to theirs. Just me. Kato had debating tournaments most weekends.

Four years passed, Kato was eighteen, had a scholarship to Harvard, and hated the house, hated Hawkins, hated everything. He hated it all so much, he drove the Beetle nine-hundred and thirty-three miles to Cambridge and never came back. He told me I would be fine, that the Moores would take care of me, that I was happier in Hawkins anyway, with my church and my school and Jermaine Clutha. That I'd been too young to remember Mom and Dad properly, so it wasn't the same for me as it was for him.

But I remember you.

No letter came. No phone call. I locked his room and half-believed he crashed the Beetle somewhere in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Connecticut or the steps of Harvard and six years have passed and I wonder if I am dead too, sometimes.

Maybe there is a noose in our attic and I used it years back and I'm the ghost of the haunted house and if I faded away and disappeared it would be as natural a thing as the seasons turning, the sun sliding across the sky, as old ideas vanishing in the face of the new. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Billy won't fade. He's the fire and the storm of Mount Sinai, he's life in all its intensity distilled into flesh. While I haunt my black mansion and let Jermaine cover up my walls and stare at death in guilt's leaden grip, he screams and fights and carves a place in the universe where he is undeniable. He's the most alive person I've ever met.

I sigh and sip my tea and sigh again because the cracked mug is empty and my tongue is raw and I am, as ever, alone.

Apart from God, comes the old refrain, but it doesn't bring the comfort, that welling of peace in my spirit, and that's the worst part of all this. He might be Ruler of All, but I want my Abba-Father.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.

"Asher? Asher, the phone."

"Oh. One moment." I swallow the glutinous mouthful of shortbread I've been rolling around in my mouth and head into the entrance hall. The hysterical cry of the phone echoes around the house, bounces off the rails and clanging against the ceiling. It's a relief to cut it off. "Hello?"

"Ash-er?" The young voice breaks my name into two hesitant syllables.

"Yes? Who is this?"

"Eleven."

I balk, swear internally, glance at the ceiling and think, Everything under Heaven includes psychic girls made from MK-Ultra, right?

". . . Oh," I say.

"Billy's in trouble. He needs help."

I have enough wit to castigate myself. I should have gone after them. "What kind of trouble?"

"He's been taken. Bad man. Yellow eyes. Looks like a skel-ling-ton." She says this last word slowly, testing it out, and I've figured out who she's talking about before she pronounced the last syllable.

"Where are they?"

"It's green and wet and . . . gross."

I should have guessed. "Is Steve there too?"

"Yes."

"What is Morell doing to them?"

"The – green – is – moving," she explains haltingly and clearing up nothing.

Oh-kay. "Right, thanks. Nancy and Jonathan are with me and we'll go get Billy."

"What did she say?" comes from the kitchen, Nancy whispering to Jonathan.

"Can you let the chief know what's happening?" I continue, mindful of my guests coming into the entrance hall, watching.

"You don't need him."

I frown and hold up a hand to Nancy and Jonathan when she makes motions to speak. "I think we will," I tell Eleven. "If Morell has them, then he will need to be put back in prison."

"You will be enough."

"Me?"

"The blue says so."

Click.

Dial tone.

"What's going on?" Nancy demands.

"That was El," I reply, placing the weighty handset on its hooks.

"What?"

The blue says so? Is the blue like the moving green?

Confusion and are fear mingling, stealing my clarity, as I frown at the pale rectangle where W.J. Morell used to be and remember his grandson those crazed, black-veined eyes and his hands at my throat, gripping tighter. He must have some heavy duty drugs at work in him, to turn his veins black and get the jump on Steve, Billy, Tyler, Mikey, and Joe . . .

Oh.

"Asher!" Nancy appears in front of me. "What's going on?"

Four minutes and one very hurried summary of Steve and El's words, we're gunning it towards the eastern pine stand.

"Superhuman strength and black veins. It has to be him. How is he back!? El closed the gate!"

"I don't know! Will better be safe. I should have rung home, checked on him, but he'll be at the arcade."

He and Nancy carry on their one-sided conversations with each other, grim, serious expressions. I can see the glint of memory in Jonathan's eyes through the rear vision mirror. It's what I expect to see in a veteran's face – have seen in articles on vets coming back from Vietnam. Their voices are capped with steel, tempered in disillusionment. Soldiers heading to the front lines once more, facing the next wave from an old enemy.

I'm in the backseat, gripping my seatbelt with both hands and sinking. It's getting harder to stay present. Twelve and three, face down, being absorbed by the algae and the muck to become of that ghastly ecosystem that had taken over the lowest floor of the College's east wing. A blue coat and fluffy hair and a fading black eye and a smirk that's seen the world and finds it ridiculous, and they're sinking too. Please, God, don't let them die. Don't take anymore from me, not this time.

I can't ignore the sour taste of doubt in the back of my throat.

The pine stand swallows us and tall, dead-looking trunks march by in endless columns. "Everything under Heaven," I murmur, the syllables condensing and fuzzing and the world beyond the car blurs. "Everything under Heaven." Drops of water beads together and run in rivulets down the glass, slicing through the haze. On the other side is the manic garden of Hawkins College.

Please, please.

.

"Hargrove. Hargrove, you asshole, wake up."

Billy groans. "Geez, drop the Hargrove thing already, would you? It reminds me of my old man." He jerks his head forward, off Steve's shoulder and nearly swoons in the effort, black swarming over his vision. It takes a few moments for the fuzz to retreat and for the weird, moist world to come into view. He wishes it hadn't – he could have lived an entire lifetime without seeing this cave of mould and moss and the stagnant water. But he can't pass out again, not with the stench of rot acting like smelling salts.

He and Steve are tied back to back, the pool between them and the main doors. There are locker room doors off to the side and high windows that let in grey light that does nothing more than feed the vegetation. This is beyond foul. Every time he breathes, he feels as if he's sucking down a miasma of bacteria. "Where's he brought us?" he says in disgust. What are they sittingin? Billy shoves that thought out of his mind as soon as it appears but now he can't ignore the frigid water seeping into his jeans.

"I think – I think this is the place where they found Joe and Mikey."

Because of course it is. "What's he doing?"

Steve looks towards the locker rooms. There, gripping the cracking, stained edge of the pool, Morell leans forward to gaze into the murk. He speaks in a manic whisper that the algal water soaks up before it reaches Billy and Steve. If Billy didn't know any better, he'd say the psycho was praying. He's acting like some sort of skeletal seer.

"Think the pool's gonna tell him to let us go?" says Steve in an attempt at levity.

Billy's head hurts too much to try and match him. "Don't get your hopes up," he slurs. "He's going to chuck us in."

"Aren't you a ray of sunshine? How's your head?"

"How'd you know?" Billy might be feeling nauseous and rattled, but he has enough of his wits to remember that Steve was unconscious before Billy's head got slammed into a fountain.

"You bled all over my shoulder."

"Oh." Should he apologise? He's aware of Steve's warmth against his back, of every shift of muscle, the old rope around their chests binding them together. He's also become Steve, not Harrington, and Billy puts that down to his fuzzy, messed up thinking and not the fact that Steve isn't such a bad guy to be stuck in this bloody pool with. Better than his Cali mates or Tommy Hagan.

Why not? Now's as good a time as any. "I'm sorry for beating your face in."

Steve doesn't reply and Billy realises he hasn't listened. He's been watching Morell. "The pool's glowing," Steve hisses.

It is. Bluey-white lights move under the top layer of algae and throw weird, shifting silhouettes on the walls and ceiling. Bioluminescent bacteria? Deep sea fish? The Mind Flayer? Anything's possible. Morell's eyes shine in rapture.

Moss doesn't do that, Billy thinks. All over the room the moss is converging, twisting into vines that emerge from the algae and spread across the tiles and up the walls and through the high windows. Billy wouldn't believe his eyes, but he can hear them moving, with a horrible squelching sound that makes him want to throw up. Where the moss drags itself into creating a vine, luminescent spores explode into the air. Soon the whole room is full of them, floating and spinning around each other like so many tiny galaxies.

The moss under Steve and Billy shifts. It breaks apart and slides into vines on either side of them. The glistening creepers are as thick as Billy's leg.

"Oh, God, not again," Steve moans. The rope pulls tight around Billy. Steve is trying to break free. It's not going to work. Morell used the same length of rope for their chests, ankles, and wrists, creating a binding as effective as a straitjacket. Unless Steve turns out to be a talented contortionist, they're not getting out of this one. Besides, that blow to the back of the head has drained Billy of his strength, he couldn't make a run for it if he tried. Typical. The moment his life starts turning around, he's helpless again, at the mercy of a madman, and probably going to die.

Morell stands up at last. He walks across the tiles, stepping over the vines in the absent-minded way of a sleepwalker. "He's ready for you," he says.

The green pool heaves.

.

"I wish I had my camera right now," says Jonathan. All three of them have to pause to take in the monstrosity of Hawkins College. My watch tells me it's only just past three, and yet darkness is falling, the sky quickly dimming. The wind is picking up too, the temperature dropping fast. This is blizzard weather. In November.

"Not the time, Jonathan," says Nancy. Both of them are steady, brave in the face of danger. Nancy has a gun Jonathan kept in his glovebox. He has the nail bat they took from the trunk of Steve's car. The Camaro is a few feet away, parked directly in front of the steps of the school and abandoned. Trails in the snow lead from the side of the car and out from the depths of the garden and head towards the east wing.

I press my hands to my face and pretend I have courage. I've been here before. I saved Tyler. I'm not alone. I can do this.

There's a demonic creature trying to take over the world and it's possessed Morell and is using him to kill young men for some plan to rebuild the world.

I can't do this.

What waits inside, Mind Flayer, demon, devil, whatever it is, I don't believe I can defeat it. Even with Nancy and Jonathan wielding their weapons and El's You will be enough I don't believe.

But Billy's in there. I'm sick of losing people.

I heft the petrol container and the lighter that are to be my weapons, found in the generator hutch and the kitchen drawer respectively. I don't pray. Everything under Heaven belongs to me. If so, then whatever happens next belongs to Him too.

"Let's go," I say. "There's a bridge around the side. We can get to the pool from there."

We run, past a bench smothered by a monstrous azalea and past the massive white quoins, around the side of the main building where a rusting fire escape leads from the top storey all the way to the cracking cobbles. The east wing stretches out before us, thrusting into the forest. We find the break between the wings where a bridge connects them at the second storey. At the other end of the small alley is a glimpse of the white tundra of the quadrangle, where girls once ate lunches and played games and escaped from the stone and their headmaster for a few precious minutes in the sun. It's a desolate plain now, and the trails of Steve and Billy's feet take a right at the end of the alley and skirt the edge of the east wing. There must be another entrance to the pool that way, unless Steve and Billy aren't in the pool at all.

"Wait here," I murmur, and I scurry around to the corner of the alley and peer across the quadrangle. The wind is blocked by the main building here and a plain of lumpen white stretches from one wing to the other, hiding the weeds and rubbish and leaf litter that has accumulated over the years. Over by the west wing, the old science block, whole desks have been thrown through the windows to crash upon the paving stones. By the east wing, the twin lines made by Steve and Billy's feet scrape along the length of the building before disappearing into the furthest door. Into the pool.

I pull back and relay the details to Nancy and Jonathan.

Nancy debates for two seconds, then decides, "We use the bridge. We don't want to spring a trap if Morell's set one."

The metal rubbish bin I used as a step the last time I came here is still in place under the bridge. Nancy goes first, then Jonathan after he tosses the bat up to her, and finally me after they relieve me of the petrol for a minute. It's an easy climb, grasping the freezing bars and railing and vaulting over onto the rotting wood of the bridge. The whole thing creaks. The door into the east wing is ajar.

I lead the way, clicking on the flashlight that I've been given ownership of. Considering I've been here before and that in a moment of sudden danger, Nancy and Jonathan with their melee weapons need both hands to react faster, it makes sense for me to carry it. Me uncapping a petrol can lid, tossing the foul liquid on the assailant, then trying to get close enough to set them on fire with a stove-top lighter while not doing the same to myself is not a first-attack plan.

Panic makes us speed walk through the obstacle course of the long hallway – we crunch over the threads of ivy creeping from room to room, and jump the fallen portraits of intimidating men and women whose names have been forgotten, and skirt the chairs and desks and shelves that vandals have thrown from the classrooms. Graffiti appears in shocking technicolour in the flashlight's beam. It's as cold within as it is outside, just how I remember it from Saturday night, though there is a tad more light to see by coming in through the windows of the empty classrooms. Nancy and Jonathan stick as close to me as they can, weapons at the ready.

Then comes the narrow stairs. It's like stepping into some dead monster's throat – dank and close and smelling almost of flesh. It's mould and dust and damp, I know, but I can't stop my mind running wild. The smell gets stronger the further we descend and starts to coat my tongue. We drown in it. Breath rasping, we reach the corridor that leads to the pool and hear Billy and Steve hollering to high heaven. A strange blue glow emits from the windows of the pool doors and spills through the corridor. That wasn't there last time.

Is this the blue that told El I would be enough? Has she led us into a trap?

Every fibre in my body says to run. That to go into that pool means death, and though I know death means going home, I am shaking. I don't want to die. God, please, don't let me die.

"Just fucking try it!" Billy screams and is cut off with a strangled yelp.

Jonathan and Nancy sprint for the doors, me hot on their heels, and we burst in the grotto of the pool. Billy and Steve are there, on the other side of the pool, Morell's hands tight on Billy's throat. All three look over at us. In the dim, the blood pouring from the back of Billy's head is black and thick and stains his mullet. And yet that tableau is not what makes me gasp.

"Not again," says Nancy.

I immediately slap my hand over my mouth and nearly brain myself with the flashlight. Strange, glowing spores swirl around us and batter our faces. They do not look healthy, nor does the creature rising out of the pool.

No doubt Dustin or Mike or Will or Lucas would have some D&D name for this thing – Cthulhu or Kraken or whatever. I'm more inclined to Eleven's explanation – the moving green.

The algae has somehow coalesced into a monster of vines and blue light and dripping slime that squats in the pool. It hears Nancy and slides towards us, sucking up more blooms of algae as it approaches. The pool ripples and sloshes at the movement and sends up the smell of the mould and damp and dust and a hundred other throat-searing, choking odours that lodge in my lungs and nose and the backs of my eyes and refuse to move. I hack into my sleeve, eyes streaming. I look down.

"The vines!" I cry, voice breaking.

Too late. The vines hook around Jonathan and Nancy's ankles and yank them off their feet. They scream. Nancy's head cracks on the tiles, knocking her out instantly. I leap for her, fumbling and letting go of the petrol can, but the vines are too fast. They whip Nancy and Jonathan away to either side of the pool and haul them up the walls where more vines circle around their ankles, their waists, their throats, and hold them there. Jonathan shouts obscenities and the vine at his throat tightens until he's silent. Another crushes his wrist. The nail bat clatters to the floor. Other vines twitch and send both the bat and the dropped gun skittering into the pool water.

An acrid scent makes me grimace. The petrol can popped its lid and its contents spill onto the floor and over my boots, useless except to make me light headed. There goes that plan. Not that it would have worked, really. It's too damp in here, the air too foul and torpid. A fire would be a miracle.

Water slops over the edge of the pool and mingles with the petrol. The monster is here.

It looms, higher and higher, pool water spilling off it as it grows into a mound of green and glowing blue. The unearthly light emits from deep within it and pierces through areas of thinner algae and sludge, yet it has no face, no eyes that I can see. Waves of freezing, stinking air flow from it and chill me to the bone. I shiver so hard I drop the flashlight. My teeth chatter against my cuff.

Is this evil? The paralysis, the cold, the sheer weight of the terror that blows all rational thought from your mind?

I can feel its polluted desire to destroy, to kill and kill and kill until everything is ruined and bitter and lifeless. And I know, as its glow brightens and I am so afraid I cannot breathe, that there must be a God. For surely this beast is the Devil.

Two stories, told many years ago in Sunday school, pop up unbidden – one of Daniel and his friends walking in the furnace with an angel. The other of Elijah calling the fire of God down to burn up the sodden wood on the altar and even the water in the trench around it.

"Asher, run!" Billy croaks through Morell's constricting fingers.

I fumble in my pocket and bring out the lighter and flick on its tiny yellow flame on the third try, a hint of blue sparking at its base. The vines react instantly and whip towards me and the ghastly emissary of the enemy throws itself forward, its dripping arms reaching towards me –

I drop the lighter in the petrol puddle at my feet.