Chapter 23

April 18, 1987

Kamchatka, Russia

Alexei's heart leapt when they brought in Joyce and the children, and then his stomach dropped when he remembered they must be prisoners too. The thing in his head hissed at the sight of the girl El. "Kill her," it said, and he could feel his hands starting to move against his will.

"No," he thought back. "This works better if they don't suspect anything." The thing seemed to take a moment to consider this, then pulled his lips into what felt like a ghastly smile. "So I see you have brought me some company," he said to Tanya. "You didn't need to go all the way to America."

"Forgive me if I doubted the sudden reawakening of your patriotism," she snapped back. "Any disobedience, and one of them gets a bullet. The woman will be last, so you get to watch her lose her children. Understood?"

"Perfectly."

The guards kept them in the lab while Tanya went off to sort out where they were going to keep a civilian and five children. Alexei was bursting with warnings he wanted to give them, but the thing in his head had no such desire – not to mention the fact that the guards wouldn't take kindly to them communicating in English. He worked on his machine and looked at them as little as possible, until the thing grew quiet. How fortunate that it didn't like physics. He debated what was most important to say. Could he explain the thing in his head, when he didn't even know what to call it? And what would they do with that information? There was only one piece he could give them that they could act on. He sat down at his desk, not far from them, and began tapping his left index finger while he worked. H-o-p-p-e-r-i-s-h-e-r-e. He couldn't get them out of this mess, but if Hopper managed to get free and get hold of a guard's Kalashnikov – it would probably still end in death, but they had the right to try to break free. He didn't for a second believe that the agents would let them go once their usefulness as hostages was over.

He noticed Will watching his finger and tapped the message again, then one more for good measure. The guard yelled at him to stop fidgeting, but he was confident Will had understood.

He returned to the equations he'd been pretending to work on and started to drift into the blissful world of numbers, until he heard tapping. He listened. T-h-e-M-i-n-d-f-l-a-y-e-r-i-s-h-e-r-e. Mindflayer. The thing in his head, he supposed. Will sensed it too. Joyce had said it had him once, so perhaps it had left a mark on him. He started to think what to tap back, but the lights flickered out. He looked up. Everyone was gone. The room was completely dark, and colder, with that terrible dust floating in the air. The thing, once again in his skin, stood in front of him. "We must build," it said, and when Alexei came to, it was clear who was in control.

The thing forced him to stand and walk over to Joyce and the children. He tried to protest, but the thing wasn't listening to him anymore. El was sitting on the floor, her head on Mike's shoulder. He knelt down beside them. El looked at him, confused and wanting some reassurance it would be all right. Just a child. He saw his hand reach out, though he didn't feel it. It wasn't his to command, no matter how much he screamed inside. The thing pushed Mike away and closed his hands around El's neck. Her eyes went wide. She clawed at him and tried to scream, but only gasped for air. The boys tried to pull him away, but the thing easily threw them off and into the wall. He focused his entire will on relaxing his hands. He couldn't stop it, but maybe he could release the pressure just enough that the child wouldn't die –

The guards grabbed him. The thing wrestled them off too, but it had to put enough effort into getting rid of them that it needed to release the pressure on El. She managed to get a hand on the side of his face. "This isn't you," she said in his head, and he agreed, but the thing didn't care. Then his mind left the present and they were all in the house in Buffalo, boiling and coloring eggs. The thing tried to pull him back, but she kept him anchored in memory. He was asking the children what the Easter Bunny's function was, and they were trying to explain. He let go of her neck, buried his face in his hands and screamed, or at least he thought he did. Was that now, or then, or something else? Pain ripped through his head, and he blacked out.