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"Small Town"

But I've seen it all in a small town

- John Mellencamp

The bell jangled as the door closed behind Hopper, but Joyce had already forgotten him, her attention on the pile of magnets on the floor. Why would they be on the floor? No one had brought a little kid into the store this morning—except for Hopper, no one other than herself had been in the store at all this morning. And the magnets hadn't been on the floor when she opened up. So how had they fallen?

Something was nagging at her, some other time when she'd had to pick up magnets from the floor. Just recently, too.

She hunkered down in front of the pile of magnets, picking one up and putting it back on the board. But it didn't stick, falling with a plastic clatter back to the floor. She tried another, and another, but none of them worked anymore. They had all been—de-magnetized. Was that the right word? And what could have happened to do that, especially to all of them at once?

The hairs prickled on the back of her neck. It was mysterious, and Joyce had grown to be very suspicious of anything mysterious. Her first thought was Will. She should call him, make sure he was okay.

Standing up, Joyce frowned down at the pile of magnets. She was overreacting. This was silly. Why should she worry about Will because of a bunch of magnets?

But the other times—those hadn't been overreactions. They hadn't been silly. Will had really been in danger. And the last time she'd seen magnets on the floor, she remembered now, had been in her house. In her house, where so many weird and awful things had already happened.

That decided her. She put the "Back in Ten Minutes" sign on the door and hurried to the library, where she fumbled with the card catalog. Magnets. Electromagnetics? She pulled a bunch of books off the shelf and checked them out, ignoring the raised eyebrows of the elderly librarian.

Staggering back to Melvald's under her pile of books, she mouthed to herself what she was sure the librarian was saying to her friends on the phone. "'That Joyce Byers, she's at it again. Electromagnetics, this time. I'm surprised she could spell it.'" God, she had to get out of this town. What would it be like to live somewhere that no one knew her?

Grabbing a notebook off the shelf and a pen from the cup at the register, she opened the books and proceeded to spend the next several hours trying to teach herself electromagnetics. It felt like banging her head against a brick wall. Where was Will when you needed him, or his buddies? Bob could have explained all this in a minute, she thought, missing him fiercely. But that wasn't going to get her anywhere, and neither was this pile of books she didn't understand. What was going to get her somewhere was finding a person who could explain them to her. A person like … Mr. What'shisname, Will's science teacher, Mr. Clarke. Yes. The kids loved that guy; he always took the time to listen to them and explain.

By this time, it was well past her lunch hour, so Joyce felt no guilt at all for putting up the "Out to Lunch" sign and peeling out of her parking space.

She felt a little strange marching up to the door of a man she didn't know carrying a pile of books she couldn't follow, but if the past few years had taught her nothing else, she had learned she couldn't stop just because she felt strange. Actually, that was usually the time to work harder.

There was no answer at the doorbell, so she shouted, "Hello?", rearranging the increasingly heavy stack of books in her arms.

She could hear music coming from somewhere inside the house, so she kept ringing the bell, knocking, and calling out, but no one came. Defeated at last, Joyce walked back to her car. Behind her, the garage door started rolling open, and she turned, shading her eyes, to see Will's science teacher standing there, in shorts and a T-shirt and some kind of weird headgear, music blaring from behind him. "Hello?" Joyce said again doubtfully.

He lifted the eyepiece on the headgear. "Mrs. Byers?"

Joyce waved at him nervously. "I … don't suppose you have a few minutes to talk about magnets, do you?"

Fortunately for her, he did, and was more than happy to. They went into the garage, which she noticed was filled with miniatures—a model train set, as well as some of the same kinds of things the kids used for D&D. No wonder they liked him so much.

"Tell me what has you so interested in electromagnetics today, Mrs. Byers."

"Oh, Joyce, please. And it's … well, it's a little—it's the magnets. The ones at my house, and then the ones at the store. They fell down. And they wouldn't go back up."

"Demagnetized?" He looked interested.

"Right. Well, the ones at the store were. The ones at home went back on the fridge."

"Huh. And this happened at the same time?"

"No, two different days."

"I see. And you want to know why."

"Right."

"Okay. Let's see, where to start …" He paged through a couple of the books, and then started explaining. She was relieved that he seemed to understand how to do it simply without making her feel like an idiot.

After a little while, he said, "Maybe I can demonstrate. Do you know what a salmanoid is?"

"A what?"

Mr. Clarke smiled. "Okay. I'll build one, and then you'll know." He brought out an old metal lunchbox and started wrapping wire around it.

"What is this thing again?"

"This is a salmanoid. It's a coil, wrapped around a metallic core, and when electricity passes through it—"

Joyce knew this part. She had learned it today. "It creates an electromagnetic field."

"Exactamundo. Now, for the fun part. Shall we?"

She nodded.

He reached for a switch and flipped it. Nothing seemed to happen, and Joyce looked at him in confusion. She waved her hand over the lunchbox a couple of times, but there was nothing there. "I don't see anything."

"Nope. You can't see it, but it's there, I assure you. Our very own Clarke-Byers electromagnetic field. Pretty neato, huh?"

"Yeah."

"And this field affects any charged object within its vicinity."

"Just like my magnets."

"Just like your magnets!"

"Okay." She looked at the lunchbox again. "Why is nothing happening?"

"Oh, because our field is stable," Mr. Clarke explained. "But, if we reduce the current—" He turned a dial, and all the magnets fell off the lunchbox.

Joyce picked one up and tried to put it back, but it wouldn't stay. Demagnetized. "How?"

"The magnetic dipoles tried to orient according to the field, but since its—"

"No, I mean, how is this happening at my house?"

"You want my honest opinion?"

She nodded.

"One of your kiddos got up in the middle of the night, bumped into the fridge, and knocked the suckers loose."

"And the magnets at Melvald's?"

"Apophenia."

"Apo-what-owa?"

"Apophenia." He waved his hands, looking for the words to explain. "You're seeing patterns that aren't there. Coincidence."

"But what if … it's not?" This was what she had really come here to find out. If something new, something disturbing, was coming back to Hawkins, she needed to know about it, to understand it.

"Well …" Mr. Clarke frowned thoughtfully, taking the question as the thought experiment he believed it was. "Theoretically speaking, I suppose some large version of this AC transformer could exist. A machine, of some kind."

"A machine?"

"But in order to reach your house and downtown, gosh, that would take billions of volts of electricity and cost tens of millions of dollars."

"But … it is possible."

He smiled. "We cured polio in '53. Landed on the moon in '69. As I tell my students, once you open up that curiosity door, anything is possible."

Which was exactly what Joyce had been afraid he was going to say.