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"In Too Deep"

All that time I was searching, nowhere to run to, it started me thinking

Wondering what I could make of my life, and who'd be waiting

Asking all kinds of questions, to myself, and never finding the answers

Crying at the top of my lungs, and no one listening

- Genesis

When a knock came at the door, Joyce hurried to open it, to send whoever it was away before … well, she didn't know what could happen, and she didn't want to. She could hear Mike calling through the door, but was surprised when she opened it to see that he was alone. Usually they were all together, Mike and Dustin and Lucas.

"Hey, Mike."

"Is Will here?" He seemed agitated. She didn't want to distress him further by telling him about Will.

"You know what, now's not a very good time," she told him.

"Is he okay?"

Joyce hesitated. But Mike had been through enough. He didn't need to know about this new development, and she wasn't sure she wanted anyone to know what had happened to Will. Deciding, she slipped out the door, closing it behind her. "You know, he just isn't feeling well. He's laying down, so I—I'll tell him you stopped by, okay," she said, all but pushing him off the porch with a gentle hand on his shoulder.

But Mike wasn't to be sent off so easily. He stood there watching her as she went back to the door. "It's about the Shadow Monster. Isn't it?"

She stopped to look at him. Mike was taller than she was now, she realized. He had grown up so much over this past year. The loss of Eleven, with whom he had clearly had a special bond, the terrible things they had all gone through … all of it had fallen nearly as hard on Mike's shoulders as it had on Will's, and he hadn't had his parents to talk to about it. Nancy had helped, some, Joyce believed, but Nancy had her own troubles coming to terms with the death of her friend Barbara.

Maybe Mike needed someone to trust him, to let him do something. Maybe Joyce needed the help of someone who understood, someone Will trusted.

"Yes," she told him. "It's about the Shadow Monster. It—it got him."

"I can help. I want to help."

Joyce nodded. "I think maybe you can." She brought Mike into the house with her, and left Will to tell him what had happened, exactly, suspecting that Will would be more comfortable telling the details to Mike than he had been telling them to her.

The day drew to a close, night falling. Jonathan wasn't home, which Joyce wondered about. She wished she could call him and tell him what had happened to Will, ask him to come home from whatever he was doing. And Hopper hadn't come back, either, and wasn't answering his phone. She had only called the police station once, to learn that he hadn't been there since he'd left her house earlier, muttering something about vines. Vines?

Will had kept drawing; the pictures were all over the house now, and there were still more of them. She looked at a stack, picking up the top picture and carrying it around, looking to see where it might fit. Finally she found the empty spot for it in her bedroom, taping it up in the blank space.

Mike was sitting with Will in his room, occasionally bringing out stacks of pictures, but mostly just talking to Will and being there for him. Joyce was grateful. She had called Karen to make sure it was okay if Mike stayed at her house, and had the impression that Karen was glad to have him away. Poor woman, she had no idea what had happened to her son, and likely wouldn't understand if she knew. Joyce wasn't sure who she felt more sorry for.

Hawkins Lab was long gone from the pumpkin field when Hopper pulled up to it. Didn't look like they had done much, really. Taken some of the rotted pumpkins away for testing, but he was sure they would say they hadn't found anything. Meanwhile … somewhere beneath this soil lay the network of vines Will had drawn. All the lab's protestations that they were burning off everything that came into this world from the Upside Down had been just so much horseshit, apparently.

Hopper could have kicked himself for being so trusting all this time, letting things build up literally underneath his feet.

He grabbed a shovel and carried it out into the middle of the field, trying to ignore the stench of the decayed pumpkins and the constant buzz of the flies around them. Then he started to dig.

It felt like he was there digging forever. The light went down, the sun nearly set, shadows advancing across the ruined field, and Hopper cursed himself for ten kinds of a fool. It was a pumpkin field. It was blighted. There was nothing more sinister here than that.

And then it happened—the shovel broke through dirt into … something else. The soil shifted beneath Hopper's feet and he nearly fell. He stabbed at the dirt with the shovel, hearing some kind of a sucking sound as it went in, and it left a sizable hole that went through the dirt to the other side.

He stepped back and chopped at the soil again and again and again, hearing that strange gurgle. It was almost as though the dirt was fighting with him, trying to tear the shovel from his hands, and he beat at it savagely.

Finally he had it open enough that a person could go through. That he could go through. It struck him that he was out here alone, that no one knew where he was—but he had to know what was going on, and the light was fading quickly. He would be in and out in just a few minutes, just check to see what was down there, he decided.

He did stop to get his flashlight before he went in, then he dropped through the hole into—a tunnel. A big one, big enough that he could stand up comfortably, and he was a tall man. It curved away from him in both directions, too. Someone or something had been working at this for a long time.

"Oh, Jesus," he muttered to himself, recognizing the white flakes floating in the air. The Upside Down. It was here, in Hawkins, and it was spreading.