On the TV screen, Lonnie Byers was dressed in his best clothes.
"I saw my ex-wife and my sons, Will and Jonathan, with that girl, and I am scared for them. This girl is clearly deranged, and dangerous. She can move things with her mind, for heaven's sake," he was saying on TV, unaware that said ex-wife and sons were watching him in disbelief and varying levels of animosity, "A few years ago, my youngest son went missing. I thought he was dead, but now it looks like his death was faked…by the very same girl who has taken control of Joyce, Jonathan, and Will. Who knows what she will make them do?"
"That…that….," Joyce almost screamed with rage, but luckily Jonathan had enough control to yank the TV remote out of her tightened grasp, and shut the stupid thing off. They had only turned it on to find out how things were going; all members of the Party had witnessed what El could do in the past, but they had never watched her use her powers as they had against Vecna, but they all knew the implications of what had happened, and it did not look good.
Several people in Lenora, some of whom were kids who'd attended the school El had been sent to, were talking about her; some of them were clearly trying to lie on live TV, saying she was weird, that she was deranged, and some of them had done their research and discovered that Hawkins seemed to be cursed with bizarre paranormal and Satanic acts; well, they now had a wonderful scapegoat to point their fingers to.
But, fortunately, some but not all of the kids who attended the school claimed El was a bad person; others said she was actually a really nice girl, very sweet, eager to please, and eager to make friends. But sadly their voices were drowned out especially when word spread about what El had done in the skating rink after Angela humiliated her which resulted in El retaliating and smashing that roller skate in Angela's face.
It didn't really surprise Will, who had been there and watched the whole thing, that they'd discovered the grisly business.
"How dare he?!" Joyce hissed like an angry cat as she paced up and down angrily when she had gotten her act together enough to speak coherently. "How dare he say that? He doesn't care about El, about us, he never has! He just wants to make a quick buck, and damn the consequences of who might suffer!"
"I'm just amazed by how quickly he jumped to do this," Jonathan commented wrapping his arms gently around his mother to calm her down.
But Robyn was confused. "I take it you knew that man?" She said, subtly asking for details.
"You could say that," Karen sighed, "that was Lonnie Byers, he's Joyce's ex-husband, and Will and Jonathan's father. I know, too much information, but just covering all the basics."
"He's a piece of scum," Ted added. "He was lazy, always looking to make a quick buck. More than once, Mike came home spooked because Lonnie didn't hesitate to lash out at his sons."
"God, what a piece of work," Robyn said, disturbed by the mental image.
"That's not even the worst of it; when I disappeared a few years back, he came back into Mum's life and pretended to comfort her when everyone thought I was dead, with a body to back it all up," Will's voice was quiet but everyone heard him from where he was sitting on the couch by the edge, which was taken up by the sleeping body of his adoptive sister, "but all he wanted to do was sue the company the quarry my body was found in for money. That's it, that's the only thing that interested him. He didn't care about Mum, he didn't care what she was going through, and he definitely didn't care about me."
Will had learnt what happened shortly after his disappearance when his friends filled him in on the details, but it was Jonathan who had given to him straight what their bastard father had done. It had hurt him so much to know that when push came to shove, Lonnie would always care about number one, even when his ex-wife was suffering, and caring more for money under the pretence of love for his youngest son.
But he had gotten over it; he had always had a much better relationship with his brother and mother anyway, and they had supported his interests, it was Jonathan who had stopped him from really worrying about trying to form a relationship with Lonnie, who loved sports more, something Will had always despised and never had the patience for.
Karen, who hadn't heard of this, was instantly by Will's side, and she slowly wrapped her arm around him and drew him into her embrace. "I'm sorry you had to go through with that, sweetie," she said softly, privately admitting to herself if Ted had tried the same for Nancy, Mike, or Holly, she would likely be arrested for assault.
Will smiled up at her, "Thanks," he whispered, but he jumped when he suddenly felt a soft, small hand reaching up and touching his face. "El!"
"Is she okay?" Joyce was instantly leaning by the couch, staring into El's face. But the girl was still asleep; she gently and clumsily patted and caressed Will's face while she was still sleeping, a warm smile on her face, but then she dropped her hand and was still again. Joyce sighed and sagged in disappointment, but she smiled at her son, "Looks like she sensed your sadness, and wanted to make you feel better," she said.
Will stared down at her, tears in his eyes. While he had admitted he was gay and fancied Mike, he did love El and he was amazed that she was empathic enough to do this.
Karen was looking down at the sleeping Eleven curiously. "How did she do that?"
"El's telepathic. Really telepathic. She either overheard what Will was saying and felt what he was feeling, or she sensed it."
Karen shook her head in confusion. "Okay, I should have asked this in the van, but why do you guys call her El?" She asked. "What does Eleven mean?"
Joyce turned to her friend seriously for a second, knowing Karen well enough to know it was going to take a while, but also that she would be horrified and repulsed by everything that had happened to Eleven; the experiments on her parents while Terry Ives was pregnant, Terry being told her daughter had died in birth, Eleven's time at the lab, the way Brenner abused her, discovering Terry's ultimate fate…
Finally, she sighed, and she stood up and gently picked up El's arm. She rolled back her sleeve, and turned the wrist over gently and stood back so then Karen and Ted, who'd come over with Holly curiously, could see it.
Karen's eyes widened when she saw the tattoo.
011.
"That's why she's called Eleven? That's her name? Her number?" Karen felt sick to her stomach. "How did she get that?"
"Wait a second, she and that thing in the square, they talked about a lab, do they mean Hawkins Laboratory?" Ted remembered.
Joyce couldn't hear mention of the lab which had brought them all so much pain and grief and so many questions about the intelligence of the human race and not become angry. Even now, just thinking of what Brenner had done, not just to El, but to so many people, many of them children who should have been nurtured, protected and treated right, but to Will, who had been taken by the Upside Down, only for the Lab to provide a fake for a funeral to cover their tracks, all the way to Bob's death, was enough to infuriate her.
"Yes," Joyce ground out, her jaw twisting ferociously, just thinking about the Lab. "The Lab. She got it when she was younger, I dunno when, and then she was used in experiments. They forced her to move things with her mind, kill people from afar, they terrorised her into opening the Gate into the Upside Down."
"The what?" Karen waved a hand, wondering if she was seeing a strange conspiracy, but after what she had just seen and witnessed, she decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
"It's another dimension. The Upside Down is like a mirror of this world, but it's dark, twisted; going in there is like going to a world in perpetual darkness," Dustin said.
"You don't really expect us to believe this-?"
"I spent days in the Upside Down. It was where I was snatched," Will interrupted. "Believe me, the place is real; I listened as the Demogorgons hunted me down. And all that time, Vecna was out there."
"Who is this Vecna anyway?" Ted asked impatiently.
Nancy sighed, "His real name is Henry Creel. Victor Creel is his father."
"Creel..?" Ted whispered thoughtfully. That name was familiar.
Nancy licked her lips thoughtfully, wondering if her parents would get it, but then she decided to just get it over and done with. "Henry discovered that he had powers similar to El's," she whispered, "I don't know when he discovered them, but it was when he was a child. He started to believe that the world we lived in was wrong, so he decided to tear it all down. He started practicing…he showed me what he'd become telepathically. I saw him torture and kill animals with his powers. He murdered his own mother, who'd started realising he was responsible while his father just believed it was some kind of demon. And then he murdered his own little sister, Alice, before framing his father."
Ted clicked his fingers. He remembered the story. "You mean Victor Creel? Everyone thought him crazy, especially when he talked about a demon."
"It was not a demon," Steve said. "It was his own son."
"Nancy and I visited Victor Creel," Robyn was grim, "He cut out his own eyes to take away the pain. From what we've heard since Henry was in a coma, and he was put into the care of a doctor called Martin Brenner," Robyn added.
"Brenner," Joyce spat. "That piece of scum has his claws everywhere."
"That's the man who came to the house after that girl," Karen trailed off, looking awkwardly down at the slight figure lying on the couch.
"He's also a sociopath who lied, Mum. I saw him starting to study Henry, 'training' him to use his powers. Showing him pictures of people to kill from afar, but he became too much for Brenner to handle. Brenner had underestimated Creel too much so Brenner decided to take things a step further. He started kidnapping other children, and as he had done with Henry, he tattooed them on the wrists. When Vecna showed me his life, and his intentions, he showed me a segment where Brenner personally tattooed him. I wouldn't be surprised if he had done the same thing to El, too."
"You mean it's because of Vecna that kids like El were given those tattoos?" Joyce stared at Nancy in horrified disbelief. "I'd always thought he'd just taken kids from the parent test subjects he'd made before. I never knew some kid had inspired him to take it that far."
"I think he did a mixture of both, but yeah, that's what happened. Because of Henry Creel and the problems with him, Brenner tried to find other children he could control, although I'm not sure what he planned to do with them," Nancy said.
"Isn't it obvious; he wanted kids to stand for truth, for justice, the American way," Steve said, his voice growing more mocking and full of poisonous contempt.
"Don't say that about America, Steve," Ted scolded.
"What's so great about America? They've kidnapped innocent kids, subjected parents to electroshock therapy, lied about missing or dead kids, and allowed soldiers to kill children," Joyce snapped back. She didn't have any loyalty to her home country, not after what they'd done, and what she had discovered.
"What do you mean, lied about missing and dead kids?" Karen hugged her youngest child to her chest protectively as if shielding her from the world.
"Do you remember when Will went missing and that body was found in the quarry?" Joyce asked with dangerous patience.
Karen nodded.
"It was a fake," Joyce spat, still furious about the whole mess. "They had dumped it there to cover up the fact Will was missing. They even went to the trouble of getting one of their people, faked a medical ID, and made him perform a faked autopsy to confirm it was my son, but I knew it wasn't. Hop also had suspicions, so while my sleaze bag of an ex-husband was more interested in scoring a point, suing the quarry for something that didn't involve them at all, Hop went into the morgue, and found out it was a fake copy. We found out Will was stuck in another dimension; it made sense, I'd been experiencing so many weird things around my home, hearing things, and seeing lightbulbs flickering until I had put them all over the place to map out sentences and messages. If it weren't for El, he would have died."
"But didn't she open this Gate to this Upside Down in the first place?"
Joyce nodded, but Lucas interrupted her, still feeling guilty over how he had treated El in those days. "She was forced to do it; when we were looking for Will, she tried to stop us because she knew it wasn't safe, but when she did help us, she got Will out, and she stopped the first Demogorgon."
"What is a Demogorgon?" Holly asked shakily; what she was hearing was largely beyond her comprehension but she was not stupid, and she was constantly sending glances down towards her new hero.
"Do you remember that thing El yanked out of the hole in the street?" Robyn asked after sending Nancy a quick look as if asking for permission.
"Yeah."
"That was a Demogorgon. One like it had come out into our world and began tearing everything apart…."
For the next 20 minutes, the Wheelers were brought up to speed; Barb, Will, El and her past. The Mind Flayer and what happened over the last couple of years was hard-hearing for some of them. Hearing about Terry Ives's story was especially tragic, hearing how a mother who was so sure she had had a daughter only to lose her, only to become desperate to get her away from the lab before she was subjected to….to that, it showed how utterly evil and cruel Dr Martin Brenner was.
Will had a revelation. "Brenner somehow survived. We found him in Nevada."
"WHAT?"
"That bastard's still alive?" Lucas yelped.
"Language!" Karen frowned, sending a pointed look at Holly.
"Sorry, but if he's still alive-."
"No, he's dead now. We saw him lying in the desert. The military had shot up this place where El got her powers back, we saw the bodies of dozens of scientists. We saw her bring down a helicopter for god's sake. I wasn't near Brenner when he died, but he'd collared El like a dog," Will was looking down at the girl who'd been his adopted sister, wondering just what she had gone through, "but he let her go when he died."
Nancy licked her lips again, wondering how she could broach the part of the tale she hadn't gotten to yet. How could she tell her parents to trust El when the girl had accidentally sent Henry Creel off into a different dimension, which twisted him further until he became that monster?
But before she had the chance, Hop and Mike came in.
"The bath's ready," Hop explained and he walked over and picked El up.
Karen found herself getting up and she followed along with the others to the bathroom.