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"On the Dark Side"

The dark side's callin' now, nothin' is real

- John Cafferty

Will couldn't fall asleep that night. He lay in bed shivering, frightened, afraid to close his eyes, afraid of what he would see, afraid he wouldn't wake up. So Joyce lay next to him until he was too tired to stay awake, holding him as he cried, singing songs with him, telling him old stories from when he was a baby. By the time he dropped off she was afraid, too, afraid that if she left him he wouldn't be there in the morning when she woke up.

She had called Hopper several times last night after bringing Will home from school, and she started calling him again first thing in the morning, but apparently he hadn't checked in at work in all that time. Was he sick? If Hopper was sick and couldn't help her … She left an emphatic message with Flo that Hop needed to call her the second he got in, and slammed the phone back on the cradle.

Will was up by that point. She didn't like the dark circles under his eyes, or the fact that he didn't immediately notice how late it was and complain that she had kept him home from school, the way he often had as a child when she thought he was too sick to go.

Joyce ruffled his hair, checking his forehead. No fever. "Hey! How you feelin', sleepyhead? Any better?"

"Mm-mm."

"Same as last night, still … weird?"

"Yeah." Will sat on one of the kitchen chairs and Joyce knelt in front of him, checking his forehead again.

"All right." He felt … strange. Not feverish, but just the opposite, his skin cool to the touch. "Hm. Stay here. I'm getting the thermometer."

Will sat patiently with the thermometer in his mouth while Joyce timed it on her watch. She used to make a game of it with him, to see if he could count the seconds as accurately as the watch could, but he wasn't up for that today.

When the time was up, she checked the temp. Ninety-five. Ninety-five? That was so odd.

"Is it a fever?" Will asked.

"No. Uh … actually … it's cold. Do you feel cold?"

He thought about it, answering slowly. "No, just a little … out of it. Like I … haven't really woken up yet."

Joyce frowned at him, not sure what to do with this situation. None of the tried and true responses of parents to sick children fit when your child had the opposite of a fever.

"You promised no doctor!" Will said, alarmed by her look.

He had nearly had hysterics yesterday when she suggested calling Dr. Owens or going to the lab. Promising she wouldn't bring them into it had seemed easy then—she wasn't sure how far she trusted them anyway—but today … Still, she had promised, and what were they going to do? They hadn't believed her so far, why would they believe her, or tell her the truth, now?

"And I meant it," she assured Will. "No doctor." Treat the symptom, then, she decided. "You know what? I'm going to run you a nice bath and it'll warm you up and hopefully get you feeling better. How's that sound?"

He nodded, going along with the plan even if he wasn't enthusiastic about it.

Joyce went into the bathroom to run the water into the tub, hoping it would be this simple, but terribly afraid it wouldn't be. Leaving the tub full of warm water for Will to get into, she went back to the phone, trying Hopper again, this time at home, and getting his machine. Like always.

Will came out of the bathroom behind her. "Mom!"

"Yes, sweetie, what is it?"

"It's too hot."

She hadn't thought so, but she supposed maybe in her concern to warm up his body temperature she may have overshot. Checking on the tub, she found that Will had drained most of the water out already, the last of it gurgling away as she sat on the edge and dipped her hand in. "I—I can cool it down a little bit, baby, but we've got to get your body temp back up." Joyce reached for the taps, but was stopped by Will's emphatic "no", in a tone of voice she had rarely heard from him. Alarmed, she looked at him. "What?"

"He likes it cold."

Then, without another word, Will turned and walked away, down the hall to his room, while Joyce sat there stunned, wondering what had happened, who "he" was, and what was wrong with her son.

In the cabin, Hopper was nailing boards over the broken windows. He had been up half the night sweeping up the glass, and all this time there had been no sound from Eleven. She opened her door once or twice, saw him still standing there, and slammed it shut again without a word.

Hopper wanted to speak. He wanted to tell her how sorry he was that he screwed up so much, how much he wanted to take care of her, to explain, really explain, calm and simple, why she had to stay safe here. But no words would come.

He stood in front of her door, trying, managing a "Hey, kid."

Silence.

He considered knocking, his knuckles barely grazing the wood, but he couldn't wait for her to respond. There wasn't time for that. "Listen, um … about last night, I, uh …" God, he wanted to apologize, but it wasn't in him. He had never known how to back down from a fight, and as much as he wanted this to be the time, he just couldn't do it. "I want this place cleaned up," he said, giving an order, "and then maybe I'll consider fixing the TV. You hear me?" He shot the last words through the door, practically barking them, and fled the cabin and his own inability to talk to any of the important women in his life about how he really felt.

As he reached his car, his radio was crackling, Flo's voice calling him. He snatched up the receiver. "Yeah, yeah, I'm on my way in, and yes, I do know what time it is."

"Joyce Byers has called eight times already this morning," Flo snapped back at him as he reached for his pack of cigarettes. "Eight times! For my sake, deal with her!"

Rolling his eyes, he started the car. The last thing he needed was for Joyce to be freaking out right now.

He drove straight to Joyce's house. Her door was standing wide open. Alarm flooded him. Maybe she wasn't freaking out. Maybe this was a real thing. Maybe the thing in Will's drawing. Memories of last year made him slow down, be more cautious as he stepped inside the house. "Hello?"

"Leave it open!"

He was relieved to hear that Joyce's voice was fairly normal. She came hurrying toward him from the back of the house, bundled up in a sweater.

"Where the hell have you been?" she asked in an angry whisper.

"I … overslept. What the hell's going on? It's freezing."

She gestured for him to follow her, leading him down the hall to Will's room. The door was ajar, but she tapped on it anyway as she opened it. "Knock, knock. We have a visitor."

Will was sitting on his bed, staring at the wall. He didn't turn when his mom spoke to him, or even seem to have heard her. The window in front of him was wide open—in November—and he wore only a pair of pajama bottoms.

Joyce moved farther into the room. "Will. Hopper's here."

At last Will turned, slowly, mustering up something that passed for a smile. "Hi."

"Hey, kid.

"Can I tell him, Will?"

Slowly, deliberately, Will nodded.

"This thing, the one from the picture. He said it 'got' him, Hop. This shadow thing. And—and this morning, I was going to run him a bath, to warm him up, but he wouldn't let me. He told me it likes it cold." She showed him the picture from before, and another one that she had made from an image on a video from Halloween.

Hopper looked at the two of them, listening to her story of Will at the school yesterday, and felt a chill that came from more than the cold air circulating through the house. "So this thing, this shadow thing," he said to Will. "You told your mom it likes it like this, it likes it cold?"

Will nodded. "Yeah," he whispered.

"How do you know that?"

"I just … know."

Damn, did he wish Joyce was freaking out over nothing. This … this was something. More than trauma, more than flashbacks. "Does he talk to you?"

"No. It's like … I don't have to think. I just know things now. Things I never did before."

Hopper got up, moving from the side of the bed next to Will to a chair in front of him, so that he could watch the kid's face better. "And, uh, what else do you know?"

"It's hard to explain, it's like … old memories in the back of my head, only they're not my memories."

Joyce was silent in between them, her eyes darting from Will's face to Hopper's. She was holding herself together, but he could see how afraid she was.

"Okay," Hopper said quietly.

Will went on, "I mean, I don't think they're old memories at all. They're … now memories, happening all at once, now." He was shivering, but with fear, not with cold.

"Can you describe these 'now memories'?"

"I don't know. It's hard to explain." Will's eyes were filled with tears.

Joyce sat on the bed next to him, her arm around him. "I know it's hard but can you just—can you try? For us?"

It was obviously hard for the kid. He was fighting to stay calm and trying to find words. "It's like … they're, they're growing, spreading … killing." The last word was little more than a breath.

"The memories?" Joyce asked.

"I don't know." A tear slipped down his cheek. "I'm sorry!" He buried his face in his mom's shoulder.

Growing? Spreading? He thought of pumpkins, for some reason. Hopper looked at Joyce, holding her son and trying to reassure him. Over her shoulder, he saw one of Will's drawings tacked to a bulletin board. Good drawing. The kid could draw.

Joyce followed the line of his gaze. "Hey. Sweetie. What if you didn't have to use words?"

Will agreed to try. They got him paper, and crayons, and he started drawing. Once he got going, it was like something else had taken over his arm. He was single-mindedly focused on his drawings, turning out page after page, but they all looked like scribbles. Huge swathes of colors—black and purple and blue and gray—across each page.

They took the stacks of papers to the kitchen table, trying to make sense of them.

"Joyce, this is … I'm sorry, I don't think these mean anything."

She frowned at him, and then at the pages. "They have to. He's trying to tell us— Wait." She pointed at a scribble of black on one of the pages.

"What?"

"Wait. Wait. These black lines, see?" She put another page next to that one. "Look. They connect."

Hopper stared at them, beginning to see. Pushing the furniture toward the walls to make space, he and Joyce laid the pages out, looking now for overlaps, places where the scribbles looked the same in density or thickness or color. Will kept drawing, and Joyce kept going back for more pages, and they kept shuffling pages around, trying to find the pattern.

At last they had it, her entire living room floor covered in spreading blue lines, like a river, almost. "This mean anything to you?" he asked her.

"No. Is it some sort of maze, or a road? It's sort of forking, and branching, like lightning."

"You think it's a storm?"

"That storm he drew was completely different. He used red. This is all blue and some weird dirt color."

Hopper stared at her. Something—yes, this seemed familiar, but why?

Joyce went on, "Maybe it's … roots. 'Cause remember he was saying it was spreading, and—and—"

"Killing. He said they were killing." Growing. Spreading. Killing. Roots. Pumpkins! Son of a bitch. "The vines." He got his hat and coat. "He's drawing vines." And then he left, hoping he was in time to prevent … whatever it was that was coming.