Head of Security, Peter Burton reviewed the tapes again in the dark office, slowly sipping off the surface of his coffee.
Despite working in near-total darkness for the sake of seeing the details of security feeds more clearly, his suit was crisply pressed, and a pair of headphones draped over his shoulders. His finger tapped the keyboard, frame-by-frame watching the local Chief of Police Jim Hopper enter the room where they had kept the dummy body of William Byers. Watched him cut it open, Watched from this outside angle as Chief Jim Hopper punched him hard enough that he slumped unconscious to the ground.
They could file a lawsuit for that. Concussions hard enough to knock someone out were often damaging enough for lasting brain damage. Luckily, the unconsciousness had only lasted a few seconds, though he recalled laying in a daze for a minute or two before one of his employees found him.
They could file criminal suits for several things that were done in this recording. Breaking and entering. Destruction of government property. Assault and battery. Accessing secure and top-secret areas and information.
He watched Hopper enter the contaminated area, coughing past the heavy mist and spores.
Watched Hopper step up to the gate. Touch its living strands.
He must have heard a guard approaching, because he suddenly turned with his gun ready, searching through the fog. One of his men shouted to get his attention, and another approached from behind to inject a sedative.
Memory loss from the drug was common, but not guaranteed. They'd left out enough drugs and alcohol when placing him back in his home to cast additional doubt, but - again - it was not guaranteed. Chief Hopper was like a dog with a bone when he found a case that truly interested him. Stubborn. Territorial. Persistent.
Peter sighed over his coffee, taking another slow sip.
The fact that William Byers and Barbara Holland had returned through a doorway that they had not created was…. Alarming. He already knew the creatures could make their own doors, but none of their tests confirmed a human could pass through them.
On one hand, this meant that additional monitoring may lead to ways into the dark world that may not be quite as dangerous as the stable door. On the other, it meant there were active doors that people could stumble on and remember .
The children returned right into Joyce Byers' lap, and threw one hell of a wrench in their plans.
He already regretted not replacing the bug in her house after her earlier phone had shorted. They didn't get enough forewarning before she checked them both into the hospital, calling what felt like half the damn town to tell them the news. They also hadn't been able to bug the hospital room ahead of their arrival, only managing to get one in with some of the get-well flowers after the boy received several visitors. Who knew what he'd shared?
He still had some agents in the waiting room to track who came and went to see the two.
His men were already cleaning up Ms. Byers' home, scrubbing clean the carpet and wiping down anything that might have been evidence. The rest of the house was going to get a thorough scrub-down as well, just in case. A few bugs in less-violate places than the phone wouldn't go amiss. She might be suspicious, but they were under the banner of a local cleaning company, services paid for 'from the community.' The leader of that operation even went door-to-door before getting started, asking people if they wanted to donate to the cause. A few had.
If he'd gotten word of their return soon enough, it might have been possible for one or both of them to quietly pass from their injuries. Might still be possible for the Holland girl - from the reports, she'd somehow survived being mauled by one of the beasts. One of her legs had been irreparable, and was amputated. Extensive surgeries like that were a strain on the system. It wouldn't be unusual if she passed in her sleep from the shock.
Peter set down his mug, tapping his fingertip on the warm ceramic.
No, suspicions were already raised. It was too risky. Chief Hopper and Joyce Byers had already shown themselves unwilling to let certain things drop. The Holland parents might roll over, but since their daughter's presence was related to William, anything untoward that happened to her would also be seen as too coincidental.
He could threaten their employment to keep their silence.
Could threaten them with prison.
Could actually arrest them.
He mulled that over, and set it aside for consideration. The biggest worry was the two of them spreading information that they couldn't cover up. None of them wanted this information falling into enemy hands.
One of his "cleaning" vans sent him a picture of Ms. Byers' ex-husband on the scene, and a report said he'd asked about where she was. They acted the part of local cleaners, and told him the good news. He left shortly after, on a road headed out of town.
A shame. He could have used a man motivated more by greed than familial bonds.
What a mess.
Back to the issue on-hand.
Chief Hopper had seen the door.
Joyce Byers had seen a door, and had pulled her child out through one.
They'd provided a false body earlier, which was now terribly incriminating.
Too many people had seen them to dismiss the return as a woman's grief-mad ravings. Hospital records were easy to erase, but eyewitnesses were not.
His finger stopped mid-tap.
Instead of silencing them, what if he brought the two of them into the fold? Let them see what they were working on, and slapped them with non-disclosure agreements to keep state secrets. Those two hadn't undergone the thorough historical and psychological testing that his own teams had, but the point was to keep them quiet, not have them work for him. If they could be reassured that their work was intended to protect the town, perhaps they could let things lie.
Another explorer went into the door this morning, in the hopes that the creatures inside had been drawn away by William and Barbara's escape. It seemed to work at first - aside from their very first entrance, that walk had been their longest on record.
He didn't know much else about what they found, only that the scientists seemed terribly excited.
Peter pulled the headphones back up over his ears, listened to the fragments of audio his other security officers had flagged as interesting/important.
Someone named Danny was mentioned, several times since the bug had been planted. The only information William Byers and his mother dropped about that name was that he'd helped William survive in the world beyond the doorway. That 'Danny' had been living there longer than the boy had.
His inbox pinged.
The Head of Research already replied back to his email about the transcripts of those audio files, careful words conveying excitement despite the bland punctuation.
The email described that, In several of their walks, they'd captured images of an 'Anomaly.' Something far more human-shaped than the other monstrous beings. In image attachments, Peter flicked through a few silhouettes, a blurred smear of a white-skinned hand, each labeled with the date they'd been taken. The final attachment was a picture simply called "Anomaly 001".
The figure itself was mostly hidden by the leaping blur of a creature diving to attack the cameraperson, but it'd still managed to capture the shape of a human torso and two glowing eyes, bright enough to cut through the fog and still show the thin lines of black slit pupils.
Humanoid, but not human.
Was it one of the people who had been taken into the gate?
Was it capable of controlling the other creatures? Did it want to harm his men, or prevent harm?
They didn't know. Perhaps only specific individuals caught its interest, so the ones they sent without being hand-picked were doomed to die. Perhaps that's why only the children, who had been dragged into the world against their will instead of walking in head-on, had lived.
But if the 'Anomaly' was the one who helped William Byers survive his days in that world, the boy might be able to tell them more.
The Head of Research went off on another tangent about the spores in his email, but none of it seemed interesting. He read it regardless, knowing any detail was important to his position.
His pager beeped. One of his men at the hospital had sent him a note to let him know Chief Hopper and Joyce Byers had taken a walk together, and had just returned.
Peter took a larger swig from his cooling coffee and made up his mind.
He sent a quick page back, letting them know to expect him shortly.
He had some meetings to arrange.
In the tiled hall of this in-between place, Danny took a breath. Someone else knew he was there. Or, someone else was existing here. He didn't know which.
He hoped she was alright.
He tested the handle to her door, suspicions confirmed when it wouldn't open.
Was she a part of all this? The source?
She couldn't be the only one, there had been other numbered doors.
Regardless, he ought to move on. It had been a long time since he ate anything, and without Will and Barb's bright emotions refueling his ghostly core, it would be foolish to waste his energy unnecessarily. He could always come back.
He headed back to the library door, reading off the numbers in his head as he passed them. Some doors didn't match the sterile hallway, those ones likely leading to other parts of the world.
Danny paused. Listened.
He set a hand on the white tiled wall and felt the glazed ceramic tremble.
A light overhead flickered anxiously.
That was all the warning he got before one of the wooden doors behind him burst open in a heady rush of sound, black smoke pouring into the hall like a physical avalanche. It hardly paused before its dark tip turned toward Danny.
It screamed .
Danny shouted a curse into the roaring winds as he leapt forward like a startled deer, tripping over himself in a mad dash to get away.
The storm tore in after him, tiles crunching off the walls and up from the floor, fracturing like glass.
Ahead of him, another wood-and-glass door splintered inward, trapping him between two walls of fury. He wasn't strong enough to fight it head-on like this, not when he couldn't run.
One last door between the advancing malice, and Danny ripped it open. He dove in, and spat another curse when it turned out to be a dead-end. Another memory room, of that table and chair, that dark mirror of a wall.
Seeing no other option, the first wisps of black already chasing him into the room, Danny put his back to the mirror, readying his fists to light up with energy the moment it came close enough to punch.
He expected cold glass against his back. Expected his heel to bump it, and to use the wall as a launching pad for fighting momentum.
He didn't expect to phase through it
From the other side of the two-way mirror, he watched black clouds press itself against glass. Watched lightning rake claws against it, the roar muffled by a barrier it apparently could not pass. Billowing black ink against the inside of a jar.
Or outside of one.
Danny continued to walk backwards until something snagged under his heel, and he tripped.
Twisting to land on his knees, he found more of the vines- no, not vines.
Cables.
Electric cables, twisted together into thick ropes. His eyes followed them to a black platform, where they joined a hundred others to twist up the side of a glass cylinder and heave over the top to dip into the top.
Behind him, the thunderclouds roared louder, still muffled into near-silence.
Danny slowly stood, mouth dry as nausea roiled in his gut.
A hundred observations drew together in one awful conclusion.
Before him, wreathed in cables that dug like burrowing worms under skin, was a body floating in cloudy water.
Like a fish that had died and been left to rot in its aquarium, slowly consumed by white fungus until it fell apart.
Long black hair hung in a spiderweb veil in the stagnant water, little flecks hanging like frozen snowflakes where they had sloughed off. Muscles expanding out into a fleshy, wet mesh of fibers only loosely connected. All the terrible details of her decay were cast sharper by the light of a single LED shining down from the top of the tank - the same cold light as the strange, unmoving moon outside.
Flesh was rendered in white and mottled black in different stages of decomposition, pierced by a hundred different wires. Human cruelty was evident all around them.
Danny felt his skin crawl under her thousand-yard stare, and took a small step back to examine his surroundings. The dim light didn't cast very far. He raised a hand to summon a green light to his palm.
The silence snapped into a piercing storm of screams.
Water suddenly churned with bubbles, hands slapping on the inside of the glass, terrified faces twisted, mouths open to exhale streams of bubbles. Faster than he could keep track, the faces changed position like overlapping film, warping and twisting. Sometimes facing toward him, toward someone else, fingers flickering between white and brown, adult and child. The black storm behind him echoed their voices.
The glass shuddered, and Danny flinched so hard that his light sputtered out.
Silence snapped back up around him as if nothing had happened. The water was still around her. Not a single hair had moved.
Behind a wall of glass behind him, clouds continued to churn uneasily.
Danny swallowed around the knot in his throat, stomach twisting with guilt and grief as he recalled the theory he'd offered Will back then.
"It's a weird pocket of rot where there shouldn't be anything. Like something died in one of the universe's pores and we're stuck in the worst ingrown hair ever."
An anchor for all the fury and resentment and fear of the victims that followed after her in what must have been a chain of human experimentation.
The dead girl quietly floated in her own decay.
Trapped and forgotten.
He stood with her in the dark, and whispered;
"I don't know how to fix this."
She didn't offer an answer.