Chapter Text
❝ This year I have disappeared. Or I was never there. Or I was never here. ❞
Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade
It’s worse, this time.
The summer is a fire that burns and burns out, into the sparking husk of an Indiana fall. Will Byers waving from the back of his brother’s Ford is the last ember to fade. After that, it’s dark. Mike fumbles the basement light and slouches to the cold floor where the blanket fort used to be, and he waits. He waits. Nothing happens.
This is the farthest he’s ever been from them, and the twin threads tug on his heart. He can see them going taut, thrumming, fraying, and he worries they’ll snap like guitar strings, somewhere deep and dark where he won’t even hear the twang. He wants to know what Will’s listening to on the radio, what city El’s devouring through the window for the first time. It’s like they’re parts of his mind that he can’t reach into anymore, black dots in the edge of his vision.
October is a backslide. It’s untucked shirts, red gashes on tests, and shouts down basement stairs. It’s an Atari back at the top of Karen Wheeler’s closet, gathering dust, and an “I just don’t know what to do with him,” whispered to Madge Galloway on the phone. It’s detention, detention, detention. A sense of imminence at the quiet dinner table.
There’s a storm on Halloween, and Mike’s call won’t go through. He stands by the basement phone, days-old sweatshirt too small at his wrists, and feels the thread in his chest pull.
“They’re probably out trick-or-treating,” his mom says long past dark, cold cream around her eyes, and he’s wound too tightly to explain that that doesn't help, not without shouting or stomping. He’s too big for tantrums, but his head feels like a tantrum, because Lucas and Max are at someone’s Halloween party, and Dustin had play rehearsal, and he’s sitting here pinned down by something he can’t name, something that won’t let him breathe, that clips his thoughts into frantic, breathless phrases.
November is a blur. Will calls on the first day, explains that their phone shorted. El sends a postcard with a muted painting of an old-timey street. There aren’t this many horses now, she explains in large, careful handwriting. It’s addressed from Greenwood, Indiana. Mike misses her – misses both of them – like a limb, and he wants it to hurt, but instead he just feels lost. He feels dizzy. He lays in bed for two-and-a-half days, eyes wide and aching, his hair a tangled shock against the pillow. Beneath his bones, it feels like even his heart is beating wrong, pounding too hard to make up for dropped beats. Maybe it'll just stop, if he gives it time.
“You’re going for Thanksgiving, right?” Max asks him in history class. There’s a bite to it that he might be imagining, something gently jealous and chiding. You get to see them soon, she reminds him. You shouldn’t be acting like this. You shouldn’t be this messed up.
Mike puts his head down on the desk, wood grain blurring to black, tuning out his friends’ exasperated sighs.
He doesn’t go for Thanksgiving. Nana Schmidt falls again, and the Wheelers all shuttle to her nursing home in Kokomo. They eat blobby gravy on plastic trays and watch the news for hours, primly ignoring the shadow Mike casts from his corner chair.
“I was supposed to go too,” Nancy reminds him over a can of ginger ale. The lights make everything look blue. “You’re not the only one who’s disappointed.”
“I know.” It’s one more syllable than Mike’s managed the whole trip, except to gripe about who’s getting the motel shower first. He crawls into bed before it’s even dark out, sneakers still tied, leaving mud in the sheets.
The next morning, he tries to call the Byers’. The line is busy.
December is black. December is frenzy. It roars in on the tail of the first snow and rattles his dark mood until it feels like a shaken soda, too many sparks on too many synapses. It’s stinging eyes, clenched fists, spinning thoughts that he can barely understand. It’s yelling at his dad over undone chores and walking up to the radio tower in blinding sleet, shivering to the bone. It’s “Your principal called” and “We’re getting concerned” and “We thought you outgrew these moods.”
It’s bullshit. December is bullshit, and he thinks he never stood a chance once it got its teeth in. He ignores his parents and his friends and spends whole nights - one after the other - awake in the basement, just like last year, hunched next to a useless radio that refuses to fizzle into life, no matter how many times he takes it apart and puts it back together again. Will and El have told him they’re okay, they’re liking school, their house is alright, but the maelstrom in his head won’t stop turning. How does he know if he can’t see them? How can he look after them from two hours away? How can he just sit here and not do anything? All of his life has been about keeping Will safe, and then about keeping them both safe, and now his hands are suddenly grasping at empty air. In his head they’re both screaming, bleeding; black smoke pours into their lungs, and they try and try to call his name. The pictures fill his dreams, and when sleep stops coming altogether, they follow him out of bed, out of the house, into the frost-grey morning, leaving devilish tracks in the snow.
On December 10th, Karen Wheeler looks over her wine glass and says, “On Christmas? Honey, we’re going up to see Nana. I told you.”
And on December 11th, sometime in the formless dark before breakfast, Mike Wheeler vanishes.
The first missing persons case in Hawkins since 1983 doesn’t make the news. No search parties comb the frozen underbrush of Mirkwood. There are no casseroles baked, no posters slapped on shop windows, no candles held behind furtive hands on the football field. A single sheet of paper in the police department declares Michael Theodore Wheeler missing. Cause of absence, runaway. Mental state, upset.
“You can’t compare it to Will.” The cooling mug in Karen’s hand leaves a ring on the newspaper; she puts it back down without taking a sip, a feedback loop of fidgets running its course next to the kitchen wallpaper. Against her ear, tinny hold music plays from the phone.
“Why not?” Nancy grips the doorway like a talisman, trying to find calm somewhere in the width of the molding against her palm, in the way it fits between her thumb and her pinky. If she focuses on something else – anything else – she can nearly forget the way her heart is racing out of time. “Because he took things?”
“He took things,” Karen echoes. Another touch to her coffee cup, another twist of the phone cord around her finger. “He left on purpose.”
“I’ve already called down there twice.” She’d caught them in the midst of breakfast the first time, Jonathan harried and pressed, his mouth half-full of toast. By the second call, an air far grimmer had fallen over the line, like a black cloud stretching from Hawkins to Greenwood. “Look,” Nancy adds, “if you’d just let me go out and-”
“We’re doing everything we can,” Karen cuts in, and in the lines of her eyes Nancy doesn’t doubt that she believes herself. Her parents are following what they know, what the world has told them to do. They’re not Joyce Byers. “Once your father- Oh, hi, Helen? It’s Karen Wheeler again, sorry to-”
Nancy can’t listen to another call with the state patrol, another vapid exchange of niceties. She leaves the kitchen in a blind huff, swallowing down the wild urge to kick and scream and swear, to upset all of the stupid pillows on her mother’s stupid sofa. Some part of her needs to make a mark, a dent somewhere, in the middle of every useless adult trying to track down her brother.
When the doorbell rings, she’s halfway up the stairs, smearing a thumb across her mascara.
For a moment there’s only sick dread. It twists cold in her stomach, deafens her with blank shock. It’s going to be the police; she knows it like she knows her own name. The new chief with the stiff, white mustache, holding his hat against his uniform coat. Anonymous and scripted. They’ll have found Mike’s bike, or his backpack, twisted off a highway or dumped in a snowbank, with or without its owner. She’s trying to decide which of the two she’d prefer when Lucas Sinclair’s voice erupts, muffled, from behind the door.
“We can see you!”
“We have Mike’s homework!” Dustin, too, his cold-reddened face pressed against the window.
Nancy has the door unbolted and open before Karen can make it out of the kitchen doorway; she’d been hovering there with a white, grasping face and a hand over the receiver. When she sees the visitors’ faces, she re-masks, deflates. Returns to her post.
“Homework,” Lucas repeats. He gives his overpacked, snow-dusted bookbag a rustle as he sidles through the open door.
“He’s-” Nancy’s jaw works, but she can’t make the right sounds come out. Has no one told them?
“Sick?” Dustin shakes his hair out, flinging ice into Nancy’s face. Behind them, Steve Harrington’s car is idling in the driveway, exhaust puffing out in little clouds. "We figured. He looked like shit yesterday."
“He’s not here.” It’s too quiet, a little uncertain. Not the conviction Nancy usually aims to speak with.
Lucas frowns, one eyebrow quirked like he’s starting into a complicated math problem “Where is he?”
“I’m sorry, I- I thought they'd come talk to you.” Nancy pushes her hair out of her eyes, looking between them in something that’s both apology and panic. They came and talked to you before. “He’s… We don’t know where he is.”
“What the hell?” Lucas drops the backpack, eyes doubling in size. “Why didn’t anyone-”
“I thought someone would!” It’s too defensive, too guilty. Nancy sits down on the stairs, hysteria rising behind shaking knees. “The police have your names.” It’s just like last time, she doesn’t add, though they can all feel it between them. Back in the kitchen, Karen still chatters at the state patrol. Bicycle. Backpack. Mood swings. Like a parrot on loop.
“When did it happen?” Lucas finally asks, voice urgent, but a touch steadier. There’s an efficiency to him, a sense that he’s forming a plan. He and Mike have always had that in common, like twin commanders, too smart and too stubborn for their own good.
Nancy shrugs, and hates how it feels. She shouldn’t be the one shrugging. “Overnight. He took things.”
“Shit. Shit.” Dustin looks like he’s going to be sick on the welcome mat.
“If either of you know anything-”
Lucas shakes his head, eyes so honest they hurt. “Have you called the Byers?”
“Twice.” From the quick glance they share, she knows they’re going to as well; Will and El will be home from school, and then the news will be out. “Our dad and Jonathan are both out looking.”
“Just two people?” Dustin’s face wrinkles, incredulous to the point of anger. “In winter?”
“Will had hundreds!”
“Will was different.” The words are every bit her mother’s, tasting like white wine and hairspray in her mouth, and Nancy wants to take them back immediately. Because if she pushes past the lightning panic in her stomach, she can reluctantly understand. Mike isn’t a timid boy who got lost in the woods, not to the police. He’s nearly fifteen, a beansprout of a troublemaker with a growing behavioral record. No one’s going to line up to scour the outskirts this time.
“Will didn’t leave on purpose.” It’s Lucas who finally fills the silence, with that steely understanding Nancy is starting to get used to. “But if Mike did-”
“He’s still in danger,” Dustin finishes, the way these boys always do, as if their minds are switches in a circuit. All means to the same end. She knows they’re going to leave here, strap on their bandanas and headsets and snow boots, try to do something. It’s the old routine, now. Shotguns and baseball bats and kids with B-movie monsters breathing down their necks. And if Mike had been snagged by a Demogorgon, or sucked into the Upside Down, they might have a plan. They might have a place to start.
What she’s not sure how to tell them is this: there are monsters that don’t have sharp teeth, that can’t be torn apart by fireworks or magic. They live in your mind, whisper horrible things to you day and night, but heat won’t burn them out.
And the worst part is, they can steal you away all the same.
It’s just after midnight when the LTD rattles into the carport. The headlights throw striped shadows into the front bedroom, across Will’s blankets, and after a minute he hears the clatter of the screen door.
“Nothing.” Jonathan’s voice is quiet, solemn. Will slides off his mattress and stands, soft and soundless; across the room, a pair of sloppy braids don’t stir on their pillowcase.
Frustration and pain are audible in his mom’s sigh. “Shit.”
“Went up on 29, back down through Kokomo. Not sure what I thought we’d find.”
“They still aren’t doing searches?” his mom asks. “Flyers?”
A sliver of orange cuts in from the hall as Will opens the door, his breath held behind anxiously chewed lips. It’s been almost nine hours, and his heart still hasn’t fallen back into rhythm. For a moment, he feels like his mother and brother might hear it.
“I’m surprised they told the police at all.” A chair scrapes on the linoleum. Exhaustion is written in Jonathan’s every word. “Ted Wheeler kept saying he’d come crawling home by dark, tail between his legs.” He says the man's name like it’s a curse.
Another sigh, pressed and beleaguered. “This is exactly what I’ve been saying.”
“I know.”
“We need to tell them. They have a right to-”
Then, without a heartbeat’s warning, Jonathan’s head tips right; it’s as though he’d sensed the pair of eyes peering from the hall, terrified and grieving, waiting for an answer no one in this house can give.
“Hey, bud.” He looks apologetic, like his little brother would be better off not having heard of the search’s fruitlessness. Bullshit. “Can’t sleep?”
Will steps into the hall and closes the door behind him, hoping he hasn’t woken El. There’s something so haunting, so final about the death march to the kitchen, and he takes it step by uneasy step.
“You didn’t find him.” It’s not a question, but his mom still shakes her head.
“We’re not done looking,” Jonathan is quick to assure him. But even though there’s hard conviction in his voice, a determination to the clench of his first, none of it reaches his eyes. His eyes are soft, scared, too young. His eyes are no stronger than Will’s, on the hardest nights.
“You need to get some rest, baby.” Their mom steps over in her ratty slippers, laying a hand on Will’s shoulder. It feels like empty consolation, and he has to resist shoving it off. Every muscle in his body wants to rush back down the hall, shake El awake, beg her to do something.
Only, he won’t. He can’t. She can’t.
“I want to stay up,” he pushes, hating how his voice sounds. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
“There’s nothing to miss right now.” It’s rational, soothing, like Jonathan’s trying to talk him down from something. The logic hurts more than anything, the He’s right, he’s right, they’ve stopped. “Not ‘til morning.”
“But he’s out there.” Something in Will’s throat feels tight, like tears, or hysteria. He wants to run. He wants to tear out the front door, into the street, straight to Hawkins.
“Will, sweetie-”
“He could be freezing to death! Why don’t they care?” The Wheelers, the police, the world. Everything feels like a black hole, growing and growing, and he and El are the only ones who can sense it, the only ones sounding the alarm. Even Dustin and Lucas hadn’t seemed to see it earlier, over the phone. They’d kept saying Mike was upset, Mike was angry, Mike had been depressed. He’d run away, and probably crashed his bike somewhere, and that’s what he needed rescuing from. No monsters, no Upside Down. Just a plain, human crisis.
Will doesn’t understand. When he talked to Mike the night before last, he seemed fine. Energetic, talkative, happy even. He wouldn’t have just disappeared on his own.
“They care,” his mom finally says, leaning down to look at him with her wide, soft eyes. His heart hurts. “Everyone cares so much. We all love Mike.”
Not like me, a terrible, strange voice insists, somewhere deep in Will’s head. He closes his eyes, swallows it back down, hopes his mom and Jonathan can’t somehow hear it. What do you know about loving him?
By the time Will slinks back into his sheets, the anger building in his chest has eroded back into fear. It claws at his ribs, squeezes his lungs, threatens to dissolve him into nothing if he lets it get control. He tucks his knees against his chest and shakes.
“Nothing?”
El’s voice is so quiet, it may as well have been a breath, or a thought. Rolling over, Will looks up at the bed, at a pair of too-serious eyes peering over the edge, barely visible in the darkness. She’s holding his old bear to the front of her (Mike’s) sweatshirt.
“Nothing,” he confirms, voice tight. He doesn’t want to cry in front of her right now; if he cries, she’ll cry, and neither of them will be able to stop. They’re a feedback loop of grief, ever since July.
“I’ll try again.” El sits up straighter, already pushing the covers aside, but Will shakes his head in protest. As badly as he wants answers, he’s wrung dry of watching her break further with every failed attempt. It’s going to break him too, before long.
“You’ve been trying all day.”
“And I’ll try until I find him!”
Some months ago, the rise of her voice may have rattled the door, cracked the flimsy window pane, knocked a picture off the wall. But now, in the black silence of the cramped room, it’s just a child’s voice, tired and desperate and too young for its hurt.
In the quiet that follows, Will sits up from his mattress on the floor, craning his neck until he can see her bowed head against sleeve-covered hands, the soundless way her shoulders shake.
“Hey.” The bed creaks when he perches on the edge of it. “Scoot over?”
It’s a question, a gentle suggestion subject to rebuke. Among all the things Will understands about El, her need for boundaries is paramount. The way their skin crawls when the world is too much, too close; the memory of their bodies not being their own. The need for comfort without suffocation. Silent nights pressed against opposite ends of the sofa.
This time, El nods. She wipes a sleeve over her red nose and backs closer to the wall. The two stretch out like twin saplings, only their socked toes touching beneath the old quilt. A car passes outside, and in the stretch of headlights, Will sees the fresh sheen in El’s eyes.
“Have you felt anything?” she half-whispers, and it needs no further explanation. Will shakes his head, and for the first time he’s not sure it’s the answer he wants to give. Because if there’s no Mind Flayer, if there’s no Upside Down…
Neither of them knows where to start with simple, human horror.
r e w i n d
The bike is gone.
That’s the third thing he notices, once he gets onto his feet. The first is the sick throbbing of his nose, smashed against the hard ground; he can taste blood on his tongue, tacky but still flowing. The second is the sharp crunch of gravel under tires, only yards behind him and moving closer. Mike keeps scanning the ground, like the bike will just appear in the high grass if he stares at the ditch long enough. It isn’t until a car door clicks up on the highway shoulder that he realizes what’s going on.
“You need help?”
The woman who climbs out of the rusty truck looks about Nana Schmidt’s age, but somehow hardier, with a patch-work coat and a broad jaw. Mud-spattered boots kick through the frozen dew as she makes her way over.
“No, I’m-” Mike stammers, but it’s hard to mask his utter confusion. It sounds almost like a question. He watches the woman come closer, a few seconds of silent stand-off. The blood dripping over his upper lip is probably all the answer necessary. “What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty, just about.” The woman furrows her grey brow. “You look half-frozen. Someone should probably take a look at that nose.”
No, no, no, shut up. Something hostile and blind twists in Mike’s head, and he closes his eyes. “Bike. I can’t find my bike.”
“Did you crash it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” The last he remembers is a truck, a sideways skid, then… something. He’s not sure. White-hot pain in his face, tumbling against the icy sludge at the bottom of the ditch. He looks around again, waiting for his eyes to catch a flash of silver. Nothing. Nothing.
The woman sighs, and there’s something apologetic about it. “I don’t see any bike, son. Your folks can come back and look for it. But what you need is some dry clothes and a doctor.”
Mike doesn’t even feel cold, but underneath his racing thoughts and his anxiety he’s vaguely aware that his fingers feel numb. He hadn’t thought to bring gloves. Admitting a touch of defeat, he finally follows the woman out of the ditch and starts to reform his plan. He doesn’t need the bike. Screw the bike. He can just walk there. Or maybe, maybe, nick the truck and drive there. It can’t be too-
“Where do you live?”
“Indianapolis.” It comes out stilted, a little too fast, and Mike can see the immediate understanding in the women’s eyes. “South of Indianapolis, I mean. Greenwood.”
“Where do you really live?” she asks patiently, opening the passenger door for him. The truck is still running, musty heat pumping out into the frigid air. The radio is crackling out something with banjos, and the back of the cab is full of plastic sacks; a corner of red gift wrap pokes out of one.
“… Hawkins,” Mike finally admits, flexing his fingers. Horror visions of frostbite and amputation are starting to twist in around the disoriented determination. His head feels cottony, his thoughts slurred. He needs to get back to the starting point and try again.
“That’s better. C’mon.”
As the truck grumbles its way back onto the road, Mike makes one last scan of the ditch – a nervous tic of his eyes – still hoping in vain for his bike to appear in the tall, brown ryegrass. No luck.
The way back seems shorter. It always does, on car rides or long walks, landmarks passing as reminders instead of discoveries. Mike lolls his head against the window, an offered Kleenex pressed to his nose, and listens to his driver prattle, phasing in and out of understanding. His head still feels like a windstorm, but it’s… quieter, maybe. He almost feels like he could go to sleep, given the chance. When did he last sleep? Two days ago? Three?
“I’m headed to my son’s for the holidays,” the woman says just as they pass over Rock Creek. Mike doesn’t remember it being frozen before. “He and his wife just had a baby, their second. A little girl.”
“Hm.”
“They’ve been trying to move down from Kewanna for awhile, get closer to a good school system. Then – lo and behold – a job opens up, and then a house, one after the other.” She claps a hand on the steering wheel, like an exclamation point. “Someone was getting out of town real fast, after that business with the mall.”
“Yeah.” The edge of town is approaching fast, too fast, and anxiety starts to build in Mike’s stomach. He thought he’d gotten farther away than this. He thought he’d almost left.
“Joe Keller, wife’s named Daisy.” Said as though Mike might know him. “Big house on Maple.”
That does get his attention, if barely. “Maple?”
“Maple Street,” the woman confirms, dipping her chin in a succinct nod. The radio goes static, and she reaches to fiddle with it. “Single mom with a couple of girls. Moved out in August, I think.”
Mike can’t claim to have a vigilant eye on his neighbors’ comings and goings, but even in all the summer’s chaos he thinks he would have noticed someone moving out. Besides, Mrs. Henderson is the only single mom he can think of on Maple, and she’s certainly still there.
“Who are your folks, honey?” The car pulls under the highway overpass, past the sawmill and the back way to the Byers’ house. The sun is starting to come out from behind the morning flurry, melting what stuck to the asphalt.
“The Wheelers.” Mike chews on his lip. “On Maple.”
Something funny passes over the woman’s face then, something Mike can’t parse. It’s between sympathy and scrutiny, and it makes his stomach clench. He chews harder, drawing blood. Home is just a mile off, and then he can grab another bike, sneak out the other way-
The truck doesn’t turn where it’s supposed to. Instead of going east it shuffles straight into downtown, right past the library and Melvald’s and the lopsided Christmas tree, right up to-
“No. No.” Mike swallows down panic and betrayal, hands fumbling with the door handle. “Not the police, I don’t need-”
“Sweetheart…” The woman’s eyes are so soft, so unbearably concerned, it’s disarming. It cuts right through Mike’s furious scramble. She eases the truck into a spot, then leans right against the center console, slow and careful. Outside, the last flecks of the snow settle on the windshield. “Now, I don’t know if I’m right,” she continues, voice gentle. “If I am, though, then you know what I’m about to say.”
“I was gonna call them,” Mike spits out, a slurred mess, head already shaking the lies free. “I swear.”
“I never met your mama, but I don’t have to know she and your daddy have been beside themselves.” The radio has fizzled back in, coughing out something tired and festive, and Mike wants to scream.
“I’ll go home,” he insists. “I’ll tell her, I promise, just don’t-” The front door of the station opens up, sending another jolt of panic through his stomach, and he looks up at the woman with desperation in his eyes.
“You’re not in any trouble, Michael. Not with Hawkins’ finest, at least.” It should be reassuring; it’s not, not at all. “But there’s a lot of people here who’ve been hurting for a long time, and you can clear it all up if you just march in there right now.”
Everything grinds to a halt in Mike’s head. A long time. The windstorm calms in the face of complete bewilderment, and he just blinks. Once, twice. Again. “What-”
“Flo’s not in today, Gladys.”
Even muffled by the window, the voice is the last straw. It tips Mike right off his axis, sends him hurtling. All the breath seems to leave his lungs; he’s frozen in place, trying and utterly failing to turn his head towards that familiar grumble. He catches the crank of the window, Gladys’ raspy response – “I’m not here for gossip, Jim!” – but it all feels like slow motion, like his head hasn’t fully caught up with the world.
“Who’s the kid?”
“Honey? Can you talk to the chief?”
You’re crazy, you’re crazy, you’ve gone crazy.
He looks.