Chapter Text
July 1985
A lot of people die in the mall fire.
Eddie watches the tiny black and white tv set with the duct taped bunny ears, sees the formal school pictures of Billy Hargrove and Steve Harrington scroll past with so many others.
He feels something twist in his gut. It’s not grief, not when the closest he’s come to a conversation with either of them is a glare across the lunch room or a quick deal in the parking lot of the Stop and Shop.
Fuck it, he should be celebrating, another symbol of American consumerism up in flames. It’s not like he can afford to buy anything there anyway.
That’s what he tells himself as he tries to lay down in bed, staring at the smoke stained ceiling illuminated by the orange glow of the single street light in the trailer park. He shouldn’t care a bit about people he doesn’t know and never will.
He doesn’t care about Steve Harrington’s sweater collection or how he sat in front of Eddie in junior year government and always smelled faintly of hairspray and peanut butter. Or last year, how he came to school with a black eye, with a limp, with an expression that said if you ask I’ll lie so no one ever did. How he so often had the opportunity to mock him, King Steve to a lowly peasant, but never did once the black eyes started. At most a bystander, and then, after Halloween of ‘84, a ghost in the hallway, with a spiderweb scar over his left temple.
But it's none of Eddie's business.
—
August 1985
Robin Buckley is standing in the scene shop. She’s clutching her backpack to her chest like a shield. A carabiner hangs from the loop of her jeans. It looks fresh from the package. No dents. I see you Buckley.
“What brings you to my lair, fine lady?” He sits back in the stupid throne he dug out of the trash after they struck last semester’s horrible production of Camelot.
Buckley narrows her eyes and clutches the backpack tighter. Eddie doesn’t really know her but they’ve run in the same nerdy circles, been invited to the same boring parties. She’s nervous. He’s making her nervous. Usually he’s all about making people nervous, but something about the way she resolutely won’t meet his eyes, the way her hand rubs up and down on the rough underside of the backpack absently, the fucking carabiner, makes him wish he wasn’t so abrasive.
“I need to talk to you about the kids.”
He wracks his mind about what kids she could be talking about. With any other pair in this situation sounds like a one night stand and emptying of bank accounts and driving to Chicago to stay with a friend of Jane’s. But Buckley has a carabiner on her belt loop and Eddie can recite some very specific chunks of Leviticus from memory.
“Henderson, Sinclair, Wheeler, sound familiar?” She’s gaining confidence the more she talks, shifting her weight from foot to foot.
“The baby nerds? They’re joining the campaign next session. What’s your deal with them?” He can’t think of a single reason why Robin Buckley of all people is asking about the freshmen who decided to join him in the social gutter.
She opens her mouth and then closes it a few times. Chews on the inside of her lip. Finally; “they were in the fire. At the mall”
Eddie can feel the immature facade the freshmen wear fall away. He thinks about the faraway look in Henderson’s eyes, the way Mike Wheeler always seems like he’s gonna burst out into a run whenever the lunch room door slams, Sinclair’s exaggerated need to bridge the gap between old and new friends.
“I only let traumatized losers in the club so I guess they’re par for the course.”
Buckley’s glare hardens. “It’s not funny. Dustin lost his brother.”
“Well shit.” He runs his fingers through his already frizzing hair, rings ripping through tangles. “Didn’t know Henderson had a brother.”
“Not blood related, but still.” She releases her hold on the backpack to flap her hand around nervously. “He’s real torn up about it. They all are.”
“I get it. No dead fantasy brothers. No plot related fires.” If there’s one thing he understands it’s keeping the real shit out of gamified escapism. There are no tent revivals or second comings or heavy footsteps on rectory steps in his fantasy worlds, no sir.
He doesn’t realize that she's constantly moving until she suddenly stills completely, like doldrums, like a prehistoric bug stuck in amber. “If you hurt them I’ll end you.” Her voice is scratchy but deadly serious.
Reading between the lines isn’t his strong suit, but Buckley’s making it pretty clear even for a super super senior. They’re looking for a replacement big brother and if he fucks them up even more they might not bounce back.
“I promise I’ll look out for them, Buckley. Can’t offer much but I can offer that.”
“Don’t sell them drugs.”
“What do you take me for, a total fuckup? I got a 16 and up policy.” If rent’s not late at least. For pills at least.
Her horrible stillness breaks and she bobs her head around like an actual robin. “Good, good good.” She giggles nervously. “I didn’t think I’d be any good threatening someone but I think I did alright.”
“Sure did.” He sinks back into the throne, tosses a leg up in the arm rest. “Gotta ask though, why are you looking out for a bunch of freshmen?”
Her nose scrunches up and her lower lip trembles for a second before she clamps it down. “He was my friend too.”
He thinks about how weird it is that this girl he’s barely talked to is giving him ultimatums about 14 year olds she has no reason to know. He thinks about watching posed school pictures flicker past on the news and how none of them seemed like someone Dustin I-Know-More-About-Quantum-Physics-and-Obscure-Star-Wars-Lore-than-you Henderson would claim as a brother.
“Who was it?” This phantom haunting his sheep.
“Steve. Steve Harrington.” And on that surprising note Buckley gives him one more nod. turns on that matching band heel and leaves just as suddenly as she came.
_
September 1985
Eddie drives Dustin home after their first Hellfire session. He had been standing on the curb, hat pulled low over his curly bangs. The elder Wheeler had picked up the younger, Sinclair had to stay for some basketball meeting, so Eddie clapped him on the back and ushered him into the passenger seat of the Shit Van Supreme.
He’s asking about the campaign, all what did you think about Ragnal the Impaler, I just came up with him last week, and yeah Gareth always plays hot elf maidens didn’t realize you would pick up on that so quickly. Henderson’s quiet, which doesn’t match up with the chattering kid that sits next to Eddie at lunch.
Finally Eddie pulls into the neighborhood and turns to face Dustin. “What’s wrong little dude? You always have something to say.”
Dustin shoots him a sharp look. “I’m not a little dude, I’m barely younger than you.”
“Six years is nothing to sneeze at, kid.” This year feels different, this year feels like he’s towering head and shoulders above everyone else in the hall.
“I’m a fucking dinosaur compared to you.” He pulls into the driveway of the house Dustin points to.
Fourteen sounds like the age of a child. Fourteen sounds like the age of a child who had only lived with Uncle Wayne for a few months, who still lashed out at every touch or kind word like a kicked dog.
Maybe that’s why he says, “You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong but you can if you want to.”
Dustin looks out the window, his eyes unseeing. Eddie doesn’t like the resigned planes of his face, the way the corners of his mouth and eyes hang slack. The only thing Eddie can compare that look to is when he asked Wayne what the pins meant on the hat hanging above the door that said “94th Airborne” in yellow stitching. It’s incongruous on a high school freshman in the middle of Indiana.
“He always used to drive me home,” Dustin finally says. “He used to pick me up from school when my mom worked because I didn’t want to take the bus.”
Eddie is reminded of Robin Buckley threatening him in the scene shop. “Steve?” He hazards a guess.
“Yeah, Steve.” Dustin laughs, a dry aching thing. “Did you know him?”
Eddie knew Steve in that sometimes Steve watched when Tommy H slammed him into a bank of lockers and called him trailer trash. Eddie knew Steve in that he had definitely sold the weed that had been smoked around his pool. Eddie knew Steve in that he had watched him run his long fingers through his pillow soft hair from across the History classroom and had dug fingernails into the meat of his hand to chase away thoughts of touching it, just to see if his hand fell through like a cloud.
“Not really,” he says.
“He would always listen even when he had no clue what I was talking about.” He sighs, leaning forward. His hat falls into his lap but he doesn’t try to put it back on. “He helped me get ready for the Snow Ball in eighth grade and told me it was okay that the only girl who danced with me was Nancy Wheeler.”
God, you really do learn something new everyday. “He sounds like was a really good friend.” Eddie grabs the hat out of Dustin’s lap and puts it back on his curly head. There’s so much to unpack about the surprising outlines of Steve Harrington’s inner life, Eddie feels like if he starts pulling on any thread the whole sweater of reality is going to unravel.
“He always protected us.” Dustin says. “He always protected me.”
Eddie clicks the locks down. He doesn't want to know who us is or why Dustin needs protecting so he knows sickly jealousy for a dead boy is the reason why he says, “if you ever need any more protecting you’ve got my number, kid. Now scram.” He’s not sure he means it, is the thing. He’s not sure if he would be any good at protecting anyone.
Dustin chuckles another sad laugh and nods, gets out of the van. As Eddie turns the corner leading out of the neighborhood, Dustin hasn’t moved from the driveway, staring into the nothing of the asphalt.
—
October 1985
He’s sitting behind Robin Buckley in seventh period Government, chewing on a section of hair. It’s a bad habit, one he breaks in fits and starts. He’s not sure why he decided to kick out the saxophone player that usually sits in that seat, why he can’t stop thinking about Buckley’s clumsy flagging, her baggy blazers. The way he can recognize his own kind.
See the thing is, he’s known other gay people before, a lot of them in fact. He’s woken up on plenty of mattresses in Indianapolis, drank coffee with old men and young, struck up conversations with drag queens smoking outside bars, gotten lovingly hassled by ancient butches in leather.
But none of them were from Hawkins, none of them he saw in the hallways everyday. There’s something different about sharing such a dangerous secret with someone who has to take the same stupid pop quizzes as you, listens to Mrs. Graves agree when Jason Carver calls Reagan god’s representative on earth during the unit on the executive branch.
The bell rings and Robin pops up from her seat like she’s powered by springs and ropes and pulleys. She’s shoving papers and pencils into her pin-covered backpack and Eddie’s gonna lose his nerve, he’s gonna forget all about this and hope she never darkens the door of his lair again. You’re a coward, he tells himself. You’re a coward and that’s the only reason you’ve made it this far.
But he’s a lonely coward and Robin’s the kind of person who sticks up for freshmen nerds.
“Hey Buckley.” Her head whips up so fast Eddie’s worried she’s going to hurt herself.
“What do you want?” She looks like someone took melon scoopers to the dark circles under her eyes.
“I like your carabiner.”
He can see a million thoughts run through her mind, face contorting into a million micro expressions, panic and fear and anger and joy and surprise. Finally it settles on something a little knowing, a little serene. “Well Munson” she says finally. “I like your hanky.”
He grins, all teeth. “Thought you might.” He stands up too.
She smiles back. “Dustin said you’ve been driving him home from your weirdo improv game.”
He follows her out into the hall. “Yeah, it’s on my way.” A lie.
“That’s nice of you. Steve used to, before.” Robin grips the straps of her backpack as they worm their way to the senior lockers.
This is his chance to stick his stupid little nose where it doesn’t belong. “Don’t want to punch any sore spots but I gotta ask. How did you and Steve become friends? He never really ran with your crowd.” He barely holds back from saying “King Steve,” the words knocking against the back side of his teeth. It feels disrespectful to attach the title to a dead man.
Robin stops at a locker, spins the lock. “We worked together. At Scoops.”
And Eddie remembers. He remembers looking through the storefront window, new Metallica record tucked under his arm, and seeing a vision in blue shorts, hands on hips, serving cones with a scowl.
He remembers splashing cold water on his face as soon as he was through the trailer door, berating himself for fantasies involving the backseat of a maroon car and those sailor shorts hitting the floor.
Robin keeps talking, oblivious to Eddie’s inner turmoil. “We hated each other at first, like he was so annoyingly Steve, you know?” Eddie does not know, but Robin barrels ahead undeterred.
“He loved complaining about how his hair looked in the stupid hat and he loved complaining about the customers, and he loved complaining about all the kids he would give free ice cream to.”
She huffs a laugh, shakes her head. “He kept striking out with girls and I had this board where I would log all the times he couldn’t get a date. But then we started talking more, and more, and he really wasn’t the same guy he was back in the day. He was like a fully fledged three dimensional person.”
Robin sucks in a deep breath. “And then he was so open minded and shit and I don’t know, I just really liked hanging out with him and I just kind of felt like he was living inside my head half the time, like he always knew what I was feeling even when I didn’t know what I was feeling and-”
She presses her hands to her eyes, shoulders ratcheting with tension. Eddie bites off the end of the nail on his pinkie finger. “I’m sorry I brought it up. Didn’t want to make it worse.”
“No, it’s fine. I never really get the chance to talk about him.” Robin takes her hands off her eyes. “No one really gives a shit. His old friends are assholes. The kids are dealing with their own stuff. No one wants to hear me wax poetic about a popular kid who graduated last year.”
Eddie thinks about staring at Steve through the smudged window of Scoops Ahoy. He thinks about Dustin’s hero worship, Robin’s rambling grief. He thinks about how she called Steve open minded, and what that could possibly mean.
He thinks about how he wouldn’t talk about his mom until Wayne sat him down and said you can’t keep it all inside kid, that’s how you drown in it. How sometimes he still drowns in it.
“You know, Buckley,” He says, leaning against the bank of lockers. “A job requirement for drug dealers is good listening skills.”
Shine is gathering at the corners of her eyes. “Are you offering to listen to me ramble about Steve Harrington?”
He sweeps out his hand like a butler announcing a dutchess at a ball. “Ramble away madam, I am all ears.”
–
November 1985
Robin is usually sitting at his picnic table in the woods when Eddie gets there. Today she’s scribbling an essay for English while yanking on her hair like it’s a leech stuck to her head.
Despite the beginning of their friendship, Robin rarely talks about Steve.
Instead she asks Eddie about how many people show up to Corroded Coffin shows, about how the freshmen are doing, about the gay clubs in Indianapolis, about the gossip customers let slip around their dealers.
She rants about esoteric themes in a French film she watched the night before, about the annoying band teacher, about how hard it is to find shoes her size, about how she maybe might have the slightest crush on the second clarinet who stands next to her in pep band. It’s not everyday Eddie meets someone who talks more than him.
“About time you showed up, lazy bones.” Robin throws a skittle at his head.
“It’s fucking cold out here, Buckley. I didn’t want to get hypothermia.” Eddie’s winter coat is much much too small and was given to him by a school social worker in 9th grade. Instead he’s shivering in the thin leather jacket Wayne found in a second hand shop years before Eddie showed up on his front stoop.
He sets his metal lunch box on the table. Business is slowing down for the year. It always hits a lull between football and basketball season. Wayne is picking up all the overtime he can but they’ve been eating a lot of packaged ramen and spam.
Robin pops another skittle in her mouth. “How are the kids?”
“Creative. Loud. Always fighting about the rules.” At the last session Dustin almost brained Mike with his Monster Manual. He doesn’t mention that Lucas always has a faraway look in his eyes, or that Mike falls asleep at the lunch table, or that Dustin hardly eats anything anymore.
“That tracks.” She finishes the essay with a flourish, stuffs it into her backpack.
Eddie offers her a loose smoke from his jacket pocket, knowing full well she’s going to decline. She rolls her eyes. “I gotta keep my lungs strong for trumpeting, dumbass.”
He lights up, rolls his eyes right back. “Okay, be a stick in the mud.”
And she truly looks like a stick in the mud. Her shoulders are hunched, her body contorting as if to protect a vulnerable creature living on her chest. “What’s the matter, Buckley? I don’t feel like this is a social call.”
The wind rustles bare tree branches, something small scuttles through the leaf litter. The sky is a slate shingle threatening to flatten the earth, its gray stifling and oppressive.
Robin traces a phone number carved into the flesh of the picnic table. She sucks in a deep breath. “Do you ever feel like you’re living in a snow globe of the worst thing that ever happened to you?”
Eddie takes a drag of his cigarette, leg bouncing bouncing bouncing. Corn fields. Dry lips. Potlucks in a musty basement. A hospital bed in the living room. Blue fingernails and open eyes.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Like I go to class and hang out with people after football games and apply for colleges, but like it feels like a massive joke because actually I’m still stuck in that fucking mall.” Her eyes find his and they’re the color of the sky and just as heavy. “I don’t understand why I get to be here and he never gets to grow any older.”
He. Steve Harrington, a ghost hanging over all of Eddie’s interactions this year. He haunts the hallways he used to rule, he haunts Hellfire sessions, and Dustin Henderson’s memories, and Robin Buckley’s moods. A ghost that looks nothing like the arrogant boy who watched as Eddie was slammed into lockers and called slurs.
His absence is a gaping void, a black hole tearing away at its surroundings.
Eddie wonders if it’s possible to miss someone he’s never met.
“He was such a bitch,” Robin continues. “Like the absolute cattiest person I’ve ever met. Mean girl of the year.” She says it fondly, like bitch is the highest honor she could bestow on a man.
“Sometimes shit sucks, Buckley.” He shrugs, takes a drag. “Sometimes horrible things happen and they won’t let you go.”
“That’s not exactly heartening advice,” she grumbles.
“Ah yes, Sir Eddie Munson, wise sage of grief rending advice. That’s what I’m known for.”
“You know,” Robin says. “You’re kind of a bitch too.”
__
August, a long time ago
One of Eddie’s snow globes looks like this.
The tent smells like the inside of a trailer and trampled grass. There’s a woman rolling around on the ground, an angel babbling nonsense words sitting on her tongue. White chairs kicked aside to make room for people on their knees, shaking demons from their blood. A man who has Eddie’s eyes shouting from the stage about the whore of Babylon and the punishing hand of God.
A grift is a grift is a grift, but Eddie thinks his daddy might really believe this one.
In the beginning was Edward Munson Senior, and Edward Munson Senior found God in the onion thin pages of a jailhouse Bible. With Edward Munson Senior was his son, through them salvation was found in the backroads of middle America. A former con man preaching the good word, and his son, so young, so precocious, leading worship on a pawn shop acoustic guitar.
They’ve been on the road for a year, wearing black ties and white shirts and yelling about the end times on street corners. Eddie can put up the revival tent with his hands tied around his back, knows how to recite Ephesians backwards and forwards, can sing the Old Rugged Cross with the most devoted of believers.
They’re outside Cedar Rapids when the fires of hell brush at his heels.
Iowa summer is humid and Eddie’s shorn scalp is starting to burn under the prairie sun. It’s too hard to keep up with haircuts on the road, and what kind of sissy has their hair long anyway. His father shaves it every other week in front of their truck’s side view mirrors.
This revival’s host church is run down and ancient, white paint peeling off the siding in long strips. Eddie has to clasp his hands together to keep from sliding his fingernails under the curling peels and methodically shearing the church like his father shears his head.
The pastor and his family greet the father and son with a meal in the cool basement. It smells like deviled eggs and mothballs and wood paneling.
The pastor has a son who’s thirteen, Eddie’s age. The son has blond hair so thin it’s almost translucent. Light streams through the window wells, illuminating the boy’s face from the inside, like his bones are made of fire and lava.
Eddie has a book of myths he stole from a library in Topeka. He reads it when his father is ranting to God outside motel rooms or working on a sermon, because he would tear it up on account of hating the pagans. The last story he read was of Icarus, his melting wings damning him, but not before the sun smiled on his face, embraced him in brilliant warmth.
Eddie remembers closing the book and leaning his mouth towards the dim motel lamp, closer and closer like he could eat the light for himself, keep it locked up somewhere no one could take it.
Now, in the basement of a church threatening to fall in on itself, he wonders if seconds before burning up, Icarus’s face was illuminated like the pastor’s son, golden and heavenly.
After they eat soggy ham and soggier potatoes, the adults get to talking shop, gossiping about other pastors they know, about the degenerates out in California with their flags and their parades, about how Regan better win.
The pastor’s son goes back upstairs, motions Eddie to follow him outside. They stare at each other in the gloaming, pink clouds wisping around the steeple.
“I’m Adam,” the boy says.
“I’m Eddie,” Eddie says.
Adam smiles and Eddie’s intestines are made out of snakes, like Medusa’s hair in the myth book. “Want to take a walk?”
Eddie smiles back. It’s been so long since he’s talked to someone his age who wasn’t some simpering alter boy or white mary jane wearing goody two shoes. “Will your dad get mad?”
Adam shrugs. “He’s always mad. Might as well give him something to get mad about.”
Eddie actually laughs at that, laughs harder than he’s laughed in a while. “You can say that again.”
And so they start off down a gravel path that runs behind the church, cutting through a soybean field, a corn field, a creek. Dust coats their church shoes. Adam tells him the story about the path, how it connects three different towns and is named after a theater that burnt down a decade ago.
“I wonder if it’s haunted,” Eddie says, watching a white tailed deer bound across a soybean field.
“Probably,” Adam shrugs. “Lots of guys killing themselves ‘cause of the all the farms going belly up. John Deere factory up the road closed its doors too. So now everyone is either going to the bar or going to church.”
“Guess that’s good for our dads.”
Adam laughs but it doesn’t sound happy. “Guess so.”
“Winning souls for the kingdom,” Eddie says.
Sometimes Eddie wonders what role he plays in God’s kingdom. His dad’s got to be a knight, which probably makes him a squire. All the way deep down he sometimes wants to ask God if he could be the princess in the tower. Or maybe a dragon. Or a dragon princess.
Adam stops walking abruptly. They’re standing on a little wooden bridge that passes over a stream. Eddie wants to roll up his pants and stick his feet in but something tells him that the water is mostly runoff.
Mosquitoes buzz around their heads. A mourning dove coos in the distance. Adam stares down at the stream. “Can I tell you something?” He asks.
“Sure man,” Eddie says. His stomach is trying to digest itself. He hasn’t had a friend since his dad came back from jail after his mom got sick and then sicker and then dead.
“I don’t think I want to go to heaven.”
“Why would you say something like that?” Eddie wants his voice to come out accusing, like it should, but instead it sounds curious, sounds like me too.
“I mean, my dad’s probably gonna be there. He’s got a line to the big man himself.”
That sounds like a good enough reason as any. Eddie’s pretty sure his mom’s not waiting at the pearly gates because his daddy keeps calling her a whore. Being a whore is against the seventh commandment.
“You tellin’ me you don’t want to eat overcooked ham at potlucks for all of eternity? Or listen to me play guitar to the oldest crustiest hymns known to man?”
“Well that part doesn’t sound so bad.”
When Adam laughs again Eddie thinks that Adam might be as lonely as he is.
And maybe he is possessed by a devil like his daddy says after he’s drunk too much cheap whiskey, maybe he is three steps away from the fires of hell, because what he does next can only be described as an act of Satan, all the angels turning away and clutching their shiny halos.
Because Eddie reaches out and touches Adam’s face. The skin of his jaw is a little sweaty and a little oily, but it’s just as warm as Eddie imagined.
Adam’s wide eyes search Eddie’s face, roaming back and forth like he’s reading a page in a book. And then he reaches out and touches the top of Eddie’s shaved head, dragging his palm over the stubble. “Scratchy,” he whispers.
Eddie closes his eyes. “I wish it was longer,” he whispers back, like it’s a secret.
“I bet it would be pretty,” Adam says, and that’s when Eddie realizes that he doesn’t want to go to heaven either.
Adam’s lips are sunburned and chapped. Their first kiss is a little dry, a little wiggly.
The sun slips below the corn stalks and frogs sing in the distance.
Edward Munson’s Old Time Revival stays in town for one week, then two. Edward Senior likes drinking beer in the rectory with the pastor, likes the desperation in the unemployed worshipers’ eyes and offerings.
Edward Junior likes kissing the pastor’s son behind the maintenance shed, likes making eye contact with him across the tent while he’s tuning his guitar.
Eddie knows he’s flirting with disaster. He’s not stupid even though he hasn’t been to real school since they’ve hit the road. He can read the Good Word and his secret myth book just fine even if he has to follow along with his finger, thank you very much.
He wonders if he’s going to get sick just because of his thoughts, just because he wants to kiss Adam. It’s not like there’s anyone he can ask.
He feels his forehead for fever every morning when he wakes up, checks his skin to see if there are any purple sores like they talk about on the news. Lust is a deadly sin, and maybe his is the fast acting kind. After all, he knows that bodies can decay and breathe at the same time.
But vengeance is God’s and he shall repay, so Edward Munson Senior finds his son with his mouth on the pastor’s son in the revival tent long after the congregation has gone home. He yanks them apart with his big hands, asks what do you think you’re doing, boy.
Adam is silent and still while Edward Munson Senior hollers for his daddy to come out to the tent, right now. He’s silent while his daddy takes his belt off, silent when he’s forced to turn around while Eddie gets lashed first. He’s silent as he’s dragged into the rectory, pants still around his ankles.
Eddie’s not silent because he’s never learned to shut up. He blubbers through the lashing, cries when his head smashes against the pulpit, sobs when he’s told not to come inside until he can recite all of Leviticus 18 from memory.
As hot as the days are, the nights are star-burnt freezing. Eddie shivers in his shirtsleeves, repeating verse after verse after verse.
For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people, he says and he says and he says while pacing up and down the gravel drive.
Morning breaks upon the tomb of Eddie’s shaved skull and God’s people file into the tent, ready for singing and sermons and maybe a healing or two. Instead they’re in for a holy treat. They fill the white plastic seats, the tent groaning like a living organism. Perfume and grass and farm hand stink mingle and muddle together in a familiar cacophony.
“Today is a blessed day, brothers and sisters. You are about to witness a lamb returning to the fold, as the Lord has left the 99 to rescue the one.” Edward Munson Senior is sweating, pools leaching out from under his armpits.
“My son here,” He gestures to Eddie, standing straight as a rail next to the lectern, “has fallen under an infernal affliction. He has been possessed by the spirit of degeneracy, the spirit of perversion.”
Eddie’s mind is somewhere far far away. A princess in a castle. A pair of wax wings. There’s a pane of frosty glass over his eyes, protecting him from the harsh glares of the congregation. He can’t feel the long wounds on his back crusting to his shirt.
“This poor lamb has fallen into the clutches of the demon of homosexuality and I intend to cast it out.” Gasps from the congregation. A hand cupping the top of his skull. Feet flooding to the stage in a healing altar call.
The tent is aflame with shouting and there are hands all over Eddie’s body. He’s being pushed and prodded, thrown across the stage. Hands on his shoulders, hands on the hollows of his knees, hands reaching into the secret corners of his heart and deeming them reprobate.
The loudest voice of them all is his father. He’s bellowing, come out of this man, come out of this man, get out of my son, in the name of Jesus, get out of this man.
And Eddie knows what he has to do. He’s seen it thousands of times in thousands of tents on thousands of dirt patches. He throws himself to the ground, limbs flailing, back arching. He screams and screams.
When the convulsions are over, when he’s breathing so hard his lungs hurt, he looks up at his father. He is wearing a tiny smile, his mouth pulled up at the slightest angle. Eddie knows that look.
It’s the look of a man who has a new con. A built in spectacle whenever the tent is raised.
Edward helps his son to stand. Makes the sign of the cross and says go in peace brother. He presses his acoustic guitar into Eddie’s blue and shaking hands. They sing Great Is Thy Faithfulness and Eddie doesn’t miss a single note.
They take down the tent after service. The pane of glass is still pulled over Eddie’s eyes. His brain is full of cotton balls and King James’ words.
Edward Munson Senior doesn’t say a word to the pastor. Edward Munson Junior doesn’t say a word to the pastor’s son, but he does catch a glimpse of Adam through the rectory window.
Adam doesn't look like Icarus. He doesn’t have fire in his veins or feathery wings. He’s just a boy with a bruise on his chin.
When the truck pulls out of the gravel driveway Eddie doesn’t turn around. He keeps his eyes fixed on the white plumes of dust in the distance, each car its own cloud of dirt.
It comes to him halfway to Des Moines. In the kingdom of God he is not a knight’s squire or a dragon princess. He’s a coward, running as soon as trouble starts.
In the six months before he shows up on Uncle Wayne’s front stoop, with a dislocated shoulder and backpack full of New Testaments, he is exorcized forty times.
__
December 1985
“You gonna visit your Mama?” Wayne asks from the couch. Eddie is sitting at the kitchen table, painting a very small Minotaur. “We can get one of them wreaths.”
This is usually Eddie’s cue to say something mean or stomp around the trailer until Wayne tells him to cut it out. But Wayne asks every year like clockwork, like tradition. “Do you want me to muster up a fight for old time sake?”
“No sense in wasting time when we both know what you’re gonna say.” Wayne is already lacing up his boots.
It’s not that Eddie doesn’t want to remember his mom. He remembers her alright, the hazy childhood he catches in smells and sounds more than anything else.
The scent of her skin, his nose pressed against her neck. The radio in her old car playing John Denver in the second grade drop-off line. Lukewarm Hamburger Helper burnt to the bottom of the pan. Men on the porch, yelling, boyfriends and landlords and his father. The creak of a hospital bed in the living room. The smell of a decaying body because nobody’s paid the phone bill and who is he supposed to call anyway?
Wayne lays a hand on his shoulder. “I know, son.” He doesn’t say what he knows but that’s okay.
This conversation is a familiar trail they’ve walked down many times in the last six years. Wayne’s got his share of ghosts in the walls and monsters under his bed. He can see straight through Eddie’s loud music and abrasive demeanor and shitty tattoos without even trying. Do you think you invented hiding all that pain behind how you look, boy?
Eddie closes up the paints and laces up his own boots. “You gonna make me hot chocolate when we get back?”
“What do you take me for, a monster? Of course I’m gonna make you hot chocolate.”
Charlotte McDonald is buried in a small graveyard a few miles outside Hawkins. Snow covers her tiny stone. There’s a name, there’s some years, there’s a little angel carved into the center.
Eddie sits down on the wet ground and traces his finger over the rough grooves of the angel’s wings. Wayne’s off looking for the bones of an old war buddy, a flimsy excuse to give Eddie privacy.
“Think I’m gonna graduate this year, Ma. I know it’s been a long time coming.” His fingers twist in his hair, winding and unwinding. The words are heavy in his mouth, like trying to chew uncooked rice.
He hates this charade more than anything, hates that none of the good things mattered in the end, not dancing in the kitchen to old country music, not her snorting laugh when he did a jump spin off the coffee table. All that mattered was how she got eaten from the inside out by a stage four creature and no one from hospice thought to check on her and her eleven year old son until it was much much too late.
“Already talked to some of the guys at the garage. They’re gonna let me apprentice there while I get my ducks in a row. Who knows, maybe I’ll be a roadie like you always talked about.” He almost smiles at that. Charlotte McDonald, groupie extraordinaire.
Melting snow soaks through his jeans as he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. Everything feels so much closer to the surface this year. Maybe it’s the actual possibility of getting his diploma and getting out of dodge. Leaving the place where he began and she ended. Maybe it’s because he’s the age she was when she got knocked up by the smooth talking con-man who grew up down the street. Maybe he’s soaking up grief from the atmosphere the longer he’s around Robin and Dustin. Loss by association.
Suddenly it’s all too much. The graveyard, the woman decomposing below him, Hawkins with its mysteries and fires and grieving teenagers.
Eddie can feel the glass begin to slide down in front of his eyes, feel his thoughts rise up and out of his head like a helium balloon. He can’t feel the snow soaking to his skin anymore, can’t feel the weak rays of sunlight slicing through the clouds.
“I’m sorry, Ma,” he says, but he doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for. Maybe for existing, maybe for not being able to cure cancer, maybe for making a mess of things with his father and ending up back in the town she hated.
Eddie’s not sure how long he sits on the soggy ground with his hair pulled over his eyes, but the sun is low in the sky when Wayne taps him on the shoulder.
“Getting cold out here, son.” Offers him a hand up, doesn’t mention the red rims around his eyes. “Let's get on home.” Wayne looks down at the grave and says, “nice seein’ ya Charlotte,” like he does every year.
They’re most of the way back to the truck when Eddie sees it. A grave that must have been cleared off in the last few days, if the lack of snow is any indication. Bursts of color stand out on the clean gray stone. An orange matchbox car. A small plastic baseball bat. A glass cup that seems to have been stolen from an ice cream parlor filled with fake pink flowers.
Eddie doesn’t need to read the stone inscription to know who that grave belongs to, to know that the casket below is empty. It’s almost a comfort knowing that the mall burned too hot to leave behind something to decay.
“Wait a second, Wayne.” Eddie pats his arm and then runs back to his mother’s stone.
He pulls the sleeve of his leather jacket down over his hand and wipes the snow off the top of the grave in big sweeps. He brushes his boots across the grass in front of the grave, like scraping the windshield of his van. When the grave is clear of snow he twists the ring off his middle finger on his left hand and sets it down in front of the stone. It’s a cheap thing, won at the arcade when he was 15, but he held onto it because he liked the memory of Gareth laughing with his mouth full of nacho chips when Eddie said something funny.
He runs back to Wayne, who’s idling the truck. When Eddie looks back at the darkening graveyard all he can see are two clear patches in a sea of white. Proof that someone loved Charlotte McDonald as much as someone loved Steve Harrington.
__
January 1986
Eddie’s rounding the corner to the scene shop, arms full of the battle map and dice bags when he hears them.
“You don’t get to use his name against us, that’s not fair.” Dustin sounds as serious as Eddie’s ever heard him, words dripping with something harsh. Eddie can’t help but notice Dustin losing his luster, more and more each day. He doesn’t seem to eat anything at the lunch table. His cherubic face is almost gaunt now and his clothes hang loose on his frame.
“I’m not using Steve against you, Dustin. I’m just saying something that’s true.” Lucus’s voice is equally strained. “He would do anything to come see my game, even if I didn’t ask him to.”
“Yeah, because he was a jock just like you.” Mike now, sounding how Mike always sounds, angry at something just out of reach. “That’s not an equal comparison.”
“He would also tell you not to ditch your friends for a bunch of guys he ended up hating,” Dustin says.
“It’s not about the other guys! It’s about me and what I care about,” Lucas sounds close to tears. “Why do I only matter when it’s convenient for you?”
Silence. Eddie presses himself to the wall, like that will keep the boys from catching him eavesdropping.
“You don’t only matter to me only when it’s convenient,” Dustin tries. “You’re my friend.”
“Steve would come to my games,” Lucas says, a seeming non sequitur. “I know he would. He would ask to reschedule Hellfire meetings so he could see me play.”
Eddie has a feeling they’re all talking about vastly different things.
“This isn’t about Steve.” Eddie has never heard this voice out of Dustin. It’s something deep and almost growling. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
“We can’t just not talk about him,” That’s Mike now, annoyed.
“You didn’t see him,” Dustin again. Eddie can’t wrap his head around what they’re talking about. They’re circling the subject but never touching what they actually want to say.
“You didn’t see him get dragged through the gate.” Dustin’s voice sounds ragged, like he’s been screaming. “You didn’t see how the muscles of his arm looked on the outside of his body. You didn’t hear him telling Erica it’s okay while the membrane closed over him. I don’t want to talk about Steve.”
Silence.
“Okay,” Lucas says, quiet. “Find someone else to play for me on the day of the game.”
Robin hasn’t mentioned a gate or muscles on the outside of arms or membranes in her many rambles.
Sometimes they sit in Eddie’s van with the heater blasting outside her parents’ 50’s style ranch and she talks about some zine she’s reading about gender and also maybe about how to blacksmith your own sword, and he tells her about the space pirate campaign he’s writing or how snowy the drive to Bloomington was to see this shitty shitty band but he got in the pants of the bassist so it was worth it.
She talks about applying for IU and Michigan and Ohio State but not any private schools, because what do you take me for, a Nancy Wheeler? He mentions the garage and how maybe he’ll be able to rustle up enough money to leave and never come back.
He figures that if Steve had died in some weird sci-fi accident it would have come up between talking shit about Hawkins and talking shit about getting out of Hawkins.
But he’s no stranger to using fantasy to cope with the stark awfulness of reality. If Dustin needs to tell himself that Steve got eaten by direwolves to get through the day, more power to him. Eddie used to pretend that the revival tent was Kronos and he was a rock, eaten day after day by his cosmic father.
When the boys don’t say anything for a good two minutes Eddie figures it’s safe to make his presence known. He rounds the corner and dumps his shit on the scene shop table. “Why the long faces, weary travelers?”
“No reason,” Mike grumbles.
Eddie rolls out the battle map, weighs the corners down with his unread textbooks. He curses himself for his habit of caring about the tiny sheep who need a shepherd to keep from getting flattened by the rising tide of conventional society. He’s supposed to be above it all, like a wizard in a high tower giving edicts but not sparing a thought for his tiny knights.
Maybe he was overestimating himself, thinking he could listen to Robin and Dustin’s tales of woe without being dragged under. He’d felt so confident offering to take in memories of Steve, a benevolent but distant listening ear. Now it’s like he can see the tension floating through the room, can feel it battering against the locked up boxes of his past.
Dustin looks pale, eyes cast down at the paint splattered floor. Lucas has his arms folded, lips pursed into a straight line. Neither seem inclined to speak.
“All right, keep your secrets.” Eddie props up his DM screen. “But don’t get your rancid attitudes all over my game.”
Once they’re all done, after Jeff raises a bunch of blood thirsty ghosts with a new spell, and Gareth flirts with all the barkeeps, and Dustin and Mike make a battle strategy so detailed Eddie almost has to stop them for the sake of time, Lucas hangs back.
“What’s up?” He’s rolling up the battle map slowly.
“A couple of my basketball games are scheduled for the same time as Hellfire.”
Eddie shrugs. “It’s fine. We’ll just find someone else to play for you.”
Lucas’s face doesn’t move, but Eddie has the distinct feeling that he failed some kind of test.
“Okay,” is all Lucas says as he leaves, swallowed up by the evening dark hallway.
__
February 1986
Nancy Wheeler is walking down the street, taking tiny steps in her kitten heels. Robin watches her intently from behind the smudged van window. They’re parked behind the Family Video, waiting for Robin’s shift to start.
Eddie takes a drag on his cigarette, blows the smoke out his cracked window. He would much rather be smoking a joint but Robin says the smell makes her stomach hurt and Keith would be pissed if she showed up to work high.
“You got a crush or something, Robbie?”
“On Wheeler?”
“Yeah, you’re staring her down.” Eddie lets his head drop back against the headrest, hair cushioning his fall. “I see it. She’s like a really mean femme.”
Robin snorts and takes a sip from her can of Coke. “She’s too much of a priss for me.” They talk a lot about girls, the ones Robin hates and the ones Robin likes. She had told him late one night that he’s the second person she ever came out to. The first was Steve, of course, on the sticky floor of the Scoops Ahoy breakroom.
They watch as Nancy slows down in front of Family Video, squints through the front window. “She doesn’t look so good.”
Eddie can’t help but agree. He has to sift through his Hawkins High Lore for a second before remembering that Nancy had once been the rebel queen to Steve Harrington’s king, and that the hollow look on her made up face is probably one of grief.
Cold air rushes into the van as Robin opens her door. Before Eddie can say anything she’s halfway to Nancy, green vest flapping behind her. He rolls up the windows and follows her out into the cold.
“-you were there and I wasn’t,” Nancy’s saying, her arms folded tightly against her pink cardigan. “I just want the details.”
“I’ve already told you everything, Wheeler. I’m not going over it again.” Robin’s voice is much colder than usual. There it is again, a secret swirling between the valedictorian and a band nerd and a bunch of kids. Eddie’s chest feels tight. “If you even think about asking Dustin or Erica-” Robin cuts herself off when she sees Eddie’s approach.
“Wheeler,” he says once he makes it over to the girls. Her eyes are like two pieces of flint and he finds himself wanting to look away.
“What do you want?” She spits and turns to Robin. “He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“He sees more of the kids than either one of us. Someone’s got to make sure they’re okay, and it sure isn’t going to be me.”
“The kids are fine,” Nancy dismisses.
Oh, this is a subject Eddie knows something about. “That’s bullshit,. Anyone with eyes can see that they are so far from fine.” His fingers drag through his hair. Jesus, he needs a scrunchie or something. Maybe with spikes on it to maintain his image.
“Dustin’s consuming the calorie intake of a toddler. Mike’s so irritable I’m surprised he’s not starting fights with people who look at him wrong. Lucus is pulling away from them so fast they’re barely talking outside the campaign.”
Nancy shakes her head hard and fast. “They’re resilient. They’ve been fine every other year.”
Eddie’s internal dial is stuck on the flight part of fight or flight and it’s starting to set off alarm bells. Something is not right in a major way and Eddie has enough nightmare fuel, thank you very much.
Dustin’s ragged voice describing the barest bones of Steve’s demise loops over and over in his head, and the little storyteller that lives in the folds of his brain has been spinning wild fables that he desperately doesn’t want to believe. In this tale he’s an unwitting villager, not a main character.
“Why are you staking out my place of work?” Robin pivots. “Unless you’re really hankering for a VHS at 2pm on a Saturday.”
Nancy grits her teeth. She looks like the doberman pinscher who‘s tied up to the trailer next door and growls at anything that moves. “This is what I do. I learn the truth and then I punish the responsible.”
“Okay Encyclopedia Brown, slow your roll.” Eddie has the distinct feeling that Nancy and Robin might come to blows right here on the sidewalk. “Enough with the dramatics.”
Nancy shoves a pointy finger in his face. “Shut up, Munson. I don’t care how scary you think you are, you’re nothing compared to me.”
“I’ve got to go clock in, Nancy,” Robin sounds like someone sucked all the life out of her in the last two minutes. “But I’ve told you everything I remember.”
Her shoulders round in on themselves and Eddie wishes he could put her in his van and drive far far away. Maybe to a beach where she can flirt with buff girls playing volleyball and he can drink cocktails with little collectable umbrellas.
Robin brushes off her Family Video vest and looks Nancy in the eye. “Kicking a hornet’s nest isn’t going to bring him back.”
She sends Eddie a sad smile and disappears into the store, bells jangling against the door.
Nancy and Eddie stare at each other. They’ve never interacted outside of her picking up Mike from Hellfire. “Do you want to go smoke a joint? It’s on the house.”
“I just threatened you. Why would you give me free drugs?” She asks like a prosecuting lawyer squaring up to the bench.
He shrugs. “I’m invested in getting the stick out of your ass. For the greater good or whatever.”
Her pink cardigan is buttoned wrong, little fake pearls sticking out of mismatched holes. Her hair is professionally permed but looks short and choppy, like she took scissors to it herself.
She shakes her head, uneven hair swirling around her face like a snowstorm. “Maybe some other day. I’ve got shit to do.”
“Offer stands, I guess.” He shuffles his feet as she turns away on those kitten heels. “For what it’s worth, I’ve seen much scarier things than you.”
She turns her severe face toward him. The movement is so precise it’s animalistic, like catching the attention of the doberman next door. “Let’s keep it that way.”
He watches her retreat until she’s a tiny dot stalking into the distance, bent forward like an arrow seeking its mark
He heads back to his van and revs it, cranks Sabbath up too loud. With any luck Hawkins will be in his rearview mirror before he gets swept up in whatever whacked out shit killed Steve Harrington.
__
March 1986
The first thing Eddie thinks as a cheerleader slides up his wall, bones cracking and eyes bleeding, is well shit. The second thing he thinks is no wonder those kids are so fucked up.
And then there’s a body on his floor, and then he’s running, because he’s a poor kid who everyone knows sells drugs, and then he’s hyperventilating on the floor of Rick’s fucking boat house.
He’s laying in the canoe, splinters digging through his jacket, when he starts to pray.
Dear father in heaven. I’m sorry for all the gay stuff and all the breaking laws stuff and all the Satanism stuff. I think I just saw a demon, the real kind, not like the kind my dad used to call out of me. You might want to come take care of that.
Then he digs his fingernails into his hands because what is he thinking, praying? Any god out there probably sent whatever that was as punishment for the layers and layers of sins that make up his whole life. But it’s a reflex, like trying to breathe in water when you’re drowning.
It doesn’t matter that he prayed and prayed when his mom was dying, when he was laying next to her cold body, when his dad would make him sleep in the truck bed in January because of all the dirty things crawling around in his blood. It doesn’t matter that no one answered.
He has no idea how long he lays in the canoe. Time slips and slides out of focus. Sometimes he can feel the cold outline of Charlotte's body pressed up against him. Sometimes the body touching his is Chrissy’s. Sometimes the wood at his back is the old revival stage digging into his skin as adults scream above him.
Maybe he really was possessed but there were so many demons inside of him that even forty exorcisms couldn’t wash him clean.
Please God, Eddie prays. Please, please, please. He doesn’t know what he’s praying for.
The sound of the boat house door creaking open. He almost weeps with relief. It’s nearly over. The cops will find him and he’ll rot in the same prison that created his father and everything will be set right.
The tarp is pulled off and instead of a cop he’s looking up at the pinched face of Robin Buckley.
“Welcome to the club, Munson.” She looks truly sorry. “I wish it didn’t come to this.”
Eddie’s halfway out of the boat when a freshman shaped form hits him square in the stomach.
“Eddie!” Dustin is almost squealing. “I’m so glad we found you.” Dustin holds him out at arms length. “We know you didn’t kill her.”
“You do?” His voice is dry from only breathing in dust and mold for god knows how long. He doesn’t even know what day it is.
“Of course you didn’t kill her, dingus,” Robin scoffs. “You told me one time you threw up dissecting the frog in freshman biology and I said I was taking away your metal card, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” He says.
Behind Robin stands Billy Hargrove’s little sister, the one who moved into the trailer across from Wayne’s last summer. Her red braids sparkle in the dim light filtering through the dirty windows. She looks like she’s witnessing a car crash.
“What’s she doing here?”
“Mayfield’s in the club too,” Robin says, flashing Eddie a look that he doesn’t understand.
“Are there any children in this town who haven’t borne witness to paranormal horrors?” Eddie can hear the frantic note in his voice.
“I’ll let you know when I find any,” Mayfield says. “Now tell us what happened.”
So Eddie does.
_
Eddie is sitting under Skull Rock when he starts laughing and suddenly can’t stop. Even after everything- the truth, and Dustin’s serious face saying Vecna, saying spell-caster, saying lich, he’s sitting at yet another monument to Steve Harrington’s short life. He runs his hand across its rough, mossy surface, feels a thrill stir deep in his stomach.
It must be the shock and sleep deprivation that has him imagining what it would have felt like to be one of the escapades Steve brought to this altar of teenage sexuality. His polo shirt would be streaked with dirt from being pressed into the cool earth, there would be leaves stuck in his perfect hair. After they were done they would lay on a ratty blanket and make up lies about knowing the constellations. Invent secret new ones that no one else would understand.
Eddie yanks his hands through his messy hair, pulling at the roots hard enough to send spikes of pain through his temple. Of course he would be thinking about ravishing a dead boy after watching two people get ripped to shreds before his eyes, of course he would. Might as well eek some enjoyment out of his last hours before getting caught by an interdimensional monster or mob of moralist townspeople.
Despite the shame spiking through his body, the image of Steve, pleasure drowsy and warm beneath his palms, calms Eddie’s frazzled nerves.
He shrugs off his denim vest and curls up in the hollow womb of Skull Rock. The revelations at the boat house should have been more of a shock, but he had been sketching an outline of the past few years through trauma responses and half understood conversations. Dustin and Robin had given him a stilted rundown that connected the dots from their past science fiction monsters to the dead girl in his living room.
Living room. Wayne. God, Eddie wants to throw up. Wayne is probably sitting in his trailer covered in crime scene tape and thinking about how his nephew is going to the electric chair. Chain-smoking so much his lungs fall right out.
After all of the shit Wayne’s put up with, he doesn’t deserve this. His own shitty childhood, Vietnam, working a job that grinds his body down more and more each year, Eddie showing up, Eddie refusing to talk for a month, Eddie refusing to eat anything but wonder bread and marshmallow fluff, Eddie screaming in the middle of night for years, Eddie cleaning out his infected stick and poke in the kitchen sink, Eddie selling pills out of the trailer.
If he hadn’t used up his prayer points earlier he would be praying that Wayne wakes up and forgets that he has a nephew at all.
He’s not sure how long he stays tucked into himself under Skull Rock, but he’s surprised when he hears voices nonetheless. A motley adventuring party materializes in the clearing, some of the cast of characters that were mentioned in the boat house are holding court. Robin and her oversized blazer, Dustin and his baseball hat pulled over over his curls, Nancy Wheeler with a hand on her hip, Max Mayfield gripping a Walkman with tight fingers, and Lucas Sinclair looking both upset and at home.
“Welcome to my safe house,” Eddie says as though it’s a normal afternoon, as though he isn’t clutching his sanity with both hands. “Nice of you to drop by.”
They talk over and around him, gates and Kate Bush and the cops and the old haunted house Eddie did coke in once and a compass needle spinning around and around. “It’s in the lake,” Dustin shouts more than once.
Eddie understands less and less as Nancy starts pacing and Robin flails her hands around, but it’s clear that they’re all in danger and need to save everyone in this town, starting with his surly neighbor.
Eddie makes a comment about Lord of the Rings and then suddenly they’re marching through the woods to go pitch the ring into Mordor or try to save Mayfield from getting all her bones broken, whichever comes first.
Once they reach the shore of Lover’s Lake Eddie has to stop Dustin from getting in the boat, ignoring his insistence that he’s mature enough to handle it, that Steve taught him some breath holding tricks from his days on swim team. Eddie practically manhandles him back on land with the wild thought that Steve would never forgive him for letting his kid swim in a monster infested lake.
Nancy paddles the boat out with surprisingly ropy arms. Robin can’t stop talking but she could be speaking Russian for all Eddie can process. And then- there they are, the spot where Patrick was strung up like a marionette and folded like a Coke can under a boot.
“I’m going in,” Nancy says. Her face is carved out of granite. “I’ll see what’s down there and report back. If you don’t see me in 30 seconds, cut your losses and run.”
She shucks off her pants and sweater with no hesitation. Maybe she knows I’m gay, the hysterical voice in Eddie’s brain suggests.
Nancy’s got her arms out in front of her like an Olympic diver on TV when Eddie shoots his hand out and says “wait!” He grabs Dustin’s flashlight from the canoe floor and wraps it in the grocery bag he stashed in his jacket after Robin threw snacks his way. His fingers scrabble at his wrist for the rubber band he keeps there, just in case his hair gets too big. He hands both to Nancy. “Here my lady. For your lovely locks and your keen investigative eye.”
Nancy looks frozen in time, posed over the early-spring lake. Then she uncoils and takes the rubber band, her hands shaking so bad Eddie feels a sudden stab of guilt.
“Nah, hand it over,” Robin says suddenly. She takes the band and gathers Nancy’s short hair into a messy ponytail. “There you go, nice and tight.”
Nancy’s face is doing something complicated, and in the stark moonlight she doesn’t look like a doberman pinscher ready to bite. She looks like a kid who keeps losing people and is in the process of losing more.
“You got this Wheeler,” Eddie says, more out of sudden pity than anything else. She takes the wrapped flashlight from his outstretched hand and nods once.
As she dives over the edge like a pointy swan, Eddie can’t help but think about a history class that he barely paid attention to during his first try at senior year. Black and white pictures of kids in trenches in France or Germany, looking at the camera, frozen in time hours or days before getting blown to bits.
Robin is counting out loud, and with each increasing number Eddie becomes more and more sure of what’s going to happen. She gets to thirty and takes a sharp breath. Nancy’s bobbing flashlight is nowhere to be seen.
Robin stands up and her blazer falls to the bottom of the canoe, pins clattering as they hit the wood. “C’mon Munson. No party member left behind, or whatever you nerds say.”
And maybe it’s small town queer solidarity, maybe it’s the way Max holds herself like her bones are carved out of fear, maybe it’s that he’s known for quite some time that he would follow Robin Buckley into just about anything, but he stands up too. “Once more into the breach, Robbie.”
They jump into the wine dark waters of Lover’s Lake.
Cold water on his skin, a sudden yank around his ankle, and then he’s reminded of Dustin’s strangled voice saying got dragged through the gate as he himself descends through glowing folds of fleshy vine pulsing with caustic light.
Deep coughing breath, there- lungs have some oxygen. A sting on his neck, another on his arm, and then too many to count, tiny spikes sinking into his flesh. Nancy is flailing on the ground, hitting flying membranous creatures with clenched fists.
Eddie’s never been good in a fight, he’s always been one to take his licks and then turn tail, but he’s trying now. Bats with viper’s teeth swarm around him as he grabs one by the throat, pulls its head off with a crunching twist. Robin has somehow found a boat oar and is pinning bats to the black and oozing ground.
It feels like they fight the bats for a hundred years, each time one gets smashed, another swoops down to take its place. Eddie has no idea what Robin and Nancy are doing, has no idea if they’re still alive, or bleeding out on the cracked ground. All he knows is to try to aim for their sinuous tails.
And suddenly, like a tornado rising from the earth, the bats lift as one. It’s like they are being called home to dinner, the way they swarm into a collective and shoot off into the distance.
“Nancy!” Robin slides across the ground to Nancy, who’s clutching at her stomach. Blood leaks through her fingers.
Nancy opens her eyes, sharp and already taking in their surroundings. She moves her fingers and inspects the slashes in her stomach. Her lips twist and she says “Not fatal. Eddie- take your shirt off and rip it into strips. We need to move before they come back.”
Eddie has no interest in taking off his shirt but does it anyway because he wants Nancy to be in charge of this particular adventure. He rips his Hellfire shirt off and throws his jackets back on, zipping up the leather.
Robin grabs the shirt and tears the bottom off in strips. She ties them around Nancy’s torso with shaking fingers. Nancy snatches the top of the shirt and shrugs it over her head. Eddie hauls her to her bare feet.
“Where are we going?” He asks. The air is filled with snow like ash and he is so so scared to look around.
“My house. The Upside Down should be a perfect reflection of our Hawkins, so there are guns in my closet.”
Absolutely none of that sentence makes any sense to Eddie but he nods anyway.
“C’mon guys we got to go,” Robin’s voice cracks and cracks. “Those have got to be carrying one hundred million diseases, did you see all those teeth? Nancy, you have to tell us if you start feeling afraid of water.” She starts off across the cracked land.
Eddie follows the girls and forces himself to look up. It looks like they’re walking through a photo negative, it looks like they’re walking through one of his father’s sermons. Red lightning cracks in the distance and he’s surprised that he doesn’t see the son of God riding on the clouds, blowing a trumpet and sitting on a seven headed beast.
Past and present begin to slide together and he has to force himself to trail after Nancy’s steps. His father said he deserves this. His father said he deserves this in every vacant lot and dusty field from the Ohio to the Snake river. Eddie wonders if forty demons are waiting for him in the spindly treeline, ready to reclaim their host.
He realizes that they’re walking through the drained reflection of Lover’s Lake. Chapter and verse beat against the inside of his temples. This is the second death, the lake of fire, the ash that falls from the sky like the merciful touch of Lazarus descending to wet the lips of the rich man.
Up ahead is Skull Rock, Eddie looks to it to orient himself. He had seen it mere hours ago, slept in its comfort. Just like in his reality, there’s a smooth part on top that connects to a swell of earth and roots. Unlike his reality, there’s a tall figure standing where the rock meets dirt.
“Stop,” he says, grabbing both girls by their collars.That’s got to be one of those flower mouthed monsters Dustin decided to name after a DND creature. If Nancy’s stories are right, then they have no chance against it without a fucking flamethrower. “Is that a demogorgon?”
The figure moves in slow halting steps as it descends from the rock. It’s holding a long object, tapered at the bottom.
“That’s not how a demogorgon moves,” Nancy sounds panicked now, her whole body tight with tension. “I have no idea what that is.”
The figure is moving a little quicker now, obviously zeroed in on their little party. “We should run, right? We should run,” Robin is holding onto Nancy’s shoulder with one hand and the boat oar with the other
Eddie can feel his blood slow to sludge in his veins, fear pulsing through every cell in his body. Like hell is he going to stand here and get eaten by this thing. It’s going to have to catch him first.
He’s just about to burst into a run when Robin screams.
She drops the oar, drops Nancy’s arm, and bolts across the lakebed in the direction of the creature.
“What the fuck is she doing?”Eddie says and Nancy groans and they take off. They follow her closely, but Robin is quick and her legs are long. They watch as she and the creature meet on the shore of the dried lake, watch as she slams her body into it.
They’re a few hundred feet away when Eddie can finally make out what Robin is screaming. “Steve!” she wails over and over. “Steve, Steve.”
And sure enough, wrapped in Robin’s lanky embrace, is a man, coated in grime and blood.