Chapter Text
October 28, 1984
Dustin called Will on the radio with a simple order: Scrounge up as many quarters as humanly possible and get his ass to the arcade, immediately.
Which meant Will had to ask his mom for a ride.
Again.
It wasn’t that he didn’t get it. She was scared that the moment he slipped out of her sight, something terrible would happen. That he would disappear again, and this time she wouldn’t be able to bring him home. Will tried to be patient about it. He really did. But it had been almost a year now.
At least she still let him see his friends.
Her green sedan pulled up in front of the arcade, and Will leaned forward in his seat, searching the sidewalk. Mike, Lucas, and Dustin were already there, clustered by the bike rack, threading chains through their wheels.
Will couldn’t remember the last time he’d ridden his bike.
His mom tapped the horn twice. The sound cut through the chatter and the music spilling out of the arcade doors. The boys looked up just in time to see Will lift a hand and wave. Mike and Lucas waved back.
“Hey!” Dustin shouted, already grinning.
Will’s mom turned toward him, one hand still resting on the steering wheel. “Okay. So, I’ll pick you up in two hours. That’s nine o’clock on the dot, okay?”
“Okay, okay.”
“If anything happens, if you need to come home, just ask them to use their phone and call home, okay? Don’t—”
“Don’t walk or bike home,” Will interjected. “I know, I know.”
“Okay, but, sweetie—”
“Mom, I have to go.”
She studied his face like she was trying to memorize it. She was always doing that lately. But all she said was, “Have fun.”
Will flashed her a big smile and jumped out of the car before she could say anything else.
Inside, the arcade was loud and warm, all flashing lights and overlapping plinks and beeps. His friends had already made a beeline for Dragon’s Lair, which wasn’t surprising. Lucas had been obsessed with it since the day the machine arrived.
Dustin was at the controls now. He gripped the joystick with one hand, his other hovering over the buttons. Lucas stood to his left, leaning in, and Mike was on his right, shoulders squared. Will slid into the open space beside Mike and peered at the screen, where the blonde damsel in distress swooned dramatically.
“To slay the dragon, use the magic sword,” she sighed. She wore a sparkly black outfit that barely seemed to count as clothing, and her voice was breathy in a way that made Will feel like he was eavesdropping on something he wasn’t supposed to hear. He glanced at Lucas, who didn’t appear bothered at all.
Maybe that was part of the appeal.
“Oh, Jesus,” Dustin moaned. “I’m in uncharted territory here, guys.”
The moment the game started, Lucas and Mike both began talking at once.
“Down! Down! Down!” Lucas shouted. “Right! Right! Right!”
“I’m going, I’m going,” Dustin said, his words tumbling over each other as he yanked the stick back and forth. “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going!”
“The sword!” Mike yelled. “The sword! The sword! The sword!”
“Keep running towards him,” Lucas instructed.
Will didn’t say anything. He watched the screen, and Mike’s face, and the way Dustin’s shoulders tensed every time Dirk jumped.
“Okay, shut up,” Dustin said. “Shut up. Shut up!”
The screen flashed. Dirk the Daring vanished suddenly in an explosion of flame.
“No. No. No!” Dustin cried, letting go of the controls as Dirk collapsed into a skeleton. “No! No! No! I hate this overpriced bullshit!” He smacked the side of the cabinet, then kicked it for good measure.
“You’re just not nimble enough,” Lucas said, settling back against the machine. “But you’ll get there one day. But until then, Princess Daphne is still mine.” He poked Dustin in the chest.
“Whatever,” Dustin grumbled. “I’m still tops on Centipede and Dig Dug.”
“You sure about that?”
They all whirled around.
One of Jonathan’s classmates, Keith, stood a few feet away with an open bag of Cheetos tucked under his arm, chewing loudly. He wore his Palace Arcade T-shirt, the one he had on nearly every day since he started working there a few months ago.
Dustin hated his guts.
“Sure about what?” Dustin asked. Keith just stared at him and popped a Cheeto into his mouth.
Dustin bolted. Will ran after him automatically, with Mike and Lucas close behind.
“You’re kidding me. No, no, no,” Dustin muttered as he went, shoving aside whoever was in his way. “Move! Move!”
They all stopped short in front of the Centipede cabinet. “No, no, no, no, no,” Dustin said, his eyes darting down the list of high scores. Then they turned around to the Dig Dug cabinet. “Aw, no! No! No!”
Will stretched up on his tiptoes to peek over Dustin’s shoulder. Dustin’s name sat in second place now. The top score belonged to someone new.
MADMAX.
“Seven hundred and fifty-one thousand, three hundred points!” Will cried. The number just didn’t make any sense.
“That’s impossible,” Mike breathed.
Dustin turned on Keith, who had followed them at a lazy pace, still eating. “Who is Mad Max?”
“Better than you,” Keith said. Dustin flipped him off.
“Is it you?” Will asked.
Keith snorted. “You know I despise Dig Dug.” He tossed another Cheeto into his mouth.
“Then who is it?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, spill it, Keith,” Dustin demanded.
Keith wiped his fingers on his jeans. “You want information? Then I need something in return.”
All three of them turned at the same time to face Mike.
“No,” he said, scrunching his face in disgust. “No, no, no. No way! You’re not getting a date with her.”
“Mike, come on,” Lucas pleaded, “Just get him the date.”
“I’m not prostituting my sister!”
“But it’s for a good cause,” Lucas argued.
It was a ridiculous conversation for a few reasons, the main one being that Nancy was way out of Keith’s league. And even if she wasn’t, everyone knew she and Steve Harrington had been going steady for almost a year now. Will didn’t know much about Steve, except that his carefully styled brunette hair was kind of legendary around Hawkins.
“No, don’t get him the date,” Dustin said. “You know what? He’s gonna spread his nasty-ass rash to your whole family.”
Keith’s mouth twisted. “Acne isn’t a rash and it isn’t contagious, you prepubescent wastoid.”
“Oh, I’m a wastoid?” Dustin shot back. “She wouldn’t wanna go on a date with you. You make, like, what, two fifty an hour?”
“Nice perm.”
“Gonna make fun of my hair?” Dustin asked.
But Will was only half-listening. Thunder cracked outside, sharp enough to make his shoulders tense. He glanced toward the front of the arcade and found he couldn’t tear his eyes away. His feet started moving before he decided to follow them.
Through the glass doors, the night didn’t look right. Pale flecks drifted through the air, moving at a slant instead of falling straight down. It reminded him of snow caught in heavy wind.
“Hey,” Will said. “Hey, guys, do you see the…”
He turned, but his friends weren’t there. Nobody was. Palace Arcade was utterly empty.
And then, suddenly, he wasn’t in the arcade anymore. Or, he was, but it was… different. The color drained from the place, leaving everything looking gray and sickly. Thick, black vines crept over the video game cabinets and across the carpet, winding around joysticks and pooling at the bases of the machines. Those drifting white flecks filled the room now.
Up close, he could see they weren’t snowflakes. They were spores.
Will swallowed hard.
He knew where he was.
The front door creaked open, pulled by something he couldn’t see, and his feet carried him outside beneath the arcade’s awning. The sky churned overhead. Red bolts of lightning split the clouds.
And then, the sound of his own name cut through the rumble.
“Will! Are you okay?”
Mike burst through the door behind him, breathless. The metal frame rattled as it slammed shut.
Just like that, the storm vanished. Will realized they were standing outside the arcade — the real arcade. The stars shone brightly overhead. The spores were gone, as were the vines.
Will stared out at the horizon, taking in the quiet parking lot, the glowing arcade sign, the hum of music leaking through the walls. “Yeah,” he said absently. “I just... I needed some air.”
His stomach gave a funny little swoop when Mike’s arm slid around him, steadying him with a firm grip on his shoulder.
“Come on,” Mike said softly. “You’re up on Dig Dug. Let’s take that top score back, huh?”
Will nodded and let Mike steer him back inside.
It wasn’t his first episode.
The doctors said it wasn’t something to be embarrassed about. It was a normal response to a disease they called post-traumatic stress disorder. A disease, they said, that Will now had.
They explained that, because of what happened to him, his mind and body had a hard time staying in the present moment. Sometimes his brain would pick a memory and play it without warning. His chest would tighten, his hands would shake, and for a few seconds, or sometimes longer, it would feel like he was back there.
Back in the Upside Down.
That was the name his friends had given the place where he’d been stuck for six days, thanks to a monster they called the Demogorgon.
They’d always named things like that. It was how they made sense of the world. The narrow route through the woods between Mike’s and Will’s houses became Mirkwood. Neighborhoods turned into kingdoms. Bullies, and even the occasional teacher, were recast as specific villains from the stories they loved. Giving things code names made them easier to understand.
So when something truly impossible happened, it felt natural to Will that they reached for Dungeons & Dragons. There was a monster. There was a terrible place. And someone needed rescuing.
That part, at least, followed the rules. Rules he was still learning.
The rest of it was harder to fit neatly into a story.
Will knew he’d missed a lot while he was gone. His friends had filled in the gaps as best they could, talking over one another, correcting details and arguing about who had figured out what first.
The government had faked his death. There had even been a body that looked just like his. But the thing they pulled from the quarry was missing a birthmark on its right arm. “I kissed that birthmark the day you were born,” Will's mom had told him. “Why would it be missing the day you died?” She had never given up on him.
There had also been a girl.
They found her in the woods off Mirkwood the same day Will disappeared. She had a shaved head and didn’t talk much at first. And she had powers.
She flipped a van.
She made Mike fly.
She’s the reason they didn’t have to worry about Troy Walsh at school anymore.
She saved them from the monster.
Only later did Will understand the other part of it: That she had accidentally opened the gate, a portal between worlds. And through it, the Demogorgon had come.
Sometimes, when Will let his mind drift, he thought he remembered her. It felt like the memory of a dream that was already fading by the time he woke up. A girl’s voice, calm and steady, cutting through the dark, telling him his mom was coming. Telling him to hold on a little longer.
But he couldn’t be sure it was real.
October 30, 1984
Will opened his locker and a folded newspaper clipping slipped forward, wedged through the narrow grate. He frowned when he saw his own face smiling back at him.
THE BOY WHO CAME BACK TO LIFE
By Benjamin Buck
In a recent statement, the state coroner’s office has admitted to misidentifying the body recovered from the Sattler Quarry as twelve-year-old Will Byers. Will Byers had gone missing two days prior, inspiring the town of Hawkins to form a search party in the hopes of finding him. When a boy’s body was recovered from the Sattler Quarry, the case seemed solved. Six days later local police, led by Chief Jim Hopper, found Byers alive in an abandoned cabin a few miles outside of Hawkins. Police launched an investigation into the state coroner and have since arrested him. Chief Hopper declined to comment on the coroner’s arrest.
Someone had written ZOMBIE BOY across the page in green marker. In red pen, they had drawn Xs over his eyes.
Below his photo, the caption read: Will Byers, as seen on the missing persons poster his mother made. He stared at the picture. It showed him smiling, eyes wide in a way that made his face look younger than he felt now.
He looked down the hallway in both directions. Nobody appeared to be watching. He crushed the paper in his fist, grabbed his science textbook, and shut the locker just as the bell rang.
It could have been anyone. His mind went first to the Zimmerman brothers, Jason and David, who had given him plenty of shit since his return to Hawkins. But they were high schoolers now. It was less likely they’d be prowling the halls of the middle school just to torment him. How would they even know which locker was his?
Then again, Will wouldn’t put it past them.
He slid into the seat Mike always saved for him, right beside him. Dustin and Lucas were in the front row, just ahead of them.
“Meet the human brain,” Mr. Clarke said, setting a model onto its stand at the front of the classroom. “I know, I know. It doesn’t look like much. A little gross even, right? But consider this: There are a hundred billion cells inside this miracle of evolution. All working as one.”
Dustin turned to Lucas, grinning like he’d just been told a phenomenally interesting piece of information.
“No, no, I did not misspeak. I did not stutter. A hundred billion,” Mr. Clarke added, punctuating the last word with both hands.
The classroom door swung open. Principal Coleman stepped in, followed by a small, redheaded girl in blue jeans and a red zip-up hoodie.
“Ah, this must be our new student,” Mr. Clarke said.
“Indeed,” Principal Coleman said, already retreating from the classroom. “All yours.”
The girl made a break for it, taking quick steps toward the edge of the classroom, but Mr. Clarke’s hand shot up. “All right. Hold up. You don’t get away that easy.”
She froze.
“Come on up, don’t be shy,” Mr. Clarke said. Then he looked at Dustin. “Dustin, drum roll.”
Dustin promptly snapped his textbook shut and began drumming his fingers across the cover. The girl stepped up and stood beside Mr. Clarke.
“Class, please welcome, all the way from sunny California, the latest passenger to join us on our curiosity voyage: Maxine!”
Dustin drummed one loud, final tap on his textbook.
“It’s Max,” the girl said quickly.
“Sorry?”
“Nobody calls me Maxine,” she said. “It’s Max.”
Lucas leaned closer, eyes bugging out of his head. “Mad Max,” he whispered.
“Well, all aboard, Max,” Mr. Clarke said, and the girl, finally released from standing, claimed a desk near the back of the room.
Will watched her cross her arms and stare out the window, completely disinterested.
***
At recess, Will leaned against the chain-link fence, fingers gripping the diamond gaps, shoulder to shoulder with his friends. They had spent the entire period like this — gawking at the new girl who Lucas was convinced was the mysterious arcade superstar.
So far, she had done a couple of tricks on the skateboard she’d carried outside. Other than that, she mostly stood with her arms crossed, watching the playground with the same unreadable expression she’d worn in class.
“There’s no way that’s Mad Max,” Mike said flatly for the fifth or sixth time today.
“Yeah,” Will agreed. “Girls don’t play video games.”
“And even if they did, you can’t get seven hundred and fifty thousand points on Dig Dug,” Mike added. “I mean, that’s impossible.”
“But her name is Max,” Lucas insisted.
“So what?” Mike asked.
“So,” Lucas said, “how many Maxes do you know?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Zero,” Lucas said. “That’s how many.”
“Yeah, and she shows up at school the day after someone with her same name breaks our top score,” Dustin pointed out. “I mean, you kidding me?”
“Exactly,” Lucas said. “So she’s gotta be Mad Max. She’s gotta be.”
“And plus she skateboards, so she’s pretty awesome,” Dustin said.
“Awesome?” Mike scoffed. “You haven’t even spoken a word to her.”
“I don’t have to,” Dustin said. “I mean, look at her… Shit, I’ve lost the target.”
Will scanned the blacktop until he spotted the flash of orange hair and the red zip-up. “Oh, there!” he called. The four boys watched as she climbed the concrete steps, dropped a crumpled ball of paper into the trash, and walked back inside the school.
The moment the door shut behind her, they moved. Dustin got to the trash can first and began rooting around inside. Lucas and Will arranged themselves to shield him from view of anyone passing by, while Mike hung back, his navy blue zip-up slipping off his shoulders.
“Got it,” Dustin said, smoothing out the wad of paper. “There we go…”
They read it aloud together: “Stop spying on me, CREEPS!”
She had underlined CREEPS three times.
Lucas and Dustin looked totally mortified. But at least her note got Mike to crack a smile.
Will felt that weird little swoop in his stomach again.
A different voice sounded from behind them. “William Byers.” He turned to see Principal Coleman. “Your mother’s here.”
Already?
Coleman walked alongside him back to his locker, because apparently Will couldn’t even be trusted to do that by himself. He could feel the weight of everyone’s eyes in the hall. It had been like this since he came back from that place.
Zombie Boy.
He gathered his things while Coleman hovered, then followed him down the hall and out the front doors. His mom waited, smiling and waving. Will climbed into the car, careful not to meet anyone’s gaze. Outside, the trees flashed by, red and gold in the crisp autumn light.
“You feeling any better, Will?” his mom asked. “Huh?”
“Yeah,” Will said, a beat too late. “Yeah, sorry.”
“Hey. What did we talk about, huh? You’ve got to stop it with the sorries.”
“Sorry,” Will said. “I mean— I mean, yeah. I know.”
“And listen, you know, there’s nothing to be nervous about, you know. Just tell ‘em what you felt last night and what you saw. Hey, I’m gonna be there the whole time. So it’s gonna be okay. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Chief Hopper met them in the parking lot outside Hawkins Lab.
“Hey buddy,” he said when he saw Will. The three of them walked inside together.
The exams were never pleasant, but Will at least knew what to expect now. They checked his height and weight, measured his blood pressure, and took blood samples. They brushed aside his sandy brown bangs, drew red dots on his forehead and temples, then connected electrodes to the marks.
After the last wire was secured, the door opened and Dr. Sam Owens entered. He was a kindly-looking man with curly gray hair and light blue eyes.
“Sir Will, how are you?” Dr. Owens asked, nodding toward Joyce. “Mom,” he said. Then he glanced at Hopper. “Pop.”
Will stifled a grin. Dr. Owens knew Hopper wasn’t his dad. But, Will supposed, he was more of a father than Will's own dad, Lonnie, ever had been. Lonnie couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone. Hopper had walked through a portal to another dimension to rescue him — a kid he’d never even met.
It had been almost a year since then, and Hopper was still coming to these appointments with him.
“Let’s take a look, see what’s going on here,” Dr. Owens said, glancing at the chart in his hand. “I see you shaved off a pound since we saw you last. Must be making room for all that Halloween candy. What’s your favorite candy? Desert-island candy, if you had to pick one?”
“I don’t know,” Will admitted.
“Come on,” he pressed. “Life or death situation. What would you pick?”
“I guess Reese’s Pieces,” Will said.
“Good call, good call,” Dr. Owens said. “I’m more of a Mounds guy, but I gotta say, peanut butter and chocolate, come on, hard to beat that. All right, so tell me what’s going on with you. Tell me about this episode you had.”
So they were jumping right into it.
“Well, my friends were there, and then they just weren’t, and I was back there again,” Will said.
“In the Upside Down?”
Will nodded.
“All right, so what happened next?”
“I heard this noise, and so I went outside, and it was worse.”
“How was it worse?” Dr. Owens asked.
“There was this storm.”
“Okay,” he said. “So how did you feel when you saw the storm?”
Will shivered at the memory of red lightning. Of turning around to find his friends had vanished. “I felt… frozen.”
“Heart racing?” Dr. Owens asked.
“Just frozen.”
“Like, frozen— cold frozen? Frozen to the touch?”
“No,” Will said. “Like how you feel when you’re scared, and you can’t breathe or talk or do anything. I felt— I felt this evil, like it was looking at me.”
“It was evil?” Dr. Owens asked. He cleared his throat. “Well, what do you think the evil wanted?”
Will didn’t have to think. The answer came instantly, like a fact he had always known. “To kill.”
“To kill you?”
“Not me,” Will said. He met the doctor’s gaze for the first time since he’d begun recounting his episode. “Everyone else.”
Will waited in the hall while his mom and Hopper spoke with Dr. Owens privately. Their words were muffled through the door, but he knew they were talking about him. He pulled out a small notebook and began sketching, tracing the outline of a figure with green skin and a disturbing face.
He was tired of these semimonthly visits. They didn’t seem to be helping. If anything, the flashbacks had been coming more often lately.
Still, he liked Dr. Owens. And at least Hawkins Lab was close to home. Before Dr. Owens had taken over, his mom had dragged him to a child psychologist in Chicago. Every other week meant a four-hour round trip, just to hear the same thing over and over again: It’s PTSD.
Finally, his mom and Hopper emerged from the room.
Will fell into step a few paces ahead of them, hands buried in the pockets of his brown jacket, as they walked to the car. He could hear their quiet conversation behind him. His mom’s voice sounded tight and anxious, but what else was new?
***
Will sat on his bed later that evening, legs bent awkwardly beneath him, a binder resting on his lap to give him a solid surface for drawing. His walls were painted a warm, golden yellow — his favorite color — and he basked in the familiar glow as he sketched.
A light rap came at his door. “Hey, bud,” Jonathan said as he eased it open. “I, uh, didn’t know what you’d like, so I got a variety. Take your pick.” He set three VHS tapes on Will’s dresser.
Will only glanced up for a second before returning to his drawing. “Whatever you want.” His green colored pencil scratched across the page.
“All right,” Jonathan said, striding across the room and sitting at the foot of the bed. “What are you working on?” He leaned closer to read the words beneath the sketch. “Zombie Boy? Who’s Zombie Boy?”
Will paused. He couldn’t bring himself to meet Jonathan’s eyes. “Me.”
“Did someone call you that?” Jonathan asked gently.
Will didn’t answer.
“Hey, you can talk to me. You know that, right?” Jonathan asked again, in that same soft tone. “Whatever happened…”
Will still refused to look up.
“Will, come on, talk to me.”
Finally, Will set the pencil down and let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Stop treating me like that.”
“What? Like what?”
“Like everyone else does,” he said. “Like there’s something wrong with me.”
“What are you talking about?”
Will’s hands curled slightly against the binder. “Mom, Dustin, Lucas. Everyone.” Everyone but Mike. “They all treat me like I’m gonna break. Like I’m a baby. Like I can’t handle things on my own. It doesn’t help. It just makes me feel like more of a freak.”
“You’re not a freak,” Jonathan said.
“Yeah, I am,” Will said. “I am.”
He searched for another word and came up empty. Normal people didn’t have these episodes. What else were you supposed to call it when you slipped out of the world without warning and deluded yourself into believing you were back in an alternate dimension?
Kids at school had cried at his funeral. They had stood in a line and hugged his mom and eaten casseroles and said they were sorry he was gone. Now they asked him to borrow pencils in class, like none of it had happened.
He got pulled out of school constantly. Not for something normal like a dentist appointment, but to visit a special government doctor, to get treated for a problem he wasn’t allowed to talk about.
He couldn’t even ride his bike to his friends’ houses anymore.
An image flashed across his memory of a slimy, slug-like creature, writhing in his bathroom sink, and he winced. He still hadn’t told anyone about that. What kind of person coughs up an inter-dimensional insect?
A freak, that’s who. Someone weird. Someone different.
“You know what? You’re right,” Jonathan said. He swung his other leg onto the bed and sat cross-legged facing Will. “You are a freak.”
Will looked up, startled. “What?”
“No, I’m serious,” Jonathan continued. “You’re a freak. But what? Do you wanna be normal? Do you wanna be just like everyone else? Being a freak is the best, all right? I’m a freak.”
“Is that why you don’t have any friends?”
Jonathan breathed out a laugh. “I— I have— I have friends, Will.”
“Then why are you always hanging out with me?”
Jonathan’s expression softened. “Because you’re my best friend, all right? And I would rather be best friends with Zombie Boy than with a boring nobody. You know what I mean?”
Will still didn’t look convinced.
“Okay, look,” Jonathan said. “Who would you rather be friends with? Bowie or Kenny Rogers?”
“Ugh,” Will cringed. Easy answer. He’d gotten really into Bowie over the past year. Jonathan had given him a mixtape in the hospital the night he was rescued, and Bowie’s Modern Love had been on repeat ever since.
“Exactly,” Jonathan said. “It’s no contest. The thing is, nobody normal ever accomplished anything meaningful in this world. You got it?”
Will leaned back against his pillow, feeling the tension in his shoulders ease a bit. “Well, some people like Kenny Rogers.”
“Kenny Rogers?” said a voice from his doorway. “I love Kenny Rogers.”
Bob Newby, his mom’s boyfriend, leaned in, smiling, hands resting on either side of the doorframe.
Will caught Jonathan’s eye, and neither of them could hold it together. They keeled over, laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Bob asked.
“Nothing,” Will said quickly.
Bob plucked a VHS from the stack on the dresser. “Mr. Mom! Woo! Perfect!”
Once he left the room, Will and Jonathan covered their faces and collapsed into another round of laughter.
Will wrapped up his drawing and set his colored pencils aside before the brothers joined the party in the living room. His mom had made popcorn on the stovetop — with extra butter, just the way Will liked it. He sat on the sofa a couple cushions away from his mom and Bob, who were snuggled against one another. Jonathan claimed the armchair nearby.
At some point, the phone rang. His mom stiffened, glancing over her shoulder.
Bob rested a hand on her knee. “Hey. It’s okay. Let it go. Probably just a crank call.”
“Okay,” she breathed, relaxing slightly.
“Let it go,” he reassured her.
She was always so on edge lately, about everything. Will noticed how easily Bob could calm her down. It was another reason he liked him, even if Jonathan was still on the fence.
Bob was easy to make fun of. But he seemed to make Will’s mom really happy. He’d been coming for their weekly movie nights for months now and they always had a fun time together. Plus, he was a nerd. He got all the things Will liked, like D&D, Lord of the Rings, even the AV club. In fact, Bob had founded the club back when he was a student at Hawkins Middle School.
With Bob there, the house felt almost... normal.
***
It was a little past midnight when Will kicked off his blankets and sat up. The house was quiet. Bob had left after the movie, and his mom and Jonathan were already asleep.
But sleep hadn’t come for Will. He had tossed and turned beneath his airplane-patterned blanket in his blue-striped pajama pants and white T-shirt.
He padded quietly across the carpet, down the hallway, and past his mom’s sewing station. She’d been bent over it for weeks, working on his Halloween costume. Tomorrow was the big day.
In the bathroom, he peed and flushed, then turned to wash his hands. A strange sound rose over the rush of water. Will shut off the faucet and slowly pushed open the door.
The house looked normal — except for the red light flickering across the walls from the windows.
The front door swung open by itself. Will felt goosebumps prickle along the back of his neck.
Outside, a familiar storm raged. Thunder cracked, and red lightning tore across the sky. Will stepped onto the porch, where thick black vines curled across the railing. White spores whipped past on the wind.
On the horizon, lit by the jagged red lightning, a massive shape hovered in the clouds. It looked like an enormous spider, its shadowy limbs as tall as skyscrapers.
He knew it was the same force, the same evil, that he’d felt outside the arcade.
And as he stared at it, he realized it wasn’t just out there. It was looking back at him.