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Will can’t say that he’s completely sure when the hazy daydream that he and his friends have been living in will end. It will end – of that he’s certain. But the when and the how have remained a mystery to him. Dark voices lace the edges of his mind, whispering their signs and portents in the background of his everyday thoughts. He’s not sure why they’re there or why they won’t leave or why it seems like only he can hear them, but they exist and so he knows that one day, a few days closer than everyone may think, their temporary relief is going to be over. Their old life isn’t their real life anymore. Monsters are their real life and any breaks are just that: breaks. Life revolves around the shadows.
But right now, Will is having fun. Fabricated fun, obviously, found at the bottom of a plastic red cup because there’s no other kind of fun to be had at a party. Judy Mathers had invited all the juniors and seniors over to her expensive house in her expensive neighborhood on this frozen March night, and since Will and his friends had nothing else to do, they decided to go. It was mostly an excuse to get their minds off the constant dread they feel. Fuck the shadows, they said. Sure.
There’s a boy with Will, warm and solid against his chest – Aidan, his boyfriend. Wonderful Aidan who always smells like oranges and ginger. Arms draped around his neck, Will buries his smile into Aidan’s shoulder, because he can’t seem to stop smiling and giggling. He loves Aidan so much. Or at least the alcohol does. The voices have gone down several octaves.
“You’re not normally like this,” Aidan laughs, kissing Will’s temple. “And by this I mean you’re never drunk.”
“I’m not drunk,” Will mumbles. “My vision isn’t blurry and I can do basic trigonometry.” He pulls back to look at Aidan, the soft edges of his face outlined in neon-colored shadows. “I’m just happy.”
“And buzzed.”
Will rolls his eyes. “Maybe.”
Aidan smiles again, nothing but adoration on his face, and Will tilts his head up so he can kiss him, lazily and lovingly and interspersed with laughter and whispers. He desperately wishes they didn’t have to stand in the hallway, just past the point where the neon party lights reach. He’d love to be out there dancing with his friends, but if even one sober soul, one pair of fogless eyes sees him and who he’s with…high schoolers don’t abide by the what happens, stays rule. They never have, and they never will.
“You could not do trigonometry right now,” Aidan mumbles.
Will laughs and opens his mouth to respond, but something stops him short. His throat grasps for words but comes up empty and his hand, previously wrapped up in the collar of Aidan’s shirt, goes slack. Aidan catches it before it can fall.
“Will? You okay?”
Will licks his lips, glancing over Aidan’s shoulder and around the dark hallway. There’s no one, nothing else there. Yet the voices have started hissing again, toppling over each other in their haste to guide his eyes, telling him to look elsewhere because what they seek and what he needs to find isn’t here in this hallway.
“Will?”
He blinks, looking up at Aidan. “Sorry. Sorry, um, I just – I need to go see something.”
“Oh. Okay. Did I –“
“No! No, of course not. I promise.” Will gives him another kiss, forcing a smile when he pulls away. “I just – I need to check on my friends, you know, make sure they’re not passed out at the bottom of the stairs or something. I’ll be right back.”
Aidan nods, dropping Will’s hand, and Will reluctantly leaves the hallway to follow the malicious feeling in his gut.
The bathroom mirror is covered in pink lipstick kisses. El’s not sure why someone would do that. A waste of lipstick, honestly.
She curls her legs tighter around Mike’s waist to maintain her precarious position on the edge of the sink. His face, his neck, his hands are all awash in neon red; somebody changed the bulbs above the mirror and the whole bathroom glows with an eerie, bloody vibe. Tinted shadows drift in the lonely corners of the bathtub, the red lights not strong enough to banish them completely. El tries not to focus on them, instead burying her hands in Mike’s hair.
They were kissing some time ago; leaving pink lipstick marks on him was much more fun than leaving them on the mirror. But now his face is pressed into her shoulder and she’s breathing deep the scent of his familiar citrus shampoo and all is okay.
Tainted Love seeps under the door, barely audible. El feels a million miles away from the dozens of high schoolers dancing and drinking just on the other side of these four walls. Mike takes a slow, wracking breath that shakes his shoulders and rattles his chest against hers.
“I love you,” he rasps into her shoulder. He doesn’t seem to be upset or otherwise distressed, just…different, reflective, in his head, so El slides a hand through his hair, letting it come to rest on his nape. The perfect, haunting isolation of this room has gotten to the both of them. It’s addictive, and something in El’s stomach tells her it isn’t to be trusted. There’s evil laced in the shadows, collected in the corners, but the harder El looks for it, the more it evades her sight.
“I know.” She kisses the top of his head, pushing back her worry. “I love you too.”
They’re just teenagers. They can have this, right now.
Max rolls her chapped bottom lip between her teeth, scrutinizing the pool from its concrete edge. Someone turned on its underwater lights so it glows electric blue against the night sky, yet despite how it inviting it looks, nothing can change the fact that it’s thirty degrees outside and all the upperclassmen would rather be inside taking shots in the kitchen and singing ear-bleeding karaoke than getting hypothermia in a nuclear pool.
“We should go into the forest,” Dustin says offhandedly, like the idea just popped into his head and he had to suggest it. Max feels an odd twinge of reluctance as she pulls her gaze away from the pool, following Dustin’s line of sight. As they stand on the edge of the Mathers’ enormous patio, all that separates them from the woods is an untended stretch of dried grass. The lights shining out the house’s floor-to-ceiling windows die out about halfway across the stretch, and all Max can see of the forest are the trees’ spindly black branches gasping upwards, still bare from winter.
The sight of it reeks of malice and demons and sends cold shocks of fear down her spine.
“No,” she says flatly, turning back to the pool without explanation. Dustin huffs.
“What is it with you and this pool? I could see you staring at it out the windows when we were inside. If you’re planning on jumping in, I feel like I should tell you that’s a bad idea.”
“It is getting kind of weird, babe,” Lucas agrees.
Max swallows. “It’s just a pool, guys. I wanted some fresh air. Go back in if you want.”
A hand softly touches her elbow – Lucas’. It’s his silent way of telling her that he’s willing to listen if she wants to talk. Unfortunately for him, she doesn’t right now. What would she even say?
“We can sit with you, Max. It isn’t like we have better plans.”
She crosses her arms over her chest, subtly leaning away from him, still unable to look away from the water. “It’s fine, Lucas. The pool’s cool and it’s really cramped in there with all the people. Go get some drinks and I’ll meet you in the kitchen in a minute, alright?
On the surface she feels like she’s telling the truth but below it swirls something dark, just like how looking at this pool feels. Why?
After another moment, once it’s clear she isn’t relenting, both boys let out a sigh and their shuffling footsteps slowly recede, disappearing with a brief swell in the volume of the music playing inside as the backdoor opens and closes.
She exhales through pursed lips, her breath a foggy white cloud that dissipates as quickly as it came. No pool should be so still. She wants to say tranquil, but that implies peace and serenity, and she doesn’t feel any of that right now. Some sick mix of restlessness and paralysis holds her bones in place and keeps her eyes on the pool. In the distance, the forest rattles as the wind courses through it, stirring up branches and ghosts.
What is going on with you, Mayfield? It’s a forest and a backyard and a pool. Nothing out there can hurt you.
A cold voice hisses at her in the back of her mind as soon as she thinks it. She knows better. Plenty of things out there can drag her to places that have never seen the sun. She knows this firsthand, as do her friends.
Didn’t Mike tell her a story about a pool once? Something that had happened ages ago, when they had just become teenagers, when she was still in California…what was that story? Was it a story or a memory?
There’s something in the water.
She blinks. Electric blue is seared on her eyelids. There’s something in the water. Didn’t they say that on the radio two, three summers ago? When there was the infection and it was hell all over again?
But why is it stuck in her head now?
The last place she was seen was next to the pool.
She blinks again, and when her eyes open, the pleasant blue water is infused with streaks of blood, all the way across, turning it purple. The light catches on them as they swirl in the water. A high-pitched whine sounds from the forest, full of grief and promised vengeance. Max’s breath stalls in her throat and she takes a step backwards, blinking rapidly. The wail is gone, but the blood keeps flashing in and out. It’s gone, it’s there, it’s gone, it’s there. Whose blood is it? Is it real?
Am I going crazy?
A loud commotion from the house breaks her out of her unearthly trance. The pool is clean, the forest is quiet. But with a nauseating pull of dread in her stomach, she remembers the story Mike was telling her. It was how Barbara Holland was lost, all because of a drop of blood in a pool.
Will finds the backdoor and the feelings pushing him onwards turn greedy when he touches the knob. He emerges into the cold, clear night, the sounds of the house disappearing when the door closes behind him. The back patio is dominated by a shining blue pool and the only other person around is Max, standing at the edge of the water, her hair glowing bright red-orange.
He looks at her and the voices subside, which scares him even more than before.
“Max?” he says carefully. Max looks over her shoulder, her eyes wide.
“Will…I think…I can’t see it anymore, but I think…”
He moves to stand next to her and follows her gaze down to the pool. A sickening cold ripples through him, latching onto all his nerves and anchoring him to the concrete.
Max raises her hand to her mouth to chew on her fingernails, and she starts talking really fast, the way she does when she’s scared and trying to hide it. “I had this really bad feeling and so I came out here and I saw something but I don’t think it’s real, it was just part of that bad feeling, maybe, and I –“
“I see it,” Will says quietly. Max stops talking. “It’s real.”
There’s blood in the pool. So much blood. Wisps and streaks of it that dye the water purple. He blinks over and over and over, but it’s still there, vivid and impossible to ignore. The cotton suddenly clogging his chest tells him it’s real. He’s seen things for the last several years, visions and flashes and nightmares every time he closes his eyes, but they’ve never been real. Knowing that it was all in his fucked-up head was his one relief, but now he doesn’t even have that reassurance. He kneels and scoops up a handful of icy water. Completely clear – no sign of blood as it trickles out of his hand. So it’s not real here. But it’s real somewhere, somewhere close, and this is just the voices’ and visions’ way of telling him that.
Next to him, Max’s breathing turns shallow. “What’s going on, Will?” she whispers.
What’s going on? He tries to sift through all the clouds and tendrils of evil winding through his mind, searching for whatever it is the voices want him to know. There’s always something they want him to know, and when the cold drifts in and his blood freezes and his heart struggles to keep going, that’s when he knows he needs to find it, however much he doesn’t want to.
A crackle of radio static fills his ears and he closes his eyes, trying to bring it closer. Someone is speaking – the monotone of a newscaster.
body…found…the quarry…hours…blood…dead…dead…dead…dead…
“Will?”
Will swallows, opening his eyes. All he feels now is cold, cutting fear. He can tell Max feels it too, despite the fact that he’s the one in touch with parallel universes.
“Someone’s dead.” He stands up. “The Upside-Down - we need to find –“
Just then, the tight thread in the back of his mind – the vague, ever-fluid one that connects him and El through some supernatural force, the one that lets them sense the other’s extreme emotions and thoughts, the one that tells him when she’s using her powers and the one that tells her when he’s having visions, the one that they’ve spent years trying to tame and learn and control – it snaps.
Just like that.
A brief rush of lightness overtakes him and then it’s completely gone, their bond severed, and…he can’t feel her anymore.
Just like that.
El gently cards her fingers through Mike’s hair, breathing deep as his thumb rubs circles over her thigh, fiddling with the hem of her lilac skirt.
“It’s getting late,” she murmurs, leaning her cheek against his head. He shrugs.
“Are you ready to go?”
“Not really.”
Mike pulls back to look at her, a soft smile on his face. “I love you.”
Her heart flip-flops. She can’t count the number of times he’s said that to her over the years, but her reaction is still the same. “You said that already.”
“I just…” His smile fades. “I feel like – I don’t know. Like we’re running out of time. Do you feel it too?”
She nods. “Like a storm on its way.”
“Yeah. And I don’t…I don’t know. Maybe it’s bad. Maybe it’s soon. But I want you to know that I can’t live without you, El. You’re everything to me, you’re…you’re just everything. I need you. I love you.”
A hot lump works its way up El’s throat and she swallows it back. She doesn’t know what to say, but Mike shakes his head. He understands, he always does. He slides a hand behind her neck, gently pulling her in for a kiss. She sighs, relaxing into him. “I love you,” she whispers against his lips. “I love you.”
Fate doesn’t like their plans. Before they can get lost, something pricks at her mind, an itch that demands her focus. Mike frowns when she pulls away, concern on his face, but she holds up a finger. Wait.
It’s Will. The pinpricks in her mind tell her that he’s having an episode, but there’s something else there. Radio static? El squeezes her eyes shut, trying to focus. Her skin erupts into goosebumps.
She sees blood. Smudgy purple blood. The radio static rushes loud in her ears. And then she opens her eyes, and the red light in the bathroom is gone. The marble counter under her thighs is suddenly cold and bruising; the darkness envelopes them on all sides. She can barely see Mike’s eyes, but she knows that they’re wide and scared, a cold and sinister malevolence swarming around them both.
The shadows have finally come for her. She should have known.
“Mike –“
She blinks and then she’s weightless, light as a feather for what feels like a terrifying forever but can’t be more than a split second. Her breath sticks in her lungs, catching on her ribs on its way up, and somehow, even though it’s never happened before, she knows what intrinsic part of her she just lost.
Her powers have been taken from her.
“El?” Mike’s voice is a mix of concern and terror.
She instinctively lifts her hand to wipe away the nosebleed she thinks she should have, but when she pulls her fingers away, there’s no familiar warmth on them. The only thing she’s able to say is “Will,” and then she falls sideways, the blood red bathroom lights flickering back on just as she slips into darkness.
“Will! Max!”
Max fights her way through the oblivious crowd, Will hot on her heels, and they slam right into Lucas and Dustin, all four of them breathing hard.
“Something’s wrong – El –“ Will gasps. Dustin’s eyes go wide and Lucas grabs Will’s arm.
“Someone’s dead, Will, they just found the body in the –“
“Quarry?” Will interjects. Max stares at him. Despite his harried breathing, he’s unnaturally calm, and it’s more unnerving to her than it is reassuring.
“How did you – no, wait, Lucas, how did you know?”
Lucas opens his mouth but then another voice erupts from the crowd. “Everyone shut up!”
Max looks up to see some loud-mouthed senior standing on the fireplace ledge, a wind-up radio held above his head. Somebody turns off the music and they all listen to the crackling monotone coming from the radio.
“- a body, found in the waters of the quarry. Authorities are saying it was female and has been there for hours, if not days, going by the extreme decay and the amount of blood still in the water. No evidence yet points to an exact cause of death, though the composition of the body’s remains suggest an animal attack. No identification yet, and…”
“I heard him say that before they knew…” Will cuts himself off, quickly shaking his confusion away. “We need to get to El. I can’t feel her.”
“Where are they?” Dustin asks.
“Hiding out in the bathroom,” Max says. “They’ve been in there all night.”
The four of them squeeze through the now-tittering crowd, all of Max’s instincts screaming at her not to get separated from her friends. She holds Lucas’ hand in a death grip. A minute later they make it to the bathroom door. Lucas tries the handle and when it doesn’t give, he kicks the whole thing in.
It slams open and Max’s heart stutters when she sees El falling sideways off the edge of the sink. Mike catches her and swings her up bridal-style, eyes wide and terrified. He looks up at them, at a loss for words.
“Is she –“ Dustin can’t finish. Mike, shaking, leans down to feel her breath across his cheek. He gives a stiff nod of affirmation that she’s alive, but it isn’t much of a relief.
“Okay,” Max says, shivering, “what the hell is going on?”
They all turn to Will, their only other link to the Upside-Down now that El is…
He stares at El’s limp form draped across Mike’s arms and all he can do is shake his head, his eyes haunted by the restless spirits that Max could hear rifling through the branches of the dead forest outside. He doesn’t need to say anything; they all already know. Really, it was only a matter of time.
It’s all starting again. Their break is over, their daydream finished, their eyes wide open again, and when Max hears the piercing wail start up from the forest again, she realizes it might have been their last reprieve.
They should have known.