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Two places. Their skin sizzles and burns in the light.
*
The bright neon lights of Hawkins Mall. And the Other Hawkins Mall, blackened, choked out, cast in blue and grey, rotting and decaying, all at once reaching for and retracting from the light.
When he looks up he sees the storefronts, the clothes, the tropical flora and fauna and busted up railings and cracked faux marble. Water from the fountains, splattered across the floor, reflecting back the high metal ribcage of the ceiling. He sees Max’s friend too, the girl with the serious eyes and the straight, no-nonsense mouth.
Her mouth isn’t no-nonsense now. She’s crying, shaking, whispering to him, and somewhere in the recesses of the consciousness that stopped being his own what feels like a lifetime ago, he thinks he might be crying too.
It feels strange, being back in his body.
Their body.
His arms are straining. There’s a needle-sharp pain in his spine, down his legs. He imagines vines growing out of himself, burrowing into the floor, pulling him down into the darkness after them until he is more vine than man.
Oozing. Swallowing. Grasping, reaching, starving.
He sees his mother.
*
We are so close. We can kill her.
We can kill everyone. End it all.
Then - peace. Silence.
Don’t you want that, Billy?
*
Blonde hair and crashing waves.
Not ten foot - it had looked that way to him, though, from so low down.
This day - does he remember it? Perhaps. It was a day - or maybe, it was a conglomeration of all the other days, soaked in salt and sun and bright light, her smile a constant on the shoreline, waiting for him, a lighthouse to lead him home.
Ten foot.
It’s barely two feet, he thinks, and he can almost feel the sand crunching beneath his toes.
Only - he doesn’t have toes. Not anymore. He’s there, and not there, everywhere and nowhere. He’s lurking beneath the water, he’s in pieces in the wind, buried beneath the silt, and more than anything he wants to run to her, run to himself, embrace them, but he can’t run, because he doesn’t have any legs, and because if he touches them, they will be ruined, the way he ruins everything he touches. The vines will sprout. They will never escape. The vines will take them.
He is too close, and he is nowhere near.
He turns, damp curls webbing across his face, and eyeless he stares into himself.
*
He and He.
He is a part of him, and He sees every part of him, every nasty dark corner, every secret.
Festers.
*
We are hungry. We are so hungry.
We cannot stand the light; the fresh air.
We spend hours hiding in the shower, in the dark and the damp.
He is no stranger to this.
Neil Hargrove’s voice, the thump of boots on the stairs, the slick lick of the belt as it slithers across a dry, angry palm.
Under the bed, when he was small enough. Later, in the bathroom. In the car. Under the car.
Under the car now, because we like it wet and dark. And the smell. The oil.
Drip. Drip.
It’s thick and black and it tastes nothing like food.
We are so hungry.
His human body vomits it up.
They keep eating it.
*
We understand. We are both lost boys. Disappointing boys. We have absent fathers. We are Not What We Were Meant To Be.
We grew. Bigger. Grew in ways we were not supposed to.
The long hair - the earring. Fag shit. You ain’t a fag, are ya boy?
And we grew and we grew, bursting out of ourselves, until we were no longer human at all.
Billy thinks, if he survives this, he won’t have long hair anymore. Won’t have an earring. Won’t have an ear, a face, arms, legs. He will be exploding, imploding, turning his skin and his flesh and muscles and sinew inside out until he is eyeless and slimy and dirty and reaching, too many appendages, too many mouths, hungry and gaping, and he will retreat, dripping, to the darkness until one day someone finds him and puts him out of his misery.
*
The girl is still showing him the beach.
How does she do that?
We hate her.
The beach envelopes everything. It burns his eyes.
Our eyes.
The road - miles and miles of America, dusty and gaping and vulnerable underneath the huge, empty sky where God was not, miles and miles from the shore.
His mother, somewhere, leagues behind him. Hawkins ahead.
“Your fault,” Neil Hargrove had said, and we had repeated it. We’ve been told that too. “Your fault.”
The fault was the fag shit. The fault was looking at another boy too long. Arms and legs intertwined on a bed. Mouths pressed together.
This feels nothing like that. This feels everything like that.
Minds pressed side by side. A body inside a body. Growing, stretching, changing, grasping.
*
Hate us. Hate us for what we did. For our descending fangs, our too-sharp claws, our eyes, glassy and attuned to the dark. For the way we hated, the way we didn’t fight. The way we swallowed gladly, as though in a drought. For the way we didn’t care to fight, the way it was easier to retreat, to say, yes, yes, I understand, we are the same.
For feeling sympathy.
*
We wish we had never got in that car.
We wish we had never spoken to Mrs. Wheeler.
We wish we had never got the job at the pool.
We wish we had never come here.
We wish we had never grown legs and arms and a brain and crawled out of the seawater.
We wish we could be normal. Be what our papas wanted.
*
Seeing what you do through my old eyes is like being cuffed and stuffed into the back of a cop car; looking out of the windows, seeing the world pass by, but being unable to get out, unable to make the car move left or right or stop, being thrown against the door when the driver takes the corner too quickly.
It’s easier to tell yourself that.
*
Hate me. Hate us. It’s easier if you do.
Hate, you understand.
Hate and fear.
*
All we ever wanted was to love you, Billy. Why are you fighting us? We are us. You are us.
*
We want to muffle you. Want to kill you. Want to kill ourselves. Want to kill the girl, who took our papa, and you want to kill us, who took you, so why not just call it even and kill everyone, hmm? Fair’s fair.
Billy thinks, I will drown you in the tides. Closes his eyes. Smells the sand and the salt and the surf. Hears the screech of gulls. Drown you.
The water closes over our heads. It’s peaceful.
Billy had thought he could drown anything, in the past.
If he drank enough.
If he sat in the bathtub and curled his face into his knees and clenched his fists, sunk down until he was wet all over, and then it was just water, and not tears.
If he stood beneath the cold showers in Hawkins High and kept his jaw hard and his voice low and his words cruel and didn’t look too closely at Steve Harrington’s slick, wet body.
We can drown you.
*
He opens his eyes, and looks at the girl. He understands where she came from and what she can do, and he understands why He hates her.
That doesn’t mean Billy has to hate her too.
He turns to him, the scared and angry little boy monster creature demon with flailing tentacles and a dripping, razor-lined mouth and barbs and pustules on its skin, shuddering and howling beneath the coloured lights, crying for papa, suffering, forgetting how it feels, to be out of the darkness and the wet.
Perhaps, he thinks, the girl can tell his mother he loves her.
Perhaps he can tell the girl He loved too much.
Loved the wrong way.
Tell Max and her friends and Steve and even Heather and everyone else that he’s sorry, so so so sorry.
Tell his mother that he misses her, tell papa he just wanted to be with him, that we hadn’t asked to be born this way, that he wanted to try, but struggling against the current was too much and he was melting, dripping in the heat, that perhaps he could have loved someone one day, perhaps he could have been a father and perhaps Max could have forgiven him, and he sees her, her hair a red ribbon against the white midwestern sky. He thinks, tell them all to hate me because they never wanted to do this, they hate like a child with a child’s fear and a child’s vengeance and a thousand deformed limbs and he stands with one foot in the darkened sunken other place and one in Hawkins Mall, between the girl and her predecessor, and he puts their arms to the sky and
he wades into the dark roiling water
and the land disappears
and he tells himself
No -