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The house is so quiet. Karen has spent more hours (days, months, years) in a quiet house than she can count, but the difference is particularly stark since the Byers came to stay. The morning circus makes her appreciate the calm even more.
It was a slightly lesser madhouse this morning, absent one Wheeler. Mike hasn’t been sick enough to stay home from school in a long time; she’d worried that maybe it was those weird white flakes from the earthquake, several months ago already, but they’d all been checked out by various medical professionals and deemed safe from whatever that was.
Autumn is arriving, though, sweeping in on a cold gust of wind. It's beginning to permeate the corners of the house, worst of all in the basement. No matter how high she sets the thermostat, there’s always a lingering chill down there. She feels badly for Will and Jonathan—they haven’t said (or even implied) anything, but they’re polite boys, and she doubts they’d speak up even if the heating broke down entirely. She brought them extra blankets on the night of the first cold snap, and they seemed grateful. It’s the best she can do. They only have so much space.
Once upon a time, Karen may have suspected Mike of faking sick to get out of school, but he isn’t that boy anymore, and in fact he usually seems eager to get to school. Maybe just eager to get out of the house. He’s sixteen. He grew up when she wasn’t looking. It snuck up on her, just like it did with Nancy. She wishes she remembered when it happened. She’s afraid she missed it entirely, preoccupied with trivial things—housekeeping, hair care, handsome lifeguards. She watches Holly carefully now; she won't miss it a third time.
The last of the breakfast dishes joins the ranks of plates and cutlery in the dish drain. Karen dries her hands. She should turn the heating up, at least while Mike is under the weather. And she could— make him soup, maybe. No, that’s silly. It’s eight-thirty in the morning. But he might be hungry. He didn’t come to breakfast—Karen only noticed after Holly remarked on it, and when she’d gone to knock on his door, there had been no reply. She has a new rule not to enter Mike or Nancy’s rooms without permission, since they’re apparently too private for even their mother’s eyes nowadays (another incurable symptom of growing up) and she wants, if nothing else, for them to trust her. But when knocking twice and calling his name through the door had been met with silence, Karen had cracked it open to find her son still fast asleep in a nest of blankets.
Something in her knew. Motherly instinct. She’d approached gently, shaking him awake: Honey, you're going to be late for school. Are you feeling okay?
He'd come to semi-consciousness enough to say, Wha?
Are you feeling okay? she'd repeated, already pretty certain of the answer.
I feel like shit, he’d replied, in a croak.
Karen had made a disapproving noise—the mouth on these kids; she can’t imagine where they learned to use that kind of language—but acquiesced, Maybe you should stay home today.
No, I’m fine. I’m fine.
She’d tsked at him, tucking him back under his comforter, and said, Really, Michael, it’s just one day. You can get the homework from Will.
A healthy Mike would have fought harder; as it stood he hadn't even corrected her for calling him Michael. So she’d left him to fall back asleep, and brought the news downstairs that he’d be staying home today. Just a bit under the weather, she’d reassured a worried Holly, noting when she relaxed as much as when Will didn’t. He’s okay. Will, do you mind picking Holly up after school?
She’s so accustomed to being alone in the house. It’s strange to know there’s someone here with her, but kind of nice. She rarely gets to spend any time with Mike; he’s always so busy and always somewhere else these days. Not that he’ll spend his sick day with her, of course, but maybe they can have lunch together, or watch Days of our Lives if he’s willing to endure it. And it’s too early for soup, but she could make him some tea when he wakes up.
Yes. That’s what she’ll do. Nothing like a warm cup of chamomile with honey to cure any ailment.
She sets the thermostat to 74, puts the kettle on, and settles into Ted’s armchair while the water boils. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him, and it is the most comfortable seat in the house.
Mike sleeps through the morning. She knocks softly every hour, busies herself boiling and re-boiling the kettle while she converts miscellaneous vegetables into soup, but it's half past noon before he finally grunts in response.
“Just checking on you,” she says through the door. “How are you feeling? Do you need anything?”
He answers, “I'm good,” but Karen pretends not to hear.
Five minutes later, she returns from the kitchen to knock once more.
“Mike?”
Grunt of acknowledgment.
“Can I come in?”
A beat, then, “Fine.”
Karen twists the doorknob, carefully stepping into Mike’s room. “There’s soup on the stove if you're hungry, but I thought you might want some tea,” she says as he comes into view: not sleeping, nor even under the covers. “Oh, Michael. What are you doing? You should be resting!”
“Mike,” Mike says, so he’s at least feeling well enough to correct her now, although the dark circles under his eyes tell a different story. “And I just slept for like fifty hours, I'm fine.”
“You slept that much because you're sick, and your body needs rest to recover.”
“I’m resting. I’m lying down and everything.”
Karen puts the mug on his bedside table. “This is not resting.”
“I’m resting my body while engaging my mind,” Mike says, rolling his eyes.
His D&D books are open on the bedspread. Mike is on his stomach, his feet kicking the pillows at his headboard, studying an artistic rendering of some kind of creature. Karen sighs. She’s trying to show an interest in his interests, but it’s hard when he’s so resistant.
Still, she aims for a lighter tone when she says, “Engaging it by…researching monsters?”
Mike’s gaze is sharp and suspicious. “Monsters aren’t real.”
Karen frowns. “I know that, but you put them in your games, don’t you? Is this for a new game?”
“It’s called a campaign, Mom,” Mike huffs. He lowers his eyes back to the book, fingering the page. “And no. We haven’t played in awhile. This is…just a thought experiment.”
She could be watching Days of our Lives. She could be in Ted’s armchair, with a knit blanket on her lap and a glass of wine in hand. But she hardly knows her son anymore. She doesn’t want that to be true.
Instead of turning and leaving, she sits on the edge of his bed and peers at the book. “What’s the thought experiment?”
“Nothing,” Mike says. “You won’t get it.”
“Try me,” Karen wheedles. “Maybe I can help! I’m not just the maid, you know.”
Mike snorts. “Trust me, Mom, you will not give a shit. But thanks for the tea.”
She refrains from chiding him for his language—for the second time today. He’s right, of course, but that’s the problem. He used to look at her like she hung the moon, like she was a superhero. He used to believe she could do anything. Maybe she wants to earn that blind faith again.
“Come on,” she says, poking his arm like she did back when he was too little to roll his eyes at her. “Don’t count me out just yet. I could always surprise you.”
Mike sighs. He looks at her, and she looks back, eyebrows raised as if to say, Go on. He must realize she's not just going to leave him alone.
“Fine,” he says. He jabs his finger at the illustration. “This is a Demogorgon.”
She remembers hearing that word around their house. “Scary.”
“Yes,” Mike says emphatically. “They don’t actually look like this— or, I mean. I mean, there’s variation. In the thought experiment, they’re pretty different from this. They don’t have two heads. No tail, either. But they are super strong, and really fast, and super deadly. They’re bloodthirsty monsters.”
“Prince of Demons,” Karen reads appreciatively.
“He’s not the Prince of Demons,” Mike says, rolling his eyes. “Not in the thought experiment.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because he’s just not!”
“Okay, alright. If you say so. I’m listening.”
Mike narrows his eyes, but the effect is lessened by how worn down he looks. It occurs to Karen to wonder how much he normally sleeps, and where he goes for all those hours of the day when he’s out doing who-knows-what with his friends. Is this just a seasonal bug, or has she failed to notice a steady decline?
“Anyway,” Mike says. “The thing about the Demogorgon is that it’s really hard to kill. Hard to hurt, even. Guns don’t do much—”
“There are guns in your fantasy game?”
Mike pauses, his eyes widening. “Uh. Yes. Yeah. It’s, like, genre fusion. It’s fantasy…plus guns. It’s super advanced, you wouldn’t get it, just— whatever. Yes, there are guns. And nail bats.”
“Nail bats?”
“A bat with nails sticking out.”
“Like a mace?”
Mike looks surprised. “Yeah, like a mace.”
“Well, why didn't you say so,” Karen says airily.
“Point is, if we can’t figure out how to kill a Demogorgon outside of literally burning it to death like a mummy, we’re screwed. In…the thought experiment. So that’s what I’m trying to solve.” He nudges the book towards Karen as if to say, Your turn. “Feel free to surprise me at any time.”
“Do I know how to kill the imaginary unkillable monster,” Karen says, pursing her lips. Mike glares. “Okay, let me think. Why don’t guns work? I would think a gun would be the right tool to kill…well, any kind of creature, really.”
“Yeah, I thought so too,” Mike says. “But it basically has no effect, except sometimes the impact of the bullets can physically push it back. Which got me thinking about damage types.”
“What are damage types?”
“So, in D&D, there’s basically two kinds of damage you can do: physical or magical.” Mike shoves himself into a sitting position and starts gesturing with his hands. Karen bites back a smile. She feels like she’s won something by getting him to talk. If Karen from 1983 could see her now, smiling at Mike explaining Dungeons & Dragons trivia to her in-depth, she’d laugh.
She’s not that Karen anymore, is she?
Mike elaborates, “Like, if I hit you with a sword, that’s physical damage. If I cast Fireball on you, it’s magical. Magical damage has some subtypes—fire, electricity, cold, it depends on the spell. But physical attacks just do physical damage.”
“Makes sense.”
“Not really, though. I mean, real life isn’t like that. Getting hit by a car and getting stabbed are both physical damage, but they’re completely different. A dagger won’t break your bones, but you could bleed out. And getting hit by a car would hurt but depending how fast it’s going you wouldn’t even bleed that much.”
Karen makes a face. This game may not be Satanic, but she's never confronted the sheer degree of gratuitous violence it encourages. Well, she's a few years too late to wind back that tape. “Are you hitting me with a car in this scenario?”
“It’s a hypothetical you, I’m not talking about you,” Mike says, waving her off. “But then I got to thinking about…” He hesitates. His eyes dart to her face, then away. In a defiant voice, he finishes, “About Eddie. The campaign he ran for us.”
The Hellfire boy. The murder suspect. (Former suspect, Mike had snapped, the only time Karen ever brought that up. Eddie was innocent. He’s a hero.) His body was never found; even now, he’s officially missing, but to Mike and his friends it’s a foregone conclusion that Eddie Munson is dead. Ted says it’s for the best if he is, that if he were still in Hawkins he'd be hunted for sport even with his name cleared, but Karen can’t in good faith wish for a young man to be dead, especially one who brought so much joy to her son’s life—controversy notwithstanding.
She arranges her features to be carefully, neutrally interested, and it must do the trick, because after a beat, Mike goes on explaining.
“Eddie, he didn’t just stick to the books. I mean, he took inspiration from them and sometimes used their characters, but ultimately he made up his own campaigns. And sometimes, when he thought the rules weren’t nuanced enough, he’d make up his own. So for example, in our campaign, my character had a sword. Dustin’s character had a club. So when I’d hit a monster, I was more likely to draw blood, but when Dustin hit a monster, he was more likely to break something—bones or cartilage or whatever. I mean, Dustin didn’t do physical attacks much anyway, since he was playing a Bard, but— it makes sense, right? Different weapons do different things.”
“It makes sense,” Karen agrees, because it does, but also because she figures he’s not asking so much as telling.
“Usually it didn’t matter. I mean, most monsters will take the same damage from a sword or a club. But Eddie would make it so that certain monsters had physical weaknesses, the same way some monsters have magical weaknesses. Like, the gelatinous cube didn't take as much damage from Dustin’s club, but it took extra from my sword—which is logical, ‘cause it's a gelatinous cube. He wouldn’t tell us, we’d just have to try stuff, but it always followed logic.”
“Pretty clever.”
“Yeah, he was really clever.” A shadow passes over Mike’s face, darker than the under-eye circles. He looks sad and angry. He shakes his head. “He was the best. But I also— I think he was right.”
“Right about what?”
“About monsters having physical weaknesses,” Mike says, tapping the Demogorgon. “I just can't figure out the logic. Guns don’t do much against the Demogorgon, but apparently the nail bat did— something, I don’t know, I didn’t see it but Steve said—”
“Steve? Nancy’s ex-boyfriend, Steve?”
“It’s all part of the thought experiment, Mom. Are you going to keep questioning me?”
“Excuse me,” Karen says. “Being sick is no excuse for being rude.”
“Sorry,” Mike mutters.
He apologizes more than he used to. It’s something, at least.
“So Steve is part of this,” Karen says. “Somehow. And I won’t ask how.”
Mike nods slowly. “He…tried…the nail bat, and it actually drew blood.”
“In the thought experiment.” She’s becoming suspicious, although she can't fathom what this conversation could be a metaphor for.
“Yes. And it’s definitely weak to fire, like super weak, but we can’t exactly carry Molotov cocktails around. It’d just be nice to have any idea what else would work. Not everyone has a nail bat.”
Does anybody have a nail bat? Is the nail bat confined to the thought experiment? Is there a real nail bat in this house?
“Can I ask a question?” Mike nods. Karen briefly considers further interrogating the subject of the nail bat, but figures it will be fruitless. “If this is a fictional monster in a thought experiment, why can’t you just decide? Like Eddie?”
“I— I just can’t. There are rules.”
“You said Eddie didn’t go strictly by the rules.”
“Yeah, he didn’t, and now he’s dead!” Mike snaps. “I was right, you don’t get it, you can’t get it. You should just go.”
Karen recoils, startled by his tone. He’s lashed out at her enough times over the years that she doesn’t take it personally anymore; she generally understands that there are always things happening in his life that she doesn’t know about, making him caustic and bitter. The attitude isn’t surprising.
It’s how serious he sounds. Like this is life or death—like it already was life or death, like what happened to Eddie can be traced back to Mike’s failure to determine whether a made-up sword can kill a made-up monster.
Now he stares daggers into the image of the Demogorgon. Karen chews her lip. He’s unlikely to be receptive to anything she has to say now, but for a minute there it was nice—bonding over fantastical problems. Before Mike started acting like none of it was fantasy at all.
So…fine. If this is what it takes to become someone Mike trusts again, then fine. She can play along.
“If it can bleed,” she says, “that means it must have veins or arteries, right? Guns are deadly if you hit the right spot, but if not, it’s pretty easy to survive a bullet wound. I know one or two vets who got shot overseas, and the doctors just left the bullet in there. You couldn’t live with an open wound the same way.”
Mike stares at her.
“I’m just saying,” Karen says.
“No, that’s…wait, seriously? People get shot and they just leave the bullets in their bodies?”
“Sometimes. If it doesn’t hit any critical organs. Once it’s in your body, it’s not going any further, right?”
“I…guess, but…huh. Wow, I never thought about that.”
“My point is, it seems possible that this Demogorgon is pretty anatomically similar to humans,” Karen says, distantly aware that any past iteration of herself would find this to be a lethal dose of overindulging Mike’s imagination. “People survive gunshots more often than you think.”
“If you clean and disinfect it, yeah. But people survive cuts all the time, too.”
“Well, that's a big if,” Karen says. “Does the Demogorgon know how to clean and disinfect a wound?”
Its entry in the book lists INTELLIGENCE: Supra-genius, but Mike did say the Demogorgon in this thought experiment was not exactly the same creature. And anyway, what counts as “genius” for a monster is probably still not quite on par with basic human intelligence. She hopes. Theoretically.
“Probably not,” Mike says consideringly.
“Probably not,” Karen says.
“So it's like— it's like a physically evolved human being, but…it totally lacks human intelligence, critical thinking. That…tracks, actually. It probably relies on being able to heal over time like we do, maybe faster, but if you cut it deep enough, you could kill it. I mean, if it can bleed, it can bleed out, right?”
“By this logic, yes.”
Mike hums, lost in thought as he studies the book. “A sword…” His eyes light up and he looks at Karen, apparently in the midst of a miraculous revelation. “Oh, holy shit. A sword. Holy shit, Hopper said…erm, uh, before he died tragically…never mind. I completely forgot— wow, okay. This is making sense. This is really making sense.”
None of that last thought makes any sense whatsoever to Karen, least of all the flippant mention of the late Chief Hopper. “It is?”
Mike nods vigorously, then presses the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Ow. Headache.”
“Okay,” Karen says, “well, I’m glad I could help. Now that we’ve solved that problem, why don’t you actually rest?” Pointedly, she adds, “Don’t make me confiscate the books.”
“I’m not a kid anymore. You can’t just take my stuff.”
“Watch me.”
Mike makes a face. Karen, in a rare moment of mirroring his childishness, makes one back.
Mike snorts a laugh. He rubs his eyes. “Thanks for listening, Mom. You actually did kinda help.”
“I’m more than a pretty face,” she says lightly.
“Ew,” Mike says, wrinkling his nose. He looks at the Demogorgon for another long moment, then shuts the book and shoves it aside. “Thanks for the tea, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” Karen says. She strokes his hair, and he doesn’t push her away, which is either a function of his ailing mind or whatever tenuous bond they’ve created in the last ten minutes. “It should be safe to drink without burning yourself by now.”
“Think I’m gonna take a nap,” Mike says.
“That’s a good idea. The soup is on the stove, you can reheat it when you wake up.”
“Thanks,” Mike says a third time, meaning they’ve definitely entered an alternate dimension.
She kisses his head. “Of course. Now get some rest. You won’t be killing any Demogorgons in this state.”
Mike’s face shutters, forcing his smile, and Karen internally curses herself. She thought it would be a clever joke, but she forgot how seriously he’s taken this entire thing.
“True,” he says. “If only I had a sword.”
“Well, Christmas is coming up,” Karen says.
That gets a real laugh. “Oh, yeah. Like you’d ever get me a sword.”
“I wouldn’t, but Santa…”
“That scam artist? Ha. Save it for Holly.” Mike grins. He yawns. “Okay. ‘Night for real.”
“Sleep well, honey.” Karen stacks his D&D books and sets them on the floor so he doesn’t kick them in his sleep. “Light?”
“You can turn it off.”
She kisses his head one more time. She doesn’t get to do it much anymore.
“Love you,” she says.
“Love you too,” Mike mumbles.
Karen flips the light switch and shuts the door behind her. She stands just outside his room, smiling to herself, feeling silly for how happy it’s made her, to just spend time with her only son.
But she saw the look, for just a moment. When she took the leap, when she said If it can bleed—he looked at her like she hung the moon. And for that, it was worth it.
(Sooner than she thinks, she’ll remember this day. There will be a monster, and she will know its name. She’ll remember the life-or-death look on Mike’s haunted face. She’ll understand, too late, that the things he’d been keeping from her all this time were not childhood secrets but bloodthirsty monsters. And she'll realize that she is now the only thing standing between this bloodthirsty monster and her precious youngest daughter.
And then she’ll see the wine bottle on the island and think if it can bleed, then it can bleed out, and she will make it bleed. She will make it fucking bleed.)