Chapter Text
[CLICK]
[A VOICE CAN BE HEARD THROUGH THE DOOR]
WILL BYERS
Yes... Yeah, thank you. Morning, Patton!
[DOOR OPENS]
WILL BYERS
Oh, Hello! Good morning to you, too. Must be a good one if you’re on. Okay, then. Statement of.. Michael Wheeler regarding his trip to Hawkins, Indiana, November 4, 1993.
[HE FLIPS THROUGH THE PAGES]
WILL BYERS
Sorry, um, anyways. Statement of Mike Wheeler regarding his trip to Hawkins, Indiana, November 1993. Written statement given December 5th, 1993. Recorded on November 10, 1994, by William Byers of the Usher Foundation.
WILL BYERS (STATEMENT)
I hate my hometown. I know, crazy thing to say about small-town Indiana, but you really had to be there. So much happened there that, sometimes, I wonder if it was even real. Maybe I made it all up. I try not to think about it too hard.
We had a few “natural disasters” over the years, “earthquakes” and the like. Because of this, Hawkins was constantly either being rebuilt or being studied, and I’d gotten sick of uneven roads and medical checks. I moved out for college as soon as I could, and went as far away as possible. It’d be another 4 years before I went back, and if it weren’t for my sister’s nagging, I would’ve stayed gone for good.
As soon as I got there, something felt… off. I never really felt welcome there in the first place, but it wasn’t that. Everything was exactly as I’d left it; Like, exactly—fresh pavement, grand re-opening signs, movie showings. I’d probably just been too used to the pace of the city at this point. I pulled into the driveway and was greeted by my older sister, Nancy, who was oddly happy to see me. I thought she was our mom for a second, to be honest. For whatever reason, all of us but my younger sister, Holly, had gotten the same haircut back in ‘89, and they’d all kept it since. I followed her into the house and met our mom in the kitchen. She wrapped me up in her arms, and I peered past her to see the two weeks of my visit circled in bright cherry ink. It made me smile, knowing how much she’d been looking forward to my visit; that is, until she started going on and on about how I “never called anymore” and how “desperately” I needed a haircut.
Thankfully, my little sister broke me out of there. She dragged me down to the basement and proudly showed me how she’d made the place her own. The floor was covered in unfinished maps and defeated figurines. She flung the black tablecloth off the table to reveal drawings of each of her party mates' characters.
“Holly, these are amazing!” I told her. “Seriously, how’d you get so good? You’re only like, what, twelve?”
“Sixteen,” She scoffed. “I dunno, I guess I just had a really good teacher.”
I followed her gaze to the counter, where I saw the binder that housed my friend’s old artwork. It was accompanied by her friends' campaign binders, which were loosely strewn on the countertop just below the shelf where my party had stored ours a few years ago. Our tour ended in front of the TV, where she already had a tape sitting atop the vhs player.
Neither of us had ever liked spiders. She woke me up one late night when she was about 6 and asked me to take care of the brown recluse that was moving about her floor. I took care of it by making Nancy kill it, of course. So when I saw the word ARACHNOPHOBIA stretched across the screen, I couldn’t help but be surprised.
“This is disgusting, Holly,” I commented. “How can you watch this?”
She kept her eyes fixed on the TV.
“I don’t know.”
“Ugh. This better not give you nightmares, Holly. I’m not gonna be able to save you from Nancy’s wrath if you start freaking out thinking you’re seeing those little things in the middle of the night.”
She didn’t respond.
“Seriously, it doesn’t remind you of anything? Of… y’know.”
She kept staring, eyes locked on the screen, glazed and dark and wide.
“It does, but... I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.”
A prickly chill rushed down my spine. She just lay there, eyelids slipping down before she drifted off to sleep. I tried to make sense of what she said. I kept trying to ask her questions, but she was knocked out cold. The remote fell out of her hand. I caught it and tried to turn off the TV. It wouldn’t budge. By the fifth time I’d swapped out the batteries, I’d given up on the remote and tried the button on the back of the TV instead. Nothing. I left it on and stole back my half of the quilt before falling asleep as well.
I barely slept that night. As I drifted off, I kept seeing spindly legs growing and twisting into all -too-familiar forms. Those of flesh and shadow and veins. That night, it’d settled on flesh, and I watched it take shape by a gradually steady stream of rat meat, compounding into a spider-like monstrosity. I watched it stab holes in my basement and into our friend’s step-brother. I watched my sister throw explosives at it. It looked more annoyed than anything. I watched it collapse right before I woke up.
It was just before 11, and everyone had already left: Nancy was visiting her friend, Ally, Mom was out shopping, Dad was golfing, and Holly was at the arcade. Holly had taken herself back upstairs at some point last night, leaving me with the mess. I took out the tape and listened to it rewind as I cleaned. It crackled and gurgled in ways that I’d heard before, but not from a machine. I told myself it was the restless sleep playing tricks on me and not something that had long since been gone.
On the drive to the video store, my car kept playing the same 5 songs. It was all The Clash, The Cure, The Smiths (why did all his music start with “The”?). None of the other channels worked, so I went to check my car cassette player, but found nothing but smooth plastic where it should’ve been. I kept pressing the spot where the button was supposed to be, but there wasn’t anything there. Listen, I’ve fished enough tapes out of my car to know it had a cassette player.
I got back home and heard Nancy on the phone. My room felt too far, and I needed to talk to her, so I slumped down on the couch and accidentally drifted off. When I woke up, she was just then saying her goodbyes, nearly 3 hours later. I walked into the kitchen and tried talking to her about what happened with Holly.
“It just worries me, y’know? I keep hoping she’ll forget about everything or think it was all just some bad dream. I keep telling myself that she was young and that she has a better chance of forgetting about it.”
God, I was freezing. I took a sip of my reheated coffee before continuing.
“ But we didn’t. And we were young, too. And we can’t just ignore it, especially if it’s-”
“Michael,” she cut me off. “Holly’s fine, okay? Maybe creepy spider movies are her coping mechanism or something.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too, but when I asked her, she just, she had this blank, dark stare in her eyes. She told me she didn’t know why; she couldn’t stop watching it. Nancy, I swear, she looked just like-”
“Michael!” she laughed. “She’s fine. We went through the same thing, and we turned out okay, right?”
“But we didn’t! It wasn’t the same at all! She was in it, all of it, trapped in his house, being chased by monsters, falling through holes in the sky or the ground or however that bullshit worked. It had her; it had itself wrapped around her and in her. We just saw the aftermath. Holly made us watch that movie on the anniversary of the day that it took her. It might be PTSD or something. Look, I’ve seen this before with him and-”
“Oh my gosh, this reminds me,” she interrupted. “So, there was this guy who’d been stealing people's pets in the downtown area, right? And just as I was sitting in the park, literally writing about him, I saw him run off with this poor little frenchie. Some cop chased him down, and I got the whole story firsthand. Snagged accounts from the officer, owner, and criminal, too! Not to brag, but I feel like this kind of luck might lead me to a promotion, or some more opportunities to get out of the office, at least.”
I stared at her, brows close and mouth agape. Did she seriously just compare our little sister’s interdimensional kidnapping to dognapping? Since when did she care about petty theft? Where was my sister who’d broken into an old lady's house just for a story, or my sister who’d shot at the military, or my sister who’d slayed monsters, for Christ's sake? Also, who the fuck was Michael?
She asked me something about my writing, but I was too stunned to speak. She started going on again about high school sports prodigies or food recalls or something, but I couldn’t pay attention. I muttered something about needing to pick Holly up from the arcade as it was getting dark, and Mom didn’t want her biking home late at night.
The arcade was the one place I was happy to see frozen in time, save for a few new machines. I wanted to check and see if I or any of my old friends still had our scores, but nearly everything was out of order. All that wasn’t broken or already in use were Mac Attack, Aliens, and Spider-Man. I picked Holly up, and she started humming along to the music coming through the speakers. It was still playing the same handful of songs. I swear, if I had to hear “Boys Don’t Cry” one more time, I was going to crash my car.
The nightmares were worse that evening. I saw it again, as a shadow this time. It grew and grew until it’d swallowed my old middle school whole. I realized that it wasn’t me who was watching it as I could hear myself yelling and feel myself shaking my- his arm. The shadow grew closer, and I could feel his larynx shredding as he screamed at it to go away. I felt all the warmth leave his body just as I remembered. I felt the dark cloud pollute his lungs and slide behind his eyes before I woke up to a biting cold in my own throat so frigid it burned. My face was drenched in a mixture of tears and sweat. I tried showering. The scalding steam still couldn’t shake the shivering cold.
I hoped writing would help. Whenever something like this happened to him, he’d draw until his fingers blistered. I hadn’t thought about what that meant. Regardless, I took out my travel typewriter, my Nana’s old Olivetti Lettera 32. She’d gifted it to me for my 14th birthday. I used to hate it. It was an oddly familiar grayish green color that looked like eyes, and I felt like it was staring at me, watching me, constantly. I realized a while ago why it had bothered me so much back then. I still use it sparingly, but the shame is different now. Now it was a sore reminder that those eyes were nothing to be afraid of, and that I should’ve stared back.
I set it up, but couldn’t get very far before the page had nearly turned black from the excess ink it was spitting up. At this point, I was so exhausted, but knew that sleep would be no respite. I brought out a notebook instead. I zoned out while writing, only to come back to a drawing of that same monster from my dreams rearing its ugly, cone-shaped head. It wasn’t like a normal sketch, though; it was composed of words. Lyrics. The same lyrics that had him shaking just like he was shaking on Halloween, on the chair in the shed, on the drive back into Hawkins, on the final crawl.
“On candy-striped legs
The Spiderman comes…
Looking for the victim shivering…
Searching out fear in the gathering gloom…
Softer than shadow and quicker than flies…
For it's much too late to get away or turn on the light
The Spiderman is having you for dinner tonight.”
At this point, I couldn’t ignore it. It felt like something was back, something I couldn’t handle on my own. I rushed down to the basement to call him. I had anchored myself to the phone before hesitating. He moved out of here as soon as he could; we all did. Why would I open an old wound? He’d had it the worst out of all of us; he probably didn’t want anything to do with it. He probably didn’t want anything to do with me.
I yanked the phone from its base anyway, but instead of a dial tone, I heard the low, echoing trill of the monster that had hunted us all those years before.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t know if I was hallucinating or paranoid, but I was having none of it. I gathered everything that had been messing with my mind ever since I came back to Hawkins. I ripped the phone off the wall and threw it on the pyre along with my notebook, typewriter, and vhs player. I considered lighting the whole town up as well, but decided against it, for the time being, and set those few items aflame instead.
It wouldn’t burn. The paper sat there with a faint, almost taunting, crispy black edge, but it wouldn’t curl or turn brown. The phone and the vhs player only synchronized the sound echoing out of them. My vision blurred, and between the waves of heat and the welling in my eyes, I could barely see. I started screaming at it to burn, like it would’ve done something.
Except it did. The fire exploded, and at the same time, I felt this sharp, burning pain in my side, like I was being stabbed. I stood there, writhing in pain as the black smoke curled up into the air, and everything below melted into a stygian puddle. I fell onto the grass and sat there, pulled my knees to my chest, and waited for the fire to dissolve. I wished for the fire to take me with it.
I couldn’t spend another night here. I packed up the rest of my things and hoped to get past my family without them noticing; I’d call them when I got back home. Just my luck, everyone was seated in the living room when I came downstairs.
“Where are you going, Michael?” she asked as she caught my arm.
“Uh, today was my last day, Mom, remember?” I lied.
She moved over towards the calendar and studied the page. I stared at it nervously.
“Oh, sorry, you’re right.”
I was? I thought. The bright red ink now circled the 6th of November instead of the 13th.
“It’s such a shame we didn’t get to see you much. I feel like we don’t see you at all anymore. I promise, next time you visit, we’ll all clear our schedules. Right, Ted?”
Dad grunted a response, not even bothering to spare his only son, the son he’d barely seen or spoken to in 4 years, a parting glance. I took my glare off of him and turned back to face my Mom.
“Of course, Mom.”
She and my sisters (surprisingly) wrapped me in a suffocating hug before sending me on my way.
I pulled out of the driveway, watching their shrinking figures wave me goodbye. I drove home in silence, still thinking about the nightmares and the fire and the calendar and every other eerie thing that happened in this town. I sped past the sign still stained with the “Now Leaving Hell” graffiti. I would’ve laughed if I didn’t feel like I’d taken a piece of hell with me.
I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since I visited Hawkins. I wake up every morning in a cold sweat with a prickling sensation on the back of my neck and the feeling of a million tiny creatures crawling over and under and through my skin. I can’t sleep or eat or think without feeling it. Everywhere. And I still don’t have my goddamn cassette player.
WILL BYERS
End of Statement.
[THE TAPE HISSES, ALMOST IMPATIENTLY, AS IT AWAITS HIS FINAL COMMENTS]
WILL BYERS [CONTINUED]
Um, this could be… anything, honestly. Senior burnout, anxious personality, apophenia.
…
The Usher Foundation is no stranger to nightmares, and this seems like just another…
[HE FLIPS THROUGH THE PAGES]
WILL BYERS [CONTINUED]
Hey, Patton, can you come in here, please?
[DOOR OPENS, PATTON ENTERS]
Hey, Will, what do you need?
WILL BYERS
What happened to the rest of this statement? It's missing contact info and a follow-up. What, are we just leaving statements blank now?
PATTON
No, what?
[THEY PICK UP THE STATEMENT]
His contact info is right there, so cool it, and we tried to follow up, but no one can find him. It’s like he just disappeared or something.
WILL BYERS
Oh, sorry. Yeah, you’re right, I see it now. Wait, What?! Disappeared where?!
PATTON
Where? Sorry, do you not know what disappeared means? I have no clue where- wait, Will, where are you going? Hey, you can’t take those with you; we don’t have copies!
WILL BYERS
Sorry, I need to… listen, I’ve gotta go. Man the fort, okay? You’re the best, thank you, bye!
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