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It was an average November evening in Hawkins, Indiana. The smell of home cooked meals had faded into the night, replaced with fresh, cold air. Will could feel it feeding his hungry lungs as he biked home from his friend’s house.
It had been a long campaign filled with imaginary monsters and epic battles, but all too many unlucky dice rolls.
The road before Will’s house was eerily quiet, edging on the vast woods. The only thing illuminating his path were the street lights. As he rode underneath them, he watched the shadows come and go.
One in the distance began flickering. He tilted his head up, not paying much mind to it. It only fuelled him to pedal faster, as he couldn’t be far from home now.
Except it wasn’t just that light. In a row, Will watched the lights flicker one after another. Then they went frantic, like someone was flicking a switch up and down erratically. In his confusion, Will kept his head tilted up to watch the odd phenomenon.
The speed of his bike had nearly been lost on him, and Will realized too late that he had missed his house. He skidded, trying to stop, but with a sharp turn of the handles, the bike tipped right over.
Will felt himself slipping off the seat, heading towards the hard gravel.
He fell, and kept falling, but Will never met the gravel.
When he finally met the ground, it was a soft and slightly scratchy yellow carpet. In fact, it was entirely yellow in this room he’d somehow teleported into.
Ignoring the sting in his knees and the ache in shoulder, Will slowly stood. His bike was gone. Above him was just ceiling, riddled with neverending rows of fluorescent lights that buzzed quietly.
But there must have been some kind of trap door he hadn’t noticed, right? It was a dark night, maybe someone was pulling a prank.
“Mike?” Will called out tentatively. His voice echoed slightly, bouncing off oddly placed walls and hallways. “Jonathan?”
It looked empty, but with just enough corners that anyone could be hiding behind them, waiting to jump out and laugh at Will’s fear. Got you!
But as he slowly dragged his feet across the carpet, peaking past the thin walls, it was becoming increasingly obvious to Will that he was not supposed to be here— wherever here was.
Trailing his fingertips against the arrowhead patterned wallpaper, Will ventured further. There had to be a staircase or an exit eventually, right?
Every hidden hall that revealed itself seemed to go on infinitely. It was like a mall-sized hedge maze made up to look like an abandoned office building.
Will charged forward, dodging inconveniently placed walls and dead end turns. It felt like time had stopped or sped up— either way, it certainly wasn’t passing normally.
As the minutes went by with no sight of an exit or even a change of scenery, Will felt a primal paranoia sneaking up on him. He was constantly swiveling his head to keep an eye on every possible hiding spot that could catch him a glimpse of a stalker. Because no matter how illogical it felt, Will had an insistently growing belief that something was watching. Something was near.
“Mom?” He yelled in his panic, and immediately regretted it. The something was going to hear him. It was going to be right behind him, he could feel it like a breath tickling the small hairs on the back of his neck.
With a pace frantic enough, he could hear his shoes thudding against the carpet. Aside from his own voice, it was the loudest sound he’d heard since falling into this maze.
The quiet white noise was there, but it wasn’t the worst thing about this place— far from it. Even the strong, musty smell akin to an old nursing home wasn’t enough to drive him crazy on its own.
No, undeniably the worst part of it all was that the night carried on without Will making any progress at all. This place had to go on to the ends of the earth. There was no other explanation.
Will collapsed eventually. He was exhausted from efforts that brought him nowhere. As he caught his breath and hunched against a wall, a terrifying thought crossed his mind.
If this place was easily reachable, he’d just brought himself so deep into it that anyone in Hawkins would have to get just as lost as he was to find Will back. There was no breadcrumb trail, nothing to mark his tracks. There was nothing at all— he’d been running for ages and not once did he come across water, food, or any other room suggesting that life could be sustained here.
Will’s cheeks wettened with tears and he missed the way the outside air would have brushed it coolly. All he could do now was rest and wait.
When the young boy woke, it was from what he both hoped for and feared.
The sound of footsteps.
Scrambling to his feet, he braced himself for the worst. The sound was echoing off of the odd walls in such a way that he couldn’t quite identify which direction it was coming from.
Then he heard a warbled, distant sound. He couldn’t quite make out if it was a voice or not, but a clear one sounded much closer next.
“Will?” It had to be his mom— it sounded like she was just around the corner.
Without hesitation, Will flipped his body, facing the hall where she stood. Her eyes were wide, mouth agape.
“Mom,” Will exclaimed, on the verge of tears as he went forward and embraced her. She was a beacon of hope in this bleak place.
He felt her arms wrapping around him in return, stroking his hair gently as she mirrored his sniffles.
“Come on, let’s get you out of this place,” she said, the comforting words washing over Will like a stream of sunshine.
Taking his mother’s hand, he let himself be led down the eerie halls, an occasional light flickering near darkened corners. She seemed to know the way out, so she must have been smarter than him on the way in.
Will felt a strange shiver shaking his bones although it was unusually warm for a place underground. Maybe it was the same paranoia as earlier, the feeling that these walls force you to sit with. He watched his mom, who faced only forward and walked with purpose. He began to wonder how she seemed to know this place so well— had she been here before? There wasn’t an inkling of hesitation to any direction she turned, despite the puzzling nature of the place.
Before Will could notice the slow fade of light, they were already far into darkness that filled out the halls they walked through. He squeezed his mother’s hand tighter and wondered what the strange sound he heard earlier had been.
In return to his gesture, his mom held his hand tighter. Much tighter. Will looked down at their interlocked hands and realized that his skin was slowly turning white.
But that didn’t matter to him at all, because something more concerning had caught his eyes.
Where had her fingernails gone?