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There’s a monster that lives in the window.
As far as Marty knows, it’s been there his whole life. All five years of it! Which is a very long time for something to be stuck in a window.
Some days Marty thinks it must be cramped. Others, he thinks maybe the window is comfy for it, like when the car is super hot and he presses his face against it and it’s nice and cool and smooth.
“Mommy?”
His mother glances at him in the mirror at the front of the car.
“What is it, sweetie?”
“Why does the monster like windows so much?”
He yelps as the car jerks to a sudden stop at the red traffic light.
“Mommy!” he giggles, getting over the shock quickly, “don’t do that!”
“I’m- I’m sorry, Marty,” she stammers, and she frowns and Marty frowns too because he doesn’t know why she’s upset? Is she mad at him? “I thought we told you that maybe you should get a different imaginary friend?”
“It’s not imaginary!” he protests. “It’s right there!”
His mom doesn’t say anything else, which makes Marty think she might not have heard him. That’s okay, though. She speeds up really quickly when the traffic light turns green and turns kind of hard, making Marty get a little squished into the door of the car.
Outside passes by in a blur of color. Marty unbuckles himself and scooches over to the other side of the car to get a better look at the clocktower when they pass it.
“Mommy?”
“…Yes, Marty?” his mom responds after a second. She clicks down the stick by the steering wheel again that makes a little ticking noise until she turns.
“When’s Jamie’s birthday?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Is there gonna be cake?”
“Marty-”
“‘Cause you said Jamie’s too small to eat a cake. But I think he’s big now and can eat cake. He has some teeth.”
She takes a deep breath, looking anywhere but at him.
“‘Member when he bit me?” he adds on.
The noise that his mom lets out is tired sounding. He wonders if she needs a nap.
“I do remember that, Marty. We… we’ll get a cake.”
Marty beams and turns to the monster in the window, which had moved to the other side of the car when Marty did.
It’s a dark color that Marty has never really seen anywhere else and its arms, or what Marty can see of them, kind of look like an octopus. Or a squid. Marty likes squids.
Squids don’t have eyes and teeth on their arms like the monster does, though. Just those funny suction cup thingys.
He whispers to it, hush so his mom doesn’t hear.
“We’re gonna get a cake!”
It blinks at him. Lots of big blue eyes, just like his. Well, his aren’t that blue.
His dad tells him a lot how he’s going to have to be ‘responsible’ and show Jamie how to do the right thing, and Marty agrees. He likes telling the monster what a good big brother he’s going to be. He’s very proud.
“You know, I’m gonna be the bestest big brother ever. I’m not gonna be like Dave. I’m gonna be repsponsible.”
“Did you say something, Mart?”
“No!” he denies, and then laughs to himself and to the monster.
They finally arrive at the shops, and his mom tells him off for opening the door before she’s turned the car off.
After, he goes home, and then he eats dinner, and then he goes to bed. Dad reads him one of his stories, but Marty falls asleep partway through.
He dreams of a road running through a big desert under a night sky with no stars.
The next morning, he’s so excited that he wakes up so early his mom gets mad at him. The day starts really good.
And then it all goes wrong.
The monster in the window took his brother.
Not Dave, though Marty kind of wishes it had been Dave instead of Jamie. Dave can be really mean sometimes.
Well, no, Marty doesn’t wish the monster took either of his brothers. But especially not Jamie.
Marty remembers when he begged his parents for a little brother or sister because he wanted to be a big brother, and then there was a baby in Mommy’s belly and then little Jamie was born.
Jamie turned one today and they were about to eat the vanilla and chocolate cake that Marty and his mom got at the shop yesterday when it happened.
But suddenly, while they were singing, his ears hurt and went pop and everything went quiet and the monster was everywhere.
And then Jamie was gone. It wrapped around him and the cake and all the cool presents that he got and in an instant it took them all. The monster went back to the window.
Now, Marty had kind of liked the monster. Marty is very good at making friends, and the monster was like a friend that’s always there. If there was a window, then there was the monster.
He does not like the monster anymore.
Mom and Dad did not know why he started crying, which only made him cry harder. Didn’t they see? The monster’s arms had been all over the place and Jamie was gone!
But they didn’t.
They didn’t see and they kept telling him that he never had a little brother, but Marty knows that’s not true! He has two brothers!
Why do they keep saying he only has one?
He tried to make them remember. He screamed and he even hit his dad a little when he tried to calm him down because if the monster took Jamie then the monster could take any of them, but they didn’t care!
All of the birthday decorations were gone. Jamie’s high chair was gone. The monster took everything. Marty had nothing to point to.
And Dave called him a freak. That was mean. Mom says he’s mean sometimes because he’s older, but Marty is four whole years older than Jamie and he was never mean to him. Never ever.
So his mom sent him to his room, though she hadn’t seemed angry when she did. She told him to relax a little, so Marty got into his bed and pulled the covers over his head, which always makes him feel a little better.
Nothing can get him under here.
When he finally peeks out, he looks around his bedroom, half expecting the monster to have come out again while he was hiding.
He clutches his bedsheets, bunching them into a ball in front of him, and sniffles.
He misses Jamie.
Turning to his window, he stares at the faint mirrored reflection of light where the monster lives. Marty can only really see it if he moves himself just right. It blinks at him.
It is doing the same thing it always does; sitting there, watching. That used to be comforting.
Now it’s like it’s pretending it didn’t do anything wrong, like when Linda steals one of his candies and then tells Mom that she didn’t and acts all normal.
Marty had thought it was his friend.
“Give him back,” Marty hisses, angry and scared and breathless. “You took him. That’s not nice.”
The monster does not respond.
It never does.
Linda likes to try to scare him sometimes, but Marty doesn’t think she really knows what she’s talking about.
“There’s monsters under your bed, you know,” Linda says to him one day at dinner. “They come out when you don’t eat all your carrots.”
“Nuh uh!” he denies, tearing his eyes away from the window he’d been staring at. “You’re lying!”
“I’m not,” she replies, smug like usual. She thinks just because she’s ten now means she’s so much smarter than him. He’s only two years younger than her.
“You’re stupid,” Marty declares, which gets a gasp from his mother that he knows means he’s about to get in trouble, but he continues anyway, “monsters don’t live under beds.”
“Martin, do not call your sister stupid.” his mom reprimands. “Say you’re sorry.”
Not fair… he thinks, she’s the one who’s teasing me!
“They live in windows,” Marty says instead of apologising, “and sometimes on metal things. Sometimes mirrors, too.”
Linda laughs.
“Marty.” his mother insists.
“Sorry,” he relents, “but-”
“No ‘buts’, Marty.”
He sighs miserably.
“You really think monsters are real?” Linda giggles. “They aren’t real! I was just messing with you!”
Well, that’s not true. Marty tilts his head and points to the window.
“There’s one right there,” he points out, and his parents both look at him kind of weird.
Dave groans, “Oh, not this again.”
“Marty, honey, we’ve talked about this,” his mom says, and he wilts.
They have talked about it. Mom and Dad think he’s making it up. That the monster isn’t real and Marty just has a really big imagination like his father. But the monster is real; he can literally see it right there!
If Marty waves at it, sometimes it blinks.
They don’t like it when he mentions that it’s there. They especially don’t like it when he talks to it or draws it in pictures.
Linda laughs harder, until she notices the way Mom and Dad and Dave are looking at him.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, sweetie,” his mom reassures her, “don’t worry about it.”
“Marty’s crazy.” Dave says through the food in his mouth, spitting chunks of it everywhere.
His mom doesn’t even tell Dave off for talking with his mouth full, which speaks volumes. “Why don’t we talk about something else?”
Marty knows he probably shouldn’t have brought it up around them again. But Linda was being dumb and mean, and while Marty has to take that from Dave because he always knows so much more than him, he does not have to take it from Linda too.
They’re probably going to take him back to the doctor. He doesn’t like the doctor. He’s not even a real doctor, not the kind in hospitals; he’s a psychiatrist, though his parents don’t like calling it that.
Dr. Miller is old and kinda weird.
Marty always ends up sitting there, waiting for the forty-five minutes to end, while Dr. Miller tries to get him to talk about “repressed memories” or “hidden trauma”. Marty doesn’t know what any of that even means. Only that Dr. Miller is convinced something bad happened to Marty and that it must be why he sees what he sees in glass and metal and mirrors.
They say his brain is just making stuff up.
But it’s real. It is.
By the time he’s twelve, Marty has stopped talking about it, but the kids at school never really forget.
He hasn’t mentioned it in years, but unsavory information has a habit of being filed away in people’s heads like dossiers.
It gets smoothed over, of course, because Marty acts, for the most part, normal. He doesn’t talk to thin air or jump away from nothing or go on rambling nonsense rants. Nothing that people associate with crazy people. Nothing that people expect from schizos.
(Though, Marty has met real schizophrenics in the waiting room at Dr. Miller’s office. They’re a lot more normal than, like, half of the kids who make fun of him.)
Smoothed over or not, everyone knows. Yeah, that’s Marty, he sees things that aren’t there. Yeah, that’s McFly, he’s got a few screws loose. Yeah, honestly, why don’t they just lock him up before he snaps?
They watch him pick the furthest desk from the windows and avoid reflective metal and mirrors, and they whisper amongst themselves when they think he can’t hear them.
Needles is okay, though.
“You wanna hang out at my house later?” Needles asks as he punches his shoulder. Marty stumbles back a little, but grins nonetheless.
“Yeah. I just gotta call home from your phone.”
Needles snorts. “You have to ask your parents? What are you, a baby?”
Though his tone is mocking, there is no real derision behind it. Marty just rolls his eyes, tearing them away from where they’ve subconsciously tracked to the window at the end of the hall.
“They’ll get worried, and I don’t want them thinking I’ve finally lost it and started wandering the town in a fit. They already think I’m crazy.”
To which Needles nods, and doesn’t comment. Marty likes that about him. He doesn’t bring up Needles’ problems, and Needles doesn’t bring up his.
“I got a new keyboard, you can try it if you want,” he changes subject, shrugging, “my mom got it ‘cause I asked.”
Marty hums at that.
Sometimes Needles feels like the only other person in his life who gets what it’s like to be so outcast by the rest of the world.
With a friend like him, who cares what anyone else thinks? Marty’s never going to be able to change their minds anyway.
He might as well just accept it and move on, instead of trying to prove them wrong.
One of the hall monitors starts toward them and he jolts, urgency filling his veins.
“I’ll catch you later!” he says as he takes a few swift steps back, Needles doing much the same.
“Yeah, man, see you then.”
The remainder of the school day goes okay-ish. History went fine. Math sucked. In general, fractions are hard. It would help if he could keep the numbers in his head after he reads them, but he just forgets immediately what it was, and then he tries to grasp the whole problem and finds he can’t.
Then he embarrassed himself when his math teacher called on him. Now, he actually knew the answer to this one, but the world seemed to blink for a second and he was so startled he forgot. He’s not sure how to describe it. It probably has something to do with the monster because his vision was totally overtaken by the sort of deep… color? that the monster is. It’s like if there was a color beyond purple on the visible light spectrum.
Afterwards, everyone kept staring and some people whispered and honestly, the worst part isn’t whatever the monster did, but the fact that he’d been doing so well keeping it to himself and he had to go and remind everyone again.
And then he got his quiz back…
Which brings him to now. He’s busy sulking by his locker about his near-failed quiz, when he’s shoved from behind, hard.
He doesn’t quite fall, nor does he drop anything, but he does end up slamming into the lockers, which, ouch.
“Heard you spun out in math, McFly,”
Marty turns to face his assailant and is surprised to see Needles leering at him.
“…What?” Marty breathes, utterly confused. And then he frowns, his friend’s wording profoundly hurtful in a way he wasn’t expecting. “Why would you say that?”
Needles laughs and Marty flinches because it sounds all wrong.
“You totally freaked,” he sneers, “everyone’s talking about it.”
Marty’s jaw goes a little slack. He can’t decide whether he’s more shocked or wounded, but anger also begins to bubble up inside of him. The hell has gotten into him?
“What’s your problem? Why are you-”
“You reckon they’ll tell your parents?” Needles continues, cutting him off and further encroaching on his space, “I bet they’ll finally ship you off to the nuthouse.”
At that, something in Marty’s heart snaps. Through the rising ire and devastation, he fights the tears forming in his eyes and manages to bite back:
“Well, at least my dad’s around to make that decision!”
Needles’ expression momentarily crumples. Marty feels awful immediately, he didn’t mean it, he didn’t.
Something in his eyes tells Marty that he, too, wasn’t expecting that comeback.
“I don’t even care about your stupid new keyboard, by the way.” Marty tacks on, hoping the comparative unimportance of such a declaration might bring some sort of levity.
Instead, Needles scowls.
“How the hell did you know about that?” he spits, and Marty thinks there might be a hint of fear there.
Marty blinks. “…You told me? Like, two hours ago?”
“I didn’t,” he responds, slowly backing away, “why would I tell you of all people about that?”
There’s a tightness in Marty’s throat as he’s suddenly five again.
“You did,” he insists, “you did.”
Needles continues to back off, and Marty hears him mutter “freaking psycho” under his breath as he goes.
Biting his tongue, he turns back to his locker, and briefly catches a glimpse of eyes and teeth in the dull glint of the metal.
When he’s alone, Marty still talks to it.
There are days when he refuses to, strings of weeks or months where he decides that this thing that haunts him and makes everyone think he’s lost his mind, isn’t worth the attention.
But perhaps there is something to be said about reliability. He’s never been unobserved. He’s never been alone. The creature, whatever it is, is an unwavering presence in Marty’s life.
So, occasionally, he talks to it.
He whispers secrets he would never dare utter to anyone else. He complains about school. He complains about his peers, or about Dave and Linda.
Sometimes, late at night, he asks it why?
His dad asked him once what it looked like. Wanted the description for a novella he was writing, a short tale of an extraterrestrial visitor that tries to warn a young girl about coming danger but cannot communicate it properly.
And some nights, Marty will lie in bed and question if the monster is trying to warn him of something, or if its existence here is purely happenstance.
Other nights, he worries its motive may be something more malevolent.
Paul and Lee won’t talk to each other.
Marty’s usually a really good mediator (except when it comes to Needles), but neither will tell him what’s wrong, so there’s nothing for him to mediate.
The extent of what he knows is as follows: on Wednesday, Lee said something to Paul, and the following day, Paul told Marty that he’s more than happy to hang with him but if he ever has to spend more than five seconds in Lee’s presence, punches will be thrown.
Which is an insane escalation if Marty’s ever heard one, but Paul’s usually reasonable, so he’s really been thrown for a loop.
“Lee,” Marty whines as they walk down the street towards the town square, looking away from the reflections in a shop window, “just tell me what you said.”
Lee shuffles uncomfortably.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lee says, refusing to meet Marty’s eyes, “it was nothing. I don’t even really remember. I don’t know why he’s reacting like this.”
“Did you say something that, like, touched a nerve?”
Lee side eyes him, eyebrows furrowing in what Marty thinks is guilt.
“…maybe.”
Marty opens his mouth to respond when he catches sight of a poster stapled to a telephone pole.
“Hey,” he says, slowing.
Lee turns to see what he’s looking at.
“Oh, man,” Lee mutters, “sixteen, he was only a couple years older than us.”
Marty nods, staring at the torn edges of the missing poster and noting the information after Last Seen as near the old mine, over a month ago.
“Bummer.”
Marty and Lee stay standing there for a small while, unsure what else to say. The kid in the picture staring back at him makes Marty’s stomach churn with unplaceable anxiety.
He shakes his head, and continues on, Lee following suit. “Well, can’t you just say sorry?”
“I did, but he says it’s not him I need to say sorry to,” Lee replies.
“Wha-” Marty laughs a little, “who the hell did you insult?”
Lee frowns and looks away again.
“Lee?”
If this keeps going the way it is, if they really stop talking to each other forever, then the band they’ve had going since elementary school will crumble.
Now, see, Marty has a vested interest in that not happening. But he doesn’t like the way it’s looking right now.
They were just starting to actually get kinda good, too. Sure, they’ve been playing for so long that they were decent enough, but Marty’s actually beginning to learn real solos instead of just chords and he’s starting to memorize songs and…
If the band, well, disbands, he’s not so sure he’ll continue playing. Not the way he is currently, at least. He’ll probably end up switching back to acoustic.
Marty’s really gotta get them to talk it out. He turns to Lee, but he’s gone completely still.
Like… frozen. As though somebody hit pause on the TV. Not a muscle twitching, not a breath taken. Even his eyes remain unmoving, unblinking.
“…Lee?”
Static crawls at the corners of his vision, and Lee suddenly jolts, moving again. Marty jumps at the movement and the vignette inching in from the edge of his sight, and Lee grasps his head in what seems to be pain.
“What- what’s-” Lee barely manages to gasp out.
A girl passing by them stops dead in her tracks, curious. Marty recognises her as one of those prep girls that likes to call him a wacko.
The curiosity then shifts to abject horror.
Time seems to slow as the creature peels itself out of the window, and from the emerging coiling mass, dark tentacles begin to creep toward them.
She startles back, and her head snaps to Marty in something like dawning realisation. Something like understanding.
Marty, however, looks away from her and back to Lee, and he sees the moment that Lee sees it too.
At a loss, all he can think to do is point and say “it’s happening again.”
Lee’s face pinches. “What is?”
The world blinks.
Marty stumbles a few paces back, heart beating out of his chest.
He stays there for a moment, recuperating, but the rest of the world carries on.
The girl walks off, fear erased from her features and replaced with indifference and disgust.
“You okay, Marty?” Lee asks as Marty stares at the girl’s retreating figure.
“…Yeah,” he breathes, “yeah, I’m fine.”
Lee raises an eyebrow. Marty tries to flash a reassuring grin. If Lee doesn’t remember the untold horror that just invaded their space, no need to make a big deal of it.
“I’m, uh, gonna talk to Paul again, I guess. If you’re not going to tell me what you said, maybe I can weasel it out of him. Especially now I know you insulted someone,” he says, trying to continue their conversation from earlier.
“…What?” Lee chuckles nervously. “What are you talking about?”
Oh.
He looks at his friend, his bandmate, one of his partners in crime. Then, he looks at the glass where the monster has returned to, hiding behind the refracting mid-afternoon light as though nothing had happened at all.
Marty lets out a shuddering breath, and isn’t sure if he’s shaking from residual adrenaline or from rage.
You can’t keep doing this to me.
His room felt suffocating, and he found he couldn’t place himself far enough away from the window.
Those watchful, waiting eyes.
Getting away from any sort of reflective surface is difficult, and maybe sneaking out of his room in the middle of the night isn’t the most efficient method of doing that, but he couldn’t be under the monster’s oppressive gaze for a second longer.
He had to get pretty far into the outskirts of Hill Valley to truly feel free. To be finally, mercifully alone.
Kicking a rock down the street, he figures his closet was the better idea. But the night air is pleasant and the soft breeze that blows brings a lightness to Marty’s heart that he hasn’t felt in a while.
He sets himself down onto the rough pavement below him, happy with how far he’s come out and the complete lack of unwanted company. Despite the sharp, tiny pebbles digging into his skin, he’s more comfortable here than he was in his bed.
The moon shines brightly above him, illuminating his surroundings with gentle pale light. It is a relatively clear night, bar the few small, wispy clouds that streak across the sky, texture like the dappled touch of a painter’s brush.
He takes in the stars above him, an infinite universe beyond that stretches far, far out. The vastness of space seems to caress him from afar, never approaching, never closing in, never trapping him under the scrutiny of a hundred, thousand, million eyes.
Closing his own, he takes in a deep breath, revelling in the coolness flooding his nose and mouth and the faint smell of nature.
For a small while, Marty knows peace.
However, when he opens his eyes again, the sky has gone entirely dark.
Flinching back and heart racing, he desperately tries to find the outline of the silhouette above him, to know where the danger is coming from.
His frantic flailing is easily overpowered even as he attempts to pull away from the rough hands that wrap around his arms and yank him up.
“Let go!” he screams, clawing at his attacker and kicking and thrashing as much as he can to get away.
Hands grab at his face and find purchase over his mouth, silencing him. He tries to bite them, of course, but can’t maneuver himself correctly to be able to. Screaming even harder into their hand in hopes someone is nearby, he starts licking aggressively so they may momentarily release him.
And they do, for a second. When Marty then opens his mouth wide to holler for help, something fabric is shoved into his mouth.
Trying to spit it out proves no use as more hands grasp at him and hold him still, and further members of the group tie something over his face to keep the gag in place.
The world then goes fully dark, something shoved over his head. He usually finds comfort in complete darkness, light no longer able to be reflected. The opposite feeling is invoked.
He’s thrown unceremoniously over a shoulder, bones digging into his abdomen and inducing a sudden urge to vomit that Marty fights back.
Once they begin to walk him someplace else, the gravity of his situation hits him in full. His sense of direction’s all messed up from the struggle, but somehow he knows he’s not being taken back into the heart of town.
This is bad. This is really, really, really bad. They’re taking him somewhere and he can’t even see where.
He keeps thrashing until he can’t anymore, keeps screaming through the gag until his throat goes raw and the familiar vibrations of noise cease, strong arms holding him in place all the while. Eventually, he goes limp, and broken, silent sobs wrack his body.
He should have chosen his closet. He should have stayed home.
Distantly, through the thick fog of panic muddling his thoughts, he notices the atmosphere go from comfortably cool to unusually cold and damp, and a smell like dirt and metal.
Footsteps start echoing off of walls Marty can’t see but knows must be there.
He gives a few last feeble kicks, jerking out of their grip for a second before his ankles are quickly restrained by someone else’s hands again.
Breathing isn’t easy with the air so saturated. Each involuntary double gasp, an aftereffect of the uncontrollable crying, has him feeling like he’s taking in water.
The ends of his fingers are going numb from either the cold or the hyperventilating, and the seizing up of his muscles suggests the latter.
By the time they stop walking, his head is spinning, and he is thrown off of their shoulder, hitting the ground with an oomph. Swiftly, before he could even hope to move to get away, he is pulled back to his feet and held in place.
Marty goes as silent as he can for a second, just trying to listen for clues as to where he is or what’s going on. It is ineffective. He can’t focus on anything other than the fact he’s just been honest-to-god kidnapped.
Then the bag is ripped from his head and the gag from his mouth, and Marty sees less than a dozen figures shrouded in darkness, dim light revealing they’re deep within the old, supposed-to-be-sealed-off Delgato Mine.
He’s given less than a second to take it all in.
“For the Ancient One!” his captor announces, and Marty cannot see his face. There’s embroidery on their clothes that resembles tendrils of some kind.
“The Ancient One!” echoes a chorus, the other people throwing their arms into the air in a strange-looking gesture.
When he’s finally released, he’s thrown a little backward, but, still, he’s granted full freedom of movement again. He’s finally, finally let go.
Great relief floods his veins for all of one blessed moment, before the free-fall starts and his heart leaps into his throat.
No noise is produced from his vocal cords, for he’s already completely lost his voice.
He falls for too long. He’s falling too fast, now. Whenever he hits the ground, that’s going to be it for him.
And as that realisation hits, a strange sort of bliss takes over. He’s going to die. There’s nothing he can do about it. The adrenaline and the terror make way for something that almost feels like a high, dizzying and tingly and cathartic.
Wind burns the skin of his face, whistling past his ears, through his hair, ripping tears from his eyes.
Instinctually, he can sense the bottom of the mineshaft incoming. There is something about the way that the sound bounces back that assures him: it is here, this is the end of the line.
Fear spikes again for just a moment before he hits the ground.
He does not feel his bones break or hear his body splat, he does not experience any kind of pain from one moment to the next.
The fall simply stops.
.
.
.
Dry and straw-like grass pokes into his cheeks.
He’s lying face-down on the ground, heart still thumping in his chest, beating steadily as he’d expect it to under any other circumstances.
Lifting his head, he spits out a mouthful of dirt and grass and finds himself in an expansive, barren wilderness.
For a moment, he just stares, wide-eyed and perplexed.
The air is completely still. Not a breeze blows, and the cluster of desert grass still brushing against his face does not rustle except for when he moves.
Marty exhales shakily and it feels as though the world around him stays holding its breath.
When he pulls himself to his feet, he staggers a little, vertigo striking as his body is convinced for a second it’s still falling.
His arms flare out to keep his balance, and he takes a second glance around him to find he isn’t in complete wilderness; there’s a road right beside him.
With nothing better to do, and still unsure as to how he’s alive, he walks along the road in hopes he’ll reach some kind of civilization. His steps are wobbly and unstable, but he finds his rhythm easy enough.
He made it. He lived. And, to be completely and utterly honest, he doesn’t really care how he’s alive.
Creosote bush scrub lines the road and populates the desert as far as he can see, and is accompanied occasionally by other foliage.
He can’t be that far on the outskirts of Hill Valley until he sees the I-80 Eastbound to Reno sign that he’s passed by dozens of times before as he’s left Hill Valley. He knows this sign.
Letting out a ragged, exhausted sigh, he drags himself in the opposite direction back towards town.
God, he’s never sneaking out again. He doesn’t care if Paul and Lee ask him to, or if he’s at some future girlfriend’s beck and call, it’s not happening. He is staying firmly planted at home, where he is safe and cultist psycho-maniacs can’t chuck him down a mineshaft.
His legs burn and he finds he dearly misses when he’d only travel this route by car.
An indeterminate amount of time passes as he mechanically puts one foot in front of the other. His pace slows, the night catching up to him, and he swears he’s been walking for hours.
Then, far down the road, another sign starts to come into view.
As it registers, his head immediately goes a little fuzzy, and, despite his fatigue, he breaks into a sprint.
Surely not. Surely not.
The colors on the sign are already a dead giveaway, but the words become legible and Marty doesn’t know what’s happening anymore.
I-80 W to Sacramento →
That’s- this is on the other side of Hill Valley. This road he’s been walking along goes through Hill Valley, he knows it does. Or, at least, it’s supposed to.
Whipping back around, he looks into the distance and tries to will his home into existence. The scene blurs as tears spring to his eyes again.
Holy shit, is he actually dead?
He just wants to go home. He doesn’t know how to get there.
The drifting remnants of a dream long forgotten return to him in fragments as his eyes trace the outline of the road ahead of him.
Lone road through an empty desert.
Slowly, fearfully, he draws his eyes upwards.
Night sky without stars.
The thing- it feels almost minimizing to call it a monster, now- takes up every inch of the sky above him down to the horizon.
Its size is incomparable. Even from all the way down here, Marty can see leviathan tendrils twisting and curling across each other, movement filling his vision.
There are long, sharp teeth that must be larger than skyscrapers flashing in between the appendages.
He runs.
Where he’s going to, he doesn’t know. Back in the direction Hill Valley is supposed to be. But how do you even get away from something that big?
Reasoning aside, he can’t bring himself to stop. Though his thighs burn and his feet beg for him to rest, he powers through, run, run, running.
Just keep pressing on.
He doesn’t go as long without seeing a road sign, this time, or maybe he noticed the distance less. Instead of hours, it takes maybe a few minutes for it to come into view.
It is the Eastbound to Reno sign again. Marty continues past it, looking away as soon as he’s read it and keeping his gaze away from the skyline.
He needs to get away from here as fast as possible.
Another few minutes pass, and another sign comes into view.
I-80 E to Reno↑
…What?
He swallows the growing panic.
Keep going.
He’s seen that rock before.
No, keep going.
Keep-
I-80 E to Reno ↓
He stops, chest heaving, and tries to steady his breathing before tetany hits again.
There is no escape.
Marty’s knees give way and he collapses down onto the asphalt below him. Searching desperately for any sort of reprieve, he considers that maybe his brain really did make this all up. Maybe he’s finally snapped, like everyone always said he would. It seems like the easier solution.
He brings his eyes back up to the sky.
The entity’s appendages roll like incoming stormclouds, the intermittent flashes of teeth lightning.
Perhaps he never could have gotten away to begin with. Maybe it envelops the whole of the Earth. It certainly seems large enough.
What must be trillions of eyes open in an instant, and Marty can feel them in his head, each individual gaze boring holes through his skull.
This time, when the world blinks, it is not just a momentary flash of dark. He sees dim cyan light emanating from behind the universe’s eyelids, revealing a matrix of pulsing black veins and capillaries.
Gone as soon as it came, Marty is no longer kneeling in the dirt looking out at the desolate landscape where Hill Valley was supposed to be.
He’s surrounded by familiar eyes and teeth and roiling, writhing tentacles of black and that same beyond purple color he doesn’t have a name for.
The eyes all focus on him, and that invisible weight settles on his shoulders and around his neck like stepping out into 100 degree heat.
He feels like a little kid again. Like he’s five and his little brother just got stolen away. Like he’s perching on the far edge of his bed to put as much distance between him and the window as he can. Like he’s muttering fearful demands at it, angry and afraid and trying to be brave in the face of the unknowable.
“I don’t know what you are,” he says, because he has to say something, “but I know what you’ve done.”
It blinks, hundreds of thousands of eyes snapping shut for a millisecond in perfect unison.
He thinks about Needles and his sudden switch-up in their friendship. He thinks about Lee forgetting whatever it was that he did to make Paul stop talking to him. He thinks about Jamie.
“You’re an opportunist,” he hisses, hoping anger can mask fear.
Its goal can’t be total destruction.
Or, at least, he hopes it isn’t.
And here, untethered, floating and encapsulated by a being he could never begin to understand, hope is all he has to hold onto.
“Listen, if you’re gonna kill me, or erase me, or whatever,” Marty starts with falsified confidence before faltering as he gazes into the hypnotic eyes directly in front of him.
Bright, too-saturated teal irises that hurt to look at constricting pupils that are a black and of a depth that make Marty feel like he’s falling again.
Somewhere he can hear rushing water and the rustle of grass swaying in the breeze.
It keeps every eye trained on him, each one eerily unmoving, but it seems like it’s only looking at him rather than really seeing him. It doesn’t speak. Marty can hear the delicate tinkle of windchimes off in the distance, too far to mean anything significant.
“There’s nothing I could do to stop you. So if you’re gonna kill me, then just do it already.” He swallows. The windchimes fall silent. “If not-”
.
.
.
He wakes up to bright light shining in his eyes, head pounding. Whatever he’s lying on is somewhat plush but lumpy and hard at the same time. His whole body aches.
“Ugh,” he groans, voice rough, the sound scraping out of his throat as razor blades. It leads directly into a coughing fit and wow, he messed up his vocal cords.
Squinting make his head hurt worse, so he closes his eyes again and throws a hand over his face to block out the light. It does little to relieve the pain, but it makes him feel like he’s at least doing something to help himself.
“Would you like some water?”
Marty’s whole body jolts as he quickly sits up and snaps his head in the direction of the voice, pain be damned.
Through the glare from the sunlight, his eyes adjust just enough for him to be able to take in what seems to be a cluttered garage and an old man with wild white hair staring at him from across the room. The man holds his hands up in mock surrender.
“Who-” Marty starts coughing again the second he tries to speak, and the man seems to debate with himself for a second before crossing the room.
Marty uses his feet to shove himself back as the man approaches, crushing himself as far into the corner of what he now recognises as a very old couch as he can.
“I’m just coming over to give you water,” the man says, holding a bottle up in his hand and shaking it a little, “then I’ll go back over there.”
Yeah, right.
Still, Marty relaxes minutely, probably because being tense is hurting a lot right now.
He takes the water from the man and downs it in less than a second, cool liquid relief drowning the cotton out of his mouth and soothing his torn up throat.
“I must say, I’ve never had a home invader pass out and then act like I’m the criminal upon waking before.”
“Home invader?” Marty chokes out, a few dribbles of water spilling from his mouth. “You didn’t kidnap me?”
The man blinks, and then his expression goes horrified and offended at the same time. “Kidnapped? Of course not! Imagine my surprise upon my return from the store to find a child passed out in my domicile.”
Marty doesn’t know what the hell is going on. This is leagues better than whatever was happening before, but he’s still at a loss.
“Kidnapped,” the man mutters with disgust, “that’ll be the day.”
The weight of the previous events comes crashing down, the last leg of stability collapsing in on itself and the floodgates breaking open.
He holds a hand to his mouth to stifle the noise, and he scrubs at his eyes, which could be best described as leaking, embarrassment and shame only adding to the fitful pile of emotions his body is desperately trying to release.
“Oh good heavens,” the man starts back toward him, hand outstretched, “I know my reputation precedes me, but I do promise you’re safe here.”
Safe.
He takes in a shuddering breath, tears falling harder, and he screws his eyes shut. When was the last time he felt truly safe?
Back when the creature in the window was still benign.
Not for almost a decade.
The man whistles, and there is suddenly a warm weight on top of him and a wet nose being shoved into the crook of his neck. He doesn’t have to open his eyes to know dog, the smell and the fluff a dead giveaway. He opens them regardless to see the most friendly looking sheepdog he’s ever seen.
Managing a wet laugh, he brings his hands up to pet the dog, and then moves himself to embrace it, pressing his face into its fur. Oh, god. God. Out of everything that has happened over the last day, please let this be the part that’s real.
The man’s hand lands on his shoulder, and Marty tenses but does not shake it off.
They stay like that for a while.
“…Are you alright, Marty?”
What a stupid question. Marty snorts, and then whines a little when it hurts both his head and his throat.
“Who even are you?” he manages to croak out, trying to place where he’s seen those saucer-like eyes before.
The man takes a step back, removing the hand from his shoulder, and Marty finds his mind traitorously mourns the loss of its comfort.
“My name is Dr. Emmett Lathrop Brown. You are currently in my garage, which also happens to double as my lab and as my home,” Dr. Brown says cautiously, “I found you in here when I returned from my trip to the electronics store, and was unsure what to do with you, so I moved you to my couch and left you be.”
Dr. Brown.
Old nutcase who burned down his house for insurance money, if what the rumors claim are true.
He looks about as crazy as Marty is.
“How’d you know my name?” Marty asks, realising he’d never introduced himself.
Dr. Brown’s eyes go wide for a second, and he seems nervous as he responds, “Well, you’re the McFly’s youngest, correct? I’ve seen you in passing before.”
“… I suppose you probably know my reputation, then,” he says glumly, and wonders how much the man will judge based on gossip alone.
“I’m afraid not,” Brown replies, and Marty lets out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, “all I know is your name. Though I would like to know how you came to be in my garage, if it was somehow your belief that it was I who’d brought you here.”
“…Not right now.”
The statement is more of a silent request, a test to see if Dr. Brown will push. He does not.
Marty goes back to petting the dog. “What’s its name?”
“Einstein. He’s quite the assistant, I’ll tell you. Very intelligent.”
“I bet you are,” Marty coos, scritching behind Einstein’s ear. “Smartest dog in the whole world.”
The doctor is easy to get along with.
Marty doesn’t tell him that he should probably get going home, because though his parents are surely tearing their hair out by now, a few hours extra panic isn’t much compared to what’s already been caused.
Papers and notebooks and bits of scrap metal and electronics are piled on almost every available surface, strangely organized despite the chaos. Maybe it should make the garage seem more claustrophobic. Marty thinks it makes it more homely.
His throat feels marginally better. He holds a warm mug of hot chocolate, hands wrapping around the sides such that he can maximize the heat transfer.
The mug is shaped like a clock, which Marty finds funny. There are… a lot of clocks in this garage. Each one is unique in shape and size and style.
“You suck, by the way,” he whispers to the flash of teeth in the liquid surface of his drink.
“Did you say something?”
“Mmmno,” Marty replies. “I like your clocks.”
Dr. Brown smiles at that, not noticing the change in subject. “Thank you,” he says, “the inner workings of the nature of time is of particular interest to me.”
Marty nods. Dr. Brown seems very nice, considering all the terrible things people like to say about him. Needles in particular, these days at least, likes to lump him into the same boat as Marty, but interacting with him makes him seem like he’s just eccentric, not crazy.
“Do you make clocks?” Marty asks, eying all of the bits of machinery around the place.
“Ah, no. My main project is on track to be completed earlier than expected due to some… lucky inspiration. So, I’ve actually been putting some research into a phenomenon I discovered years ago but was not able to look into at the time.”
“Phenomenon?”
“Indeed. Are you familiar with the GZK limit? Have they taught you that in school yet?”
Marty stares blankly. “The what.”
“The Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit,” he says, and upon Marty’s sustained nonunderstanding, continues. “During long-distance travel, cosmic ray protons have a theoretical upper limit on their energy of five times ten to the nineteenth electron-volts, due to-”
“Doc, I’m fourteen.”
The doc pauses. “I suppose you do not want to hear about relic radiation or pi meson production.”
“You are just saying words,” Marty whines.
“Why, of course they’re words. Communication would prove rather difficult if I were not to use words, as my drawing skills leave much to be desired and I have not played a game of charades since my college days.” Doc moves to a pile of wires and metal and wheels it toward Marty, revealing it not to be useless scrap but instead an intentionally designed machine.
He clicks on a few buttons and some strange lights illuminate. They blink on and off like airplanes in the night, twinkling in patterns Marty is sure must be intentional but cannot fathom how so.
“I shall not bore you with details you do not understand,” he says slowly, “in simple terms, when these cosmic rays collide with air molecules, a shower of particles is created. Measure the energy and trajectory of enough of those secondary particles, and you can calculate the energy of the cosmic ray they came from.”
“Uh… okay?”
“If I collect enough pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and I know where they go, I can guess at the big picture,” Doc tries again, grimacing.
Marty nods. He kind of gets it.
“This device is connected to multiple tanks of water I have spread across Hill Valley in places they will not be disturbed. This is how I detect these secondary particles.”
He sighs. “No offence, Doc, but ‘phenomenon’ made this sound more interesting.”
“I’m getting to that. These rays are extraordinarily rare and require expansive setups to capture enough data to truly extrapolate their energy levels,” the man explains with an intonation that suggests that Marty should be more interested than he is. “I’d set the tanks up with the intention of creating a larger array across northern California, but I ran out of budget. I left what I had, though knowing I would not detect even a single event this century with an array this small.”
“…But you did?”
“But I did!” Doc grinned, “and, not only that, but by my calculations, the rays I have detected have far exceeded the GZK limit.”
“Oh,” Marty says, voice wavering slightly as he catches sight of beyond-purple in the glass of Doc’s goggles, “great. Love to hear that.”
“Indeed! Furthermore, they are all arriving from exactly the same direction above Hill Valley, which, too, is infinitesimally improbable. But in terms of how their energy is dispersed, I’ve found what I consider to be a fascinating impossibility.” Doc leans in close, and Marty leans in, too, waiting in somewhat fearful anticipation.
“The secondary particles expectedly produce the Cherenkov radiation as they move through the water, which is measured. However, beyond a certain threshold in the tank, the signal from the radiation abruptly cuts out, as though the remaining energy gets removed, somehow, from the system.”
That doesn’t sound good. Dr. Brown looks excited but that doesn’t sound like a good thing.
That sounds like a world-enveloping eyelid blinking shut, erasing past events yet leaving Marty’s memory of them inexplicably intact.
Doc catches Marty’s expression and seems to mistake the discomfort for confusion.
“What I mean is these particles have all that energy, and it seems to go nowhere. It’s an incredible violation of the laws of physics as we know them.”
Oh, Marty’s very familiar with that.
“How many times has this happened?” he asks quietly, slouching a little further into the lumpy old sofa.
“Fantastic question! If it were just the once, surely it would be a fault of equipment. Alas, I have detected it numerous times over the past decade alone, with four notable instances of my evidence suggesting truly impossible amounts of energy disappearing entirely. Last night broke the record.”
Marty’s stomach drops. God damnit.
“Last night?”
“Correct, and I’ve made a significant amount of progress on my theory that this ‘disappearance’ of energy is actually being absorbed by a- well, for your sake, what could essentially be considered a highly specialized… field, I suppose.” Doc makes a somewhat frustrated noise and flaps his hand a little to wave the statement off. “That is a gross oversimplification, of course, but if you haven’t even been taught about the GZK cutoff, I doubt I could explain it to you.”
Marty avoids Doc’s gaze and fiddles with the fabric of his pants, noting the dust that seems caked onto them.
“What if it was a monster?”
That gets Doc to stop pacing. His eyebrows furrow and he tilts his head a little. Marty waits for the inevitable judgement of his mental state.
“…Of what variety?”
Big. Impossible. Lives beyond this world except apparently for when it doesn’t.
Seems designed to mess with Marty specifically.
“It’s been watching me,” Marty elaborates, “and I know it sounds insane, but last night I think I got sacrificed to it and I’m still alive, so it must have done something.”
Dr. Brown suddenly seems much more concerned than he had a second ago, and Marty finds the fact that he seems to be believing him almost more unfathomable than the untold horrors he’d witnessed.
“Go on,” Doc urges, and Marty does.
Marty tries to emphasize the danger, but Doc gets hung up on a lot of minor details, like how it interacts with light reflection and refraction, and the description of a new color. He’s especially concerned about where something of this scale could be living, all of which aren’t really what’s important here.
“I suppose a parallel sector that is an exact copy of our particle sector could exist, if we do not exclude neutron oscillations to their degenerate-”
“Doc,” Marty warns, “the monster.”
“Yes, yes, of course. The best possible explanation, perhaps, is that the particles I am detecting are not travelling from distant galaxies at all, but rather through whatever space exists between timelines.”
Huh???
“What?! What does that even mean?”
“You are familiar with the concept of paradox. Perhaps temporal paradoxes could expel these cosmic ray particles, which I would suppose make them not cosmic at all.” The first person to ever believe him and he’s more concerned about the science behind it.
“Doc,”
“If we imagine this entity of yours with the intention to feed… perhaps the energy dispersal I observed is not in violation with the law of mass and energy conservation but rather just consumption by something we neither have the tools nor physics to understand.”
“Doc!” he finally yells, and the man looks up from where he’d been pacing.
“What?”
“What do we do?”
Marty doesn’t want to know the how. He doesn’t care about the how. Hasn’t since the first time his parents’ memories got erased.
What good is how when nobody remembers anyway?
“You do the same as you have been doing, Marty. Everything will end up as it is supposed to.” Doc replies unhelpfully.
Marty blinks back tears. He’s not crying for a second time in front of this guy.
“I,” he starts, taking a bold step forward, “have been living with this thing-”
“Marty-“
“-for my entire life, and that’s all you have to say to me about it?” he growls, throwing his hands into the air. “That’s it?”
Doc inhales and gives a sympathetic smile. “There will be time after time in your life, you’ll find, where there are things beyond your scope of understanding that are completely and utterly out of your control.”
His chest tightens. “But this- this is-“
“Out of our control,” Doc finishes for him, “completely and utterly.”
Despite his best efforts to keep his gaze on Doc, Marty’s eyes track slowly over to the window.
“So what now, then?” Marty asks miserably. “Do I just stop caring? Do I look at the thing that can erase people and say ‘oh, that’s fine, carry on’?!”
“Not at all,” Doc places his hands on both of Marty’s shoulders, “care, Marty, care so much it hurts.”
He shoots Doc a perplexed look. “Why would I do that?”
“SNAFU.”
“SNAFU?”
Doc nods. “It’s all just as bad as it’s always been; keep pressing forward, Marty.”
Well, he supposes, he already does that. Shouldn’t be so hard.
Still, when Doc had believed him and then had all that physics to back it up, Marty had hoped there would be a solution.
The lack of one feels like insult to injury.
“Besides, such a decision to become complacent would be so unlike you, I believe your ‘monster’ would eat it.” Doc adds on, and Marty looks back to him from where his eyes had moved to the window.
His first thought in response is what the hell is he talking about?
But then complacency.
And he thinks about Needles and how easy it felt to accept people treating him wrong when he’d had someone else who understood.
Anger, beautifully ugly, curls in his chest at the thought of a version of himself defined by numb indifference.
It eats paradox, Doc says.
Marty wonders how a paradox could happen if he hasn’t time travelled. Doc, confusingly, doesn’t explain that.
In chaos theory, tiny changes can have big effects on future outcomes, called the butterfly effect.
“Having a younger sibling impacts you behaviourally, often making you more responsible,” Doc explains when Marty brings up Jamie, “and all that needs to cause is a moment of hesitation at the wrong time.”
What about Paul and Lee? What about Needles?
What about the dozens of smaller things Marty could never point to but knew changed in some minute way because people looked at him weird when he mentioned how they used to be?
“It’s all about leading you to where you’re supposed to be and who you’re supposed to be, Marty.”
If he needs to be a certain way behaviourally, well, surely everyone treating him like a lunatic would impact that? Even his family thinks he’s nuts.
“If it weren’t that, it’d be something else you felt the need to disprove.”
Okay, but why does he need to be a certain way in particular?
Why him?
Frustratingly, Doc won’t say. Marty doesn’t believe that he doesn’t know. He thinks Doc is trying to spare him from something, which is ridiculous, because Marty is fourteen and that’s practically almost an adult.
He questions the supposed benevolence of such a creature.
“I don’t believe the entity is trying to help. I believe it is feeding, and the prevention of a world-ending paradox is merely a byproduct that we happen to benefit from.
“But who knows?
“Maybe it’s doing it on purpose.”
Doc becomes a friend.
Perhaps he shouldn’t? He’s a strange old man living in a garage with a dog as his only company, but, well, ‘only’ becomes inaccurate very quickly. His parents are more than supportive. Apparently they knew Doc from back when they were kids.
By the time Marty’s going into his senior year, Doc has become such a staple in his life he doesn’t know how he survived before.
Dropping the spare key back under the welcome mat, Marty enters the garage with swagger, chucking his bag unceremoniously to the floor.
“Doc?” he calls out.
“In here!”
Marty continues further in, and finds Doc wrestling with the wires and circuitboard of a device he has no name for.
“How is everything?” Doc asks, not looking up from his project.
Marty picks up a pile of disorganized papers, flicking through old bills and newspapers. “Situation’s normal,” he responds, “sucks as always.”
Doc hums in acknowledgment.
An old headline from a couple years ago catches his eye as he sifts through the stack.
ANONYMOUS TIP LEADS TO MULTIPLE ARRESTS AT DELGATO MINE- FURTHER INVESTIGATION PENDING
He wonders why Doc kept this, but smiles to himself anyway.
Behind it is an unopened envelope with a much more recent date on it.
“Doc, you gotta pay your water bill,” Marty says, eyes stuck on the words PAST DUE.
Doc jolts up from where he’s working and strides over to Marty, taking the now-opened envelope and bill notice in his hand.
“Damn!” he exclaims, looking at the papers Marty was looking through. “How on earth did this end up in there?!”
“Dunno, Doc.”
“Damn!” he repeats, starting off in another direction.
Marty follows, as he always does.
“Listen, can you meet me at Lone Pine Mall tonight at 1:15? I made a major breakthrough and I’ll need your assistance.”
Being chased by gun-wielding terrorists is only marginally less terrifying than being kidnapped, just for the reason that he can actually do something.
The DeLorean speeds up, fifty, sixty miles per hour.
Doc is dead.
Doc is dead but Marty must keep pressing on.
Seventy.
It hurts. It feels immobilizing. But if Marty dies and there’s no one to be angry about it then it’s worse.
Seventy-five.
A moment of hesitation, and he’d have been dead back there.
A moment of logic, and he’d be a hole-ridden smear on the pavement.
What idiot jumps into a disintegrating car?
Eighty.
There’s a glint of teeth in the rearview mirror.
There’s a man pointing a grenade launcher at him in his wingmirror.
Eighty-five.
Marty will not let Doc’s death be in vain. He will not give up.
He will not be snuffed out like a candle. He will be the moth that self-immolates on it; a final blaze of glory.
.
.
.
For a moment, a millionth of a millionth of a second, Marty is no longer in the car.
He’s surrounded again by those tendrils and teeth and eyes. Writhing, squirming, roiling mass. It looks at him. Each and every eye, as always vaguely staring at him.
Then, synchronously, the eyes move minutely to make eye contact.
The pressure, suffocating like the air of the mine, deepens.
For the first time ever, Marty is seen.
A scarecrow appears on the DeLorean’s windshield, mall and road replaced by barn and field.
Marty wakes from his sleep with a start, the distant sensation of terminal velocity and impending doom causing a jerk of his limbs and a sudden need to scream.
He doesn’t, of course. Heart pounding, he takes a second to just lie there.
Blinking blearily, his clock-radio clicks and Huey Lewis starts to play. A look to his calendar tells him it is October 26th, 1985.
1985. He lets out a breath he didn’t realise he was holding, though his throat still feels tight.
…There is no way that was real. Time travel. Absurd.
As he sits up, noting he’s still in his clothes from the previous day, he throws his legs over the edge of his bed and takes a second to process.
“What a nightmare,” he mutters, not entirely sure what he’s referring to. His head feels fuzzy.
He momentarily thinks of an empty desert and a night sky with no stars. Of teeth and tentacles and eyes.
Slowly, subconsciously, his gaze slides to his window. For a reason unbeknownst to him, Marty goes to wave at it, only stopping himself halfway through the motion.
He stares at the faint outline of his own reflection in that glass,
and wonders briefly what else he was expecting to see.