093 — Terry's Memories
Max held the pen for about three seconds before it moved.
She felt it before she saw it — a pressure against her fingers that wasn't her own, something wrapping around her hand from the outside without anything being there, cold and deliberate, like being guided by a hand she couldn't see. The cold traveled up through her palm and into her wrist and she watched her own handwriting appear on the notepad in a script that was almost hers but not quite, slightly steadier than her hand ever was.
Susan.
She dropped the pen like it had bitten her.
Her breathing was audible in the garage. Everyone was looking at her — not at the paper, at her — with the particular attention of people who already knew what they were seeing and were watching her catch up to it.
"What was that," Max said. Not a question. A statement of something she needed to say out loud.
"That's what I've been telling you about," Richard said. "There are things in this town that don't follow the rules you're used to. The pen's been carrying a presence for a while. Old one, generally harmless. It reads what's on the surface of your mind and puts it down." He picked the pen up and tucked it into his bag. "I'm sorry for the cold. That part's unpleasant."
Max was staring at her own hand. She turned it over, back, over again, like she was checking for evidence. The cold was already fading. "Susan is my mother's name," she said. "Nobody here knows my mother's name."
"I know," Richard said.
Max looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the test tube still sitting on the workbench, the dark particulate inside still moving with its slow, purposeful roll. She looked at Mike and Will and Lucas and Dustin, who were all watching her with varying expressions of concern and solidarity.
She exhaled. Her hand, when she flexed it, felt normal.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I believe you."
The tension in the room came down a notch. Lucas put his hand briefly on her shoulder and she didn't shrug it off.
"That was genuinely terrifying," she said, "but also kind of —" She paused, and a reluctant, slightly wild smile crossed her face. "I don't know. Is it wrong that part of me thought it was cool?"
Dustin pointed at her. "She's one of us."
That got a laugh out of everyone, including Max, the kind that came partly from relief and partly from the absurdity of the whole situation, and something settled into place in the dynamic of the group that hadn't been there before. The circle had moved to include her, not officially, not with a ceremony, but in the way things actually happened — through something shared and survived.
Richard leaned back against the workbench and looked at Max. "When Eleven gets back, she's going to want to meet you. She's been the only girl in this group for a while and she's had to put up with a significant amount of D&D." He glanced at Mike. "No offense."
"Some offense taken," Mike said.
"She'll like having someone who actually knows what she's going through," Richard continued. "Growing up the way she did, she missed a lot of the stuff girls figure out together. Having a friend who can help her with that matters. Hopper and I aren't much use on that front."
Max nodded, something genuine crossing her face. "I'd like that. I haven't really had a close girlfriend since we moved."
"What does she like?" Max asked.
"Eggos," said Will, Dustin, and Lucas at the same time.
"And TV," Will added. "She's catching up on everything she missed."
"She likes winning at things," Dustin said, which got a nod from the others.
Mike had been quiet through this, sitting on a stack of old National Geographic issues with his elbows on his knees. He looked up. "She likes us," he said. It came out more defensive than he'd intended.
"She loves you guys," Richard said, which took some of the air out of Mike's posture. "That's not the same as saying she wouldn't also love having a friend who's a girl. Both things can be true at the same time."
Mike didn't say anything. But he also didn't argue, which was progress.
From the back of the garage, Joyce's voice drifted through the connecting door she'd left cracked: "Mike, for what it's worth — if you want Eleven to like you, learn what she actually wants, not what you think she should want."
Mike's expression went through several phases in quick succession.
"Was she listening this whole time?" he asked.
"She can hear everything through that door," Will said pleasantly.
Hopper's truck was in the driveway when they got back to the cabin just after six, headlights cutting across the gravel, engine still ticking as it cooled. The drive back from Larrabee Road had been quiet in the way drives were quiet when both people in the car were processing too much to talk.
Inside, Eleven sat at the kitchen table with a mug of hot chocolate going cold in front of her, looking at nothing in particular. Her eyes were red-rimmed. There was a dried smear of blood under her nose she'd mostly wiped away.
Hopper had his hand on her shoulder, standing beside her chair, and looked up when the door opened. He gave a small shake of his head — not now — to Richard, who read it and went to put the kettle on instead.
What Eleven had seen in her mother's memories had started simply enough.
When she and Hopper first arrived at the Ives house, Becky had given them space to sit with Terry — not pushing, just making coffee and staying in the kitchen doorway in case she was needed. Eleven had sat across from her mother in the rocking chair and watched her cycle through the words, and then, because she couldn't help it, she'd reached out and taken Terry's hand.
The lights had started flickering almost immediately. Not randomly — sequentially, room to room, like something was indicating a direction. Becky had started an explanation about old wiring that trailed off when the flickering moved in a clear path up the stairs.
They'd followed it.
The room at the end of the hall was small and had been waiting for a long time — a child's room, painted yellow, a crib that had been left there with the mattress still in it, a mobile with small felt animals hanging over it, dusty now, still. Eleven had stood in the doorway and understood without being told that the room had been made for her.
Then the lights had brought them back downstairs, back to Terry. And Eleven had understood that the code — the looping words, breathe, sunflower, rainbow, three to the right, four to the left — wasn't meaningless repetition. It was a key her mother had left. An instruction. A door left open for her daughter in the only way Terry had left to leave anything.
Eleven had closed her eyes, held her mother's hand, and gone in.
What she told Hopper on the drive home, haltingly, wiping her nose on the back of her hand and staring at the dark road:
She had seen her own birth. Seen the lab from the inside of her mother's memory — the cold, the brightness of the lights, Brenner in the doorway while Terry was still in the hospital bed. Seen the moment they took her, the infant version of herself wrapped in a lab blanket, Terry reaching and reaching and nobody stopping to help her.
She had felt the electroshock therapy. Not described, not observed — felt, the way memory worked when you were inside it. What Brenner had done to Terry afterward, the punishment for trying to come back, the reason Terry Ives sat in a rocking chair in a yellow house on Larrabee Road and could no longer reach the world.
Eleven had come up out of the memory shaking, her nose bleeding freely, Hopper's arms already around her before she'd fully surfaced.
She wasn't sad, exactly. It was bigger than sad. It sat in her chest like something that needed somewhere to go and hadn't found it yet.
"Brenner," she said at the kitchen table, later, both hands around the cooling mug. "I want —" She stopped. Started again. "When I find him."
"Together," Hopper said. "When the time comes, we deal with him together. That's a promise."
Eleven looked at the table for a moment. Then she nodded.
The files Terry had accumulated over the years were in two shoeboxes — newspaper clippings mostly, some handwritten notes in a script that had deteriorated over time, a few photocopied documents that Becky had found and kept without fully understanding why. Terry had been building a case from the outside, working from the fragments of memory she had and the public record of children who had disappeared in and around Hawkins over the years.
The clippings came from multiple states. Most of the missing children were young, most of the cases unsolved, most of them with the particular quality of cases that hadn't been looked for very hard.
One face appeared more than the others.
A girl, a few years older than Eleven would have been at the time the earliest clippings were dated. The photos were black and white, school picture quality, slightly grainy from the photocopy. But the face was familiar in the specific way that things were familiar when you'd seen them in someone else's memory.
"I know her," Eleven said. She touched the edge of the clipping. "From Mom's memories. When I was little, at the lab. We were in the same room for a while."
Hopper looked at the clipping. The name in the caption was there, the town, the year of the disappearance. He read it quietly. "Do you know if she made it?"
Eleven shook her head. "I don't know what happened to her after." She paused. "But I think I can find out. If I reach far enough."
Hopper looked at her. "Not tonight."
"Not tonight," she agreed.
She set the clipping aside, carefully, face up, and looked at it for a long moment before Hopper closed the shoebox.
[500 PS unlocks 1 Extra Chapter]
[10 Reviews unlock 1 Extra Chapter]
Thanks for reading—reviews are appreciated.
P1treon Soulforger has 20+advance chapters