Chapter 56: In Love
Sunday Morning — Hawkins, Indiana, 1959
The Creel family moved along the gravel path toward the church entrance in the specific formation of people trying to look like they belonged somewhere.
Victor Creel led, back straight, chin up, the posture of a man performing respectability for an audience he couldn't stop thinking about. His dark gray suit was pressed to a crease that could cut paper. His tie was a straight vertical line. His hair was pomaded back with the careful attention of someone who understood that first impressions in small towns lasted longer than they had any right to.
Virginia walked beside him, her hand in the crook of his arm, wearing beige with matching gloves and a hat that sat just slightly too carefully on her head. Her makeup was precise. It didn't quite cover the shadows under her eyes.
Alice skipped along beside them in her blue dress with the lace trim, stopping every few feet to look at something that interested her, which was everything.
Henry walked three steps behind all of them.
His mother had picked out the white shirt and dark pants. The collar was a size too small and he'd known that since he put it on and hadn't said anything about it because saying something would have required a conversation he didn't have the energy for. His hands were in his pockets. His fingernails were pressed into his palms.
The church steps were already populated with the Sunday morning social machinery of a small town — clusters of adults exchanging the week's accumulated information, elderly couples moving at their own pace, young parents managing children who had opinions about being dressed up. The teenagers had claimed the oak tree off to the side, which was far enough from the entrance to feel like their own territory and close enough that nobody could reasonably object to it.
As the Creels came up the path, the volume of nearby conversations made a small, involuntary adjustment. Eyes moved and then moved away, the way eyes did when they were looking without wanting to be caught looking.
Victor registered it. His smile went up a degree. His nods became more deliberate.
He spotted the teenagers under the oak tree and recognized faces from school events and neighborhood introductions. He stopped.
"Hey, kids!"
His voice was pitched to carry — friendly, parental, the voice of a man demonstrating that his family had integrated successfully into the community.
Under the tree, heads came up. Patti stopped mid-sentence. Walter's expression closed. Claudia, who'd been crying about something, paused mid-sniff. Hopper straightened from where he'd been leaning against his bicycle. Joyce looked over with her usual alert curiosity.
Victor's hand came down on Henry's shoulder with the pressure of an instruction.
"I imagine you've all met Henry at school." The hand pushed, gently but with clear intent. "He's here to make friends. Have fun."
The last part was said to Henry but meant for everyone — an announcement more than a request. See? My son is normal. He socializes. This is him socializing.
Then Victor nodded, the nod of a man who has completed a task, and turned back to Virginia and Alice, steering them toward the church entrance and the relative privacy of pews and programs.
Henry stood on the gravel path in the morning sun with ten feet of open air between him and the group under the oak tree, and every one of their eyes still on him.
The silence had texture.
He wanted to turn and walk directly into the church. He wanted to find a pew in the back corner and sit in it until this was over. His feet did not cooperate.
Claudia broke it.
She hadn't been part of the social choreography happening under the tree — she'd been standing slightly apart, holding a canvas bag against her chest with both arms, and whatever she was feeling had apparently reached capacity, because she took two steps forward and her voice came out like something that had been building pressure for hours.
"The devil!" She said it at a volume that reached the adults near the church entrance and made several of them turn around. "The devil has come to Hawkins!"
She lifted the bag.
It was heavy. The bottom of it was dark with something that had soaked through the canvas.
"My Pranson—" Her voice cracked, and she forced it back. "My Pranson. Look at what something did to him. No human being did this. This was a monster."
Several girls backed up a step. The boys' expressions went serious in the specific way that happened when something stopped being a social situation and became something else.
"I'm offering a reward." Claudia's voice had found its footing again — louder now, steadier, the volume of someone who has decided to make this public. Her eyes swept the group under the tree and then moved out to the adults who'd stopped to listen. "A hundred dollars. To whoever finds the thing that killed my Pranson and makes sure it faces what it deserves."
The silence after this was a different kind from before.
Hopper pushed off his bicycle. He'd had an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth — he'd been carrying it since he left the house, not lighting it in front of the church — and now he took it out and held it between two fingers.
"A hundred dollars?" His voice was careful. Interested in a specific, calculating way.
Claudia turned to him and nodded. "One hundred dollars."
In 1959 Hawkins, to a high school kid, that was close to a fortune.
"For a cat," Lonnie said, from under the tree, with the tone of someone who found this both absurd and interesting. He had his thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets. "That's generous, Miller."
"Somebody might check what's in the bag first," Byers added, which was a mean thing to say and everyone knew it.
Claudia's face went red and wet at the same time. She pulled the bag closer. "Laugh all you want," she said, her voice breaking at the edges. "Go ahead. But what if it's not a cat next time? What if it's your dog? What if it's — what if it's you?"
Her eyes moved across the group. They landed on Henry.
He was standing at the edge of the path with his collar too tight and his hands in his pockets and whatever had happened to him last night written across his face in a language she apparently could read.
She took a step toward him. Just one step, but it was aimed.
"You." Her voice went quiet and pointed. "Next time it could be you."
It made no sense. Everyone there probably understood it made no sense. Nobody laughed.
Claudia had used up whatever she'd come here with. She turned, clutching the bag against her chest, and walked fast away along the path beside the church, her dark dress moving into the morning light.
The crowd absorbed the silence for a moment and then released it as noise — adults exchanging looks and steering children toward the entrance, the teenagers under the tree pulling back together to process what had just happened, voices overlapping with theories and questions and the specific excitement of something genuinely strange occurring on a Sunday morning in a town where Sunday mornings were supposed to be predictable.
Henry stood where Victor had left him.
Claudia's words were in his ears. Next time it could be you.
Last night. The dark space. The particles. The cat — the way it had moved, the way it hadn't, the way it had ended.
That's impossible, he thought. That wasn't real.
He knew he was lying to himself. He knew it the way you knew things that lived in your stomach rather than your head.
The nausea came up fast. The church spire seemed to tilt slightly.
He needed something solid. Something outside his own skull.
His eyes found Hopper, who had settled back against his bicycle with the expression of a man running numbers.
Henry crossed the distance between them. His steps weren't entirely steady. He stopped in front of Hopper and said, in a voice that came out drier than he intended: "What happened?"
Hopper looked at him sideways. Mildly surprised that the quiet transfer kid was initiating conversation. He shrugged.
"Some freak killed Claudia Miller's cat." His tone was matter-of-fact, carrying no particular sympathy in any direction. "She's paying a hundred dollars to find out who."
He paused. His eyes moved out past the church, past the oak tree, past the rooftops of Hawkins to wherever the edge of the town was.
"I'm going to collect it," he said. "And then I'm getting out of this place."
He said it the way people said things they'd made peace with — no drama, no performance. Just the flat certainty of a decision already made.
Henry stood there and felt the last thing he'd been holding onto give way.
Hopper meant it. And if Hopper went looking, if other people went looking, if Claudia's hundred-dollar reward sent people into the corners of this town asking questions about what had happened to her cat—
He turned and walked.
Not toward the church entrance. Around the side of the building, where the path narrowed and the noise of the crowd faded, toward the row of low stone annexes in the back — the storage rooms, the old confessional booths, the quieter architecture of a building that also had a back.
He made it around the corner.
"Henry!"
He almost walked directly into Patti Newby.
"Oh—" He jumped back, his heart lurching. His face had gone white before he'd consciously registered who it was.
Patti blinked at him. She looked at his face — the pallor, the way his hands had come up, the posture of someone whose nervous system had made a premature decision.
"Easy," she said, keeping her voice light. "It's just me." She tilted her head. "You look like you saw a ghost."
Henry looked at her.
Her eyes were clear and blue and had none of the things in them that everyone else's eyes had been carrying this morning — no calculation, no suspicion, no the specific wariness of people deciding whether he was worth worrying about.
The dam had been cracking since last night. It had been cracking since Lincoln County, probably. But there was something about standing in the narrow side passage of a church in the particular quiet that existed between the public noise and the private dark, looking at the one person who'd called something about him cool and meant it, that finished the job.
"I'm trying to figure out," he heard himself say, "whether I'm crazy or whether I'm actually what Claudia called me."
Patti stared at him.
Then she laughed — not at him, but at the situation, at the specific absurdity of this boy showing up around the side of a church on a Sunday morning with that particular look on his face and that particular sentence coming out of his mouth.
"Well," she said. She looked at the small wooden door set into the stone wall nearby. "There's a confessional right here." She pulled back the heavy curtain and looked at him. "You could start there."
Henry's mouth did something that was the approximate shape of a smile without committing to it. "I wouldn't know where to begin."
"Nobody does," Patti said. "That's why they've got the booth."
She slipped into one side of the confessional, letting the curtain fall behind her. Her voice came through the carved wooden partition, muffled but clear.
"I'll go first. I hate the choir." A pause. "And I hate being an orphan. There. Your turn."
Henry stood outside for a moment.
Then he lifted the curtain on the other side and sat down on the hard wooden bench.
The space was small and dark, with thin lines of morning light coming through the latticed partition. The air smelled like old wood and candle wax and the faint ghost of incense from services going back years. Through the carved screen he could see the vague outline of Patti — the dark shape of her ponytail, the set of her shoulders.
The smallness of it helped. The privacy of it. The fact that he didn't have to look directly at her face while he said things.
"Fine," he said, to the partition. "Try having parents."
He paused. "My mom's anxious about everything and my dad drinks."
He said it the way you said things you'd been carrying alone for long enough that they'd lost their full weight — not numb exactly, but worn smooth. It was the first time he'd said it to anyone outside the house.
Patti didn't make sympathetic sounds. "My dad drinks too," she said, "and he can't stand me."
Henry: "The only thing my parents hate more than me is each other."
Patti: "I got grounded once for general ingratitude. That was the official reason. General ingratitude."
Henry: "My mom tried to have me exorcised."
A beat.
"Seriously?" Patti's voice had shifted — not laughing, something more attentive.
"Lincoln County. There was a priest involved." He pressed his back against the booth wall. "It didn't take."
Patti was quiet for a moment. Then: "My mom gave me up."
She said it with no particular drama. Just the flatness of a fact so fundamental it had stopped being surprising.
"I have no real friends here," she added.
"I don't have friends anywhere," Henry said. "And I have nightmares."
"Nightmares aren't special," Patti said, with the easy dismissiveness of someone who had her own. "Everyone has nightmares."
Henry looked at the partition.
"Not like mine," he said. "Mine are — if you can make them come true, that's different."
Silence.
On the other side of the screen, Patti's outline had gone still.
He waited. His heart was doing something loud and irregular in his chest. He'd said it. He hadn't said it clearly, hadn't said everything it meant, but he'd said something, and it was out in the air now, in this small dark wooden box by the side of a church in Hawkins, Indiana.
"Okay," Patti said, finally. Her voice was careful. "Are you saying you actually — like, what, a superpower? Like in the comics?"
Henry almost laughed. The word superpower next to what actually lived in his head was like putting a party hat on something that bit.
"No," he said. "More like the opposite. A super weakness. Something I can't control that makes things worse."
He pressed his forehead lightly against the partition.
Patti was quiet for a moment on her side. Then:
"Well if you can't control it," she said, "then why not try to point it somewhere better? If you can make nightmares come true, why not make good dreams come true instead?"
Henry blinked.
He'd been living with this thing since he could remember, and in all that time it had been a problem to contain, a secret to keep, a source of fear and shame and the exorcism in Lincoln County. The idea that you could simply — redirect it — was so foreign it took him a second to even find the shape of it.
"For instance," Patti continued, her voice warming to the idea the way she warmed to all her ideas, quickly and completely, "Las Vegas."
"Las Vegas."
"You conjure us a car, or conjure some cash, we drive to Las Vegas." She said it like she'd been thinking about it for longer than she was letting on. "I'd sing there. A real stage, not the Hawkins High choir." Her voice dropped slightly. "An actual real stage."
"I thought you hated singing," Henry said.
"I hate the choir," Patti corrected, with some feeling. "There's a difference. The choir is fifteen girls who all look exactly like what Hawkins thinks a girl should look like, and then me." A pause. "Singing itself is different."
Henry sat with that.
"You might have a superpower too," he said. He hadn't planned to say it. It came out anyway.
"What?"
He cleared his throat. "I mean — Clark Kent was an orphan. Batman's parents were gone. Robin. Wonder Woman was made out of clay, technically." He'd read a lot of comics alone in a lot of rooms. "Not having parents is basically a requirement."
Silence on the other side. Then Patti laughed — not the big version, the quiet one, the one that meant something had actually landed.
"Mystery Meat," she said. "That's my superhero name. I've decided."
Henry processed this. "...Why Mystery Meat?"
"I don't know where I came from. Like the cafeteria." She sounded pleased with this logic.
"And your sidekick is—"
"Magic Meatball!" she said, and then laughed at herself for saying it.
"Magic Meatball," Henry repeated, with the careful tone of someone encountering something they don't have a category for.
"I don't know why I said that," Patti said, through laughter. "I was just thinking about meat."
"You were thinking about meat," Henry said.
"Don't — I know how that sounds."
For the first time since he'd woken up that morning — since last night, since Lincoln County, since a long time before that — the weight in Henry's chest lifted slightly. Not gone. Just lighter. The specific relief of absurdity after too much gravity.
The organ inside the church started its prelude, the sound coming through the walls in a muffled, distant way.
Patti's curtain moved fast.
"I have to go—" She was already out, already turning, already—
She stopped and looked back at him, half in the morning light and half in the shadow of the church wall. Her face still had the color that laughing had put there. But her eyes had gone serious.
"Don't repeat any of that," she said. "Any of it. Ever. Or I will end you."
The tone was entirely sincere and also somehow still warm.
Henry stepped out of the booth and stood in the light.
He raised his right hand and made a fist, tapped it gently against his chest. The gesture of someone who'd picked it up from somewhere — a movie, a radio show — and was deploying it with more earnestness than technical accuracy.
"Your secret is safe with me," he said.
Patti looked at the gesture. Something in her face opened up briefly, the way faces did when they were caught off guard by sincerity they hadn't expected.
She smiled — a real one, unguarded, quick.
Then she was running for the side door, her shoes on the flagstone, and she called back over her shoulder without breaking stride:
"You're not a demon, Creel! You're just a freak!"
And then she was inside, the door swinging shut behind her.
Henry stood in the passage with the morning light on his face.
Just a freak.
He turned it over.
From her, the way she'd said it, it hadn't sounded like Claudia's monster or the priest's affliction or his own internal wrong wrong wrong.
It had sounded, somehow, almost like the beginning of something else.
"Patti—" he called, on impulse.
The door opened again. She leaned out. "What?"
"What do you actually want?" He took a step toward her. "If I could — if what I have could make something real — what would you want most?"
She looked at him. Her expression moved through confusion and then something more honest, the careful consideration of a question she knew the answer to but didn't hand out easily.
"I want to find my mom," she said.
Simple. Direct. The weight of fifteen years of not-knowing in six words.
"Where?" Henry asked.
Patti's expression shifted toward exasperated. "If I knew where, I wouldn't still be looking."
"No, I mean—" He moved a little closer, lowered his voice. "In your imagination. In the version where you find her. Where is she? What does it look like? Close your eyes."
She looked at him.
He waited.
Patti Newby stood in the doorway of a church in Hawkins, Indiana on a Sunday morning in 1959, and after a moment, she closed her eyes.
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