092 — Max's Choice
The cabin was locked up tight, curtains drawn, Hopper's truck still gone. Mike knocked twice, waited, knocked again, and got nothing.
He turned around with an expression he was trying very hard to keep neutral and failing at completely. "She's not home. So — guess we should head out."
Lucas looked at him sideways. "You're literally smiling right now."
"I'm not —" Mike arranged his face. "I'm just saying, nothing we can do here, so —"
"You're smiling," Dustin confirmed.
Mike made a sound of protest and walked toward his bike. Lucas and Dustin let him go, exchanged a look, and drifted toward Max, who had been taking in the cabin with the quiet attention of someone filing away information.
"Sorry," Lucas said. "We wanted to introduce you. Bad timing."
"It's fine." Max shrugged, but she was still looking at the cabin. She'd been curious about this Eleven since the name had slipped out in the hallway — the way all three boys had gone briefly electric when Mike said it, the way Mike had immediately tried to stuff it back in the box. Whatever this girl was to them, she wasn't just a friend. She was something they protected.
What kind of name was Eleven, anyway. What kind of parents —
The bicycle bell came from somewhere up in the tree line, a light metallic ring, and then Richard came rolling down the path from the woods on his bike. No hands on the pedals. The path was uphill behind him. Neither of these things appeared to be causing him any difficulty.
Max stared. "How is it doing that?"
"Doing what?" Richard pulled up alongside them and stopped, looking at the group with the mild surprise of someone who hadn't expected company.
"The bike. You're not pedaling. It's going uphill." Max gestured at the evident physical impossibility in front of her.
"It's an older model," Richard said. "Gets set in its ways."
Dustin narrowed his eyes. "That is not an explanation."
"It's the explanation I have." Richard looked at the group. "You all came to see Eleven? She's out with Hopper today." He glanced at the sky, then back at them, and his expression shifted — not alarmed, but deliberate. "Actually, good timing. I was going to call you tonight anyway." He looked at Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and Will in turn, and then at Max. "Things have been unsettled after dark lately. Go home before it gets late. Don't go out alone at night if you can help it."
Max looked at the woods, then back at him. "Unsettled how? Like, are there coyotes or something?"
The boys went quiet in the specific way they went quiet when something from the other side came up in conversation. Dustin recovered first. "Is it back? Is something back?"
Mike glanced at Max, clearly calculating. Richard didn't wait for him to finish the calculation.
"I found Demogorgons in the tunnels under the lab yesterday," he said, easy and direct, like he was describing road conditions. "Three of them. And there's a black particulate substance down there — part of the Mind Flayer's physical body that didn't make it back through the Gate when it closed. It's been sitting down there since last year. It can currently attach itself to dead organisms and spirits and amplify them. I'm concerned about what happens if it develops the ability to parasitize living people."
Dustin exhaled sharply. Will went still. Lucas said, low: "Seriously."
Mike looked at Max, then at Richard, with the expression of someone whose objection was arriving about ten seconds too late to matter. "You just —" He gestured vaguely. "She doesn't know about any of this."
"She does now," Richard said. "Which is better than her not knowing and making a decision that gets her hurt." He looked at Mike with the patience of someone who'd had this specific conversation before. "The people around you deserve to know what they're walking into. That's not your secret to keep on their behalf."
Mike's jaw worked. He looked at Max, then at the ground, then at his bike. The argument he wanted to make kept running into the part of him that knew Richard was right, and the collision was visibly uncomfortable.
He didn't say anything else.
They ended up at the Wheeler garage, which was the closest available space with both privacy and chairs. Mrs. Wheeler had left a case of Cokes in the mini-fridge out there in what had become a kind of permanent open hospitality, and they pulled them out and settled in while Richard laid out what he'd found.
Max sat on an overturned milk crate and listened. She was the kind of listener who went very still when she was actually engaged, and she went very still now — through the explanation of the Upside Down, the Gate, the Demogorgons, the Mind Flayer, all of it. Her face moved through several phases: skepticism, reluctant interest, something that looked like the discomfort of a person who has suspected there's something wrong with the town they just moved to and is now receiving confirmation.
When Richard finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"This is either the most elaborate hazing ritual in history," she said, "or you're all completely serious."
"We're serious," Will said.
"The thing about hazing," Dustin said, "is we'd have to have planned it, and none of us are that organized."
Max looked at the test tube Richard had set on the workbench — a thumb-sized glass vial with something dark inside that moved like it had opinions about its own movement, thick and slow, rolling against the glass without settling. It didn't behave like any liquid she'd seen. It behaved like something that was aware of being looked at.
"Is that —"
"Part of the Mind Flayer's physical body," Richard said. "Took most of yesterday to collect that much. Right now it's inert — no host, no instruction. But it's not dead. It's waiting."
Max picked up the vial. The darkness inside rolled toward her fingertip through the glass. She set it back down.
"I saw something come out of a guy at school," Mike said, quieter now, the fight mostly out of him. "Last year. This black stuff, same as that. He'd been acting wrong for months." He paused. "The sauna room. We ran a current through him and it came out."
"Troy," Dustin confirmed.
Max looked at the vial and then at the boys and understood, in the specific way you understood things that rearranged the furniture of your assumptions, that this was real and had been real before she ever showed up in Hawkins.
Richard reached into his pack and pulled out a notepad and a pen — a plain Bic, nothing remarkable about it — and set them on the workbench in front of Max.
"I want to show you one more thing," he said. "The bike runs the way it does because there's a presence in it. Old one, been there a long time, generally cooperative." He nudged the pen toward her. "Same with this. You don't have to do anything. Just hold it over the paper and think about something — anything. Let it move."
Max looked at the pen. She looked at Richard. She looked at the pen again.
There were two things happening in her at the same time: the part that said this is insane and the part that said but the black stuff moved when I touched the glass. The second part was winning.
She picked up the pen.
Lucas, Dustin, Will, and even Mike leaned in slightly without appearing to notice they were doing it.
Max held the pen over the notepad. She thought about Billy — it was the most present thing in her mind most of the time, the thing she navigated around like a piece of furniture in the dark — the parking lot last night, the dust in everyone's hair, the way his door-slam still echoed in the house at eleven PM.
The pen moved.
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