chapter xvii .
put him in an early grave
IF MAX HAD THOUGHT VAL'S MUSIC TASTE WAS BAD, Val wondered what she was thinking about Eddie's—all Iron Maiden, Metallica, Black Sabbath. The only song Val recognized out of all the tapes she was throwing around was For Whom The Bell Tolls, and that was only because Mason had gone through a hard rock phase for a day and a half before he decided it was lame and gross. But despite her outward persona, Val was not the average hard rock enjoyer, and she found most of the names of the songs she was reading to be very morose and weird.
"What exactly are we looking for here?" she asked, shuffling through as many tapes as she could. "What does Wheeler listen to? Anybody? Robin?"
"Madonna, Blondie, Bowie, The Beatles?" Robin cried, throwing a bunch of tapes onto the bed and turning to Eddie. "Music! We need music!"
Eddie picked up one of his Iron Maiden tapes and shoved it in Robin's face, screaming passionately, "THIS IS MUSIC!"
("i never even saw him get mad")
Val dumped the rest of the tapes onto the floor and rushed back into the living room, staring up through the hole in the ceiling to where Steve was still shaking Nancy's shoulders and calling for her. Val cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, "How's she doing? How much time do we have?"
"No fucking clue!" Steve yelled back, without taking his eyes off Nancy. "Just hurry!"
She cursed to herself, turning to run back to Eddie's room—but before she could even hop off the mattress and take a step in the right direction, Steve exclaimed Nancy's name, and Val looked back up through the gate to see her collapsing into Steve's arms. She was breathless and looked scared out of her goddamn mind, but her bones were still intact, her eyes didn't have blood leaking out of them, and she wasn't dead. So Val counted it as a win.
A FEW HOURS LATER, silhouetted against the early traces of a morning sun peeking through the window and announcing morning, Nancy recounted everything she'd seen while under the curse. Her voice was shaky, and she hadn't quite caught her breath yet, but she was able to tell the rest of them everything. Val had to tune out for a few parts, finding herself unable to listen, to relive what she'd experienced under the curse.
"He showed me things that haven't even happened yet," Nancy remembered, her voice hoarse. "I saw a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins. Downtown on fire. Dead soldiers. And this... this giant creature with.. a gaping mouth. And it wasn't alone. There were so many monsters. An army of them. And they were coming into Hawkins... into our neighborhoods. Our homes. And then... he showed me my mom, and Holly. Mike. And they were all..."
Her voice trailed off, tears welling up in her eyes. She shook her head and drew in a shaky breath. Everybody looked down. Nobody was waiting for her to go on—it was easy to understand what she'd been meaning.
"Okay," Steve began warily, "but he's just trying to scare you, Nance. Right? I mean, it's not.. real."
"Not yet," Nancy whispered. "But there.. there was something else. He showed me gates. Four of them. Spreading across Hawkins. And these gates, they looked like the one outside of Eddie's trailer. But.... they didn't stop growing. And this wasn't the Upside Down Hawkins—this was our Hawkins. Our home."
Val swallowed, her knee bouncing anxiously as she listened to Nancy's retelling. Her mind was flooding with fearful thoughts. Whatever Nancy had seen must have been some sort of premonition, a warning of what was to come. What was in store for Hawkins.
