"Hey, you remember what I said last year, right? We're Zombie Boy and Ghost Boy. I'm not ever gonna leave you."
"Promise?"
"One hundred percent."
***
In which Alistair fights the monster that possessed his friend alongside his friends, while trying...
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Chapter Sixty-Seven: Finding Eddie: The Sequel
(The Dive)
***
Vecna was in the Upside Down.
That haunted Alistair's mind since they left the Creel house and returned back to the Wheeler residence, everyone silent and unanimously deciding to just sleep and come up with a new plan regarding the new information they'd learned tomorrow. Alistair and Max had found themselves sleeping next to each other, Cami, Dustin and Lucas next to them, headphones firmly on their ears and trying to sleep, but every time Alistair closed his eyes, nightmares greeted him. And when he was awake but had his eyes closed in a pretence of sleep, his mind was racing with that Vecna was indeed something from the Upside Down, that he was attacking and killing from it somehow without an open gate.
And that was a problem, since without an open gate, none of them could head into the Upside Down and kill Vecna, to prove Eddie's innocence. To fully break the curse on Alistair and Max.
Which, of course, did wonders for his already-terrible sleeping habits.
When the morning arrived, it passed in haze—they all got up, he and Max were checked on to make sure they hadn't been attacked by Vecna during the night (they hadn't) and eating a quick breakfast where Alistair had a much-needed cup of coffee, Mrs. Wheeler serving them without complaints despite there being eleven people, and they returned to the basement to go over what they knew with said breakfast in tow.
Vecna had killed two people—maybe three, if that surge and what Alistair felt was him killing another person—and possibly more if he couldn't get Max and Alistair first, which was a really comforting thing to think about first thing in the morning. His first victims were Virginia, Alice and Henry Creel, and according to Leo and the article he found, Virginia had been seeking help for Henry and his supposed sensitivity that Alistair assumed and his psychology-minded sister suspected was 50s talk for she'd been finding a way to treat a mental illness of Henry's, and talking about it again had Alistair remember that letter before pushing it away. Vecna was connected to the Creels in a way that both explained why he killed them and made their house in the Upside Down his lair. And, after Leo went upstairs to get more food, Alistair revealed his hunch about the other experimented-on kids possibly being victims of Vecna, even though he ended up being wrong. Leading to the final piece shared after Leo came back—that Vecna was a creature of the Upside Down, possibly at the same strength and power as the Mind Flayer, who could kill without a gate being opened.
It all felt like different pieces of the same puzzle that was missing that crucial piece, that once it was in place, they would see the full picture. But what was it? What were they missing?
Whatever. It didn't matter. What mattered was that they needed to find Vecna and, most importantly, a way into the Upside Down that wasn't El opening a gate to it or the machine the Russians built to open one. Make what felt like an impossible task to be possible—which might be true, since this was Hawkins they lived in.
