Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[5] (Mike)

Mike tiptoed past Nancy and Steve, who were discussing a lot of things he already knew about, and stepped outside. The cement was a sandpaper ice cube under his bare toes. The swim trunks were way too big but the drawstring saved the day, bunching the band around his waist like a deflated inner tube. He shivered as he crept down to the shallow end: the mist was cold, the air was cold, the snowflakes melting on his arms were cold. There was no way the water could be anything but cold too.

Mike stuck his foot into the pool. It felt like a bath. His Christmas joy swelled up within him, threatening volcanic meltdown. He chomped on his lip to stop a laugh, then sat down on the pool's edge to control his cannonball impulse. He splashed his fingers in the water, where they waved impossibly in the light-bending ripples, backlit yet dull and distant through the mist. He held up his hand. It smoked as if he had dipped it in dry ice.

"Cool."

He wished the guys were here. And Elle. She could float away to a whole other galaxy in this pool―a galaxy with a nicer planet than Earth, where the people based their constitution on the Jedi code and whose national food was just like pure Eggo pizza with maple syrup sauce only good for you, where things were always right side up except in stories. How much salt would that take? Like forty tons. At least.

Mike slipped into the pool and started walking toward the deeper end. This was awesome, the biggest bathtub ever, but he had no idea what to do. Splashing wasn't allowed, there weren't any pool toys, he couldn't make a whirlpool all by himself and he had no one to play Marco Polo with. Treading water was boring. His feet glowed big and blue in the underwater lights, waving silently to keep him afloat.

That was it: it was silent under the surface. Down there no one could hear him. He could do whatever he liked. He pinched his nose, kicked himself up for momentum and dropped, enjoyed the momentary warm weightlessness whose familiarity he couldn't quite name, then paddled back to the surface and caught his breath. On his next drop he pretzeled into a sort of improvised diving position and swam along to the other side the way a snorkeler would pass over the Great Barrier Reef.

At the deep end Mike surfaced, grabbed onto the edge and, emboldened, dove nearly straight down. When his elbow scraped the bottom he kept his breath. He kicked along, rising up the slope like a sea snake or a crab, as far as his lungs would let him go plus a little more than that for practice, and surfaced, gasping, near the shallow end. He had made it almost all the way across the whole pool underwater. Impressive.

Mike kept practicing, lap after diving lap. Eight laps. His head was getting fuzzy, his eyes chlorine-sore and his ears achy from repeated pressure changes. With one hand he held on to the end of the diving board and bobbed in the water.

Falling snowflakes raced each other downward through the steam. One after another he spotted them and silently encouraged them to touch the pool's surface before the rising heat could melt them away into nothing, but only a few made it. Only a few were big enough. The rest got nowhere, and there was nothing they could do about it.

He startled: a shiny black lump had gotten stuck to his scraped elbow. A leech? Leeches lived in lakes, not swimming pools. He imagined it sucking his blood and, shuddering, reached over to pull it off, but before he could grab it the lights went dark.

The pool blinked empty.

His guts balled up into his throat as the diving board slipped from his grasp.

Mike's bare feet slammed down through a sponge and the extra momentum threw him to his knees, toward a bloated face with bulging brown eyeballs and a long, living, alien black tongue, a head wreathed in clumps of rusty hair and mucous spiderwebs. Tentacle vines strangled a grey, undead world. He thought of Elle.

The lights flickered back on and pressure needled his eardrums. He nearly inhaled water. He flailed, found a semblance of his bearings and kicked upward.

Gone.

Halfway to the surface it all flickered out again and dropped him back into the nightmare.

Mike hit bottom with his hand square on the dead face. The force of his impact tore the flesh away from the skull so easily it could have been held on by vanilla pudding. An eyeball rolled over his fingers. More black leeches squirmed among the newly bared teeth, shrinking back into the mouth in response to the sudden exposure. Mike stopped thinking.

The return of the water pulled an explosion of bubbles out of him and he swam up again. The water dropped him for only a flash, returning to catch him before he could land.

Mike reached through the water for his elbow and missed.

Lights out, he fell.

Mike's brain told him he would land on a giant spongy Eggo instead.

Lights on, he swam.

There was no way to know when it would be safe to breathe.

Lights out, he bounced onto the other end of the sponge pile, puffing up a sulphuric garbage smell. Those big eyeglasses tangled in the webbing by his leg were familiar, sickeningly reminiscent of a handful of chance meetings and a corkboard in Nancy's bedroom. He grabbed on to them and, dry heaving, ripped them from an amalgamation of decayed brown corduroy and elastic paper snot.

Mike risked a breath, crept his free fingers to the slimy lump on his elbow, closed his eyes and waited for the light to come back. Two breaths, three breaths, in and out, and he held it. The instant the water's bright warmth touched his cheeks he yanked the leech from its sucking place, pushed off the bottom with all the strength left in his legs and swam up.

He was going nowhere. It was the longest swim of his life. When he surfaced he gasped only as much air as would allow him to scream again, and once he started he couldn't stop.

"Nancy! NANCY!" He tried to pull himself out of the pool at the nearest edge, climbing with his knee over the side, but with Barbara's glasses clutched in one hand he slipped so forcefully that he launched backwards into the pool again.

He gasped beneath the water.

The world narrowed to a pinhole.

Mike was drowning.