Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[20] (Jonathan)

Elle had already been inside Nicole's house. The front door was open, the window was broken and a rock lay on the floor of the living room, a crashed meteor in a spray of glass. Jonathan juggled his weight from the wobbly railing to the doorway. "You shouldn't climb through broken windows," he teased. "You'll hurt yourself."

"Sorry," Elle said, holding her flashlight and hooking her backpack with the same arm. She dug around in it until she found some batteries and switched them into the flashlight with a shotgunner's hands, discarding the dead ones like bullet casings. She pointed a bright beam of chalk into the house. "Help," she offered, twisting to extend a hand. Jonathan declined and ditched his axe in favor of the wall.

They moved through the living room, past the kitchen―Had there been a fire in here?―and down the hallway into a blue bedroom. Although dusted with grime, the dresser looked a little bit girly. The stacks of magazines on top were moldy, their edges so blackened that barely any white showed at all.

Elle sat down at the room's small desk, dwarfing the chair, puffy in her dirty skirt and big pink coat.

The corner of the bedroom floor nearest the door had rotted away. Jonathan used some intuitive sign language to borrow the flashlight and found that the hole went right through to an underground pond. The floodwater reflected the light like a mirror. There was a table down there, lumped with laundry. Tight golfballs of white fluff dotted the clothing, enormous cousins of the egg sacks that tended to congregate under windowsills and picnic tables.

When he caught a hint of his reflection in the floodwater he shuffled away. He didn't want to know. He planted the flashlight beside the phone on the bedside table, endowing the ceiling with an artificially shining full moon, and checked out the bed in the corner. Like the rest of the room, it was mostly clean. Maybe a little musty, but there was nothing to stop him climbing in and letting it swallow him whole.

Jonathan sank back into the far corner under the window, between the bedside table and the desk, and enjoyed the dryness of the hard wood floor. Wall corners made good vertical pillows. He put his headphones on because it seemed like the thing to do, but they only magnified the whine inside him. He sneezed and took them off again.

Usually, when he wanted music but didn't have any on hand, he just closed his eyes and listened. Either he would find something, or something would find him―a fly, or a leaf, or a kid with a ball―and he would trace their paths as far as he could before they blended into everything else. It was silent now, so he pushed his ears out, past the noise in his head, and listened to the silence. Something would come. Something always came.

Elle poked at something on the desk, too high up for Jonathan to see, making little schwick-click sounds. It didn't matter what it was. It was better not to know what it was, so you could listen.

It was cold in here.

A scratchy blanket fell on him. When had he closed his eyes? Why was he forgetting whether his eyes were closed? The dull clang of his inner alarm awakened a captive swarm of inner bees. It would be nice to hear Will laugh again instead. Maybe he could come up with a joke.

"Hey," he whispered.

Elle had dark smudges under her eyes. She looked down at him from her chair and waited.

"Can you make a new hole, like in a wall or something?"

"No."

"But you have another one. Of the worms."

She nodded.

"And you said Will's here."

She nodded.

"Please, Elle."

"No."

"Please."

"No."

Jonathan let her see him cry this time. He was too angry and tired to hide it. He wanted her to see it, he needed her to get  this. He trapped her in the jaws of his blurry stare, he pierced her with it, and he wasn't going to let her go until she got it.

Finally, her crumpling expression proved that Jonathan was contagious. "Vulnerable people," she explained, and hiccoughed. "I'm the monster. I made you the monster too."

It was a lot worse than watching a baby cry. He wished he hadn't done it.

...was all alone, tumbled a moan from the walls.

"What was that?"

Elle ignored him, her eyes shut, her troubled face shiny and stiff. She was listening.

...all alone...

It almost sounded like Mom.

This is not yours to fix alone!  One day she was apologizing for needing Jonathan to do life alone―to cook, clean, do the repairs, get the groceries; to answer Will's hard questions, homework and worse―and the next she was yelling at him for doing life alone. You act like you're all alone out there in the world but you're not. Sometimes she yelled at her own reflection in his eyes without realizing it. That was when he was the most alone.

It wasn't Mom, though.

Every soft feature of Elle's face gestured to the centre of her forehead. "Will's hiding," she said, drifting blindly to her feet. A little fairy bell rang. The rotary phone from the bedside table appeared in the shelf of her hands. "Find him."