Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[24] (Jonathan)

Jonathan wasn't describing what a gas can looked like, or explaining to Elle what the word 'siphon' meant.

He wasn't asking her to douse the body as soon as he was dead, or to draw a line from this corner to the kitchen, pouring carefully to preserve fuel. He wasn't telling her to knot a rope from strips of dishtowel and soak it in gasoline to use as a wick connecting the stove's coil burners to the puddle on the floor. He wasn't making her promise to wait until everyone had left the normal version of the bedroom before she turned on the burner, just in case some of the fire came through, and he wasn't telling her to leave the house right after she hit the knob.

It was familiar, what he wasn't doing. It was like that time he wasn't arranging Will's funeral by himself, but less real. So maybe this wasn't really real either. Maybe he would wake up in a hospital in a minute like Will had, and not kill any of the nurses like Will hadn't.

Elle sat with an elbow on the desk, propping her head up with her fist squashing her cheek. Jonathan hadn't noticed until now that her nose had a drop of blood under it. He had hidden behind closed eyes while giving his cremation instructions so he wouldn't have to see them written on her face.

"Was it hard to make the phone work?"

Elle nodded. She carried permanent tension in the corners of her mouth. "Hard to punch through." She wiped her nose on her hand, then wiped her hand on the dark leg of her pants.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes." She dug around in a coat pocket. "But I'm tired. They're quiet again." She gave Jonathan the water bottle and returned to her digging. Instead of drinking, he put the bottle down, wrapped the scratchy blanket around his fists and pulled it up to his chin.

What was it like to be burned alive?

Was it worse to burn alive from the inside by acid or from the outside by fire?

As he fixated on this, Jonathan's noisy vibration swelled the way it had done in the woods, threatening to break open the way it had done in the road. "Thank you for making the phone work," he said, and the inhuman semitone in his voice kept him going: "I can't do this."

Elle ate a little piece of yellow bread and waited for him to continue.

"Can you do it?"

She didn't understand.

"Will's friends said you can do it."

She still didn't understand.

Jonathan retreated behind his eyelids again because he was a coward. "You can kill people."

A phantom Nancy slapped him across the face, shocking his eyes back open with the flick of a notebook page. There had been lavender in her pillows.

"No," Elle said.

"You can't do it, or you won't?"

"Both."