Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[28] (Mike)

Mike couldn't get back into Nicole's bedroom window. He should have been able to, but every time he ran enough momentum up the wall and pulled, his weight turned his arms to jelly. It was as if he still had Barbara's glasses in his hand. He must have tried twenty times by now.

"Will," he said to the window. "Will, I'm back. Are you still here? I can't climb in."

Will's dark head and bright eyes appeared in the corner. "I've seen you climb way higher things."

"I'm having a bad memory from the pool and the body. From the upside down. It's stopping me."

"So put it over there."

"Huh? Put it where?"

"You know, over there. You know where." Will looked down at him curiously. "Haven't you done it before?"

"No."

"Oh. Okay, well, it doesn't really matter where you put the memory, just put it there so it's not here."

"Well I need to think of somewhere." Somewhere like a trash can, or the big dumpster behind the school, or the sewer. Mike wanted to flush it all down the toilet.

"How about the fort in your basement? Put it in there."

"But I like it there." Mike didn't want Elle sleeping next to Barb's dead body, not even in his imagination.

"Then you should definitely put it there. I put mine in Jonathan's room. The worst parts dissolve after a while."

"Really?"

"Trust me, I know what I'm doing." Will put his hand out. "Need a boost?"

"That's okay, I can do the rest myself."

Will got out of the way.

Mike closed his eyes and pulled the pool to the front of his head. He picked out the leech, the smell, the sponge, the vanilla pudding, the rolling eyeball, the glasses and the dry ice, and held a deep breath on them. He backed away a few paces, balled them all up between his hands as if he was crumpling a piece of wastepaper, ran toward the window, threw the ball of paper into the fort, and in a puff of surprise, Elle caught it and pulled the bedsheet down over the door with a soft Burrrrp.

Mike tipped over the sill and into the room with plenty of momentum to spare, so he just kept moving. He closed the bedroom door on the yelling, he took Will's blanket off the bed and stuffed it along the crack under the door, he closed the window and dropped the bamboo blind, then he took the shade off the lamp. The lamp was dark but still hot, so he used his sweater sleeve as an oven mitt to unscrew the bulb and switched it out with the safelight from the nightstand drawer. He turned it on, put it on the floor and turned off the overhead light. The room turned red, except for a crack of white light coming in from the top of the door. Not quite good enough.

"What are you doing?"

"Making a dark room." Mike took off Nancy's backpack and put it by the lamp on the floor.

"You got the camera?"

"Yeah." Mike loaded the typewriter with a new piece of paper from the stack beside it and put it on the floor with everything else. "You said there's room under there?"

"Lots."

A few strands of Mike's hair got caught when he climbed under the bed but he let them rip out and just kept going until he was on his belly next to Will with his tools within reach. He pulled the red light under the bed near their faces, turning Will into a squinting devil. When he took the camera from the bag he discovered there was no latch on the back where he imagined one would be. "Do you know how to open it?"

Will reached over, pushed a button on the bottom, turned a crank on the top left around and around until Mike felt a click, and then pulled the crank's lever up. The back popped open and there was the film, all rolled up and waiting for Mike to do something he had always been told he should never, ever do: he tugged the tab sticking out of the canister and began to unwind the roll.

Will shuffled close and leaned on Mike's shoulder so he could see. "Christmas," he said. "Please don't wreck these."

"I'm not going to wreck them." Mike had forgotten negatives were in the negative. It was hard to tell what he was looking at. There was a bright red Christmas tree on a black background, a freakishly dark-faced Will with red hair holding big present, a light table with dark dishes, Will's mom with red hair and black teeth, some kind of black slop falling off a spoon. Mike rushed through Christmas morning and a closeup of a red sphere with black reflections all over it, and came upon a sideways picture of Jonathan laying spaced out on a pillow. Someone else had been behind the camera for this one.

"What are you looking for, anyway?"

The message in Mike's pocket reminded him, secret. "Clues," he said. Proof.

The next one looked alarmingly normal―it was as red as the others, but it wasn't in the negative. Elle stood in the middle of the Byers' front porch with a hat on her head and a gas mask in her hand. Mike brought the tiny image of her face as close to his eye as his focus would let him. She looked a little upset, but she was okay. She was definitely okay. Not only was she alive, she was okay. He kicked his feet around to keep his Christmas joy off his face.

Following an image of a black cloudy moon in a red sky, there she was again, and again, and again, walking down an overgrown road in a series of blurry shots that looked like they had been taken blind. The rest of the film was blank, unused. It was over but Mike's feet kept on bouncing, toes to floor and heels to bed, whunk whunk whunk.

"Is that Eleven? She's in here with Jonathan?"

"Yeah." Now that the news was out Mike could finally smile, and once he started he couldn't stop. "Don't tell anyone about her, okay? It has to stay a secret."

Nodding groovily, Will eased the camera and the ribbon of film from Mike's hands and began rewinding. "I know how to talk to them. We can ask her to use her superpowers to get Nancy's gun back from those jerks so everyone can leave."

"Uh huh." Mike grabbed the typewriter, and a loud noise exploded in the living room.