Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Bat Out of Hell

"Bat Out of Hell"

There's evil in the air and there's thunder in the sky

- Meat Loaf

Joyce couldn't get what Bob had told her about the tape out of her head. All through the rest of her shift at work she seethed over those Zimmerman boys, always picking on her son. Maybe if she had proof, if she could tell on the video who they were, she could—talk to their mother, go to the principal, maybe even go to Hopper. Anything to take one more burden off her son's already fragile shoulders.

As soon as she got home she found the video camera in Will's room and looked it over, figuring out how to pop the tape out of it. Only, she couldn't seem to get it to play in the VCR. The space for the tape was the wrong size. When did everything get so complicated? It used to be, you sat down, you turned on the TV, you were set. Now there were all these different machines that you couldn't use properly unless you had the right thingamabob to go in the doohickey.

Dragging the phone over to the TV, she sat down with the video camera on her lap and dialed the familiar number.

"Radio Shack. Bob Newby speaking. How can I help you?"

"Bob, it's Joyce."

"Hey, Joyce, how you doin'?"

"Hey, um, I'm trying to watch your video thingie, and the tape, it's just, it's ... tiny. It's like it just shrunk."

He chuckled in her ear. From another man, that laugh when she was honestly confused and edging toward frustrated would have made her mad. From Bob, it made her feel like he was happy to help, glad she had asked. "That's because it's a VHS-C, not a VHS. You gotta find the RFP1U with coaxial cable so you can connect the video ins and outs."

Did he really think she could follow all those technical terms? "Bob. English."

"Right. Sorry. Um ... Okay, the cables will be in the box the JVC came in. Can you find those?"

She hunted, eventually finding cables, and Bob walked her through connecting them to the TV, a harder task than it sounded, while she squinted at the various holes in the back of the TV and tried to figure out which ones were input and which ones were output.

"Yeah, I did the coaxial things in the back. So ... this one just goes into the camera itself?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Exactly," Bob said encouragingly.

She pushed the cable in, hoping it was the right place, and the TV screen reassuringly turned blue. In a hurry to watch the tape before Will got home—or Jonathan, who was supposed to have been with Will last night, an issue she didn't think she wanted to deal with just yet—she babbled something into the phone and hung it up. Probably she should call Bob back later and apologize, she thought, pressing play on the camera. She would do that, she promised herself as the tape started playing.

The opening bit was Bob explaining how to use the camera. Joyce fast-forwarded through that section and into the trick-or-treating part. There were the people at the doors when the kids knocked, and there was Mike. She wished he looked like he was having more fun, poor kid. He'd been as traumatized by last year's events as Will had, in his own way, and no one was monitoring him. He hadn't had any help at all. If only she could have told Karen the truth—but Karen wasn't ready for the truth, probably wouldn't believe her anyway, and Hawkins Lab wouldn't have let her say anything even if she'd thought it would do any good.

Then she got to the part with the big kids coming after Will, narrowing her eyes as she tried to recognize faces through the masks.

It was painful to watch, as the bigger kids got up in his face and called him Zombie-boy and freak ... but Will was used to that. If his friends had been with him—where were his friends when this was happening? The worst of it was, the kids hadn't done anything she could use against them other than the name-calling. Will's own fear had knocked him down, from what she could see, and that wasn't their fault. Hawkins Lab and the Upside Down had made Will afraid, not the bullies at his school, and there was no one at Hawkins Lab she could yell at to make that go away, much as she wanted to.

The next part was odd, though, Joyce thought, frowning at the screen. Will had dropped the camera, it seemed, and he was standing in front of it, hollering for Mike over and over again. But there was some kind of static on the screen, something—a shadow, maybe, superimposed over the picture?

Joyce paused the tape, and it froze on the image of the shadow looming over Will. It was big, and black, and it looked like it had legs ... She had seen this before, she realized, with a sudden sickening drop of the stomach. Running to the kitchen, she grabbed the roll of paper she kept there, and a crayon. She knelt in front of the TV, holding the paper up to the screen, and she drew the shadow as it appeared on the video.

There was no doubt about it. She carried the paper into the kitchen and placed it on the table next to Will's drawing.

They were the same. No matter what Hopper said, or the people at Hawkins Lab, the shadow wasn't in Will's mind, it wasn't trauma. It was real, and whatever it was, it was coming after her son.