Chapter 34: Terrifying Darkness
The lighting in the inner corridors of Hawkins National Laboratory was the color of bad news — harsh, institutional white that drained every surface of warmth and made the polished tile floors look like something out of a horror movie set in a hospital. The air carried that particular combination of antiseptic cleaner, ozone, and something metallic that Andy associated with medical instruments and bad outcomes.
He knew this smell. Knew it deep in his gut, in a way that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with his body.
The silence was broken by the sound of running footsteps and the hard clatter of gurney wheels.
A cluster of people in white coats pushed an emergency gurney forward at a near-jog, their faces tight. The wheels hit every seam in the floor with a little rhythmic clack-clack-clack that echoed off the walls.
Will lay curled on the gurney like he was trying to make himself smaller, his face almost as white as the walls. Cold sweat had matted his hair to his forehead, and even under a thin blanket his body kept twitching — small, helpless spasms that he clearly couldn't control. He made sounds that weren't quite words, pained and intermittent, like he was still fighting something nobody else could see.
His lips were cracked and dry. His eyes, when they opened at all, were fixed on nothing.
Joyce walked alongside the gurney with one hand locked on its railing, knuckles white. Her other hand kept moving to Will's forehead, brushing back his hair, the way she'd probably done a thousand times when he was little and had a fever.
"It's okay, baby. Mom's right here. Just hang on a little longer, okay? They're going to help you. You're going to be okay."
She said it like if she said it enough times it would become true. Her voice didn't break, but the tears were coming anyway, cutting through the exhaustion on her face.
Hopper didn't make it past the main entrance.
The moment their group crossed the threshold into the Lab proper, two personnel in hazmat suits peeled off from somewhere and intercepted him, steering him firmly toward a decontamination corridor. Full safety scrub — no argument, no negotiation, standard protocol. He went, because he knew better than to fight it here.
But before they pulled him around the corner, he looked back.
He took in Will on the gurney, surrounded by medical staff and Joyce. He took in Bob, bewildered but steady, keeping pace. And he took in the two kids — Mike, and Andy tucked close behind him, that oversized cowboy hat pulled low over his face, making himself as small as possible.
Hopper's eyes stayed on Andy for half a second longer than everything else.
It was a complicated look. The kind that had too many things in it to name quickly — concern, calculation, something that might have been guilt. Then it compressed down into a single expression that Andy recognized as frustrated helplessness, and Hopper pressed his lips together and let himself be led away into a corridor strobing with warning lights.
Andy watched him go.
Then he lowered his eyes back to the floor and kept walking.
He had no good options and no way out. All he could do was follow Mike, swept along with Joyce and Bob into the heart of the building.
With every step on the polished floor, something in his chest got a little heavier.
The corridor was lined with heavy numbered metal doors. Observation windows cut into the walls at regular intervals — through them, figures in white coats moved in silence, heads down, focused on things Andy didn't want to think about. The ventilation ducts above ran a constant low hum. Security cameras tracked their progress from every corner, small red lights blinking steadily.
Every detail of this place lived somewhere beneath Andy's skin. The light. The smell. The sound of the ventilation. The way the cameras moved.
His breathing went shallow without him deciding to let it. Under the brim of the hat, his face had gone the same color as Will's, though he was working hard not to let his hands shake where anyone could see.
Mike noticed anyway.
He glanced sideways and saw Andy trying to disappear inside that cowboy hat, lips pressed into a thin pale line, eyes fixed on the floor like he was mapping exit routes.
Mike remembered — not perfectly, but enough. The things Andy had told them in the Wheeler basement after he first got out. The fragments. The way he'd gone quiet in the middle of sentences, like certain words had edges he didn't want to touch.
Without thinking about it too hard, Mike reached over and grabbed Andy's hand.
Andy's whole body went rigid. He pulled back instinctively.
Mike held on.
"Hey," he said, low enough that only Andy could hear it. His voice was steadier than it had any right to be for a thirteen-year-old in a government lab. "I'm staying right here. We all are. You're not doing this alone."
He pressed his thumb against Andy's knuckles — just a small movement, barely anything at all.
Andy looked up. The hat brim lifted enough that their eyes met.
Mike's expression was straightforward: worried, sure, but not pitying. Just there. Fully, stubbornly there.
Andy's throat went tight. He didn't have anything to say to that. He just squeezed Mike's hand back once, firm, and nodded.
It helped. More than it probably should have. He took a breath and kept moving, his eyes scanning the corridor as they walked.
The group was brought to an observation room in the medical wing. Through the window, they could see Will being transferred to a proper hospital bed, medical staff moving around him with practiced efficiency — oxygen mask, EKG patches, IV line. The monitor above the bed showed a heart rate that looked like a seismograph before an earthquake.
Will made a sound from behind the glass that hit Andy somewhere below the sternum.
Andy leaned his back against the cold wall outside the observation room, arms crossed, eyes fixed on Will. He could feel it — not just the visual of Will in pain, but something deeper, a kind of psychic resonance. The underground vine network had been torched by the Lab's flamethrowers, but whatever connection it had built with Will hadn't died with it. Andy could still feel the echo of it, like a phone line that was technically cut but still carrying a faint signal.
Mike leaned close to his ear, his voice barely above a breath. "You know what's happening to him, don't you."
It wasn't really a question.
Andy gave a single small nod, not looking away from Will.
"Then—" Mike's breath hitched. Andy could hear the hope and the fear fighting it out in that single syllable. "Can you do something? Like you did last year?"
Could he?
Maybe. Possibly.
But he caught the security camera in the corner of the ceiling, red light blinking its patient rhythm. He clocked the two Lab staffers standing at the far end of the corridor, positioned casually in a way that didn't fool anybody. He thought about Hopper's hand on his wrist back at the pumpkin field. The look on his face. The absolute, non-negotiable shake of his head.
Not safe.
This was the Lab. The actual Lab. Any unusual mental activity, any spike in instrumentation they didn't expect — they'd be watching for exactly that kind of thing.
Andy opened his mouth. He was about to say no. He had the word ready.
Then Will let out a sound from the other side of the glass — sharper this time, the sound of someone being hurt — and his body arched up off the bed hard enough that one of the medical staff had to grab his shoulders. Joyce's hands flew to her mouth. A small, involuntary sound escaped her that she immediately pressed down, but Andy heard it anyway.
Mike's grip on his hand got tighter.
Andy closed his eyes for one second.
Then he nodded.
But he turned toward Mike immediately and kept his voice flat and serious: "It's not safe in there."
Mike's face lit up for exactly one second before he put it away and started thinking. Andy could almost watch him do it — the quick scan of the corridor, the mental inventory of cameras and doors and sight lines. Then something shifted in his expression.
He let go of Andy's hand and walked to the observation room door, pulling on a pretty convincing version of a scared, overwhelmed kid.
"Mrs. Byers." He didn't go in — he spoke to Joyce through the doorway, keeping his voice slightly unsteady. "I think I left something in the car. Something important."
Joyce turned. The confusion on her face was understandable — they were in the middle of a medical crisis and a thirteen-year-old was asking about his backpack.
"Mike, now? What do you—"
Mike tilted his head toward Andy. Just slightly. His eyes did the rest of the work.
Joyce went still.
A mother's instinct, running faster than conscious thought. Her gaze moved to Andy, and Andy watched her connect the dots in real time — his expression, Mike's positioning, what she already knew about what Andy could do.
She made her decision in about three seconds.
She turned to Bob, who had the look of a man who'd wandered into the wrong movie and was still waiting for someone to explain the plot to him.
"Bob." She touched his arm. "Can you stay with Will? I'm going to take the boys outside for a minute — they're scared, and Will has some things in the car that might help him feel better when he wakes up."
Bob didn't understand. That much was clear. But he looked at Joyce's face, and whatever he saw there was enough.
"Of course," he said. "Go ahead. I'll be right here."
Joyce looked through the glass at Will one more time — something that barely lasted a second but felt much longer — and then turned and walked out into the corridor.
She put one arm around Mike's shoulder. Her other hand came up and pressed down on the brim of Andy's hat, easing it a little lower over his face. Practical and protective in the same motion.
"Let's go," she said quietly. "Fast."
They moved through the Lab corridors at a pace that was technically not running. Joyce tried to retrace their path, and mostly she got it right. A few people looked at them along the way — the tear tracks on Joyce's face, two kids pressed close to her sides. Nobody stopped them. A distraught mother taking her kids out of the medical wing for air was, at least on its surface, a completely normal thing.
The night air outside hit Andy like cold water. He stood there for a second and just breathed it.
Joyce pulled them quickly across the parking lot to her car — still sitting exactly where they'd left it, next to Hopper's cruiser. She got the doors open, ushered them into the back seat, and climbed into the front. The moment the door shut, the Lab's lights and cameras and staff were cut off by four walls of dirty metal and glass.
It wasn't much. But it was something.
Joyce twisted around in the driver's seat, her eyes finding Andy in the dim light.
"Okay," she said, low and urgent. "Tell me you can help him."
Andy took the hat off and set it on his knee.
He looked steadier than he felt. He met her eyes and nodded — clearly, without hesitation.
Then he pointed to the center console. "Turn on the radio."
Joyce didn't ask why. She turned the key to accessory, and the radio came on with a hiss of static — that particular kind of empty-channel white noise that had become, in the past year or so, something none of them could hear without their skin prickling.
Andy reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a strip of dark cloth. He shook it out and tied it over his eyes, shutting out everything visual.
Joyce and Mike didn't move. The only sounds were the static from the radio and the sound of three people trying not to breathe too loudly.
Andy rested his hands on his knees and let his shoulders drop.
He breathed in. Breathed out. And on the exhale, he let his mental focus extend outward — not scattered, not flooding the space the way it did in the bathtub, but precise. Directed. A single sustained thread of attention cutting through walls and floors and the interference of a dozen pieces of medical equipment.
He found Will.
Almost instantly.
And the second his awareness touched the edge of Will's consciousness, everything else dropped away.
The world went dark.
Then it came back, like a TV set being switched on — fuzzy at the edges, then sharp.
Andy was standing in a corridor.
Fluorescent lights above him buzzed and flickered. The walls were threaded with vines, dark and slow-moving, pushing through the drywall from the inside. The floor was the same polished Lab tile, but slicked with moisture and crawling with smaller tendrils. The ceiling tiles had buckled in places where something organic had forced its way through.
He recognized it. It was the Lab. Or a version of the Lab. Something built from Will's memory and whatever else was living inside it.
"Will!" He kept his voice low out of instinct. "Will, where are you?"
His footsteps echoed back at him from somewhere far down the corridor.
Then Will's scream cut through the dark, high and terrified and very close.
Andy was already running.
He hit a corner and skidded, and ahead of him — not far — a heavy metal door stood slightly open. Unnatural light leaked through the gap.
He hit the door with both hands and shoved it open.
What was on the other side made him stop.
The room was enormous. At its center was a rift in the earth — massive, jagged, dropping down into blackness with no visible bottom. The organic material lining its edges pulsed like a living thing. This was what he'd felt beneath the pumpkin field, but smaller, contained, translated into the geography of Will's inner landscape.
From the rift, vines spread across every surface. The walls were covered. The floor was barely visible under the network of dark red tendrils, thick as fire hoses at the core, tapering to whiplike tendrils at the ends, all of them constantly moving.
Will stood at the edge of the rift, his back to Andy. Perfectly still.
"Will!"
Andy crossed the room at a run and grabbed Will's arm.
"Come on. We gotta go. Right now. This place isn't—"
Will didn't move. Not an inch. Like his feet had been bolted to the floor.
Andy got in front of him and stopped.
Will's eyes were open. White. Completely white — the iris, the pupil, all of it gone, replaced by a flat, sightless blank. His mouth was slightly open and he was murmuring something in a low, rhythmic monotone, the same syllables repeating, like he was responding to something Andy couldn't hear.
"No, no, no—" Andy grabbed his shoulders. "Will. Look at me. Hey. It's Andy. Come back."
Something about the word Andy landed differently. Will's body jerked. Then the white drained back from his eyes like a tide going out, and his actual brown eyes came back into focus, blinking, confused and terrified and disoriented.
"Andy?" His voice came out wrecked. "You're — why are you here? This place, it—"
"No time. We're leaving."
Andy grabbed his hand and pulled.
Will's eyes filled with tears — not just fear, something underneath it. Like he already knew something Andy didn't. Like he'd seen the end of this.
"Andy, I don't think I can—"
Then Will's face changed.
Fast. Like a switch being thrown.
The despair went out and something else came in — violent, wrong, not Will — and his eyes started going white again as he screamed: "Andy — RUN—"
Every vine in the room launched at once.
They came from the floor, the walls, the ceiling, converging from every direction like everything had been waiting for exactly this signal. Fast. Impossibly fast, for something biological.
Andy's telekinesis hit them before they got close — a hard, expanding burst that cut the lead vines clean through. Dark fluid sprayed across the walls. The severed ends flopped and twitched on the floor.
Then Will collapsed.
He hit the ground with both hands over his head, curled up tight, screaming in a way that was pure pain with no fear mixed in — the kind of sound you make when something is happening to your body that you didn't consent to.
Andy understood it in an instant. In here, in this space, the vines were connected to Will at a fundamental level. Cutting them was cutting him.
He stopped.
The moment he stopped, the vines surged back.
Thick ones wrapped around Will's wrists and ankles, dragging toward the rift. A net of smaller ones dropped from the ceiling toward Andy, reaching for his arms.
Andy threw up a containment field — both hands out, telekinesis pressed into a dome around them — and held it. The vines hammered against it steadily, an ongoing pressure, and Andy could feel the strain of maintaining it running up through his arms like holding a door shut in a hurricane.
"Will! Come on! Look at me!"
Will's consciousness was flickering. His own eyes — scared, exhausted, Will — kept getting replaced by that blank, foreign white. The intervals were getting shorter. The vines pulling at him were syncing with something, like they could tell which version of Will was in control and were waiting for the other one.
The gap of Will was getting smaller.
Andy made the decision.
He had half a second of Will's actual eyes, looking up at him through tears and terror and pain that was almost used up—
"I'm sorry," Andy said.
He dropped the shield.
And he hit.
Everything he had left, compressed into a single sustained focused pulse — not scattered, not blade-like, but a deep, sustained push against the core of the vine network, the densest cluster, the place where the rift connected to Will. Not slicing. Burning it out at the root.
The mental space went white.
There was a sound that wasn't quite a sound — the kind of thing that lands in your teeth rather than your ears. The vines at the center burst apart in a spray of black smoke that had its own horrible quality, its own sense of violation, like something that had been occupying a space and was being evicted badly.
Will's body launched backward across the room and hit the ground hard and lay still.
The light in the rift dimmed. The vines went gray and dry, crumbling away from Will's limbs, dissolving into ash before they could settle.
The room went quiet.
Andy stood there and breathed for a few seconds. The expenditure of it sat across his shoulders like a physical weight.
Then he crossed the room and crouched next to Will.
Will's eyes were closed. His face had smoothed out — no pain, no tension. His breathing was slow and steady, the kind that came with deep, genuine sleep rather than unconsciousness. Whatever had been in him, the visible part of it was gone.
Andy put his hand on Will's and got ready to pull back from the connection.
The space around him began to dissolve, that familiar blur and fade of the psychic state releasing—
And then he felt it.
A pulse.
Not Will's. Not his.
Something else, deeper. Below the Lab. Below the tunnels. Below everything. Like whatever Will carried in him was a single terminal on a network, and the network had a center, and the center was alive, and it was aware that Andy was here.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Slow and deliberate. The heartbeat of something massive. Something that had been here longer than any of them.
It adjusted its rhythm as Andy held still.
And then — Will's heartbeat from the monitor feed Andy was still faintly connected to — they began to line up.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
The two pulses moving toward each other. Will's heart and whatever was down there in the dark, syncing like a tuning fork finding its frequency.
The moment they locked together—
The roar hit Andy like the building falling on him.
No warning. No build. Just a wall of sound and hunger and intent that had nothing human in it, coming straight up through the vine network and the earth and the psychic connection and slamming into the center of his skull.
It wasn't the black particles. It wasn't the scattered pressure he'd felt before. This was something that chose to roar. Something that knew he was there. Something that wanted him to know it knew.
Andy's whole body spasmed.
The connection shattered.
He ripped the blindfold off.
His back hit the car seat hard. He was gasping, both hands gripping the upholstery, vision doing something strange at the edges, his whole system trying to reboot from a complete cold stop.
The radio was screaming — not static, but sharp electrical feedback, the kind that made your molars ache. The interior lights were strobing.
Then, all at once, everything cut out. Radio, lights, all of it. The power indicator on the radio glowed a faint steady red. The cab settled into dim quiet.
"Andy!" Mike had his hand on Andy's shoulder, steadying him. "Hey. Hey, are you—? What was that noise? What happened with the lights?"
Joyce had both hands on the back of the driver's seat, leaning over it, her face doing several things at once.
"Will." Her voice was barely holding together. "Andy. How is he? Did it work?"
Andy sat there for a few seconds, putting his breathing back in order. His hands had stopped shaking. His vision had stopped being weird. But the cold that had come up through that connection — the specific cold of that heartbeat locking onto Will's — was still sitting at the base of his skull.
He looked at Joyce. He looked at Mike.
He nodded slowly. Yes. It had worked. For now.
Then, with the weight of what he'd felt still pressing down on him, he shook his head.
Not yet done. Not even close.
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