your cosmic call sign

by heartofwinterfell

Summary:

Steve looks up at the sky and sees stars. Eddie looks up at the sky and sees alien spaceships. It’s going to start with a graveyard shift, a midnight radio hour, and Dustin Henderson. It’s going to end on New Year’s Eve, 1985—one way or another.

Notes:

a love letter to, in no particular order: The Vast of Night (2019) & Super 8 (2011), the profession of babysitting and the cinema it inspires, college radio, the cosmic discography of David Bowie, Long Island, and Suzie, who does copy.

happy new year!

Chapter 1: september // where is everybody?

 

 

 

Star facts! That’s right, ladies and unearthly beings, ground control is coming at you again with another star fact. So, as we all know, the best and brightest star in our night sky is Sirius. The dog star, as some like to call it, part of the Great Dog constellation. But did you know that those magnificent Greeks weren’t the only ones who named our brightest star after a lovable canine? The Chinese called it the celestial wolf and tons of tribes around here, in America, associated it with dogs and wolves and some badass coyotes.

Isn’t it crazy that a bunch of civilizations, completely separate from each other, looked up at the sky, saw the brightest thing there, and said, “Yeah, that’s a dog. It’ll help you find the way home.”

Someone should write a song about that.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — AUGUST 30, ‘85

 

 

He got his first job the old-fashioned way: a help wanted sign in the window and a three minute interview with a guy who smelled like sour cream and onion. His second job on the other hand—well, it involved his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s brother, a minor nervous breakdown, and a dead cat.

It was the nicest cat funeral Steve Harrington ever attended. Dustin Henderson, human brother of the recently deceased, read a passage from a book about something called a hobbit and played “Always Something There to Remind Me” as they shoveled dirt over a blacked-out Old Navy shoe box. At the reception, held in the Henderson's living room, Steve implied his parents didn’t believe in family dinners within earshot of Claudia Henderson and she refused to let him turn down an invitation to stay for theirs.

Then, he just never really left.

 

 

 

ALIENS IN MONTAUK?
New sightings at Montauk Point Lighthouse may point to signs of extraterrestrial life.
by Robin Buckley

 

 

 

“I can’t believe Nancy Wheeler let you publish this.”

The way Dustin talks about Nancy, you’d think she’s Phoebe Cates. Childhood crushes die hard, sure, but maybe Steve expected him to have switched sides by now. 

Or maybe there aren’t any sides and he needs to accept that almost a year has gone by since Nancy called bullshit on their love while drunk in a beach house bathroom, and he should have buried the hatchet alongside Dustin’s dead cat.

He blames the Family Video night shift. It makes him cranky, and gets him thinking too hard about his life choices, and that makes him crankier. What video store needs to stay open past nine anyway? Keith claims the 1 A.M. close on weekends is company-wide policy, but Steve believes Keith is full of crap and running a long con on him.

(“So, he’s taking money out of his own pockets giving you and me a paycheck, just to get back at you for shit you might have pulled in high school?” Robin asked once, on a spectacularly cranky night. “And you say Dustin’s ego is huge.”)

What Robin can’t argue with is how pointless the graveyard shifts are. The only person looking to rent videotapes at midnight is—drum roll on the counter—absolutely no one. Over the summer, they had a few nightly visitations courtesy of some roaring drunks stumbling out of their cars, on their way back from a bar by the water and clambering inside out of a desperate need to piss. After three separate occasions where he had a fist swung at him upon telling a drunk to rent something or no dice, Steve took to passing off the bathroom key without fanfare.

Those were the most exciting nights of Steve’s summer, punches or no punches.

Now rolling into the fall, they consider themselves lucky if a kid high off his ass wanders in on foot and spends thirty minutes gawking at the “Fun for the Whole Family” display. Robin goaded one into renting The Dark Crystal and forced him to stay in the store to watch it. Around the half-hour mark, the kid pointed a wavering finger at the television screen, brimming with Jim Henson puppets, and whispered, “Wait, those aren’t people,” before bursting into tears.

Again, these are the highlights of Steve’s 1985 thus far.

“...and middle school science teacher Scott Clarke has reported several strange electrical occurrences at the school and his own residence, including a number of radios picking up strange broadcasting signals in a foreign language none of the linguistics professors at Stony Brook University could identify,” Dustin rattles off from Robin’s article. Steve all but sees the excited vibrations squiggling off him like he’s a character in a Sunday morning cartoon. “Man, I can’t wait to show this to Eddie and see what he thinks.”

A squeak—marker meeting dry erase board—accompanies the thump of Steve’s forehead hitting the counter. How fantastic would it be to go a whole week without hearing the name Eddie Munson. But since that’s about as realistic as an actual alien abduction in Montauk, a day would be pretty damn nice.

“Last chance to drive us to the Dragon’s Lair tomorrow,” Dustin says, waggling his eyebrows. Steve gags in response—he’d rather drive into the Long Island Sound. “C’mon, I swear whatever happened in high school, Eddie forgives you.”

“Dude, I don’t even remember him from high school,” Steve protests, because yeah, he’s turned over a new leaf and he likes that leaf fine, but he isn’t about to grovel to every guy he didn’t wave at coming out of math class. Especially if the most he can drum up about this Eddie is a fuzzy snapshot of wavy brown hair and a toothy, baiting smile.

“I’m just looking out for you here, Steve.” Dustin holds up his hands, The Goonies in the right and A Nightmare on Elm Street in the left. “You need more friends your own age.”

Robin doubles over the reshelf cart cackling and Steve snatches the Nightmare tape from Dustin's grubby hand, because Ma Henderson forgives him many a sin but giving her Dusty R-rated bad dreams will not be one of them. “Alright, would you look at that,” Steve says, hiking up his sleeve to check the irrelevant time. “Your mom’s getting off in thirty, so you better get biking to Benny’s.”

“It takes two minutes to bike to Benny’s from here—”

“Out.”

On the curb, Dustin flips up his kickstand and flips Steve off in one fluid motion. Steve rolls his eyes, but watches him bike down the sleepy road until the little asshole is nothing but a speck under the shallows of the streetlamps.

“You’re so jealous, it’s making you look extra stupid,” Robin declares on his way back to the counter. “And that’s saying something, dingus.”

“What would I possibly have to be jealous about?” Steve asks, lobbing her the copy of A Nightmare on Elm Street he forced Dustin to leave behind.

She pops the tape in the VCR, but answers his question with another, “That’s the thing: why are you jealous? You’re paid to hang out with Dustin five days a week, sometimes weekends. Eddie Munson sees him maybe twice a month if the rugrats can get Jonathan Byers to drive them to East Hampton.”

“I’m not paid to be Dustin’s friend,” Steve insists, and it always stings more than he anticipates when people imply it.

Look, he calls it a job, but only to his parents’ faces. Late last fall, Mrs. Henderson started giving him gas money for shepherding Dustin (and Mike most days—not that Ted Wheeler ever coughed up a chunk of change) to and from the middle school and for rides across Long Island on stray weekends in the winter that became most weekends by spring and every weekend this past summer. Now, the boys ride the bus to the high school in East Hampton, but Steve remains the de facto chauffeur for almost all of their geeky extracurriculars.

He tucks the money away in a box he has labeled, for shits and giggles, “College Fund” and breaks into it once in a blue moon to buy a few joints off Reefer Rick. The point being, liking Dustin has nothing to do with the money.

“No, sorry, I know, but also not what I was getting at,” Robin says. “You and Dustin have hung out, like, every day for almost a year. Just because this Eddie guy beats you on the dork-a-meter doesn’t mean he’s replacing you.”

“Hey,” Steve says, snapping his fingers in her face. “I don’t clock at all on the dork-a-whatever.”

“Sure you don’t.”

They let A Nightmare on Elm Street play while they rearrange the counter displays to suggest title-based innuendos that will soar over Keith's head. They chat aimlessly, circling around their weekend plans. A football game courtesy of mandatory marching band service for Robin and a date for Steve, maybe. Alexandra is the first girl to want a second date in the last two months, but now that he has it on the books, Steve is considering bailing. Shitty thing to do, but so is dating in your hometown as a washed-out post-grad. Just this month he has run into Nancy twice while they were both on dates.

Pathetic, Steve thinks, catching the distorted and darkened reflection of himself in the computer monitor. The clock beside it ticks close to midnight and a tiny thrill shoots up Steve’s spine. Yeah, definitely pathetic if he’s looking forward to a crummy midnight radio show more than a date where he has an outside chance of getting laid.

“Hey, Freddy hasn’t killed Nancy yet,” Robin complains when Steve shuts off the movie in favor of tuning the old transistor once entombed in Family Video's fire hazard of a storeroom.

“Spoiler alert: she survives.”

“Who says the ending hasn’t changed,” she posits. Even still, Robin collapses on the floor behind the counter, limbs splaying like a Raggedy Ann missing a good deal of stuffing. She's pretty much his best friend in the whole world—every floppy, clumsy, sharp-witted, terribly sarcastic bit of her—and the only person he'll let see how eager he is to listen to an hour's worth of music he typically can't stand.

The radio spurts to life, spitting out the grand finale of an Eagles song about taking it easy through its cheap speaker. The guy who jockeys before midnight has a hard-on for 70s rock bands with country twang. It's a toss-up on who hates it more: Robin or the host on deck.

The song fades into oblivion as Steve flops down opposite Robin, crossing his legs at the ankles and hooking his arms around his shins. He always has the weird urge to close his eyes at the beginning of the show, like the mystical music of the Dark Star opening might have the power to transport him a hundred million miles from planet Earth.

“Greetings cosmonauts, and anyone traveling in the dark tonight. This is Ground Control speaking and you’re listening to the one and only Dark Star broadcast.”

“Closing says he plays Bowie first.” Robin rips off a long piece of Twizzler and eyes Steve expectantly.

“Nah, he’s been really leaning into the heavy metal lately.” Steve grimaces—heavy metal only, more like it.

Robin snorts. “Almost like someone complained.”

“If someone did, you’d think he’d take audience feedback to heart.”

“I don’t think not taking it to heart is what’s happening here,” Robin says, but when Steve opens his mouth to ask what the hell she’s talking about, she shushes him and cranks up the volume.

“—and tonight, boys, girls, and aliens off the coast of Long Island, I thought I’d take pity on one of our dear regulars and start us off with something more his speed. Your majesty, we are so humbled to have you listening. Please enjoy this small token of Ground Control’s appreciation—”

The opening bars of “Oh! You Pretty Things” sing alongside Robin’s whoop of victory and Steve’s groan.

“While I’m tempted to put another tally in ‘You Suck’…” Robin stands, her knees popping, and drums her chipped red nails on the board without picking up the marker. “See you Sunday, dingus.”

“You’re really gonna leave me here?” Steve calls at her back as she disappears into the office to secure her stuff.

She returns slinging on her black denim jacket, backpack hanging off the hook of her elbow, and rolls her eyes at his best pout. “C’mon, Captain Steve. You’ve got Ground Control to keep you company.”

“What if we get robbed?” he asks over the bell chime.

“Tell them they’re idiots!”

The door sinks closed behind her, and Steve again watches someone pull a bike from the rack, the last one standing, and cycle away down the sleepy street. He should have known what she was planning when she didn’t insist on shoving the bike into the trunk of his car at the beginning of their shift.

Steve slides back to the floor and finally closes his eyes. He won’t fall asleep, not with the radio on, but he can pretend he really is a hundred million miles from planet Earth. Captain Steve—it has a certain ring to it. He explores uncharted space and has a blaster gun that makes the pew-pew sounds Henderson spouts off, and the voice of Ground Control can guide him to a distant sun if ever he were to lose his way in the dark.

“Alright, now that we got that out of the way—” The voice sounds playfully frustrated. Steve pictures the guy smiling unabashed because he has no one in the booth with him to prove that he is.

In the midst of Steve trying to conjure up a face, another sound overlaps the host’s excitable chatter. More like it's the lack of sound. The faint electrical buzz of the overhead lights cuts out. Steve blinks into darkness; everything save for the battery powered radio is down for the count.

Five seconds pass in the silent void, then the lights flicker. The computer hums back to life. A flood of neon green numbers begin running down the screen in long lines of indecipherable code.

“Shit.”

If Keith can find a way to put Steve on the hook for a shot computer, he will. Steve scrambles to stand and slams his finger on the only button he knows—shut down. The lights are flashing batshit crazy above him, bringing the room in and out of shadow. The computer continues spitting out sinister strings of nonsensical numbers. Everything defies him. In the background, jangly laughter rings from the radio, and Steve can’t be sure something hasn’t switched the station.

Shit—Nancy, the car—

His chest tightens.

This is crazy—this is crazy!

The lights cut out again, plunging the room again into full dark. The computer freezes, the last line of numbers just a succession of ones. Slowly the screen dims, joining the darkness.

There's the screech of an electric guitar, and Steve leaps half out of his skin. Hand clutching his chest, rubbing over his racing heart, he turns to shut off the radio at the exact moment the lights come back on. 

Steve waits, holding his breath. Thirty seconds pass, then a minute, two. The lights stay on. Glancing over his shoulder, he sees the monitor is still black. Shut down hadn’t failed him after all.

On the counter by the keyboard, the East Hampton High paper is where Dustin left it. Evidently, Robin’s conspiracy theories have wormed their way into his brain. That’s it, has to be. Instead of sinking back to the floor, Steve takes the store phone off the hook and dials a number he shouldn’t know offhand, no double-checking necessary.

“Ground Control here.”

“Play something that doesn’t make my ears bleed,” Steve spits out, cringing at how winded he sounds. And because his parents raised him—if not right, then with a couple manners, he adds, “Please.”

“Can do, your majesty.” Christ, he must be oozing desperation if the heavyweight champion of giving shit isn’t treating him to an ounce of it. “Can do.”

 

 

 

“Why the fu—[barely audible, off mic: FCC violation!]—ahem, why didn’t we in the US of A name our space people cosmonauts? Cosmonaut sounds so much cooler. It’s dignified. Cosmonauts traverse the galaxy. Astronauts play some game with a ball and a wooden stick down in Texas. Yeah, I know some sports, your majesty.”

DARK STAR BROADCAST — SEPTEMBER 13, ‘85

 

 

 

Steve wants it on the record: he was tricked into becoming a regular Dark Star listener. A cosmonaut, as the host—known only as Ground Control—has dubbed his loyalty club.

At the beginning of the summer, back when Robin carried her grudge against him like a sock full of rocks she had license to beat him with, Steve took to playing Fast Times at Ridgemont High anytime they had to work the night shift together. Mediocre payback to be sure, but at least he got to spend ninety minutes with Jennifer Jason Leigh and queen Phoebe Cates herself.

Shift four of Fast Times and furious stare downs, Robin dragged the transistor radio out of its forced retirement and wound through the stations searching for the worst music on offer. And as if called up from space hell, Dark Star answered.

For the back half of the first screaming metal anthem, Steve refused to pause the movie. Then, the second song began. Panic flashed like hazard lights on Robin’s face as she realized she had made a terrible mistake. By the third song, Steve stopped—not paused, fully stopped—the movie, so he and Robin could gape at the radio together, united in their horror someone let the shit play even past midnight.

“That was ‘Creeping Death’ by Metallica.”

The host’s voice had surprised Steve. He was expecting a tone somewhere in the nasal register or with the scratchy, smoky quality of a two-pack a day heavy; instead, the voice flowed through the speaker deep and smooth. Deep, smooth, and yet youthful in a way Steve hadn’t felt since the fall of his junior year. The guy sounded excited to be living another night on this earth, hosting his radio show and relishing the opportunity to play his deafening music. He had things he was proud of behind him and things to look forward to ahead, or if he didn't have anything like that, he had an otherworldly ability to fake it. It was a lot to read into a voice Steve had heard a grand total of once, but going on four months of ritual listening now, he hasn't found evidence to prove his first impression wrong.

“As always, Ground Control here. So happy you cosmonauts are alive and well out there as you continue journeying through space…”

“Wait, is this like that show? The black and white one, with the guy, and he had a suit. The Something Sphere.”

“The Twilight Zone?”

Steve had been both right and wrong that first night. Dark Star is interested in music above all else, the loudest music possible taking precedence, but the host enjoys sprinkling in facts about outer space and tidbits concerning recent unconfirmed alien sightings around the country. Sometimes, rarely, he mentions the disappearances.

“Do you ever feel like a whole town can be cursed, cosmonauts?” he mused on his Friday night broadcast the week after the Fourth of July, the day Heather Holloway and Billy Hargrove vanished without a trace. “Maybe that’s why you keep tuning in here. You’re dreaming of being somewhere really far away from where you are.”

That was the night Steve first called in with a request to play—of all things— “Space Oddity.”

“How fatalistic, my liege. And not our usual style here at Dark Star, but just this once, I can swing it.”

Steve had hung up the phone before it registered that the host seemed to know him by voice alone.

 

 

 

CITY HALL STILL HAS NO ANSWERS FOR RECENT BLACKOUTS
Montauk residents are concerned for what this may mean as the weather starts to dip.
by Nancy Wheeler

 

 

 

“This isn’t your desk, Henderson. Shit off the counter.”

Steve hadn't known the Hendersons owned a Super 8 until Dustin smacked the thing on the counter, causing Will to wince. Will had presented his own video camera—on loan, Steve guesses, from Jonathan—with greater care, but both are eating up valuable rental space. It's nothing that hasn’t happened before but with Dungeons and Dorks manuals, but something about the sharp gleam in Dustin’s eyes is setting Steve’s teeth on edge. He had that gleam when they first set off on the hunt for Mews’s slayer, and that quest finished in disappointment and a dead-end blood trail.

And with the claim—“Aliens, Steve, aliens!”

“Here we go again,” Steve mutters and waves up the gentleman waiting with a copy of Mr. Mom.

“Just look at the evidence,” Dustin says, impervious to how the customer’s jaw clenches at the volume of his voice. “One, the blackouts. They’ve been happening every Friday night now. Almost like something is performing a test.”

“Like the power company,” Max supplies before Steve has to. She's slouched beside the return cart, keeping her distance from the boys. Behind the counter is an employee-only zone, no exceptions, but Steve has been making a great many exceptions for Max Mayfield nowadays.

“Why wouldn’t the power company just say that then?” Mike argues, siding himself with Dustin for no other reason than it goes against Max.

“And it’s not just the blackouts,” Lucas points out, though in a much more forgiving tone. “Mr. Clarke has been taking down more strange messages coming through his radios and he still can’t find anyone able to translate them.”

“Could be using one of those scrambler things,” Steve suggests. At the bug eyes he gets from Mike and Dustin, he bristles. “What? I know some shit about radios.”

“But what about the disappearances,” Will asks quietly.

In the silence that follows, Steve hands off the bag with the man’s rental inside and a receipt with a return date he forgets to circle in red. The man gives Steve a curt nod, but as he turns, his eyes linger on Will. A familiar shutter falls over the man’s face, and Will shrinks in on himself seeing it. Before Steve can snap at him to leave, the man collects himself and bolts for the door, the one now plastered with the missing poster of Chrissy Cunningham.

It isn’t fair, but Will doesn’t need to hear Steve say it. Why should a kid once twelve, now a burgeoning fourteen, bear the burden of a town’s worst memories? The boy who disappeared, the boy who returned when the others didn’t, the boy who has to read on people’s faces how he reminds them of those still gone.

What about the disappearances—Benny Hammond, Barb Holland, Bob Newby, Heather Holloway, Billy Hargove. Now added to the list, Chrissy, who had just started her senior year. She was in the store a week ago to rent Valley Girl, and they chatted about the upcoming swim season and Steve skipping out on a third summer lifeguarding at the pool. Towards the end of their short conversation, Chrissy mentioned how much she missed Heather’s laugh.

Steve glances behind him and sees Max has wheeled the return cart out, pushing it towards the action aisle. None of the tapes will end up on the right shelves, but he'll blame vandalism on a different pack of meddling kids.

“Alright, so what’s all this supposed to be for?” Steve asks, pressing the Super 8 against Dustin’s chest and hoping it distracts them into letting Max be.

“This, Steven”—Dustin shakes the camera inches from Steve’s face—“is our ticket to international fame and fortune.”

“And groundbreaking scientific discovery,” Lucas adds.

“And stopping more people from going missing,” Mike says with impatience.

“You’re gonna do all that with a couple of video cameras and what? Your bikes?” Steve isn’t in the business of bursting any bubbles or teaching the kids life lessons, but someone needs to knock it into their thick skulls that they aren’t going to succeed where the Montauk police are continually failing just because they have a few canisters of film reel and a crackpot theory.

“First, we’re getting proof on film,” Dustin says, far from discouraged. “We’ll figure out the rest from there. Actually—”

Dustin jams his middle finger on the record button and shoves the camera at an unprepared Lucas. He spins his fingers in the universal sign for “rolling” before darting behind the counter, butting up against Steve. “Dude, what the hell—”

“I’m here with a Montauk local and extraterrestrial nonbeliever, Steve Harrington—”

“Who said I was a nonbeliever—”

“You have.”

“A bunch of times,” joins Mike, edging out of Lucas’s shot. Beside him, Will has the back of his hand pressed to his mouth, stifling his laughter.

“I never said nonbeliever,” Steve maintains, trying not to stare down the barrel of the camera lens. “Do I think you’re all crazy? Absolutely, but—”

Dustin interrupts him a third time. “See, we need a skeptic’s point of view for the documentary…”

“It’s a documentary now?”

“…and you’ll be the perfect counterpoint to Eddie.”

Of course Eddie Munson is in on this. It's something just short of a miracle Robin had to call in sick today because she’d never let him live down how his nostrils flare at the mention of Eddie, his stupid yet unshakeable jealousy immortalized on 8mm.

“I don’t want to be in your documentary.”

“Steve,” Dustin whines, at a pitch unsuitable for human eardrums. Only children are the terrors of the earth, and Steve does recognize himself among them.

A car horn blares outside, startling everyone in the store. Double-parked, because she’ll peel off in thirty seconds whether everyone who needs a ride is in the car or not, Nancy pops her head out of the driver’s side window and shouts Mike’s name.

“Saved by the ex-girlfriend,” Dustin grumbles and goes to take his camera back from Lucas.

As the kids gather their stuff, Steve considers waving to Nancy, but he can hardly see her through the sun’s glare on the windshield. That’s about all they do these days—wave and hand-off the kids. Somehow, Steve is living in the aftermath of a divorce without having ever been married.

Mike gives him a wince of sympathy before heading out the door. Being on better terms with the teenage younger brother of an ex probably says something about Steve that he doesn’t want to sit down and unpack. The other kids follow after Mike, bickering over where to shoot footage Friday night, and Steve finds himself staring at the outline of Chrissy Cunningham’s smiling, missing face again as the door blows shut.

Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up tomorrow in a science-fiction universe where a pack of feral fourteen-year-olds and their Super 8 camera could save the world from an impending alien apocalypse? That universe seems a whole lot better than the one where Benny Hammond and Bob Newby were declared suicides, Barb Holland a runaway, and Heather Holloway a murder at the hands of a fugitive Billy Hargrove.

Max reappears at the counter with a copy of Risky Business. Her mom never expects her home for dinner, and she doesn’t want Steve asking about it.

“Are you going to be in this documentary?” Steve asks lightly, prodding close to a bruise.

Max rams the cassette into the VCR and shakes her head. Her copper hair falls over her shoulders, gilded by the golden hour sun streaming through the storefront window. The image of red hair, cropped at the chin, flashes in his mind’s eye. In his ears, he hears the phantom whisper of her telling Nancy she wanted to go home.

She never made it.

 

 

Something I think about all the time when I’m—[throat clear] something I think about a lot is how extraterrestrials—aliens, actual aliens have probably been visiting us since the dawn of our time. We have this bias where just because it’s more popular to report UFOs sightings now, like post World War II, we think aliens have only become interested in visiting us now. I mean, a farmer in Kansas reported seeing a strange ship hovering above his cows in 1897. And who’s to say the light show people saw in the sky in Portugal in uh-…1917? 18? What if that was some kind of visitation, too? 

They called it a miracle. And isn’t it? A beautiful thing we don’t understand…yet.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — SEPTEMBER 20, ‘85

 

 

At seven minutes past one in the morning, the sign in the local video store window flips from opened to closed. A chill wind is blowing off the water, but the kid closing shop forgot to bring a jacket. Goosebumps rush up his arms as he locks up. The fine hair at the back of his neck is sticking up, too. He thinks nothing of it. In his car, the last one in the lot, he blasts the heat and tunes the radio to a show he knows has ended already.

In the town next door, the local station switches over to its lunar rotation. The day's final host shutters the building for the night. His pint-sized producer and her older sister, who has the producing title in name only, left a half-hour earlier, wringing out the promise he’d say nothing off-color while still on air. He had crossed his fingers behind his back, but kept the promise nevertheless, at least by his standards.

He's never without a jacket or his battle vest, never mind that he runs hot anyway, so the wind is nothing more than a cold blow-dry through his hair as he ducks outside. His van is also the last in the lot. He has a long drive ahead of him back over to Montauk.

Neither of them have anyone waiting up, parents away and uncle working the worse side of a graveyard shift.

The van trails a Camry across the town line. It moves at a steady, frustrating crawl. The town will learn later that the Camry was traveling back from East Hampton High, a late night spent pouring over Monday's edition of the school paper. The leading item, never printed, is a memorial piece dedicated to Barbara Holland. She would have been a senior, same as Chrissy Cunningham. Same as the young man driving the Camry.

At forty minutes past the hour, though the police will not have any record of it, the Camry passes the Harrington house. The BMW is parked in the garage. He is laying in bed, studying the ceiling, headphones on. The album is new to him, Black Sabbath’s Sabotage. He’s trying to like it. So far, he’s learned that a symptom of the universe is love that never dies.

Three hours from now, in a house two blocks over, the mother of the young man in the Camry will wake up suddenly, feeling that something is very wrong. The Camry won't be in the driveway. As in the case of Barb Holland, the search for the car will yield nothing.

Just before two in the morning—and the van's driver will tell Chief Hopper so—the van pulls up to a double-wide. The outside light and the overhead in the kitchen is shining for him. He pours himself a bowl of dry cereal because the milk has gone off and retreats to his room to give his sweetheart some love. He plays, of all things, “Symptom of the Universe.”

At that moment, in two different bedrooms, two different boys are thinking about the same thing. Steve Harrington is thinking about love. Eddie Munson is thinking about Steve Harrington.

They don’t really know they’re existing as a binary star. Neither of them could say what that means. The young man in the Camry—Fred Benson, co-editor of the East Hampton High Beachcomber and ranked second in his class—could tell them a binary star is a system of two stars that are bound to and orbit each other by nature of gravity. In a night sky, as clear as the one above them tonight, the two stars appear as a single object to the naked eye.

The brightest star in a human’s sky—Sirius—is a binary star.

Fred Benson knows all of this because he is an amateur study of astronomy. Other kids had liked matchbox cars or dinosaurs; he had liked the planets and the asteroid that changed the course of the Earth. What are great beasts to the force of a single rock breaking through the atmosphere, its arrival the signal of devastation beyond the beasts' comprehension? An anti-miracle.

He thinks it’s a meteorite, the streak of light dashing across the sky that he sees through his windshield. The second flash is bigger and lasts longer, eclipsing his view of the road ahead. It’s as if his car has been caught in the beam of the Montauk Point Lighthouse. 

The light is calling him somewhere, just not home. He had been only three houses away.

 

 

Notes:

This fic began with a dream. That dream? Aliens.

I’m hoping to update every Sunday (serialization, baby). And now for a few notes:

1) As many of you definitely know, the working title and setting of Stranger Things was once Montauk. Montauk is famous in pop culture for a conspiracy theory called The Montauk Project, which alleges the government conducted a series of experiments and projects at the town’s decommissioned air force base (known as Camp Hero; watch this space). The conspiracy itself arose from accounts in the early 80s by two men who claimed to have repressed memories from their unwilling involvement in these experiments. One of their claims is that the project attempted contact with extraterrestrial life.

2) The title of Eddie’s radio show is a reference to John Carpenter’s first feature-length film, Dark Star. It was released in 1974 (though was in and out of theaters through 1980) and became an early cult classic with the rise of VHS and video rentals.

3) In the final Dark Star broadcast of this chapter, Eddie is referencing several solar-based events, most prominently the Miracle of the Sun. These events are most commonly associated with religious prophecy, but ufologist Jacques Vallée included them in his 1969 nonfiction work, Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds, which Eddie is drawing from.

That's all I've got for now! Thank you so much for reading and I am very excited to embark on this adventure with you. As ever, if you wanna kick it some more, you can find me at nancywheeeler on tumblr.

Chapter 2: october // night call

Summary:

Steve acquires a nightly caller, Dustin comes up with a new plan, and all continues to be unwell in Montauk.

 

 

GROUND CONTROL: Best episode of The Twilight Zone: go.

E. BINGHAM: The Shelter.

GC: You’re picking one of the only episodes without any science fiction elements. Hold on, let me try to act surprised.

EB: It’s about the breakdown of civil society in the face of a catastrophic threat to humanity. No need for science or fiction.

S. BINGHAM: [off-mic] Everything requires science!

DARK STAR BROADCAST — OCTOBER 9, ‘85

 

 

 

So, about that breakdown.

Rewind to the fall of his senior year: landing flat on his ass in the bushes of the Wheelers' front yard with a probable concussion and a definite broken heart, and getting smacked in the chest with a bag of frozen carrots courtesy of Mike Wheeler.

No, rewind the tape further than that.

Rewind to the fall of the year prior, junior year. The final months of King Steve Harrington’s golden reign, not that he knew it. On an ordinary Tuesday morning, he saw Nancy Wheeler walking out of the chemistry lab and understood what it meant to be a daydream believer. Just like that, he was a goner.

But here’s the thing: approaching her for the first time, leaning against her locker and demanding to be seen, he hoped she’d reject him. The king and his kingdom would never be good enough for her, but plain old Steve could be with some elbow grease. 

Maybe that’s the silver lining, at the end of all things: from the start, Steve had wanted to be better for Nancy.

She didn’t reject him. She blushed in disbelief and checked over her shoulder like he might have been talking to someone else. It made Steve queasy at the same time it puffed out his chest. For their unofficial first date, he quizzed her on American History dates for O’Donnell’s class behind the locked door of her lilac-shaded bedroom and kissed her amongst a collection of stuffed animals. It felt different. It felt like it could be the start of the rest of his life.

Then Will Byers went missing, and Steve threw a party.

At the time, the two events were unrelated, but life has a way of melding disparate things together, like a mud soup kids make in the backyard. Crush a handful of red berries in the stew and everything in it turns to poison.

Will Byers went missing, and Steve threw a party, and Nancy lost her virginity in his big, dark, impersonal bedroom, and Barb Holland never made it home.

There was a blackout that night, but Steve only found out about it the next morning. His bedside clock was flashing a minute past midnight, but his watch told him it was twenty minutes past seven. Nancy swore more words than Steve had in his cursing vocabulary and he had a thought that he had woken up beside a different person. She wouldn’t let him drive her home or to school. The next time Steve saw her, she was being marched down the hall with her mom at her side, two officers flanking them.

Barb Holland never made it home, and Nancy refused to believe she had run away just as Jonathan Byers refused to believe his kid brother drowned, and when Steve found them together in her room late in the night, three days gone on the search for Will, he lost his head for a minute.

It might have been two breakdowns actually.

The blood rushed out of his head very literally courtesy of several punches to the face by Byers. He caught sight of his own reflection in a convenience store freezer buying a can of coke to combat the swelling and abruptly stopped thinking about the revenge he’d get on Byers. What he saw in that reflection was a loser, in the company of other losers, who never grew out of playing king of the hill. And Steve was tired, exhausted to the goddamn bone, of pushing other people down to be the ruler of dirt.

He apologized, with half his lights out, on a night he, Nancy, and Jonathan once agreed to never talk about again. The bulbs flickered in the Byers house like a crazed kid had control of the switch, and there might have been balls of lights dancing in the sky, too, but it wasn’t aliens, alright?

Because the next morning, Will Byers was found on the grounds of Montauk Lighthouse Park with a week wiped from his memory. The town declared it a miracle, or at least they did then.

Barb never came home. Some people called it a tragedy. A minority of whispering voices chalked it up to bad parenting. Someone, one of them, probably should have said something when the missing posters started coming down, but they agreed not to talk about it again because Jonathan had a family to glue back together, and Steve needed to plow through the last year and a half of his high school career to buck his dad off his back, and Nancy wanted—

It would take him almost a year to realize he had no idea what Nancy wanted.

Not him, as it turned out.

The one year anniversary of Barb’s disappearance was less than a week away when Tina Calloway threw her annual Halloween party at her parent’s beachfront house. Nancy drank her weight in spiked cherry punch chugged out of a red solo cup and her eyes were bloodshot as she looked at their reflection in a foggy bathroom mirror and told him everything was bullshit. Him, them, their love. Bullshit.

He told Byers to take her home before climbing into his car and driving until he hit the end of the island. He trembled behind the steering wheel, engine still running and the radio on low. The lighthouse glared from above. Bowie was singing about how planet earth was blue and there was nothing he could do. Gazing out at the ocean—black and indistinguishable from the sky, one endless void—Steve found he agreed.

“Happy Halloween, ladies, ghouls, and space travelers,” the radio host said as the song waned. “Greatest night of the year, right?”

“Right,” Steve echoed, bitterly sarcastic and for no one but himself. He shut off the radio.

Everything was slipping away from him, but Steve didn’t know if he was the one with a severed tether or if the world itself had been knocked off its orbit. Either way, here he was, spinning adrift in the dark, grasping for something of substance to hold on to for dear life.

He’d get Nancy back, he decided. They hadn’t floated so far apart from each other that Steve fell outside the pull of her gravity.

Her gravity was not what sent him toppling off the Wheelers' roof, but the same principles applied. He woke up in a bed of dead rose bushes, the stars in his eyes swirling in frenzied circles, and Mike was peering over him, his lip curled in disgust.

Concussion, broken heart, a frozen bag of carrots hitting his chest—the welcome package at rock bottom needed some work. Steve sat up, groaning, and placed the bag against the crown of his head. As he blinked, the street started to solidify, the porch lights looking less like flares, but he’d need a minute before he was safe to drive. He was about to say as much to Mike, promise him he’d peel himself off the lawn and fuck off as soon as the world wasn’t a blurry photograph of something captured in motion, but to his surprise, Mike settled on the ground beside him.

“Love sucks,” Mike declared with a depressing definiteness Steve might have challenged on a night his brain was not scrambled eggs.

Instead, he muttered, “You have no idea.”

(He learns later, thanks to Henderson and his motor-mouth, that Mike Wheeler may have some idea. Even if a few parts of the story back flip over his head and some touch on a night he vowed to forget, Steve does not envy his ex-girlfriend’s angsty brother for falling in love with Chief Hopper’s mysterious and reclusive daughter.)

“I’ll deny saying this if you repeat it to anyone,” Mike said vehemently, “but you can probably do better.”

“Who would I repeat that to?” Steve questioned, a bigger dig at himself than Mike. “Not very brotherly of you either.”

He wondered whether he’d behave similarly if he had an older sibling making lovers drop out of two-story windows. Then he wondered whether a younger sibling of his would be all that impressed with their older brother, scaling walls like a pitiful Romeo while his grades were tanking and his swim coach pulled him off both relay teams after one too many skipped practices. At the rate he was going, he’d be bench-riding through basketball season. Who knew where he’d end up for college. And this was the guy Mike thought could do better than Nancy Wheeler.

“She’s probably better off without me, honestly,” Steve admitted, rising gingerly to his feet. He had thorn scratches criss-crossed along his palms and dirt streaked across the seat of his pants. Wincing, more at how he looked than how any of it felt, he asked, “Do me a favor and don’t tell her I was here, alright?”

Rather than looking pleased to see him gone for good, Mike gazed up at him from the ground radiating exasperation. In his face, Steve saw shades of Nancy. “What, that’s it? You’re just going to give up and never see her again?”

That sounded much more like the punk Steve knew and tolerated over the last year. “Dude, you just said I could do better.”

“Yeah, so what, that doesn’t mean you just give up on love!” he argued, arms waving mad. “What if you don’t see her for a week, or two weeks, or—or a month and she just forgets you exist.”

“She wouldn’t forget I exist,” Steve said, despite having spiraled over the idea for the last twenty-four hours. He had to give himself credit for recognizing Mike wasn’t talking about him and Nancy anymore.

“How can you know that?”

“I don’t know, just…that shouldn’t be how love works. You don’t stop loving someone after one fight or when you can’t see them for a while,” Steve said. “You can go a whole year without seeing someone and still love them. Ever heard of long-distance?”

“Distance isn’t the problem,” Mike grumbled.

“Well, time is kind of a form of distance, too, right?” At Mike’s baffled expression, Steve tried again, “You know, like the speed of…the speed of time.”

“Are you talking about the speed of light?” came Mike’s correction, spoken like Steve might be the stupidest man alive.

“Whatever, dude,” Steve dismissed. “All I’m saying is this girl, whoever she is, isn’t going to forget you just because you haven’t been able to see each other for awhile.”

Mike balked but stopped short of denying it. Avoiding Steve’s eyes, he kicked up the mulch of his mother’s flowerbeds with the heel of his shoe, looking and sounding very young when he whispered, “Promise?”

“Yeah,” Steve said automatically, even though he had no business making guarantees. He held his hand out to Mike and helped him to his feet. “Yeah, promise.”

Steve went home that night in a daze, but his chest felt lighter than it had in a week. Had to be a weird symptom of head trauma. Though he told Mike not to tell Nancy he tried climbing through her window, Steve seriously considered driving by a garden store and buying Karen Wheeler a rose bush to replace the one that broke his fall.

Fate—or a vessel of chaos, Steve hasn’t decided nearly a year later—intervened with a belligerent knocking at his front door. On his doorstep, with an antenna poking out of his zip-up pocket and holding a bloody collar in his hand, was Dustin Henderson.

“Something took my cat,” he announced without preamble. He peered around Steve into his empty living room, then back at him, his eyebrows arched. “You’re going to need a weapon. Do you have a baseball bat?”

 

 

 

And as many of you are aware, we are continuing to work with the Long Island Lighting Company [pause; boos from the crowd] —yes, yes, I know this has been a very frustrating last two weeks after Gloria’s visit, but now that full power has been restored to the island, we’ll be working with the company in regards to the recent and irregular power outages in the Montauk area.

Chief Hopper and his department believe there is no link between the outages and the recent disappearances of East Hampton seniors Chrissy Cunningham and Fred Benson. The chief has assured me they are following every possible lead and the families continue to be in City Hall’s thoughts and prayers.

TRANSCRIPT — MAYOR’S REMARKS, OCTOBER 14, ‘85

 

 

 

In the hierarchy of Family Video shifts, Steve ranks Monday closing as the worst.

Following the after-work rush, which is never more than trickle on Mondays, the store is a dead zone from seven to ten. Keith schedules only one person for those hours and the lucky guy is almost always Steve. Even if he did staff two people to putter around in mind-numbing boredom for three hours, the person by his side at the counter would not be Robin. Her parents don’t like the idea of her working late on school nights, a rule set down even before Fred Benson disappeared.

His missing poster is next to Chrissy’s on the door. The longer Steve stares at it, the harder it is not to hear a mimicry of his old friend Tommy Hagan’s voice in his head, perversely whispering little Freddie Benson’s dreams have finally come true, he and Chrissy Cunningham talked about in the same breath.

For the first time in months, Steve craves a cigarette. Robin bullied him out of the habit for good over the summer, but as bored, and frustrated, and disgusted with himself as he is right now, he’s having trouble remembering why he let her. It had been good to hang outside for a while, let the chemicals in his cigarette give the chemicals in his brain a rest.

He’s tired of listening to himself; it’s like holding a conch shell to his ear and, instead of hearing a soothing tide, he’s treated to a flash flood of every thought he’s been repressing. His dad’s unvoiced question from a series of non-conversation they had while cleaning the hurricane debris off the back deck—when, exactly, do you plan to stop wasting your life?—is hitting heavy.

Steve is a life-waster. Today alone, he has watched E.T. the Extra-terrestrial two and a half times out of sheer laziness. About half of their family section and three-fourths of science-fiction is made up of E.T. tapes and Keith is forcing a push to get them off the shelves. It’s the only tape he allows on the TV when he’s in the store, but Keith left two hours ago and, for some goddamn reason, Steve restarted the movie like he hadn’t. If he has to hear that fleshy nightmare say, “E.T. phone home,” one more time, it’ll look like the store got off easy after Hurricane Gloria with the damage he’ll do.

The science fiction section really is a pitiful lot, not that he’d let Dustin hear him say so. That Steve is shopping sci-fi, when thrillers and romance are housed in the aisle next door, speaks to a brainwashing campaign that is clearly succeeding. And still, he scans the shelves, skipping over every Star Wars until he lands on a title that rings a faint bell.

He wrestles the E.T. tape out of the VCR and slips in the new one. The Twilight Zone: The Movie—he can spend the rest of his night seeing what the fuss is about.

About a third of the way through the movie, the phone rings. Steve jolts, his chin slipping out of his palm. There’s a bit of drool at the corner of his mouth. He fumbles for the receiver, assuming it’ll be the perpetually-stoned pizza delivery guy from Pepe’s who occasionally calls to see if they have Singin’ in the Rain available, says “Righteous!” when Steve tells him they do, and then has never once arrived at the store to rent it.

“Family Video,” he says with the pick-up, not bothering to put an ounce of pep into it. Pizza boy will get what he doesn’t pay for at eight o’clock on a Monday.

“Wow,” the voice on the other side marvels, far from high. Deep, surprisingly youthful, but not as smooth without an audience tuning in. Steve bolts up as though the guy had strolled into the store rather than dialed his number. “Didn’t think I’d actually get you, Major Steve.”

Steve blanks. “Major?”

“Like Major Tom,” the guy—Ground Control, Steve’s rattled brain supplies—says. “Don’t tell me I have to start quizzing you on Bowie, too. You’re the one always requesting him.”

“Always,” he scoffs, incredulous.

“You just gonna repeat everything I say?” Ground Control asks, mirth in his tone.

“No,” Steve snaps, refusing to call how he sounds petulant. “I guess I just thought of myself more as a captain.”

“So, it’s Captain Jack that does it for you.”

Steve’s eyebrows soar up his forehead. “Was that a Billy Joel reference?”

“Saturday night, and you’re still hanging around,” he sings, husky but on-key, “tired of living in your one horse town…” He trails off, chuckling, not that Steve is disappointed. “It’s one of my uncle’s favorites.”

Steve nearly says mine too, but aborts the stupid lie at the last second. He has an uncle outside of Westchester and another preempting his retirement in a beach house on Florida’s Atlantic coast, but the most he knows about either of them is how much cash they can stuff in an envelope and how little they can write on a birthday card. But he wants to slip briefly into a parallel universe where he could feed a nickel into a jukebox and know a close relative’s favorite song.

“You alright out there, Captain Steve?”

His voice cuts through Steve’s reverie. Clearing his throat, slipping his self-pity under his tongue and hoping it will dissolve, Steve answers, “Yeah, I’m alright.”

A long pause stretches over the line, and Steve has a weird sense the guy isn’t satisfied with his answer. He opens his mouth to affirm he really is alright, scout’s honor, but Ground Control beats him to breaking the quiet. “So, whatcha doing?”

“Nothing, working,” Steve answers, two words meaning the same thing at Family Video. “Watching The Twilight Zone.”

“Really?” the guy asks with a burst of childlike glee.

Steve shrugs before remembering they’re not in the same room. It’s Ground Control's outsized presence, even auditory only; his voice is filled with so many vibrant emotional colors that Steve keeps experiencing fleeting images of how he must be smirking, grinning, or narrowing his eyes comically while he leans in on both elbows. He’s never met the guy in person before, but the visions seem real in an inexplicable way, like flashes from the future.

That is, if you believe in that sort of thing.

“I mean, yeah, we got the tape in the—”

“Oh, boo,” Ground Control intrudes, tone changing dramatically. Another flash: him sticking out his tongue. “You’re watching the shitty movie?”

On the television set, the movie has trooped onward without Steve’s poor attention. Bizarrely, the story has shifted from the trials and tribulations of a jackass suffering through horrible events in history to the tale of a bunch of residents at an old folks home. He frowns at the screen and asks, “Uh yeah, what’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference, he says,” Ground Control sighs. It reminds Steve of Dustin, who has adopted the annoying habit of giving a similar sigh before he starts explaining one of his many opinions like it’s a universal fact. “The original Twilight Zone series is a masterpiece, dude. Five seasons of art. The movie, it’s…it’s…you can’t even compare them.”

“I’ve never seen the original.”

“For shame!” he proclaims. Steve wrenches the phone away from his ear at the booming volume. Tentatively, he brings the phone back to hear the guy instructing, “Channel 7, man, they play all the old episodes around like three or four. Sometimes they’ll do late night blocks, too, show the spookier stuff.”

“It’s scary?”

“Why, you scare easy, Captain Steve?” he teases. “Do you need someone to hold your hand?”

Steve rolls his eyes, but realizes he’s smiling. He has been smiling for a while, actually. “If I can handle this movie, I think I can handle the show just fine.”

“What part are you on?”

Ground Control has Steve give him a play-by-play of the rest of the movie, though he periodically interrupts in favor of describing old-school Twilight Zone episodes in vivid detail and insisting which ones Steve has to drop everything to watch if he gets the chance. Having listened to the guy once a week for over four months, Steve thought he had a pretty good idea of how passionate he was, but it’s different with the beam of his passion trained solely on him, no musical interruptions, not shared over the radio waves.

He talks with his foot pressing the gas to the floor, and Steve has another flash of him sweeping his free hand around anytime he goes on a tear. Sometimes Steve loses the plot of what Ground Control is talking about, but he keeps listening, carried away on the riptide of the guy’s enthusiasm. He always comes back around to ask Steve where they’re at in the movie, how he's liking it, or what candy Steve prefers to munch on at the theaters. They wind up in a heated debate on the correct amount of butter to lather on popcorn, then, as soon as Steve blinks, the movie is over.

“Let the midnight special shine a light on me,” Ground Control sings alongside the credits. “Let the midnight special shine a ever lovin’ light on me.”

“I liked it,” Steve finds himself saying, though he pretty much missed half of the movie.

“Of course you did.” If he’s shooting for condescending, he misses by a mile. His voice has veered closer to how he sounds at the end of his show, drowsy and warm.

Steve yawns into the crook of his elbow and checks his watch. “Jesus, it’s still only nine. I’ve got another hour here.”

“Close early.”

“No way, man,” Steve says, his eyes falling on the closed back office. “My manager will write me up in a second if he finds out I skipped out.”

“How’s he gonna know?”

“I mean, if my time card reads nine and not ten…”

“Lock up for now, swing over to Benny’s for a late night burger, and then come back to clock out,” Ground Control suggests, laying the plan out so easy and quick that Steve feels like an idiot for never having thought of it before.

“That’s…yeah, that could work,” Steve says. His stomach rumbles in agreement. “How do you know about Benny’s?”

“Dude, the station is in East Hampton, not actual Houston,” he answers, underscored by laughter, “but also, I live in Montauk.”

Steve will not confess to it now, but he has been envisioning Ground Control and the entire Dark Star enterprise operating hundreds of miles away. The reality that Ground Control lives in town and Steve has probably passed him by unknowingly is doing strange things to his stomach.

“Uh, before I hang up, man…” Steve pauses, stopping short of asking what he wants to ask. He lands on a question he thinks he may receive an honest answer to: “Why did you call?”

The guy groans theatrically. “Because I am bored out of my fucking mind over here. My show’s not for hours and my producer isn’t in the mood to entertain me, and the guy going right now was about to put me through a plate glass window if I kept complaining about his shitty Eagles records.”

“You just have that effect on people, huh?”

The line quiets. Inside the store is quiet, too. The movie credits are through, the street outside is vacant, and all Steve hears is the static hum from the television, still on but blank and casting a warm glow over the room. And breathing—he hears breathing, his and not his.

Sometimes, towards the end of a Dark Star broadcast, a small pause occurs between the end of a song and the beginning of Ground Control’s outro. Dead air is what he's learned it’s called. If his eyes are closed, fully in the dark, Steve experiences a momentary feeling of weightlessness. Nothing is keeping him inside his body. But he waits, never for long, for Ground Control’s voice to bring him back down.

Steve waits.

“Not on you, though,” he says at last, softer than Steve knew him capable. “Right?”

Steve swallows, but doesn’t see why he shouldn’t tell the truth. It’s like that quote on the cover of the space odyssey movie Robin is a few weeks away from shoving down his throat: in space, no one can hear you scream. Well, in an empty store, no one is around to hear Steve admit: “Not me.”

“Good night, Captain Steve,” Ground Control says, the words coming out soupy. Steve guesses he’ll be spending the next three hours before his show fast asleep on whatever couch he’s crashed on. He smiles against the receiver, another thing no one is around to catch him out on.

“Night.”

Steve is about to hang up when he hears, “And stay safe out there, okay?”

It’s a variation on the send-off he gives at the end of every Dark Star broadcast, but tonight, a thread of worry laces through it.

“Yeah, of course,” he says. On the door, the paper appearing orange owing to the light from the street lamps, the two missing posters are impossible to miss.

Steve sticks to the lit sidewalks on the walk to Benny’s and, to himself, starts to sing, “Let the midnight special, shine a light on me…”

 

 

 

You know what’s fu—Jesus Christ—and definitely am not allowed to say that either, sh—anyway, you know what’s messed up? The ocean. The whole entire ocean. Something like eighty or ninety percent—astronomically higher than I ever got on a biology test—eighty freakin’ percent is still unexplored. Imagine the creepy, fantastical creatures hanging out down in the cavernous depths of the Atlantic where we humans would just explode from the pressure.

There could be intelligent life down there. Who the hell knows.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — OCTOBER 18, ‘85

 

 

“Did you have to, like, audition for the radio?”

“Are you suggesting someone made a mistake putting me on air?”

“Hey, you said it, not me.”

“Firstly, fuck you. Secondly, it wasn’t like an audition or anything. The radio club put up fliers about having some slots to fill and I wanted it, so I went in and explained my ideas for the show and what kind of music I was looking to play. Eden’s great about wanting a lot of different sounds at the station. And here I am: a different sound.”

“Wait, club—how is it a club?”

“It’s the community college station. Did you not know that?”

“So, that means you’re not getting paid, right? Oh, yeah, no, things make a lot more sense now.”

 

 

 

GROUND CONTROL: You’re live on the air, Captain Steve.

CAPT. STEVE: Great, because I have a request from my…co-astronaut, I guess.

GC: And what does Lieutenant Robin have in store for us?

CAPT. STEVE: ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy” by Deniece Williams

GC: [cough] Huh…let me just…as I thought, we had a sacrificial bonfire for the Footloose soundtrack. Better luck next time, lieutenant.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — OCTOBER 23, ‘85

 

 

 

“What’s your Benny’s order?”

“Uh, double cheeseburger, no pickles, half a side of fries and half a side of onion rings.”

“And do you get a slice of apple pie with that, too, All-American dream boy?”

“Fuck you, dude.”

“No, no, it’s good, Captain Steve. Astronauts are supposed to be All-American, so someday soon they can go out all gung-ho to galaxies far, far away and stick the American flag up every intergalactic—”

“Jesus, dude, and what’s your Benny’s order, huh?”

“Pretty much exactly the same, just with the pickles.”

“Seriously, go to hell.”

“Aye-aye, captain.”

 

 

 

We’re closing in on the best day of the year, ladies and aliens. I assume you all have your crushingly mainstream costume picked out.

My favorite Halloween memory—for all my Montauk listeners, remember how decked out Bob Newby’s house used to be? Working in RadioShack obviously gets you hooked up because he had those spiders that dropped from the ceiling when you rang the doorbell. And he dressed as Dracula, every year, fake fangs, bad face paint job…he was the genuine article, man.

I don’t know what kind of music he liked, or anything, but this next one's for him. Hope he’s still somewhere out there.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — OCTOBER 25, ‘85

 

 

 

All things considered, Steve owes his life to Benny’s Burger House.

In the late fifties, back in the days when Big Benny Sr. ran the kitchen and Benny Jr. was painting the walls with ketchup and mustard bottles, Steve’s mom waited tables on the night shift to put herself through nursing school. Her dad was a gentleman fisherman who had his own boat and sold his own catch, and, though she grew to hate the smell, his mom always said it was watching her dad lop the heads off of fish that made her indifferent to looking at everyone else’s blood and guts.

The same summer after she had finished her first year in the program, his dad was spending the first few months of his post-college career holed up in his parents’ beach house. His job at his father’s real estate firm was secured. It was the last carefree summer before the rest of John Harrington's life began.

Once, Steve had asked his mom if she knew the moment his dad walked through the door of Benny’s, hungry for a burger, that he would be it—the one. She had said yes. Steve wonders now, were he to ask again, if she wouldn’t bother lying.

It took John Harrington two months to wear her down. He came in every Wednesday and Friday night, his hair combed back and in his best shoes, and occupied the stool at the center of the counter. Best view in Montauk, he declared it. At the end of each visit, using a nickel from his change, he selected a Shirley & Lee song on the jukebox, most often “You’d Be Thinking of Me.”

(Steve's not a true believer in things like omens or signs, but he does find the foundational song of his parents’ relationship ending with the lyrics, “No matter who you hold in your arms, baby / You should be thinking of me” fitting in a twisted, prophetic way.)

The engagement was short; the paperwork necessary for his mom to drop out of nursing school was shorter. She must have weighed it all out in her head, like her dad had weighed his catch by the pound. With John, the new Mrs. Catherine Harrington married into one of the nicest houses in Montauk, had a car of her own to drive, and none of it smelled fishy. She never had to see the insides of people. The bloodiest things in her life now are the hamburgers they order out from Benny’s on a rare Friday night.

As a kid, Steve secretly believed he’d meet the one at Benny’s. It didn’t matter his parents were fighting constantly; the magic of Benny’s as a place where true love was bought at a nickel for a song hadn’t been lost yet.

He and Tommy biked there together Sundays after church and sat at the center of the counter jamming fries into their mouths. Benny Sr.’s back went out the spring Steve turned twelve and Benny Jr. had taken his place at the grill. He always nestled an onion ring amongst Steve’s fries and told him the most romantic song he knew was “What Is Life” by George Harrison. Too bad that song wasn’t on the jukebox, so Steve played “Starman” by Bowie and tried to see what girls bobbed their heads along. Best he got was a boy with a buzzcut telling him his music taste wasn’t that garbage.

The years went by and his parents’ marriage frosted into a second cold war coming from inside the house. They went on his dad’s business trips together so his mom could act as a spy, gathering intelligence on her husband’s affairs. Steve did poking of his own from time to time in unlocked drawers in his father’s office, but felt nauseous and ashamed afterwards. They were not his enemies in the end, only each other’s.

The stupid and recklessly naive thing was, the slow decay of their relationship made Steve believe in the one harder. Because if his parents were a shining example of how to do it wrong, that meant there had to be a way to do it right. A right way to comb his hair, a right seat to sit in, a right thing to order, and a right song to play.

He brought Nancy to Benny’s on their second date, technically, but first in public. Though he had no way of knowing it, it would be the last time Benny snuck an onion ring into his fries. 

Two weeks later, he vanished, his pickup discovered empty at a dock on the Sound side of the island. The investigation closed with a cause of death listed as unknown. Drowning, most likely. It often is in an coastal town. The question mark hanging over the shut case: a fall or a jump?

The town rallied to keep Benny’s doors open, and the new management honored the town’s wishes. Owner Sam Owens is a retired doctor with a tricky smile but a workman’s attitude. He knows better than to step behind a fryer, but hires good people and keeps the wheels’ greased and turning. One of his good hires was Claudia Henderson.

In the wake of his breakup with Nancy, Steve probably wouldn’t have stepped foot inside Benny’s again if not for Mrs. Henderson. She ardently believes every ailment has a cure found within the pages of a recipe book—head colds need chicken noodle, a sore wrist needs a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie, and mending a broken heart requires a double cheeseburger, extra onions, hold the pickles. Every Wednesday, whether he’s working the morning shift, closing, or not on the schedule, she expects him to swing by for his usual with a side of gossip. It’s almost always about her son.

The leaves in town have turned fiery, crackling under Steve’s heels as he exits the car and walks towards the restaurant. The air has taken a turn, too, chilly and saltier. The countdown to Halloween is ticking like a five-foot time bomb, what with Dustin hounding him to join a group costume. He won’t be surprised if Mrs. Henderson brings it up; Dustin has gotten wise to the fact his mom can guilt trip Steve into just about anything.

The bell above the door clangs, announcing his arrival. For nine on a Wednesday night, the place is buzzing. The more commercial Montauk becomes, the more the locals cling to their old haunts.

Mrs. Henderson is at the register, ringing up a man Steve has seen around the local auto-body shop. They’re chatting about his nephew, and Steve swears he hears reference to a dragon. The man takes his change, his fingers brushing against Mrs. Henderson’s open palm. He passes Steve with his head bowed, undoubtedly to hide the small but pleased smile on his face. You go, Mrs. H, Steve thinks as he watches the man go.

“Hey there, pumpkin!” 

Mrs. Henderson switches up her terms of endearment to fit with the season. Come December, Dustin will be her little elf and Steve a sugar cookie.

Tonight, she’s snug in a vibrant orange sweater, the collar patterned with felt green leaves. She has a bag on the counter with Steve’s usual packed in it and acts like Steve insulted her homemade lasagna to her face when he attempts to pay. It’s a tired routine, but Steve will never stop trying to pay back a little of what he owes her now.

“Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask,” she says, passing him the bag, “what happened with the girl you were in here with last month. Amy?”

“Alison,” Steve corrects lightly, then second guesses himself. Had it been Amy? Did it matter? “Nothing happened.”

Nothing ever happens. From the small smile of sympathy Mrs. Henderson gives him, Steve can tell she knows that for herself. “It’s going to happen for you, pumpkin,” she says, giving his hand a squeeze. “Probably how you least expect it.”

His eyes stray to the jukebox. He knows it’s been gutted recently, crusty oldies swapped out for the newer hits. Shirley & Lee have been gone for decades. Bowie is hanging in there, but nowadays he doesn’t believe in modern love. Steve’s not much of a believer these days either.

“Thanks, Mrs. Henderson,” Steve says, and means it for the food and the kindness.

By the time Steve arrives home, his dad is locked in his office for the night and his mom has gone to bed early, so he takes his dinner up to his room and switches on the radio, tuned to the only station he cares to listen to anymore.

“Greetings cosmonauts, and anyone traveling in the dark tonight,” comes the welcome that Steve has memorized forward and backward. “This is Ground Control speaking and you’re listening to the one and only Dark Star broadcast. I thought I’d start you off right with a classic: ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ by the almighty Zeppelin.”

“Lot of love songs lately,” Steve mumbles as if Robin were next to him to say she’s been noticing the same.

Workin’ from seven to eleven every night / really makes life a drag, the singer commiserates and Steve mutters, “No kidding,” to the wall. The wallpaper squares have started to blur and move, his eyes dry. Steve rubs his forearm across them and turns his head, blinking into the dim light from his lamp and eying the phone on his bedside table. He’s got a personal line, but no one calls it other than Robin. The kids deliver their demands to him via walkie-talkie.

Steve fumbles for the phone before he really knows what he’s doing. If he had to give an excuse, it’s that he’s bored. If he had to give a reason closer to the truth, it’s that he’s lonely. He dials the familiar number and listens to it ring.

The call connects.

“Ground Control to Major…” He leaves off finishing, prompting whoever is on the other side to fill in their name. In the background, Steve hears the same song as is playing through his radio, the music layering in a strange echo.

“Hey, it’s—”

“Captain Steve!” he interrupts cheerily, a grin trilling in his tone. “Wasn’t anticipating a check-in from you today. Wait, shit—is Family Video closing at 1AM on Wednesdays and Thursdays now, too? That’s too much, man. You’ve gotta fucking unionize or—” 

A second voice, reaching Steve’s end garbled, calls something to Ground Control. The guy exerts minimal effort covering the speaker while he answers the complaint with, “Simmer down, supergenius, the mic’s off and you know it.” To Steve, he clucks his tongue and says, “The tone of the youths these days.”

Steve sinks against the headboard, tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder blade. “No kidding.”

“So, if you’re not at Space Station Video, Captain Steve,” he says, “where are you?”

It almost sounds like a come on, to the point Steve glances down at his over-washed sweats and ratty basketball t-shirt and thinks he’ll have to drum up a better answer to the question of what he’s wearing. As if the guy plans to ask that while he’s on the clock, inches from a microphone. If anything, he’s probably just curious to know why Steve seems grossly obsessed with him.

“I’m at my house, bored out of my mind,” Steve says, parroting Ground Control’s excuse and cringing at how lame it sounds coming from him. “And I thought…”

Except he hadn’t been thinking. This is what Steve gets for cannonballing into everything without a plan.

“Don’t keep us in suspense, Captain.”

“I dunno, I thought if you were bored again, too, but I wasn’t working, you might want my number,” Steve suggests, out of the blue. Without a way of backtracking, he wades in deeper: “My real number.”

In the heavy pause, the song screeches on (I’ve been trying, Lord, let me tell you / let me tell you, I really did the best I could) and frantic, hushed whispering floats over the line. Their tones make it sound like cats hissing back and forth at each other.

Finally, as Steve is deciding between hanging up without explanation or chucking the phone out the window, Ground Control returns. “Yeah, that’s…sure, that might be something I’d be interested in. Are you sure you know what you’re signing yourself up for?”

“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Steve huffs, while not knowing if that is necessarily true. 

Head underwater now, he rattles off the number to him without a second’s hesitation.

 

 

 

JC + CC 4EVER

billy hargrove sucks massive [SCRATCHED OUT]

STEVE HARRINGTON AND NANCY WHEELER AXED BARB HOLLAND

hello? ¿ǝɹǝɥʇ uᴉ ʎpoqʎuɐ ǝɹǝɥʇ sᴉ just nod if you can hear me. ¿ǝɯoɥ ʎpoqʎuɐ ǝɹǝɥʇ sᴉ

GRAFFITI FOUND IN SHUTTERED RADIOSHACK — DATES UNKNOWN

 

 

 

Both of his sexual awakenings had been mortifying.

The first happened at the Montauk Middle pool, in the shallow end, a pair of goggles hanging around his neck and his eyes teary from the thick haze of chlorine. He had made it through the first round of swim team tryouts and was trying his best to pay attention to the coach instructing them on the proper form of a flip turn, but it was his stomach that performed the flip turn as he watched Heather Hollaway, in a red swimsuit, spring off the one meter diving board and perform a perfect one-and-a-half somersault. He popped a boner and didn’t know it until Andy Johnson announced it with a cackle for the whole pool to hear.

Steve dashed into the locker room and shivered under a freezing stream of water for ten minutes, vowing to crush Andy in every race they competed in and to ask Heather Hollaway on a date that very day. She was his middle school sweetheart.

The second awakening happened in the East Hampton High gymnasium during a basketball practice, shirts versus skins. A new year had arrived—1985, why not make it his—and he was done taking shit about his break-up and the imaginary crown he once wore from the likes of Billy Hargrove. 

Billy was mouthing off to him, his sweaty mullet whipping against Steve’s flushed cheek. One minute, Steve was dribbling the ball and grinding his elbow into Billy’s stomach; the next, he was flat on his back, and the room had two ceilings.

His face glossy and golden, Billy loomed over him, sporting a slick smile. He held out his hand. His tongue ran along his bottom lip, and Steve thought he wanted to punch him in the teeth at the same time he wanted that tongue shoved down his throat.

Andy Johnson, playing for Steve’s team, wasn’t paying enough attention to shout out Steve’s boner. Billy didn’t seem to notice it either, too absorbed in his self-admiration. After Steve refused his help, he ruffled Steve’s hair and smoothly rejoined the game. It was Jason Carver, pointedly not looking anywhere near Steve's groin, who tossed him a towel and said nothing while Steve sped towards the locker room.

It took longer to reckon with that awakening. In the months that followed, often at random, he’d remember all the times Tommy Hagan suggested they shotgun and how quick Steve was to say yes. No other guy he smoked with, in the shadows of a party or alone at the edge of his pool, proposed it. Steve hadn’t found the shotgunning strange, but he also never dared suggest it himself. A part of him had known it wasn’t something guys did casually while smoking together, even so-called best friends.

There were the actors he found hot—Patrick Swayze, Robert Redford, Matt Dillon, the list doubled and tripled in size as soon as he realized he had a list. There was the detention he spent distracted by the hands of a guy slumped by the window, his long fingers playing a slow air-guitar. Pieces of evidence were jigsawing into a picture he preferred to ignore, because what did the full picture matter if he still thought about how sweet Heather’s lips tasted when he kissed her after their ice cream date and that he dreamed of Nancy more nights than he didn’t.

Then, the day before the Fourth of July, Heather Holloway and Billy Hargrove walked into Family Video together. Her hair was damp from their shift at the public pool, he hadn’t taken his sunglasses off, and they both stank of sunscreen. He strolled around the store like she wasn’t with him.

“What a dick,” Robin muttered under her breath, but Heather heard it. Heather smiled at her, a little sad, and Robin’s lips parted in surprise. Steve had never seen her tongue-tied, and it clicked for him then, a simple oh, like an exhaled breath of relief, at the discovery he wasn’t alone in the universe.

Billy ended up renting them First Blood. His way of insulting Steve was pretending they had never met before. Ringing him up, Steve wished he had the luxury of forgetting Billy, unaware he’d never see Billy back at Family Video or anywhere around town again. A week later, Steve would have to input the tape into the system as lost.

As Billy peeled off the curb with Heather bracing herself in the passenger seat, Robin flipped off the car. “What a dick,” she repeated at the top of her lungs. “Seriously, how did you survive months of playing basketball with that?”

“No idea,” Steve told her, tearing up the receipt Billy had left behind. “If he wasn’t so hot, I think someone would have strangled him by now.”

Robin stared at him, her eyebrows high. Neither of them said anything. She seemed to be waiting for him to walk it back. Under the counter, he curled his fingers tightly until his nails bit into his palms, but kept his eyes on Robin. He hoped something in them communicated, I trust you enough to see me, even the parts I really don’t want to see myself.

“I don’t find him hot,” Robin said eventually, expression neutral but the tension in her shoulders easing. “I’ll strangle him.”

“Heather would probably thank you.”

With a tiny, dreamy sigh, Robin said, “If only.”

After closing, they broke onto the Family Video roof and watched the fireworks celebration happening over at the beach. They traded off naming actresses they found hot, with Robin tossing in a couple of actors to assess how bad Steve’s taste was, and they continued to slander Billy while plotting ways to break him and Heather up. 

It was probably the last time anyone laughed about Billy Hargrove and Heather Holloway.

 

 

 

I have been asked to comment on whether or not I think secret experiments are being conducted at the supposedly closed air force base at our very own Camp Hero and whether or not I believe these secret experiments are the work of our government colluding with Martians. I am here to say not only do I believe it, one hundred percent, but I have unassailable proof—

[a thud, followed by the sounds of a person imitating gunshot noises; a pained groan; shouted off-mic: “You are such a loser.”]

DARK STAR BROADCAST — OCTOBER 28, ‘85

 

 

 

“I’ve figured it out.”

The television in his room is on, tuned to Channel 7. Ground Control made sure he knew a late-night Twilight Zone block is running tonight, and Steve had been anticipating his call. He’s two episodes deep; currently, a man with coke-bottle glasses is watching in horror as his wife tears apart a treasured book page by page. The TV is the sole source of light, the room awash in a bluish glow like how the ocean looks beneath a full moon.

Steve takes a second hit off his joint and asks, “Figured what out?”

“You wouldn’t be a major or a captain; you’d be a commander,” he advises him. “Commander Steve.”

“Sounds kind of important,” Steve says, blowing a stream of smoke towards his open window. Too important, he adds to himself.

As if he had spoken the thought allowed, Ground Control asserts, “You’re an important guy, commander.”

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

“I serve at the pleasure of the commander,” he says, and Steve would bet the house he’s grinning.

“Do you actually believe in all of it?” Steve asks while watching an H-bomb decimate the world on screen. He shudders with his next drag. “UFOs and all that.”

“You’re asking if I believe in aliens.”

“Yeah.” He nods his head along and keeps nodding it, bobbing like a buoy. It’s been a few months since he last smoked weed; he had to bum this joint from Jonathan.

“Of course I do. What’s not to believe?”

“You don’t find it terrifying, at all, that there could be things out there that make us look like…” On the screen, a bug crawls from the building wreckage. “…cockroaches?”

“I don’t know, man,” he says, heaving a sigh. The sound, and his voice, envelope Steve, not unlike the smoke. “Isn’t it a lot more terrifying to think that in an almost infinite universe we’re completely alone?”

Steve has never thought about it in those terms. “Yeah,” he says, barely rising above a whisper. His vision is blurring. In the twilight zone, the man—the potential last survivor of a nuclear apocalypse—has found a revolver. “I guess it is.”

“Don’t get me wrong, dude, I’m not really sold on the idea that people are being abducted left and right…” He trails off and Steve hears a sound like he’s chewing something, a chain maybe. “Did you know any of them?” he asks, hushed. “Any of the people who’ve disappeared.”

“I knew most of them,” Steve answers, “Some better than others, but…”

It sounds crazy even to him, but that’s how it goes in a small town made smaller by the people who leave after the summer season ends. Ships don’t just pass in the night around Montauk; they sail side by side, they engage in races and battle, they wave white flags, they sail into docks and trade cargo, and some of them crash and go down together. Montauk is famous for their shipwrecks.

“I knew Chrissy Cunningham, sort of,” Ground Control says. His voice wavers, and Steve’s heart launches into his mouth, suddenly afraid to hear about this particular wreck. “We weren’t friends or anything, but right before she—I think she just needed someone who wasn’t her parents or her shitty boyfriend, someone that was totally divorced from the shit she was dealing with, you know. And—” He clears his throat; it’s brutal. “She was supposed to be coming to my place, that night. She knew I had some K, but I was going to try talking her down to smoking some weed. I thought she stood me up, Steve. I swear, I…”

He exhales a shaky breath. This secret must have been hanging around his neck since the night Chrissy went missing. As gently as he can, Steve asks, “Did you tell any of that to the police?”

“Shit, dude, are you kidding? What, I march into the police station and announce that the co-captain of the cheer squad disappeared right before she was about to buy drugs from a community college delinquent? That I was supposed to be the last person who saw her alive? I mean, there’s proof I was at the radio station until after one, but no one knows when she actually disappeared and I’ve got no one to vouch for me until nine the next morning,” he says, hardly stopping to take a breath. “I’m a fucking coward, man, too much of a coward to tell anyone else this. It doesn’t matter if they clear me the day I go in. I won’t be able to stand the way people will look at me.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I’m the reason she was out driving so late,” he snaps. “Christ, she just seemed so…I don’t know, done. I didn’t have any idea how to help her, really. What are the police supposed to do with that now? What are her parents supposed to do with that?”

With a snap, Steve is back in an emptied high school cafeteria, sitting across from Officers Powell and Callahan as they grill him on the party he hosted at his house two nights before, the last place Barb Holland was seen alive. Most of the questions were trying to establish a timeline, but the last inked itself onto his memory permanently. Officer Powell, who never betrayed the amount of judgment Callahan did, asked him, “Did she seem at all depressed to you? Maybe more upset than you would have expected?”

And Steve had said, “I mean, not really. No.”

As if he had any idea.

“What are her parents supposed to do with that,” Steve echoes in the present.

His joint has died. Rod Serling has moved on to another episode in the twilight zone and Steve has missed how the last ended—is there time enough at last?

“Maybe she did run,” Ground Control says, sounding miserable and very small.

“Maybe,” Steve says, and wants more than anything to believe it.

 

 

 

EDDIE MUNSON (DUNGEON MASTER / BELIEVER): You spend your whole life getting called a freak and I don’t think you have a choice whether or not to believe in alien life. Sometimes, all you’ve got is this belief that somewhere out there are other freaks like you. Planets and people who couldn’t give less of a shit if you play fantasy games, or you’re a male of the species who decides to grow your hair out—species that don’t even have that sort of binary, where no one gets called a qu—I don’t know. I just think it would be nice someday, when someone tries to say there’s a right way to do things or a right way to be, to be able to have somewhere in the galaxy to point to and say, “Not here.”

Sorry, is this too dark, man?

THE MONTAUK FILES (WORKING TITLE) — INTERVIEW II — RECORDED OCTOBER 31, ‘85

 

 

 

“Steve, do you copy? Over.”

The crackling summons spooks the dressed-down couple renting Body Double. “Happy Halloween,” Steve tells them with a grimace and, for something like the thirtieth time that night, wishes he were not wearing a tuxedo. The martini glass he has filled with water sitting by the computer sure as hell isn’t making him look suave.

“Steve,” Dustin whines over the walkie. “This is a Code Red! Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve—”

The couple, disturbed in fitting with the holiday, flee the store with their rental and leave Steve to the asshole who has him at his beck and call.

“That’s Agent 007 to you, Special Agent Dickhead,” Steve answers. “What do you want?”

“What do you want, over.”

Steve pinches the bridge of his nose. “Why are you repeating what I just said?”

“Because you have to say ‘over’ when you’re done talking; we’ve been over this!” Dustin shouts. “Over.”

“Whatever you wanted, it’s now a no,” Steve says and skids the walkie to the opposite end of the counter. He misses Robin, but Vickie invited her to a party the Montauk band kids were going to and there was no chance Steve would let her pass that up to spend Halloween at Family Video. No holiday pay and Keith dusted off another bullshit company policy that said employees had to wear a costume. Steve’s life is a series of cosmic jokes.

“Steve, c’mon,” comes Dustin, pushing his luck. “I’ve just had a supermassive breakthrough on how we can isolate the messages the aliens are sending through the airwaves, but I’m not going to be able to bike with all the equipment we need and Jonathan and Nancy and Robin are all at that party and Eddie is still at Dragon’s Lair cleaning up after our session and I know your shift ends in ten minutes, so unless you have some hot Halloween date none of us know about, get your ass over to my house as soon as you clock out. Over.”

Somewhere around aliens, Steve’s soul vacated his body, but as he returns to himself, checking the clock to see Dustin is right and he is ten minutes away from freedom, he reaches the sobering conclusion that Dustin is right about more than the time. Steve could show up at the party, but only to feel like the washout who is always destined to be too small for anywhere but his hometown. The only useful thing he can do tonight is drag himself along on whatever hellish misadventure Dustin has cooked up.

He shuts down the computer, dumps his fake martini, not shaken or stirred, down the drain in the employee bathroom, doesn’t look in the mirror, and clocks out for the night.

Dustin is camped on the front lawn with a hefty duffel bag when Steve pulls up outside his house. “Everyone else is biking there,” he informs him as he heaves the bag into the backseat. He climbs into the passenger side, having to maneuver a long, spindly tail. He’s decked completely in black.

“What are you supposed to be, some kind of ninja?” Steve asks.

“Ninja—I’m clearly the alien from Alien!”

The tail swipes Steve’s forearm as he moves to put the car into drive. “Whatever you say, buddy.”

Dustin directs him to the mouth of Montauk Downs State Park and then instructs him to pull off to the side of the road. “It would look too suspicious parking in the lot,” Dustin gives by way of an explanation, pushing his heavy bag of crap into Steve’s arms. Steve will keel over from shock the day Dustin says either please or thank you.

“Because this isn’t suspicious at all,” he grumbles, locking up the car with limited use of his hands.

The walk, under the cover darkness, dumps them at the first hole of the public golf course. Two Marty McFlys, The Flash, a ghost, and Max are waiting there already, but only Will waves to them with his flashlight beam. Lucas and Mike are busy glaring daggers at each other, the twin costumes not planned. Max is standing off to the side by the heap of bikes, her hands jammed in the pockets of her hoodie. No matter how dark her mood, it’s a relief to see her stick with them.

The ghost—a sheet with two holes for eyes and no mouth—blinks up at Steve when he comes to stand in front of her, hands on his hip. “I’m guessing your dad doesn’t know you’re here.”

El shakes her head, the sheet rippling.

“So, the chief of police is gonna kill me tomorrow. Great, that’s just great.” Steve sighs and tugs his bow tie loose. “Okay, anyone want to explain to me what we’re doing here?”

“Ask him,” Mike says, jutting his chin towards Dustin.

“We”—Dustin pats the duffle still in Steve’s arms—“are reassembling my baby.”

Max wrinkles her nose. “Ew.”

“Your baby—what is your baby?” Steve asks, hefting up the bag. The parts inside jangle. “And why do we have to set it up here?”

As Dustin explains it, his baby is the Cadillac of ham radios, one he invented himself at the nerd camp he went to over the summer. Up until an hour ago, the Cadillac had been languishing in the Henderson's garage, but during a Halloween Dungeons and Dragons session—and Steve tries very hard not to roll his eyes into his skull at this part of the telling—Eddie Munson mentioned how he wished he had a clean copy of the strange message radio-heads like Scott Clarke kept picking up, and that was when the idea struck Dustin like a gamma ray: Cerebro.

“Awesome,” Mike and Lucas exhale together.

The way Dustin sees it, they can use Cerebro to intercept and record the alien’s message while it’s too far away to interfere with any other frequencies.

“Still doesn’t explain why we have to do this here, dude,” Steve says. Sure, the police will have their hands full around East Hampton and Montauk tonight breaking up rowdy teenage parties, but he guesses the course has its own security patrol and he was not kidding about Chief Jim Hopper murdering him if he catches wind that Steve Harrington is signing off on his daughter sneaking out and traipsing around closed public property.

“Higher ground is always better, Steve!” Dustin insists, one of the worst answers he has given in awhile. How fortunate for this kid that Steve’s arms are full with his extra credit science fair project.

“But you know what we’re doing right now is called trespassing and it’s illegal, right?”

“Yes, dad,” the assholes chorus.

And that decides it. On board with Dustin’s plan, the kids begin trekking down the first fairway and towards the highest point of the course, a steep incline around the ninth. Steve follows them at a fair distance, his arms sore and his dignity in tatters. As he walks, he tips his chins toward the sky, following the chart of the stars. What’s Ground Control doing tonight, he wonders. He spent his Monday and Wednesday show exalting Halloween, so he has to have something big planned. Whatever it is, Steve hopes his night has been better than his so far.

Mind in the clouds, Steve misses El sneaking up behind him. When her elbow brushes against his, he jumps, the bag slipping in his grip.

“Sorry,” she says. Her costume is off and bundled in her arms, so Steve can see the stricken look on her face at the fact she had scared him.

“It’s alright,” he assures her. “I promise.”

“Okay,” El says slowly, trying to believe him. 

He and El haven’t spent much time together, what with how little she gets out, and Steve is under the impression she thinks she’s always one misstep away from him taking his friendship away. Steve doesn’t know how to rid her of the misconception except to give it time and just keep being around, the same way he never kicks Max out of Family Video, no matter how many times Keith gets on his ass about letting the kids loiter, and doesn’t say a word about Billy unless she says something first.

Max is up ahead, walking beside Lucas. He’s saying something to her, but she isn’t really listening. Her eyes stray to the towering coniferous trees lining the fairway, staring into the dark.

“You’re blue.”

Steve snaps back to El, who is peering up at him with knitted brows. Really, she isn’t so much looking at him as she is looking at the air surrounding him, like it’s a force field with an electric current only she is able to see.

“Thank—thank you?” Steve replies, though it hadn’t sounded like a compliment. If anything, she seems concerned. Goosebumps rush up his arms, but he tries not to let how unnerved he is show on his face.

“You’re very blue,” she stresses.

With a nervous chuckle, Steve says, “You’re gonna have to help me out here: is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

El frowns. “I don’t know,” she says, hardly reassuring. “It is better than Max.”

Again, Steve glances over at Max and Lucas, who has given up on the one-sided conversation. She has her arms wrapped around herself, and he’s fiddling with a pine cone he must have scooped off the ground. They’re drifting further apart with every step they take, slowly and without meaning for it to happen. The shallow beams of their flashlights point in two different directions.

“What’s she?” Steve asks quietly.

“Black,” El answers, her frown deepening. “Sometimes, I cannot see her.”

Steve has to suck in a breath and remind himself what El is saying is something she’s feeling and not a physical reality. Steve is not glowing blue. Max is not a walking shadow. In her own strange and sweet way, El is recognizing the toll that Billy’s disappearance and her stepdad’s desertion has taken on Max. And with him—

None of this is about him.

“Hurry up!” Dustin calls.

No, none of this is about him. It’s about getting this miniature radio tower set up, so Dustin Henderson can try and fail to contact aliens and Steve can drive back home, burrow himself under his sheets, watch an episode or two of The Twilight Zone if any channel is offering, and eventually succumb to a fitful sleep where he dreams of a planet inhabited by blue people doing their best to muddle through the long, blue days.

Thirty minutes of this never-ending day are spent assembling Cerebro. The thing looks like a hunk of junk to Steve, stuck together by spit, gum, and a dream, but the boys—and El by extension, because she tends to absorb and copy the emotion everyone around her is expressing until she is certain enough to decide for herself—are proud of themselves.

The boys, minus Dustin, become less and less proud over the hour that follows. The radio works, or so Dustin swears, but it has yet to pick up any rogue alien broadcasts. The closest they get is butting in on a police radio. Will, who had been instructed to film the entire endeavor, finally calls it quits at a quarter past eleven.

The temperature has dipped under fifty, and Steve’s patience has worn as thin as the line Max has pressed her lips into. He doesn’t know if she’s about to explode or implode, or if there’s much of a difference, but he doesn’t think the boys or El are prepared for either scenario. 

Steve claps them to attention. “Okay, time to wrap it up.”

“But—”

Dustin is shut down by a torrential downpour of boo’s.

“It’s about trial and error, Steve,” Dustin rants to him on the way back to the car, Steve once again lugging Cerebro. “Tomorrow night, I’m gonna start a list of all the frequencies we try and—”

“Get Jonathan to take you tomorrow night,” Steve snaps, exhausted enough not to pull his punches. “Better yet, get your best friend, Eddie Munson, to do it.”

“Eddie is never free Friday nights,” Dustin informs him, like it’s something Steve cares to know. If Dustin is trying to insinuate Eddie is taking out hot singles in their area every Friday night and it should be a wake-up call for Steve, he is months too late ringing that alarm.

Steve drops off Dustin and the Cadillac of ham radios and then has a decision to make. Midnight hasn’t struck yet. Every teenager not searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe is raging at the party Robin begged him to swing by, but Steve was evasive with her, worried about cramping her style. If junior-year Steve could hear himself now, anxious about making a band nerd look uncool.

If junior-year Steve were here right now, current Steve wouldn’t hesitate to knock him to the ground, same as Jonathan Byers did.

His subconscious reaches a decision for him because he finds himself driving down Benson. Through the cracked-open window, music floats in, a charting pop song he sometimes hears out of the jukebox at Benny’s. Steve is realizing, with how little he listens to the radio outside of Dark Star, his music taste has subtly shifted. Whatever gumball of a song this is, it bores him.

The party has spilled into the yard by the time Steve reaches it. He slows to a crawl, feeling like an undercover cop, and understands immediately he won’t stay. On the front steps, a boy and a girl are in quiet conversation, his jean jacket hanging off her shoulders. He reaches over to brush a strand of hair from her forehead and lingers, twisting it around his index finger, his knuckles skimming over her cheek. Steve loves that move; Nancy used to look up at him with starlight in her eyes, like that one little strand of hair had eclipsed her view, but now she was seeing him bright and clear.

Witnessing the move here, between two people not more than a year younger than him, Steve somehow feels like a space traveler who has returned to earth to discover what had been a few months for him had been decades for the world. Everything moved on without him, and he’s left to stare through the windshield, wondering where there is somewhere left to fit in. How does someone become a fossil without knowing it?

Steve keeps driving, at a slow and punishing pace, and notices a van parked a few yards away under the cover of an oak tree. The van’s back doors are open, light beaming out, and people are buzzing around it like flies drawn to a screen door. A guy is perched on the van’s floor, one knee tucked to his chest and his other leg dangling. The green jumpsuit he’s wearing is tied at the waist, revealing a wife-beater purposefully dirtied on top. Nestled in his arm, as if it were real, is a stuffed ginger cat. The guy’s dealing, but that’s somehow the least interesting thing about him.

His car inches closer to the van. It sends one drunk kid scurrying off, afraid of a bust. The eagle-eyed dealer notices and drags his eyes slowly over to Steve. Even staring into the headlights, the guy seems to see him. He lifts his hand and waves, his mouth tugging up and left.

Instead of waving back, Steve presses his foot to the gas. His nerves are shot.

He drives, and drives, and drives. Growing up, Steve thought of Montauk as endless, but it isn’t and never was. Montauk is the tiny tip of an island that is a speck off the coast of a giant country Steve has seen nothing of. There are days he thinks about blowing past the town line, driving straight over a bridge to take him to the mainland, west to Illinois, further to Colorado, onward to California until he arrives at a different coast, warmer waters. 

But if it’s really so easy to keep driving, why does he always turn around? He ends up back at the lighthouse, thinking that what would be easier is crashing his car into this old familiar ocean.

“I don’t know / I’m not cryin’,” the radio sings, “Laughin’ mostly / as you can see.”

Steve laughs wetly and turns around. Can’t go one way, but can’t go the other.

At home, Steve creeps through the hallway just to be halted by two distinct sounds: a ringing phone and the voice of his mother. “Tell whoever it is, they cannot be calling you this late,” she mumbles, half-asleep, but in her tone is the threat of a continued conversation tomorrow morning.

Steve grabs the phone and carries it into his en suite, closing the door on the cord.

“Hello?” he whispers into the receiver.

“Are you hiding from a rogue alien, Commander Steve?”

Steve chews the inside of his cheek, holding back his smile. He had been harboring a fear that after their last conversation Ground Control wouldn’t call again. “No, but you’ve seriously pissed off my parents.”

“I’m known to make really bad first impressions,” Ground Control concedes, “but I grow on people.”

“Like a parasite?”

“Ouch.”

“Did you have a show tonight I didn’t know about?” Steve asks, because they haven’t done away with the excuse that they’re calling around his show schedule.

“Nope, I had—uh, doesn’t matter,” he says, managing to be both casual and cagey. Steve bites his tongue before he says something as thrillingly stupid as whatever it is, it matters to me. “Much more importantly, for the next…” He trails off, probably to consult a clock. “…two minutes, it’s still my birthday.”

Steve shoots up from his slouch against the tub. “Your birthday is Halloween?”

“I can’t say my mother planned it, but pretty fitting, right?”

“Why didn’t you say anything during one of your shows?”

Ground Control snorts. “No one cares about Houston’s birthday.”

For a guy who seems so smart on the air, Ground Control is wrong about some pretty basic shit. Or, more likely, Steve is the one who’s wrong. Former popular kids sometimes need reminding that what they care about isn’t what the whole wide world cares about.

“Happy Birthday, Houston,” Steve says, cradling the phone with both his hands, pressing it hard enough against his ear to leave an indent.

“Thanks, Commander Steve.”

“Did you wish for anything?”

A pause, in it the soothing hum of static and their breathing, and Steve thinks this is what holding your ear to a conch shell should sound like.

“Yeah,” he finally answers but says nothing further.

“And?”

“Rule number one of wishes, commander: say them out loud and they don’t come true.”

 

 

 

On October 31st at 11:49 PM, village police received several noise complaints from residents on Benson Dr. Officers dispatched broke up a party. Three teenagers were apprehended; dozens more were seen fleeing on foot. The possibility of underage drinking and use of illegal substances is currently being reviewed.

On November 1st at 2:37AM, an officer responded to a report of trespassing at Camp Hero State Park. No persons were found on the property.

VILLAGE POLICE BLOTTER — OCTOBER 31 / NOVEMBER 1, ‘85

 

 

 

Just past midnight, a girl sneaks back through her bedroom window. She slips out the walkie hidden beneath her bed and whispers into it, “Home.” Before she climbs into bed, she unravels her braids. They’re a dead giveaway, a phrase she has learned means her dad will deduce she snuck out. She doesn’t know how to braid hair.

Her dad will find out, just not tonight. He’s at the station on call. Another phrase with a real definition, but to her just means anyone can take him away whenever they want.

As the chief, he’ll be the one who sends Callahan to check out the trespassing tip at Camp Hero. Callahan will miss the red puffy vest, abandoned under a picnic table.

The borrower of the red vest ran from the party, purposefully in the opposite direction as his friends. Jason and Andy, along with whoever is hanging on, will regroup at the closed RadioShack on East Lake and booze until dawn. They’ll end up sleeping through first period—(he knew that and it’s why he ran away from them; he’ll never be vindicated)—and arrive at school late for the third. It will not strike them as weird he never shows.

He has to sober up and that’s why he wanders down Old Montauk Highway and into the state park. His dad has been riding his ass worse than usual lately. The walk is hard on his sore ribs, and he assumes the walk back home will be brutal. He picks a picnic table by a shadowy willow tree and shucks off Jason’s dorky vest. If he had a mirror, he’d say his reflection now looks less like an amateur time traveler and more like a lame suburban dad. Someone else’s lame, good suburban dad.

Not far from the state park, in the double-wide, another boy without a good ol' suburban dad is still on the phone. His uncle will chide him for racking up a hell of a phone bill, but he’s on a holy roll telling the boy on the other end of the line why he’s a cockroach who will survive the impending apocalypse. And the boy is laughing. With him, not at him. Because of him. Steve Harrington is laughing, and it’s Eddie Munson’s favorite sound in the whole world even though he’s a goddamn musician.

Patrick McKinney is not a musician, but he knows a thing or two about cockroaches. He was a bug kid. Outside existed a sanctuary he shared with hundreds of species of crawling creatures, and he wanted to be on a first name basis with all of them. Hands caked in dirt, surrounded by mason jars his mom washed out for him, he studied everything from ladybugs to fireflies, ants to daddy long legs.

Worms were his favorite. After rainstorms, he ferried any he could find from the pavement back home to the dirt. He liked the idea that a worm could have its tail chopped off and be able to regenerate a new one. It made him think about what he could survive, what he could lose, how much he could hurt, and still come back together whole.

He isn’t thinking about worms at two in the morning in the lonesome quiet of the state park, the old radar tower looming large above him and not more than a quarter mile away. No, what he’s thinking about is his father.

In the morning, his father will be the one to phone the police, wanting to know where his no-good son is. He’ll be assuming Patrick got collared at the busted Halloween party. The woman who answers the phone will be a little impatient, almost at the end of her rope, because the station will have been flooded with calls all morning. Another blackout. Isn’t it a crime at this point, the town criers will say, is it too much to ask for a little bit of reliability?

The blackout ends Steve and Eddie’s night call.

For Patrick, there is no blackout. His night sky is nothing but light.

Notes:

apologies in advance for the approximately one million notes i have for this chapter:

1) Songs referenced in this music-heavy chapter: “Space Oddity” by David Bowie, “Captain Jack” by Billy Joel, “Midnight Special” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “You’d Be Thinking of Me” by Shirley & Lee, “What Is Life” by George Harrison, “Starman” by Bowie, “Since I’ve Been Loving You” by Led Zeppelin, “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd, and “What’s Happening?!?!” by The Byrds.

2) The hurricane referenced a few times in this chapter is Hurricane Gloria, which hit Long Island on September 27, 1985. The island’s power wasn’t fully restored until October 8, thus the pointed disgruntlement with the Long Island Lighting Company (a company already notorious for having some of the highest rates in the country).

3) The Benny’s Burger House here is based on a real Montauk mainstay, Anthony’s Pancake House. Alas, I do not know if Montauk ever had a video rental store in town.

4) The Twilight Zone: The Movie came out in 1983 and the revival series began airing in the fall of 1985 (with the first episode directed by Wes Craven!) but owing to Eddie’s gentle bullying, Steve is watching the original series. Thanks to my mom for verifying how kids in the 80s watched the original. Who needs Google, amiright?

5) In my initial brainstorming for this fic, I planned to set it around Halloween, partly to torture Eddie with Steve running around in a tuxedo. The timeline eventually shifted, but I wanted to keep a little Bond!Steve action. And Steve doesn’t know it, because he has some massive cultural blind spots, but Eddie is dressed as Ripley from Alien.

6) Did Eddie see Steve drive by the party, watch him pull away, jump into his van, and speed back to his place just so he could call him? Who is to say.

Thank you so much for reading. See you around the skies next Sunday or, if you're heading that way, I can also be found nancywheeeler on tumblr.

Chapter 3: november // the encounter

Summary:

The documentary picks up steam, Steve dispenses some relationship advice, and the kids stage a risky break-in.

 

 

 

BE ADVISED: The Mayor’s Office, in conjunction with the East Hampton Police Department, has announced a new curfew of 8 P.M. for persons under the age of 18 in East Hampton and Montauk village. Parents and guardians are advised to have their children accounted for and within their homes by this time. Anyone found in violation of the curfew could be subject to fines. Please contact the East Hampton Police Department with questions or inquiries concerning possible exemptions.

PUBLISHED IN THE EAST HAMPTON STAR — NOVEMBER 4, ‘85

 

 

 

Dustin has a girlfriend. Allegedly.

He picked her up with his Cadillac. Since the town curfew nixed any future trips to the golf course, Dustin had to settle for reassembling Cerebro in his backyard, and, on his first night scanning frequencies solo, he apparently stumbled on signs of intelligent life. The only problem (though not as Steve sees it) is the intelligent life form is very human, very female, and an off-the-charts nerd.

The actual problem is Dustin has not told Steve any of this himself. His protege has been clandestinely calling a girl, sweet talking her with science, and convincing her to join his hunt for UFOs, but Steve has had to hear about this momentous shift in Dustin's love life through the second-hand accounts of Mike Wheeler and Lucas Sinclair. It’s insulting.

“I’ve given the kid all my best moves,” Steve rants, pacing as far as the phone cord tether allowed, “and this is how I’m being paid back?”

“Are you seriously complaining because a fourteen-year-old isn’t giving you the play-by-play of how they’re playing tonsil hockey with another fourteen-year-old?” Ground Control asks, unsympathetic to his plight.

“Gross, dude, they’re not playing tonsil hockey," Steve snaps, shuddering at the image Ground Control beamed into his head. "They’ve never even seen each other. It’s all through his…super radio thing.”

Twist his arm hard enough, and Steve will admit it’s cute. It reminds him a bit of the advertisements people place in the personal section of a newspaper, relationships acquired long-distance. And if love is possible through paper and ink, why can’t it be found over radio waves or the wires strung between telephone poles?

“If he’s never seen her, how does he know she’s actually a cute girl his age?” Ground Control questions. “This girl could actually be a middle-age trucker named Frank who happened to be driving by on the I-95.” 

“No way, she’s definitely real,” Steve says, though it's not like he has any solid evidence to prove it himself. “Her name is Suzie.”

“Sounds exactly like a name trucker Frank would pick.”

Steve rolls his eyes and nods a welcome at a blonde strolling into the store. She smiles at him, slow and suggestive, and it takes Steve a second to understand why. The blonde thinks his smile at Ground Control’s joke had been for her.

Wiping the grin off his face, Steve ducks behind the computer and mimes inputting an important order. Once she disappears into the romance aisle, Steve lowers his volume to say, “I just don’t get why he doesn’t want me to know.”

“I don’t think it’s that he doesn’t want you to know,” Ground Control says. “This kid, he—he seems like he idolizes you, man. Maybe he just wants to make sure it’s real and not completely in his head before he tells you.”

While Steve is not sold on idolization, waiting until it feels real makes sense to him. If not for an on-going harassment campaign, Steve would never tell Dustin or Robin about a new date or his subsequent failures to book a second. “You’re probably right,” he admits.

“Fuck, can you call in and repeat that live on the show later?”

“In your dreams.”

“In whose dreams?”

Steve slams his elbow on the space bar. The computer releases an obnoxious error noise, but the blonde, now waiting at the counter with a tape, continues to smile like Steve hasn’t made a giant ass of himself. “Hold on,” Steve whispers into the phone and leaves it face down next to the computer. “Uh, in my dreams, because I was dreaming of someone exactly like you coming in to rent…” He peers at the tape upside down. “…The Slumber Party Massacre.”

“Rent it before the PTA bans it, right?” she asks, giggling. The laugh is too put-on, overtly flirtatious. If they go out, she’ll fake a laugh at all his jokes and he’ll never know what her real sense of humor is, if she has one.

“Right,” Steve echoes and dials down the charm.

He rings her up quickly. As he hands her the receipt, the due back date circled in blue, she glances at the bottom where the fine print directs customer inquiries to the store phone and asks, “Is this your number, too?” Her eyes flicker to the phone in a coy way that suggests, I know your secret.

“Just the store number,” Steve says, shrugging with one shoulder. “You’re gonna get whoever is working.”

The twinkle in her smile fades. In her face, he sees the question of what the hell is the matter with him. If she’s after an honest answer, she’ll first have to let him know how much time she has to spare.

The door sinks shut behind her as Steve exhales a long sigh. The missing posters are gone now; Patrick McKinney never got one. They’ve been replaced by a poster of boldfaced text, requesting any information regarding the recent disappearances be directed to the East Hampton Police tip line. It’s only a matter of time, his father has been saying, before the FBI will have to be brought in. Clean up after Chief Hopper’s incompetence.

Steve sighs again and picks up the phone.

“Sorry, someone came into the—”

But he’s talking to the dial tone. Ground Control hung up.

 

 

 

M. BAUMAN: What you’ve got to understand, Houston and all your listeners out there, is that behind every hoax, there’s still an element of the strange. Every ten years or so you get a new crackpot on the scene proclaiming something like a naval base in Philly successfully made a ship disappear. And not just disappear—teleport! Crew going bananas, sailors with their hands embedded in the ship walls. It’s ludicrous, right? But these theories, they bubble up because there are cracks. The public, we don’t get to know what actual experiments our military is conducting, oh no. Every page out of the CIA, redacted, redacted, redacted. Look at your own Camp Hero. It’s been closed for four years now and people are talking about armed security hanging around. Men in black types.

Five kids disappear in under four months. High security presence no one’s got an explanation for. Cracks, my friend. Cracks.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — NOVEMBER 8, ‘85

 

 

 

A cop car is parked outside Family Video. Not just any old cop car either but the chief’s. The big man himself is leaning against the bumper, already halfway through a cigarette because he sucks down nicotine like a kid slurps down a slushie.

Steve freezes in the center of the comedy aisle, the faces of Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy laughing at him and his imminent demise. Not too late to clock back in and ask Keith for a double, but Too Much Aftershave Tom must be getting a jump-start on his ‘86 resolutions by showing up to his shift early. He’s slouching behind the counter, reeking of a hangover and watching Pete’s Dragon with a slack jaw.

Also behind the counter inputting returns, Robin meets Steve’s eyes and mouths, “Sorry.”

She’ll be the one giving his eulogy.

“Try to find my body,” he requests on his way out.

Robin salutes him with two fingers and returns to the movie, where Helen Reddy is pining away for her lost sailor and serenading the sea. The song follows Steve out the door, to an uncharacteristically patient Hopper.

“C’mon kid, let’s go to Shagwong. We gotta talk.” Hopper stamps out his cigarette with the heel of his boot, giving the statement a hard period, no room for argument.

Steve tails his car to the tavern, keeping the radio off because if he has to focus on two things at once, he’ll plow into a telephone pole. Hopper hadn't seemed pissed, just serious. Steve isn’t sure he likes that much better. A pissed off Hopper, Steve can weather; it’s yelling, and blowing steam, and spraying spit across the room. The chief broke up enough of his parties and reamed him out for enough foolish shit that Steve knows how to steel himself for his boiling red face of fury. A serious Hopper, now that Steve has no clue what to do with.

And no time to figure it out. Shagwong is a two-stone skip from Family Video. Steve pulls alongside the curb, parking behind Hopper and parallel to a neon sign advertising seafood. The thought of fish right now turns his stomach.

Though three in the afternoon on a Sunday, the bar is packed with locals. Shagwong is the last tavern for the old mariners of Montauk, a place that has been on the block so long its nautical decor comes off as authentic and not a lobster trap designed for catching hokey tourists. Hopper has three mounted swordfish to choose from if he’s looking to skewer Steve, and that’s not even taking into account the harpoon gun.

Hopper bypasses the gun and commandeers one of the last two stools at the bar. With his entrance, the conversational buzz around the room dips. The whiskered man to his right, three-fourths of the way through his pint and finished with whatever had been in a rocks glass, shoots Hopper a hard side-eye before angling his body away, a cold shoulder below freezing.

The bartender is not as inclined to freeze Hopper out. While Steve takes a cautious seat on the last stool standing, the bartender begins pouring Hopper a beer from the tap.

“Want anything?” the bartender asks Steve after setting the frothing glass in front of Hopper.

“I’m not—”

“Let me get you a drink, kid,” Hopper says, nodding at the bartender.

The guy goes to pour the second pint, officially an accessory to the chief of police’s crime. He has ten years on Steve, easy, so he may have willfully forgotten the drinking age is not eighteen anymore. And once upon a time, it might have been Steve in his shoes. Around June, he had filled out an application to work at Shagwong after learning you had to be twenty-one to drink liquor but not to serve it, but never sent it in after considering if he wanted to be the guy carding his old basketball buds and cutting them off from the tap. He already felt like enough of a loser, why add the charge of narc?

But if Hopper is buying, Steve won’t say a word. He takes his first sip, tasting the grit of foam, and waits for Hopper to rake him over the coals.

“You doing okay?”

Steve freezes with the back of his hand over his mouth. His eyes shoot to Hopper, who looks back at Steve with a genuine and unguarded concern. His frown lines are pronounced, the bags under his eyes more so. He has to be working nights, doubles and triples, shifts where he glances up at the clock and discovers five hours have passed since he last blinked his bloodshot eyes. He’s drowning himself at the bottom of the ocean, swimming up long enough to force one shallow breath into his lungs before diving back down again, but, for reasons unknown, he’s finding time to worry about Steve.

“Yeah, I’m…I’m fine. I’m…”

“Anniversary was two days ago,” Hopper says simply, like it’s not something everyone else has marked off with yellow tape. Go no further, never speak of what happened here. It drove Nancy crazy. It drives Steve—

Something. It does something to his chest, rattling like he has a build up of fluid in his lungs. Despite how his breathing is quickening, Steve takes a longer pull from his beer. He tried smoking out the feeling last night, but maybe he’d have better luck drowning it. He wishes Hopper had a stronger usual—bourbon, gin, lighter fluid.

Hopper is eyeing him warily when he puts down the drink, drained by a half.

“Is there anything you can tell me?” Steve asks, just shy of begging. “Like, anything at all.”

What he's after is the informational equivalent of a sedative. Something, anything to help him sleep at night, two years on.

Hopper contemplates the glass he hasn't touched. “There’s a lot of things you don’t understand, kid,” he says. Steve bites his tongue to avoid spitting out a bitter no shit. “There’s a lot we still don’t understand either. But it probably would have happened if she left your house two hours earlier. It probably would have happened if she left your house two hours later. It might have even happened the night after.”

Bringing his voice down to a whisper, Steve asks, “So, you think someone was, like, stalking her, maybe? Her specifically?”

With a tired sigh, Hopper repeats, “There’s a lot we don’t understand."

It's terrifying. So terrifying, Steve glances around the room to see if anyone else is hearing what he’s hearing, is waking up to what Steve is waking up to. Adults do not have all the answers, even the ones other adults have slapped shiny silver badges on that say they enforce the law, a law that exists because at some point someone had to have answers for how to keep the world from killing itself. Was answer key lost somewhere back in history? Or have people stopped caring enough to go out and find more answers for themselves?

No one else in the bar looks shell-shocked. Only Steve, the naive kid.

Though at nineteen, the town doesn’t consider him a kid anymore. Of all his friends, Steve is the only one allowed out after dark.

“Okay,” is all Steve says. He finishes another fourth of his drink.

“That means you have to keep that brat pack out of trouble,” Hopper says. A smile peeks out from beneath his mustache. “Especially Dustin Henderson.”

Steve huffs. “Pretty tall order, chief.”

“If anyone can do it…” Hopper claps him between the shoulder blades, and it feels like a pitiful deputization. Steve Harrington, East Hampton PD, special babysitting unit. He’s had the position unofficially for a year now, if Hopper is persuasive to forking up back pay.

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will.”

Hopper moves the hand resting on his back to his shoulder, squeezing once. Steve hates him for that, just a little. Hates how he took his disappointment in Steve for chaperoning his daughter and her friends on their late-night escapades and channeled it into a beer-soaked guilt trip, baiting Steve hook, line, and sinker. Hates how Hopper senses he’s got daddy issues longer than Long Island. Hates how Hopper knows Steve needs to hear he has faith in him even though he shouldn’t, like a dog who has yet to learn how to sit or stay but receives a pat on the head anyway. Because maybe one day, if he’s told he’s a good boy enough times, the dog will learn.

Steve drains the last sip of his police-sanctioned beer, chokes down the last of the grit.

Going to polish off his drink, Hopper is interrupted by an empty glass slammed down beside his elbow. A man near Hopper’s age and roughly matching him in weight looms over him. “Thought I’d do for you what you’re doing for the town,” he says. “Nothing.”

The drunk in the stool next to Hopper chortles wryly.

Without a word, Hopper finishes his drink and sets the empty glass by the one the man presented him. Fishing out his wallet, he takes out a twenty and slides it across the counter. “For me, the kid, and whatever Danny was having,” he tells the bartender.

The man with the glass of nothing flares his nostrils.

Hopper stands, signaling their afternoon happy hour is over. Steve trails him out of the tavern, waiting until the door sinks shut to ask, “You’re just gonna let that asshole talk to you like that?”

“It’s always been a thankless job. It was a thankless job when all I had to worry about was rogue seagull attacks and it’s going to be a thankless job until they kick me out on my ass, probably in a few weeks from now.” Hopper lights up a new cigarette. Blowing out a puff of smoke, he looks Steve dead in the eyes and says, “But it was a lot more thankless when I didn’t give a shit about it.”

There’s no exit wound from that parting shot, and Steve drives home with the bullet buried between his ribs. Wanting out his head, buzzing but not drunk, he fumbles with the tapes jumbled in the glove compartment. Shagwong always has him thinking of the Stones, so he settles on the first flash of Mick he sees.

The tape’s not rewound, left off in the middle of a slow song. “You're just a memory of a love,” Jagger croons, “that used to mean so much to me.”

“She’s got a mind of her own.” Steve speaks the lyric over the tape, grip tightening on the steering wheel. He turns onto his street, cruising past the neighboring houses with their Cape Cod shingling and wide windows that followed the car like watchful eyes. It has never made sense to him how someone could disappear in plain sight of so many windows. Not unless they were driving away on their own.

In his room, the curtains drawn shut to close off the view of the pool, Steve dials an old and familiar number.

The call connects on the third ring. “Hello, Wheeler residence.”

“Hey, Mrs. Wheeler. It’s Steve.”

“Steve, sweetheart, how are you?” Even a year after the break-up, Mrs. Wheeler always sounds happy to hear from him. “Are you looking to talk to Mike?”

Steve winces. “I was actually wondering if Nancy was there.”

“She should be. Just give me one second.” Her voice echoes as she calls up the stairs, “Nance, phone’s for you!”

“Hello?” she answers, a little breathy. It sets off an old ache in Steve. Every time she used to answer his phone calls out of breath, Steve liked to think it was because she had rushed to pick up the phone, desperate to hear his voice.

“Hey, it’s…” He clears his throat. “It’s Steve.”

“Oh,” she says. He tries not to hear it, the disappointment. “Hey, is everything okay?”

“You kinda stole my line. I was actually calling to ask you that,” Steve says. “Are you doing okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m…” She pauses, inhales. “Good. I’m good.”

He listens from the catch in her voice and finds it. Of course she remembers the anniversary, and he should have called last year, but the scab of their breakup was too fresh as was the dirt on the grave of Dustin’s cat and he thought he was laying one more thing to rest. They’re alike, more alike than Steve realized while they were dating. He and Nancy will soldier through anything. She’s better at pushing back when she comes up against resistance, his own weakness; he’s better at throwing up a false front while he’s in the process of building the real one, and that's hers.

“Is that all you called for?” Nancy asks gently.

“Yeah,” Steve answers, and it really is. “I’ll let you get back to whatever town-rocking article you’re writing.”

“It’s a doozy,” she promises, and Steve picks out her smile.

“Good night, Nance.”

“Good night,” she says. “And Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for asking.”

Steve holds the phone to his ear for a long minute after, listening to the dial tone drone. His first instinct is to call Ground Control, but he isn’t at the station on Sundays and has never given Steve another number where he can reach him. He hangs up the phone.

The setting sun is slipping through the crack in his curtains. It’s barely past four. Peeking out of his backpack, discarded by the door, is his walkie-talkie, antenna halfway up just in case. Steve snatches the bag and dumps it on his bed, bringing the antenna to full mast. 

“Hey, paging lieutenant asshole.” He takes his finger off the call button, then remembers, “Over.”

Five minutes pass, no answer.

“What happened to the rule to always have your walkie on you at all times,” Steve asks. “Over.”

Another five minutes go by before Steve remembers what Sunday also means. In light of the curfew, Eddie Munson offered to host his Dungeons and Dickheads campaign on weekends rather than after school, and the kids acted like he had single-handedly solved world hunger and the case of the Zodiac Killer. Steve tosses the walkie onto his pillows and falls back on his bed, groaning at the ceiling. His emergency of boredom should take precedence over Eddie Munson’s fake dragon quest, even if encouraging the kids to spend an entire afternoon locked in a sweaty, stinky basement rolling a bunch of pointy dice is probably what Hopper meant by keeping them out of trouble.

He’s not being replaced—which should be Steve’s daily affirmation at this point. While pathetic, at least it’s the truth. Eddie Munson will have to ruin a Members Only jacket carrying the corpse of a cat two miles down the beach before he can claim custody of Dustin Henderson.

 

 

 

A NEW WAVE OF CENSORSHIP THREATENS TO HIT MONTAUK
Local library and video store are facing mounting pressure to remove Stephen King and other horror titles from the shelves
by Nancy Wheeler

 

 

 

First rule of cat hunting: best not to call it cat hunting. Might give people the wrong idea.

The second rule of cat hunting: bring a baseball bat.

At Dustin Henderson’s suggestion, Steve had dug one out of a crawl space in the garage, the bat undersized from his time in the pee-wee leagues. Dustin hadn’t been impressed. Steve snapped it was as good as he was going to get, then hustled the toothless, spitfire kid towards the car like this was their regular Saturday shtick.

It might have been because of the speckled blood on the tiny cat collar Dustin gripped like a security blanket, or it might have been because when he interrupted Dustin laying out the clues he had collected thus far in the fashion of an old-school private eye to ask why him, Dustin answered, "Mike said you aren’t that big of a douche.”

“Fantastic,” Steve muttered at having earned the Mike Wheeler seal of approval.

But really, it had been because of a look Dustin gave him when he thought Steve had his eyes on the road. He saw something in Dustin’s face he recognized, a green tinge of envy muddling with a light shade of the blues to form a pretty, petty aquamarine. His own face must have been slathered with the color whenever Tommy H bragged about the fake ID his brother got him or Carol bitched about her younger sister stealing a pair of pumps. The feeling came to a rolling boil anytime an only child was reminded everyone else’s family team had a much deeper bench than theirs.

Steve hadn’t planned on ditching the kid missing his four-legged best friend, but he thought he’d give him an hour max, maybe an extra half to buy ice cream when their search came up with squat. After seeing that look though, he arrived at the unconscious decision to stay as long as it took.

Three hours later, walking up and down the thin and rocky beach of Culloden Point, Steve had learned a number of things about Dustin. Mainly, that he was a dick. The good kind of dick—short-tempered but with a big bark and not a strong bite, stubborn as hell even when no one was fighting him on anything, thoughtless at times but willing to apologize after a smack upside the head, and a tendency to act on everything from the heart.

To this day, Dustin would say brain, not heart. Steve knows better.

(“You like people who are kinda mean,” Ground Control once observed after Steve got through spinning a Robin story from over the summer.

“Is that a bad thing?” Steve asked, his worry genuine. He had a fear, sometimes, that if he began backsliding into King Steve, no one would tell him. They’d just stop answering his calls.

“It would be pretty hypocritical if I said yes.”)

Dustin likes his people mean, too, because he likes Steve, and he likes Robin, and he likes Eddie Munson (who Steve assumes is a bastard, sight unseen), and, on hour four into the cat hunt, he confided in Steve about his crush on the new girl in town, Max Mayfield.

“But she likes Lucas.”

He said it to the cliff face, his lower lip trembling. Steve opened his mouth but stopped short of saying what he and Tommy would tell each other in the days before Carol and Nancy, when freshman year relationships fizzled or the girls they were interested in wanted someone else. Plenty of other girls on the island, as if love came in models like cars did and you could trade in any time.

Instead, Steve thought of what he’d want someone to say to him at that moment, going on three days since Nancy Wheeler broke his heart.

“That really fucking sucks, bud.”

Dustin’s glossy cow eyes shot to him in surprise, and Steve worried he had gotten it wrong. Maybe Dustin wanted him to say it was Lucas who sucked, or he shouldn’t give up trying to change her mind, or here were ten tips to wooing a girl, patent-pending. Then, Dustin smiled, bright and with a flash of gums. “Hey, since we’re both single—”

“I’m gonna stop you right there.”

The search for Mews ended in the untamed dunes bordering the Wills Point cul-de-sac. Steve saw blood sprayed in the grass and told Dustin not to look. Defiant, Dustin looked anyway, his weapon—a shovel with a dirt-encrusted hilt—raised, but the slayer had high-tailed it, leaving behind a tiny trail of blood. Dustin insisted they follow it.

Quiet tears poured down Dustin’s face during that short hunt for the killer, but Steve said nothing about it because that was what he would have wanted an older brother to do for him. Dustin kept his chin up the whole time, even though he had just received an up close and personal lesson about the circle of life, and the universe had decided to make the example his cat. Around that point, Steve decided he’d do anything for him.

The strange thing was not that they never found the animal that killed Mews. Steve considered that a lost cause the second Dustin asked him about a baseball bat.

The strange thing was how abruptly the blood trail ended. In the middle of the road, no sign that the animal had been struck by an on-coming car—there were pitter-patters of drying blood until suddenly there weren’t. A hawk swooped in, Steve figured, or the animal ran out of blood to drip. Weirder things happened in nature every day.

Dustin arrived at an altogether different conclusion, and it haunts Steve to this day.

Aliens, Steve. Aliens.

 

 

 

GROUND CONTROL: We have an incoming status report from one of our most intrepid explorers, Commander Steve.

COMMANDER STEVE: Everything is a-okay out here. Very, uh…blue? I was wondering if you could find it in yourself to play Starman by Bowie.

GC: You know, for someone who doesn’t believe in life on Mars, you have a very galactic music taste, commander.

CMDR. STEVE: Yeah, well, someone told me it’d be pretty terrifying to live in a universe where we’re completely alone and I might be coming around. [pause] Since you’re, like, Ground Control and it’s your whole job to…warn us…you’d say if something went wrong over here, right? No wires have been crossed or…

GC: Nothing’s gone wrong, Houston’s honor. [indistinct voice off-mic] Nothing’s wrong for anyone joining us tonight! Thanks for the request, commander. Let’s put that on now, right now.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — NOVEMBER 13, ‘85

 

 

 

The Montauk Public Library is housed in a one-story cottage a hairpin turn off the old highway, as Steve learns when Dustin demands he chaperone a weekday field trip.

Steve regrets asking why. 

“Every good documentary needs research, Steve,” Dustin informs him like he’s the foremost expert. “Eddie thinks we should look more into Camp Hero. He said he’s seen men in black guarding the base.” Dustin says men in black as if it should mean something to Steve. Metalheads walk around town in all black every day. Are they worth a trip to the library?

The library board must have slipped some cash under the table to pass a fire and safety inspection because there is hardly room to walk through the door. Every wall is lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed to capacity and then some. Where once stood a quaint kitchen, there is now a reference room with overflowing shelves of thick textbooks, sheaves of paper, and two bursting filing boxes archived with old East Hampton Star issues. The sole holdout of the cottage days is a small brick fireplace fashioned into a children’s reading nook. Steve takes a seat in one of the miniature arm chairs, stitched to resemble a teddy bear, and feels like a life-sized GI Joe action figure someone shoved into a dollhouse.

The librarian on duty eyes him curiously from behind her thick frames. The desk she sits behind is one in name only, two wooden tables shoved together in a right angle, one in use for her work and the other sustaining the weight of two hulking computers. Lucas is on one, Max hovering at his shoulder, though her eyes are not on the monitor.

She is staring at the window, itself cut in half by a shelf of books and, hanging below the shelf, a paper collection of dangling stars. Her unfixed gaze is trained on one of the stars, spinning slowly on its string like a statuette in a music box. Sensing someone staring, Max snaps her watery eyes to Steve. 

He grapples for the nearest thing he can bury his nose in and winds up with a copy of Highlights magazine, the cover hosting a marching band of animated pets on parade. Listen, he may have dressed up as a spy extraordinaire last month, but espionage is not his strong suit.

Her irritation visceral, but instead of unleashing it on him, Max chooses the closer target. Whatever she snaps at Lucas, it confuses him enough to stop his typing. With how his head cranes to look at her, Steve has trouble seeing his face, but Max’s shutters at how he answers her. She storms out of the library, Lucas hot on her heels, pleading with her to slow down.

At the slamming door, the librarian looks up, mildly miffed. “The course of love never did run smooth,” she says to Steve, and isn’t that the truth.

She hasn’t the time to return to her cataloging because Dustin arrives on the scene, a thick stack of Star issues bundled in his arms. “Excuse me,” he says, presenting the papers to her, “is there any way to make copies of these?”

“I’m afraid not, hun,” she says, thumbing through his collection. “You know…” She gives the issue at the top of the stack a closer inspection. “You’re not the first person to visit this month looking for information on Camp Hero. Is there a conspiracy afoot I should be made aware of?”

Though her question has a teasing lilt, Dustin latches on with serious zeal. “Who?” he asks, veering perilously close to demanding. “Around nineteen, curly hair down to”—Dustin measures to his shoulder—“here? Totally metal leather jacket?”

Steve’s next flick tears the fingernail-thin page at the spine.

“I don’t know about the metal jacket,” the librarian says, amused. “But she did have quite the head of curly hair. I told her I remembered the year they installed the radar. Let’s just say no one in town was very happy.”

“Why not?”

“Well, they turned it on and every TV and radio in town went haywire,” she tells him, shaking her head at the memory. “Turned it off, said they were re-calibrating it, turned it back on and there the radios went again. I had a neighbor say they heard strange things through the phone, but I’ve always thought that was just an operator error. But it made people pretty paranoid. It started to feel like Maple Street around here, though I suppose you don’t know that old show…”

“The Twilight Zone,” Steve fills in, approaching the circulation desk. He steals a peek at the stack, seeing the top issue is dated January 31st, 1981. The leading headline, above a picture of the antenna, is announcing the closure of the air force station. In the text running beneath the picture, it says the antenna will remain. The exact wording is “abandoned in place.”

“Yes, The Twilight Zone,” she confirms, delighted in Steve’s fifties era knowledge. She turns to Dustin, smiling warmly as she says, “Your brother has good taste.”

“So, it was a really powerful radar,” Dustin says, bulldozing past her assumption without correcting it.

“Most high-powered of its kind at the time,” she confirms. “They got it all working eventually and no one had any problems again because of it. At least that anyone around town knows about.”

Dustin nods along, then Steve sees the spark of an idea blazing in his eyes. “Do you mind saying all of that again for a documentary me and my friends are filming?”

“Oh, I suppose I—”

“Will!” Dustin hollers in the direction Will and Mike have disappeared. “I need the camera!”

The librarian looks flustered now, unready for a camera shoved in her face. Steve doesn’t want to abandon her, but Dustin has been driving Will crazy asking for three or four takes of every interview, and Steve does not have it in him to listen to a story about radar five times over. Shooting the librarian an apologetic smile she does not notice, as concerned as she is with fluffing her perm, Steve ducks out of the stuffy library and returns to a world with breathable air.

The sun is dipping beneath the trees, the sky a slow-burning gold. On a bench to left of the front walk, with his head hanging between his knees, is Lucas. Max is nowhere to be seen.

Tentatively, Steve takes the open seat beside Lucas, hoping not to spook him. Lucas barely lifts his head.

“We’ve got to get some one-on-one in before it starts getting too cold to play on the outdoor courts, dude,” Steve says, trying to coax him out of hiding. “I mean, you’re a little sick of this documentary shit, too, right? Don’t tell me I’m completely alone here.”

Lucas shuffles so he has both forearms resting on his thighs, his shoulders hunched inward. He looks like a guy just off the court after a grueling third quarter, playing for the losing side. “Sure, sounds good, man,” he says without looking Steve’s way.

“Look, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but…”

“It just feels like everything I say is the wrong thing,” Lucas says in a burst of frustration, his fingers curling around his knees. “But if I don’t say anything, what if she thinks I’m giving up on her? Is there ever a right answer, like a way to give her space that’s not…” He exhales through his nose, blinking rapidly. “…accidentally letting her go?”

“I don’t know about there being a right answer, but take it from a guy who has said every wrong thing, and not said anything when he should have, and had to let the girl go—”

“Should I be listening to you?” Lucas cuts in, squinting at Steve.

“Learn from my mistakes, Sinclair,” Steve says, because someone should. “She doesn’t want you to try and make her life feel normal again. And when she tells you to leave her alone for a while, definitely listen, because she means it and also Max is terrifying and I’m worried for your safety sometimes.”

Lucas huffs, the corners of his mouth tugging upward.

“But I think what she probably wants most right now is someone who will just say, ‘You’re right. Everything blows. Let’s yell about how unfair everything is together.’” Steve doesn’t realize how loud his voice has raised until a young mom shepherding her two sons up the path glowers at him and picks up their pace. He grimaces. At least those kids are learning everything is terrible early.

“Isn’t reminding her how terrible everything is just going to make her feel worse?” Lucas asks once they’ve lost their audience.

“I’m not saying it should be the only thing you talk about,” Steve says. “But if you were alone in a completely dark room, who would you trust: the voices that come in saying everything’s fine, it’s not even that dark in here, or the voice that comes in and actually says, holy shit, you can’t see anything in here.”

Lucas immediately answers, “The person not totally lying to me.”

Steve nods. “Right, and then once she trusts you…I don’t know, find a flashlight, I guess.”

His metaphor is falling apart, but of all the kids, he trusts Lucas to get the gist. If Steve and Dustin share different sides of one brain, he and Lucas are operating from the same side most days. They’d make for a lopsided partnership with how their skill sets match up, but Steve feels he understands certain sides of Lucas his other friends may struggle to—the athletic side, sure, but also the side desperate to do right by everyone while harboring a secret fear he’s never quite measuring up.

“So, I’d be like her lighthouse,” Lucas says, receiving Steve’s message loud and clear.

“Yeah, like her lighthouse. Or like…” Steve gazes out at the dimming sky. “…like Ground Control. It must be scary as hell, being up in space in a small metal tube, where there isn’t any air to breathe, but you have a voice back down on Earth guiding you through it. You know, making sure you get back home in one piece.”

A scoff sounds from behind them. Steve and Lucas turn their heads in tandem to see Mike and Will, each with a pile of books in their arms, sporting vastly different expressions.

Wrinkling his nose, offended by who the hell knows, Mike asks, “What, did you get that from a book?”

Will pops an elbow into his ribs and tells Steve, “I thought it was really nice.”

“Yeah, yeah, did Dustin get his interview in the can?” Steve cringes at his own use of film lingo. Too much of what Dustin rambles at him sticks in his ears like glue.

Speaking of the hellion, the amateur documentarian bounds out of the library holding the Super 8, beaming.

“You realize where we have to shoot now, right?”

“Yeah, that’s going to be no.”

Steve spends the majority of the drop-offs defending the rational position that a bunch of fourteen-year-olds should not break into a closed-off air base, but doubts he’s drilled so much as an inch into the rock of Dustin’s skull. Failing Hopper’s edict in the second week, seems on par.

Outside the Sinclair house, Lucas pauses before opening the passenger door. Quietly, he says, “Thanks, Steve.”

Hours later, their conversation continues running on a loop in his head. Ground Control has gone off on a tangent about the new A Nightmare on Elm Street movie, something about the blatant homoerotic undertones—“The tagline is literally ‘The man of your dreams is back” and it’s a final boy. I mean, c’mon…”—and Steve is interested in circling back around to that, but there’s something bothering him now, and the itchy feeling beneath his skin won’t go away until he asks.

“Hey, sorry, I’m down to hear about Jesse and Randy—”

“Ron.”

“Ron and Randy, yeah, but can I ask you something first?”

Steve hears a shrieking squeak, Ground Control leaning back in the studio’s ancient rolling chair. “If it’s my opinions on the Rocky franchise, I really don’t think you want to hear them.”

“No, nothing about movies. It’s about…” Steve decides to come out with it, no introduction. “Why aren’t you the space traveler on your show? You could say you're broadcasting from Neptune one night and that star you were talking about yesterday, Alpha Centauri, the next show.”

“Is this audience feedback?” he asks, voice blank. “Because it’s a little late to rebrand…”

“No, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it,” Steve clarifies quickly. “I’m just wondering why you chose Ground Control.”

“It’s like I told you, dude—I’m a coward to the core,” Ground Control says without a trace of self-pity. “Even when it’s all make-believe, I’m not going to kid myself acting like I’m the kind of guy going out searching for adventure. Not when there’s an actual risk. Not when there’s real pain on the line.”

Steve expects Ground Control will hate it if he objects to the cowardly label, never mind that he says things on his broadcast Steve would have trouble saying to Robin privately. Ground Control would know his own limitations better than Steve. It doesn’t matter if Steve thinks he’s surpassing them, constantly.

“But that’s just why you’re not the cosmonaut,” Steve says. “You didn’t have to be Ground Control. You could’ve been, like, the leader of a space cantina band.”

“Was that a Star Wars reference?” Ground Control asks, elated. “Commander, have you been holding out on me?”

“Whatever, man, keep your pants on.” Steve scratches the back of his neck, the skin there burning. “Answer the question.”

“Where was the question in that?” At Steve’s frustrated sigh, he relents, “I don’t know if I picked it for some big, special, poetic reason. Ground Control is made up of all the little guys, right? They’re the ants who are making sure the colony doesn’t blow up while everyone else is busy looking at the queen. Well, I like the little guys. Is that a good enough answer for you, commander?”

It’s a great answer that sinks Steve's heart as if it were weighted down with stones. Because from the start, Ground Control has operated under the impression Steve is a major, a captain, a commander. Even before he bestowed Steve with a cosmic title, he had taken distinct pleasure in referencing his high school career, your majesty some days and my liege on others. King Steve had not been a little guy in the small sea of East Hampton High. Commander Steve is not a little guy in the sprawling universe of the Dark Star Broadcast.

He wonders if it’s not too late for Ground Control to call him back from his mission, bring him home. If he ever gets the chance to stand in front of him, with two feet planted on solid ground, Ground Control will see Steve is no bigger than he is. He is small-town. He’s been knocked down to size. In the end, Steve wants nothing more than to be one of the little guys.

“Well?” comes Ground Control, radioing him back from the clouds.

Steve shakes his head while he tells him, “Yeah, good enough.”

 

 

 

.. / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / ..-. .. -. -.. / -.-- --- ..- / .. -. / - .... . / .-.. .. --. .... - .-.-.- / -.-- --- ..- / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / ..-. .. -. -.. / -- . / .. -. / - .... . / -.. .- .-. -.- .-.-.-

TRANSMISSION, PICKED UP BY CEREBRO — NOVEMBER 22, ‘85

 

 

 

At a quarter to midnight, a boy abiding by the curfew—the town’s curfew, not his mother’s—stumbles upon an isolated transmission. The message is short, fifteen seconds at maximum, and followed by five seconds of static silence. It loops. The words in it are nonsensical to him, but he notices a series of sounds beneath the words. A deliberate, measured clicking, like the dots and dashes of morse code.

The boy rushes to jot down the clicks as best he can. Long, long, short, long—or is it, short, short, long, short? His notebook is a messy map of dashes, slashes, and periods, but within two minutes, he believes he has a rough outline.

He switches frequencies.

At ten minutes to midnight, a girl who once spent her Friday nights in the control room of the college radio station but now is sitting alone in her room reading The Colour of Magic, is asked if she copies. She does.

The boy in the backyard, next to his beloved ham radio talking to his new beloved over its waves, relays what he just heard and gives her the frequency so she can hear it for herself. This is the break they’ve been looking for, they agree.

Over his walkie, he radios his documentary crew. All but one stuck in their bedrooms, all wishing they were together on a Friday night, they each copy, with two exceptions.

At the video store, the documentarian’s driver is on the phone, his walkie forgotten at the bottom of his backpack, which he left in the store office. It’s five minutes to midnight. In the background of the call, the radio host’s producer, forced to do her job with her baby sister stuck at home, is demanding the radio host hang up and get his ass into the booth. Just five more minutes, please. This whole thing started because of a midnight radio show, and now Steve Harrington doesn’t want the show to go on.

Not far from the video store, in a house with all the lights turned off, a girl is laying on her bed studying the shadows rolling across her ceiling. They move in mysterious ways. She hears the walkie’s siren call, but doesn’t have the energy to get up and turn it off. In one ear, Kate Bush is singing to her. When the song ends, she’s going to play it again.

Her room is filled with cardboard boxes that need packing. This is her last weekend in the old house. As her mom was leaving for her late-night shift, she told her she better see those boxes sealed shut in the morning. Or else. 

But or else requires a consequence, and her mom always accepts those, never gives them. Being forced to move out of their house because her mom can’t afford the mortgage on her own is a consequence of her stepdad leaving them. Her stepdad leaving them is a consequence of him being a piece shit her mother should have never married in the first place.

And it’s a consequence of Billy. Everything is a consequence of Billy.

She gazes out her window to the jet black sky pin-pricked by stars. That’s what living in her brain feels like nowadays—a dark abyss with little pockets of light. The harder she tries to walk towards the light, the farther away it goes from her.

Maybe she should try walking into the dark for a change. No one is around to stop her from climbing out the window. She could stroll the beach, listen to Kate, skip stones across the surf, perhaps discover a shipwreck, or meet the ghost of a drowned man, or disappear.

Her dad had been a lover of urban legends, campfire tales, and horror. On the day he said goodbye to her at the Los Angeles airport, he told her to watch out for East Coast fog. It’s easy to lose yourself in it. But if anyone could find her way back, it was his final girl.

Max Mayfield doesn’t feel like the final girl anymore.

The boys continue chattering over the walkies. Lucas pipes in, something about his father’s Morse code dictionary. Max almost smiles. Of course his father has a dictionary of Morse code. Her father had his slashers, his father has big books of everything.

She keeps her window shut tonight.

The clock strikes midnight. “Greetings, cosmo—”

The power cuts out.

Tomorrow, the tip line will light up with a firework show of frantic gut feelings and doomsday predictions. One tipper, an old kook living in a two-room by the state park, will say he saw a green comet streak across the sky. Tomorrow, the mayor of East Hampton will formally request FBI assistance. After he makes the call, he’ll receive confirmation no one has vanished.

In twelve hours, Max Mayfield will skateboard to the video store and force Steve Harrington to play Black Christmas on the store television. He’ll be grumpier than usual. And when she asks what crawled up his ass and died, he’ll say cryptically, “I missed my show.”

 

 

 

Much like the guiding light of our beloved Montauk Point Lighthouse, the sense of community in East Hampton has always been a beacon for every local, summer resident, and visitor of our wonderful town. Though it has been a tough year in our history, I—on behalf of myself, my family, and the Mayor’s Office—want to express gratitude to all of our residents, who have shown nothing but tenacity, kindness, and a generosity of spirit during these difficult days.

I am thankful for you, I am here for you, and I wish you and your families a Happy Thanksgiving.

FROM THE MAYOR’S DESK — NOVEMBER 28, ‘85

 

 

 

Thanksgiving arrives as threatened and brings with it a conference of Harringtons ferried in from the mainland, carrying cast iron dishes stuffed with sweet potato mash, bread pudding, and passive-aggression—a Harrington staple best served chilled like white wine. Steve takes coats, purses, and perfumed pecks on the cheek and dumps everything, including his sanity, in an unceremonious pile on the guest bed. After a steadying breath, he goes to face the firing squad.

The Harringtons are good shots, he’ll give them that. Their jabs are practiced, subtle, and, at times, surprising, the gun somehow loaded, aimed, and fired without anyone else at the table sensing the sniper. His grandmother has the greatest patience; she finishes a full serving of her daughter-in-law’s mashed potatoes before commenting the cream available in the local shops must not be very good what with how little of it she used. His grandfather, on the other hand, is trigger-happy. Sees an opening and takes it; doesn’t have an opening, creates one.

“The firm has openings, Steven,” he says, apropos to nothing, around a cheek stuffed with dry mashed potatoes. “If it makes you more comfortable, you can start in the mail room.”

The firm always has openings, fit to his exact measurements. He may have been more grateful if the positions were not deep in the background, hidden away from the clients, Harrington and son and the unschooled gremlin they kept in the basement. Temporary, his grandfather calls them. Until you’ve finished school, his grandmother adds in pointed suggestion.

They want what’s best for him, so Steve says he’ll consider it. Best is a college education, nothing wrong with that. Best is a girlfriend like Nancy Wheeler, whatever happened to that sweet girl. Best is a high-paying job at the family’s real estate firm, the company keeping his father in the city three nights a week and flying to conferences in Florida and Arizona two weekends a month. It’s the life Tommy H and Carol used to fantasize for themselves, summer tans that lasted all year and money to burn in the fuel tank of a yacht. Steve played along, because he was stoned and scared to tell them that when he imagined five years in the future, he saw a black void.

He still closes his eyes and sees the void, but here’s his grandfather, dangling a carrot of future in front of his nose and Steve hasn’t the heart to bite it. The smell of it repels him. He knows it will taste wrong.

Steve glances at the empty chair across from him, where his mother’s fisherman father once sat stoically, looking like he was missing his pipe. He died when Steve was seven, so Steve never got to ask him the big life questions. Like did he ever consider a path that didn’t take him out on the water, morning after morning, alone? Did it hurt every time, to drag fish from their homes without the intention of returning them there? Did he ever gaze into the horizon and think about seeing if he could reach the line where the sea met the sky, because what if everything science told him was wrong and he fell off the world?

There are so many things Steve doesn’t know.

For the portions of the dinner he spends not shielding himself from unfriendly fire, he thinks about the kids. Specifically, he thinks about Dustin calling him late last night, whispering over the rustling of sheets about the plan he has drawn up for Saturday night. He's named it Operation: Hero Storm.

“Not happening,” Steve told him, holding the line.

“Steve, there’s a 99.9% chance there’s something in that air force base that can help us crack the alien’s code,” Dustin argued, and even Steve, who never rose above a C-minus in statistics, doubted his percentages. “What kind of documentarians would we be if we let this boulder in our backyard go unturned?”

“Uh, the kind not murdered by your mothers.”

Dustin ended the call with the unveiled threat Operation: Hero Storm would happen with or without Steve’s approval.

Part of Steve is happy to call his bluff. Dustin needs Steve on the heist team, if only because he needs Steve’s car. The kids will be lucky to get off their respective blocks if they try biking to the state park in the middle of the night while a town curfew is in effect. Right now, Dustin’s plan is destined to be a failure to launch.

A smaller part of Steve—small but loud as a fog horn—wants in. If there are no answers in the East Hampton police department, why not try finding some at an old radar tower? The odds of discovering a clue in a haystack of military bullshit is nowhere close to a hundred, no matter Dustin’s insistence, but even one percent is something more than nothing.

“The interest is still there,” his grandfather is advising his father, in conversation on the possibility of selling the house. His father is worried the disappearances are washing out the market in Montauk.

Chasing bad odds seems better than abandoning the ship.

Upstairs, a phone starts to ring.

Steve excuses himself to answer it, choosing to ignore his grandmother’s murmured comment concerning the type of rude person who would phone during a holiday dinner. From the stairs, the last he hears is his grandfather decrying the damn telemarketers. Steve smiles to himself, wondering what skit Ground Control would drum up to hear himself lumped in with a collection of capitalist scam artists.

“I have a theory,” Ground Control announces right off the top.

“Oh, great.”

“Fuck off, commander douchebag. It’s a good one.” Then, quieting, “A real one.”

“Alright, what’s the good theory?” Steve asks, sitting on the bed and toeing off his shoes as he straps himself in for the ride.

“So, if we agree the disappearances and the weird blackouts are completely, totally, 100% unrelated”—Steve bites his lip to stop himself from interrupting, but what is it with the geeks in his life acting like there’s anything in the universe that can be known with foolproof certainty—“why do these blackouts keep happening? Why is whatever’s causing them sticking around Montauk for so long?”

The length of Ground Control’s pause suggests he’s after a little audience participation. “Uh, they really like lobster rolls,” Steve says, because it’s the answer that would have most riled up Dustin.

“Why not!” Ground Control says.

Steve’s eyebrows pinch together “Thought you said this was a good theory.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” he says. “Maybe these creatures of superior intellect are here searching for the best lobster roll on the Atlantic seaboard, or maybe they’re searching for the best double cheeseburger with no pickles, or maybe it’s not food and they’re searching high and low for the guy with the most perfect head of hair…”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I was talking about myself, big boy.”

His heart boxes harder against his chest, and he’s grateful no one is around to see his flush. “So, what you’re saying,” he says, bringing them back on track, “is these blackouts, if they’re caused by aliens—massive if—it’s because they’re searching for something.”

“Exactly, Commander Steve. Knew we promoted you up the ranks for a reason,” Ground Control says cheerfully. “And whatever they’re searching for, they obviously believe they’re going to find it in Montauk, even if it’s taken three years so far. Creatures of not such superior intellect, it would seem.”

“What could they be looking for that they could only find here?”

“Hell if I know,” he says with a snort. “Seems like a job for minds far greater than my own.”

Again, Steve thinks of Dustin and his desired fact-finding mission. His is a mind greater than Steve’s own, but with the common sense of a labrador retriever and the self-preservation skills of a toddler armed only with a plastic hammer.  He’ll be more than willing to turn over every rock, stick, and stone to prove or disprove Ground Control’s theory if Steve presents it to him, but he’ll overturn those stones expecting to shine a light on a colony of ants when what he may find is a nest of poisonous snakes. Or worse.

“Are you okay over there?” Ground Control asks, and Steve realizes he had sighed into the speaker.

“Yeah, it’s not really me. It’s…the kids, they—” He stops to explain, “You know, the ones I kind of babysit for, I guess…they want to do something really fucking stupid and I don’t think I can tell them no without them just going off and doing it anyway. I mean, yeah, I could tell their parents—”

Ground Control interrupts, “What, snitch on them?”

“I knew you would say that.”

“Snitching is a big deal in my line of work.”

Steve frowns. “In radio hosting?”

“In one of my, uh…” Ground Control clears his throat. “…other lines of work.”

After learning Ground Control hosted his show through the local community college, Steve ran with the assumption he has a paying job alongside the classes he’s taking. Never has he asked what that job may be, but only because he’s pretty sure Ground Control won’t offer him an answer. From the start, he has been frustratingly vague about anything you'd find on a resume. No real name, no jobs past or present outside his radio gig, no address or home phone number.

The only section Steve is confident he could fill out for him is special skills. Ground Control plays electric guitar, and can sing but will not let you tell him so, and knows what half the buttons on the radio board do, and has memorized every Twilight Zone episode title along with their original air dates, and loses his train of thought halfway through a monologue but will remember the fruit snack brand you mentioned liking off-hand three weeks before. He’ll slip the fruit snacks into a joke to crack you up, and you won’t really think about it until after you've hung up, how much he must be thinking about you and just how much you’re thinking about him, too.

Steve understands special skills make up more of a person than any of the other bullshit that pads a resume. Just someday soon, he’d like to have the name at the top.

“I don’t want to have to do it.” Steve sighs again. “I wish I could just say no and they’d respect it.”

“If it makes you feel any better, dude, I don’t think it’s that they don’t respect you,” Ground Control says. “Sounds like these little shits don’t respect authority in general, like across the board.”

Steve rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, but with a smile on his face that has no business feeling so fond. “Can you try not to sound so proud when you say that?”

Ground Control laughs, a big one that rocks his bedroom from twenty miles away. Steve selfishly basks in the sound of it. He has never made anyone laugh the way he manages to make Ground Control laugh, the real deal, gold-certified. It’s an ego trip, totally, but what Steve likes more is that Ground Control has his sides aching in the same way, at a frequency that may be the cause of health problems somewhere down the line. They get each other. That’s the simple way of putting it, but the only way Steve knows how to.

The laughter dies down in a long fade. On the floor below, Steve hears the faint clatter of cutlery and china scraping together, the table clearing. His mother will be irritated with him for not helping with the clean up, but at this exact moment, Steve could care less. The silence humming over the line isn’t awkward; if anything, it has a weak but certain electric pulse. Steve once thought a charge like it only sparked when two pairs of eyes met across a room.

“I haven’t talked you into anything stupid, have I?” Ground Control asks, his voice dipping low.

“You probably couldn’t have talked me into it or out of it,” Steve tells him truthfully. “It’s just something that’s going to happen, no matter what.”

“You’re a regular tragic hero, Commander Steve,” he says. If it’s meant as a jab, the delivery falls flat. He sounds one part sincere and one part resigned, like his fate is tied up in Steve’s.

Leaving Steve to muse aloud, “What does that make you?”

Another beat of silence passes before Ground Control answers, “Your faithful companion, watching from the sidelines and hoping this will be the time it doesn’t end in tragedy.”

“Faithful companion…” Steve digs it, but doesn’t know how to say so without coming off as corny or in too deep. “That makes you sound like my dog.”

“Woof,” he intones. Steve laughs; Ground Control does not. “Don’t be stupid, Steve.”

He has never had anyone ask him not to be stupid before; most just assume he will be. “No promises,” he says with a trying laugh, doing his best to play it off like a joke.

“Fuck that, dude,” Ground Control says vehemently, surprising Steve. Another flare of phantom memory, of searching eyes mapping every slope and dip of Steve’s face. The eyes flash hazel, then blue, before settling on a deep, impossible brown. Steve imagines them holding steady, looking hard into his eyes when he demands, “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”

Steve blinks. As always, he’s the only person in his room.

“I promise.”

 

 

 

That’s right, gentle alien folk, it’s that time again: star facts! Because if I have to listen to two super dweebs geek out about the solar system, so do you.

Do you know what happens when a star dies? We’re talking about massive stars here—the Jolly Green Giants of stars. Well, they collapse. Sometimes, if they’re big enough they take other stars down with them. But when they collapse, they form…[improvised drum roll] a black hole! Light dies and it becomes this—this ultimate darkness. Poetic shi—poetic stuff, right?

Now, my faithful cosmonauts, you’re out there traversing the galaxy and probably thinking, “How do I save myself from being sucked into the darkness?” Thanks to the dweeb squad, I can tell you that you have to make sure not to cross something called the event horizon. It’s basically the black hole point of no return. Problem is, there’s no way to see the event horizon. You only know once you’ve already passed it.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — NOVEMBER 29, ‘85

 

 

 

The dark is breathing down their necks as they weave through the woods, approaching the old air base from the back. Moving shadows are everywhere, just at the peripheries of his vision. Steve keeps glancing over his shoulder, dogged by the feeling someone is watching them. There’s never anyone there.

The trees thin, bringing them to a chain link fence with a large rip already torn through it. Steve tightens his grip on his baseball bat. Beside him, bringing up the rear of the pack, Will tenses, his face pinched with worry. His flashlight bounces off the backs of Mike and Lucas, heads bent in conference, then El and Max, El’s fingers hooked in the hem of Max’s windbreaker, and the leading Dustin, who halts them a few feet from the fence.

He pulls out a notebook from his backpack and flips to a page where he has crudely drawn what looks to be a floor plan. Lucas, Mike and Will cluster around him and the notebook, their flashlights joining to create a super beam. Again, Steve checks over his shoulder. In the woods, he felt stalked; without the cover of the trees, he worries they’re too exposed.

Only El seems as discomfited as he is, her eyes piercing through the chain link to the concrete building beyond. It’s less of a building and more a massive wall built into the side of a hill, with wings on either side forming a brutalist tunnel. The slab of rock operating as a door appears impenetrable. El’s flashlight traces over the words stamped on the door and she mouths them slowly to herself. DO NOT ENTER BUILDING. CLOSED TO PUBLIC.

Message not received.

“See, there should be a smaller entrance here…”

“And you’re just trusting these plans she got our real?”

“Of course I trust them, Mike,” Dustin snaps, and with such fervor that Wheeler is struck stupid. “Suzie can do anything. Now c’mon.”

Betraying his first sign of hesitancy, Dustin prods the fence with his little finger. When it doesn’t fry his circuits, he peels back the torn section, creating a makeshift gate they all slip through. While the kids soldier ahead, Steve scans the treeline a final time. It’s empty, save for anything that keeps itself alive hiding in the dark.

The base plans that, according to a boastful Dustin, Suzie hacked into a government database to secure do not steer them wrong, depending on what is considered wrong here. Here being a breaking and entering plot aided by stolen classified air force documents. Past the concrete bunker sunken into the hillside, there is a smaller entrance sheltered in the trees. A long cement path leading directly to it like a landing strip. On the door, connected to a shed-like beige building, is a familiar directive: DO NOT ENTER.

Except the door is missing its handle, and it hangs open a crack. From the crack comes the haunting echo of wind whistling through a cavernous space.

“Go, Suzie,” Mike exhales, standing thoroughly corrected.

“Ready?” Dustin asks, still with the notebook guide open.

Steve is not ready. Instead, he is speed-running through a playbook of things he might say to steer them in the opposite direction, homeward bound. He can’t say it isn’t safe because they already know and most of them think they don’t care. Protesting they’ll get caught won’t convince them either. UFOs are pronounced real without a shred of visual evidence, but security guards armed to the teeth are boogeymen that have to be seen to believe.

He wonders if it would matter if he said, I don’t want to do this. Me, Steve, the guy who drives you assholes around everywhere and never asks for anything in return. I’m scared for you, for all of us. Please, let’s just go.

It seems too late for appeals to the heart when Dustin is swinging the broken door open and pointing his flashlight down a narrow hall, grimy, riddled with puddles, and stinking of mildew. Mike and Will both plug their noses as they follow Dustin inside. An expressionless Max follows.

Lucas is over the threshold and Steve is waiting to enter last, but El is not moving. Though her expression is as blank as Max’s had been, her eyes are dark and wide, her head shaking slowly from side to side.

“Bad place,” she whispers, falling a step back.

Steve plants himself between her and the building, trying to capture her attention. “You okay?”

Her eyes snap to him. The fear lurking in them drives up his pulse’s tempo. “Bad place,” she repeats, and like her father, her tone leaves no room for argument.

“We can leave,” he says and immediately turns to tell Lucas to call the rest of the kids back.

Lucas beats out his request and tells El, “I can stay outside with you.” He draws his walkie out of his inner pocket and shakes it, smiling lightly. “Might be good to have some eyes out here, just in case. Right?”

After a pause, her brow knitted by doubt, El nods her head. Her desire not to disappoint the boys always wins out in the end. Steve sighs inwardly. It has to be a curse that these kids are gifted with great gut instincts, but they’re bound to ignore them in the pursuit of greater glory.

His gut instinct continues screaming at him to hightail it, but inside the building, the light from the kids' flashlights is fading fast. Steve nods at Lucas’s walkie and says, “Stay in contact. You see anything or anyone, you tell us. No playing heroes. Don't be stupid.”

He hears the hypocrisy. No one else does.

“We’re not stupid,” El says, definitely a mantra adopted from her father. If Hopper were to see them now, he’d disagree—Steve Harrington is very stupid.

Steve rushes down the hall, following the disappearing light like he were chasing after the tail of a comet. The whole place smells of rot. Even pulling the collar of his sweater over his nose does nothing to combat the stench of abandon.

Eventually, the hallway dumps him into what was once the building’s mess hall. Most of the tables have been pushed against the wall, forming a pit in the center of the room. Newspaper is strewn about the cement floor in piles like makeshift nests. In one, Steve spies a forgotten knit hat then a graveyard of cigarette butts. The slashed fence and dismantled door might have been the work of a different pack of kids looking for a late night thrill, but it’s also the means for people in need of a place to come in from the cold to have somewhere to sleep. Better the base be good for something, but Steve can’t help thinking sleeping inside it must feel like sleeping in a tomb.

Dustin is standing at the bulls-eye of the pit, consulting his map. The room has wide entryways to the east and west, leading to industrial-size hallways lined with windowless doors. On the east side, at least two doors have been wrenched off their hinges. At the end of the hall, Steve spies a padlocked door. Isn’t that fantastic.

Drifting back from the east hall, Steve winds up next to Max. She’s studying a portion of the south wall where a bulletin board had been removed, leaving behind a discolored rectangle like the chalk outline of a body. In the rectangle, someone had spray painted, “as above, so below.” An arrow, a startling pop of red in a gray-scale place, points to the floor.

“Is there a basement?” Max asks.

Dustin flips between two pages of floor plans, frowning. “There shouldn’t be.”

They decide to split up to investigate—Max, Will, and Mike taking the west wing and Steve and Dustin heading east. Dustin instructs them to keep their eyes peeled from the radar’s control room. According to his schematics, it should be on the second floor of the tower, wherever that is within this cinder block labyrinth.

Most of the doors on the east side are locked, unpersuaded to give no matter how many times Dustin has Steve ram his shoulder against them. Even through a layer of corduroy and another of cable-knit, the ramming takes its toll. His only solace is Dustin stopped filming his embarrassing attempts to bust down the doors after the fourth abysmal failure.

The open doors lead into gutted offices, some under an inch of murky water thanks to shitty cut-corner plumbing. Most of the furniture is gone, and the desks that remain are thoroughly trashed, drawers dumped out and discarded, a few missing entirely. The scraps of papers Dustin recovers are pretty much all invoices for mechanical equipment or memos with names of employees come and gone. Nothing to suggest cracked alien codes.

“So,” Steve says as they exit the last open office, “Suzie.”

“We’re on a mission here, Steve,” Dustin says, testy. He shoves the camera at Steve and demands he film him trying the final two doors on the left, just shy of the padlocked double doors.

Steve records as he is told to, but not without announcing for the record, “You have a girlfriend, dude. I’m happy for you.”

“She’s not—” Dustin breaks off, his lips pursed. He rattles the first door knob, locked.

“Well, whatever she is, I just want to know why you haven’t said anything about it,” Steve says. In answer, Dustin gives a noncommittal sort of shrug, which is about as far from the usual Dustin as it gets. “C’mon, man, I’m here in this gross old military base, risking my own neck because I drove you. The least you can do is tell me what’s going on.”

Dustin moves on to the second door, avoiding the lens of the camera. Pausing, hand hovering over the latch, he eventually admits, “I thought you might not care.”

“Seriously?” Steve asks, not hiding his offense. He drops the camera to his side, giving the future audience of Mrs. H a great shot off the shit-stained floor. “Why wouldn’t I care?”

“Because it isn’t real,” Dustin protests, his nose scrunching in his struggle to keep himself together. “We’ve never even seen each other.”

A pit opens up in Steve’s stomach, gargantuan and all-consuming. “Why would that make it not real?” he asks softly, but doesn’t allow time for Dustin to give him an answer. “Modern love, dude. So what if you haven’t seen her yet. You’re talking to her every night, right?”

Dustin nods.

“That’s real.” Steve cuffs him on the shoulder. Really, he’d like to shake him, knock loose every dumb movie cliche and bad piece of love advice Steve himself once gave him.

There’s a lot you can learn in a year, about relationships and about yourself, and Steve decides, when they leave this hellhole, he’s going to introduce Dustin to Ground Control, if only through the radio and a short-but-long distance telephone call. He’s thought since the beginning they’d get along famously.

“Holy shit,” comes Mike’s voice through the walkie, snapping Dustin back into documentary mode. “I think we actually found something!”

The walkie switches off for a beat before Will’s gentler voice filters through it. “We think it’s the radar control room. Over.”

Dustin snatches the camera from Steve, not bothering to stop recording, and races back down the corridor. Will was still delivering directions to the control room over the walkie. Not seeing a reason for Dustin’s mad rush, Steve strolls back towards the mess hall, avoiding the muddy puddles. He’s trying to convince himself it’s a good thing if the kids believe they’ve found a break in the case. They can chase coded shadows for a while, become bored of it in the new year, and leave the alien talk behind. That’s the dream.

Max has a head start on the boredom. He finds her alone in the mess hall, staring hard at one of the newspaper nests on the floor. As Steve draws closer, he realizes it’s one newspaper in the pile arresting her attention. It’s a yellowed issue of the Star from early July; the lead item concerns the disappearances of Billy Hargrove and Heather Holloway. Hargrove named a person of interest in missing persons’ case.

“Max—”

“Don’t,” she spits out, vicious. Her fists clench. “You know what? Screw this.”

Her foot strikes a turned-over chair, sending it clear across the room. Steve jumps at the crash, and Max steals the opportunity to storm past him, heading back the way they entered. Just as she disappears into the back hall, Mike flies into the room in panic.

“What the hell was that?” he asks.

“Nothing, just—” Steve starts toward their exit, waving Mike back to the west hall. “Go round up the other idiots. Tell them we’re leaving. Now.”

He can’t stand around and wait to see how bad Mike is at following simple directions. By the time he careens outside, Max has cleared the hole in the fence and is stalking towards the woods. Steve ducks through the gap and sprints to catch up with her, taking hold of her forearm. “Max, wait—”

“Why?” Max snaps, wrenching her arm back before rounding on him. “None of this means anything! It’s not going to bring anyone back. It’s not going to make anything better.”

“I don’t think they’re trying to—”

She isn’t listening. “Sometimes, people disappear, and that’s it. They’re in your life, then they’re not, and they never come back. Everyone else has to suck it up. Why can’t they?”

Her body is trembling, and suddenly Steve thinks he understands what El meant when she said sometimes she can’t see Max. Steve hasn’t been seeing her, this, how Billy’s disappearance has devastated her life and warped her into a powder keg of repressed rage. One spark: boom. 

It shouldn’t matter that she hasn’t wanted any of them to look too closely. Friends are supposed to see through the bullshit.

“Max, I’m so—”

“Shh—do you hear that?”

A black sedan screeches to a stop alongside the fence and three men in dark clothes, guns latched to their hips, step out. One draws. They do not have the faces of forgiving security guards planning to guide them back to the park entrance and let them off with a gentle slap on the wrist. They look contracted to kill.

“Shit.” Steve palms his pockets, but he forgot his walkie. He looks at Max and her empty hands. “Shit.”

Dustin, Mike, and Will are sitting ducks inside. Even if Lucas and El have seen or heard the car and radioed them to get their asses outside, they’ll have to find an alternative path through the maze with guns trained at their back. He can’t allow the men in black to step foot in the building.

Steve turns to Max. “Get ready.”

One of the men is in the process of unlocking the gate. Steve picks up a rock the size of a baseball and winds up his arm. The rock crashes through the back windshield of the sedan, the shattering of the glass sounding through the woods like a crack of lightning. The men in black startle, necks snapping.

“Run.”

Max takes off first, into the woods, her flat palms pumping at her sides. Steve races after her, hearing the pounding of boots closing in behind them. “C’mon!” he shouts, baiting the men in black onward. He sends up a silent prayer to the sky that Lucas and El alerted the boys, and they’re running in the opposite direction.

Something whizzes by his ear, striking a tree to his right. The trunk explodes, showering wood splinters into the leaves.

“Are they shooting at us?” Max yells.

“Go left!” he yells back, while tilting his head right, quietly begging her to understand his signal. He veers right, and she’s a step ahead of him, racing in the direction of the lighthouse.

They run, not looking back for a second. The burning in his lungs is choking him, like it’s sending real smoke signals into his throat. His watery eyes turn the trees around him into a blur, Max a blob with two streaks of red like twin comet tails blazing across her back.

The whizzing has stopped. The first and only bullet might have been a warning shot.

At last, they break through the treeline. The knee-high grass at the base of a low hill is difficult to wade through, but Max doesn’t stop running. Steve keeps pace with her until they reach the top of the hill, both of them struggling for breath. Looking down from their vantage point, Steve doesn’t see any of the men emerging from the trees. They have given up the chase.

Steve hunches at the waist. The bones in his body, once calcium, are now the consistency of jello.

“Are you okay?”

He tastes metal in his mouth. Spits. Heaves. Max hasn’t answered.

“Max?”

A few feet away, Max is standing with her back to him, swaying in place. Steve stumbles over to her, hands outstretched as if to catch her before she falls. Reaching her, repeating her name still to no answer, he sees she is gaping at something in the distance. His eyes follow her sight-line, down to the town below.

Every street light, every porch light, every light shining through a window or hanging on the docks is flashing wild, the whole town lit up like a switchboard. Steve watches a car, matchbox-sized, slam to a stop, skidding beneath a haywire streetlight, dark to light to dark. Blink, blink, blink. There's a crackle, the sound right before a circuit shorts. Then, all the lights go dead.

“What the hell?” Max breathes out.

Steve steps forward, one shaky foot in front of the other, feeling his way along the hilltop as if there's a light switch within reach. A low drone sets off in his ears. A low drone, approaching, hovering, closing in—

This is cra—this is crazy!

His head tips up. The town has gone dark, but the sky is glowing an otherworldly green. The droning grows louder, so loud it threatens to split his head in two. Steve stumbles backwards, clapping his hands over his ears, and yells Max’s name. 

They have to go. They have to go right fucking now.

A light like a camera flash momentarily stuns him. He stumbles again, a gust of unnatural wind bowling into him. Steve turns, desperate to grab Max and bolt.

She is crouched where he left her, hands curled over her ears and eyes squeezed shut, mouth open in a silent scream, trapped in a blinding beam of bright white light. The dust in the grass is swirling around her, kicking up into a tornado. The droning has become a roar.

Her feet lift off the ground.

In the space of a breath, Steve is running. The last thing he sees is a streak of quicksilver, a vein of metal floating in the sky. His eyes shut as he plows into Max, a foot off the ground, knocking both of them sideways. They crash out of the light beam and over the crest of the hill, her body tucked into his, falling, falling, falling until they smash into the grass.

Max gasps close to his ear and it’s the only sound Steve hears for a few disorienting seconds. The droning is gone. Max crawls from under the shield of Steve’s body, causing his arms to shift. His shoulder howls.

They’re alive. For the second time that night, Steve is marveling at how he’s still breathing.

He rises onto his knees. Falls back on his heels. Blood is pounding in his ears. He blinks, flash-blind. The ground should be scorched, cratered, burned to a crisp, but it’s untouched. The dust has settled. There’s nothing to suggest what just happened. The sky is empty, the stars fixed. In town, the lights are coming back to life.

He knots his fingers in his hair, yanks until the pain is in his brain.

“Aliens are fucking real.”

Beside him in the brush, Max sits up. Her knees are skinned, and one of her braids has unraveled. A strand of hair whips into her face, sticking in her wet eyelashes. She tugs it free and looks at him, eyes wide as saucers.

“No shit.”

Notes:

smash to black. moonage daydream plays. directed by shawn levy (not actually; god forbid)

once again, i have a million geeky notes to share:

1) As Montauk is a hamlet, its municipal services are through the neighboring town, East Hampton, which is why the kids attend East Hampton High and the name generally comes up so frequently.

2) Our favorite conspiracy nut, Murray, is waxing poetic on The Philadelphia Experiment.

3) The bar where Hopper and Steve have their conversation is a real location, famously frequented by Andy Warhol (who had a home in Montauk) and The Rolling Stones. The song Steve is listening to while driving is “Memory Motel” by the Stones, named after a motel on the island.

4) The fact the librarian shares about the AN/FPS-35 radar at Camp Hero being taken off full-time use in 1961 due to radio and television interference is true. It resumed full-service a year later and was in continued use until 1981. The tower and antenna are still standing today, making it the only remaining one of its kind (it was declared a historic place in 2002). As the Montauk legends go, the tower was used for time travel experiments, naturally.

5) It’s important to me that you know the mayor’s Thanksgiving remarks should be read in the same tone Henry Winkler uses in Scream when he announces over the school intercom “Remember kids, your principal loves you!” Ya know, after two of their classmates have been brutally murdered and the killer is at large.

6) The term “event horizon” would have still been relatively new in the 80s. It was coined by Wolfgang Rindler in the mid-50s (though the proposed existence of an event horizon dates back to the eighteenth century). If anyone is going to be up on black hole science, it’s our supergenius couple, Dustin and Suzie!

7) The Montauk Air Force Base allegedly had unusually tight security in the 1980s, but many people have shared accounts of sneaking onto the base, including a group of teenagers who documented their experiences on video. As I have never snuck into any defunct military bases, I was drawing from those accounts when writing our own heroes’ escapades.

8) Steve “i don’t want to be in the documentary to i am the unofficial chauffeur for the documentary to i almost died twice because of the documentary” Harrington. Not clickbait.

as always, thank you so much for reading! you can still find me over at nancywheeeler on tumblr if you wanna talk bowie, a nightmare on elm street 2, or why aliens are definitely real.

Chapter 4: december // will the real martian please stand up?

Summary:

The gang joins El for a family reunion, Steve unearths a long-buried secret, and New Year's Eve finally arrives.

 

 

There is so much you don't remember.

The doctor says that is okay. You like him. He makes you waffles after everyone else is gone and listens to you talk about what you want to talk about. He tells you the word for what erased your memories is trauma. But he says it might be other things, too.

There is so much you don't remember, and there is so much you don't understand.

You remember some things. Little things. Nice things. Mostly about your mama. She combed your hair with a soft brush. She took you to the park and watched as you fed ducks. She pasted glowing stars on your ceiling. She ran two fingers down the tender inside of your wrist where you shine sometimes. One, one. She said you were never going anywhere, nowhere that she couldn’t find you and bring you back.

She did bring you somewhere you once thought was school, but you know now was not. They put you in a room, and people stood in lines, a green man, and a light blue man, and a gray woman, and a red man. Red, were you sure? Red.

The doctor is a little blue. He tells you not to worry. You don’t know your color, but you think yours would be blue, too. So many people are blue.

You tell the doctor blue is better than red. It is better than gray.

It is better than the shadows.

 

 

 

 

What is it about Mars, cosmonauts? Not to quote our favorite commander’s dear friend, David, but is there life there? Because apparently, our future invaders come from Mars. Terrors from beyond space come from Mars. Even in the Twilight Zone, you end up stranded at a diner with your fellow bus passengers, and everyone starts accusing everyone of being a Martian.

Why does Hollywood think no one is ever coming from Saturn? Or Uranus? The whole of the galaxy to choose from and we just wind up with really bad neighbors.

Maybe we’re the bad neighbors, ever thought about that? We’re approaching the new millennium and we’re nowhere close to getting over there and saying hi.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — DECEMBER 6, ‘85

 

 

 

Everywhere Steve turns, he sees rouge agents.

On a grocery store run two days after their siege on Camp Hero, Steve ducks out of the baking aisle because he doesn’t like the look of a dark-suited man with a military haircut choosing between generic or name-brand flour. He spends a full shift stressing over a sedan sporting tinted-windows parked in the strip mall across from Family Video. Even while picking up his usual from Benny’s, his hands start to shake after retired Dr. Owens hands him the take-out bag and asks him, “Taking care, Steve?”

An odd inflection transforms a benign question into a cryptic threat. A pair of opaque sunglasses have him performing double-takes. The flash of headlights streaking across his bedroom ceiling threatens to send him into cardiac arrest.

It occurs to Steve that he may be in the midst of another breakdown.

Robin certainly thinks so. Steve feels her eyes tracking him around the store, a worried crease between her brows. The crease deepens each time he stops to swear at the squeaky wheel on the return cart. His little fits are driving away customers. Good riddance, he says. No one has been reported missing since Halloween, so everyone is behaving like the worst of the storm has passed, that the blackouts are minor nuisances the electric company is to blame for, and why the hell would they look up at the sky when their lives are here on the ground? Who believes in extraterrestrials anyway? Nutjobs, that’s who.

“Will you shut the fuck up?” Steve snaps at the cart. The wheel screeches in defiance.

“Okay,” Robin says, each syllable long and placating, as a parent would talk down to a child on the brink of a temper tantrum. She flips the sign from Open to Closed, though they’re only two hours into the Sunday slog. “I think someone needs a break.”

A backroom lobotomy is what Steve needs. He can’t lose his shit again, not after the first two rounds of shit lost led to a concussion apiece. Steve is no head doctor, but he’s pretty sure the third strike on brain trauma carries with it an eighty-percent chance you’re knocked out of the game for good.

“What’s going on?” Robin asks, gently wrestling the return cart from him before he starts using it as a battering ram.

Steve trails her to the counter, a hand threaded through his hair, wondering if there is a way to tell her everything without coming off like both a negligent idiot and a man who lost a bunch of marbles he couldn’t afford to lose in the first place. Then again, this is Robin, the girl who finishes his sentences and the crusts of his pizza, and affectionately calls him her idiot while listening to every word out of his mouth like it's her nine o’clock news. They’re tuned to the same frequency, permanently, and it’s been killing him not to have her in the loop.

“Robin,” he whispers, pushing up on his elbows and craning his neck to assure the store is empty. Satisfied they’re alone, he confides, “Aliens are real.”

“Uh…” Robin squints, trying to discern if he’s being serious. “Yeah, probably.”

“No, they’re real,” he emphasizes. “I’ve seen them.”

“You’ve seen…” The crease between her brows looks painful now. “You’re gonna have to help me out here, Harrington. You’ve seen little green people? Martians?”

Steve gives her the down and dirty version of what happened at Camp Hero, the break-in, the arrival of the men in black, the chase, and, the grand finale, an aborted alien abduction. At the end of his fireside saga, missing the bonfire and the comfort of knowing the story was a fantasy, Robin has trouble closing her gaping mouth.

“Hopper is actually going to kill you,” Robin says finally, dumbstruck by his stupidity. If ever there was a time to call him a dingus. “And Joyce Byers is going to throw your body to the sharks.”

“But you believe me?” Steve asks, because he needs her to say it in words. In the aftermath of their alien encounter, Steve and Max had returned to the rendezvous point at the edge of the state park to find the other kids waiting for them, shaken but unharmed. Dustin had believed their story without question, but the other three boys had been skeptical. Everyone wants to believe in aliens until someone says they saw a UFO floating in the sky.

Robin’s lengthy pause is not boding well for him. “I—”

“You do realize half the reason Dustin is doing any of this is because of an article you wrote.”

“The headline was meant to be attention-grabbing,” Robin says in excuse, tossing up her arms.

“Well, it worked! Attention grabbed!” Steve slumps across the counter and buries his face in his folded arms, though not before getting an eyeful of the Marty McFly and Doc Brown cut-out propped up by the new releases. What he wouldn’t give to have a DeLorean right about now. A good old-fashioned memory eraser would suffice.

“Hey.” Robin taps his arm. When Steve props his chin on his forearms, he sees she has slumped to match his stance, her elbows butting against his. Her eyes are filled to the brim with understanding as they look into his. “I do believe you and I’m sorry that happened to you.”

Steve musters a small smile. “You don’t have to be sorry…”

“Then can I be mad?” Robin asks, already dusting up some indignation. “Aliens almost took my best friend away.”

“It wasn’t really me they were after. It was more Max—”

The bell chimes, because speak of the devils and they ignore a simple closed sign, or however the saying goes. All the kids tromp in, save for El, and Robin does not hesitate to fix them with a fierce glare. “Do you kiddies have a death wish?”

“You told her?” Dustin accuses Steve, appalled, like he has broken a blood oath.

“Of course I told her.”

The news does not faze the other kids, who have grown accustomed to Robin and Steve as a two-for-one rental deal. Will and Mike are more interested in the Back to the Future display and Lucas in Max, wandering over by the new releases. For as long as she’s here, Max will do her best not to look Steve’s way. He gets it, really. His face is a reminder she might have been Montauk’s latest missing person this time last week.

Returning his attention to the counter, Steve sees Dustin and Robin are still in the midst of a stare-off, their eyes comically narrowed. Dustin breaks first, his eyes widening in recollection. “You speak a bunch of languages, right?” he asks.

“Oui,” Robin says blandly, but shoots Steve a questioning glance. 

He doesn’t have time to shrug back, what with how Dustin unceremoniously bumps him out of the way so he can lay out a series of yellow pages onto the countertop for Robin’s viewing pleasure. How quickly he changes his tune. “We found these in what we think is the radar control room at Camp Hero,” he tells her as she studies the first page.

“This just seems like Morse code and a bunch of phonetic spellings of…” Robin looks closer, mouthing a couple of syllables, and concludes, “…nonsense.”

“We think the air base was primarily communicating with these beings in Morse code,” Lucas explains, edging back towards the group.

“But they took the Morse code and turned it into a code within a code,” Dustin says, beaming. He and Suzie have been putting in overtime attempting to crack this mysterious code within a code. It's a love language of nerd. “Awesome, right?”

“Kind of,” Robin allows with a close-lipped smile of her own. That’s the beauty of Dustin Henderson at work right there; his enthusiasm is a slow but tenacious contagion. “But why would they need a code that the military couldn’t understand?”

The question stumps the boys, but Steve is struck by a memory from Thanksgiving, Ground Control sharing his theory on the blackouts and what Steve once refused to call alien activity. “They’re searching for something,” he says quietly, more to himself than the group.

“Or someone,” Max suggests, decamped from New Releases. “And the message is for them.”

“An alien that’s already here?” Mike says, unconvinced.

“And it’s really taking them over two years to find them?” Lucas follows up, as doubting as Mike.

Beings of not such superior intellect, Ground Control had called the aliens. Not that Steve enjoys siding with Mike Wheeler, but he and Lucas are bringing up valid points. It hardly seems like an alien invasion has begun in Montauk, New York and, if they’re only hunting for one lone ranger lost on Earth, they’re pretty terrible seekers in this cosmic game of hide and seek.

“Maybe they don’t see the same way we do,” comes Will, surfacing from deep in thought. He looks like he’s trying to call back a memory, only to have it elude him at every turn. “That, or whoever they’re trying to find really doesn’t want to be found.”

“So what? They’re just letting other people get taken instead?” Max asks.

“We still don’t know the disappearances are related,” Lucas counters.

“Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right,” Max says, her voice dripping in sarcasm. “It was the other aliens who tried to abduct me and Steve on your dumb let’s break into the creepy air base mission.”

“Alright, children, no fighting in Family Video,” Robin says, as if she and Steve hadn’t spent the first half the summer here sniping at each other. She shuffles the crusty papers together into a haphazard pile, ignoring Dustin’s whinging, and hands them back to him with the advice, “You should show these to Nancy.”

“Why Nancy?” Steve says, overlapping Mike asking with disdain, “My sister?”

“She’s been doing some investigating into Camp Hero, too,” Robin says. “She obviously wasn’t crazy enough to break in…”

Dustin turns on Mike, his hands planted on his hips. Steve hates how the pose is so familiar, like gazing into a funhouse mirror and seeing himself at half the height. “Why is your sister trying to scoop us?” Dustin demands.

“How the hell should I know?”

“Has she told you anything she’s got?” Dustin asks Robin, motioning for Will to bring over the camera. “Do you know anything?”

Robin shoots Steve another look over Dustin’s head. He reads the message in her eyes loud and clear: this is what you’ve been dealing with for the last three months? Steve nods, pursing his lips and raising his eyebrows to say, you have no idea.

“I don’t know, she said something about a woman who worked at the air base, or claimed she did. I guess the woman went to East Hampton police accusing the government of running illegal experiments on her and a bunch of other people there. And she said…” Robin pauses, glancing again at the stack of papers left on the edge of the counter. “Apparently, she said she had been abducted by aliens because of what they were doing at the base.”

Steve can imagine what the police did with a report like that. Hopefully, they waited at least a week before shredding it, the account dismissed as the ravings of a mad woman.

“Did Nancy get to talk to her?” Dustin asks.

Robin shakes her head. “She died a couple of years ago. I don’t even know how Nance found out any of this. Wheeler, your sister is kind of a genius—”

“Yeah, cool, Nancy is amazing. Everyone in Montauk knows that,” Dustin motor-mouths, heedless to the fact Robin is a few seconds away from strangling him. “Did Nancy tell you her name by any chance?”

“Something Ives, I think?”

Mike visibly tenses. Max, who had been training her irritated glare on Marty and Doc, snaps her head back to the counter. Everyone else in the room watches the two of them lock eyes, a wordless secret passing between them.

“She told you?” Mike goggles Max in disbelief.

“Of course she told me,” she snaps back at him, arms crossing tightly over her chest. “We’re best friends.”

“Is there something you kids would like to share with the class?” Robin asks, fully dragged down the documentary rabbit hole now.

“It could just be a coincidence,” Mike says. For once, Max seems like she wants to agree with him.

Dustin is swinging the camera between Mike and Max, focusing on their anxious faces. “What’s a coincidence?”

Neither of them look like they want to answer, on film or otherwise. They’re both stubborn to a fault, but Max really digs her heels in, lips sealed in a thin, unbreachable line. Finally, Mike sighs, a deep and foreboding sound, and says, “Ives used to be El’s last name.”

 

 

 

Star facts! This might actually be the last star fact of ‘85, cosmonauts. How time flies when you’re having fun.

If you’re traveling in our own solar system tonight, cosmonauts, you might pass a wandering star. The wandering stars, for any of our listeners down here on Earth, are the Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Basically, our good old Greek ancestors looked up at the same night sky we are and thought, “Hey, some of those things in the sky move and some of them don’t.” The wandering stars are born. Thanks to Suzie Science, I can tell you our word for these movers and shakers, “planet,” even comes from an ancient Greek word that meant “wanderer.” That's right—this star fact was a planet fact in disguise all along.

Pretty sure this was all back in the days when Earth was the center of the universe. They didn’t know we were wandering, too.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — DECEMBER 13, ‘85

 

 

 

This is your first big memory.

Mama was gone. You woke up; she didn’t.

That morning, you played pretend. You brushed your hair yourself, dressed for another day of telling green people from yellow people, yellow people from red, and sat at the kitchen table, thinking if you played well enough, Mama would come downstairs and tell you that you won the game.

But the morning became the afternoon, and a car pulled up outside. You and Mama had another game, one that involved cars. If a strange one came along, you hid.

You raced outside and hid behind the trunk of a tree, but the plants were dead and you would get found hiding behind skeleton branches. The farther you ran in the woods, the louder your footsteps sounded and the more you missed Mama. She always said there was never a place you could go where she couldn’t find you, but she never promised there wasn’t a place she could go where you couldn’t follow.

On a road hugging the ocean, wandering in the dark, a truck stopped for you. You were too tired to hide. The man who rolled his window down did not look like any of the men at the school-not-school. He said his name was Benny. He owned a burger place—had you heard of it? You shook your head. Your stomach hurt at the mention of burgers. You hadn’t eaten all day.

He said you probably shouldn’t get into a car with a stranger, but he had a flashlight and a pair of feet, and he could walk with you to find a phone. You had no one to call. That was alright, he said, because he had a friend named Chief Hopper and he helped kids who were lost.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

Real name or the name Mama called you? How about both.

“Jane,” you said, “and Eleven.”

“Well, Jane Eleven”—he smiled and handed you the flashlight to carry for yourself—“it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

His glow was yellow, firefly light, and you’re the reason his light got stamped out. You heard the low hum before he did, a two-note song, and you felt the presence of something else, something different and unknown, in between your toes and your teeth, prickling under your fingernails, and surging through your wrists that sometimes shine.

You hid, because that was what you were told you to do. Beneath a dock, freezing water lapping at your ankles. The light washed over the world in a wave. And when you opened your eyes again, Benny was gone.

Not like Mama, but just like Mama. Not coming back.

 

 

 

Teresa Ives, known to those closest to her as Terry, passed away in her sleep on November 4, 1983. A longtime East Hampton resident, she attended East Hampton High and studied at Hampton Community College. She worked at the Montauk Air Force Station until its closure in 1981. She will be remembered for her fierce intelligence, her resilience, and her commitment to the people she loved. A beloved sister and mother, she is survived by her sister, Rebecca Ives, and a daughter.

OBITUARY OF TERRY IVES (FEBRUARY 17, 1951 – NOVEMBER 4, 1983)

 

 

The hour drive over to Shelter Island is quiet, an unusual occurrence where the kids are concerned. The Nancy Wheeler effect at work.

Dustin is stewing in the trunk of the station wagon, none too pleased he was strong-armed into a joint interview, but his disgruntlement has nothing on Nancy’s. She hasn’t decided if she’s livid at Steve for allowing the kids to break into a military facility, horrified government-seeming agents appeared to have license to open fire on children, or worried for Steve and Max’s lives and, by extension, all of their lives. Where is the none of the above box is what Steve would like to know.

Staked in the passenger seat, he provides the necessary directions to the house of Becky Ives. When he’s not sneaking glimpses at Nancy, her sharp eyes never straying from the road, Steve is checking in on El through the rearview mirror. She’s sitting in the middle seat between Max and Mike, watching the water as they cross onto the island. She had been quick to agree to visit the aunt she only sees once or twice a year, but Steve wouldn’t call the way she looks now excited. It’s not apprehensive either. She’s never been an easy girl to get a read on.

Even learning that her mother, who El says she has very few concrete memories of, once claimed the military facilitated her alien abduction, El hadn’t betrayed any shock or horror. They all would have understood if she accused them of lying, but if anything, she had seemed relieved. Someone had finally sat her down and handed her the key to her life’s padlocked door. Now, she had made a choice to open it.

Her hand does tighten around Mike’s as Nancy pulls down a short gravel driveway on a quiet residential street a ways off from the ocean. The Ives house is a small one-story cottage with weathered brown shingles and green-shuttered windows. There’s a tall elm tree in the center of the front yard and, in the summer, the tree in bloom must block the cottage’s view from the street. The house feels safe, secluded, tucked away.

While Nancy throws the car into park, Steve twists in his seat. “Ground rules,” he says, zeroing in on Dustin. “El gets to ask all the questions. If her aunt says she doesn’t want to be filmed, that’s it. No protesting, no whining, I don’t want to hear it. Clear?”

“Crystal,” Dustin grumbles and crawls after Will and Lucas out of the trunk.

“Wow,” Nancy says, beneath seatbelts unbuckling and car doors slamming. “They actually listen to you. Even Mike.”

If junior year Steve Harrington could see him now, impressing Nancy Wheeler with his babysitting prowess. “He’s just worried about El,” he says, because under normal circumstances, Mike would not have missed a chance to sneer at Steve’s supposed authority.

Nancy gazes through the windshield, to where El is walking up the front path, Mike hovering anxious at her shoulder. “I’m worried, too.”

It’s the wrong moment to bring up the night Will returned, so instead Steve climbs out of the car and trails Nancy to the front door, now standing open. The woman in the doorframe is in her mid-thirties, smoking her way through the last of a cigarette. Her face is serious and understandably wary, but her eyes are kind, especially as they fall on El.

“Hey, sweetheart,” she says, stepping to the left to usher them inside. “I hope I can help you.”

She leads them into a cozy living room, warmly decorated with furniture comfortable and lived-in. On the fireplace mantle, there’s a row of family photos in need of dusting. The photograph in the center is of two girls, both teenagers and pained to be taking a forced Christmas card. The younger of the pair has El’s huge eyes and her small, tentative smile.

Dustin is fussing over Will and the video camera set-up, but Becky Ives has her attention solely focused on El. As they settle onto the couch, she asks after Hopper and how her homeschooling is going. El’s answers are stilted, like she’s not used to an adult who is not her father being so invested in her life. Her eyes keep going to Mike or Max for encouragement, which they give her in nods and comforting half-smiles. Nancy’s right—they did listen to Steve’s car instructions and let El lead the conversation.

After the school talk runs dry, a short, lingering silence follows that Becky breaks with a gentle sigh. “So, you’re here to talk about your mom, huh?”

She looks around the room, to Dustin and Will in the corner with their camera, to Nancy at the table in the kitchen nook with her notebook out, to Lucas, Max, and Mike on the second couch, Steve himself perched on the arm. She turns back to El. “Are you sure this is something you want to know? I loved your mom, so much, but she had some darkness right”—Becky taps her temple—“here.”

“She was bad?” El asks, her eyes widening a fraction.

“Oh no, nothing like that, sweetheart. Darkness like…”

Though Becky can’t seem to find the words, El does. “She had shadows.”

Becky knits her eyebrows. “That’s exactly what your mom used to say.”

El cuts her eyes to Steve and Max, her concern stark. He ducks his head and looks at his hand folded in his lap, almost expecting them to be shroud in a blue fog so dark and thick that he’d hardly see his knuckles.

“Ready?” Dustin asks from the corner, camera trained on Becky and El.

If it were up to Steve to answer, he’d say when have they ever been.

 

BECKY IVES (SISTER OF THERESA IVES, ALLEGED CAMP HERO SUBJECT): I guess I should start at the beginning then. Our parents—your grandparents, they passed away in a car accident when I was nineteen and your mom was fifteen. Neither of us wanted to deal with it…I think because it would have felt like we were blaming each other. I was so angry at—at God, I guess, for taking them away and making it so I had to drop out of college, and I think Terry was angry that I couldn’t be her big sister anymore. Suddenly, I was fake mom.

She started getting into a lot of things I didn’t understand. Not just drugs, but that was…whenever I tried to get her off it, she’d say I didn’t get it. She was expanding the boundaries of her mind. I just didn’t know how to stop us from drifting apart. I thought it would be good if I gave her some space, let her explore whatever hippie stuff she wanted as long as she took some classes at Hampton. When she told me she got a job at that base, I was actually happy for her. I didn’t totally believe it at first, but…

ELEVEN HOPPER (DAUGHTER OF THERESA IVES): It was a…job?

B. IVES: At this point, I don’t really believe it was. It might have been a drug trial. She might have made the whole thing up and she was never at that base. But one day, after six months not hearing from her at all, Terry showed up here eight months pregnant and telling me the military and aliens had done something to her baby, to—to you.

E. HOPPER: Something bad?

B. IVES: She kept saying they wanted to see what was possible. It was the same stuff she said about the acid and LSD, so I never thought—and you were so beautiful and healthy. Fine, you were fine! And sweet, so sweet…I don’t know how much you remember, but sometimes, your mom let us take you to the park and you always knew when another kid was feeling left out or sad…Terry used to say that was part of it, that these beings, their way of seeing wasn’t like ours. It sounded like a science-fiction movie.

I wanted her to see someone or even just move back home for a little while, because I was worried with you and her, in Montauk without any help, but she said they wouldn’t let that happen. They needed to keep observing her—you…and someday…

E. HOPPER: Someday?

B. IVES: They’d want you back.

THE MONTAUK FILES (WORKING TITLE) — INT. V — RECORDED DECEMBER 20, ‘85

 

“No way!” Mike explodes, vaulting off the couch. “No way—they can’t have her. She doesn’t belong to them, just because—because—”

“Hun—Mike?” Becky looks to El for confirmation of the name and she nods. “Mike, there is no one that can swoop in and take Jane away, I promise. Hopper and I have arranged for him to have full custody. My sister was paranoid, especially towards the end, but that’s all it was.”

“No, you don’t—” Mike breaks off with a yelp of pain. Max had managed to pinch his wrist before he said anything as dumb and revealing as Becky wouldn’t get it. The woman has been nice enough to give them an afternoon’s worth of her time, but she’ll definitely draw the line if they attempt to convince her aliens actually are real and abduction-happy.

“I’m sorry if that wasn’t what you were hoping to hear,” Becky says to El, taking her hands in hers. “She really loved you more than anything in the world.”

“I know,” El says softly, her thumb circling around the inside of her own wrist.

Becky picks up the motion and smooths two fingers down her inner wrist, as if she were drawing two tally marks on her skin. “She said you used to shine here and sometimes, I swore I could see it, too.”

“So she could find me,” El says.

“Right…” Becky trails off, overcome by a memory. “She used to say that thing about the shadows, but then towards the end…” With the back of one hand, she wiped tears from both eyes. “She just kept repeating, I will find you in the light. You will find me in the dark.”

“Shit.”

Dustin and Will had sworn at the same time, throwing panicked glances at each other and at Lucas and Mike. The telepathic conversations those four share have never amounted to anything good in Steve’s extensive experience and he already knows he’ll hate whatever is coming next.

“That’s—” Will swallows, his face ashen. “That’s what the morse code Dustin picked up said.”

“You’re sure?” Nancy asks, her pen suspended over a full page of hurried notes.

“We weren’t before,” Dustin says. “I think we are now.”

All but one person in the room reaches the exact same conclusion at the exact same time. Terry Ives knew the Morse code the aliens are continuing to transmit, a code they adapted to under Camp Hero’s instructions. She would have needed a radio as powerful as Dustin’s to have heard an isolated transmission, so she had to have heard it somewhere else. Somewhere closer to the source, like a base. Or a ship.

Terry Ives was no mad woman.

The person left in the dark is scrutinizing them with growing unease. “Your dad knows you’re here,” Becky says to El, unconvinced. “Right?”

No one can give her the assurances she's after.

They leave the Ives house without invitations extended for them to come again soon. The drive back to Montauk is solemn, silent, everyone lost in their own worlds of thought. Steve has fallen into the past, running through a timeline he wishes would stop making sense.

Terry Ives died sometime in the night on November 6th, 1983. Will disappeared that same night. The next night, Benny Hammond disappears. Two nights later, Barb Holland. Then, that Saturday, Will was found in the state park and he, Nancy, and Jonathan had—

Something began with Terry Ives. The silence in the car tells Steve that no one has a clue how to end it.

Nancy drops the kids off, one hour early for curfew. At the Wheeler house, Mike drags his feet walking into the garage, but Nancy follows Steve to where his Bimmer is waiting.

She goes as far as pressing her back against the driver side door. “Steve, we have to talk about it.”

“Nance, I’ve got a shift. I can’t.”

“Do any of them know?” Nancy asks, relentless. “Did you tell Dustin?”

“Did you tell Mike?” Steve counters, and because he’s exhausted and feeling raw, he sinks lower. “Did Jonathan tell Will?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Yeah, none of this is.” 

Steve wrenches the door open and Nancy doesn’t stop him this time. Family Video is dead when he arrives, but Tom is thrilled to see him and clocks out with the speed of a record-shattering sprinter. As a parting gift, he’s left Steve with the plentiful Friday returns to reshelf and with the inventory to complete. For once, Steve is grateful for the kid’s laziness. He needs the grunt work to occupy his brain.

Hour one, he inputs the returns and reshelves. The squeaky wheel mocks him. Hour two, he finishes the inventory and restocks the snacks for the weekend rush. He also rents Terminator and dry heaves in the employee bathroom. Hour three, he decides to put on a movie scarier than his life. He goes with the succinctly-named The Fog and rips open a packet of M&Ms with his teeth while the opening scene plays. There’s the promised fog.

He soon discovers one of the characters is a late-night radio host. His eyes drift to the phone, slumbering. He had decided he wasn’t going to call him tonight, because if he’s dry heaving in the bathroom, he’s guaranteed to vomit everything he’s been repressing for two long years into that phone receiver. But now, Steve hears the smooth radio voice of this woman who doesn’t know yet her life is a horror movie and all he can think about is Ground Control.

Steve mutes the TV and takes the phone off the hook.

“Cutting it pretty close, Commander—”

“I have to tell you something and if you don’t just shut up and listen, I’m not going to be able to get through the whole thing, so can you…” Steve sinks to the floor behind the counter, dragging the phone with him. “Save saying ‘I told you so’ or ‘Never talk to me again’ until the end, okay?”

“You’re kind of freaking me out here, Steve,” Ground Control says, sounding on edge because Steve put him there. “But okay. Lay it on me.”

“Okay,” Steve exhales. Okay.

 

 

 

 

[A suburban road, late night. Middle left, a line of bare trees; dark, heavy grain. Middle right, distant, a paved driveway, empty, and the silhouette of a house without lights on. No cars parked on the road. No people. Sky, a luminous teal-green. Top right corner, a hovering object in the sky. Emitting light.]

PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN NOVEMBER 8, ‘83

 

 

 

He shouldn’t have been driving.

That hadn’t occurred to him at the time, gunning the Bimmer down Old Montauk Highway with one eye swollen shut, single-minded as he was in his desire to apologize to Jonathan Byers for everything. But later, he’d dream of that drive, of being pulled over for speeding and rolling down his window to see an officer with a void where a face should have been, like a giant mouth opening to scream. Waking up in a cold sweat, he’d remember how delirious he had been behind the wheel. Try to convince himself that entire night had been nothing but a bad dream.

It had been dark at the Byers house, save for a single bulb shining in the living room. Now, he believes they had been testing a theory. Steve staggered out of the car, forgetting to take the keys out of the ignition. Anyone would have guessed he was drunk, not concussed.

His bruised hand hurt, banging on the Byers’s front door. He begged Jonathan to open up, declared he was there with good intentions.

Nancy answered instead. She told him, with steel in her voice, to go home.

Details have come back to him over the last two years, things that had not started to add up until now. To this day, he’s not sure Jonathan or Nancy understood it all either. They had a radio on the coffee table, tuned to a staticky station, alongside an old walkie-talkie and a lamp with the shade taken off. The telephone was dangling off the hook. His headlights were flooding the living room, because he hadn’t just forgotten to take his keys out of the ignition. He had left the car running.

Steve was rambling off an apology, and Nancy was demanding he go, and Jonathan was volleying between assuring Steve it was alright and assuring Nancy the same. Two boys with black and blue faces and a girl clenching her fists. Beneath them, static, so much static, and the murmur of a dial tone, and ringing in his ears that just wouldn’t quit.

He had flicked on the light switch, a confused reflex. The room was already too bright. They hadn’t noticed the radio changed its tune, because they were yelling, and snapping, and overlapping one another, and—“Shut up!”

Nancy wasn’t looking at Steve or Jonathan. The lamp on the coffee table was flickering, off, on, off, on, off. Steve blinked, blinked, blinked and the overhead lights blinked back at him. His hand was nowhere near the switch. The radio was spitting out a language he had never heard before, and a clicking, a sharp, fast clicking that felt like a pick piercing his temples.

“This is crazy—” Steve dug the heels of his hands into his ears. “This is crazy!”

“Shit—” Jonathan, one hand stabilizing himself on the wall, was staring out the open door. “Nancy, the car—”

His car alarm went off, a hysterical cry into the night. The bulb in the lamp shorted. The room, once awash in the cold light of the headlight beams, went in and out of shadow. The floor felt like it was moving beneath his feet and he knew Jonathan and Nancy felt the vibrations, too. They raced together onto the porch, saw for themselves how his car was rattling, the headlights blinking off and on in manic bursts, the dirt off the Byers’s unpaved driveway circling it in a dusty cyclone.

“Steve, wait!”

His wrist slipped from Jonathan’s grip. He jumped the two porch steps. The only thought in his head had been how his dad was going to kill him, for the fight, for having the police involved, and now for wrecking the car—

A light exploded, a supernova across his eyes. He slammed into a wall. Nothing.

He woke up on the ground next to his car, a half-mile down the road from the Byers house. In the distance, he heard voices screaming his name. Some days, he still manages to convince himself he suffered a brief blackout. He had been so confused, so terrified, so sideways that he climbed into his car and drove off, leaving Byers to his possessed house and Nancy to help him exorcise it. Nancy and Jonathan told him a different story when they found him, though one they hardly believed themselves.

He had vanished without a trace.

Stranger still, they had already searched where they eventually found him and his car. He hadn’t been there. They guessed he had been gone for about forty minutes, a miniscule amount of time in the grand scheme of things. Especially when compared to Will Byers. Even more so when compared to everyone who never came home.

Nancy tried to interrogate him, right there on the side of the road. Her face was drawn and serious, but her hands fluttered in her lap, wringing the skin of each finger raw, until he had to grab her hands to still them. Steve maintains that’s the moment she decided to stay with him. He would be the boy who tried to stop her hands from shaking. Funny that the things you think you want often end up becoming the very things you resent.

The interrogation didn’t last as long as it might have because a cop car with the lights on, but not the sirens came trundling down the road. The car cruised to a stop and Officer Callahan stepped out, looking baffled by the players in the scene set before him—the two boys whose fight he broke up the day before and the girl the fight was and was not about, all three pale-faced like they had witnessed something unspeakable. Or like they had done something unspeakable themselves.

Deciding against asking any questions, he turned to Jonathan. “I was told to come pick you up. They just found your brother in the state park.”

The three of them would not be alone in a room together again until two weeks later. In the East Hampton High dark room, they revisited the photo Jonathan had taken the night of Barb’s disappearance. It wasn’t proof of anything. It wouldn’t give Will peace of mind, though Jonathan wished it could. It wouldn’t bring Barb back, of that Nancy was certain. And it never made Steve feel any better about forty minutes of missing time edited out of his memory.

They promised, with linked pinkies like they were seven and not seventeen, never to talk about it again.

He knows Nancy and Jonathan broke the promise a long time ago and did it with each other. He can’t fault them. In the end, it had been Steve who needed the denial most.

 

 

 

Dear Jonathan,

I hope everything has been going well with your family. Nancy’s been telling me I’ve heard Will has been doing better and I’m really glad to hear it.

I’m sorry for everything that went down between us, the things I said, provoking a fight. I know you said I don’t have to apologize anymore, but after that night but my dad always said to get everything down in writing. Sorry, bad joke.

This gift isn’t me trying to buy your forgiveness, I swear. But you need a camera with a talent like yours, man. Just consider it me fixing what I broke.

Merry Christmas.

– Steve

GIFT DELIVERED DECEMBER 24, ‘83

 

 

 

For a while, neither of them speak a word. On the television screen, The Fog has reached its grand finale; without sound, the scene somehow seems more violent, more unrelenting, like everything is happening behind soundproof glass, these scared, defenseless people on one side and him powerless on the other. He blinks, his temples throbbing. The overhead fluorescents are hurting his eyes. Steve just wants to turn everything off, everything but the telephone.

Eventually, Ground Control says softly, “You’ve really been holding out on me, commander.”

At some point, Steve had pulled his legs into his chest. He rests his forehead against his knee, hiding his face from the light. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he says. “Just—Jesus Christ, Steve.”

Funny enough, Steve toyed with the idea of dragging himself to church in the aftermath of that night, on the off chance his experience had been an act of God. But he learned soon enough acts of God are just what insurance agents call earthquake damage or flash floods. Not disappearing acts.

“I swear, even then I didn’t think it was aliens,” Steve says in his own defense. He can’t have Ground Control thinking he has been lying by omission and evasion for their entire correspondence, even if it sometimes seems like Ground Control is in a state of constant redaction.

“What did you think it was?” he asks, incredulous. “An atomic bomb?”

A bomb, a flashbang, a miracle, not a miracle, a blackout, an alternate dimension—take your pick from Steve’s unwillingly-kept list. None of the explanations fit quite right, because it had to say something about him, about the blank in his memory he didn’t want to recover, that the most obvious theory for everyone else was one he refused to touch with a hundred-foot pole.

“I thought something fucking crazy happened to me and I was never going to know for sure what it was, and maybe I was okay with that,” Steve answers, and that was the vague truth he had settled for until Dustin Henderson shoved a camera in his face, called him a nonbeliever, and turned his life upside down for a second time.

“But Nancy and Jonathan weren’t,” Ground Control says, stuck somewhere between a question and a statement of fact.

“I don’t think either of them wanted to believe it was aliens either, because just imagine what that meant for Will. And Barb…” Steve closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. “Nance must have thought it was military then and she probably still thinks it’s military now.”

Ground Control sighs, sounding a shade off of disgusted when he says, “She’s not totally wrong there.”

“She never is.”

Steve doesn’t know how he fell into a life where he’s destined to be always out of his depth. It serves him right for hanging out with kids who have supercomputers instead of normal human brains and falling for people with opinions and ideas that ballooned and multiplied until they sucked all the oxygen out of a room.

“What are you going to do now?” Ground Control asks.

“What am I supposed to do?” Steve counters and doesn’t mean it rhetorically. For once, he’d like someone to spell out, in plain English, how he is meant to clean up the mess he and the universe have made of his life. “Seriously, I’m actually asking.”

A tall order to demand of an amateur radio jockey who has about a year of life experience on Steve. “I really wish I had something for you, dude,” he says, his voice thick with genuine regret.

Steve tips his head back, letting it thump against the shelves underneath the counter. The movie is over, the credits rolled. Steve stares into the empty screen and says, “I feel like all I’ve been doing for the last two years is taking shots in the dark. What am I expecting is gonna happen?”

“What everyone expects is gonna happen,” Ground Control says quietly, almost in confession.

Steve scoffs. “So, nothing.”

Ground Control exhales, a tiny sigh, with a feeling in it that Steve has trouble identifying. “Are you going to be okay?” he asks. Their conversation is fast approaching its end, as Steve checks his watch and sees they’re coming up on midnight.

“Mind playing ‘Across the Universe’ for me?” Steve requests. In the six months Steve has been listening to Dark Star, Ground Control has never once played a Beatles song. He wouldn’t be surprised to hear him claim the band causes him to break out in hives.

True to character, Ground Control emits a weak gag. “You’ve officially gone a step too far.”

“One small step for man…” Steve quotes, leaving it for him to finish the rest.

“One giant assault on the eardrums of mankind.”

Steve huffs a laugh, not altogether real but close enough. “You’re still going to play it.”

Silence travels down the line. That might have been the step too far, assuming he knows Ground Control so well. A small inhale, like he’s arrived at some decision, and then: “You know I’d do just about anything for you, right?”

Steve hears a crack; it could have been his knuckles, or the plastic receiver, or his rib cage, too small and tight to contain the massive thing pounding within it. His chest may split through the center, earthquake damage. An act of God.

With how fast his breath is coming, it’s amazing he’s able to blurt out, “Why?”

Ground Control takes his turn to laugh, almost. “Why do you think.”

“Yeah.” Steve nods his head and, like his own echo, repeats, “Yeah.”

Ground Control does not dedicate the song to Commander Steve. The mystic music of Dark Star’s intro leads into his familiar greeting, though more subdued than usual, and he plays “Across the Universe” without flourish, complaint, or comment. It’s an inside joke for them alone. Steve listens to Lennon sing, “Nothing’s gonna change my world,” again and again and thinks it's way too late.

 

 

 

Merry Commercial Christianity—ahem, Merry Christmas! Welcome to Dark Star: The Christmas Special, where I will be playing no Christmas music, so don’t bother asking. 

We all agree Christmas blows, right? I mean, if you’re listening to this right now, your day couldn’t have been that merry and bright. Forced cheer and watching people pretend they had goodwill towards men the whole year isn’t really our thing over here at Ground Control. It makes you wonder what kind of holidays they celebrate out there in the universe. Do other planets pick days on their calendar and announce, “And on this day, we chop down some trees and throw colored balls on them, and everyone acts like they’re happy.” Well, bah humbug.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — DECEMBER 25, ‘85

 

 

 

The holidays of Harringtons’ past were anemic affairs.

His mom tended to bring in a decorator who trimmed the tree and strung the lights to the tasteful, colorless-bulb preferred standards of the neighborhood. Presents were wrapped at the department stores, then packed away in preparation for the holiday exodus from Montauk. Steve can’t remember the last Christmas he spent in his house. To a young Steve, Christmas meant a week in Westchester with his grandparents, at a stone house dressed up like it was the centerfold in a county magazine and everyone in it props completing the picture.

The small slew of cousins were fun to hang around, in the pockets of attic rooms and unkempt areas of the grounds where it felt safe to roughhouse without an adult snapping at them to mind an antique whatchamacallit. But as the cousins grew and Steve grew with them, the games went from make-believe and cooperative, to every man for himself, to pass-the-bottle rounds of one-upmanship. Who locked the most lips, who had the highest grades, who was accepted to the most elite school.

Steve left those drunken game nights with a few small victories—most parties thrown, most cops called, most numbers in the black book he wanted to burn—but felt he lost in the categories that counted, the big-door prizes of life. By seventeen, he understood his cousins, both older and younger, thought of him as the family joke. A joke they liked to share laughs with, but a joke that also made them feel better about themselves when they got to laugh at him.

The winter of his senior year, Steve skipped out the day after Christmas, claiming his swim coach had scheduled training sessions over the break. States were coming up. Steve had bombed out of his qualifier and his dad knew it, but must have been holding out some hope because he let Steve go. It took a train, a ferry, and multitude of buses with his fellow holiday exiles, but Steve arrived back in Montauk in time to slink over to Carol’s Orphan Christmas party.

She had hosted the first of these parties during their final year of middle school and dubbed it Orphan Christmas because her father was a surgeon and her mother an ER nurse and they were guaranteed to be working the long-haul shift after Christmas day, if they hadn’t been called into emergency surgery on the holiday itself. From what Steve heard about the party over the years, everyone made it out to be a blast.

The second Steve stepped inside the Perkins house, he wanted to walk right back out the door.

It was the usual suspects of East Hampton High assholes, belligerently drunk on peppermint schnapps and stumbling around the first floor in a zombified daze, dizzied by the ropes of colored Christmas lights criss-crossed along the ceiling. Steve spotted Officer Powell’s daughter curled into Patrick McKinney on one of the couches. Her eyes were wet, his were staring unfixed at a wooden manger scene. Jason Carver was there, too, chatting up Chrissy Cunningham, swimming in a sweater bought a size too large, her teeth nibbling a tiny gingerbread cookie. From the kitchen, he heard the wolfish howl of Billy Hargrove.

Steve ducked out the back door. The Perkins’ pool was covered for the season, blanketed with a thin dusting of snow, but the hot tub was open and a group of tipsy sophomores were gambling with their lives sipping vodka straight in the bubbling water. Before he had to watch one of them lose their dinner, Steve moved to the outer limits of the deck, hiding himself between the barrier of stacked summer furniture and the frosty pachysandra.

Someone else had the same idea and Steve spooked seeing the cherry of a cigarette burning in the darkness. “Sorry,” the guy said with a roguish smile, not sounding all that apologetic.

Steve didn’t recognize him as anyone from the senior class, though he looked too old to be in the grades below. He had the slack spine of a guy who had weathered through his share of high school shit and wasn’t just fed up with it, but bored to tears. He proffered his cigarette and his smile grew when Steve took up the offer.

“Happy Orphan Christmas,” he said derisively, slouching against the tower of deck chairs.

“Cut Carol a break,” Steve said, though the sentiment was about as substantive as the smoke he blew out. He hadn’t cut her a break last year.

He went to give the guy back his cigarette to find him lighting a new one. The little flame of the Bic lit up his face for a brief moment. A pair of dark eyes flickered to Steve, considering. Steve swallowed and took another drag of the cigarette that was his to keep. His chin tipped towards the sky, the stars crystal clear in the cloudless night.

They stayed like that for a while, smoking silently side by side. It was the first time in weeks Steve’s nerves hadn’t felt shot.

“You know,” the guy said, eyes roaming over Steve’s face and then traveling up and up to the sky, “the light we’re seeing up there from the stars is, like, old. They’re so far away from Earth that it takes literal years for the light to reach us. So we’re seeing what the star looked like five years ago, probably more.”

Steve blinked up at the stars. He had never considered them as anything but fixed points in the night sky. Scientists gave the names Steve didn’t remember. Sometimes people wished on them.

“Cool,” he said, considering one star brighter than most and wondering how long and far that light had traveled to reach him.

“You don’t have to humor me, dude.”

“I’m not,” Steve said, and meant it. “Seems pretty sad, though. What if you travel across the universe to get a certain star and discover it was just gone? And you didn’t know it because you were seeing it from five years ago.”

The guy tilted his head, appraising Steve anew, and Steve tore his eyes away, focusing instead on his fingers wrapped around the last stub of his cigarette.

“Stars are billions of years old, so you’d have to be getting really lost along the way for it to go kaput on you,” the guy said, though it didn’t sound like he thought Steve was an idiot for not knowing any better. “I don’t know, I think it’s metal as hell that even if it takes years, light is always gonna reach you.”

They stare at each other, the guy grinning crooked, his teeth lit by moonlight.

“Hey, Manson!”

Billy Hargrove’s voice cratered into their quiet moment, busting it apart.

The guy sighed, stubbing out his cigarette and kicking the butt into the pachysandra. “The new king beckons.” He shuffled around Steve, but paused long enough to grab Steve’s open hand and deposit something small there, closing his fingers in a fist around it. “You could probably use this. Just don’t go out exploring the universe if you don’t plan on coming back, Steve.”

Steve opened his mouth to ask what he meant, but surprise tangled his tongue. The guy—Manson, though he doubted that was his actual name—went to deal with Hargrove. After he had disappeared inside, Steve unfurled his fist to see the token he left him with: a joint

Suppressing a smile and a shiver, Steve tucked the joint into his pocket and finished his cigarette, the little left of it. He waited for a long time in the shadows of a party he never should have come to, hoping the guy would return. Only when he stopped being able to feel his toes did Steve leave, lugging his disappointment behind him.

He still wonders if the guy came back eventually, if he followed the memory of light and found it gone once he got there. And Steve wonders if Ground Control looks back on that night, that chance encounter, as often as he does, because Steve is sure now that’s who it was. Who else would want to talk about stars at a rager?

Steve wishes it hadn’t been so dark, and that he had waited longer, and that stars weren’t so far away.

 

 

 

PLEASE BE ADVISED: The Mayor’s Office, in conjunction with the East Hampton Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has elected to restore the curfew on all persons under the age of 18 to the previous town mandate of 11 PM. This curfew will be enforced and anyone found in violation could be subject to fines. Please contact the East Hampton Police Department with any questions or inquiries.

We hope you had a wonderful holiday.

PUBLISHED IN THE EAST HAMPTON STAR — DECEMBER 26, ‘85

 

 

 

Your most important memory, the one you keep warm in the space closest to your heart, is this.

It had started to rain. You did not have a coat. Benny’s flashlight kept you from slipping and falling as you ran through the trees, wet leaves sticking to your legs and blowing into your sticky cheeks. You thought you might be in the park.

You were shivering, about to give up. Maybe if you tried, you could call the light back to you. You closed your eyes hard and wished for home, so badly it ground your teeth and hammered your heart.

A light shined in your face. You blinked, squinted through a sheet of rain.

It was not one light, but three. The beam shining in your face belonged to a boy not much older or taller than you. He wore a raincoat, but he was as soaked as you were. Despite this, he shrugged off his coat and held it out for you to take. You did.

“Are you lost?” the boy asked.

“No,” you answered, because to be lost, you thought, meant someone was looking for you. Later, you’d learn the most lost people are the ones who think no one cares if they’re ever found.

“You should come with us,” he said, circling his arm to encompass the two other boys shivering in the rain. “We’re looking for our friend. You can help us find him.”

You probably should have told him you were bad luck, but you were wearing his coat and standing in his light, and you didn’t want to be alone anymore. The boy’s glow was a pale yellow, almost as white as starlight, and he told you his name was Mike.

 

 

 

Good riddance, 1985. Like pretty much everyone on the northern tip of Long Island, we here at Ground Control want nothing more than a quieter, safer new year. Eden’s resolution is to listen to something other than Siouxsie and the Banshees. [off-mic: you wish, dickhead] Suzie’s resolutions are care less about FCC violations and to meet the love of her nerdy—[mic cuts out; five seconds of dead air]

I’ve been told I have to apologize or my mic privileges will be revoked. Sorry.

And what’s my resolution, cosmonauts? Be less spineless, probably. Yeah, bet you were expecting a joke there, right? But I’m serious—this is going to be the year everything turns around for your friendly neighborhood Ground Control. Ad astra per aspera.

‘86, baby.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — DECEMBER 30, ‘85

 

 

 

Two women old enough to be his mother have asked who he is kissing at midnight.

Last year, he had the question posed to him four times. The year before, while seventeen and with Nancy under his arm, he still had to laugh off three of Montauk Gardening Association's finest. It’s only nine o’clock now, the night young and the annual Harrington New Year’s Eve party not yet in full swing. He can go for a record five.

His record of champagne glasses downed with his parents none the wiser is six. His mom gave him glass one herself an hour ago, before she warned him to behave tonight, as if he had a track record for causing scenes. But New Year’s Eve is his mom’s big night and Steve allowed her to fuss over his hair and adjust his collar. She had laid out his outfit herself, a cashmere red sweater she had gifted him for Christmas and a white button down beneath it, dark corduroys and a buffed pair of boat shoes to tie together the ensemble. If Ground Control could see him, he’d call him an unforgivable prep.

Steve pops the button at his neck as he watches a caterer pop open a new bottle of champagne. The caterer—a young twentysomething with a Rob Lowe haircut and golden earring his father would call unprofessional dangling from his left lobe—winks at him while he tops off Steve’s second glass. Steve’s next swallow is long and deep, feeling the bubbles seep into his bloodstream. He should ask the caterer what he’s doing later. Who he’s kissing at midnight. Last night, Ground Control said his resolution is to be less spineless. Maybe Steve can steal the resolution for himself.

Thinking of Ground Control dims the brightness of the caterer’s toothy smile. His eyes are a lake water blue, but the longer Steve stares, the less he drowns. The poor guy is counting on Steve to say something, so he thanks him for the champagne and watches his smile drop. He leaves with the bottle, confused and dejected, and Steve feels like an ass without a good apology to offer him. What is he supposed to say—sorry that you, a physical person just waiting for an invitation to shove your tongue down my throat, seem less real to me than a disembodied voice I met through my radio.

Steve is a lunatic. Thanks to Ground Control, he knows that word comes from some ancient idea of madness caused by the moon. He’s everywhere, constantly, in the songs Steve sings, and the little facts he knows, and the secrets they’ve shared. He’s everywhere but where Steve is standing, sipping champagne and waiting out midnight, wanting for something he hasn’t had to see to believe.

“Steven!” his mom trills from the foyer, where he finds her, face wrinkled with displeasure. “Please deal with that. Now.”

She waves to the front door, open a crack, allowing the last dregs of December to slip inside. Chilled and impatient to return to her guests, she leaves Steve to the chore. He goes, expecting a lost delivery guy, the stoner from the local pizza parlor on the wrong block and looking for some directions. What he gets is six familiar faces crowding his doorstep.

“Please tell me you’re caroling.”

The kids are bundled in winter coats, scarves snug around their necks and hats crammed on their heads, but their faces are splotchy and noses running. The boys are out of breath. Steve leans out of the door frame and sees four bikes stashed in the flowerless azalea bushes. Not the promising signs of a friendly little social call.

“Suzie cracked the code,” Dustin says around his huffing and puffing, the words reaching Steve as crystallized clouds of his breath. Louder, in breathless exhilaration, he repeats, “Suzie cracked the code!”

Steve moves out of the doorway, shooing the kids down a step, and yanks the door shut behind him, locking them out of the party. “And you couldn’t have radioed that?” he hisses, despite the closed door. “You had to bike all the way here? All of you?”

“Why are you dressed like Andrew McCarthy?” Lucas asks rather than answering Steve’s question. Max snickers beside him.

“I don’t know, Sinclair,” Steve snaps. “Why are you guys always dressed like the goonies?”

“Can we focus please?” Dustin says impatiently. “We can’t trust someone—or something—isn’t listening to our frequency. No walkies, no phones. We have to go meet her.”

Steve bats back his first instinct where the kids and their plans are concerned: no, no way, absolutely not, no six ways to Sunday. His parents have been up his ass enough tonight to play perfect heir apparent to their suburban king and queen act and if he skips out on their party to ferry a pack of otherwise unsupervised teens to East Hampton, the punishment may be execution. Or they’ll cut him off, whichever requires less clean-up.

The reason Steve does not issue an automatic veto is Dustin, bouncing his weight between both legs, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. He is the only one who has foregone a hat, his hair stiffer than usual. Steve catches a light whiff of Farrah Fawcett hair spray wafting on the wind.

While Dustin may have packaged his request in a paranoid delusion of grandeur—seriously, what spook is listening in on the ham radio jabbering of two geeks in love?—Steve is picking up what’s riding between the lines. Whether Dustin or Suzie conjured up the phone tap excuse, the angle is clear: they want to meet face to face, finally. Seal it with a big New Year’s Eve kiss.

Dustin is staring up at Steve with those big eyes and Steve is taken back to the year before, this same stoop, Dustin demanding he grab a baseball bat because they had a cat killer to catch. Steve really would do anything for the brat, then and now.

“Fine,” he says, rolling his eyes at Dustin pumping his fist in victory. “And you all have to be there for this, too?”

“Duh,” Mike says.

“Yeah, duh,” El echoes, and next to her, Will shakes his camera lightly.

So, the moment will be captured on film for Suzie and Dustin to show their future kids, Steve thinks as he sneaks back inside to grab his coat and keys. Not that Steve himself would want to watch a video of a younger version of his parents kissing. He shudders to imagine them kissing now.

Steve spots his mom entertaining in the living, his father smoking a cigar with a group of colleagues on the back deck. Better to ask for an apology later than permission now. He sneaks the keys to his dad’s G-Wagen, because why not go big if he may never go home again, and wrangles the kids through the garage, into the car, and out of the Harrington house. Exactly what his mom wanted, give or take his getaway.

Dustin directs him out of Montauk and into East Hampton, because why assume Steve remembers the route from his house to the town where he attended four years of high school, then produces a map from his backpack to feed him further turns.

“Suzie can’t tell you the cracked alien code over the radio, but she’s okay with giving out her address?” Steve asks.

“We’re not going to her house,” Dustin says as if stating the obvious, motioning for him to continue straight down the old highway. “We’re going to the Hampton Community College radio station.”

“The radio station?” Steve furrows his brows, valiantly ignoring the way his stomach flips at the mention of the community college. He fumbles to turn down the volume on the song currently playing, his father having the stereo tuned to an easy listening station trumpeting Kenny G. “What the hell is at the radio station?”

“Suzie! She works there, technically.” Dustin glances up from the map, grinning to the gums. “So cool, right?”

“Cool,” Steve echoes tonelessly, his brain working to recalibrate. “Does Suzie have an older sister named Eden?”

He becomes aware the quiet side conversations that had been happening in the back have petered out, all eyes and ears now eavesdropping on the front. His hands tighten around the steering wheel, cruising through another light.

“She’s got a bunch of brothers and sisters, but yeah, her oldest sister is Eden,” Dustin answers, abandoning the map to turn his full attention onto Steve. “How did you know that?”

“Your Suzie is Ground Control’s Suzie,” Steve says in one breath, and feels like a moron for having never connected the dots before. The matching names, Ground Control mentioning two super geniuses rather than one throughout the months of November and December, the very fact Dustin met his mystery girl through a ham radio. Christ, is he dense.

“Ground Control?” Mike repeats, perplexed.

“The Ground Control that heads the Space Shuttle missions? Like in Houston?” Lucas calls from the way back.

“No—kind of…” Steve attempts to explain, “It’s the name the guy who hosts this radio show uses. He’s Ground Control, the listeners are cosmonauts, he calls Suzie and Eden his producers, but I don’t know what that means—”

“Wait, Steve,” Dustin interrupts, aghast. “Are you dating Eden?”

“What? No!” Steve says, though he can’t say he’s thrilled by how horrified Dustin seems at the idea. “I’ve never met her, or Suzie, or Ground Control. It’s just a stupid radio show.”

“That you know an awful lot about,” Max intones, her shrewd eyes meeting Steve’s in the rearview mirror.

His nostrils flare minutely. There’s no reason he deserves a third-degree because he happens to listen to a radio show Dustin’s girlfriend helps out with from time to time. It’s a coincidence—a bizarre one, no arguments here, but his life has been bizarre for two years and counting and this revelation ranks pretty damn low when all is said and done.

Steve does not want to stop and think too long about what he’s driving towards, what showing up at the radio station means for him and not just for Dustin. For almost four months, he’s been waiting for Ground Control to say “Come on down, Commander Steve. Please allow me to introduce myself,” but now that the moment is rushing to meet him, Steve isn’t sure he’s ready. Hell, he hasn’t even been invited.

He follows Dustin’s instructions, right leg jiggling, and ignores the confused glances ricocheting around the car. They’ve been in it too long, swam out too deep to go back now. 

Dustin directs him into the parking lot of a nondescript two-story building, made distinct by the sizable antenna on the roof, sitting at the outskirts of the Hampton campus. Three other cars are in the lot: a standard Ford Escort in gray parked by the front entrance, a chunky Chevy van two spots over, and, swerved across three spaces under the cover of an evergreen cluster, a pizza truck with the headlights killed but the dim interior light on. Two shadows are moving in the backseat and Steve decidedly does not want to know more.

He pulls into a spot between the Escort and the van and the kids are bounding out of the car before he’s cut the engine. Even Dustin, who Steve assumed would transform into a nervous puddle of goo as soon as they got within sight of the station, is scurrying towards the entrance. Only Will hangs back, studying the van like it’s a riddle he once knew the answer to.

“You okay?” Steve asks, stepping beside him and giving the van a quick once-over. A real hunk of junk is his conclusion.

“Yeah, it’s just…” Will sighs, shrugging off whatever is bothering him. “Nothing.”

The other kids are holding the elevator for them, the button pressed for two. If Steve’s stomach was cartwheeling in the car, it’s doing full somersaults now as the elevator doors open and deposit them on the second floor.

The hall they wind up in reminds Steve of a doctor’s office—inoffensively beige, the walls painted to match the carpeting, sterile but for a sad potted plant resigned to a corner. It’s the music that sets it apart, The Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” filtering from down the hall. Fitting.

They follow the music to the end of the hallway, where they find an open door with a hand-drawn sign taped next to it announcing they have reached 90.1 FM—HAMPTON COLLEGE RADIO!

“Well?” Max looks at Dustin, eyebrows raised.

Dustin, his expression a familiar one of intense concentration, walks through the door, everyone else falling in step behind him. Bringing up the rear, Steve tucks his hands into his pockets and crosses his fingers, for the sake of Dustin and himself. Odds are fifty-fifty Ground Control is even here tonight.

In sharp contrast to the corridor, everything about the inside of the station is colorful and loud. The beige carpet carries over from the hallway, but the radio staff hides it under a trove of heavily-treaded oriental and shag rugs. The room they’ve entered is evidently a green room, stuffed with two couches undoubtedly discovered by the side of a road and two armchairs monopolized by a box of tapes each. A full wall is dedicated to shelves of records and another to a chalkboard outline the weekly broadcast schedule. In the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday midnight slots, Steve sees “Dark Star” written in skinny, capitalized letters by a dramatic hand. He smiles. Houston, he thinks, we have landed.

Boxed in by the shorter of the two couches is a closed door, labeled with a strip of masking tape, “Manager’s Office.” Another arched doorway flanked by the armchairs gives a limited view of what Steve guesses is the control room. More records line the wall, alongside a hanging rack of tapes. From what he can see of the desk, there’s a black rotary telephone, a pair of headphones, and a book face down, spine cracked. Someone with a head of dark hair is getting out of the chair.

A small, unsure voice calls out, “Dusty-bun?”

“Suzie-kins?” Dustin calls back, face splitting into a wide grin.

Lucas and Max look at each other like they just won the New York lottery.

Oblivious, Dustin trips forward as Suzie steps into the archway. She fits Ground Control’s description of her to a tee—a pint-sized genius. Her dark hair is tied back in two pigtails, pulled away from the large, rectangular glasses framing her face. Behind the glasses, her eyes blink like she isn’t quite sure what she’s seeing is real. After a moment of she and Dustin staring at each other, no one else in the room moving, Suzie breaks into the giggly, breathless smile of a girl who has met the prince of her dreams and found him to be everything she hoped he would be.

“You’re here,” she says, awed.

“Of course I am,” Dustin says. “You asked me to come.”

In his periphery, Steve sees Mike wrap his arm around El’s waist, her head dropping onto his shoulder. Will is smiling, camera inconspicuously pointing at the pair. Even Lucas and Max are struggling to maintain their claim to cool. Steve is about to shoo the lot of them out of the room with some half-assed excuse that they forgot something in the car, just for the moment to be broken apart by another arrival.

“Hey supergenius, are we going live at ten or—”

That voice.

His voice.

The guy freezes in the now-open doorway of the office, struck dumb by the seven extra sets of eyes staring back at him. About Steve’s age, not an inch over or under on him, Ground Control is nothing and everything Steve expected him to be. He has hair to his shoulders, naturally curly and currently a tangled mess. By his rumpled clothes—a red and black checkered flannel, one sleeve bunched up and the other hanging past his fingers, and a pair of sinfully-tight torn black jeans—Steve guesses he had been taking his usual pre-show nap. Even with the slackened jaw and the bit of drool clinging to the corner of his mouth, he’s still the one of the prettiest guys Steve has ever seen. Not that it would have mattered. This is the guy who has had Steve wanting to tongue a live wire.

Steve assumes Ground Control will want to know what the hell he thinks he’s doing here. That is, if it’s not too conceited to believe Ground Control remembers his face. A face seems easier to remember than a voice and Ground Control had his voice clocked after a single phone call back in July.

And Ground Control does ask, “What are you doing here, man?” but his bewildered eyes are trained on Dustin, not Steve.

“You host a radio show?” Dustin asks in return, gobsmacked. “Dude, why didn’t you tell us? That’s so cool.”

A series of little things suddenly stick out at Steve, as he takes further stock of the room. Dustin is not the only one gaping. Mike, Lucas, and Will are staring in various stages of shock, like Michael J. Fox had shown up and asked them if they wanted a ride in the DeLorean. Earlier, Will had not been bothered by the van; he had recognized it from somewhere. Their Dungeons and Dragons sessions at the Dragon’s Lair happened on Tuesday and Thursday nights, never Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. And in the hand not folded into his flannel sleeve, Ground Control is rolling a die cut and colored like a gemstone between his long, anxious fingers.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

Eddie Munson snaps his eyes to him, a deep and impossible brown.

Steve takes back what he thought in the car—this is the most blindsiding, bizarre thing to happen in his life.

And he’s been abducted by fucking aliens.

Notes:

And it only took 45,000 words!

1) The Twilight Zone episode Eddie is talking about in the first Dark Star is also this chapter’s namesake, Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? It’s one of my personal favorite episodes. He’s also referencing several ‘50s B-movies, including It! The Terror from Beyond Space and Invaders from Mars (later remade in 1986 by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw fame)

2) More talk about The Montauk Project? Don’t mind if I do! One of the claims Preston Nichols (the driving force behind the Montauk conspiracy) made over the years is that Martians gave Camp Hero the technology that made the Montauk Project experiments possible. The chapter title is my little goof on that wild assertion.

3) Ad astra per aspera: to the stars through difficulties. Mottos using “ad astra” come in many shapes and sizes. My favorite is from Seneca the Younger, non est ad astra mollis e terris via, which means “there is no easy way from earth to the stars.” Thought that one might be a bit of a stretch for Eddie to know, so I went with the state of Kansas’ (and Starfleet’s) motto.

4) The car Steve “borrows” from his dad is a 1979 Mercedes-Benz W460 (known as a G-Wagen). Famously the model of car used for the 1980s Popemobile. Mercedes never imported the W460 to the American market, but it was sold through grey import specialists (basically, sellers who legally import cars but not through the official distribution system of that car’s company) and Mr. Harrington just feels like the kind of guy who would have a fancy, harder to obtain European car, you know? Also, I needed a car that better fit seven people. The Bimmer was not gonna cut it.

5) Hampton Community College is an invention of mine, as the closest community college to Montauk is Suffolk College’s east campus, over an hour away. We don’t got that kind of time.

6) 90.1 FM is Stony Brook’s college station that I am borrowing for this fic. Thank you, Stony Brook. Congratulations on having Long Island’s largest non-commercial, free-form radio station!

We're getting to the endgame now, cosmonauts. as ever, thank you so much for reading! wanna talk favorite twilight zone episodes? hit me up over at you can find me over at nancywheeeler on tumblr.

Chapter 5: new year's eve // the arrival

Summary:

A code is cracked, more questions are raised, a new plan is hatched, and the clock strikes midnight.

 

 

Happy New Year’s Eve cosmonauts. Another one of the worst nights of the year, am I right? Probably made even worse for some of you because they allowed me, Ground Control, to host the countdown show. I’m not letting anyone off the hook for “Jump” at #6. Goddamn Van Halen, man…

But first, boy oh boy, do I have a cosmic big bang for you. Yeah, you’re on board with Dark Star tonight. We’re doing this my way, star facts included.

Stars die, just like we die. Except we live like eighty years if we’re lucky and then decompose back into the earth. Food for worms. Stars live billions of years and when they die…[mimics an explosion sound] it’s an event. A galaxy-altering one. And sometimes, two dying stars will collide into each other and unleash this light, this deadly light that’s brighter than sunlight by, like, a trillion times. That’s what gamma rays are. That sure is one way to go into the light, huh?

DARK STAR BROADCAST — DECEMBER 31, ‘84

 

 

 

Living up to her title of supergenius, Suzie puts it together first: “You’re Commander Steve.” 

“Commander?” Lucas and Max say together.

Bouncing on the balls of her feet, Suzie is shooting Eddie a giddy smile. Before, Steve had some outside understanding that Suzie and Eden knew he existed and understood him to be a regular listener more loyal than most. Now, seeing how eager Suzie is for Eddie to say something to him, it hits Steve, in a shock like a sudden clap of thunder, how much of a fixture he is in the Dark Star sky. If not a second sun, then the dark star’s closest orbiting satellite.

Everyone else is looking between Eddie and Steve, attempting to figure out what to make of this new development. Will has made the much-appreciated decision to cut the camera; he looks hopelessly confused, in good company with El. Mike is staring at Steve through eyes narrowed to slits, without a doubt looking to blame him for something. Corrupting Eddie’s coolness by being associated with him, if Steve had to place a bet.

Dustin hasn’t decided what to do with his face. In the span of thirty seconds, his expression has shifted from shocked to perplexed to outraged before settling into a soupy mix of the three.

“You were friends the whole time, and you didn’t tell me?” he asks, at a pitch louder than a singer in one of Ground Control’s precious scream-o songs.

Not just Ground Control, but Eddie. Steve was being spoon-fed Eddie Munson’s precious metal anthems for the last six months.

Unconsciously, Steve has been clenching his jaw. He tries to exhale some of the tension, but does shoot off a snippy, “It’s news to me, too, buddy.”

Eddie has the decency to appear cowed. He slouches against the door frame of the office in an effort to make himself smaller. Small is a bad fit for him, and a wave of guilt threatens to wash away Steve’s anger. At least, Steve thinks he’s angry. He’s well within his rights to be, what with how Ground Control has been listening to Steve talk about Dustin and the kids for months, never letting on that he, Eddie Munson, knows them about as well as Steve does. Lies of omission are still lies. 

Genuinely, what the hell.

Then, Steve tunes his ear to the music playing through the station’s speakers—Bowie serenading Long Island, telling them to turn and face the stranger—and remembers how Ground Control teases him for the boner he has for Bowie but still plays one song of his per Dark Star broadcast just because Steve likes it. If Eddie has been performing a long con on him for half a year, all part of a nefarious plot to humiliate him, Steve doesn’t understand how knowing his favorite songs factors into it. What he wants to ask why—why the anonymity if it wasn't all just one big galaxy-sized joke.

The teenage audience throws a wrench in the plan for an impromptu heart-to-heart.

“What do you mean it’s news to you, too?” Dustin asks, not believing what Steve will acknowledge is a coincidence the size of a black hole.

“Commander Steve here sometimes calls into my radio show during his graveyard shifts,” Eddie explains, dispensing about a quarter of the truth, maybe less. “That’s all, dude. We’re not weaving friendship bracelets and going to Coney Island without you.”

Suzie frowns at Eddie, but he avoids facing her dismay head-on. His eyes flit to Steve, in them a fast apology and the offer to accept the cover Eddie has provided him. The kids don’t have to know they’re friends. The kids don’t have to know they’re anything more than a radio jockey and one of his bored listeners. And at the end of a long night, maybe that’s all they are.

“Yeah, meet Ground Control,” Steve mutters, half-expecting the kids already forgot what he told them about Dark Star in the car.

“Do you play Top 40 on your show?” Mike asks Eddie in an accusatory tone. Mike must have gotten his music taste torn to shreds at one of their dragons and dweebs sessions.

Eddie manages to snort. “Not on your life.”

“So, Steve is listening to metal?”

At Mike’s flabbergasted question, the kids shift their eyes back to him. The base of his neck is as hot as a stove top, but Steve can’t muster up a defense for himself, because if the positions were flipped and any one of the kids was revealed to be head-banging to Ozzy Osbourne every night, he’d be just as shocked. They’re punks in name only.

“Aren’t we supposed to be here for a code?” Steve asks to rip the eyes off of him.

Suzie lights up with the intensity of a power surge, and Steve decides she is his new favorite. Following where she scurries, the group crowds into the station’s control room, elbows jamming into elbows, trading inhales and exhales of the same musty air. The kids circle the desk, forming a human wall around Suzie as they attempt a glimpse at the notebook she has open. Steve hangs back, pressing himself against the opposing wall where there is greater room to breathe.

The spot on the wall beside him is free, and Eddie takes it. Despite how guilty and anxious he seems, Eddie isn’t bracing himself for a punch. For that, Steve is grateful. It’s a consolation that they still have faith in their bedrock knowledge of each other. No matter how hurt or angry Steve is, he’s done unloading those feelings into a fist, and Eddie trusts that about him.

The excited chatter bubbling up in the room gives Eddie a screen to say quietly, “This really wasn’t how I planned for this to happen.”

“Oh, there was a plan?” Steve replies flatly, tapping into a bit of Robin’s sarcasm. He doesn’t know how to be the person he was on the phone with Eddie Munson, a guy he once assumed he wouldn’t be able to stand if they ever met in person. Steve put in six months of work ensuring that meeting never happened, or so he thought.

Slowly but surely, he is realizing there have been two Steves wandering around for months now, a late-night Steve and the Steve he has to face up to every morning. The Steve who everyone thinks is wasting away his life and the Steve who just gets to talk on the phone unfiltered, secure in the knowledge the person on the other end is listening. How does he reconcile these people—one whose life is a series of unremarkable accidents and mistakes and the other who is too afraid to come out of the dark and finally take control of the wheel.

Somehow, reconciling himself seems a less daunting task than reconciling Eddie, his rival, with Ground Control, his—well, something he wants but may not get to have. He wonders if Eddie feels as he does, that he has a day self and a night self and they’re destined to never come together. The sun chases after the moon but always ends up on the opposite side of the planet.

Of course, Ground Control would tell him that's not how the sky works. The sun is not the chaser in a universal game of tag. The moon circles the Earth and the Earth circles the sun, two closed loops. It would take a cataclysmic event to knock either off their orbit, while it took a whole lot less to knock Steve off his. Then again, maybe he’s naive not to think of love as a cataclysmic event.

Because he has been adrift for two years now, maybe longer, without a center of gravity to anchor him. The most grounded he has felt since his fallout with Nancy—no, since the night Barb Holland went missing—was talking to Ground Control in the middle of the night. Standing beside Eddie now, though nowhere close to touching despite being in such a narrow room, Steve feels the pull.

He isn’t sure whether or not he wants to resist it. High school science never taught him much, but he does remember the average person doesn’t have a choice in saying yes to gravity.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says, because Steve hasn’t done much more than stare at him, trying to wrap his head around it all.

Steve is afraid to ask what exactly Eddie is apologizing for, if it stretches back as far as answering the phone the first time Steve called in, begging him to play “Space Oddity.”

A hush has fallen over the room. For a second, Steve is scared to look over and find the kids staring at them again, but they’re absorbed in Suzie’s cracked code. He and Eddie exchange a look, apologies and personal history momentarily forgotten, and they edge closer to the group, using height advantage to peer over the kids’ heads.

Suzie’s writing, though so neat it could have come out of a typewriter, looks like nonsense to Steve. Dashes, dots, more dashes, more dots, and a long string of vowels and constants clumped together in two or three pairs that don’t form any words Steve recognizes. That is, until he skims further down the page. Words begin to emerge. A definite article here, a small verb there.

Suzie is whispering something to Dustin about night writing and phonetic spellings, but the other kids are locked on what Steve discovers at the bottom of the page, a full message emerging from the mess.

It is time, daughter, to return to the stars.

“Daughter,” Eddie reads aloud, his volume turned down. Again, he glances at Steve, his eyes swimming with worry and for good reason, even if he doesn’t know the full story yet. Steve hardly has all the pieces himself.

El, her blank expression not betraying any of what she has to be feeling, lightly taps Suzie on the shoulder. “Can I hear it?” she asks, nodding at the notebook.

Just as Dustin starts to shake his head, Suzie produces a cassette tape from her bag. “I recorded it with a tape recorder during the last blackout.”

“While you were listening to my show?” Eddie asks, flattening his palm against his chest to make a show of how flattered he is. A small glimpse of normalcy, one that Steve wants to latch onto it with both hands. “Super Suzie, are you my biggest fan?”

“I still have to make sure you're abiding by the FCC regulations,” Suzie says primly while she slips the tape into the deck.

“Sorry, commander,” Eddie says to Steve, talking out of the corner of his mouth, a staged whisper. “You’ve been unseated as Dark Star’s number one fan.”

Steve huffs. “I really don’t think your producer counts, dude.”

Eddie has a high-beam grin, bright enough to blind, and Steve is returning his smile before it clicks for both of them that they’ve slipped into their familiar pattern of conversation. The smiles come off, a screen wipe. Steve tries to return his attention to the radio, but catches Will glancing between him and Eddie, the only one to see and hear their small exchange. He looks like he’s trying to convince himself he’s seeing things. Noticing Steve’s eyes are on him, Will turns away.

The message has been played twice through by the time Steve tunes into it. It’s as Dustin described it—a spoken message in an unknown language, underlaid by a series of taps and clickings. If Steve closes his eyes and focuses, he almost hears something underneath both the words and the taps, a low-level hum that may be nothing more than sound distortion.

When he looks at El, he sees her listening with a similar concentration, her eyes screwed shut and her jaw tight. The loop restarts and no one says a word. El’s eyes somehow close tighter, a tiny bead of blood forming in her left nostril. Steve reaches his hand out to touch her shoulder, ask if she’s alright.

The lights in the room flicker.

He retracts his hand as if it had been electrocuted. At the same time, Eddie grasps his other wrist, grip punishing, digging into his tendons. The kids begin talking over each other, arguing over what to do. The message continues playing beneath them, reaching the end of the fourth loop. El’s eyes fly open.

The lights return to their normal, steady brightness. Suzie stops the recording and ejects the tape, treating it like she’s handling toxic waste. El wipes her nose with the back of her hand, streaking her skin with blood. Both Mike and Max notice, but Mike is cut off from asking El if she’s okay by her announcing what almost everyone in the room has been thinking to themselves, “They are searching for me.”

“Uh, sorry,” Eddie says, releasing his vice grip on Steve’s wrist. “Come again?”

Dustin gives Eddie and Suzie the cliff notes version of their afternoon with El’s aunt and the revelation her mother had been a participant in a series of experiments conducted at Camp Hero. Terry Ives had feared the day beings from outer space would return to take her daughter back with them. Is it that much of a blessing she did not have to live to see the day her dark prophecy may come true?

“And you’ve been in Montauk this entire time?” Eddie asks. At El’s nod, he glances around the room, seeming like he’s trying to determine if he’s missing something obvious. “Not that I’m doubting the chief’s ability to witness protect you, but these abductions have been happening since November ‘83. They haven’t found you once, even by accident?”

El studies Eddie as a kid would a butterfly they trapped in a jar. He squirms, his lips twitching like he wants to blurt out something to break the awkward silence, but the words keep disappearing on him. Finally, El finishes her scan and tells him, “You’re very green.”

“Uhm—”

Without giving Eddie time to calibrate to her aura-reading abilities, El tells them, “I think that is how they see.”

“Through color?” Lucas attempts to clarify.

“No, through energy,” Suzie says, her eyes widening at the proposed hypothesis. “They see the energy things emit.”

Dustin snaps his fingers. “Like an infrared camera!”

“But infrared cameras just pick up the heat things produce,” Will says, still in the confused boat alongside Steve. “If the aliens were only picking up heat, we’d all be the same color. El, what color am I?”

El squints at Will. “Purple, a light purple.”

“And Mike?”

Her answer is automatic: “A very pale yellow. Like a star.”

As the kids continue quizzing El on colors and where exactly they originate from around the body, Steve leans closer to Eddie and asks in a whisper, “Does any of this make sense to you?”

“Dude, I barely graduated high school,” he whispers back. “It takes three Suzie astronomy lessons for me to understand any of the star fact shit I spout off on air.”

“So, it’s probably energy,” Mike is saying, “just not energy that humans have been able to see or observe.”

“Exactly,” Dustin confirms, putting forth himself and Suzie as the foremost experts.

“Okay, for the sake of the peanut gallery over here,” Eddie says, waving his hand between himself and Steve. “One, the aliens can’t see us in detail, but they can see a rainbow light show of energy we’re radiating?” At the collection of nods he receives, Eddie continues, “And because of the aforementioned rainbow light show, it’s taken them two years to find supergirl over there, which leads me to question two: what does that mean for the other abductions? Oopsie, they just picked up a random person by mistake? Better put that back where it came from, except they’ve only done the putting back twice—”

Mike scrunches his nose. “Twice?”

Eddie, and by extension Steve, are saved from having to backpedal by Max surfacing from a long period of silence to suggest, “What if the abductions aren’t random?”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” Dustin asks. “They’re searching for El because she has some of their awesome powers. No one else we know can do what she can.”

Max opts to ignore Dustin and instead turns to El. “You looked at me and Steve at your aunt’s house, when you said your mom had shadows.”

El nods.

“Are there other people with shadows?”

“A lot of people are blue,” El answers, her words coming together with careful consideration. “Some are very dark blue or very dark red.”

“Was Billy dark red?” Max asks, holding her chin up, refusing to let her voice waver saying his name.

Steve flashes back to the last time he saw Billy Hargrove in Family Video. For all his indifference, Billy had seemed tense, something at a simmer beneath his surface. Steve had brushed it off because Billy was a walking stick of dynamite out scouting for someone to light his fuse. He hadn’t wanted to be in the blast radius when he did go off.

“He was almost a shadow,” El says, very quietly.

“Chrissy Cunningham.” Hearing the name, everyone snaps their eyes to Eddie, his face downcast. “I’m no human mood ring, but I saw her right before she went missing and she definitely had a shadow hanging over her.”

Steve flexes his hand, desperate to grasp Eddie by the sleeve and tug him into his arms. The guilt over her disappearance clearly still hangs heavy around his neck. Steve wishes he had a cure for him, a foolproof way to shake off the weight, but he has yet to throw off the two tons he carries around because Barb Holland never made it home from his house. Hopper said she would have disappeared no matter what time she left his house. The truth of that is now staring Steve in the face, but the guilt refuses to let up.

Barb Holland. Billy Hargove and Heather Holloway. Chrissy Cunningham.

“Patrick, too,” Lucas says softly. “I mean, I hadn’t known him for very long, just through basketball, but there was something off, sometimes. I don’t think things were okay for him at home, but I didn’t—no one ever…”

Steve moves over to Lucas and rests his hand on his shoulder, squeezing it to communicate he knows what he’s talking about. Christ, does he ever. Every guy on the team complained about their dad behaving like a drill sergeant. The weekly bitch sessions were a locker room institution. Patrick never made it out like his dad rode his ass worse than the rest of theirs, but Steve recalls more than one practice where Patrick came in with a bruise on his jaw or discoloration around his ribs and his excuse that he had gotten into a fight never rang true of a kid who called every man of authority sir and always wiped his feet before getting into Steve’s car.

But Steve chose to believe him, because he hadn’t wanted to think about it. Think about that, and then notice Billy Hargrove has bruises, too. Heather Holloway flinches when someone slams a locker too hard. Chrissy Cunningham disappears fifteen minutes before the end of every lunch period. Barb Holland walks the halls alone, removed, if Nancy is not there to walk with her. Fred Benson sometimes has a haunted glaze in his eyes.

Max Mayfield hasn’t been the same since her stepbrother disappeared. Steve Harrington sometimes spends the whole day staring at his bedroom ceiling. In the summer, he couldn’t stop testing how long he could hold his breath underwater. Never long enough.

Though everyone in the room is making it a point not to look at him, Will is wilting. He’s not the only person here with a shadow hanging off them like an invisible cloak, but, as far as they know, he’s the boy who disappeared and came back. The answer to why these beings seem to target people with dark auras may be locked somewhere in his memory, if it hasn’t been as wiped clean as they once thought.

“Steve, can you…” Will motions with his shoulder towards the door.

He nods, catching Will’s meaning. “Uh, we’ll be right back. Don’t…” For once, Steve can’t think of any trouble the kids can get into while he’s gone. Blowing up the station is a reach, even for them.

Will is waiting for him at the elevator and they ride down to the first floor in silence. The distance is helping to loosen the stiff set of Will’s shoulders. In the lobby of the building, Will casts his eyes between the door and the benign hall to their left, a match to the one upstairs. Deciding against a trip into the December cold, Will leads them into the hallway.

Someone left their office open over the winter break, though it just as easily may belong to the sight-unseen building manager out on a smoke break. There’s a bulletin board hung on one wall advertising a variety of specialty programs the community college offers. One is a class in radio production. Steve almost wishes he had a pen and paper to take down the information.

His attention returns to Will, holding out his brother’s video camera to Steve. He hadn’t noticed Will brought it along. “Do you want me to…” Steve trails off, unsure what he’s supposed to do with the camera other than handle it with care.

“I thought it would be easier to talk about if I pretend it’s an interview,” Will gives in explanation, settling himself uneasily in one of the doctor’s office chairs set in front of the office’s desk. “I can imagine it’s ten years from now and I’m older and…over it, I guess.”

Steve sits in the chair across from Will, balancing the camera on his knee. It will be an intense close-up. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Steve says, and almost adds, just like I didn’t.

“I think I’m done carrying it around,” Will says quietly. Then, he smiles, as shit-eating as little Byers is capable of. “Plus, my story will be the best part of the documentary.”

“Won’t even be close,” Steve says, and presses what he hopes is the record button.

 

STEVE HARRINGTON (FAMILY VIDEO EMPLOYEE / PRODUCTION ASSISTANT): I, uh—I think we’re rolling? I—yeah, rolling. Do you need me to, like…ask a question or…?

WILLIAM BYERS (STUDENT / DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY): No, it’s okay. I just don’t really know when it started. Probably what stands out most was this Saturday, end of September I think. My dad promised to take me to this baseball game. I made the guys postpone our D&D session because I was so sure he was going to make it this time. About an hour after he was supposed to pick me up, I heard my mom yelling at him on the phone. I was waiting on the porch with this baseball glove that Jonathan got me that neither of us ever used and I…I don’t think I got that dads weren’t supposed to make you feel like an idiot. I thought that I was doing something wrong, that there had to be a reason he always bailed, even though we were doing stuff only he liked to do. But the more I tried to—to fix it, fix whatever I…the more it just felt like there was something wrong with me and my dad noticed and soon everyone else would notice, too.

I didn’t tell Mike, or Lucas, or anyone. I wasn’t even feeling that bad that night, biking home, but I guess…I really don’t remember that week, at all. I remember this bright white light. It almost seemed solid, like I was going to run my bike into a wall. And then…

S. HARRINGTON: Nothing?

W. BYERS: Yeah, like I blinked and suddenly I was in the park and Chief Hopper was asking me if I was hurt. Time skipped forward and everything that happened in between just got lost. But sometimes, I have these dreams…though I guess they’re not normal dreams, because I don’t see anything. Everything is pitch black, but I feel something. I’m floating, and nothing hurts, almost like…you know when music plays in another room? It’s like that, but my body is in one room and I’m in another. And something is telling me I should be happy here, that it’s better, but all I can think about is wanting to see my mom again. I’m just thinking over and over again, I want to go home, I want to go home, I want…I’m supposed to be telling Dr. Owens all this stuff, but I can’t. My mom has enough to worry about and it seemed crazy before…well, whatever’s happening happened.

It’s not me and Max’s fault, right? We didn’t do anything to, to…

THE MONTAUK FILES {WORKING TITLE} — INT. V — DECEMBER 31, ‘85

 

Steve shoves the camera onto the desk, sending papers flying, not that he gives a shit.

“Hey, woah, no way, neither of you did anything wrong.” Steve scoots his chair forward until his shins brush up against Will’s knees. Will has his head ducked, wringing his hands, the skin at the base of his ring finger a raw red. “Seriously, whatever is happening, it’s on these…alien people and their problems. It’s 100% their fault, completely.”

“You don’t get it,” Will says, scrubbing his runny nose with the cuff of his shirt. “I’m not like Dustin, or Mike, or Lucas, or even Max. What if they sense that? That I don’t—that I’m not…”

Steve swallows thickly, his eyes hot with tears of his own. It should be Eddie down here with Will, or any one of the kids, but Will must have chosen Steve for a reason, if only because he’s the most neutral party, the one with the least amount of emotional skin in the game. So much for that.

“I get it.”

Will shakes his head miserably.

“Hey, c’mon Byers, work with me here.” Steve taps his knees, trying to draw his eyes up. “I really, really do. If you want me to tell you the story of how I probably got abducted by aliens the night you came back, I can. And then I can tell you about how I fell in love with Eddie Munson kind of against my will, but I don’t know how much time we have before Henderson hunts us down.”

Will’s stunned eyes find his. He opens his mouth to say something, but no words come out.

“We both came back,” Steve says, clapping Will on the shoulder as he would do to Dustin, and Mike, and Lucas because these boys are the same at heart. Funny, geeky, tack sharp one minute and unbelievably stupid the next, braver than Steve was fourteen and kinder, and good. “That’s gotta mean something, right?”

“You’re not just saying this to make me feel better?” Will asks cautiously, unsure if what he’s hearing is too good to be true. It’s like Steve finding a twin soul in Robin in the armpit of purgatory, also known as Family Video: a miracle that takes some getting used to because you’re not sure you deserve it. As if anyone has to deserve a little understanding.

“No way. I’m trusting you, Byers,” Steve says, holding out his other hand to shake. “Did you not hear what I said? Eddie Munson.”

Will laughs, a weak, watery sound, but a laugh all the same. Accepting his offered hand, Will shakes, their secrets sealed in a pact.

After Will shows him how to turn off the video camera—that tape is going to mysteriously lose some footage, they agree—they head back to the elevator. He hopes Will feels a little lighter, as Steve had the night he told Ground Control about his close encounter.

“Do you think Eddie loves you back?” Will asks in the elevator, because far be it for the kids to let him off the hook just once.

“I don’t know,” Steve says, honesty the name of the game tonight. “It’s not really up to me.”

Will offers him a sad smile, but one shot through with hope. Always nice to have someone rooting for you, even if you may be playing out of your league.

An argument is in full swing, loud enough to be heard down the length of the hallway, as he and Will return to the station. The group has migrated back into the green room, most camped on the couches watching the showdown with varying degrees of entertainment. In corner number one, Eddie is sporting a look that Steve recognizes, one he keeps on hand in his back pocket because he wears it so often himself—complete and utter exasperation. The cause is currently counting off points on his left hand.

“—and have you ever seen The Day the Earth Stood Still?” Dustin asks rhetorically. By how Eddie’s nostrils flare, it’s obvious he has. Knowing his tastes, he’s undoubtedly the one who recommended it to Dustin. “What if the aliens are here to give an El a warning for all of humanity and we’re just ignoring them? What then, huh?”

“Or, abducting people and experimenting on them was just phase one of their plan and phase two is turning us into programmed drones, Henderson, ever thought about that?” Eddie shoots back. “Or maybe they’re ultimately here to eat us…”

Eddie clocks him and Will reentering the room and trails off, delivering Will an apology in the form of an embarrassed grimace. His eyes slide to Steve and, after a beat of hesitancy, Eddie inclines his head in a silent question: everything go alright? Though hopelessly unclear where his relationship with Eddie stands, Steve trusts himself to nod.

“What are you yelling about?” he asks at his own risk.

“Oh, nothing. Just Henderson wanting to contact the aliens, so we can hear all about their Plan 9 to start the zombie apocalypse,” Eddie answers, crossing his arms and tossing Dustin a disgruntled look, transformed into a tired middle-aged father of seven in five seconds flat. Steve may have fallen victim to a fit of jealousy if he weren’t busy trying to parse through what the hell Eddie just said.

“Come again?”

“Dustin wants to go back to Camp Hero and find out how the military was contacting the aliens,” Lucas supplies from his spot on the loveseat next to Max.

“Do you have some kind of death wish, Henderson?” Steve asks, folding his arms in a perfect mirror to Eddie. “Or do you not remember the last time Max almost got abducted by aliens? I got shot at!”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie cuts in, his lips pursing, “you got shot at? Didn’t I tell you not to do anything stupid?”

Right—Steve had left off telling Ground Control the unclassified version of his night at Camp Hero for this very reason. He did not anticipate it would be fun getting told off for stupid acts of heroism by someone who is chaos incarnate.

“You talked about our secret mission on air? For anyone to hear?” Dustin rounds on Steve, about to blow his lid. Steve winces; the room is too cramped to have him talking at maximum volume. “No wonder the men in black tried to kill us!”

“Dude, number one, you have never called it a secret mission,” Steve argues. “Number two, no, I didn’t talk about your dumb not-secret mission on the radio—”

“But you and Eddie said you just called into the show sometimes,” points out Lucas, of all the kids to betray him. Beside him, Max cups her chin in her palm, elbow propped on the couch’s armrest, waiting eagerly for how he answers to that.

He makes the mature decision not to.

“Look, none of this matters because we aren’t going back to Camp Hero and we aren’t trying to contact any aliens,” Steve says, the foot coming down. “We’re going to Chief Hopper and we’re letting him figure it out.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose like he whiffed sour milk. “You want to go to the cops?”

While Steve found Ground Control’s anti-authoritarian streak charming in the past, he can’t say it’s helpful at this particular moment. “Whose side are you on here, Munson?”

“What is Hopper supposed to do?” Dustin asks. “And anyone else at the police station is just going to think we’re crazy.”

“El.” Steve turns to her, sitting on the larger couch with her legs drawn up and her arms hugged around her shins, and is ready to drop to his knees in a plea for sanity. “Hop—your dad, he isn’t totally in the dark here, right? He’ll know a better way to handle all this.”

There’s a lot we don’t understand—Hopper had trusted that to Steve two months ago and never has it rang truer. How far had Hopper made it down the winding path they’re following before the trail disappeared altogether? Or until he came upon something or someone who warned him off going any further?

“He knows some things,” El says slowly, her fingers dancing along her wrist. The shine is there if you know to look for it, dim tonight, like shimmering tear tracks caught under the right light. “But not everything. He does not think it is aliens.”

Steve guesses Hopper has been thinking along the same lines Nancy has, a well-buried government conspiracy so expansive that they’ve unearthed less than an inch of its underground network. It’s a difficult pill to swallow, but not one big enough to choke on. Not like asking two of the most rational people they know to believe in flying saucers lifting people off of the earth.

Let him believe they have collectively lost their minds. Better that than having to explain to him with the sunrise why another person is missing and why that person is his daughter.

“Time to change his mind.”

“He will say no,” El says, founded in two years of experience hearing the same answer.

What Steve does not say is how little he’d mind if Hopper denies them the opportunity to revisit Camp Hero and contact aliens they know nothing of other than their mission to reach Eleven and their tendency to pick up unwitting passengers along the way. If what it takes to deliver them all to Hopper is a couple of white lies, Steve is willing to face the wrath of Henderson and Wheeler later. 

“You don’t know he’ll say no.”

El frowns, far from sold on his little lie, and Steve finds himself glancing at Eddie, not for back-up but because he knows he’ll see a similar unease at the direction their night is taking. The feeling sucks, always has and always will, but it’s nice not to be alone in it for once.

“I want to talk to them.” A sharp inhale, impossible to pinpoint the source. El looks to Dustin and says, “You said they might not be bad.”

Now, Dustin seems less sure. “We don’t really know,” he says with a helpless shrug.

“If we go to my dad, he will want us to go away,” El says carefully, stealing a glance at Mike, uncharacteristically subdued where he’s hunched beside her. “We will not know if they are bad or good.”

The room falls quiet as what El is relaying to them sinks in. Going to Hopper will not just deny them another trip to Camp Hero and a chance at contacting the aliens. If Hopper believes what the coded message says and that someone is threatening to take his daughter away, in all likelihood he’ll have El out of Montauk before midnight strikes. Steve wonders if that’s the worst thing in the world, but then wonders how long it will take for the aliens to realize the girl they are looking for is long gone. How many more people do they pick up along the way? Does it stop at Montauk?

“So, we tell Hopper and El might have to disappear forever,” Max says after some time has passed in painful silence, “or we don’t tell Hopper, try to contact these aliens, and El still might disappear forever. Those are really the options?”

They all return to El, looking at Mike like he is a compass who can point her towards the true north, the right way to go. Steve understands the desire to have someone else give you a direction all too well. It takes effort not to seek out Eddie, who Steve would have let chart the course of his life to anywhere he thought would suit them both fine.

“It’s your choice,” Mike says eventually, slotting his fingers between El’s and holding her gaze. “Whatever you decide, I’m here. I’m with you. Promise.”

“Promise,” El repeats, tipping her forehead against Mike’s for a moment before nodding her head, coming to a decision. “I want to talk to them. I don’t want anyone else to disappear.”

It’s Steve’s turn to fall under the room’s spotlight—what will the ardent objector say now?

“Fine, fine!” Steve says, throwing up his arms. He isn’t going to take a choice away from El, even if it goes against his own gut instincts. “But I’m calling in reinforcements. Not Hopper, but we’re getting Nancy and Jonathan.”

“What?” Will asks, beneath Mike shouting, “No way!”

“How many guards do you think Lucas and I can take out on our own?” Steve asks, marveling at how the boys spend upwards of eight hours a week playing a fantasy game and haven’t yet internalized the adage that there is strength in numbers. Eddie has to be a pretty poor master of the universe.

As soon as Steve has thought it, he remembers anew that said master is in the room and he is rolling his eyes in Steve’s direction. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Harrington,” Eddie drawls.

“What—” Steve stops, staring at the set of car keys Eddie is twirling in his hand, and it’s like he has taken a bucket of cold water to the face, a chill down to the bone. “Uh no, you’re not coming.”

Ground Control is supposed to stay outside of the action, keeping everyone safe and sound from a distance. It’s in the name.

“How are you proposing you stop me?” Eddie asks with infuriating nonchalance. Beside him, Suzie is nodding along in agreement. At some point in the last ten minutes, she had collected her coat and hat, ready to go when they are.

Dustin sees the coat and blanches. “You can’t come either,” he protests. “It’s too dangerous.”

“But it’s okay if the rest of us die?” Max questions, earning a glare from Dustin.

“I’m the one who cracked the code, remember?” Suzie lifts her chin with a touch of arrogance. No wonder Dustin likes her so much. “You need me if you’re going to communicate anything to them.”

“Exactly,” Eddie crows. “We’re part of the party now.”

“I wouldn’t call this a party,” Steve grumbles.

Eddie is staring at him openly, bemused but with something else hidden there. Steve doesn’t dare call it adoration, whatever that would mean, but thinks it may be fondness.

“Oh, god,” comes a voice from the station doorway.

“You’re seeing all these little people, too, right?” joins in a second voice, stoned to high heaven. And for the second time tonight, Steve recognizes the tone.

The young woman in the doorway, her shaggy haircut smoothed down haphazardly and a large black trench hanging off both shoulders, is shaking her head at Eddie, a cryptic smile alighting her face. Based on the lack of height and the sharp gleam in her eyes, Steve guesses this is Eden Bingham. The tall guy behind her has hair so long and silken that it has Steve a little envious. His expression is one of bewildered bliss, bestowing a lopsided smile on every person in the room like he’s a benevolent king and they’re all figments in his court of imagination. No coat on, Steve sees he’s wearing a Pepe’s Pizza t-shirt, the cartoon pizza on the logo as happy-go-lucky as this delivery guy is. The askew name tag declares him Argyle.

“Is Singin’ in the Rain actually your favorite movie?” Steve asks Argyle to the bafflement of everyone else. It’s impressive any of them still have the capacity to be surprised after the turns tonight has taken. Personally, Steve thinks it’s fitting he should meet Family Video’s other frequent late-night caller on the day everything else in his life has flipped upside down. It’s a comfort that the pizza guy is precisely as Steve imagined him to be, down to the mismatched patterned socks with sandals.

“Singin’ in the Rain is righteous, man!” Argyle exclaims, reaching his hand over Eden’s shoulder to high-five Steve.

“You should come into Family Video and rent it sometime,” Steve says, smacking his hand.

“Commander Steve in the flesh.” Eden treats him to a lazy once-over that reminds him of Robin. If the world is spinning like normal come tomorrow morning, he’ll have to introduce them.

“Does everyone here know you?” Dustin asks.

Eddie swings an arm around Dustin’s shoulder, scrubbing a hand through his gelled hair. “Only the cool kids, Henderson.” Seeing how Eden is smirking at him like she has his number, forwards and backwards, Eddie drops his smile in favor of a guilty wince. “Sorry, Lady Bingham, you’re gonna have to do the countdown tonight. Places to be, aliens to vanquish.”

Eden’s smirk morphs into an affronted scowl. “Are you kidding?” she says, undercut by Argyle exhaling, “Hell yeah!”

“I’ll do every Sunday countdown in January,” Eddie offers under some pain. “And I’ll only complain about half of the songs.”

“A quarter,” Eden counters, then looks to her sister, bundled in her coat and hugging her code cracker’s bible close to her chest. “You’re going to do something illegal and stupid, aren’t you?”

Though the question is for Suzie, everyone excluding Dustin and El nod with her.

That earns them Argyle’s approval: “Nice.”

Eden is not so easily bought. Her eyes flick between Eddie and Steve, trying to decide if she can entrust the life of her sister with them. With a sigh, an irritated puff of air that ruffles her bangs, she shoulders into the green room, leading Argyle by their tangled hands, and weaves her way toward the studio. After plunking Argyle in the control room chair—Steve wouldn’t be surprised if the guy had a note in his wallet reading, if lost, return to Eden Bingham—she hangs her head out of the control room doorway and leaves them with a parting word:

“At least make it something good.”

 

 

 

That was “What’s Love Got to Do with It” by Tina Turner. Enough said.

We’re getting close to midnight, cosmonauts. If anyone wants to confess they’re in love with me before the world ends, now is the time to do it. I won’t hold my breath for your call, though, Officer Callahan.

The world’s not actually going to end tonight. Obviously. But I can’t be the only one who feels like it might happen every New Year’s Eve. It’s something about the countdown, like it always feels like it’s going down to something more than watching a dumb ball drop and a clock change over. We’re always closer to apocalypse than we think. Asteroid, alien invasion, someone counting down from ten before they press the big red button.

In light of that, does anyone want to say they love me now?

DARK STAR BROADCAST — DECEMBER 31, ‘84

 

 

 

Reinforcements called, they split off at the parking lot into two groups: Eddie with Dustin, Suzie, and Will and Steve with El, Mike, Max, and Lucas. The team in the van will swing by Dustin’s house first to pick up Cerebro and meet the rest of them, along with Nancy and Jonathan, at Camp Hero.

Max climbs into his front seat and he gives her the pick of his tape collection. A trip into the unknown deserves a good soundtrack. Instead of choosing any of the music he has on offer, she ejects the cassette out of her Walkman and pops it into the stereo. The heavy synths of a Kate Bush song fill the car, Kate singing about making a deal with God.

In the backseat, Mike has El’s hand in his, watching her gaze out the window at the car headlights passing them in the opposite direction, on the way home. Lucas is staring at Max in a similar fashion, his eyes dark with worry.

“I don’t want to have shadows,” Max confesses softly, her hands twisting the cord of her Walkman around her fingers, the skin at the tips white. Pressing her cheek against her shoulder, she looks into the backseat and asks El, “Is there any way to just…stop?”

“I don’t know,” El answers, never one to tell a lie. “But no one is just one color all the time. In the summer, you were orange. Maybe you can be orange again.”

“Orange like her hair?” Mike asks, pleased with his own joke.

Max climbs around in her seat and punches Mike in the knee, causing him to yelp in pain, which makes Lucas cackle and Max giggle with him and though Steve is snapping at Max to put her damn seat belt back on, Jesus Christ, he’s having trouble maintaining his composure. It’s a good thought, that Max can fight her way through the shadows and come out on the other side orange again, the shade of an Orange Crush soda or the sunset on a late August evening.

Steve wouldn’t mind stumbling his way back to blue, a clear sky day or the ocean after a hurricane.

The sky is a bruising blue as Steve rolls to stop on the shoulder of the Camp Hero State Parkway, the headlights cut. The Wheeler station wagon is up ahead, three figures hunched over the open trunk. They turn their heads in tandem, shielding their eyes from the beams of Lucas and Mike’s flashlights. Nancy, Jonathan, and Robin are dressed for a storm.

“Do I wanna know what you’re doing here?” Steve asks Robin, tapping two fingers against her elbow to signal he’s not unhappy she’s along for the ride, even given the circumstances. It would be like trying to scale a rock wall without his left arm.

“I was with Nancy and Jonathan when you called,” Robin explains, accepting the spare tire iron Steve offers up as a weapon. Better to be safe and armed than empty-handed and sorry. “Nance thinks there’s a pattern to the abductions.”

“Yeah, so do we,” Mike grouches, but does the work explaining their theories to the trio, with additional input from Lucas and Max.

The further Mike goes down their rabbit hole of discovery, the more Steve feels Nancy and Jonathan’s eyes on him, the gears in their heads turning in the right direction, arriving at the correct conclusions. For all he wishes they weren’t able to see him through so easily, Steve still wouldn’t have wanted to be alone that night. They probably saved his life, even if none of them understand how.

“You okay?” Jonathan asks him at a moment Robin and Mike are bickering over the specific capabilities of infrared cameras.

“Honestly?” Steve sighs, attuning his ear to listen for the sounds of the sea churning a way’s off. “Not really.”

Jonathan nods and doesn’t tell him everything is going to turn out alright in the end. Maybe that wouldn’t be a lie, but Jonathan understands Steve isn’t just talking about what may happen tonight. None of them have been okay for awhile now and they probably shouldn’t have expended so much effort pretending they were.

“Your brother’s pretty incredible, by the way,” Steve says, though he isn’t telling Jonathan anything he doesn’t already know.

“Yours isn’t so bad either.” Jonathan nudges him with his shoulder, tilting his chin toward the unloading van parked behind his dad’s G-Wagon. Dustin is trundling out of the back, his arms stuffed full with his ham radio. He’s talking five miles a minute to Suzie, Eddie and Will following behind them rolling their eyes like they unlocked a new inside joke on the ride over. Steve guesses it’s fondly at Dustin’s expense and he wants in on it.

Will darts for Jonathan upon seeing him and accepts his brother’s hug without complaint. Instead of a hug, Steve receives an armful of Cerebro.

Eddie smacks Dustin upside the head and says, “How about ‘please carry this for me, Steve?’”

“Please carry this for me, Steve,” Dustin parrots, already beelining for Nancy.

“His tone,” Steve and Eddie commiserate in unison.

“No way,” someone sounds off behind him. Robin comes up beside Steve, her eyes ping-ponging between him and Eddie, her eyebrows comically arched. “Eddie Munson is—”

“Ground Control at your service, Lieutenant Buckley,” Eddie says, giving her a military salute.

While Eddie nods a greeting at Jonathan, the kids’ usual ride to the Dragon’s Lair for their Dungeons and Dragons’ sessions, Robin whispers to Steve, “We’re talking about this later,” as if that was not a given.

“Okay,” Nancy says, calling the group to order. “Here’s the plan.”

Lucas, Max, and Robin will act as look-outs outside of Camp Hero, while Jonathan and Will drive towards the lighthouse to have eyes on the town and report any electrical anomalies. Suzie and Dustin will head to the radar control room where Mike and Will discovered the military’s attempts at communication with the aliens the last time, searching for any information on how the military contacted the visitors in the first place. Meanwhile, Nancy, Mike, and El will take another sweep of the base to see if it jogs any memories for El. Which leaves Eddie and Steve to—

“Dude, I don’t have the first clue how to set this thing up,” Steve says, jostling the bag in his arms. “Anyway, you need me here.”

“To do what? Act as a human shield?” Eddie asks blandly. Steve’s glower does not deal the blow he hoped it would.

“I already explained how to set it up to Eddie,” Dustin says, foot tapping on the asphalt in impatience. He and Nancy make quite the team when they’re aligned on the same side. “You’re only going to the Bluffs. Your walkies will be in range and you’ll have plenty of time to run back and save the day.”

His glower has even less of an effect on Dustin.

“Do you not want to go with Eddie?” Dustin questions with a disappointed frown. “I thought you guys were friends.”

Robin snorts and does a terrible job covering it with a cough. Steve is losing the battle on every front.

The honest truth is Steve does not want to go with Eddie. The longer they stand in the dark, the trees looming around them like silent soldiers, the more Steve wishes Eddie were far, far away from here. Somewhere he doesn’t have a chance of a bullet ripping through his chest or a beam of light transporting him off the earth, never to be seen again. Steve feels the same concern for all of them. He loves Robin with every breath in his lungs, but what’s she capable of doing if confronted by a squad of men equipped with heavy-duty rifles?

Steve is the human shield, whether Eddie likes that or not. He’s not useful to anyone lugging a bag of mechanical parts through the woods and acting as the radio technician’s assistant.

“C’mon, Harrington,” Eddie says, leveling him a long, hard look that has Steve momentarily fearful he somehow read his mind. “Protect the goods”—he sweeps his hand down his own body and up again—“make sure I don’t get taken out by any men in black.”

There it is—a direct hit, right through the ribs, lodged in the meat of his heart. Eddie had known exactly where to aim.

“Fine,” he grumbles, his storm-cloud attitude a front for how dry his mouth is and how unsteady his legs are beneath him. He hoists the bag onto Eddie, because he isn’t going to be the donkey for the entire trip to the Bluffs, and sets off in the opposite direction as everyone else is heading. “Let’s go, dude.”

Eddie says it under his breath, so no one else can catch it: “Aye-aye, commander.”

 

 

 

SUZIE BINGHAM (STUDENT / CODE BREAKER): I don’t think it’s very strange that these extra-terrestrial beings would design a code hoping to find—[looking off camera] can I say Eleven? That’s what codes are supposed to be. They’re hidden languages, meant to reach only certain people. It really only takes one person to create a code and use it. But obviously it’s the most useful if you have someone else to understand it.

THE MONTAUK FILES {WORKING TITLE} — INT. VI — DECEMBER 31, ‘85

 

 

 

The walk through the woods is slow-going, what with the heap of mechanical crap, the cold, and the ever-present fear they’d be shot at by government goons. Eddie falls behind, pausing every few steps to heft up the bag. If he’s thinking the former jock should be doing the heavy lifting, to his credit, Eddie doesn’t say so out loud, but Steve finally caves and grabs the bag back from him. He’s not watching Eddie take a bullet through the shoulder because he hid out during every high school gym class.

“Thanks,” Eddie mumbles, his teeth chattering from the cold, and Steve swallows the urge to tell him where he can shove his gratitude.

Ground Control—Eddie, one and the same—would have never thanked Steve for lightening the load for him. He would have pretended to swoon or teased Steve about putting those old basketball muscles to good use. In the flashes Steve used to have of him, he never pictured Eddie bowing his head or dragging his feet like he’s doing now. He looks defeated.

They sure are alone now.

Steve sighs. “Can you maybe stop looking like someone killed your dog, dude?” Out of his peripheral vision, he spies Eddie turning his head, but Steve sticks to staring through the trees, telling himself he’s on the lookout for signs of the danger.

“No can do, Com—” Eddie cuts himself off with a choked cough. “Sorry, I’m afraid this is just what my face does when I’m marching to certain doom.”

“We’re not marching to certain doom,” Steve scoffs. A branch snaps. His tongue stings at the place where he bit down in alarm.

Imbued with a second wind, Eddie picks up the pace and brings himself parallel to Steve, though not without leaving a gaping six feet of distance between them. “We’re about to use that crap in your arms to contact an alien race we still know next to nothing about,” he says. “Pretty sure that’s just asking for doom.”

“I thought you liked aliens.”

“Yeah, well, I also like movies where a big guy with a knife goes around killing babysitters,” he mutters, “doesn’t mean I’d want to be best friends with Michael Myers if he ever showed up in Montauk.”

“It’s gonna be fine,” Steve says, because he doesn’t want to stop and consider the alternative.

“Like it was fine when you almost got shot?” Eddie snaps, clearly not dialed into the same wavelength of denial Steve is riding. His voice carries far through the empty woods, producing an eerie echo. Steve reprimanded twice over.

He flares his nostrils, shifting the duffle’s weight onto his left shoulder. “The guy got off like one shot, max.”

“Okay, and was it fine when you and Red almost got abducted,” Eddie counters, spoiling for a fight now. “Making that your—huh, what was it again—second close encounter?”

“What does it matter?” Steve asks, his voice rising above the wind, and their footfalls in the crunching leaves, and the blood pounding in his ears. “We just found out me and Max aren’t the ones they’re after. It was a—a fluke, or something. And why do you even care?”

“Fuck you, Harrington,” Eddie seethes, stopping in his tracks. “Why do you think I care?”

“I don’t know! I—” Steve whips around to face him and everything he had been planning on unloading jams in his throat.

Eddie is standing with his arms wrapped around himself, his head angled towards the tree canopy, eyes blinking back frustrated tears. Under the hazy blue moonlight, he looks younger than he is, childlike and lonely, but at the same time, otherworldly. All those late nights spent whispering through the phone, trying to develop a piecemeal snapshot of this guy who had bought up every square inch of available real estate in his head, and Steve never came close to a true picture. He missed the imperfect details that make up a person—the chapped lips because he’s licked them a hundred times since they started walking, the slight shadow on his chin from skipping a shave this morning, his bangs fluffy thanks to a blow-dry, a small cluster of pimples peeking beneath them, a stress breakout if Steve had to guess.

The fight flies out of Steve as he realizes he wants to kiss Eddie’s frown away, not making him suffer through it. He did tell Will it was love.

“I’m just really confused here,” he admits, slowly setting down Dustin’s radio. They’re doing this then.

“I am, too, man,” Eddie says, his voice breaking just a little.

Steve finally asks the question looping in his head since he saw Eddie Munson standing in that office doorway: “Why did you never tell me?”

He expects Eddie to leave him in suspense or attempt to deflect, but his answer is immediate. 

“Because you hated me.”

A sick feeling rolls into Steve’s stomach. “I didn’t hate you. I didn’t re—” He breaks off, because it feels like the only thing worse than agreeing he hated Eddie is saying he forgot him.

“Dustin showed me a lot of the footage they shot,” Eddie says, dragging his foot in a semicircle through the fallen leaves. “He mentions my name once and you look like you’re going to pop a blood vessel.”

“That wasn’t hate, man, that was…” His throat tightens. He’s never had to put it in words. Robin had seen through his thick skull, to the little green monster camping in his brain, throwing a temper tantrum every time Eddie came up in conversation. She teased him for it, because that's her full-time job, but never forced him to own up to it as he has to now. “It was jealousy.”

Eddie points a finger at Steve’s chest and mouths “You,” before turning the finger back on himself, touching his own chest, and whispering, “Of me?”

Steve shrugs weakly. “Yeah.”

“Sorry, but what could you possibly have had to be jealous about?”

“Dustin is obsessed with you. Robin has a white board at Family Video dedicated to the number of times he brings you up and I—” Lose my mind, Steve keeps to himself. “I don’t have a ton in common with Henderson, or any of them really. You’ve got Dungeons and Dragons, and your nerdy movies, and the radio show…”

“Which they didn’t know about until an hour ago,” Eddie reminds him.

“Exactly, you’re only going to get cooler in their eyes,” Steve says, because already Eddie works at a specialty store the boys love, hosts a midnight radio hour rocking metal and nerd facts galore, takes classes at the community college, can supply the good weed when they’re old enough, and he’s going places. Meanwhile, there’s Steve, loafing in Family Video and listening to it happen long-distance through an old radio.  “I’m just going to be…”

In Montauk, renting tapes and living on his parents’ charity until the fast-approaching day it dries up. The kids will continue on through high school, developing their interests in art, and basketball, and science. Mike will see his sister race up to Boston and shoot to the top of her class at Emerson, while Will is bound to hear how his brother’s photography is making waves in the city. And in time, they’ll understand Nancy, Jonathan, Robin, and Eddie are the ones to look up to, model themselves after. Steve is the high school has-been everyone is embarrassed to see at the reunion.

“You never cut yourself a break, do you?” Eddie shakes his head, seeming astounded.

“What?”

Eddie huffs, like he’s having trouble believing he has to spell this out. “You hear my name what—once a day?”

“Try once an hour.”

“I hear yours once a minute,” Eddie says, though without a trace of aggravation. “From all of them, even that little shit Wheeler. He won’t admit it, but he thinks you’re some kind of love guru. Trust me, you're never gonna lose those dickheads.”

No, they may never say in so many words that Steve is meant to be a temporary figure in their lives, but there are a hundred different ways to lose people. It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as a break-up or a freak accident. Friends drift. Marriages chill. People vanish. Kids outgrow their babysitter.

“They’re still all gonna leave one day,” Steve says, low enough he is not sure Eddie will hear him. He may not want him to. “And I’ll just be here.”

“Yeah, about that…” Eddie licks his lip and Steve follows the slow drag of his tongue, wetting his own lips unconsciously. “Remember how you told me you felt like you were out there just taking shots in the dark?”

Steve furrows his brow, paging back through their conversations. The amount of personal shit he's told Eddie could fill the Montauk library twice over.  “Uh, yeah, I think so,” he says eventually, not quite the truth, but he trusts Eddie to have kept their best memories.

Eddie fixes his fingers into a gun, mimes loading it, and turns it on himself. 

“Bang!” He shoots straight at the heart. “You got me.”

Steve shakes his head, something in his brain misfiring. “I don’t—”

“Okay, do you also remember the night after Christmas last year?” Eddie asks, taking a measured step closer to Steve. His lips twist into a sardonic smile. “Carol’s shitty orphan party?”

For that memory, Steve does not need to trust in Eddie’s vault. He has replayed his recollection of the night so many times, he has worn down the film.

“Of course I do.”

“I mean, I always thought you were hot in high school, man, but I took comfort in the fact you were a total douche,” Eddie says, chuckling at his own expense. “But then I’m standing next to the Steve Harrington, looking like he’s having a worse time than I am at a party with all his supposed friends, and he actually wants to hear my dumb bullshit.”

“The light we’re seeing from stars takes years to get to us,” Steve recalls, nearly word for word. “I remember it.”

“See? That’s what I mean. You…” Eddie looks at him in amazement, like Steve and not the miraculous light of the stars, reaching them from trillions of miles away, is what’s remarkable. “I was done for after that night. Ruined for all other hot, non-douchey guys.”

Steve thought the most important question he had to ask of Eddie tonight was why he never told him who he was, but really, it’s this: “Did you come back after you finished dealing to Hargrove?”

Eddie nods. “Yeah, total wishful think—”

Wishful thinking, that a cosmonaut will reach a far-off star and discover it unchanged from when he set out to find it. Wishful thinking, the cosmonaut will make it back to Earth. Wishful thinking, a person hits what they’re aiming for in the dark, a one in a trillion shot.

Wishful thinking, that Steve Harrington will kiss the doubt from Eddie’s mouth. The stars are so damn far away, but Ground Control—Eddie fucking Munson—is right here, his lips warm against Steve’s own, his pulse fluttering beneath his hand cupping his neck, reeling him closer until they’re collapsing into each other.

Eddie falls backwards, toppling them to the ground in a messy tangle of limbs. One of them is groaning, doesn’t matter who, because they’re both grappling to seal their mouths back together again. Steve smiles against Eddie’s lips, catching his bottom lip between his teeth. Eddie moans, sending a shock wave through Steve’s system.

He pulls back, just enough to see Eddie’s face, flushed and smacked with awe. A leaf is entangled in his hair and Steve plucks it out, then twirls the strand between his fingers.

“I should’ve waited for you longer,” he tells Eddie, something he has been holding inside for a year.

Eddie brings his hand up to Steve’s face, brushing his thumb along the constellation of moles on his cheek. “I should’ve told you who I was sooner.”

They might have come together if Steve had waited in the shadows of that party or if Eddie had told him from the start who he was, but they just as easily could have imploded before Steve felt half of what he feels for Eddie right now. “Maybe it’s better it happened this way,” he posits, dragging a finger down the slope of Eddie’s nose, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“Uh, yeah, that’s a really cute way of looking at it, commander,” Eddie says breathlessly, as Steve peppers kisses along his jaw. “But some of us are never getting any and would have liked to be doing this three months ago.”

Steve leaves a lingering kiss at Eddie’s pulse point before looking into his eyes and making sure he knows, “It’s only you, has been for awhile. You know that, right?”

“I didn’t want to get my hopes up.” Eddie’s attempts to avoid looking at him are made difficult by how Steve’s arms are bracketing his head. With a sigh, he says, “I wasn’t exactly giving you much.”

Steve thinks he has to have misheard him. “Are you kidding?” he asks, and Eddie shakes his head. “You said you would do just about anything for me.”

“See?” Eddie says, fidgeting with the collar of Steve’s sweater. “I started our relationship on a lie. I said I would do just about anything for you so I wouldn’t scare you off. Harrington, I would do anything for you. No questions asked. Anything, everything.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

And what is Steve supposed to do with that, other than kiss him again with everything he’s got? They’re both panting, in a daze, when they have to surface for air again.

“I’d do anything for you, too,” Steve says, the least terrifying confession he has ever made.

Eddie leans up on his elbows, pressing his lips to the shell of Steve’s ear, and whispers, “Never listen to David Bowie again.”

Steve sits back in Eddie’s lap and pretends to think it over. “Fine. If you never watch an episode of The Twilight Zone again.”

Bullshit, all of it. Steve knows Eddie has a soft spot for Bowie’s lyrics just as Eddie knows Steve is a Rod Serling junkie.

“Fine,” Eddie agrees, grinning up at him. “Must be true love then.”

His grin falters, afraid he had stepped over an invisible line. He has no need to be. Steve fists his hands in the collar of his flannel and yanks Eddie up, whispering against his mouth, “Must be,” before he kisses him again, and again, and again until their mouths are sore and they’re laughing too hard for the kisses to be anything more than the messy slides of smiling lips.

At some point, one of their walkies crackles from where it had been abandoned on the cold ground.

“Steve, Eddie—do you copy? Over.”

“Boo,” Eddie hisses, chasing Steve’s mouth as he pulls back. “Let’s tell them we need to take a rain check.”

“It might be important,” Steve says, even as he indulges Eddie in another kiss.

“Steve,” the walkie whines and he rolls his eyes in answer. “We’re heading in your direction with El. We found the frequency they used. Over.”

Eddie exhales a long sigh against his neck. “The secret mission beckons.”

“Hey.” Steve grabs Eddie’s attention by cupping his face with both hands, holding him there. “If anything happens—men in black, lights in the sky, whatever…grab the closest kids and run, okay?”

“Steve—”

“You said you’d do anything for me, right,” he says, not playing fair, but he needs to extract this assurance from Eddie before they go any further. “Do this for me. Please.”

“Only if that’s what you’re going to do, too,” Eddie says with a stubborn scowl, made somewhat adorable by how his cheeks are slightly squashed.

Steve kisses him once, quick, on those smushed lips. “It’s what I did last time.”

Neither of them call out the other on never saying the words, I promise.

 

 

 

Your number one song of Orwell’s 1984, ladies, gentlemen, and extra-terrestrial beings: “When Doves Cry” by his excellency, Prince. Yeah, I do like the song. People contain multitudes.

We’ve reached the end of the line here and the clock is telling me it’s time to start counting down to midnight. Who knows what fresh hell 1985 will bring. Maybe this time next year, we’ll all be kissing the person of our dreams.

In five, four, three, two—

DARK STAR BROADCAST — DECEMBER 31, ‘84

 

 

 

Your worst memory will be this.

You have so many of them—bad memories. A toy box full of promises broken, of people you hurt by mistake, of people who hurt you on purpose, of nights you cried so hard for Mama that you thought you heard a rib crack.

But this memory will be the worst of them because you know everything happening is your fault. You are hurting people you love on purpose, because they’re here for you. People are gone because of you. You should not exist.

Mama said you were special. She didn’t have time to tell you that special could be good and bad.

Your friends are the good kind of special. Dustin and Suzie are bright balls of green light guiding you through the woods, to a place called the Bluffs. Mike is beside you, your most special pocket of starlight, but he is slowly turning blue. Walking behind you, his big sister, a light red, is keeping her eyes out for bad men. You are thinking you’re safe.

Steve and his friend—Eddie, of a spring green—have not finished setting up Dustin’s special machine when you reach the Bluffs. You see why this place is called that, perched on the edge of the ocean. The waves crash, metal pots at Benny’s banging together, but you hear something else, too. The hum, like a siren calling out to you.

You didn’t tell your friends there was a third message, something designed for only you to hear if you listened hard enough. They had to be sure you heard them through the noise. This planet is so loud. Messages get lost all the time. Humans miss each other over the littlest things, sounds unheard.

Steve asks you if you’re okay. He does that a lot and you think it’s because not many people ask him the same thing. His shadows are smokier than they were earlier. You can see him, the worry on his face. He tells you it’s fine if you don’t want to do this anymore. No one will be mad.

He doesn’t know they’re already here.

What you understand now is that the colors—the auras, your friends call them—are like thumbprints. Everyone’s light is different. You have been lucky, the times you slipped past your dad and into the dark. You’re lucky they did not see your thumbprint, which is more different than most. The bad kind of special.

Tonight, they see it. They don’t need Dustin and Suzie tuning the radio to find the right frequency. They may pick up the message Suzie cobbled together—Hello, we come in peace—but they don’t wait to hear anything more.

The hum is deafening, a wordless song wailing in your ears. You crumple to the ground, yelling for it to stop. Someone is trying to pick you up, to get you away. You think Mike is calling out your name, but the sound barely reaches you. He doesn’t reach you either.

The light eclipses the water, eclipses the world, eclipses you. The arms around you have not let go.

They’re here. They want you back. To the stars.

Steve!—

When the darkness turns back on, Suzie Bingham and Dustin Henderson are huddled around each other, under the shadow of the radio that brought them together. Mike Wheeler is screaming at his sister to let him go, tears leaking down his face. He wrenches out of her grip and Nancy Wheeler brings her hands to her face, covering her mouth, hanging open in horror.

Mike races to where Eddie Munson stands not moving, unblinking, staring at a spot on the ground that’s empty.

Steve Harrington and Jane Hopper are gone.

Notes:

hey, the good news is this is the last cliffhanger you have to put up with!

1) I haven’t said it before, because I keep forgetting, but it’s important that everyone knows that while Steve has been in a slow burn sci-fi drama this whole time, Eddie has been in a workplace romantic comedy. The two genres have finally collided!

2) Blessed to have Steve as a narrator because I can hand-wave some of the code breaking stuff, but Suzie does mention night writing, which is a tactile code used as the basis for Braille. The 12 dot symbols in night writing represented phonetic sounds rather than letters of the alphabet and, in my mind, the aliens did something similar with their code, combining Morse with phonetic sounds in their language.

3) The titles I’ve been giving to people interviewed for the documentary aren’t necessarily real (given the documentary hasn’t been edited in universe), but they’re what I imagine Dustin is planning to use if the documentary does get finished (no spoilers). Will deserves that DP credit.

4) Eddie is once again referencing a number of B-movies, including Invaders from Mars and The Thing from Another World, along with a very famous episode of The Twilight Zone, “To Serve Man” (my dad’s favorite and thus the first episode I ever saw—scarring!). He also alludes to the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space, which was declared the worst movie ever made back in 1980, resulting in a cult following that persists to this day. Meanwhile, Dustin is referring to The Day the Earth Stood Still, a classic.

5) An Argyle appearance! I simply could not resist. Ditto to Robin being roped into the final adventure. Does it really make sense she’s there? Probably not. Did I need her there? Absolutely.

6) All of the songs Eddie references in his 1984 New Year’s Eve’s Dark Star broadcasts were on Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 Singles. Eddie brought it on himself agreeing to do the countdown show.

One more chapter to go! I will see you next Sunday for what will hopefully be a grand finale. In the meantime, as always, you can find me over at nancywheeeler on tumblr.

Chapter 6: new year's day // time enough at last

Summary:

The end is here. So is the beginning.

 

 

Hello? [mimicking an echo: hello, hello hello] Is there anybody in there? Nod if you can hear me. Is there anybody home?

If you can hear me, good. That means this thing’s on. For anyone out there traveling in the dark tonight, welcome to your new favorite broadcast and probably your only option. I’m thinking of calling our little show Dark Star. Any Carpenter fans out there? Call in and let me know. Call in for anything: song requests I won’t play, directions to get to the lighthouse…over here at Ground Control, we are your one-stop shop.

Just don’t tell me if I’m blowing it.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — SEPTEMBER 10, ‘84

 

 

 

Steve surfaces slowly. A low hum is buzzing behind his eyes, spreading to his temples, tender just below the skin, and running in a shiver down his spinal cord. He lifts his head, peeling his eyes open with effort. After a few long seconds, waiting for the starbursts to fade, his vision clears.

He is in Family Video, upright behind the counter like he had fallen asleep standing. The store is empty, but otherwise looks the same as it does every day. In fact, it’s the mirror image of how Steve left it the day before New Year’s Eve. In the trash bin, he spies the crumpled wrapper of his midday power bar. The Sunday crossword, dated December 29th, is sitting beside the computer where Robin abandoned it half-finished. Steve had filled in one word, in pencil to Robin’s confident blue ink: minor. The clue was a fill-in, “Ursa ___.” The lesser bear.

The computer is off. Steve hovers his palm over the screen, feeling for heat. The screen is not hot or cold. It’s not anything. He flexes his fingers, watches them extend. The air around him seems stagnant, but not stale like he’s grown used to in the thick of winter, the heat overcooking everything in the store including the musty carpeting. Steve sniffs the air, searching for that familiar, omnipresent must, but can’t find it.

The room is overpowered by light, courtesy of the overhead fluorescent, on a brighter setting than Steve knew they had, and of the cool mid-afternoon sunlight beaming through the storefront windows. The clock by the phone reads 13:01, military time. Around one in the afternoon, so the store shouldn’t be empty. Even on a Monday. 

Is it Monday? Is it any day?

He has to find—huh.

Steve massages his temples. The humming hasn’t stopped.

He has to find something, someone. Rounding the counter, he bolts for the exit. His shoes squeak beneath him, the screechy sound of rubber soles on a smooth surface. A blink.

Outside, he’s outside on the curb of Family Video. He blinks again, adjusting to the heavy beating of the sunlight. The cold sun hangs lonely above him in a cloudless sky, pale, a winter blue. 

His eyes travel down to street level, a familiar if disconcerting sight. It’s Elmwood as it ever was, the street of his sorry second home. The Family Video strip mall is sandwiched between The Albatross Motel in its white clapboard glory on one side and the competitor, The Wave Inn Resort, who are they kidding, on the other. A few cars are parked in the lots of each motel, but no one is out smoking on the balconies. Another cluster of cars are parked across the street in the back lot of the Montauk Corner Store. Next door, Pepe’s Pizza is missing its typical lunch rush line. Argyle’s pizza van is hugging the curb, motionless.

“Hello?” he calls out, because it feels like what the guy in a movie would do. No one calls back to him.

Benny’s—Steve decides he'll go to Benny’s. He doesn’t expect to find anyone there, but he already hates being out on the vacant street, soundless but for the hum. It reminds him of the sound a refrigerator makes, the whirl of machinery working behind the scenes.

Old Montauk Highway is in the same state as Elmwood, dotted with parked cars suggesting a normal weekday except that no one is coming in or out of the shops. Peeking in the window of Benny's, Steve sees all of the booths are free and the stools at the counter are clear. He goes for the door, another blink.

He is inside, standing in the center of the room. A couple of booths have plates set on the table, loaded with scrambled eggs and hash browns, scavenged for the best bits. No one is manning the kitchen, but Steve smells the grease of bacon frying. The scent is sharp, the way cheddar fresh from the fridge is, but something underlies it. Not something rotten, but something off.

“I’ll be seeing you / In all the old familiar places…”

Steve jumps half out of his skin. The jukebox in the corner has switched on without anyone to feed it nickels. Billie Holiday croons through the crackly speaker, an old favorite of his mom’s that she mourned the first time the jukebox was gutted. Steve edges towards the first signs of life he’s had, even if it’s artificial.

He stops halfway, distracted by two place settings at the counter. Served up on one plate, a cheeseburger with a huge bite taken out of it, a few strings of onion peeking from beneath the bun. No pickles. Amongst the fries is a single onion ring. Steve draws closer, powerless against memory's magnetic pull.

The Benny’s place mat beneath the dish is fingerprinted with grease. In the lower right corner, someone has drawn a heart in yellow crayon. Within the heart are the initials S.H. and a plus sign. The initials he was supposed to add under his own are missing.

His head is light, woozy. Feels like the comedown after a bad late-night binge, the ones where Tommy H. goaded him into drinking until he was blitzed and wanted to chase the reflection of himself to the bottom of his swimming pool. He needs to get out of this place. Find her.

“I’ll find you in the morning sun / and when the night is new…”

Close his eyes. He’ll close his eyes for just a minute.

 

 

 

“Jesus H. Christ. What do we do? What the fuck do we do?”

“We need to stay calm—”

“Stay calm. Stay calm?”

“Don’t yell at me, Mike. Dustin, Suzie, are you getting anything back from—from these…do you think they’re reading you?”

“Didn’t you tell them we come in peace?”

“Uh yes, Eddie, we did. That doesn’t mean they agreed.”

“And who told you that might be the case, Henderson, huh? Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Nancy, what are you—hey!”

“Find the frequency the police radio uses. Now.”

 

 

 

Easier waking up the second time around, less light to swim through.

He’s lying on his back, the surface beneath him hard and unyielding. Smooth, too, like running a hand over the cool hood of a car. The texture doesn’t match what he sees, cream carpeting he recognizes from the floor of his bedroom. It should be scratchy, uncomfortable to walk on with bare feet, carpeting chosen to align with an aesthetic and not for its coziness.

He sits up and finds he is, in fact, in his bedroom. The sun has set, must have happened hours ago. So much for shutting his eyes for just one minute. Steve doesn’t understand how he got from Benny’s to his house, except in the way he understands he is not actually in Montauk anymore, this is not his real bedroom, and the longer he spends wandering this uncanny and lifeless replication, the harder it may be to get back home.

The clock on his bedside table, also in military time, tells him it is now 18:11.

Eleven. That’s who he needs to find.

Steve stands, his knees popping. It’s something of a relief to feel his body’s regular aches and pains. He takes it as a sign—while this world may not be real, he still is.

The shades are drawn over the window, but Steve thumbs them open a crack. He’s not sure he can walk down another deserted street, this time in the dark. The woods won’t be much better, but at least they’re supposed to be eerie and empty by nature.

Outside, the patio lights are glowing, beaconlike. The pool is open but drained of water, a gaping concrete hole carved into the earth. Someone is standing at the edge.

His heartbeat pounds in his ears, overriding the hum. He has to bite his tongue, hard enough to taste a flood of iron, just to prevent himself from desperately crying out El’s name.

The figure at the lip of the pool is a foot too tall to be El. Their build is lanky, boyish and slim, but Steve is able to discern this person is a man. The dim light and distance makes it difficult to pick out other defining characteristics; he thinks his hair is a sandy blonde, his skin pale as the moonlight reflecting in the little puddles left at the bottom of the pool.

His head lifts slowly, sensing he has an audience. He finds Steve in the window without having to search for him, as if he had known where to look. His face is angular, the cut of his cheekbones sharp as the rock of a cliff’s edge. Thin lips stretch out taut into a closed, delighted smile. He waves.

Steve scrambles back from the window, so fast he nearly topples to the ground. Whoever that is, however he is here with him, Steve does not want to stick around for answers. He rushes from his room and to the staircase, deciding to try his luck again with the street. First step onto the landing, a metallic stomp.

In the next step, not a breath taken between them, he is running on the road. He skids to a stop and turns on his heels, seeing his house ten yards behind him. The front door is shut, as is the garage. The Bimmer is parked in the driveway, asleep for the night, same as the street.

“What the hell,” he exhales, burying his hands in his hair. “What the hell, what the hell, what the hell?”

He screams the final word and it bounces back at him, hitting like a hard ball to the gut.

“Oh, you really shouldn’t be here.”

Steve whirls around, hand grasping for a weapon when nothing is within reach. He balls his fists in last resort, though the person he comes face to face with is not steeled for a fight. It’s a woman—a young woman, about his age, straddling that indistinct line between teenaged and burgeoning adulthood—and she is regarding him with a look of pity.

Hard-won pity, Steve would say, because she doesn’t seem the type to give it out for free. She has tough eyes, darkened by smudgy circles of inky eyeliner, and a tougher set to her mouth, frowning, not many smile lines to be seen. A head shorter than Steve, but she carries herself with drawn-back shoulders and a stubborn stance. Steve’s own spine might as well be a misshapen snake.

He lowers his fists, but keeps them balled. She’ll respect him less if he gives in to trusting her without a second thought, just because her first move wasn’t to rip his eyes from their sockets. “What do you mean I really shouldn’t be here?” he asks. “Who are you?”

She ignores both questions. Her eyes are drinking in the atmosphere around him, a move similar to El’s. What she’s doing is confirmed when she says, “Your shadows aren’t very dark.” Her eyes sweep over him again, lips quirking. “Though I guess you’re pretty cute. I didn’t think that mattered to them.”

“Look, I don’t know where I am or what any of this is,” Steve says, a shiver he has been suppressing finally wracking his body. “But I need to find someone. Her name is El. Eleven.”

“You were taken with someone else?” At his nod, the young woman says, “They usually try to keep people apart awhile.”

“What does that mean? Apart—” Steve glances wildly around the dark street. “Seriously, where the hell are we?”

Her eyes flick lazily from house to house, her lower lip curling in distaste. Best to not say the neighborhood looks better in the daylight, especially given it doesn’t. “I don’t know where this is, but you’re seeing what your mind finds easiest to handle. But here—do you trust me?”

“No.”

“Good answer.”

She begins strolling to the end of his street and Steve follows. As he does, he notices the asphalt, the grass, everything begins to ripple, like this world is nothing but a reflection in water and someone has cast a stone. The ripples grow, folding them into darkness one second and rebuilding into a new world in the next.

Instead of a silent suburban street, they are in the alley of a city, tall brick walls on either side of them. At the entrance of the alley, Steve is offered a view into the street, clear of cars. At the other end of the alley, an old van is parked beside a pair of dumpsters. The young woman stares at the van, her expression unreadable.

“So what? Everything here is fake and we’re in a…” Steve’s vocabulary is missing the word for it, but Dustin would have known. Thinking of him triggers a deep ache in his chest. He had to watch Steve disappear and now is undoubtedly scrabbling to find a way to get him back. Him, and Nancy, and Eddie—

Eddie.

Steve told him he would run; instead of keeping his promise when he had the chance, he has now found himself in a place where there is nowhere to run to.

“I haven’t been here long, but these beings pretty much exist in the dark,” she explains. “They set this up for people like you, so it wouldn’t be so scary when you first got here.”

“Because this is all very comforting.” Steve cuts his eyes to the scrap-yard van, the doors hanging open like someone is supposed to be coming back soon. Someone who does not exist here. Someone who is back on earth, with the real van, perhaps wondering why this woman left them in the lurch. “Nope, not at all creepy and terrifying.”

The woman shrugs, not seeing the problem. “They’re trying. How long did it take you to understand people?”

“Listen, I just want to find this girl and leave,” Steve says, coming close to begging. “She’s like you, I think. She knew I had shadows. She can tell when other people have them, too. We found out it’s because they did these experiments on her mom at this air base—”

She interrupts, her tone adopting a new sense of urgency. “They found her?”

“Found might be a strong word. She kind of…” Steve winces. “She wanted to meet them. We discovered this transmission, calling her—”

“Daughter,” she finishes with a reflective quality in her voice. So, she had heard the messages, too, and cracked the code on her own. “It wasn’t just for her, but she was the last of us.”

“They experimented on you, too?”

“Experiment.” She huffs, the word sounding dirty, like she had to scrape it off her tongue. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Can you help me find her in here?” Steve asks, his desperation mounting. “There are people down there who have to get back to.”

The pity resurfaces, softening her eyes from steel to flint. “You really don’t belong here,” she repeats. She presses her hand against the wall of the alley. The ever-present electric hum is joined for a moment by two short beeps. With the beeps, the alley stretches, pulling like taffy. Little lights materialize on the wall, creating a path to follow. “C’mon.”

She walks straight through the open mouth of the van, swallowed by it and coming out on the other side whole. Steve goes where she leads, flinching only slightly to pass through what looks like solid metal.

“But just a warning.” Her dark eyes cut to Steve, wary. “Just because you don’t belong here, it doesn’t mean Eleven doesn’t.”

 

 

 

“How long have they been gone?”

“We don’t know exactly…”

“Guess.”

“A couple of hours.”

“I checked my watch when we reached the Bluffs and it was 11:57. The abduction happened approximately two minutes later. It’s 1:53 now, so they have been gone for a little under two hours.”

“Who is this?”

“Suzie. She cracked the alien’s top secret code.”

“Right—that thing doesn’t make phone calls, does it? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Listen to me very carefully: a man named Dr. Sam Owens is going to be here with some people very soon. Do you think you’ll be able to explain how the code works to him?”

“That depends—is he not a complete idiot?”

 

 

 

You were born with the dust of a very old star.

We thought we had more time.

You have a color that you know as red. To us, red is a symbol of anger. Though we wish you did not have to discover this for yourself, we have observed humans for long enough to know anger is as plentiful a deposit on your planet as it was on ours.

Our star, the center of our universe, was angry. Ages of wrath and approaching ruin, but we believed since it had raged before us, it would rage long after us. We were wrong. We clung to life beyond all expectation and clung to it harder the closer we teetered on the brink of disaster.

We became angry. We had ages of wrath. Our anger and our fear built the vessel you stand in, but it waged war over who was allowed to build it and who was allowed to leave in it once it was complete. Knowing what one is feeling is not the same as understanding it.

We are the fortunate few left of our planet. From a great distance, we watched as our angry star exploded, becoming something new. You have a beautiful word for it: supernova.

Defying expectation for a final time, the rock we called home clung to life as we had. It survived the supernova’s blast, but was ejected out of orbit. It might wander still, a rogue planet in the vast universe. In that, we are one and the same.

We ended up here not to invade the planet you call Earth. We’re small, inessential, borrowers of time. What we hoped for was shelter, to end our wandering. The humans we found wanted to help us, but only if we helped them. Everything was an exchange: our technological advances and samples of what they called our genes, for their promises and little else. Until you.

Daughter, we are ready to start anew. To become new. We may have to wander the stars for many ages more, we may have to return here if there is nowhere else for us to go, but we will come back as something different. Something like you.

We will not leave you behind for them to poke and prod, on this blue planet alone. You belong with us. From dust to dust.

 

 

 

“What have you tried to communicate to them thus far?”

“Just that we come in peace.”

“They’re fourteen.”

“I’m getting that. Listen kids, can you tell them all we want is the safe return of the two people they’ve taken tonight?”

“That’s all you’re government guy’s got, Mr. Chief of Police, sir? Asking the kidnap-happy aliens to pretty please give us our friends back?”

“I get it, kid, I do. But I’m about to say something I know none of you will want to hear, including you, pop, but a lot of what happens next is going to come down to Steve and Jane.”

 

 

 

After what felt like hours spent walking in protracted silence, the infinite alley ripples again. The brick walls are displaced by concrete, the asphalt by the cement. The utilitarian corridor is immediately familiar to Steve. It’s Camp Hero.

Glancing over his shoulder, the last of the ripples waning as the scene settles, Steve sees a set of concrete stairs behind them. The stairs are leading up.

“As above, so below,” Steve mutters, remembering the writing on the wall. Max had asked if the base had a basement and Dustin answered the plans hadn’t indicated one. Either Suzie had missed hacking a page of the plans or someone buried the basement’s existence. Steve is not betting against Suzie.

“They told me I had top secret clearance,” the young woman—Kali, she said her name was Kali—says, her teeth clenching as she takes in what little the hallway has to offer. “That’s why I was allowed down here and why I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it.”

He keeps his mouth shut as they continue down the hall. The questions he has are deeply personal and he’s not sure he wants the answers even if Kali is willing to volunteer them.

“They didn’t hurt us in the way you’re thinking.”

His eyes shoot to her.

“He—they wanted to know what we could do,” she says, a chill in her voice. “What we could see. I don’t think it was enough for them, but I didn’t stick around for as long as they would have liked me to.”

Her small smirk, proud at having screwed over the people who had dictated the course of her life since conception, reminds Steve of Eddie. Almost everything does, in one way or another.

“Why are you here then?” Steve asks.

Kali brings them to a stop at a room with a closed door, though one with a window view. In the rectangle of glass, Steve makes out a white room with a few circular tables scattered around the floor. Low tables, designed to be used by children. A wave of disgust washes over Steve, mirrored in Kali’s scowl at seeing the room again.

“This was all human,” Kali spits out, worse than profanity. “But I chose to be here, with them.”

Again, Steve has to ask, “Why?”

“After all this bullshit, I spent every second running, just trying to make sure I didn’t end up back here,” she says, not sparing any pity for herself. “So I never belonged anywhere. I had one foot in the world and one sunk into a void, but I didn’t like either of those options. Turns out I had a third.”

“And you’re…” He isn’t able to finish.

Kali puts it to him bluntly. “Happy?”

He nods.

“What does it matter?” she counters. “This is where I’m supposed to be.”

Without further embellishment, a young woman without fuss because the world burned it out of her, Kali strides towards the stairs. Steve calls after her, “You don’t want to meet El?”

Without turning around, she calls back, “If she stays, I will.” She passes through the stairs as she had walked straight through the van, figments from their imagination, structures and objects made of air. Only this time, Steve isn’t bound to follow her. He hopes to never see her again.

Knowing the door is as real as the stairs, Steve doesn’t bother trying the handle. He steps through it and into the room. El is standing with her back to him, her hair hanging loose over her shoulders. The scrunchie Max gave her is around her wrist, keeping company with a collection of beaded and woven friendship bracelets. She is twisting the beds of one between her fingers, nervously counting down from ten.

“El?”

At his voice, El snaps out of her trance. She whirls around, getting her eyes on him for a tenth of a second before launching herself at him. He falters back a step, but holds her steady in his arms, his relief palpable, a bittersweet taste underneath his tongue.

“I thought I was alone,” she says, her big eyes wet and shining as they look up at him.

Steve opens his mouth to assure her that is never the case, but the voice that fills the room is not his. “No one is alone here.”

Another person is in the room, standing by a mirror occupying most of the north wall. A one-way observation window, Steve realizes. The man is well over six feet, thin in frame, and sporting a shock of white hair. He is in a brown suit and tie, the style a decade past the fashion. El startles seeing him, like he is a risen body she had buried in her past, and Steve pushes her behind him, readying to run.

“Bad man,” she whispers, curling her fingers in the hem of Steve’s sweater.

“He was a bad man.” Though the man’s lips move in time, the voice doesn’t match. The words sound robotic, as if spoken by a computer. The effect becomes more pronounced the more he—it, the thing behind the shell—speaks. “He hoped to use you as a weapon. That is not who we are.”

“And who are you?” Steve asks, wishing for a baseball bat, purchase for his shaking hands.

“A very old people,” they answer. “We’re sorry you’re not able to remember us, Steve Harrington. Erasing memory is one of our ways of protecting ourselves.”

“I—” His tongue is a lead weight. 

Of course, why wouldn’t they remember him? He has been here once before.

“He can stay with you, if you like,” they say, directing their puppet to El. They forget a human blinks, so the man stares at them vacantly, nothing behind his eyes. “We have been waiting for you for quite some time.”

El clings tighter to Steve. “Waiting?”

The man-not-man nods, a jerky bob. “Who you are is who we are. You have a word for it: family.”

Steve scoffs bitterly. “That’s not what a family is.”

“For your kind, a family is people made up of the same stuff, of the same…” The speech pauses; however they are translating their language to English, they are caught searching for the right word. “D–N–A.”

“If that’s what your definition is, then you took a lot of people away from their families,” Steve snaps. He feels El’s nod, the brush of her curls against his arm.

“You are right. In our search, we found some of your people in pain and brought them here.” The man motions mechanically around the sterile room. “But we always offered them a choice to stay or go. They chose to stay.”

Steve shakes his head in disbelief. “Why would anyone choose to stay here?”

“When one of us becomes cloaked in what you have named shadows, we understand that means they need our help. Shelter. Protection. Our love,” they say with as much emotion as a computer in translation is capable of expressing. “The ones who are hardest to see are those who need to be seen the most.”

Steve feels El nod again, slower now, understanding. It’s not that Steve disagrees with them; they’ve packaged their philosophy beautifully. He just can’t lose El to it.

“That doesn’t mean you get to just—just—” Steve cracks his knuckles, the sound deafening in a vacuum. “Decide they’d be happier here.”

“They decided,” and he hears the emphasis without the robotic voice needing to provide the inflection.

Steve stubbornly tilts his chin. “I don’t believe you.”

They’re having this conversation with a fake man, inside a room made of fake walls and fake furniture. What is there to believe in here, Steve wants to know.

“Let us ask you, Steve Harrington: are you very happy where you are?”

Steve goes to answer yes and cannot spit the single syllable out. He’s a good liar, trained by the cream of the lying crop. That’s what you get from a genetic family, the best of their bad habits. He should be able to grit his teeth and say the single word that may save his skin. But he can’t.

Because he doesn’t want it to be a lie. He wants to say yes and mean it.

“I don’t…”

El is staring at him, hinging on what he has to say next, and he stares back, without anything to say that he thinks would convince someone to stay. Are his shadows back with a vengeance, he thinks to ask her. Sometimes, he almost feels them, panting at his back.

No—Steve Harrington is not very happy where he is most days. He drags himself out of bed in the morning and eats breakfast standing over the sink, alone. At Family Video, he spends most of his waking hours getting snapped at by mothers for renting their teen sons PG-13 movies and cleaning up after kids who shotgun a pack of Milk Duds and ralph in the romance aisle. For most of the summer, he went on dates without his heart in it, because he had stopped putting his heart into much of anything. Trashed pamphlets for community college courses, ignored the cranky noises the Bimmer made, forgot to call a girl, forgot his mom’s birthday, forgot if he liked the taste of french fries, forgot why he thought his life was going anywhere.

Except he never did think his life was going anywhere. Stupidly, he once thought of himself as the fortunate son who got to stay sixteen forever.

Barb Holland crosses his mind, a girl frozen in the town’s memory as forever sweet sixteen. Had she left his party that night starting to forget why any of it was worth a damn?

She would never know that the first thing Nancy Wheeler asked, upon stepping over the threshold of King Steve Harrington’s bedroom, was did Steve think Barb was alright? And the first coherent thing Nancy said in the morning, between viciously swearing at the time, was she hoped Barb made it back home safe.

And how would Max have known how worried Lucas has been about her if she disappeared the night of their Camp Hero break-in? Will certainly wouldn’t have discovered the lengths his mom and brother went to in the search for him if he never came back.

As for Steve, he wouldn’t have gotten his heart torn in two, that’s for sure. Missed out on hunting for a serial cat killer with Dustin Henderson, kind of a bummer. He wouldn’t have graduated high school, so no worries about getting rejected from all the good state schools and atrophying behind the counter of Family Video. Where he met Robin Buckley, the apple to his banana, the Leia to his Luke, his best friend, partners in heart ache and misdemeanors.

He would not have been losing sleep over how far his life derailed off some bullshit course his father set him on. Listening to the radio instead. Hearing a voice reaching him in the dark. Bang. A one in a trillion shot.

“What does it matter?” Steve finds himself asking, echoing Kali. “I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

A pause. Somehow, he had managed to confuse them.

“Why?”

He glances down at El, whose eyes have never left him. “I’ve got my family there.”

“And that is enough?”

Some days, it almost isn’t. The air conditioner blows out in the store and he and Robin snap each other until one or both of them is close to frustrated tears. Dustin refuses to listen to him. He’s on the phone with Ground Control until three in the morning and still doesn’t know his name. All the big, bad thoughts and feelings are as heavy as cannonballs chained to the ankle and deep as an ocean’s trench. 

And love, well.

Love is a very small thing. It slips through the slotted fingers of intertwined hands. He carries it out in a takeout bag from Benny’s. It’s the length of an episode of The Twilight Zone, not a second longer than a song recommended to him by a voice on his radio. It’s captured on 8mm. Only when he steps back and considers these tiny and insignificant acts together, does love reveal itself to be a vast sky of a million little stars.

Steve hasn’t stepped back in awhile. That was his only mistake.

El answers for him, seeing it in his face. “That is enough.”

“Daughter—”

“I want to go home.”

Steve smiles and takes El’s hand, a small thing, warm in his own.

“This is the only chance you have to come with us. If we are ever to come back here, it will likely be long after you have died,” they say, matter-of-fact. A computer cannot communicate grief. “Are you sure this is your choice?”

El, once sure of her decision, is not known to hesitate. “Yes. I am sure.”

The man is fading, never was. The walls of the room have begun to blend with the floor as the lights in the room brighten. Steve squints, cupping over his eyes with his free hand. El presses her face into his arm to shield herself.

“A part of us will always be in you,” the voice, newly disembodied, says. “We are glad, daughter, that you have found a home.”

“You’re really letting us go?” Steve shouts into the light, too bright for him to keep his eyes open.

His final word reverberates back at him—go, go, go—and then transforms.

Goodbye.

 

 

 

.- -.. / .- ... - .-. .- / .--. . .-. / .- ... .--. . .-. .-

FINAL TRANSMISSION — JANUARY 1, ‘86

 

 

 

Cold washes over him.

His eyes burst open. He scrambles to sit up, folding his legs into his chest, wrapping his stiff fingers around his ankle where it feels like ice has been shot through his veins. His pant leg is soaking wet, as are his shoes and socks. The culprit is receding, a frigid ocean wave returning from whence it came.

On the horizon, dawn is breaking.

Steve plunges his hands into the ground and unearths two fistfuls of rocky sand that he lets fall through the gaps in his fingers. He stares at the flecks sticking to his palm, moving his hand so they catch the light of the sun, scarcely believing the morning is real.

A bubble of hysterical laughter explodes out of him. He is on a northern beach in early January, soaked to the knees. Who knows how long he had been lying there. It’s possible he is in the early stages of hypothermia, not that the shock of cold explains why he has no memory of  how he got to where he is. 

Steve stands, a little unsteady, his sides aching from the laughter and just breathing, in and out, and takes stock of his surroundings. He is on a strip of beach, but not a public one. The rocky cliff faces feel like they should be a clue. Reminds him of jogs he used to take by the lookout at the bluffs.

A tidal wave of memories from the night before bowl into him. Almost midnight, reaching the bluffs out of breath and strangely giddy, setting up Dustin’s ham radio with—

Eddie.

He takes off running, though in the opposite direction of where he needs to be, searching for a place to scale his way off the beach that will not result in his untimely death. Half a mile down, he finds a trodden trail through the sand reeds. It dumps him onto the road snaking through the state park. So early in the morning, the road is empty and a strange sense of deja vu ripples through Steve, but he elects to ignore it. He has miles more to run.

At the intersection between the old highway and state parkway, leading up to the air base, Steve slows to a stop, to catch his breath and because there is a caravan of cars blocking both roads. Steve ducks behind the closest tree to avoid being spotted by a man in a black suit, snapping an order at someone waiting in the passenger seat of a dark SUV. All the cars are clones of each other save one, driven haphazardly off the asphalt, deep tire tracks left in its wake. The chief’s car.

Steve doesn’t waste time. He bolts for the bluffs, following the same hike he and Eddie took the night before. His legs are sore. His lungs burn with each quick breath he takes. He thinks he hears voices, what they’re saying indistinct, but he recognizes them. He makes a last push.

The lookout point is a mess with people when Steve stumbles off the trail and into the clearing. A few men in black pace the perimeters, faces drawn. One by the trail head says something to him, going through one of Steve’s ears and out the other.

By the Cadillac of ham radios, still standing in the morning light, Suzie is speaking with Dr. Sam Owens, who Steve thought of only as the new owner of Benny’s Burger House until about three seconds ago. Though he is listening to Suzie with rapt attention, occasionally giving her a deferring nod, he seems to be running the larger show. A man in a charcoal gray suit, a rank above black, whispers something in his ear. He cranes his head and his wide eyes meet Steve’s.

In tandem, everyone turns to see what has Dr. Owens in shock. Steve might have been able to take a better inventory of who exactly is staring at him, but a body barrels into him, nearly knocking him off his feet.

“You are so”—punch to the shoulder— “fucking”— swat to the chest—“stupid”—flick to the forehead— “dingus!” Robin latches his arms around his neck, burying her wet face where his shoulder meets his neck.

Steve winds his arms around her waist and holds on.

A pair of arms squeeze into the nonexistent space between their bodies, trying to pry them apart like the jaws of life. “Robin,” Dustin whines, checking his hip against hers. “I get a turn.”

He drops one arm from Robin’s waist and wraps it around Dustin’s shoulders. “So, did it work?” Steve asks, giving his earlobe a sharp tug. “Did you contact your aliens? Get it on video for the world to see?”

Dustin mutters something unintelligible into his chest and Steve will take it as a no.

“Are you okay?” Robin asks, searching his face for signs of unspeakable trauma, or body snatching, or alien probing, so he guesses.

He shrugs and gives the only answer he has: “I’m alive.”

“And that’s really saying something.”

Steve looks over Dustin’s head to Eddie, standing a ways off. His eyes are bloodshot and his lips cracked, probably from biting at them for the worse part of the night. He’s not exactly looking at Steve, almost like he’s afraid if he does that Steve will vanish again.

Giving Robin and Dustin another quick squeeze, he disentangles himself from their holds and walks up to Eddie. “Sorry—” Eddie starts to say, but the rest of his apology is lost to Steve throwing his arms around his neck and hugging him hard enough to punch the air out of both of their lungs.

“Pretty sure I’m the one who should be apologizing,” Steve whispers into his hair. It smells smoky, and like ocean salt, and Steve feels a final piece of himself settle back onto the ground.

“Yeah,” Eddie concurs, rubbing his cheeks on Steve’s sweater.

A commotion somewhere left breaks them apart, though one of Eddie’s hands stays tangled in his sweater, gravity assurance. At the other trailhead, El has emerged, carrying her shoes in one hand. Her pant legs are as soaked as Steve’s.

He exhales a breath with the force of a gale wind. The crystallized cloud it forms in the freezing air floats off, carried away from him. He watches as Hopper scoops El off the ground, crushing her to his chest. Mike is hovering close by, tears streaming down his cheeks. Steve takes the hand Eddie is using to hold him in a vice grip and slots their fingers together, not giving a shit who is around to notice.

All his people are here. Robin, coming to hold his other hand. Dustin, nudging Eddie with his elbow. At the edge of the bluffs, Jonathan has one arm wrapped around Will’s shoulders and another slung around Nancy’s waist. Lucas and Max are standing by Suzie, their hands intertwined. Across the distance, Max finds Steve’s eyes and nods at him with unshed tears clinging to her lower lashes. Though he cannot see it for himself, he likes to think he can feel their shadows dissipating that much more.

“Is it over?” Hopper asks Dr. Owens in a thick voice.

Dr. Owens looks to the sky, a clear day where you can see forever. Not entirely true if the doctor’s answer is anything to go by.

“For now.”

Eddie tugs Steve’s hand, trying to bring him closer. Steve goes easily. There’s so much more to say, but Eddie’s shoulder is warm where it presses against Steve’s and it’s good enough, grounding enough, for now.

 

 

 

STEVE HARRINGTON (FAMILY VIDEO EMPLOYEE / PRODUCTION ASSISTANT): I guess I thought it was kind of stupid believing in aliens. Like you were believing in little green people, like that Martian, the one from the Looney Tunes…Marvin! Marvin the Martian. I mean, if I wanted to believe in something ridiculous—or what I thought was ridiculous—it would be Bigfoot or, or wizards…

But believing in aliens is more like believing in what we don’t understand yet, right? Just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean everything we do know is all there is…that—that makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, I’ve seen some pretty crazy shit now. I know aliens are real now and I don’t understand half of it. Or any of it, honestly.

They wanted a lot of the same things we do. At least that’s what El believes. It’d be a pretty good sign for…I dunno, world peace, if next time they come around, we all get it right.

THE MONTAUK FILES {WORKING TITLE} — INT. VII — JANUARY 10, ‘86

 

 

 

“And that’s a wrap.”

Steve blinks. It sounds too good to be true. “Seriously?”

Dustin nods, not wholly listening, distracted giving the camera a final check. The mood in the store is calm, unmoved by this momentous announcement. Steve had expected Dustin to have cake and balloons ready for the day he had his documentary in the can, but he is unnaturally subdued. He packs the camera away and turns back to Robin and Steve, finding them both staring at him from behind the counter.

“What?”

“Aren’t you sad it’s over?” Robin asks.

“Or over the freaking moon that you have actual proof of aliens on tape?” Steve is disappointed, to put it mildly. After the shit this documentary has dragged him through, he wants Montauk to throw them an exclusive film festival and, afterwards, a parade. “Dude, this could win you one of those—an Oscar!”

Robin snorts. “Let’s not go that far.”

“We don’t actually have a lot of real proof,” Dustin hedges. “We’ve got some radio broadcasts people could dismiss as frequency issues or a hoax. A bunch of lights in the sky that could be airplanes or helicopters. We have no footage of what these aliens look like…”

“Henderson.” Steve plants his palms face-down on the countertop, staring the kid down. “Are you telling me I went through all of that—getting shot at, abducted by aliens, chewed out by the chief of police—for nothing?”

Dustin shrugs. “I mean, Will and I are still going to cut together the documentary.” Seeing how Steve is fuming, Dustin amends quickly, “And hey buddy, we know aliens exist even if no one else does! I also got a girlfriend and you got a…”

The hanging thread of Dustin’s sentence is about right. Steve doesn’t know what he has. Boyfriend seems like a silly word, hardly able to encompass what the last six months have meant to him, but partner is a hair too serious and sounds more like he and Eddie are opening a law practice together. It doesn’t help that Steve hasn’t talked to Eddie about the seismic shift in their relationship. The shift happened and the dust is settling, but they haven’t given it a name.

Keeping the fuzzy feelings in his chest to himself, Steve sends Dustin a flat look. “What I want is an Oscar, dude.”

With an apologetic grimace, Dustin whispers, “Sorry,” beneath the ring of the store bell. Weird, given it’s gone past nine and they rarely see anyone after the restaurants along the main drag have closed. He and Robin trade irritated glances, expecting a pack of teens or a lone wolf looking to use the employee bathroom. None of them are prepared to see Dr. Sam Owens, dressed in a thick coat for the weather, a light sprinkling of snow on his shoulders.

Steve hasn’t seen him in the flesh since that night—or really, that morning where Steve is concerned. Hopper has relayed details about how Dr. Owens and his team are cleaning up the loose ends surrounding Camp Hero, but the man himself has been, for the most part, an invisible hand, a puppet master pulling at the appropriate strings. The electric company is taking the fall for the black outs. The entrances into the air base are being sealed permanently, the mysterious levels of security dispensed with to minimize the appearance of a conspiracy. The missing person cases will remain unsolved.

(“You don’t remember maybe seeing Barb there? Wherever you were?” Nancy asked him the night after. Steve wished he had a satisfying answer for her. There is none.)

It’s not the satisfying conclusion to the story someone like Spielberg would conjure and immortalize on film. But as the cliche goes, life is not a movie. You can only rent happy endings for a buck a night.

“Heya, kids,” Dr. Owens says, coming to stand beside Dustin. He seems tired, but not deathly so, and Steve is willing to take that as a fair sign the last of the clean-up is going as well as they can hope. “You”—he nods at Dustin—“are supposed to be walking back to Benny’s with me.”

Dustin groans, grumbling something about his mom not letting the town curfew go.

Ignoring Dustin’s hot air, Robin asks Dr. Owens, “Here to rent something?”

“I guess I’ll have to,” he says with a hearty sigh. He plucks what’s closest on the counter display, Real Genius, a favorite of Steve’s, and gives it to Robin to rent. Clearly, he has come for a social call, evident when he looks at Steve and asks, “Are you doing alright?”

“Yeah,” Steve answers, too quickly. Dr. Owens’s eyebrows raise, telegraphing doubt. “As good as I can be doing, considering. I didn’t get any superpowers, so that can kinda blows…”

Robin rolls her eyes, not a fan of his abduction jokes, but says nothing. She hands off the rental to a chuckling Dr. Owens. Good to have someone appreciating his sense of humor.

Though smiling, Dr. Owens does say, “I was thinking you can come into Benny’s sometime during the off hours this week. We can talk more.”

“I haven’t remembered anything more,” Steve warns.

“Yeah, I figured,” Dr. Owens says with a forgiving shrug. “Doesn’t hurt to talk about what you do remember again. It’s been helpful for Jane. It’s alright if you don’t want to give it a go, but I’m here if you need me. That goes for any of you.”

Steve hasn’t decided how much faith to place in Dr. Owens yet, but he appreciates the offer, and might take him up on it in the coming days. He’s been sleeping alright, owing to a generalized exhaustion and the lulling tones of Eddie’s voice after midnight. Now that he has his home phone number, Steve has been ringing the Munson phone off the hook. He imagines his Uncle Wayne answers just about every phone call now with a “Hey, Steve.”

If sleep does start to evade him, Steve refuses to put that all on Eddie. He nods at Dr. Owens in gratitude without promising anything, but he does know where to find him.

“C’mon, scamp,” Dr. Owens says to Dustin, who cringes at the endearment. 

Still muttering his complaints, Dustin collects his stuff and says good night to Steve and Robin before following Dr. Owens out the door. Even with the escort, Steve does what he always did before and walks to the window, watching them walk down the block long enough that they become the size of flies under the streetlights.

“You really haven’t remembered anything else?” Robin asks once he’s back at the counter.

“Nope, but if I did, I’m telling you way before I tell him.”

“Good.”

The bell rings again just as Robin is starting up Out of Africa.

“So, this is the infamous Family Video.”

Steve beams hearing his voice, live and in person, and Robin mouths, “Disgusting,” at him before turning to greet Eddie.

“You’ve never been here?” Robin asks, skeptical.

“More of a record store guy,” Eddie says in excuse, his eyes siding over to Steve. His grin takes on a new dimension. “Hey there, commander.”

“Hey,” Steve says, leaning on his forearms. “Shouldn’t you be in East Hampton right now?”

“Show doesn’t start ‘til midnight. I’ve got time.” Eddie inches into Steve’s space, folding his arms onto the counter so they run parallel to Steve’s. “I was only there so early because I never had anything better to do and…”

“And?”

Eddie drums his fingers along Steve’s bare arm, leaving behind goosebumps. “I was calling you.”

Somewhere behind them, Robin gags. “Please, I’m begging you: get a room.”

“This is a room,” Steve and Eddie say in unison.

“Well, I’m pretty sure there’s a policy against bringing your lover to work,” she says, laying the title on thick. “But if he’s going to stay, you can shelve the returns together.”

Robin returns to her movie, leaving Steve and Eddie to stare at each other, both clearly biting their tongues to keep from laughing.

“Lovers, huh,” Eddie says, his tongue shaping nicely around the word.

Pretty old-fashioned, like vanilla ice cream and love songs, but Steve doesn’t hate it. With an accommodating shrug, masking how badly he wants to hear Eddie agree, Steve says, “If you want.”

“‘Cause we’re lovers, and that is a fact,” Eddie sings, “Yes, we’re lovers, and that is that.”

“I’m starting to think you’re a bigger Bowie fan than I am.”

“Though nothing will keep us together / We could steal time just for one day / We can be heroes forever and ever,” he continues singing, “What d'you say?”

He holds his hand out, palm up, and Steve tangles their fingers together. “Nothing can keep us together?” he questions.

“Eh, Bowie can’t be right about everything,” Eddie dismisses, grinning with a bite. “But you’re definitely my hero, Commander Steve.”

Steve is listening for the joke, the hidden thread of sarcasm, but doesn’t find it.

“I’m not a hero.”

“You probably saved the world from an alien invasion. Doesn’t get much more heroic than that,” Eddie says, not leaving room for an argument. “And even if you didn’t, you don’t get to decide whether or not you’re my hero. Sorry.”

“Fine, whatever,” Steve mutters, running the pad of his index finger along the ridges of Eddie’s skull ring.

“Can we quote you on that?” Eddie asks, adopting the tone of a newscaster. Using his free hand as a microphone, he shoves his fist below Steve’s chin. “The world you saved is dying to know, Commander Steve: where are you going next?”

“Home, hopefully.” His bed is calling out to him, louder with the echo of an empty house. It gives him an idea. He wraps his fingers around the wrist of Eddie’s microphone hand, pulling him in close enough for Steve’s lips to brush his knuckles. “With you, preferably.”

“That is very forward of you, commander,” Eddie says, swallowing thickly, his eyes darting from Steve’s lips to somewhere above his head. “I have my career to think about.”

“You can come after your show,” Steve says seriously, needing this to be more than a game. “You know, if you want to.”

Eddie squeezes his hand. “Anything for you, remember? Anywhere, any time.”

“Let’s start with my house, 1:30.”

“Aye-aye, lover.”

 

 

 

That was “Symptom of the Universe” by the inimitable Black Sabbath. That is also all the time we have tonight, which means, my dear cosmonauts, your missions are complete and you have officially touched back down on Planet Earth.

What does that actually mean? Well, we over here at Ground Control are taking a much-needed summer vacation. Star fact: I, your beloved Dark Star host Edward Munson, have been doing this show every week for almost two years. That’s the longest I've ever willingly committed to something in my life. But I’m pretty ready to commit to some different things, too.

Never fear! We will be lifting off together again soon. Apparently, just like in high school, you need to actually attend classes at a community college to graduate. Who knew? But for now, I guess the only thing left to say is—

Welcome home.

DARK STAR BROADCAST — MAY 26, ‘86

 

 

 

The station’s lunar rotation, which Suzie has taught him means songs only played in off-peak hours, kicks in with “Driver 8” by R.E.M. Steve smiles at the synchronicity, but shuts the radio off.

On the dashboard, he has lined up six mix tapes. The first he’s hoping to save; Max made it—with input from Lucas, so he claims—and the songs are almost exclusively California rock, a surfer’s paradise. Mike and El worked together on the second and, though Steve will carry this secret to the grave, Wheeler’s music taste hews the closest to Steve’s own. Last resort tape, he’s guessing.

Will is responsible for the third, though Steve bets Jonathan took over halfway through the process. The B-side is loaded with The Smiths and The Cure. Should make it good for night driving, so Steve swaps it with the fourth tape, edging it closer to the passenger side.

The fourth and fifth are from Dustin and Suzie, their collaboration not to be contained to just one tape. The songs are an eclectic mix. Steve sees shades of himself in what he assumes are Dustin’s more mainstream picks, echoes of Eden’s love of new wave in Suzie’s, and the metallic streaks of Eddie’s influence in all the songs folded in between. The last track on the fifth tape is “Space Oddity.”

Steve wonders how long Suzie has been keeping a mental scrapbook of his and Eddie’s relationship, if she considered it her job as Dark Star’s producer. She must have enough cataloged by now for a retrospective show: Ground Control and Commander Steve, a space age love story.

The last tape is Steve’s own creation. Robin helped in the recording during their final graveyard shift together, but the selections are pure Harrington. If Dustin and Suzie’s mixes are eclectic, he doesn’t have a word for his. Bizarre. A Russian roulette game of metal, rock, metal, rock, soundtrack ballad. But in the end, he hadn’t been aiming for cohesion. His tape is a timeline. He’ll have to give it to Suzie if they ever get around to a show of greatest hits.

“He’s going to love it, dingus,” Robin assured him while the ink dried on the insert. “I don’t know if he deserves it, though. He’s taking my best friend away for the whole summer to reenact a John Hughes movie.”

“He would hate to hear you say that,” Steve said with the store phone already off the hook.

Keith will undoubtedly be shocked to see such a sharp reduction in the store’s phone bill. Steve left a fifty on the office desk as he clocked out yesterday, to pay down some of the debt and to make Keith more persuasive to hire him back in the fall.

The fifty came from the box where he once stashed the gas money from Mrs. Henderson. He had taken out half the money and deposited it in his bank account, saving it for the community college classes he’ll have to pay for come September. He’s finally making good on the “College Fund” label he slapped onto the box for a bitter laugh.

The rest of the money is still sitting pretty in the box, nestled in the trunk alongside the two bags he packed. It should be enough to get them through the summer if they pinch pennies, but Steve is bringing his credit card along for the ride just in case. He figures his parents owe him an adventure.

He has his walkie tucked in the glove compartment, but that’s purely decorative. Dustin’s Cadillac radio is good, just not cross-country good. Dustin extracted a promise from him to send a postcard from every stop along their route and demanded he, Steve, write the messages on the back because Eddie’s handwriting is the one code Suzie is unable to crack. It’s a good thing their relationship began over phone calls and not letters then.

The man of the hour finally steps out of the building. He has his leather jacket and denim vest on even though the weather has been peaking in the sixties all week and it’ll only get hotter the further south they drive. One hand empty save for his rings, the other holding a small duffel bag. Eddie told Steve that he’d be packing light, but Jesus Christ. Strapped to his back is what Steve guess he’d call his most important cargo—an acoustic guitar.

In the months since they met in person, Steve has heard Eddie play his guitar dozens of times. Doesn’t make the heat that pools in his gut every time Eddie brings out either the electric or acoustic any less intense. Seeing him play outdoors, a wide-open landscape behind him, the sun dripping gold off his back—

Okay, they’re not going to make it driving long if Steve continues along these trains of thought.

Suzie, Eden, and Argyle have joined Eddie outside. Suzie throws her arms around his middle and Eddie acts like she’s knocked the wind out of him. He whispers something into her hair. As she steps back, she takes her glasses off and wipes her eyes, but nods in answer to whatever Eddie told her.

Eden takes her turn next for a hug that seems stiff and awkward for the both of them, but Steve knows is just their begrudging way of showing affection. She hands him something small, rectangular—an Eden and Argyle mixtape, now that should be a ride—and seems to wish him well. 

Last but hardly least, Argyle does not hug Eddie, but instead presents him with a pizza box for the road. It’ll stink up the car with grease, but it’s the time of the season to roll the windows down and let the salt air in.

Eddie smiles at the trio, looking a little wistful, and Steve has to wonder if he’s not taking him away from something he’d prefer doing with his summer vacation. Earning money, shooting the shit live on the airwaves, not trapped in a sweaty car for the sunlight hours of the day.

But then, Eddie turns his head and catches sight of Steve through the windshield, engine idling and ready to go, and his smile deepens, the wistfulness gone. Every star and planet in the sky aligns, some kind of cosmic miracle. Yeah, they’re doing this.

After shouting a last round of goodbyes, Eddie sprints to Steve’s car, wrenching the passenger door open without ceremony. “Sorry, they wouldn’t quit crying over me,” Eddie says, his eyelashes suspiciously wet.

“Right,” Steve intones, watching as Eddie chucks his bag into the backseat and, with much greater care, buckles his baby in. With an impatient sigh, about half-feigned, he asks, “Ready?”

Eddie twists back around and buckles himself in, eying the tapes displayed across the dashboard. “What’re these?” He picks up Steve’s tape, turning it over in his hands.

“Music for the road,” Steve answers, ignoring his heartrate’s pick-up. To give himself something to do, he throws the car into reverse and begins backing out of the parking lot, but at a slow speed to avoid sending the precious cargo flying.

Eddie gives the tape’s tracklist a brief skim, then his eyes flit to the five other tapes. “Did you make all of these?”

“Oh, hell no. I don’t have that kind of time.” Steve turns onto the road, the tapes sliding despite his best efforts. Eddie gathers them up and dumps them in a messy pile in his lap. “Most of them are from the kids.”

Eddie gives a considering hum.

“What?”

“Trying to decide if now is a good time to say I told you so,” Eddie says, shooting Steve an impish grin. “Did they make you promise to call them every day?”

“Every two days.” Steve had tried bargaining them down to three, but no dice. One of these days, he’ll convince the brats that he isn’t made of money even if his parents are.

Eddie snorts and goes back to assessing the tape selection. “Okay, surfer rock a la Maxine Mayfield. We’ll have to save this one for when we cross over to California…”

Steve can’t help the smile that tugs at his lips at Eddie voicing exactly what he had been thinking, before realizing he doesn’t have to help it. There’s nothing Steve has to hold back anymore. At this moment, it’s just him and Eddie, in a car, after midnight, at the beginning of a three month long road trip with no destinations in mind other than making it to see the Pacific Ocean. He smiles, uninhibited.

“You know what…” Abandoning the tapes in his lap, Eddie pops open the glove compartment. He bypasses the walkie and begins rooting through Steve’s music collection.

“What are you looking for?” Steve asks, trying to keep his eyes on the road and Eddie in his periphery.

“Ah-ha!” Eddie unearths a tape and brandishes it in triumph. “Knew you’d have this in here.”

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Steve actually didn’t have the tape until last year, around the time Ground Control teased him for being Ziggy’s biggest fan.

He lets it go without saying, watching as Eddie ejects the Kate Bush tape Max had wanted him to keep and pops in Bowie. “Alright, Commander Steve,” he says over the opening bars of “Five Years,” Bowie lamenting we have five years left on Earth. He never thought he’d need so many people. Eddie glances over at him, finding his eyes in the dark. “Take me to the stars.”

Steve huffs, pressing harder on the gas. It’ll take them hours just to get off Long Island. “I’m kind of sick of the stars,” he admits, not that it should come as much of a surprise.

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees, his smile, and face, and voice softening. “Then just take me wherever you want to go.”

Everywhere, Steve thinks as the road unfurls before them, for once ignoring the horizon. Anywhere. He feels Eddie’s hand cover his on the gear shift. As long as you’re my passenger.

 

 

 

 

“ There's a starman waiting in the sky /
He's told us not to blow it /
'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile ”

STARMAN BY DAVID BOWIE

 

 

 

Tonight, in Montauk, New York, the lights are on. People are home.

A young woman flips the sign from Open to Closed at the local video store. She has a tape she’s filched. Raiders of the Lost Ark, because everyone in town is sick of science fiction, including the two people waiting in the parking lot for her. She climbs in the backseat, joining a bag full of Benny’s takeout. Steals a fry and sticks out her tongue when the girl driving says to save it for the movie.

They’re headed to a full house. The living room is on reserve for them, but the basement has been crowded since eight. The television is on, now screening the third and final of the Star Wars movies, because these might be the only kids in town not sick of sci-fi. Space opera, the boys would correct. It’s an important distinction.

Not that any of them are paying attention to the movie.

Lucas Sinclair and Max Mayfield are curled together in an old armchair, an issue of Spider-Man open on Lucas’s lap. Her head has fallen onto his shoulder, her breathing gentle. She’s been sleeping better lately and calling him when she can’t. He sneaks over sometimes in the middle of night and she knows he’s arrived by the beam of his flashlight waving outside her window.

On the couch, Mike Wheeler and Will Byers are arguing over the importance of the Ewoks. Sandwiched in the middle, El tunes in and out of the argument. Mike has one his hands in hers while waving emphatically with the other. He’s shining his near-constant pale yellow, her favorite star. Will has begun shifting from purple to green, a tree coming into bloom.

She still wonders about her color, but doesn’t worry over it as much as she once did. Dr. Owens is teaching her the signs in the body of a person feeling blue. Some days, she is sad. Some days, her heart does ache in a painful way that makes her want to reach inside herself and hold it, keep it close and safe. But those are some days, not all days.

What she aspires to be is Dustin Henderson’s explosion of green. The glow casts a puddle on the floor where he’s sitting, eagerly eying the stairs and waiting for Suzie to arrive. She has promised to bring along her telescope.

They should be scared of the sky, of everything in it seen and unseen, and they are, some days. Some but not all. 

Across the universe, there are empty planets and lonely planets. Planets hot enough to melt lead, with atmospheres that could kill a living thing in ten seconds flat. Planets far, far away that have the conditions to support life. Planets that once could sustain life, but no longer can. There are stars being born and stars collapsing. Stars becoming black holes and black holes devouring stars. There are phenomena happening no one on Earth yet understands. The world may end in five years without anyone having all the answers.

They now belong to a small club that knows somewhere out there, a spaceship is searching for a place to land. One day, the spaceship may circle back around and decide here, after all. When Dustin Henderson peeks into Suzie’s telescope, it’s because he wants to start preparing for one day.

Right now, the future is of very little consequence to the two members of the club checking into a motel aptly named The Starlight Inn. The girl working the night desk is apathetic enough that they feel emboldened to accept a room with one queen bed.

They haven’t made it off the island yet and Eddie Munson is telling Steve Harrington he better be taking him to Coney Island in the morning. Steve makes no promises.

Except he has made a promise already. A promise to hold onto this love, here on this earth, with his eyes wide open, for as long as he can. It may be that the end of the world is five years away. Fifteen, if they’re lucky enough to usher in the new millennium.

No matter how many years it is, he pours his promise into a moonlit kiss as soon as the motel door slams closed. He sucks the promise into bruises along Eddie’s collarbone and breathes it against the hollow of his throat as Eddie drags his lips along his skin, turning his moles and freckles into constellations. Never has he felt more anchored to one place and one time. The ceiling in this motel room is as good a sky as any.

“What are you thinking about so hard?”

Aliens. Lighthouses. Love.

“You.”

Notes:

and here we are!

1) aliens! i ultimately wanted our extraterrestrial friends’ motives to be a little ambiguous. i’m leaving it up to you (and, to some extent, our intrepid heroes) to decide if you believe they gave all the abducted the choice to stay or go and that most chose to stay.

2) “From dust to dust” is a slight paraphrase of a biblical verse. Unfortunately, I do think any aliens that come to observe Earth would use the bible as a touchstone text of our species. It does have some bangers, though.

3) Another allusion! The aliens asking Steve if he’s happy here is a reference to one of my literary loves, The Secret History. One character asks another, “Are you happy here?” and they answer, “Not particularly. But you’re not very happy where you are, either.” A disillusioned academic’s “wherever you go, there you are.”

4) I’m being pretty vague about Dr. Owens and his special government powers here, but to be fair, the Duffers always are, too. That’s what makes it shadowy, I guess!

5) If you’d be interested in a full watchlist / playlist / reading list for this fic, I’d be happy to make one and post it on tumblr (nancywheeeler). Not only did I get to revisit a lot of my favorite alien-centric media, I found some new favorites and probably did more research for this than I’ve done for anything? ever? UPDATE: you can now find the watchlist /playlist here.

I really cannot thank you all enough for riding shotgun on this journey with me! I have had such a blast essentially writing the early 00s sci-fi network drama of my dreams, but it never would have been finished without all of your encouragement and enthusiasm for this little universe (Stranger Things, slightly to the left). One last time, you can find me over at nancywheeeler on tumblr. Until next time, Strange Things tag!