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CHAPTER TEN
an incomplete guide to
dimensional travel
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( the flea and the acrobat, pt. iii — the monster, pt. i )

• °:.☆ . ₊°• ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

THE TUNNEL IS warm, which is about the worst possible thing that it could be. Laura holds her breath as she army crawls further inside. The spongy floor smushes under her elbows, forcing her to lift them higher in order to drag herself forward inch by miserable inch. Liquid oozes from the top, drip, drip, dripping over her, and even though she ducks her head to avoid touching the slimy roof, her hat still gets caught on something that yanks it off. She curses under her breath when a warm, wet substance slides against her scalp. But eventually, she reaches solid ground and hauls herself to her feet, gagging.

Nancy's figure is the first thing she sees. Her body sags in relief, stumbling toward her as Nancy smacks her flickering flashlight in frustration.

They're in another part of the forest, though this one is different. For one, it's much darker, with no moonlight streaming through the treetops. The trunks around them are covered in thick vines that nearly swallow the bark whole as if the trees are being strangled. Laura's trachea spasms when she breathes in the white particles that float in the air, almost like snow, but definitely not.

Nancy is relieved to see her, too. Her ponytail is soaked in whatever slime had been in that tunnel, her maroon sherpa jacket stained a darker red with it as well. She seems okay, if not equally disgusted at what they'd just crawled through.

Laura's mouth opens to say something. Instead, she's cut off by an inhuman snarl in the distance. Nancy jumps, whirling around to aim her flashlight at the source. The beam lands on the shredded deer carcass with something hunched over it. Something tall, with cadaverous limbs, its leathery skin an ashy gray.

Wet gnawing sounds fill the air as the creature feasts on the corpse. Laura's stomach churns again, her palms slick with cold sweat as she grips tightly onto her rifle with one hand, her other grappling wildly for Nancy's. The girls' fingers lace together as they take careful steps back toward the tunnel and Jonathan. One step. Two.

Nancy's foot lands on something that crunches under it.

The creature immediately turns and roars, four flaps in its face opening up to reveal one giant mouth framed by circular rows of sharp teeth. Nancy screams Jonathan's name again. The light falls from her hand, winking out as it hits the ground, smothering them in darkness.

Laura aims her rifle, not bothering to check the sights before she pulls the trigger. Smoke billows from the gun and the kickback almost makes her trip. The monster shrieks as the bullet strikes home, stumbling back enough for Laura to turn and sprint away, dodging the squelching tentacles that litter the forest floor instead of dead leaves.

"Nancy!" she calls, squinting to see in the black woods. "Nance!"

A hand grabs her wrist. She jumps with a choked gasp, almost smacking the person with the barrel of her rifle before she realizes it's Nancy. She can see the same terror reflected in her large eyes, rapid pants leaving both of their mouths.

"Did you hit it?" Nancy asks breathlessly.

Laura nods. "I think so. We have to — to find —"

Nancy nods, understanding what she means even though she can't finish her sentence due to the fear overtaking her entire body. Every nerve is on high alert. She feels simultaneously electrified and yet sluggish from adrenaline, making her both wired and clumsy at the same time. Survival instinct will take over and get them out of here alive.

"Jonathan?" Laura calls, ready to risk the monster finding them again if it means warning him about its existence. Her voice is high-pitched and frantic, trembling from the cold terror coursing through her veins. "Where are you?"

A voice calls back. Laura realizes a moment later that it's him, shouting their names as if he's right beside them, but even with their heads whirling around until Laura's vision swirls and her surroundings blend together, he's nowhere to be seen.

"Nancy! Laura!"

"Jonathan, we're right here!" Nancy shouts back, her tone tinged with hysteria.

The trees all look the same. The harder Laura looks, the more it appears that the forest is endless, trapping them in this dark hell for all eternity. Their skeletal branches reach out like boney hands. Everything about this place sets Laura on edge with an acute sense of wrongness.

They run blindly through the woods, dodging massive trees and fighting not to trip over tentacles and uneven ground. They follow the sounds of Jonathan's voice to no avail. It has a strange echo to it unlike anything Laura has heard before, reverberating around the forest soft soft LOUD soft LOUD soft.

"Laura, where are you?"

"I'm here!" she cries back, unsure of how else to answer, hoping that if they can't follow his voice, he can follow theirs. Tears of fear and frustration blur her vision, turning the terrain into smudges of black.

"Why can't he see us?" Nancy asks.

"Why can't we see him?"

"Laura! Nancy!" The sound is discombobulating, making Laura's head spin. It seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. "I'm over here— just follow my voice, okay? Follow my voice!"

Laura wants to scream, We're trying!

They turn in the direction where it sounds loudest, only to see the hulking creature blocking their path. Synced screams burst from their mouths as their feet scramble for purchase on the sopping ground. Branches scrape past them as they run. One slices against Laura's cheek, then another cuts her forehead open. Her body is too fueled by adrenaline for her to feel more than the initial sting of pain.

Laura's chest aches from the force of her frantic breaths and her heart slamming against her ribcage. Her sneakers strike the ground hard, sliding on appendages and loose twigs, still soaked from the tunnel. She and Nancy throw themselves against separate trees that are thick enough to obscure their frames. Laura angles her chin upward to quiet the sound of her erratic panting, clutching tightly onto the rifle, wondering if she can fire it fast enough if the monster appears.

She remembers how quickly it had snatched that deer and realizes she probably won't even have time to load it before it would grab her.

Low, guttural growls sound from the opposite side of the trees. Heavy footsteps slam against the earth. An unearthly noise echoes from the monster as it stalks past them, searching the girls out. It doesn't have eyes, so Laura wonders how it detects other living things. Is it only through sound, or smell, too?

For the first time, she actually feels grateful to be smothered in the slime from that tunnel. It had probably obscured her natural scent.

"Nancy! Laura! Just follow my voice!"

Jonathan's voice is louder and clearer than it's ever been. Laura glances to her right. The tunnel they'd come through is a mere ten feet away, thrumming with some kind of light. She looks back at Nancy, who nods in understanding.

The girls break into a sprint. Since she has the gun, Laura pushes Nancy to go first. Some sort of webbing has appeared over the entrance since they'd been here. Nancy has to wrench it aside to make room for herself before she can climb through.

As soon as Nancy's leg disappears, Laura dives into the tunnel after her, wrestling her way through. Maybe it's just because she's more desperate this time, but it feels narrower. The warm, pulsating sides seem to clench around her as if forcing her to stay. Slime trickles down the side of her face, thick and vile. Her slippery hands fight to hang onto the rifle even as it impedes her movements and jams into her sternum, almost knocking the breath out of her lungs.

"Laur!" Nancy cries.

A small hand wraps around her forearm, followed by a larger one, and then she's being pulled out of the tunnel and into freezing, open air, the permanent song of cicadas welcoming her back to the world she knows.

Laura stays on her hands and knees when she makes it to solid ground, retching, the granola in her stomach threatening to come back up. Acidic bile stings the back of her throat. She hacks as if trying to cough up her entire digestive system. She's certain she got some of that muck in her mouth, and even if she brushes her teeth a thousand times, she'll never be able to get rid of the taste.

She's drenched in sludge. The night breeze makes her shiver, a sharp contrast to how warm and womb-like the tunnel had felt. Her muscles ache with the willpower it takes not to shed her jacket, sweatshirt, and jeans. She needs to turn her skin inside out. Her fingers dig into the earth, dirt embedding deep under her nails, as she tries to convince herself she's real.

Jonathan hangs onto both girls. Nancy's sobs fill the air, and Laura is one step away from losing it. All he can do is hold onto them both and assure them, "I've got you. I've got you."

—°• ☆ . °—

The Wheeler house is too quiet. The trio had taken a silent ride there in Jonathan's car, then trudged up to the front door with Jonathan fidgeting and the girls like zombies, walking catatonically with their bodies on autopilot.

Laura doesn't realize until they're standing in the foyer that she'd expected Nancy's parents to be home. She isn't sure what excuse they would have made up for being covered in slime that's now mostly dry, crusting their hair into clumps and creating a thin cast of their bodies that cracks with every movement. Mike and Holly are nowhere to be found, either. The place is empty.

Nancy leads them upstairs to her bedroom. While she and Jonathan slip inside, Laura heads to the linen closet down the hall for extra blankets. This is the same place they used to raid for living room blanket forts, carrying huge bundles of bedding in their arms as they tried not to trip down the stairs. Now she uses one of those same quilts to curl up into after an evening beyond her worst nightmares.

When she walks back to Nancy's bedroom, she nudges the door open to see Jonathan and Nancy sitting quietly on her bed, a thin blanket wrapped around the girl's shoulders. The dim lighting from the bedside lamp casts a warm glow over the room, but it does nothing to chase away the shivers still running rampant through Laura's body. Her eyes dart around every dark corner like a child checking for monsters. Now, she knows those monsters are real.

"We should sh — shower," she suggests as she tosses the extra linens at Jonathan, the cleanest person of them all.

Nancy nods. She briefly rummages through a drawer in her dresser before handing her a set of pajamas, saying, "You can take the master bathroom."

This house is like her second home. Laura easily locates a clean towel, shuts herself in the master bathroom, turns on the water, and eagerly strips herself out of her clothes. Her jacket had absorbed some of the slime; it makes a wet squelching sound when she chucks it on the tile. She feels lucky that she'd zipped it after the sun had set, because it prevented her dad's sweatshirt  and the turtleneck underneath from getting soaked. Her jeans stick to her legs stubbornly. She has to peel them off, grimacing as the denim clings to her. She outright gags when she yanks off her wet socks. Every piece of clothing gets tossed into one giant heap on the floor, reeking of muck and fear.

The water is still warming up, so Laura has time to undo her braids as she waits. By some miracle, only her scalp had been touched by the clear sludge— the actual plaited bits are only a bit stiff from the sweat that had drenched her neck. Regardless, it's going to take forever for her to feel like herself again.

When Laura finally climbs into the shower, steam curls from the tub in thick clouds of gray. The scalding water turns her skin red within a few minutes. Normally, she'd settle for something on the warmer side of room temperature, but she wants to ensure that she boils the germs from her body.

She stands under the searing spray for a few minutes, letting it drench her and loosen up the dried sludge in her hair. Then she turns toward Mrs. Wheeler's dizzying array of products lining the tub. Tubes and bottles in all colors stare back at her. What does one person need so many types of shampoo for? Which one would be best for heavy-duty scrubbing action? In the end, she picks a vanilla-scented one described as "Clarifying!" and hopes for the best.

Sorry, Mrs. Wheeler, Laura thinks as she squirts an obscene amount of shampoo into her palm, then plops it on top of her head. Her nails rake into her scalp as she scrubs. Suds form on her dark locks while she works the product into a lather. Even when her arms begin to ache, she keeps going, working it through until each strand is clean.

Then comes the cleaning of her body. Laura is certain that she'd entered the shower as one person and will exit it another based on the layer of skin she removes. Her skin glows florid and irritated from the hot temperature and rough scraping, but she finds that once she starts, she can't stop. Dirt is caked under her fingernails. There's gunpowder residue on her hands. She lathers every nook and cranny with soap, annihilating any trace of sweat or slime or blood.

Part of her scrubs so ferociously to keep her mind focused on the task at hand. When she isn't preoccupied by a slight twinge of pain, she finds her brain wandering to what she'd seen. That place... it looked like the regular forest, but also not. It was too dark and lacking in any sort of life. Everything except... that.

Laura is certain that it's safe to call it a monster. There was nothing human or animalistic about it, and the way its mouth opened from four different sides made it look like a creature from one of the kids' Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. It had seized the deer. Had it taken Barb and Will, too?

One second, the poor animal had been in front of them. Then it was gone, just like that. Were their friends captured that quickly? There one moment, and simply gone the next, with no possibility of being saved even if someone else was there with them?

She catches herself stifling a sob for Will. He's so young, and having to face a creature so terrifying... Laura isn't sure she could have endured it at that age. She wouldn't have had anything left in her to fight. And Barb... she certainly isn't the battling type, nor is she very stubborn, but Laura hopes she's doing something to help herself.

She's not abandoning her friend. Not again.

As Nancy is shorter than Laura, her pajama bottoms are a little small, but since nothing she owns is risqué, she doesn't feel exposed. The pants fall above her ankles instead of to her feet.

She returns to Nancy's bedroom feeling substantially cleaner. Her friend hands her a comb to tame her wild, wet hair, but thanks to Mrs. Wheeler's fancy conditioner (also vanilla-scented), it doesn't hurt to wrestle through the tangles.

Jonathan has stacked blankets and pillows on the floor to create a makeshift bed. He's quiet as usual, but he doesn't seem annoyed like he was earlier. It's more like he's staying silent to avoid tipping them over the edge into hysterics again. He's a person who's efficient at not taking up space.

He clearly has questions. He just knows that now is not the right time to ask them. Once again, Jonathan has earned a piece of Laura's respect.

Nancy momentarily disappears to toss their soiled clothing into the wash. When she returns, her brows furrow at the sight of Laura's face. "Oh, Laur."

"What?" she asks. She leans against the bed, not quite sitting on the mattress, but still relieving most of her weight from her aching feet. It makes them more at eye-level when Nancy walks closer. Laura tries not to let her breath hitch as Nancy's thumb brushes across her forehead, then her cheek, her touch feather-light. Her delicate features are wrinkled with concern.

"They look dry for now," Nancy says. Laura realizes she's talking about the cuts on her face from the branches smacking into her as they'd fled from the monster. She'd completely forgotten about them. "We should definitely clean them, though. I'll be right back."

Laura opens her mouth to protest, but she knows that Nancy (as usual) is right. Who knows what kinds of bacteria live in that place? Even if she'd just showered, it couldn't hurt to take extra caution. Plus, if she has something to do, something to focus on, Nancy will feel better. Especially if it involves taking care of someone she cares about.

She doesn't even feel the sting of antiseptic. When Nancy cleans the lacerations with a cotton ball soaked in hydrogen peroxide, Laura has to fight not to stare at the adorable splash of freckles on the bridge of her nose, the way her damn hair clings to her neck, or her lips. She pretends not to notice that she smells like whatever soap she'd used to scrub off the muck. The scent is captivating, sweet, wafting from Nancy's skin with every movement. Luckily, the dim lighting will hide the flush of Laura's cheeks if she's blushing, but she still hopes she's not. Jonathan is more perceptive than he has any right to be. Damn it if she has to rely on another white boy to keep her secrets.

"They're shallow," Nancy informs her, and Laura snaps her eyes to hers as she draws back. "I don't think you need any Band-Aids."

"Thanks," Laura says.

"You guys feel better?" Jonathan asks, fidgeting with his fingers.

"Yeah," Nancy replies.

"I can go home," he offers. His eyes flicker to the carpet. "I just figured—"

"Yeah, no. I..." Nancy trails off and glances at Laura. She reads something in her expression Laura hadn't realized was there, which is one of the reasons why she loves Nancy so much. Her best friend knows her better than she sometimes knows herself. "It would be better if you were here. You know, someone who didn't... um..."

Who didn't go into that tree. Who didn't see that monster. Nancy's unspoken words linger in the air for a moment before Jonathan nods.

"Yeah. Yeah, I get it," he says.

"I should call my parents before they freak out," Laura realizes, already moving toward the phone on Nancy's bedside table. She dials her number before bringing the receiver to her ear.

"Fairer residence," her mom's voice answers.

She resists the sudden urge to cry. Even though she's somewhat estranged from her mom, used to finding prickles instead of soft comfort in their interactions, her experience tonight awakens some childlike part of her she thought was gone forever. A tiny piece of her remembers her mom's warm embraces when she'd had nightmares as a kid. She'd soothed away the fear, and now Laura yearns for the same reassurance after her hellish night.

But she's done enough crying in the past two days, and she's sick of tears. She steadies herself before saying, "Hi, mom. It's me. I just wanted to let you know that I'm staying over Nancy's."

"Are you telling the truth this time?"

Ouch. The question is warranted, given her confession of sneaking off to a party, but it still stings. Her parents used to accept her statements of staying over at the Wheeler residence without a second thought. She'd abused that trust and fractured it.

"Yeah. Here, I'll wave to you from her bedroom window."

Laura sets the receiver on Nancy's bed before heading over to the window and drawing Nancy's lacy curtain aside. She peers at her house across the street, searching each illuminated window for her mother's figure. Instead, she notices the lean frame of her father in the one beside the front door. She waves. He copies her action.

"Your father sees you," her mom says when Laura picks up the receiver again. "Make sure you're back before your shift tomorrow. Goodnight."

Laura stifles a groan at the reminder of work. Why does she keep agreeing to pick up so many shifts and covering for her older coworkers? Before last week, her life was boring enough that she worked often just to pass the time. But now, when she actually has plans, she regrets her hardworking nature.

Jonathan settles into his makeshift sleeping bag on the floor, tugging two layers of blankets over himself. Laura's heart jolts when she realizes that she's going to be sharing Nancy's bed with her. It shouldn't be surprising; they always do so when she spends the night, but with how abnormal everything has been, she'd momentarily forgotten how things usually are.

Laura slips under the covers that smell like Nancy, trying to ignore the fact that the girl herself is only a few inches away. She's aware of every movement that makes the mattress shift until both of them finally lie still.

She closes her eyes, trying to shove away the flashes that plague the space behind her eyelids, and pretends that this is a normal sleepover. No monsters involved.

__________

a/n:

laura is a better friend than me bc if i saw nancy crawling into that tunnel, i would've been like 🤨👋🏻 BON VOYAGE!

it's so weird rewatching this season because everyone is so TINY. and thinking about how the dynamics between the characters change is so funny. steve has no idea he will soon be a mother to several middle schoolers.

this will be my last update of 2023! i'm really glad that i was able to pick this story back up this year and post more updates. thank you for your support and see ya in the new year!

— kristyn

( word count: 3.7k )