Chapter Text
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“You live here alone?”
Chrissy, still in her cheer uniform, wondered aloud as she awkwardly hung around the mobile home's living room. She tried to be polite and not gawk at the mess. Eddie haphazardly opened up random containers near the front door, peering inside before placing them back.
“With my uncle. But, uh, he works nights at the plant. Bringing home the big bucks.” Eddie pulled out the closest drawer to finger through all the junk. Nothing caught his eye yet.
“How long does it take?”
“Sorry? “ He focused on sorting through papers for the hidden stash.
“The Special K. How long to kick in?” Chrissy asked nervously.
"Oh, uh, well," Eddie initially caught off guard. "It depends if you snort it or not.”
He continued on searching erratically through the rest of the drawers.
“Uh, if you do, then, uh, yeah. It'll, uh, kick in pretty quick.” He smiled, until he opened an empty metal pot. “Oh, shit."
"You're sure you have it?" Chrissy sounded impatient now.
"No, no, I got it. Um, somewhere."
Eddie ran out of view to a back room. Chrissy could hear sounds of stuff clunking onto the floor. He was rummaging furiously through his old dresser. Chrissy spaced out, looking off into the distance from a small window. It overlooked most of the trailer park homes and trucks. She widened her stance suddenly, looking afraid, and quickly closed the ratty red curtains.
“Eddie, did you find it?” Her voice quivered as she turned around.
In the back, he was plowing through his old hiding places until he reached the back of a deep drawer. He felt an old tin stuck in a tight corner. He yanked the tin out and pried open the lid.
“Gotcha,” Eddie said to himself, as his fingers pinched the bag, before yelling out: “Found it. Peaceful bliss, just moments away.”
Eddie raised the bag of special K triumphantly in front of him. He was walking back over to where he left Chrissy, hoping she didn’t notice any of Uncle Wayne’s adult “magazines” by his recliner. He rushed down the hall and out into the opening from his room.
“Chrissy?” he probed after her non-response to his discovery.
He paused when Chrissy came into view. She was frozen in the center of the TV room. Her arms were unnaturally straight and her face was as still as death. He swore her eyes were rolled back all the way in her head with her eyelids stretched wide open.
“Hello? Chrissy.” he waved his hand, confused.
Her eyelids twitched as she stood unmoved by his attempt to get her attention.
“Hey, Chrissy!” he jumped forward to scare her. Nothing changed.
“Wake up. Hey. Hellooo? Chrissy?” He desperately called out to her, waving his hand and snapping his fingers together. He had closed the distance between them, now they were only a few feet apart. Her eyes looked sickly gray.
The lights flickered violently in repetition. He wondered if she was electrocuted somehow. He braced her shoulders and shook her over and over again.
He trembled. Eddie couldn’t tell if this was a seizure, a stroke, or a trance. It was too real to be a prank. But the air around them felt cold and dead.
“Time to wake up. Hello? Can you hear me?” Eddie had no idea how to snap her out of it. It felt like precious time was slipping away.
He heard a soft whimper behind her strained mouth. She was fighting to come back. Her back stiffened up, he could barely shake her anymore.
“I don't like this! Chrissy, Wake up!” He raised his voice in exasperation, still trying to shake her.
Without warning, Chrissy’s body slowly lifted from his grasp. She floated in midair a few feet off the ground. The motion was so strange that he had let go of her cheer jacket completely.
Her body convulsed back simultaneously with the rapid flickering of all the light fixtures. Stepping back from this horror, Eddie lost his balance and fell backward knocking over a chair and landing on the floor. His hair spilled over his face.
“Jesus Christ!”
When he looked up after fixing his hair, Chrissy's back was now touching the ceiling. He blinked quickly to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. He knew he didn’t hit his head, but there she was defying gravity and anything that made sense to him.
There was a faint muffled moan that came from above. He scrambled to get up off the floor, accidentally pushing the radio off the counter and turning it on.
The channels skipped around causing a staticky buzz to blast loudly for a few seconds until finally a station broke through. A woman’s voice was singing in between bursts of crackling.
“.. can't afford to be innocent..Stand up and face the enemy.”
“CHRISSY!” Eddie cried out.
The signal waned and warped the sound of the guitar. Eddie leapt up and over to Chrissy. He reached up for her with all his stretch, his leather jacket felt taut.
She looked stiff as a board in her supernatural position above him. Her skin drained to an unnatural pallor. He thought he heard a crack as one of her hands bent backwards.
The radio station, in the meantime, had stabilized again and returned to that booming female voice .
“..the power of conviction, There is no sacrifice… a do-or-die situation. We will be invincible”
Her eyes were fluttering back and forth – she winced and grit her teeth– while the song continued on with a strong pattern of rhythmic drums. Eddie was jumping up to pull at her arms or her waist or whatever part of her uniform he could reach to get her down.
“When there's nowhere, nowhere we can run to anymore.”
Eddie grasped at the edge of her clothes when he noticed her irises, a bluish grey, rush back down. Almost immediately after her focus returned, her body went limp and collapsed with gravity. She landed right on top of Eddie, bringing them both down to the shaggy rug.
All of the light fixtures shone brightly without wavering. The radio amplified Pat Benatar’s voice with the ad libs and vocal runs from her song Invincible. One of Chrissy’s hands had plopped onto his neck and felt cold and clammy on his skin.
Her whole body trembled as she sobbed into his side. Eddie was stuck in time, shocked by the seemingly paranormal experience that unfolded. Most of Chrissy’s weight pinned his torso down making it harder for him to breathe.
“Chrissy… Are you okay?” His voice strained.
He attempted to put a hand over top of her back. He needed to feel her breath, make sure she’s still alive– crying or not, moving or not. He wasn’t sure what was real anymore. The jacket felt dusty across his palm, likely from her visit to the ceiling. Her lungs filled quickly and sporadically as her rib cage jumped up and down.
“No..Where.. am…I?” Her words, barely a whisper, were punctuated by quick shallow breaths.
“My place. It’s me, Eddie Munson. Don’t you remember, you wanted something a little stronger? You’re definitely not getting it now." He replied in an ironic, but soft tone.
When she wrestled to get control over her tears, the movement of her ribs gradually slowed under his hand.
Eddie shifted his body to sit up in a more comfortable position. As he moved, he held her upper body up gently to help her catch her breath. Once he settled, she laid across his legs looking at the wall across from them. She braced both of her hands under her neck.
“I was here and then…I wasn’t.”
“Well, you can say that again.”
He looked down at her. Her normal tidy ponytail had stray pieces all over the place. He wanted to let her hair free, but decided against it. He kept his hand instead on her shoulder– as if he had the power to keep her grounded for whatever came next.
“ No I mean… it sounds crazy.”
“Chrissy, I saw something crazy, try me.”
She took a slightly deeper breath. She shuffled her legs around aimlessly for a few seconds. Then, her body stilled and silence chilled the air around her. A radio personality was closing out the song and introducing the next one. Right as Eddie was about to check if she was still conscious, she took another deep breath to explain.
“Well at first when you left the room, I heard this creepy chiming clock. I’d been seeing this clock a lot recently. Like everywhere. I thought I've been losing my mind, like I said in the woods. I decided to try to ignore the chiming though, and I looked for you."
"I went back there,” she pointed to his room vaguely over her shoulder. “But my mom.. She was in there, talking to me with my cheer skirt. But her face… it wasn’t right. Everything around me was distorted.”
She shivered and pulled her arm closer to her chest.
“And then…" Chrissy started again, " When I slammed the door shut, I was at my house instead, but the nightmare version of my house. Like it had the same things, but everything was buzzing and scary."
"It felt like a waking nightmare. I tried to keep the door closed, but it flew open hard. I ran all the way down the stairs to where I found my dad… his face was so disfigured. Worse than my mom’s was. He was trying to scream but couldn’t open his mouth."
She looked off into the distance, deep in thought for a moment. Sadness crept in before being replaced by disgust.
"Something else called my name. I tried to get away again. There were tons of spiders and flies everywhere in the dining room and… It was disgusting.”
“I tried to get out of there, but the door was boarded shut. And this scary, slimy monster cornered me. I was so scared I didn’t move. It told me it was time for my suffering to end. It's voice was terrifying."
Eddie could feel her shaking relentlessly as her breath hitched again.
" So terrifying. I wanted this to end. All the flies buzzing around and the haunted parts of my house and this horrible, terrible feeling I had inside. It needed to end."
Tears welled up in her eyes. She quickly brushed them away with her sleeve. Eddie kept quiet. He let her breathe through it all. He had no idea how any of this story was possible.
But he also had no idea how she ended up levitating in his living room like The Exorcist. He glanced around the room, the overall destruction of the room reminded him it really did happen.
Chrissy took in a deep breath and carefully sat up next to Eddie, fixing her skirt modestly with one hand. She kept her left arm nestled on her lap protectively.
“I had given up when the monster cornered me. I had nowhere to go. It reached out with this sick claw over my face," Chrissy didn't look Eddie in the eye. "And when it touched me, it hurt. It burned from the inside-out almost."
"But right when I thought I couldn't take anymore, I started to hear something through all the buzzing. A song. It sounded like Invincible. A song I knew, a song I loved. But it sounded so far away. I tore open my eyes which surprised the monster, I think, so he let go. Just for a second. It was the break I needed, so without thinking, I backed out the window next to the boarded up door and busted the glass. I took off running through somewhere unrecognizable. I just kept running toward the music.”
She looked over to the sideways busted radio, playing another distorted hit loudly. A light static still overlayed the vocals.
"I didn't even know where I was running to, but eventually, I came to a clearing where I could see you in an opening below me, reaching for me, and the next thing I knew, I was falling back down to the ground. Here."
Her palm slapped down onto the rug with her free hand. She let it linger there, staring at the pulls on the rug. Eddie leaned back to fix the radio and turn down the volume slightly. Chrissy stayed quiet.
"Okay, sooo let me recap to make sure I got all of this,” Eddie nodded his head. “You walked around my place with a freaky nightmare clock that transported you to your freaky nightmare house with your creepy parents and an evil alien Frankenstein who tried to kill you with his claw and then Pat Benatar's voice from this radio, my radio, saved you."
"I guess… I guess so." Chrissy hesitated.
"Right…I didn't peg you as a Pat Benatar fan."
"What’s wrong with that?” She asked defensively. He simply shrugged in response.
“I like her. She's strong. And she doesn't care what anybody thinks. It’s not common in a town like Hawkins." She stated matter-of-factly.
Chrissy rubbed her left arm nervously and winced a little. Her breathing was more controlled, and her face was less gray now. But worry sat in her eyes as she bit her lip.
“You think I’m crazy.”
"Seriously? Crazy? Crazy is finding out your athlete boyfriend prom king actually plays chess on the weekend. This? This is beyond that. Chrissy, I just want to know if you’re okay!"
"I'm fine, I just need to go. I'm sorry. You shouldn't have seen that and I'm sorry that I messed up your place. I’m gonna go now." Chrissy sputtered out her train of thought.
She checked out her outfit to make sure everything was in its right place. Chrissy straightened up, but a little too fast and wobbled as soon as she stood up. She grabbed onto the recliner to steady herself and gasped when her hand touched the chair.
Eddie jumped up to guard her position from behind just in case. He noticed her left wrist looked purplish and swollen. He realized she’d been hiding her injury and that it was probably broken from that crack he heard earlier.
"Where do you think you're going?!" Eddie exclaimed.
"I have to leave, I'm fine. I don't want to bother you anymore. Let me go." She held her left wrist with her other hand over her chest.
"You were on my fucking ceiling possessed or voodooed in a trance or something, Chrissy. I thought you were gonna die! How are you getting home? Let me at least call somebody to pick you up, you know your boyfriend, an ambulance, or maybe a priest?"
“I'm fine. This is my problem to worry about, not yours or anybody else’s." Chrissy pushed past him with as much force as she had left in her tired body. "Just let me get out of here. You've done enough."
She made her way towards the screen door outside. Her body ached all over, like stoked embers inflamed all of her joints. Chrissy carefully avoided the mess spilled in her path. When she gripped the handle of the door, the edges of her vision darkened.
She stumbled against the door frame, glued to the wooden frame and unsure of what to do. It was already so dark outside and she was just so... dizzy. Her eyelids sunk shut and her legs grew numb and heavy. Chrissy expected to hit the floor hard as she teetered back, but instead she felt two strong arms wrap around her.
“Whoa there,” He held her up in a swift catch. “Not so fast. Let’s sit back down, shall we?”
Chrissy felt relieved knowing she wouldn’t be on the floor again, but an old darkness consumed her mind. It went blank. The last thing she remembered thinking was she hoped Eddie didn’t notice her broken hand. The last thing she needed was for him to feel bad for her.