077 Town Changes
"I look forward to hearing from you." Grace tucked the note into Richard's jacket pocket, stood on her tiptoes, and pressed a quick, soft kiss to the corner of his lips — the most personal farewell gift she could offer. When their lips parted, a rosy flush spread across her fair cheeks beneath her bright green eyes.
The girl's warm, effortless smile had a way of making everything feel a little lighter; even the biting winter cold seemed to ease up around her. The Harrington family, watching the moment unfold, wore the quiet, charmed expressions of people witnessing something genuinely lovely.
Richard wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, completely unbothered romantically. He thought it over for a moment with genuine sincerity, then said, "If nothing's going on, I'm not really sure what I'd call you about. Maybe you should just call me instead?"
He flipped open his small spiral notebook, scrawled down a phone number, tore the page out, and tucked it into her coat pocket in exactly the same way she had done to him.
Grace's smile froze on her face. She exhaled slowly and nodded, resigning herself to it. "Fine. But you'd better actually pick up, or I'm going to be seriously annoyed, understood?"
"Understood," Richard said with an easy grin. He glanced over at Steve, who was saying his own goodbyes across the driveway. Mr. Howard was pushing Mrs. Howard's wheelchair across the stone path, and Steve had leaned down to wrap his arms gently around his mother, whose head was still wrapped in bandages.
The two of them waved to the Harrington family from the car window as it rolled down the long driveway, and finally headed back toward Hawkins.
William drove them to the airport himself. Given that Richard had played a direct role in saving the lives of his family and his mother, it was the least he felt he could do.
"I'm really sorry, man," Steve said, turning around in the passenger seat to look at Richard in the back. "You came all the way to New York and never got to actually enjoy any of it."
Richard smiled. "Are you kidding? It was exciting. I'll remember this trip for the rest of my life."
"You're welcome back anytime," William said, catching Richard's eye in the rearview mirror, his tone completely genuine. "Next time, I'll take you to every place worth going in this city. I mean it."
"I'll hold you to that," Richard replied with a smile. William and his parents weren't bad people, not really. Their early attitude had been cold and dismissive — the kind of quiet arrogance that came from old money and unchecked assumptions — but somewhere along the way, those walls had come down. What replaced them was something closer to genuine respect.
The drive back to Hawkins took most of the day, same as the trip up.
When Richard finally got home, he dropped his bags just inside the door and let himself fall face-first onto his bed. Lying there, he was surprised to notice something — a faint, quiet feeling of being glad to be back. He hadn't expected that.
The Upside Down, burrowed beneath this town like rot in the walls, was something he genuinely despised. But somewhere along the way, Hawkins had become familiar. And familiar, he was realizing, had its own kind of pull.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
The sound of small footsteps crossing old floorboards broke the quiet. Richard cracked one eye open. It was the Louis family — the three household spirits who had been managing the other entities in the house while he was gone.
"Nothing went wrong while I was away, right?" Richard asked.
The three of them went quiet. They exchanged a look.
Richard sat up.
It turned out that during his time in New York, two separate groups had tried to break into the house. The first were ordinary burglars. The second appeared to be government operatives — most likely sent by Hawkins Lab.
Neither group had fared well. Anyone who crossed the threshold of the house without permission found themselves caught in something they couldn't explain — vivid, suffocating hallucinations generated by the spirits inside, or worse, a partial possession that turned their own hands against them. The Louis family had kept things from going too far, pulling the spirits back before anyone actually died.
But the damage to Richard's reputation — if you could call it that — had already been done. Word had spread through the town's more shadowed corners that his house was haunted. And the government people were now watching him with serious suspicion, convinced he had ties to something beyond normal explanation.
Richard genuinely wanted to point out that the haunted house rumor was completely accurate.
As for what Hawkins Lab might do next — he had no real way to predict it. The gap between him and a government black-site research program wasn't a gap you bridged; it was a canyon. Whatever they decided to do, he'd always be reacting to their moves, never ahead of them.
He'd already given up on trying to stay hidden from them.
Let them watch. If it ever came down to a direct confrontation — if they made the first move — he'd deal with whoever was giving the orders. People in powerful positions never wanted to die badly. That tended to be a good deterrent.
That was enough for now.
Richard reached down with one foot, hooked the edge of the blanket, dragged it up over himself with one hand, and fell asleep.
The shop opens tomorrow...
"Dr. Owens, what is actually wrong with my son?!"
The well-dressed woman had both hands on the doctor's shoulders and was shaking him, her voice raw and breaking. When he looked away instead of answering, her legs buckled, and she sank to the floor of the hallway, sobbing.
For the past two weeks, Troy's hallucination episodes had become less frequent — but that was the only thing that had improved. What replaced them was worse. The duration of each episode had doubled, and the nature of them had shifted entirely. Troy used to fall into hallucinations and then come back. Now he woke up already inside one, and only escaped it when he fell asleep.
Dr. Owens had resisted saying it out loud for weeks. But he couldn't anymore.
What Troy was experiencing wasn't hallucination. It was something closer to sensory overlap — a live connection. During the time Troy had been held in the Upside Down, something had been done to him. The vine-like organisms down there had modified him in some way that neither the Lab's equipment nor its researchers had caught until now. His consciousness had been tethered to the hive mind.
What Troy "saw" during his episodes wasn't his mind generating images. It was a feed. His awareness was being pulled through to the other side, and what he experienced there was real — the actual environment of the Upside Down, as though some part of him had been relocated there permanently.
And the creature Troy had described — the massive, spider-like thing at the center of it all, the Mind Flayer — wasn't tormenting him out of cruelty. It was trying to take hold of him. To root itself into Troy's mind and use him as a foothold in the real world. Eyes on this side of the gate. A hostage. A spy it didn't even need to ask anything of, because it would simply be Troy, eventually.
The conclusion left the room silent for a long moment.
Then one of the researchers said the quiet part out loud: that the cleanest solution was to eliminate Troy before the connection deepened further. That the longer they waited, the greater the risk. That one child's life, weighed against the potential damage—
Dr. Owens shut it down before the sentence was finished. He'd worked alongside Martin Brennan for years, watched what that kind of thinking did to people — what it had done to children, to Eleven, to every kid who'd ever passed through those doors. He wasn't going there.
"We close the gate," he said flatly. "Before that thing gets its hooks all the way in."
He didn't open it up for debate. He turned and walked out of the conference room.
From there he went to the medical ward — the special care unit where Troy had been sleeping and waking in cycles of silent agony for weeks. Troy's mother had been there almost constantly. Dr. Owens stood in the doorway and let her yell at him. He didn't defend himself. He didn't have anything to say that would help.
He was still standing there, thinking, when one of the Lab's supply runners came back from a grocery run into town. The man was carrying a cup from that little shop on Main Street — Richard's place. Some kind of fruit tea with what looked like tapioca pearls.
Dr. Owens's expression shifted slightly.
"Is that high school kid back in town? Richard?"
"Drove past his shop this morning — lights were on, looked like he was setting up."
Dr. Owens was quiet for a moment.
He thought about the people who had stood up to the Lab during Brennan's tenure. A ragtag group of Hawkins residents who'd had no business going up against a government facility — and who had somehow made it work.
Maybe they'd seen something down there that his researchers hadn't.
"We should reach out to them," he said quietly. "They might know something about the Upside Down that we don't."
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