083 Domesticated Vengeful Spirits
Steve watched the red-haired girl disappear into the passenger seat of the car outside, the door barely closed before it pulled away from the curb. He shook his head slowly. "What is that guy's deal? Seriously."
"Probably a new family in town," Richard said, wiping down the counter. In the back of his mind, a quiet notification registered itself.
Established a relationship with core plot character Maxine Mayfield. +10 plot points.
"Huh." Steve turned back to the counter. "Hey — don't you think it's about time we actually hired some help around here?"
"Probably," Richard said. "But not just anyone. We spent a long time building this place's reputation. New staff need to actually know what they're doing before they're on the floor, and they need to be people we can trust while they're learning."
Steve nodded. "So someone we already know."
"I've got two people in mind." Richard held up two fingers. "Joyce and Robin."
Steve blinked. "Robin? I thought she was prepping for college applications."
"She is. But Robin's situation is — specific." Richard set the cloth down. "She wants Stanford. Only Stanford. Won't apply anywhere else on principle, which is either very brave or very Robin, depending on how you look at it. Stanford's acceptance rate being what it is, that could take a year or two to work out. In the meantime, she needs something steady, and I think she'd actually be good at this."
Steve was quiet for a moment, processing. "The world of people who have actual academic goals is genuinely foreign to me. Like, I understand it intellectually. I just don't — feel it."
Richard smiled. "Everyone's running their own race. As long as she doesn't regret it later, that's her call to make."
Steve leaned against the counter and looked at him sideways. "What about your call? If Robin gets into Stanford — when she gets in, if she gets in — she leaves. Probably for good. You'd really just let that happen?"
Richard thought about it for a genuine moment. "Then I'd find a way to bring her back eventually."
Steve waited for the punchline. It didn't come. "Dude. I asked that like, semi-casually."
"And I answered semi-casually."
"You answered it like you were filing a legal document!"
Nearly a year had passed since the gate closed.
Hawkins looked different now — not dramatically, not overnight, but in the accumulated way that towns change when the thing that had been quietly strangling them finally lets go. The municipal building had been renovated. New businesses had moved into the downtown office spaces that had sat half-empty for years. The police department had gotten an equipment upgrade. People walked around like they weren't unconsciously bracing for something, which, Richard had come to realize, was what normal actually looked like.
Everyone from the original Upside Down situation had moved in their own directions.
Joyce and Bob were the clearest success story. What had started as a Christmas Eve coincidence had turned into something solid and real — they were apparently talking about engagement, which Joyce's boys had received with the quiet, careful approval of kids who had watched their mom deserve better for a long time. Bob was exactly what he appeared to be, which in Hawkins was rarer than it should have been.
Hopper had handled it about as well as a man could handle watching someone he cared about find happiness with someone else — which meant he'd handled it quietly, redirected the energy, and thrown himself into the two things he actually could control: his job and Eleven. The Upside Down incident had gotten him promoted to Deputy Chief, which gave him enough authority to actually get things done in this town for once. And Eleven — Jane, officially — was taking up more of his attention and patience than he'd expected, which he complained about regularly and clearly didn't mind at all.
In the young adult group, things had broken open in ways nobody had quite predicted.
Creel — the film Jonathan had directed from Richard and Steve's script, shot on a budget that now seemed almost comically small given what it had turned into — had opened in theaters two months ago and done something nobody in Hawkins had bet on: it had actually connected with audiences. The unconventional camera work, the practical effects, the script that treated its horror as something genuinely rooted rather than just staged — critics had noticed, and then audiences had followed. It had made real money.
Steve and Richard, as co-writers and investors, had benefited accordingly.
Jonathan had benefited differently. His name was now attached to something that had gotten people in the industry paying attention, and one of those people was a director he'd admired since he was fifteen. The man had reached out personally — not through an intermediary, not through the studio — and offered to take Jonathan on as a mentee. A film school had extended an invitation to their photography program around the same time. Jonathan had called Joyce from a payphone when he found out, crying too hard to be fully coherent, which she'd understood completely and cried right along with him.
Eddie's soundtrack had gotten him noticed by a label rep who'd caught a screening and tracked him down afterward. There were conversations happening about signing Hellfire Club — the real kind of conversations, with real paperwork. Eddie was handling the news by being loud about it everywhere he went, which was exactly how anyone who knew Eddie would have predicted he'd handle it.
Robin was still working toward Stanford. Nancy was regrouping after her rejection letter and already planning the next application cycle with the focused, slightly terrifying energy she applied to most obstacles. Barbara had gotten into Miskatonic's journalism program and was trying to figure out whether to defer for a year so she could work at the shop — a decision that had nothing to do with the shop, and which Nancy was currently managing not to editorialize about.
Everyone was moving. Everyone had something ahead of them.
Richard got home just after seven.
He hadn't even gotten his keys out of his bag before the front door opened from the inside. The lights in the entryway came on as he stepped through. By the time he reached the kitchen, a glass of water — filled to about the halfway point, exactly how he preferred it — had already traveled across the room and settled into his outstretched hand.
Not a smart home system. Not a remote trigger.
Just the house, doing what the house did now.
The past year of work had paid off in ways that still occasionally surprised him. The entities in the house weren't reformed — that wasn't really the right word for it, and it wouldn't have been accurate. They still had edges. They still had the fundamental nature of what they were. But they were controlled, which was something he hadn't been fully confident about twelve months ago. Guests who followed the unspoken rules of the space were left alone. Guests who didn't — who broke something, who showed up with bad intentions, who pushed in ways that agitated the atmosphere — got a lesson. Not a fatal one. The spirits had learned, over the course of many conversations and one or two incidents that required cleanup, that Richard had a strong preference for everyone leaving the house alive.
They'd adjusted.
What had gotten them there, more than any negotiation or display of authority, was the cleaning.
Richard's housekeeping was — by any standard, human or otherwise — exceptional. He'd developed it out of necessity years before any of this, and it turned out that the entities sharing his space had opinions about it. Strong ones. According to what the Louis family had communicated to him over several months of patient back-and-forth, a deep clean from Richard registered to the spirits in the house as something approximately equivalent to a full spa day — pressure relieved, atmosphere refreshed, the psychic equivalent of a long hot shower after a hard week. Once they'd experienced it a few times, the calculus of cooperation became straightforward. Good behavior meant Richard kept the house. Richard keeping the house meant they got to experience that again.
He had, in effect, won the loyalty of a houseful of vengeful spirits through exceptional domestic standards.
He still wasn't entirely sure how he felt about that.
He settled onto the couch and looked at the father doll sitting across from him — the eldest of the Louis family, the one that handled most of the household communication.
"Anything unusual today?"
The doll's glass eyes rotated toward him. A response came through, not in words but in impression, the way communication with the spirits usually worked — a general sense of no, quiet, nothing out of the ordinary.
Richard nodded slowly. "So the government people are actually gone." He'd been waiting to confirm it for a while. The Lab was ash. Owens had made good on the shutdown. The military presence that had been hovering around the edges of town for months had apparently, finally, packed up. "That's one less thing."
He set his glass down. "Anyone call today?"
The doll shook its head.
Richard looked at the phone on the wall for a moment.
Kali. Number Eight. He'd been turning that particular problem over in his mind for months — a girl with extraordinary ability who had every reason to be angry at the world and had built an entire identity around that anger. He'd tried to reach her. The line stayed quiet.
When the Upside Down came back — and it would come back, Henry wasn't finished, the Mind Flayer wasn't finished, that wasn't how any of this worked — he was going to need more people who could actually stand in the middle of it. Eleven was remarkable. But remarkable and singular was a vulnerability, not a strength.
He needed Kali.
He just hadn't figured out yet how to get through to someone who had very good reasons not to trust anyone.
He picked up his glass and finished the water and thought about it for a while in the quiet house, with the lights on and the spirits settled and the town outside finally, temporarily, at peace.
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