Leaglaeca

. . .

1958

The spider moved carefully across Henry Creel’s palm, its legs thin as black thread against the pale cup of his hand.

He sat in the grass near the edge of the yard, knees bent, head lowered, watching it with the sort of attention he rarely gave to people. People were too loud. Too obvious. Too eager to prove they were ordinary, like dogs pressing their noses against a fence and barking at anything that dared to pass.

Spiders were different.

They did not pretend.

This one stepped over the curve of his lifeline, delicate and sure, as if it knew exactly where it meant to go. Henry held still for it. He liked the feeling of its tiny feet against his skin, liked the patience required to keep from frightening it. There was something honest in such a small creature carrying so much fear inside other people.

Behind him, through the living room window, the television flickered.

His parents were watching the news.

Henry could not hear much of it from outside. Only the muted rhythm of a man’s voice coming through the glass, flat and grave, swallowed by the hum of evening insects and the distant pulse of sirens somewhere far off in Hawkins. The words came in broken pieces, too muffled to fully understand.

Tragic incident.

Hawkins High School.

Senior prom.

Electrical malfunction.

Multiple students.

Dead.

Henry did not turn around at first.

He kept his eyes on the spider.

Inside the house, the blue-white glow of the television flashed across the window. His father’s shape stood stiff near the sofa. His mother sat closer to the screen, one hand pressed over her mouth.

Henry could see her face reflected in the glass.

That was what made him look up.

Virginia Creel was not crying. Not exactly. His mother was very good at keeping herself arranged, very good at folding horror into something presentable. But her expression had changed. Her eyes were wide and wet-looking, her lips parted around some prayer or gasp she had not let out.

She looked frightened.

Not sad.

Frightened.

Henry stared at her reflection, curious despite himself.

Then something moved beyond it.

At first, he thought it was only another trick of the glass, a smear of shadow, a pale shape crossing behind his mother’s reflected face. But then the shape stepped into the glow of a streetlamp, and Henry’s fingers went still.

A girl was walking down the road.

Barefoot.

Her shoes were gone.

She moved slowly, as if every step had to be remembered before she could take it. Her feet were dark against the pavement, one of them leaving faint marks behind her. Her dress, once pretty, hung from her like a ruined flower. Pale fabric clung to her knees and waist, soaked through in places with something too dark to be rain.

Blood.

It was everywhere.

On her skirt. On her arms. Streaked at her throat. Dried along one side of her face where it had tangled with her hair. The curls or waves someone must have tried to arrange for her had fallen loose, wild around her shoulders, pins hanging uselessly like broken little stars.

Henry knew her.

Not well.

No one knew her well.

She was the sophomore girl from Hawkins High, the one who always walked with her books pressed tight to her chest, as if holding them there could keep the world from touching her. The one with the long skirts, the plain blouses, the sleeves buttoned at her wrists even when the weather turned warm. The one other students whispered about with cruel little smiles. 

He had seen her before.

In town. Outside the school. Once in the grocery store with her mother gripping her arm hard enough to leave finger marks.

She was always looking down.

But not now.

Now her head was lifted slightly, her face empty in a way that made Henry’s chest feel strangely hollow. Not peaceful. Not calm. Empty, the way a house looked after a fire had eaten through the rooms and left only the shape of where a life had been.

And still, even covered in blood, Henry noticed what no one else would have.

She was beautiful.

Not in the shiny, laughing way the girls at school tried to be. Not like the girls who curled their hair and painted their mouths and learned how to smile so people would look. Her beauty was quieter than that. Stranger. Like a saint in a cracked church window. Like a doll left too long in the rain. Like something delicate that had been mistaken for weak until it shattered in someone’s hand.

The spider reached the edge of his palm.

Henry did not feel it at first.

He was watching her.

The girl slowed.

For one moment, she seemed to sense him there in the yard. Her head turned, and her eyes found his through the dark.

Henry stopped breathing.

The streetlamp threw a thin, golden line across her face. Her eyes were wide, glassy, and terribly alive. They did not look like the eyes of a girl who had walked away from an accident. They looked like the eyes of someone who had seen the inside of the world and found it rotten.

She stared at him.

He stared back.

Neither of them spoke.

Inside the house, the television continued flickering. His mother’s reflected face hovered in the window like a ghost, pale with fear. His father shifted behind her. Somewhere far away, another siren rose and fell.

Henry thought, suddenly and with a sharpness that startled him, that he should do something.

Step forward.

Say her name.

Ask what happened.

Ask if she was hurt.

But the thought came and died in the same breath.

He imagined his mother seeing. His father opening the door. The neighbors peering through curtains. The police asking why Henry Creel had been outside speaking to the blood-covered girl from Hawkins High.

He imagined the whispers turning.

Not just about her.

About him.

So he stayed still.

The spider slipped from his palm into the grass.

The tiny loss broke whatever spell had held him. Henry looked down quickly, searching between the blades for the black shape, but it had already vanished into the dark.

When he looked back up, the road was empty.

The girl was gone.

Only the streetlamp remained, buzzing faintly above the pavement, shining on nothing at all.

. . .

Y/N did not remember the walk home ending.

One moment, there had been pavement beneath her bare feet and streetlights above her head, humming like tired insects. The next, she was standing on the porch of her childhood home with blood drying stiff on her dress and her hand wrapped around the doorknob.

For a few seconds, she only stared at it.

The brass was cold against her palm.

Inside, the house was quiet.

Not peaceful quiet. Never that. The house had never known peace. It was the kind of quiet that waited with its teeth hidden, the kind that made her shoulders pull inward before anything had even happened.

Y/N pushed the door open.

The smell of lemon polish and old wood met her first. Then candle wax. Then the faint, sour scent of her mother’s perfume.

“Momma?” she called.

Her voice barely sounded like her own. It was small and scraped thin, like someone had dragged it over broken glass.

There was no answer.

Y/N stepped inside, leaving faint red marks on the floorboards behind her. Her eyes moved over the familiar room in pieces: the worn rug, the stiff-backed sofa, the Bible open on the side table, the little wooden crosses nailed above every doorway as if God needed directions.

She wanted her mother.

That was the worst part.

After everything, after the laughter and the blood and the screams folding into each other until the whole gymnasium became one terrible sound, Y/N wanted her mother. She wanted arms around her. She wanted someone to say it was over. She wanted, foolishly, desperately, to be somebody’s child.

Her mother appeared in the hall.

For one fragile second, neither of them moved.

Her mother wore her robe over her nightdress, hair pinned back so tightly it pulled at her temples. Her eyes traveled over Y/N slowly, from the ruined hem of her dress to the blood on her throat, to the mess of her hair, to her bare feet.

Y/N’s lips trembled.

“Momma,” she whispered.

Her mother’s face changed.

Not with relief.

With horror.

Then disgust.

“I knew it,” her mother breathed.

Y/N took a step toward her anyway. “Please—”

“I knew it was in you.”

The words struck harder than a hand. Y/N stopped in the middle of the room, chest rising and falling too fast beneath the sticky weight of her dress.

“They laughed at me,” she said, and the words came out broken, childlike. “They all laughed at me like you said.”

Her mother’s mouth twisted.

“Because they saw you.”

Y/N blinked.

A tear slipped down her cheek, cutting through the blood like rain through dirt.

Her mother moved fast.

The slap snapped Y/N’s face to the side.

For a moment, all she could hear was the ringing in her ear.

Then another hit came. A hand to her shoulder. Fingers biting into her arm. Her mother shook her once, hard enough that Y/N’s teeth clicked together.

“You wicked girl,” her mother hissed. “You filthy, wicked girl.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Y/N cried. “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t—”

“Liar.”

The lamps flickered.

Neither of them noticed at first.

Her mother shoved her backward, and Y/N stumbled against the edge of the sofa. Her knees nearly gave out. She grabbed at the fabric to steady herself, leaving red smears across the faded flowers.

“I was right,” her mother said, voice rising. “All these years, I was right. I tried to beat it out of you. I tried to pray it out of you. I tried to save you from what you are.”

Y/N shook her head, sobbing now. “Please, Momma, please don’t—”

“They laughed because they knew.” Her mother pointed toward the door as if the whole town stood outside listening. “They saw the devil wearing my daughter’s face.”

The lights flickered again.

The Bible pages on the side table fluttered though no window was open.

Y/N pressed a trembling hand to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Her mother’s eyes sharpened at that.

“Then pray.”

Y/N froze.

Her mother grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her toward the little corner of the parlor where a wooden crucifix hung above a narrow kneeling bench. Y/N had spent half her childhood there, knees aching, hands clasped until her fingers went numb.

“No,” Y/N whispered.

Her mother yanked harder.

“On your knees.”

“Momma, please—”

“On. Your. Knees.”

She forced her down.

Y/N hit the floor hard, pain bursting through her knees. She folded instinctively, shoulders hunched, head bowed, hands coming together because her body remembered obedience even when her mind was falling apart.

The house groaned around them.

Her mother stood behind her, breathing heavily.

“Beg,” she snapped. “You beg Him to forgive you.”

Y/N stared at the crucifix through blurred eyes.

The figure nailed there looked back at her with carved wooden sorrow.

She did not know what to say.

All her life, she had prayed to be good. To be normal. To be quiet enough, clean enough, small enough. She had prayed until the words became stones in her mouth. She had prayed while her mother stood behind her and told her every strange thing inside her was sin.

And still, the blood had come.

Still, the gym had screamed.

Still, everyone had looked at her like she was a monster.

“Pray,” her mother snarled.

Y/N squeezed her eyes shut.

“Our Father,” she whispered, voice shaking, “who art in Heaven…”

The walls gave a low creak.

“Hallowed be Thy name.”

A picture frame rattled on the wall.

“Thy kingdom come…”

Her mother’s breathing changed behind her.

“Thy will be done…”

Something cold touched Y/N’s back.

At first, she did not understand it.

Then the pain came.

Sharp.

Deep.

White-hot.

Y/N’s prayer broke into a strangled gasp.

She looked down, stunned, as if her body belonged to someone else. Her hands opened against her lap. The room tilted. Behind her, her mother made a sound that was almost a sob and almost a laugh as she held a bloodied kitchen knife in her hand. 

“I won’t let Him have to look at you anymore,” her mother whispered.

For a second, Y/N was only a girl.

A hurt girl.

A frightened girl.

A girl who had come home wanting comfort and found the final proof that there had never been any waiting for her.

Then something inside her opened.

Not like a door.

Like a wound.

The lamps exploded.

Glass burst outward in glittering sprays. The crucifix ripped itself from the wall and flew across the room. Her mother stumbled back with a cry, but Y/N did not turn around. She stayed on her knees, eyes wide and wet, breath coming in little broken pulls.

The house began to shake.

Not all at once. First the floorboards trembled beneath her. Then the walls. Then the ceiling groaned overhead, dust raining down like pale ash.

Her mother screamed her name.

Y/N heard it as if from underwater.

Every candle in the room flared high, flames stretching thin and bright. The Bible pages whipped back and forth violently, tearing loose one by one. The little crosses above the doorways cracked down the middle.

“No,” her mother gasped. “No, no, no—”

Y/N turned.

Her eyes were no longer soft.

The fear was still there, but it had changed shape. It had teeth now. It had hands. It had spent sixteen years being swallowed and had finally clawed its way back up.

Her mother stared at her.

For the first time in Y/N’s life, the woman looked afraid of what she had made.

Y/N did not speak.

She only cried.

The force of it tore through the room.

Furniture slammed against the walls. Windows shattered inward. The ceiling split with a sound like thunder cracking open above them. Her mother was thrown back, disappearing into the chaos of splintered wood and falling plaster.

The house screamed.

Or maybe Y/N did.

It was impossible to tell.

The walls bent inward as if some giant hand had wrapped around the home and squeezed. The staircase buckled. The roof groaned. Smoke curled from the curtains where candleflame kissed fabric and spread. Fire crawled up the walls, orange and hungry, lighting the room in flashes like the last moments of the prom all over again.

Y/N staggered to her feet.

Pain ripped through her back, and she nearly fell, catching herself on the edge of the broken kneeling bench. Her blood dripped onto the floorboards, mixing with the trail she had already left behind.

“Momma?” she whispered.

There was no answer.

Only the crackle of fire.

Only the groan of the house coming apart.

Y/N looked around at the place that had kept her small. The prayers. The locked doors. The hands. The rules. The shame pressed into every corner like dust.

And then the house gave way.

By the time the neighbors came running, there was little left but flame and ruin.

By the time the police arrived, the fire had chewed through most of the roof.

By the time the men from the laboratory stepped out of their black cars, Y/N was sitting in the ashes of her childhood home, still wearing the ruined prom dress, her knees drawn to her chest and her eyes fixed on nothing.

She did not look up when they called her name.

She did not cry when they covered her shoulders with a blanket.

She did not ask where her mother was.

The girl who had walked home from prom was gone.

And Hawkins, hungry for a cleaner story, would bury her before morning.

. . . 

1978 

Hawkins Laboratory looked cleaner than it really was.

The floors shone beneath the fluorescent lights, polished to a dull reflection. The walls were white. The doors were white. The coats were white. Everything had been scrubbed and bleached until the building looked less like a place where children cried in their sleep and more like something holy.

Henry Creel knew better.

He walked near the back of the group with his hands folded neatly in front of him, his expression mild, almost empty. Around him, several other orderlies moved with the same careful silence, trained to become part of the hallway rather than people within it.

Dr. Brenner walked ahead of them.

He always did.

The new doctors followed him like parishioners behind a priest, nodding at every word he said, eyes bright with curiosity they mistook for intelligence. They looked at the laboratory as if it were a miracle.

Henry watched them look.

He found it almost funny.

“This wing is restricted for a reason,” Brenner said, his voice calm and practiced. “Much of the work conducted here predates our current program.”

One of the doctors, a young man with nervous hands and glasses too large for his face, glanced toward a sealed door as they passed.

“Predates the children?”

Brenner smiled faintly.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Henry’s eyes shifted toward him.

A manner of speaking.

That was one of Brenner’s favorite ways to lie. It sounded gentler than no. It sounded more educated than yes.

They continued down the corridor. The lights hummed above them. Somewhere behind one of the doors, something metal clattered, followed by the sharp scrape of a chair being dragged across tile.

No one in the group reacted.

They had already been told not to.

Brenner stopped outside a room at the very end of the hall.

Unlike the others, this door had no number printed at eye level. No cheerful color marker. No observation schedule clipped neatly beside it. It was heavier than the rest, reinforced along the frame, with a small rectangular pane of glass set high enough that a child could not have looked through it without standing on their toes.

Henry’s attention sharpened.

He had been in this hall before. He had cleaned it. Carried trays through it. Walked past this door a hundred times with his gaze obediently forward.

The room was never spoken of.

Not by the children.

Not by the orderlies.

Not by anyone who wanted to continue breathing comfortably beneath Brenner’s roof.

“This subject,” Brenner said, “is one of our earliest acquisitions.”

One of the doctors leaned forward slightly. “Acquisitions?”

Brenner did not look at him.

“Yes.”

The word settled into the hallway like dust.

Henry felt something move at the base of his skull.

Not pain. Not exactly.

Recognition before memory.

A faint pressure, like fingertips pressing against the inside of his mind.

Brenner placed one hand near the door, not touching it. Even he seemed to understand there was something different about this room. Something that did not belong to the orderly system he had built out of numbers and punishments and carefully measured rewards.

“She was brought to us in 1958 after an incident in Hawkins,” Brenner continued. “At the time, the event was attributed publicly to electrical failure and structural damage. Privately, it became clear that the situation was… unusual.”

Henry went still.

The year unfolded somewhere deep inside him, old and dark, like a photograph pulled from water.

A road beneath streetlamps.

A blood-soaked dress.

Bare feet against pavement.

Brenner’s voice continued, clean and distant.

“We considered integrating her into the later program, but she proved unsuitable.”

“Unsuitable how?” one of the doctors asked.

Brenner’s expression did not change.

“Her responses were difficult to predict.”

Another doctor glanced toward the sealed door. “Violent?”

“At times.”

The answer was too simple.

Too clean.

Henry’s eyes remained on the little glass window.

“Her condition does not behave as neatly as the others,” Brenner said. “The children can be instructed. Encouraged. Corrected. Their gifts, while varied, are measurable. Hers has always resisted that kind of structure.”

“What can she do?” asked the nervous doctor.

Brenner paused.

Only for a second.

But Henry noticed.

“That is not the question we ask anymore.”

The doctor frowned. “Then what is?”

Brenner looked at the door.

“What happens when she is allowed to?”

The hallway went quiet.

No one asked another question right away.

Brenner clasped his hands behind his back and continued, voice smooth again.

“She is not to have unsupervised contact with the children. Nor with most staff. Prolonged exposure has produced complications in the past.”

“What sort of complications?”

“Unreliable reports,” Brenner said. “Emotional disturbances. Memory irregularities. Physical symptoms without consistent medical cause.”

“That sounds broad.”

“It is.”

“And dangerous?”

Brenner finally turned his head toward the man.

“Everything here is dangerous, Doctor. The difference is that most things here can be taught to sit when asked.”

His gaze returned to the door.

“She does not sit.”

Henry’s fingers curled slightly at his sides.

Inside the room came no sound.

That bothered him more than screaming would have.

“Does she have a designation?” the nervous doctor asked.

“Before our current numbering system, designations were less standardized,” Brenner replied. “In early records, she was referred to as Project Liminal.”

“Liminal?”

“Existing at a threshold.”

“Between what?”

Brenner smiled faintly.

“That has been the matter of debate for nearly twenty years.”

Another doctor looked uncomfortable. “And what do you call her now?”

Brenner’s gaze hardened just slightly.

“Contained.”

No one laughed.

From inside the room, still nothing.

Brenner stepped away from the door, signaling the end of the discussion.

“You will not be assigned to this subject without direct clearance from me. You will not attempt conversation. You will not observe her alone. You will not open that door unless instructed to do so by me personally.”

A woman doctor shifted uneasily. “Is that level of restriction necessary?”

Brenner looked at her.

“Yes.”

That was all.

Not an explanation.

Not a warning.

A fact.

The kind men like Brenner used when they wanted fear to do the rest of the talking.

The group began moving again, white coats shifting like pale wings beneath the fluorescent lights. The orderlies followed. Henry took one step with them.

Then stopped.

No one noticed immediately.

Brenner’s voice continued farther down the hall, already discussing another room, another subject, another living thing reduced to a category. The doctors turned the corner one by one.

Henry remained at the door.

For several seconds, he only listened.

Nothing.

No footsteps inside. No breathing he could hear. No movement.

Only that pressure at the back of his mind, soft and terrible. Familiar in the way childhood nightmares were familiar. In the way old bruises remembered fingers.

Slowly, Henry stepped closer.

The glass panel was narrow and smudged from the outside. He leaned in just enough to see through.

The room beyond was dimmer than the hallway.

Not dark. Brenner would never allow true darkness unless it served a purpose. But the light inside was low, grayish, softened by distance and neglect.

At first, Henry saw only the bed.

Then the wall.

Then a thin figure sitting near the far corner with her knees drawn close, head turned slightly away from the door.

She was older now.

Of course she was.

The girl he remembered had been sixteen and drenched in blood beneath a streetlamp. This woman was no longer that girl, not exactly. Time had sharpened some things and hollowed others. Her hair fell loose around her face. Her skin looked almost colorless beneath the laboratory light. She wore the same plain clothing they gave the others, but on her it seemed less like a uniform and more like another burial shroud.

Still, Henry knew.

Not from her face.

Not first.

From the stillness.

That same terrible emptiness he had seen from the yard all those years ago. The look of a person who had walked out of one life and never been allowed to enter another.

His fingers curled slightly at his sides.

Memory came fully now.

The spider in his palm.

His mother’s frightened reflection in the window.

Sirens.

The road.

The blood.

Her eyes finding his.

And then nothing.

He had done nothing.

Henry stared through the glass, and for the first time in years, something like guilt moved through him.

Not soft guilt. Not human guilt.

Something colder.

Sharper.

A resentment aimed at himself, at Brenner, at the whole rotten little town that had seen two children becoming monsters and had only watched from behind glass.

His lips parted before he decided to speak.

“Y/N.”

The name left him quietly.

Barely more than breath against the door.

But inside the room, her head turned.

Henry’s body went still.

She moved slowly, as if returning from somewhere far away. Her face angled toward the glass. For a moment, the dim light hid her eyes beneath the shadow of her lashes.

Then she looked directly at him.

The hallway seemed to disappear.

No doctors.

No orderlies.

No Brenner’s voice echoing from around the corner.

Only her eyes through the narrow pane of glass, older and emptier than before, but awake. Terribly awake.

Henry felt the pressure in his skull deepen.

Not an attack.

A recognition.

Her gaze searched his face.

He wondered if she remembered him. The boy in the yard. The one who had watched her pass barefoot and bloody and had chosen silence because he was afraid of becoming part of her story.

Her lips parted.

No sound reached him through the door.

But he saw the shape of the word.

Not his name.

She did not know his name.

Not yet.

Her mouth formed something smaller.

A question.

Henry leaned closer to the glass.

For the first time, the faintest expression crossed her face.

Not fear.

Not quite.

Curiosity.

Then, behind him, footsteps approached.

“Peter.”

Henry’s expression emptied at once.

Brenner stood several yards down the hall, watching him with the calm of a man who missed very little and forgave even less.

The doctors were gone. The other orderlies waited behind him, carefully pretending not to stare.

“You were instructed to remain with the group,” Brenner said.

Henry stepped back from the door.

“Yes, sir.”

Brenner’s eyes moved briefly to the glass panel, then back to Henry.

There was a pause.

Small.

Measured.

Dangerous.

“I would advise against developing an interest in this one.”

Henry lowered his gaze with practiced obedience.

“Of course.”

Brenner held him there a moment longer.

Then he turned.

Henry followed.

He did not look back.

Not until they reached the corner.

Only once.

A final glance over his shoulder toward the door at the end of the hall.

Through the little glass panel, Y/N was still watching him.