In 2023, I took part in a fun project I've been following for a while. The Paris collage collective is a project where people can weekly make a collage with the same picture/ artwork. The pictures are carefully selected and licence free. The pictures are digital available, or you can buy the book with all 52 images in advance. In 2023, I finally decided to buy the book and weekly participate, and it has been such fun. It's amazing to see people all over the world working with the same image.

Nobody--not even Max, who knew about the weirdest shit in Hawkins, and lived in his house--seemed to figure him out, though she frowned at him occasionally, probably remembering how he’d basically died.  But she’d opened the door for him when he staggered back from the lab.  Her glare barely flickered when he was injured after a demodog attack, or missing when the mindflayer popped up again--and she didn’t seem to recognize him when he transformed, even though he didn’t look that different with more hair, makeup, and a guitar.  Maybe she just never looked that close, he thought, snorting softly.  

The lab hadn’t been able to explain it in any way that made sense--they’d used some kind of portal machine to shrink down the original gate, and removed the “unstable” piece from the wall.  Billy felt a kinship with the hunk of cement, having some experience being an unpredictable, unstable and dangerous part of a whole.  The rotten tooth, he thought, watching it.  Gotta remove it, before it rots out the whole jaw.

He’d spent a lot of time down in the Hawkins lab sub-basement, while they decided whether he was a monster, or controlled by one, and waited to see whether he’d live.  When it began to look like he might, he’d thought about the other questions--whether he had a monster in him, or was a monster, entirely, and whether he’d been a monster before he and the mindflayer had even met.  

He’d been able to roll over, by that point, restless in his cot, and he’d stared at the chunk of cement hovering in its surrounding incomprehensible technology until everything exploded in light and sound, and the whole room fell away into the dark fluttery place where his breath froze in his lungs.  

Billy managed to crawl to the embankment of equipment with the chunk of cement on it, and turn it back on.

The chill darkness sucked away, pooling on the walls and ceiling, and sending tendrils around Billy’s ankles, but he kept hitting switches and buttons until it was gone, standing firm on both feet for the first time since Starcourt Mall.  When it was gone, he stood panting, surrounded by staring scientists, and cracked his neck.  

“What did you do,” one of them breathed, and Billy waved at the...thing.  

“I turned it on,” he said.

“No, you did not,” said one of the others.  “It was on.  What just happened.”

“I...turned it up?” Billy asked, stretching.

“How can you walk all of a sudden,” said a third labcoated person, sounding bewildered.

“I don’t know,” Billy said, frowning down at his hands, and starting to hunch his shoulders a little at their stares.  

“Are you Billy Hargrove,” asked another one, squinting at him, and he stared back.

“What the fuck,” Billy whispered, feeling the world list around him as his knees bent, and his shoulder hit the floor.  The ceiling above looked like it was through water, fuzzy and rippling as his eyes flickered shut.  

“You are,” the scientist whispered back.  “What are you doing?!”

He’d kept some of his ability to channel the energy of the other place, they finally realized, talking around him where he’d curled up on on the cement floor.  He was connected to the world beyond the Gates.  When a Gate opened three hours later, he staggered to his feet and closed it, fumbling with the machines.

They panicked and shouted at each other as the rush of energy wore off, and he slumped to the floor.  “We need him away from the lab,” somebody said over his head.

“He might be causing the rifts,” somebody else said, in a weirdly far away voice.

When the van dropped him off outside his house, Billy staggered to the door, wondering how long it had been, whether Max, Susan, and his dad had moved back to California, and whether even if they still lived there.  He wondered whether seeing his face would be any reason to open the door.  

It opened on Max’s white face, and Billy’s knees gave out.  She half caught him, screaming, and he woke again to the ceiling of his bedroom.