Chapter Text
Prologue
Remember that a stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet. Or perhaps they’re a secret agent sent to shut you up.
Hawkins, WSQK radio station. Three weeks after the gates of the Other Side closed. Returning to ‘normal’ life is proving difficult. Steve Harrington was wiping the counter with obsessive thoroughness, as if hoping to wipe away not only the prints of his palms, but also the memories of the recent nightmare. A ray of sunlight streaming through the shop window illuminated the dust motes swirling in the thick, almost viscous air. To Steve, every swipe of the cloth seemed like a pointless ritual: he kept freezing in the middle of the room anyway, his gaze fixed on the empty space between the coffee machine and the display case. His ears picked up every sound—not just the clink of crockery or the hum of the fridge, but also the silence, thick as syrup, in which even his own breathing was all too clear. It felt as though the silence was lurking behind him, ready at any moment to burst with the creak of a floorboard, the echo of footsteps, or a rustle, followed by something vile and alien.
‘Harrington, are you off in a world of your own again?’ Robin’s voice, like a tap on glass, brought him back to reality. She was checking the recording equipment, but her fingers moved mechanically, her gaze remaining glassy and wary, like that of an animal alert to an unseen danger. ‘That’s the fifth time in an hour.’
‘Quiet,’ muttered Steve, struggling to put the rag back on the shelf. ‘It’s… too loud.’ They exchanged a glance, and neither needed to explain what the other meant. After the dungeons, the Demogorgons and Vekna, after fleeing through sticky corridors and fighting for their lives, the mundane silence of an ordinary day had suddenly become unbearable. It rang in their ears like an alarm, like a void in which monsters could be lurking behind every door — and in which it was all too easy to hear an unfamiliar Chevrolet with tinted windows standing outside for far too long, its headlights off even in the evening.
Meanwhile, at the offices of the school newspaper, the Hawkins Post. Nancy Wheeler, biting her lip, was studying two photographs taken by Jonathan Byers. In one, she and Steve were at the WSQK radio station; in the other, she and Jonathan were outside his house. But in both, in different corners of the frame, the same silhouette kept flashing by: a man in a cap and dark glasses, frozen in the shadows, as if deliberately trying to remain unnoticed. Too coincidental to be a coincidence. Too systematic to be a figment of the imagination.
‘It’s not the paparazzi,’ Nancy said quietly, her voice trembling not with fear but with bitter irritation. ‘We’ve got nothing to hide from the press. Just…’
‘Except from everything else,’ Jonathan finished grimly, running his finger over the camera lens as if that might give him some confidence. He didn’t say aloud what they were both thinking: ‘What if they aren’t human?’