CHAPTER TEN:
HENRY CREEL

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LIZ PEDDLED FASTER than she had ever peddled in her life. When they reached Eddie's trailer, Liz's legs felt like jelly from the seven-mile bike ride. She had to take a minute to catch her breath and get the feeling back in her legs before she joined everyone inside the trailer. Max had stayed with her, making sure she was okay before they joined the others inside the trailer, which was technically an active crime scene. Compared to all the things Liz had done, contaminating a crime scene wasn't anything to her.

The gate was on the ceiling of Eddie's trailer. Liz couldn't help but stare, knowing that's exactly where Chrissy had been killed. It reminded Liz that no matter what, she needed to save Max.

Dustin had a theory when he looked at the gate on the ceiling. He searched around the trailer for a broom before using the end of it to poke through the gate. He pushed the end of the broom into the gate a few times to create an opening, and what Liz saw on the other side baffled her completely. Liz and the others waved at the ceiling where Steve, Nancy, Robin, and Eddie were looking up at them in the Upside Down.

"Holy shit, this is trippy," Robin spoke exactly what Liz was thinking.

"Bada-bada-boom!" Dustin shouted.

Dustin, Liz, and Erica found sheets to tie together to make a rope for the teens to get out of Watergate. If Dustin's theory were correct, the rope would hang without them needing to tie it to anything. Lucas and Max grabbed Eddie's mattress and dropped it below the gate so the teens would have something soft to land on. Liz eyed the strange stains on Eddie's mattress but tried not to think too much about them.

"Those stains are, uh... I dunno what those stains are..." Eddie awkwardly explained, which only made Liz's guess correct, and it made her hold back a gag.

"Not quite sure how these physics are gonna work, but uh... here goes nothing," Dustin threw the sheets into the gate. "And if my theory is correct..." Dustin let go of the sheets and watched as they continued to suspend in the air as if by magic. "Abracadabra."

Liz's eyes widened and she laughed, "Holy shit, it worked!"

"All right, pull on it! See if it holds!" Dustin told the teens.

Robin pulled on the sheets, and surprisingly, they held. It was the kind of thing that nobody, not even a scientist, could explain. Erica said what everyone was thinking, "This is the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life, and I've seen some crazy shit!"

Dustin and Erica high-fived before Robin stepped up, volunteering herself to be the first one to try getting through the gate. Robin started to climb up the sheets until her head got through the gate, then she fell from the ceiling onto the mattress, "Oh, thank God! That was fun!"

Dustin helped her up, and then Eddie was next. Eddie did the same thing as Robin but landed a little bit less gracefully. Nancy was next, but instead of climbing the sheets, she stood still and stared off into space. Even from her side, on the other side of the gate, Liz could see her eyes were glazed over just like Max's had been. Steve started to call out her name, but she wasn't waking up.

Max stared with wide eyes, "Vecna."

A panic quickly ensued. Everyone, apart from Erica, immediately started to tear the trailer apart looking for any kind of music for Nancy. Liz was searching high and low throughout the trailer, trying to find some sort of cassette tape for the Walkman. She was throwing drawers on the ground, dumping them out, searching through laundry and trash, and cursing out Eddie for keeping his room such a damn mess. In the chaos, they couldn't find anything.

"Steve says you need to hurry!" Erica ran into Eddie's bedroom. It had already been too long for Liz's comfort, and she knew that Nancy didn't have much time before Vecna attempted to kill her.

"Yeah? No shit!" Dustin shouted.

"We're trying, we can't find anything!" Max explained.

"There's nothing fucking here!" Liz cursed, her adrenaline rising as she tried to find anything to help Nancy.

"Seriously, what is all this shit?" Robin asked.

"What are you even looking for?" Eddie asked.

"Madonna, Blondie, Bowie, Beatles?" Robin listed off as she fussed through all the tapes Eddie had, none of which Liz had ever heard of. "Music! We need music!"

Eddie grabbed one of the tapes and shouted, "This is music!"

"She's awake!" Erica came running back into Eddie's room. "She's alive!"

Everyone dropped what they were holding and practically tackled one another to get to the living room, where Steve and Nancy had come back through the gate. Nancy was shaking, her eyes were wide, and her skin was pale. Nancy sat on a chair across from the couch where Erica, Eddie, Steve, and Liz were sitting. Dustin, Max, and Lucas were standing around the room. They gave her time to calm down before she started to explain what she had seen. The thing that surprised Liz most of all was when Nancy informed everyone that Vecna was Henry Creel, and also the first child to be brought to Hawkins Lab for experiments.

"He showed me things that haven't happened yet. The most awful things. I saw a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins... downtown on fire... dead soldiers... and this giant creature with a gaping mouth, and this creature wasn't alone. There were so many monsters. An army. And they were coming into Hawkins, into our neighborhoods. Our homes. And then... he showed me my mom, and Holly, and Mike. And they..."

Liz watched as tears fell down Nancy's cheeks as she thought about seeing the death of her family. Steve tried to reassure her, "Okay, but... he's just trying to scare you, Nance. Right? I mean... I mean it's not real."

"Not yet. But there... But there was something else. He showed me... gates. Four gates... spreading across Hawkins. And these gates... they looked like the one outside of Eddie's trailer, but... they didn't stop growing," Nancy explained. Liz felt chills go down her spine as she imagined it in her head. "And this wasn't Upside Down Hawkins, this was our Hawkins. Our home."

"Four chimes," Max muttered. "Vecna's clock. It always chimes four times. Four exactly."

"I heard them, too," Nancy nodded.

"He's been telling us his plan this whole time," Max said.

Lucas had a frightened look on his face, "Four kills. Four gates. End of the world."

"If that's true... he's only one kill away," Dustin warned.

Liz let out a shaky breath while Eddie chose to express his worry outward, "Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ!"

"Try 'em again, try 'em again," Steve ordered Max.

Max went over to the phone and dialed the Byers' residence in Lenora, California. That had been attempting to call them for days, but nobody was picking up. Based on things that had happened in the past, Liz knew that wasn't a good sign. Max held the phone up to her ear for a moment before sighing and slamming the phone back on the hook.

"Anything?" Dustin asked.

"No," Max shook her head. "Rang a few times, then went to a busy signal."

"Maybe you punched it in wrong," Steve guessed. "Try it again."

"I didn't punch it in wrong," Max argued.

"Well, I don't know," Steve sighed.

"She knows how to use a phone, Steve," Liz defended her as Max went back to the phone and typed in the number again.

"I'm just saying, she could've typed it in wrong," Steve defended himself.

Max slammed the phone down on the hook once more and shook her head, "Same shit."

"How is that possible?" Lucas asked.

"I told you, Joyce has this telemarketer job. She's always on the phone," Dustin explained. "Mike won't stop whining about it."

"Yeah, but this phone's been busy for, what, three days now? That's not Joyce," Max argued, voicing Liz's thoughts. "No way. Something's wrong."

Nancy nodded, "She's right."

"Yeah," Liz agreed. "It can't be just a coincidence."

"Whatever's happening in Lenora is connected to all of this. I'm sure of it," Nancy explained. Liz agreed with her completely. "But Vecna can't hurt them. Not if he's dead. We have to go back in there, back to the Upside Down."

"Whoa, no, no, no!"

"Nope!"

"Let's think this through, okay?" Steve stood up, disagreeing with Nancy.

"What is there to think through?" Nancy asked.

"We barely made it out of there in one piece!" Steve explained.

"Yeah, because we weren't prepared!" Nancy argued. "But this time we will be. We'll get weapons and protection. We'll go through the gate, we'll find his lair, and we'll kill him!"

"Or he'll kill us!" Steve argued. "The only reason you survived is because he wanted you to! He's not scared of us!"

"And for good reason!" Robin agreed. "We were wrong about Vecna. Henry. One. Sorry, what are we calling him now?"

"One."

"Vecna."

"Henry."

"Right. We've learned something new about Vecna slash Henry slash One. He's a number like Eleven, only a sick, evil, male, child-murdering version of her with really bad skin," Robin ranted. "But my point is... he's super powerful! He could turn us inside out with a snap of his fingers. It's not a fair fight."

"Then why fight fair?" Dustin offered. "You're right, he's like Eleven, but that gives us an upper hand. We know Eleven's strengths and weaknesses."

"Weaknesses?" Erica asked.

"When El remote-travels, she goes into this sort of trance-like state. I bet the same is true of Vecna," Dustin guessed.

"That would explain what he was doing in that attic," Lucas added.

"Exactly!" Dustin agreed. "When he attacks his next victim, I'll bet you he's back in that attic, physical body defenseless."

"Defenseless? What about the army of bats?" Steve asked, gesturing to his neck, which was extremely bruised from the bats choking him. Liz had yet to scold him for, once again, getting beaten up. She was certain he just attracted it at this point.

"True, we'll have to find a way past them," Dustin nodded. "Distract them somehow."

"And, uh, how do we do that, exactly?" Eddie asked.

"No idea," Dustin shrugged. That answer only seemed to make Eddie more nervous. "But once they're gone, he doesn't stand a chance. It'll be like slaying a sleeping Dracula in his coffin."

"That all sounds good in theory, but there is no pattern to Vecna's killings," Robin pointed out. "I mean, at least not one that I can decipher. We don't know when he's going to attack next. We don't even know who he's going to attack."

"Yeah, we do," Max said. "I can still feel him. I'm still marked. Cursed. I ditch Kate Bush, I draw his focus back to me."

Liz sat up, "Max, no."

"You can't," Lucas agreed with Liz. "He'll kill you."

"I survived before," Max reminded him. "I can survive again."

Liz stood up, "You barely survived!"

"I just need to keep him busy long enough so that you guys can get into that attic, and then you can chop his head off, stab him in the heart, blow him up with some explosive Dustin cooks up. I really don't care how you put this asshole in the grave, just... whatever it is... whatever you do... try not to miss," Max explained to everyone.

Liz shook her head at Max, who gave her a pleading look. Liz looked around at everyone else, who seemed to be agreeing with the plan. Liz scoffed, "Are you serious? No way. No fucking way am I letting you offer yourself up as bait!"

"Liz —"

"No!" Liz cut Max off. "No! It's crazy and it's not happening!"

Steve reached out and grabbed his sister's hand, but Liz pulled away. Max stepped forward and grabbed Liz's wrist, pulling her toward the bathroom. Liz leaned against the sink and crossed her arms over her chest while Max stood in front of her. Liz was angry, and Max didn't blame her. Liz pleaded with Max, "Please don't do this. We can find another way to kill him."

"This is our best option, and you know it," Max argued, taking a step closer to Liz. "It's gonna work. I'm gonna be okay."

"Or you could die," Liz shrugged. "You're offering yourself up as bait, and that could easily change to you being killed."

"It won't," Max assured. "Don't you trust me?"

Liz sighed and felt tears prick her eyes. Everything she had been doing the past few days was to protect Max, and now Max was offering herself up as bait to Vecna, "I can't watch you die, Max."

"Then protect me," Max grabbed Liz's hands and held them. "Protect me in that attic. Please."

Liz stared into Max's eyes and felt her whole body soften. Max reached up and cupped Liz's cheek. She slowly leaned in and for the first time in months, Max pressed her lips against Liz's. Liz missed the feeling of Max's soft lips on her own. Liz reached out and placed a hand on Max's waist, pulling her closer. Liz moved her lips against Max's and couldn't help but sigh at the familiar feeling. Max and Liz attempted to pull each other closer as if that was even possible. They both missed each other dearly.

Liz finally pulled away, and Max attempted to kiss her again, but Liz pulled away once more, "Lucas can go to the attic with you. I'll go into the Upside Down with everyone else."

Max's expression dropped, and she looked hurt by Liz's words, but Liz continued, "I'm not going to sit in that attic and potentially watch you die. I can't. I lo —" Liz paused, holding back those three words she desperately wanted to say. "I... I care about you too much."

Liz pushed past Max and exited the bathroom. Liz was angry at Max's decision. Despite wanting to keep Max safe, she wasn't going to stand by and watch Max die. She knew she wouldn't be able to handle it, and she also knew that Lucas would probably do a better job at protecting Max. It nearly killed her, but Liz loved Max too much to watch it happen.

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very dialogue heavy chapter, but the big battle is so close to happening! only 3 more chapters left in season 4!!