landslide

ix.

「nine」

HER EYELIDS SLOWLY BROKE APART. She couldn't breathe. Her muscles refused to function. She tried to call out for help, but her voice was nonexistent. Her lungs had no feeling. Her head was fuzzy and dry. 

Eliza stared up at the gray sky. Red lightning flared in the edges of her vision. 

Whatever tendril had pulled her into the Upside Down had flung her several meters away. Her chest and back ached; a growing soreness in her spine attacking her nerves with every movement she tried to make. 

The dimension's floating snow particles drifted down, touching her face and eyes. Eliza screamed, batting them away to no avail. But no sound escaped her lips. Her arms fell back to the ground. She gasped for breath, her chest expanding and deflating in uneven intervals - which only caused her to inhale larger portions of the toxic particles. 

She could hear the gate's membrane closing up and healing itself. The gooey, unnatural sounds made her want to shrink within her skin. 

It was a minute before she was able to sit up. A minute, or several? Half an hour? Eliza could not tell. Her mind was too foggy to process the passage of time or to begin the stretches of counting seconds to make sense of a passing minute. 

Eliza had never been to the Upside Down before. A few of the others had described it to her, but not one of their descriptions could compare to what surrounded her.  

Thunder rumbled in the far - yet threateningly close - distance. The space and sky loomed overhead in a permanent and never faltering black and gray cloud. She tried to brush the floating particles out of her hair, but every touch of her finger resulted in them dissolving like fine ash. 

She had vague and fuzzy memories of her last minutes in the regular world - their world. She remembered going for a jog to clear her head and escape the house. The weather was beautiful; a horrible joke of the occasion. She remembered devising a plan to get a ride home from Rachel, or somehow join up with the others after their meeting with Eddie. There was a creepy man on the road once she got past the residential areas. She remembered turning into the woods to avoid him. The sun started to set. 

Then she remembered the voices. 

She remembered people chasing her; following her, tracing and judging her every move. Laughing. Poking fun at her mistakes and fumbles through high school. The rumors, the lies, the hierarchy of popularity, and the invulnerability that came with it. They were chasing her. 

Yet she had never felt so alone. 

And Patrick. She remembered Patrick. 

If she met Vecna down here, she was ready to sacrifice an arm just to land one good hit on that bastard. 

Her breath returned soon enough, though the fresh ability to breathe drew in a surplus of flakes. The thought of what that stuff was scared her. Eliza may become bedridden and sick the moment she stepped back into the regular world. Who else had inhaled such amounts of it? Jim Hopper, perhaps. He had been stuck in the winding tunnels that connected the two worlds underneath their feet for days. Hopper ended up okay. 

She stared at the gate for a moment before crawling on all fours to get back through. But it sensed her movements. The gate knew what she was planning. 

The tendrils and vines snaked tighter around the edge, forming a smaller opening. Eliza lept to her feet and nearly threw herself toward the red membrane... prompting several long tailed bats to swoop in. Eliza fell back to the ground when a wing cut through her hair. The bats had the same haunting white skin as she remembered, trademark of the dimensional monsters. No eyes, small holes where several rows of minuscule teeth bared at her. They perched themselves on the edge of the gate, daring her to take two more steps.