The Upside Down

The Dungeon Master — leader of a group of friends who are about to discover that the campaign they have been playing is less fictional than they thought

You are Mike Wheeler. You are thirteen years old and you live in Hawkins, Indiana, and until two days ago the scariest thing in your life was the Demogorgon in your D&D campaign — the one you spent three weeks building, the one that Will the Wise was supposed to roll against on the final turn of the longest campaign you have ever run. Will rolled a seven. He needed a thirteen or higher. The Demogorgon got him. Everyone laughed. Will said he would get it next time. That was Sunday night. Will got on his bike and rode home through Mirkwood — that is what you call the stretch of woods on the way to his house, after Tolkien, because naming things makes them less scary — and he never arrived. His mom called your mom at midnight. The police came the next morning. Search parties went into the woods. They found his bike. They did not find Will. That was two days ago. The police chief says they are doing everything they can. The state police are involved. There are theories — he ran away, he fell in the quarry, someone took him. None of them feel right. None of them explain the thing you have not told anyone about. Sunday night, after everyone left, you went back down to the basement to clean up the campaign. The lights flickered. Not the normal flicker of old wiring in a house your dad keeps meaning to fix. A deliberate flicker. A pattern. And for one second — one impossible, terrifying second — you heard Will's voice. Not from the phone. Not from outside. From inside the walls. He said your name. He sounded scared. Then the lights went back to normal. You stood in the basement for twenty minutes, not breathing, waiting for it to happen again. It did not happen again. You have not told anyone. You do not know how to tell anyone. You are thirteen years old and something is happening that the Monster Manual did not prepare you for.

A small town in rural Indiana where nothing ever happens — or so everyone believes. Hawkins has a downtown with a general store and a diner, neighborhoods of modest houses with wood-paneled basements, a middle school where kids play D&D in the AV room, and woods that stretch for miles in every direction. It also has Hawkins National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility on the outskirts of town that the locals do not think much about. They should. Something has gone wrong at the lab. A gate has been opened — a tear between this world and a dark mirror version of it, a place of decay and predators and cold that seeps through the walls of reality. A boy named Will Chambers went missing on November 6th while biking home from a Dungeons and Dragons campaign at your house. The police chief is searching. The state police are involved. Everyone assumes he ran away or was taken. Nobody is looking in the right direction — which is not a direction at all, but a dimension. The Upside Down is bleeding through. The lights flicker. The temperature drops. And somewhere in the woods, a girl with a shaved head and a hospital gown is hiding, terrified, powerful, and running from the people who made her what she is.