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CHAPTER TWO THE BRANCH
If one were to take a look intoPeekay's mind, they would see the clutter of thoughts and formulating theories, arranging themselves into a labyrinth of conceptions.
Her bedroom was only a reflection of her flytrap of a mind. It was a clutter of vampire sketches that she had created through several painstaking hours of dedication abandoned on her desk, stacked underneath her copy of Dracula; charts labeling the anatomy of a bat that her former science teacher, Mr. Clarke had graciously supplied her with were hung carefully on her walls; the infamous poster that had fanned the spark of interest into the flame of passion that still burned brightly within Peekay was securely taped to the back of the door; newspaper clippings of the strange happenings over the past two years (predominately ones that focused on Will Byers and his disappearance) were pinned in every vacant space of her walls, red yarn connected each occurrence until her wall was a crimson spiderweb of conspiracies.
To Peekay Morrison, it all made sense — Will Byers' and Barbara Hollands' disappearances and subsequent deaths (excusing the fact that Will had never actually been dead), the Lab's Chemical Leak that had killed poor Barabara, and even the strange disease that had infected the previous year's harvest of pumpkins — all of it. Every minor detail was interconnected and spun into the most delicate plot, each phase was meticulously planned by the vampires, but Peekay was determined to become one of their victims.
Already, there was William Byers, the sweet boy in English, who looked as though he were haunted. Two years previously, Will Byers had disappeared on a cold November night, leaving no trace of where he had gone, save for the abandoned bike just outside of the forest. Three days later, they had dragged his body, sallow and pale, out of the quarry. There had even been a funeral for the young boy; her father had committed the young boy's body into the ground six feet below them, Will's body, cleaned of its decay and dressed in a crisp suit lay in its casket peacefully. But one day later, police chief Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers had returned victorious with Will Byers, very much alive and above ground.
Peekay knew better than to believe the cover story that they had fabricated, not when the obvious answer had been written out plainly. The vampires had finally come to Hawkins; it would explain Will's sudden reappearance (they had bitten him, injecting his blood with their venom, turning him into one of them); the mysterious illness he had contracted the previous year (a side-effect of his sudden transformation); and Barbara Holland's mysterious death (her transformation had gone horribly wrong).
