BILLIE JEAN ( eddie munson.. ) ✔

003. Thriller, Thriller Night..

Eddie didn't call.

D&D games had the bad habit of taking hours on end to actually reach a satisfying conclusion and use up the entire initially planned plots. Billie was aware of just how much Eddie had planned for this so she couldn't really let this gut feeling that the delayed call was a bad sign. Watching "The Return of the Pink Panther" with Sam while eating pizza certainly played a part in distracting her from watching the phone and hoping it rang.

Devin had refused entirely to give the family movie night a shot. He didn't even take the peace offering of his favorite pizza, meaning that Billie carried two boxes for nothing. One had been enough for her and Sam.

Fortunately, she did manage to calm her youngest brother down about their first night without their dad home. He fell asleep on the couch, towards the end of the movie, still dirty with grease around his mouth and snoring into her shoulder.

Billie left the side of the phone for only as long as it took her to carry the sleepyhead back to his room, upstairs. She left his door slightly open, then, returning to the couch, she cleaned up: stopped the movie, put the pizza in the kitchen for when Barry got back, then got her walkman out of the bag -previously deserted- to listen to some music which was supposed to keep her awake and ready to receive Eddie's call.

She left one ear uncovered and leant back on the couch, watching the phone beside it be as still as if time itself had stopped. Eventually, the defeated position turned into a self-hug... then the darkness of the house became a menacing swirl of hypnosis, forcing her eyes to flutter close to the first tones of a new song on her Michael Jackson cassette.

"It's close to midnight and something evil's lurkin' in the dark," she heard his suave and enjoyable voice from the flashes of light happening behind her tired and closed eyes. A mind driven past fatigue and still fighting to stay awake, drifted away into dreams by clinging to the irony of those lyrics.

Now, her brain fell into a trance and believed, with all its might and glory, that her idol began narrating her life through one of his most famous songs.

"Under the moonlight you see a sight that almost stops your heart," Michael dictated that the flashes should now catch more corporal forms and so, Billie witnessed them turn into the blurred depiction of a warm night falling over the imposing presence of a house growing ever closer to her perception. In a fragmentation of lucidity, Billie realized where she was: the place where all her nightmares happened, the original Carter home.

She tried to close her eyes and shake herself awake, but instead of jolting up in the living room in the heart of Hawkins, she woke up in the living room of her childhood, a chill running down her spine as she even pinpointed the exact date. By then, hearing Michael Jackson sing in the distance became an amplifier to her shivers, to that suffocating sensation that this was it. She was trapped again.

"You try to scream."

Timely, the action unfolded right before her eyes, the way she knew it happened: Sam ran down the stairs, hurried by Devin's excited exclamations that the game they were about to play would be twice as cool with the right snack. The youngest Carter wanted to go to the kitchen, but in order to get there, he had to pass through the living room, where horror awaited for him the dark corner of the unlit room.

At first, it was just a horrible scent, making Sam gag.

Billie shook her head. She didn't want to see this. Once again, her eyes forced closed and her teeth gritted until she heard them over the mockery of Michael Jackson's "Thriller", still playing.

"But terror takes the sound before you make it."

Sam's distant scream. Her and Devin's steps stomped down the stairs. Devin's heart wrenching cry accompanied the crack of two bones. Billie heard her own scream.