Chapter 24: Will Byers Comes Home; What That Costs

The hospital corridor smelled of ammonia and old coffee and the specific variety of synthetic carpet that institutions deployed in colors no one would choose voluntarily. Holmes was acquainted with hospital corridors from the other side of the professional equation — as a man who arrived with evidence and left with conclusions — and found this angle of approach considerably less efficient. There was nothing to observe that told him anything useful. There was only the waiting, which he had never been good at, and the sounds from behind the swing doors at the corridor's far end, which told him the medical staff were working with urgency but not panic, which was the most he had been able to determine for the past forty-three minutes.

He sat in a plastic chair of a color that might charitably be called harvest gold and opened his notebook to a clean page.

He dated it first. November 1983, Hawkins Memorial Hospital, Hawkins, Indiana. The date felt important in a way dates rarely did — not as orientation but as documentation, as the kind of fact that needed to be fixed in place before the surrounding tissue of the event collapsed into impression and approximation. Dates were the scaffolding. Holmes had spent enough nights in enough corridors to know that memory without scaffolding became elegiac rather than accurate, and elegiac was not useful.