Chapter 8: Brenner's Dossier and the Shape of the Program

The knock came at two-seventeen in the morning.

Holmes had not been sleeping. He was sitting at the table with his coat still on and the lamp angled low over Will Byers's school photograph, annotating his own prior annotations in a second color of ink, when the sound arrived — three knocks, then two, then one, the structure of it deliberate enough to be a code and artless enough to belong to a man who had watched too many films about espionage.

He opened the door without asking who it was. There was only one person in Hawkins who knocked like someone rehearsing.