“AH HA HA HA HA HA!” I laughed as Travis opened his front door to let me in, “What are you wearing? You look like something out of Spy Kids!”
“We’re going to be spying on someone, aren’t we?” he shot back, “So I brought spy equipment.”
“Dude, those are toys your parents bought for your little brother last Christmas. They’re not spy equipment; they’re probably going to do a better job blowing our cover as you fiddle around with all the buttons and doohickies. Do those things make beeping noises when you turn them on?”
Travis paused before saying “Some of them do.”
“Exactly. Hang on to the binoculars, leave the rest.”
We rode our bikes to a park that was near Charlie’s neighborhood and locked them to the park’s bike racks. We didn’t want to have our modes of transportation visible to Charlie. If he saw our bikes parked near his place while we were trying to snoop on him, then saw us riding the same bikes later, he might get suspicious.
As we approached Charlie’s neighborhood, I was mentally psyching myself up so I wouldn’t be afraid to spy on a hulked-up metalhead drummer who might also be a demon. Travis, on the other hand, was occupying his mind with irrelevant minutia.
“Hey Eric, this area is just a suburb. It’s all houses,” he said. Sure enough, it was your standard clump of houses all built at the same time designed by the same architect. Par for the course in a suburban town like Felmore.
“Yeah, so?”
“When we first found Charlie playing in the band room, he told us he lived in a crappy apartment.”
“Who cares?” I waved Travis off and went back to navigating.
We reached Charlie’s street, Muir Avenue, and started walking down it. It wasn’t long before I spotted a mailbox with his street number, 106, from a distance. I had to admit, I was a little disappointed he didn’t live in a house that was numbered “666.” If he had, we probably could have concluded our investigation right there, but apparently there aren’t too many houses with that number in Felmore according to the phone book.
“This has to be it,” I said, “Travis, hand me your binoculars.”
The house itself appeared pretty ordinary, from what I could tell by looking at it through the binoculars. It was a single-story house painted emerald green with a single door garage, a long front porch, and a decent sized front yard. There was a silver Honda CR-V parked in the driveway that looked like it was at least 10 years old. Unfortunately, we had never seen Charlie drive, so this car did nothing to confirm whether this was his house or not.
“Let’s take a closer look,” Travis said, taking a step forward.
“Wait!” I hissed as I held my arm out in front of him, “We can’t approach from the front of the house! Look at the size of the windows in his living room. If we approach from the front he could see us waltzing up. Our cover would be blown. No, we gotta approach from the rear.”
I led Travis to Favreau Street, the street parallel to Muir Avenue, and started down Favreau instead. We stopped when we reached 105 Favreau.
“According to the map, Charlie’s backyard should be behind this house’s backyard. All we need to do is cut through his neighbor’s yard. With any luck, they’ll have some hedges or tall flowers on the property line we can use to hide in,” I explained. I couldn’t actually see the backyard from the street, since the houses next door were so close I couldn’t get a good view, but I figured there had to be something.
“Wait,” Travis said, “Are you sure you’ve got the right place?”
“Yes, I’m sure I’ve got the right place, Travis! You were there when we looked it up, remember?!”
“Yeah, but I also remember Charlie saying he lived in an apartment.”
“English isn’t even his first language. Maybe he got the words for ‘apartment’ and ‘house’ mixed up. It’s an easy mistake to make, especially since he was so flustered at the time,” I said, becoming frustrated.
Backing off the subject, Travis asked “So the plan is to run through Charlie’s neighbor’s front yard, run through his neighbor’s backyard, hide in the bushes between their houses, and spy on Charlie from his backyard, since that way we’ll be less likely to have our cover blown than spying on Charlie from his front yard?”
“Exactly.”
Travis’s expression revealed some remaining degree of confusion, or skepticism, but I wasn’t about to let his naysaying get in the way of my plan.
“Alright, let’s get in position. I’m going to count down from three, then we’ll sprint to Charlie’s backyard. Ready? Three, tw…”
“Wait!” Travis interrupted.
“What?!” I asked, beginning to get annoyed.
“The whole reason Charlie said he was practicing in the band room at school was because he said his neighbors would complain to his landlord if he practiced in his apartment,” Travis stated with a completely straight face, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to bring this up right before we were about to run across a stranger’s property.
I paused for a few seconds before I asked again, “What?!”
“The whole reason Charlie said he was practicing in the band room at school was because he said his neighbors would complain to his landlord if he practiced in his apartment,” Travis repeated.
“I heard what you said, Travis! Why are you interrupting my countdown to tell me this?!”
“This is a house. Charlie said he lived in an apartment. It was the entire reason he was rehearsing in the band room the day we found him there. So why are we spying into a house looking for Charlie?”
Travis is my best friend, he really is, but he’s not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, in case that wasn’t already obvious. I spent all last night figuring out where Charlie lived to make a detailed plan for how Travis and I would spy on him to settle if he was a dark pagan deity once and for all. I think I knew what I was talking about when I said we needed to sprint through the neighbor’s yard to get a view of the back of Charlie’s house. Yet Travis thought it was more important to waste valuable time bickering over whether we had the right place or not.
“I DON’T KNOW, TRAVIS! MAYBE HE MEANT TO SAY HE RENTS A HOUSE INSTEAD OF AN APARTMENT! DRUMS ARE LOUD, IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED! IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME IF HIS NEIGHBORS COULD HEAR HIM PLAYING DRUMS FROM THEIR HOUSES! THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE IN THE STURLUSON AREA PHONE BOOK WITH HIS NAME LISTED, SO UNLESS YOU’VE GOT ANY BETTER SUGGESTIONS FOR WHERE HE MIGHT LIVE, SHUT UP!”
Neighborhood dogs started to bark, windows started to light up as people flicked their lights on, and a few peeked out their windows and doors to see what all the racket was. I may have raised my voice a little too much for 8:30 AM on a Saturday in a middle class neighborhood.
“Uh oh, Eric, looks like our cover’s blown. What’s the plan now?”
I didn’t exactly have a plan B in case our cover got blown. I figured my plan A was so bullet-proof that I didn’t need one (and if it hadn’t been for Travis’s constant pestering, I would have been correct). But I couldn’t let it look like I didn’t have a plan; Travis expected me to be a leader, I had to deliver.
“Let’s go eat ice cream,” I said, trying to sound authoritative.
“Ice cream?” Travis asked, confused. Poor guy was having trouble keeping up with my genius.
“Yes, ice cream! Very important for keeping our energy and brain function up as spies. I have some back at my house, but we need to eat it now, otherwise this entire operation will be in jeopardy. So let’s get out of here and go back to my house! Quickly, there’s no time to waste!”
We bolted back to the park where we left our bikes, away from the view of any of Charlie’s neighbors who may have gotten a good look at us while Travis was making me yell at him. From there we biked home and had a much-needed snack break after all that intense spy work.
We returned about an hour later, after changing our clothes just in case anyone may have recognized us.
Fortunately, 105 Favreau Street still seemed to be inactive. But I couldn’t say the same about some of the other houses in the neighborhood; the sound of lawnmowers alerted us that our window of opportunity was about to close if we wanted to make it into Charlie’s backyard undetected.
“Alright, Travis, it’s now or never. I’m going to count down from three, and I don’t want you interrupting me this time,” I instructed. Travis nodded silently.
We both got into position to sprint past the side of this house into the backyard.
“Ready? Three, two, one, go!”
We both took off. Travis was surprisingly fast, disappearing into the backyard almost as soon as I had said “go.” As a stitch immediately formed in my gut as I tried to run, I realized ice cream may have been a bad choice.
I rounded the corner of the house into the backyard so I could stop and survey my surroundings before I made the final sprint to the property line. I wanted to make sure no one would see me as I did it, as well as check for any obstacles in the yard so I wouldn’t trip over them. I also needed to catch my breath and get rid of this stitch that was starting to kill me after only a few seconds.
Unfortunately, Travis had the same idea and I bumped into him, knocking both of us over.
“Uhhh, did it occur to you to leave room for m-” Travis cut me off as he slapped his hand over my mouth and pointed.
Fortunately for us, there were hedges and flowers covering the property line that would be perfect to hide in. Unfortunately, they were currently being tended to by an old lady with her back turned to us.
Travis and I tried to slowly stand up without making any noise. I was somewhat successful. However, I sort of stepped on a hoe in the process. You know how in cartoons when people step on hoes the handle flies up and hits them in the face? Well in this case the handle was on the ground between Travis’s feet as he tried to stand up. So it wasn’t exactly his face the hoe handle hit.
“Oooooooh!” Travis said, not very quietly.
Doubled over in pain, he fell back down to the ground with a not very quiet thump.
I looked back at the old lady, terrified that she would have heard us. However, she hadn’t moved, continuing to tend to her flowers.
Travis slowly rose again, letting out a groan. He only stood fully erect for a few seconds before bending over to put his hands on his knees and let out a few more various vowel sounds as he stared at the ground: “Ooooh, aaaaah, ugggh, haaaaah,” eventually he was able to stand back up and speak, “Thanks for that!” his voice cracked to about the same octave as Mickey Mouse and every bit as piercing.
I tried to hold in a chuckle, partially because it would have been rude to laugh at my friend’s pain, but mostly because I was afraid the old lady would hear us. However, she still had her back toward us, diligently watering, trimming, and whatever else you do to a garden. Look, I get that old ladies find their dumb hobbies much more interesting than they actually are, but there’s no way you’d be so engrossed in your garden that you’d tune out a couple of teenage boys scrambling into your backyard and running into each other. Unless…
“Travis!” I said, “The old lady’s hard of hearing! She doesn’t even know we’re here!”
Sure enough, the old lady didn’t even react to me speaking at a somewhat normal volume and continued to garden.
Travis, having finally regained his breath, replied with “That’s great and all, but how are we supposed to spy on Charlie from the hedges when she’s in the middle of watering them?”
Shoot. I hadn’t quite thought of that. I must have given him a deer-caught-in-headlights face because he followed up with “Do we need to go on another ice cream break?”
I wasn’t entirely sure if he was serious or just taking a dig at me, but either way I snapped out of it and said “No! But let’s run back to the sidewalk before she turns around and sees us. Hurry!”
Thanks to Travis’s mishap with the hoe, I was able to beat him back to the sidewalk. Once he met me there and caught his breath he said “Charlie’s neighbor is deaf.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I replied, “I just told you that a minute ago.”
“You also said his neighbors would be able to hear him drumming in his house from their houses.”
Although Travis continued to try my patience, I resisted the urge to scream at him again and said “In case you haven’t noticed,” I gestured to all the houses surrounding us, “Charlie has more than one neighbor. I’m sure they’re not all deaf. We’ll have to spy on him from one of the other neighbors’ yards instead. Now let’s go.”
We walked back to Muir Avenue and surveyed the scene. We could see a few lights on inside 106 Muir, so that meant barging in through his front lawn was still out of the question. 108 Muir, on the other hand, had all its lights off and according to the map, its backyard was far enough from 105 Favreau’s backyard that the old deaf lady wouldn’t see us while she was gardening.
Having learned our lesson from running into each other, we decided against sprinting into the backyard this time, instead slowly scaling the side of 108 Muir facing away from Charlie’s house. This way there would be no sudden surprises and Charlie wouldn’t be able to catch a glimpse of us sneaking into his next door neighbor’s backyard.
As we reached the corner of the house, we slowly peeked around at Charlie’s next door neighbor’s backyard. Although there were a bunch of kids’ toys lying around, the coast was otherwise clear. The deaf old lady couldn’t see us from this distance, and there were three big evergreen trees on the property line between the neighbor’s backyard and Charlie’s that could provide cover. I took a quick peek through the binoculars at the windows on the side of Charlie’s house to see if I could get a glimpse at him, but no one was there and I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary in his house.
I motioned to Travis for us to get a closer view of Charlie’s house. We slowly traversed the neighbor’s backyard, making sure we weren’t tripping over any of the squirt guns, action figures, and footballs on the ground. We also kept an eye on the neighbor’s rear windows, praying no one would look out and see a couple of delinquents trespassing on their property. After what seemed like ages, we reached the evergreen trees, and since there were three of them we were both able to fit into our own space between two of them.
If his next door neighbor’s backyard was cluttered, it was nothing compared to Charlie’s. He had some kind of jungle gym-like device with a bunch of metal bars welded together, some weird metal bars on the ground, a triangular-shaped device with handles sticking out of it, a bunch of weight plates, and a few other things I couldn’t identify. Despite all this stuff taking up a good deal of backyard space, Charlie appeared to be rather economical with it, as he also designated room for a small garden of his own. Unlike his neighbor in 105 Favreau, Charlie took a more pragmatic and less aesthetic approach with his garden, as he appeared to be growing stuff like tomatoes, carrots, and broccoli.
Charlie’s house had a back porch with some other miscellaneous clutter I couldn’t identify, with a staircase below it with a door at the bottom that must have led to Charlie’s basement. I tried to shift into a better position to see inside the house, but the branches and thorns of the evergreen trees made this difficult to do without making a bunch of noise that could have given me away.
As I tried to change my position discreetly, I heard the creak of a window opening, prompting me to freeze for fear of blowing our cover. I scanned the house to see which window had been opened, but that became obvious a couple seconds later when I heard the intro riff to “Infected,” by Obituary coming from one of the tiny basement windows.
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
We heard someone inside breathing heavily, followed by a metallic sliding sound, then a few minutes later the person inside started making the sound again:
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
“Uuuuurgh!”
Thud, thud
This continued a few more times. About 15 minutes after the music had started we heard the door at the bottom of the staircase open, music continuing to blare (at this point, the song was “Circle of the Tyrants,” since this person was playing the entire Cause of Death album). Despite all the noise, Travis and I stayed perfectly still, trying to breathe as little as possible. We could hear footsteps ascending the staircase, and shortly after a head came into view. Even if we hadn’t seen his face, we would have known who it was; not many people would have been tall enough for their head to appear after only a couple steps on that staircase. It was Charlie.
He had his long hair tied back in a ponytail, and was wearing a torn up tank top that revealed just how jacked he was. Whatever exercise he had been doing in his basement had gotten him to work up a sweat. He carried a boombox, the source of the music, in one hand, and a bunch of chains in the other. He put the boombox down and draped the chains around his shoulders, then jumped and grabbed a horizontal bar that was attached to one of the various contraptions occupying his backyard. He proceeded to do pull-ups, with about 10 thick chains hanging off his shoulders for additional resistance.
“Holy cow,” Travis whispered, “How much do you think those chains weigh?”
“Sshhhhh!” I responded. I didn’t care how loud Charlie was blasting his music, I was not about to let Travis give away our position after all we had gone through to get to this point.
We kept observing Charlie as he continued to perform jaw-dropping feats of strength. As his CD reached the sixth track of the album, “Find the Arise,” he loaded up two of these weird handlebar things up with three 45 pound plates on each side, lifted one handlebar with each hand, then started walking back and forth across his backyard while carrying this insane amount of weight. But even with the music blastic and Charlie grunting noisily, neither sound covered the unmistakable sound of a car door closing.
Travis and I both froze. Well, we were already staying still, but we froze even more. The sound of children’s voices confirmed our initial suspicion: the people whose property we were trespassing on were home. One of the children said “Dad, the weird guy next door is blasting that noise again.”
The father replied “Sigh, I’ll go ask him to turn it down.”
Crap! He was coming right for us! Our only choice was to make a run for it into the backyard of 107 Favreau Street and pray no one would be there to see us.
“Travis!” I whispered as loudly as I could, “Bail! Now!” I said as I pointed to the end of the backyard where it bordered 107 Favreau’s property.
We bolted for the end of the backyard, immediately tripping on all the squirt guns, action figures, and footballs all over the ground. We scrambled to pick ourselves up and kept going. Travis, hampered by his injury below the belt, was a bit slow, but we were both able to make a dive into the hedges that bordered 108 Muir and 107 Favreau before anyone saw us.
We peeked out from the hedges to watch the confrontation occur. Charlie’s next door neighbor’s first challenge was to get Charlie’s attention, as he was still walking back and forth across his yard with something like 300+ pounds in each hand.
“Charlie? Hey, Charlie? Charlie! Over here! Excuse me?” Charlie’s next door neighbor shouted. Charlie eventually dropped the weights he was carrying with a loud thud and looked at his neighbor with an expression of mild annoyance, at least from what I could tell from the hedges.
“Could you turn the music down?”
Charlie just stared at his neighbor with a look of confusion.
“Can…you…turn…the…music…down?” Charlie’s neighbor repeated, miming his words as he said them. Well, at least he tried to mime them out. His trembling in what appeared to be fear made that somewhat difficult.
Charlie continued to say nothing for a few more seconds before replying, “Oh! You want me turn boom box down?” in a way thicker accent than he usually had, with much more broken English.
“Yes!” Charlie’s neighbor exclaimed, giving a two-thumbs up sign.
“Okay! I turn down!” Charlie replied.
“Thanks, Charlie!” his neighbor said as he quickly returned to the front of his house, seemingly not wanting to let the conversation continue for any longer than it had to.
I thought I saw Charlie roll his eyes before he loaded one of the other contraptions up with several weight plates and started pushing it across his back yard. I didn’t see him touch the boom box once.
“Okay, now let’s carefully get out of these hedges and check for anyone who might see us, especially in 107 Favreau,” I whispered, slowly maneuvering myself to get out of the hedges without making much noise in the process (and failing).
“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Travis replied, “A branch has been poking me in the exact place you hit me with that hoe this entire time.”
As we snuck into the backyard of 107 Favreau, I scanned the area and to my relief, no lights were on in the house and no one was in the backyard. We were in the clear. We both stood up straight, stretched, and brushed off all the pine needles, leaves, twigs, dirt, and whatever else we had coated ourselves in during our expedition.
“Well, what can we conclude from our little mission today?” I asked Travis.
“That you were right, Charlie does live here after all?” Travis replied, almost unsure of his answer.
“Well, yes,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes, “But more importantly, the whole ‘demon’ question is settled. Did that look like a demon to you?”
“Nope, just your average, everyday muscled-up, insanely strong, monstrously tall Eastern European middle school janitor,” Travis joked.
“Exactly,” I said, ignoring Travis’s wisecrack, “I don’t know what’s up with his tattoo looking like our rashes, but if he were really up to some sinister plot, I think he’d want to be a few levels subtler than grunting, lifting, and dropping heavy weights with Obituary blasting in his backyard. I think it’s safe to rule out Charlie as a suspect.”
Travis was no longer listening to me, instead looking off to the side.
“Hello, Travis? Did you not hear anything I just said?” I asked, annoyed at his tiny attention span.
“Dude, look,” he responded.
I followed Travis’s eyes and realized he was staring at the old gardening lady from 105 Favreau, who must have seen us and was now staring directly at us. She smiled and waved. Almost automatically, we waved back in unison. The old lady then walked in through her back door and closed it without saying a word.
We both stood there, dumbfounded for a good couple minutes before my mind started working again and I asked Travis:
“Let’s get out of here?”
“Let’s get out of here.”