I held my enclosed hand up to knock on the door, but paused.
“What if he’s been here the entire time?” I asked Travis.
“Then we’ll ask him why,” he answered.
We both looked forward at the front door of 106 Muir Avenue as I knocked.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Birds chirped in the trees surrounding us as we waited. A couple dogs barked. But no one came to the door.
We retreated to the front of his lawn, where it met the sidewalk, and surveyed the front of Charlie’s house. All the blinds in the windows were still shut, just as they had been when we arrived, and no one had turned on any of the lights in response to the knock on the door. The Honda CR-V was parked in the driveway, the same place it had been when we came here last Saturday.
“Maybe he’s working out in his basement or backyard again?” I suggested.
“We would have heard it if he was,” Travis replied.
“Well I didn’t walk all the way here for nothing,” I said through gritted teeth as I glared at the empty house.
Travis and I had walked to Charlie’s house during lunch. We didn’t exactly know what we were looking for, but if we wanted to be metal gods there had to be something there that could have helped us. Now that we were forbidden from going into the band room, school had absolutely nothing to offer.
Sneaking out of that place was night and day compared to yesterday. The students may have regarded us as nobodies not even worth acknowledging, but the teachers were still wary of us. They weren’t so scared that we could do anything without them objecting like yesterday. Instead, they watched us closely, as if to make sure we didn’t sic our “demon” on any of them. We only managed to sneak out when the teachers had to break up a fight between two of the lacrosse players over who got to pay for Jeff Hennessy’s ice cream.
I looked around at the other houses. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t look like many of Charlie’s neighbors were home at 12:13 PM on a Tuesday.
“At least we won’t need to sneak around as much this time,” I started to head for the backyard, “Let’s try the back door.”
“Wait!” Travis grabbed my arm, “The old gardening lady in the house behind Charlie’s!”
He was right. If any of Charlie’s neighbors were home right now, it would be her. And chances were she’d be gardening at that very moment.
“So what are we supposed to do, go back to school? Let this whole trip be a waste?” I growled.
“We could try the front door.”
“We just tried the front door!” I shot back. Travis was testing my patience again.
“No, we could try going inside through the front door.”
I paused. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. But if we were going to illegally trespass for the second time in less than a week, we may as well have made it easy on ourselves.
Approaching the front door again, I reached for the doorknob. My rash started to sting ever so slightly more. I tried to turn the doorknob. Unsurprisingly, it was locked.
“Maybe he left the garage door unlocked?” Travis suggested.
No luck with that, either.
“Well at least he left his car parked in the driveway. We might find something there,” he observed.
Beginning to lose hope, I tried the driver’s side door. If we weren’t able to trespass on private property, we at least had to make ourselves look like car thieves, right?
It opened. Travis and I looked at each other in shock. I unlocked the rest of the doors using the button on the inside of the door so Travis could investigate the back seat. But it turns out we didn’t need to spend much time searching Charlie’s car.
“Travis?”
“Yeah?”
“He left his keys in the ignition.”
“Keys, you said?”
“Yes.”
“Like plural?”
“You heard right.”
“As in one of those could unlock something else that belongs to him?”
“Exactly.”
We returned to the front door to test to see if any of the keys would unlock it. It took us a few minutes, since Charlie’s keychain had several keys. Just as I was beginning to fear someone would see us and call the cops, one of the keys turned in the lock. I turned the doorknob and cracked the door open.
“Hello? Is anyone home?”
No reply. From my limited view through the cracked door I could see what appeared to be the living room, with a single recliner, a coffee table, a TV on a stand containing a bunch of home entertainment systems, and a massive CD rack in the corner.
“Charlie? Are you here? It’s Eric and Travis!”
Still nothing. I opened the door a little wider, still slowly and quietly, even though I had just shouted inside. I could now see even more CD racks, vinyl record shelves, a record player, a bunch of surround sound speakers, clothes and trash on the floor, and multiple band posters and flags covering the walls, except for one part that had a mounted shotgun. Past the living room we could see his kitchen.
“Charlie, Travis and I are coming in! If you’re here, please don’t freak out!”
Travis and I walked in, flicked a light switch, and looked around. Overall, it seemed like a pretty sweet bachelor pad living room, although it could have used a run-through with a vacuum cleaner and an air freshener. Now that we were inside, we saw a hallway to our left that looked like it led to the garage, along with a laundry room, a bathroom, and a door that probably went to the basement. The floor in the hallway was littered with boxes of ammo, clothes, and other miscellaneous junk as well. I shut the door behind me and noticed two small white blocks: one mounted on the door frame and one mounted on the door itself, sitting next to each other when I closed the door.
“Crap, crap, crap!” I exclaimed, “Travis! Charlie’s got a home security system!”
“Well I don’t hear any alarm,” he replied nonchalantly, continuing to try my patience.
“It could be one of those silent alarms! Don’t move! Don’t touch anything! The police could be here any minute, or worse, Charlie himself!”
As if he hadn’t been listening to anything I had just said, Travis returned from the kitchen holding some kind of electronic device with a keypad and a calculator screen.
“Not unless ‘disarmed-battery low’ means ‘silent alarm that will send the police, or worse, Charlie himself here any minute,’” Travis’s voice was laden with sarcasm.
I breathed a small sigh of relief, but didn’t let my guard down.
Going back to the kitchen, Travis started rummaging through the pantry and cabinets, “Man, how does this guy cook for himself with all his kitchenware strewn everywhere? It must take him ten minutes to find a fork!” He had found the fridge as I joined him in the kitchen, “I thought big, buffed-up meathead guys like him prepped all their food in tupperware. What is this mess? Is any of this food even good?” After continuing to rummage through the fridge, he pulled out a couple of steaks, “Score! These don’t expire for a couple more days. If Charlie doesn’t come back by then I’m totally grilling these!”
“Travis!” I shouted, probably a little louder than I should have, “We are not trespassing in Charlie’s house to raid his fridge! Now put those back where you found them, we don’t have much time!”
As he begrudgingly obliged, I made my way to two doorways at the end of the kitchen, careful not to trip over anything on the floor. I knocked on the door on the right first.
“What are you knocking on the door for? No one’s here!” Travis called from the kitchen as he went through each of the drawers, “Man, how many guns does this guy have?”
Grumbling, but not being able to think of a good retort, I opened the door and peaked my head in. This must have been the master bedroom. Charlie’s bed wasn’t made, and the bedsheets thrown to the side revealed a gun mount attached to the side of his bed frame holding another shotgun. The floor was cluttered with piles of dirty clothes, but there was still room for guitars and basses on stands, a few amps, a shelf full of books about rock and metal, and a desk with a drawer that contained a bunch of sheet music and tablature. The walls were also plastered with band posters. His closet contained a few leather jackets, countless band shirts, denim vests, jeans, and a few pairs of combat boots. Charlie didn’t seem to own a single blazer, tie, or suit. Probably because those would have taken up room in his closet that his gun safe occupied. At least I thought it was a gun safe. We couldn’t find out what was in it because unlike his car, this was actually locked.
As I left Charlie’s room, Travis emerged from the basement.
“Find anything interesting down there?” I asked.
“Well, at first I thought it was some kind of medieval torture dungeon, until I realized it was all a bunch of workout equipment. I guess the advantage of having a home gym is you never need to rack your weights, because they were all over the place. For a guy whose job it is to keep stuff clean and orderly, he seems to be a slob with his own stuff unless it’s related to music. What about you?”
“Nope, nothing unusual. You try the garage next, I’ll check out the spare bedroom.”
The door to the spare bedroom was a little harder to open because of the foam wedged in the cracks between the door and the door frame. Unlike every other part of his house, this room didn’t have anything on the floor to trip over, unless you counted the cables from the microphones, guitars, keyboards, basses, amps, and soundboard, and even those were velcroed to the floor in such a way to avoid just this. Charlie had converted his spare bedroom into a recording studio.
I booted up the computer that was connected to the sound board. Oddly enough, it wasn’t password protected, but I guess Charlie didn’t need a password when this computer wasn’t connected to the internet, only had recording software installed, and the only recordings he had made were testing the equipment. Although we didn’t have much time left, I couldn’t help but test out the recording gear myself, so I tooled around with all the instruments and screamed some nonsense into the mic and tried to layer the recordings together. The final product sounded decent, not super polished but not Burzum-level muddy, either.
As I deleted my impromptu demo recording, I noticed an option on the recording software that said “drum machine.” I clicked it, and sure enough, this software had a programmable drum machine you could add to your recordings if you were one of those poor bands who didn’t have a real drummer.
Wait a minute, we were one of those poor bands who didn’t have a real drummer.
I opened the door to tell Travis to come see what I had found, only to find him standing on the other side of the door already.
“Did you not hear me shouting at you to come to the garage?” he asked, annoyed.
“No, I was playing on Charlie’s drum set. Did you not hear me playing?”
“No,” he answered.
“What? How?” I asked, perplexed.
“Nevermind! Come to the garage!”
When I saw it, I understood why Travis was freaking out. Charlie had turned it into some kind of workshop, but the work he must have been doing there was more than woodworking or metalworking. He had tools for those as well, but he also had equipment I had never seen before. The shapes and angles of these tools looked so alien, I couldn’t even have guessed what they were for, or even what material they were made out of.
Taking assessment of all the guitars and other instruments in various states of disassembly, I asked “You think he was making his own custom guitars? That seems like something he would do, right? Maybe he was trying to make a guitar with its own unique look?”
“That’s not what I’m concerned about,” Travis said as he approached one of the tables and held up an object that had been sitting on it, “Does this look familiar to you?”
Despite the object looking somewhat alien itself, it did look familiar to me. It was the same device that had emitted purple vapor in Principal Porter’s office.
“Uh oh,” I said, “It didn’t let out any of that vapor we saw in Porter’s office did it?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean it’s not, uh, turned on? I’m not sure what this thing is or what it does, but I’m starting to think we should probably stop talking in its vicinity,” Travis replied.
Back in the hallway with the door to the garage shut, I said “Now I have something to show you.”
I showed him Charlie’s recording studio, played my impromptu one-man demo for him, and demonstrated the drum machine.
“With all the effects pedals Charlie has, I should be able to play the drum machine through my sound rig at the audition,” I told him.
“You recorded all that just now?” Travis asked me.
“Yeah, you seriously didn’t hear any of that from the garage?”
“Hey, how about you show me what you played on drums again?” he asked.
“Sure, I guess, but we won’t be using my real drumming for the audition. It’s not good enough,” but I obliged.
As I played, Travis stepped outside the studio, said “don’t stop playing,” and shut the door.
When he came back into the studio, I asked him “What do you think you’re doing?”
“No wonder you couldn’t hear me shouting at you from the garage,” Travis said.
“What are you talking about?” Travis was really starting to drive me nuts.
“You know how last Saturday you said his neighbors would still have probably been able to hear him playing drums, even though he lived in a house and not an apartment like he had said?”
“Yeah, I think I remember screaming something like that at you.” Maybe the sarcasm in my voice would clue Travis to get to the point.
“Well Charlie must have sound-proofed this whole studio. I couldn’t even hear you standing right outside the door or in any of the neighboring rooms. There’s no way his neighbors in the other houses could hear him playing drums.”
I paused for a few seconds to take that in before saying “So the whole reason Charlie told us he was jamming in the band room in the first place, the dirt we thought we had on him to get him to join our band…”
“…Was a total lie,” Travis finished my sentence.
We didn’t have time to discuss this anymore at Charlie’s house, lunch would be over soon. We did a quick once-over to make sure everything was where we found it and got moving. Well, almost everything. I kept Charlie’s keys with me, although I did him the favor of locking his car as we left. If Charlie were to return, he’d have to find me to unlock any of his stuff. Or any of the school’s stuff, for that matter; I had realized that as a janitor, most of the many keys Charlie had on his chain were probably for work.
As I locked Charlie’s car, Travis let out a concerned-sounding “Hm.”
“What is it now, Travis?” I asked wearily.
“You remember how we caught Charlie jamming in the band room?” he asked.
“Yeah, we heard him playing from the art wing,” I answered.
“And how did we get into the art wing after classes had ended?” he continued.
“We got in through one of the side doors. A side door he was supposed to have…locked,” I was starting to realize where Travis was going with this.
“Exactly. Now you know how we thought we’d convince him to join our band by making him think it was his idea?”
“Yeeees,” I groaned.
“He was the reason the whole rumor about us summoning a demon started…”
My pace slowed, even though we didn’t have much time left to get back to school.
“…The rumor that made you want to take advantage of having metal street cred…”
My heart started to sink.
“…And we just happened to hear him jamming in the band room, where he had absolutely no reason to be playing, by going through a door that should have been locked…”
“…And those music stands and gong just happened to be placed perfectly to make a bunch of noise when your clumsy arse bumped into them, giving us away,” I interjected. Even while starting to come to a terrible realization, I couldn’t help but take a dig at my friend.
“Hey, shut up, but yes that too,” Travis continued, “He acted all surprised when he saw us. He made us think we had dirt on him. So while we thought we had gotten him to think it was his idea to join our band when it was really ours…”
“…He was getting us to think everything had been our idea the entire time, when it was really his,” I finished his thought.
“Exactly.”
“And you decided to name our band after him.”
Travis paused for a few seconds before asking “So that’s what you believe now?”
“Don’t you?” I replied, “I know what I said after we had spied on him, but we’ve taken in a lot of new information since then. Demons are supposed to be deceivers, and I think Chernobog is a freaking pro.”
“Alright, so going back to the unlocked car: do you think he knew we would come here?”