After we spent nearly an hour helping Purple Hair rearrange Porter’s office to look exactly as we had found it, she took us to the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru, which had just conveniently opened.
Purple Hair ordered her usual bagel, heavy on the cream cheese, and a large coffee with whole milk and sugar. In answer to the question she had asked us back in the staff lounge, neither Travis nor I drank coffee, so she bought both of us breakfast and a chocolate glazed doughnut.
“Normally I’d order inside so we could eat and talk in the restaurant,” Purple Hair said, “But as much as I like Rick and Jennifer, I can’t let a couple of Dunkin’ employees on the opening shift overhear what I’m about to tell you.”
I wasn’t sure what was normal about a conversation with anyone in a Dunkin’ Donuts at 4 in the morning, let alone someone you had just pointed a gun at while committing a felony. But then again, Purple Hair and I probably had several differing opinions on what constituted “normal.”
“We can’t go to my apartment,” she continued, “My dogs will bark at you and my neighbors have already filed a noise complaint against me. Let’s sit down at one of the picnic tables at Felmore Park. There might be a few early-morning joggers there, but they shouldn’t be able to hear us over the sound of their thin privilege.”
Travis started to chuckle until he saw Purple Hair’s face was completely serious.
We arrived at Felmore Park, picked a table, brushed off a few seeds and leaves, and sat down to eat. Purple Hair was not in good shape. I mean, she wasn’t in good shape when we first met her, but now she looked haggard. Something told me she had a much longer streak of getting up stupid early than Travis’s and my two-day streak. As we began to eat, she apologized for what seemed like the hundredth time, barely able to make eye contact with us, “I’m so sorry I pointed that gun at you back there, guys. I thought you were…well I thought you were someone much more dangerous.”
“I’m surprised you own a gun,” Travis said, seemingly unfazed by nearly getting shot in the face just minutes ago, “Aren’t guns supposed to be tools of the patriarchy or somethi-oof!”
I elbowed him in the ribs. I didn’t care how sore his ribs or my elbow were.
“They’re tools of the patriarchy when men use them to oppress women and compensate for their other shortcomings,” she shot back, “When women own them it’s simply self-defense from predators and rapists since men can’t be bothered to teach other men not to ra-” She stopped herself mid-rant and took a deep breath, “But that’s not why I had it with me in Porter’s office. I’m sure you were wondering why I was there.”
“We heard what you said to Porter last Thursday after classes let out,” Travis said.
“You did?” Purple Hair almost chuckled, “For such a secretive person who takes her work so seriously, you’d think her recruiter would at least be able to get her sound-proofed walls.”
Travis and I shared a concerned look.
“Anyway, I should share the rest of the story with you: like you guys probably know, I’m deeply passionate about advancing equal rights and social justice. I believe by instilling these values in your generation, we can destroy the systems of institutionalized systemic oppression that previous generations created. It’s why I studied to be a guidance counselor. Old farts like Porter and most of your teachers haven’t caught up to this kind of thinking yet. They’re second-wave TERFs at best,” she rolled her eyes. Travis and I had no idea what that meant, but we weren’t going to interrupt to ask.
“But even old ladies like Mrs. Whitley will either have to retire from teaching or die at some point. As the older teachers leave the profession, younger educators like me will gradually start to replace them. That’s how we’ll set this country on the right track. At least that was what I thought when I started studying to become a guidance counselor in college.
“I was far from the only one who believed this. The majority of my peers who were studying to go into K-12 education, child psychology, and early child development shared my views on social justice. Not only that, but most of my professors were on the same page as well. They may have been old, but they supported us in our mission of fighting intersectional inequality.
“I knew I was in for a challenge when I decided to enroll in Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts for my master’s. It was one of the last schools in New England to go co-ed, and was still heavily male-dominated when I attended, for both faculty and students. But it wasn’t just that; when I started applying to master’s programs my faculty advisor warned me against Miskatonic, saying they had a very secretive, conservative culture, and didn’t take well to outsiders rocking the boat. But the way I saw it, that was all the more reason I was needed there. Why should Miskatonic be allowed to have their little boys’ club? I was trying to fight the patriarchy, not cater to it when it inconvenienced them! Besides, I could have used a little more of a secretive, mellow environment for grad school after partying it up at UVM in undergrad.
“But when I started my graduate studies, I learned my advisor wasn’t only talking about politics when she said Miskatonic had a ‘conservative’ culture. It’s hard to describe. On the surface, Miskatonic seemed like a fairly normal university, not too different from all the other preppy New England schools funded by old family money. However, my professors treated me differently than the ones at UVM. These professors weren’t opposed to my mission, in fact they were incredibly helpful, but I never got the feeling that we were on the same team, like I did with my college professors. These professors almost viewed me…as a tool. Like they would tolerate and help me on my mission for social justice as long as it also aided whatever their mission was.
“This put me in a weird position. I wasn’t presented with the patriarchal dystopia I had expected to rebel against, but at the same time I wasn’t among allies, either. But I figured grad school was only part of the journey to social justice, not the destination itself. And as long as I was making progress toward that destination, I had nothing to complain about. So I stuck my nose to the grindstone and worked on getting my master’s. After a while, I got used to being the odd one out at Miskatonic. Until I encountered one particular professor.
“Even though we only met once, I’ve tried to keep the meeting a secret, especially in the Miskatonic community. If someone in the community found out, I would lie about how we met, saying I bumped into him without seeing him one night and helped him pick up a bunch of papers he dropped. I have never told anyone how we actually met, let alone volunteered that information, until now.
“It was my last semester at Miskatonic. Although I was doing well academically, I was not doing well overall. I still had no friends in Arkham, I felt like I needed to constantly watch my back at school, and I was struggling with anxiety and depression. I had just finished a late study session, was stressed out of my mind, exhausted, and barely aware of the world around me. I just wanted to go home and sleep.
“My car was in the shop at the time, and the quickest way to my apartment by foot was through an old wooded area near campus, the Arkham Forest. This forest was the subject of several legends about witchcraft and hauntings since the indigenous Americans had lived there. Although I didn’t believe in any of that stuff at the time, even I was familiar with the stories:
“Throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, the white European colonizers progressively clear-cut the forest as Arkham industrialized and its population expanded. Although this process came with several alleged encounters with ‘dark forces,’ that didn’t deter the colonizers from eventually clear-cutting almost all of it. However, Miskatonic University purchased the forest’s few remaining untouched acres some time in the late 19th Century for ‘environmental reasons.’ I didn’t exactly peg the old white men of Miskatonic as tree-huggers, especially not in the 1800s, but I didn’t give it much thought beyond that. I would soon learn they had meant something very different by ‘environmental reasons.’
“The City of Arkham’s only stipulation in selling the land to Miskatonic was to let the City make a road through the forest connecting downtown to campus. Without a road, Miskatonic’s campus would have existed in relative isolation; the forest to its south separated it from the rest of Arkham, and the Miskatonic River was to its north.
“The City did not want the university to be isolated for two reasons. The first was pragmatism: they didn’t want a large, potentially haunted barrier between the two inhabited parts of the city, which would have forced travelers to take detours through less developed towns like Dunwich. The second was the City’s distrust of Miskatonic’s administration and faculty: the City wanted easy access to the campus to keep an eye on them.
“As time progressed, both of these reasons gradually became moot. The introduction of the automobile and paved roads created several other ways to travel between the two parts of Arkham, meaning the City had easy access to campus. This actually somewhat backfired on them, since the university ended up having more influence over the local government than the reverse, but that’s a whole other story. Without any need to maintain the original dirt road, the forest gradually reclaimed it, leaving it as an unofficial trail. In a couple more centuries, not even the trail will remain as the forest takes it back entirely, but there was still enough of it to traverse while I was there.
“As I was following the trail, barely looking up, I heard a strange noise coming from the woods. At first I thought it was just the wind going through the trees, but after hearing it a few more times I realized it was a voice. I stopped and listened closer to make sure it wasn’t my imagination. It wasn’t. There was a child crying somewhere in the woods. I may have been tired and stressed, and I knew animals like foxes could make human-like cries, but there was no mistaking this. Somehow, there was a child crying in Arkham Forest.
“I shouted out to the child, ‘Hello! Where are you?’ The child wasn’t very helpful, only saying stuff like ‘I’m here,’ and ‘I’m lost,’ but following the voice led me off the trail. Somehow I made it through all the branches, roots, thorns, and other forest stuff until I found the source of the voice.
“A little girl, probably no older than six, was kneeling on the ground facing away from me, her face in her hands, crying. I tried to get her attention, but she didn’t respond. Only when I reached out and touched her shoulder did she turn around. She was the most adorable little girl I had ever seen, with big, beautiful brown eyes. Even though she was crying, I couldn’t help but feel comforted looking into her eyes, like somehow I knew everything was going to be okay. Her stare was almost spellbinding enough for me to overlook the bright red welt on her left cheek.
“After introducing myself and getting her to calm down, I learned her name was Maggie. ‘Why are you crying all alone in the woods?’ I asked her.
“‘Daddy hit Mommy, then he hit me,’ she said, ‘I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I ran here where I knew he wouldn’t find me. But now I’m lost!
“Suddenly my problems all but vanished from my mind. Some drunk scumbag was beating his wife and daughter somewhere near me. This man had the NERVE…”
Although we were alone in the park, Purple Hair had raised her voice to the extent that it scared away a few birds. Noticing this, she lowered her voice again.
“Sorry about that,” she said, “There’s a reason I don’t tell many people this story. Anyway, I forgot all about my problems after Maggie told me what happened to her. My new job was to help this poor little girl. I told her ‘It’s okay! We’ll find somewhere safe for you together. Follow me!’
“There was only one problem: in locating Maggie, I had become lost myself. But I couldn’t panic now that I was responsible for her. So I made my best guess as to the direction of the trail, and started walking that way with Maggie, pretending I knew where I was going.
“As we started walking, Maggie began asking me questions. I was glad to answer them since the conversation kept her mind off of how lost we both were. The questions started innocently enough, the kind of stuff a kid would usually ask someone they just met: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Are you married?’ ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ But as we continued, the questions became stranger: ‘Why are you helping me?’ ‘Why were you walking through the woods? Didn’t your mommy tell you it was haunted?’ ‘Is this place scary for you?’ ‘Do you want to know how to make it less scary?’
“That last question made me stop. ‘Why are you asking me that?’ I asked her, ‘Do you know something I don’t know about this place?’
“She simply smiled and stared at me with her big, brown eyes, again calming me down, although I probably should have been even more disturbed at this point. Instead of answering my question, she asked another one of her own: ‘Do you know my daddy?’
“‘I’ve never met him,’ I replied.
“‘Then why do you want to hurt him?’
“That question knocked me off my guard, to say the least. We had both stopped walking at this point, but Maggie didn’t seem to care. After a minute or two, I finally regained my senses and responded with ‘Who said I wanted to hurt him?’
“‘Don’t you?’ she said.
“I don’t know what it was about this kid, but something about her stare made me want to open up. ‘Yes!’ I told her, ‘Yes, I want to hurt him! For what he did to your mother and for what he did to you! I may have never met your father, but I know him! There are men like him everywhere! Men who brutalize women, terrorize their daughters, and teach their sons that behavior like this is okay! Yes, I want to hurt him!’
“‘What else do you want to do?’ she asked. Again, I couldn’t keep myself from giving it to her straight.
“‘I want to keep men like him away from children. What good have they ever done? They’ve been running the world since the beginning of our species yet they still act like cavemen! These are the people raising and teaching our children? We have to do better. I can do better!’
“‘Yes, you can do better. With my help. Do you want my help?’ Her stare grew even more intense. It was almost as if her eyes had grown even bigger. Like I was slowly becoming lost in them.
“‘What will you do to help?’ I asked her like I believed her. Like there was something this one girl could do about the age-old patriarchy. But at the time, I genuinely believed she could.
“‘Everything you want,’ she said. I was no longer in Arkham Forest. I was in the National Mall in Washington D.C., watching the first woman president get sworn in. I was in millions of homes all over the country, watching women leave their dreary, oppressed lives as homemakers to join the workforce. And if their husbands didn’t like it, they kicked them to the curb. Once male-dominated industries were now gender-inclusive, all the way up to the CEO level. And they were getting paid the same as their male counterparts. Women were no longer objectified to suit piggish men in the media, instead they were recognized for the contributions they made to society. I was on college campuses throughout the country, knowing women no longer had to fear that 1 in 4 of them would be sexually assaulted.
“Then I was in a classroom. But instead of teaching about a bunch of dead white men, I was teaching women’s history. Instead of reading from a bunch of white male authors, we read women of color like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. I could openly teach about white privilege and male privilege without being run out of town. Finally teaching children was in the hands of experts like me who actually studied this instead of the students’ idiot parents!”
She slammed her hand on the table, realized how much she had raised her voice, and quieted down again.
“I was elated. It was everything I had ever dreamed of achieving right in front of me, all at once. Maggie was sitting in the front of the classroom, staring at me with her big, brown eyes. ‘All this can be yours with my help, Erica. Do you want my help?’ she asked again.
“‘Yes!’ I screamed, ‘Yes, I want your help, Maggie! What do I have to do to have this?’
“‘Great! All you need to do is become a dues-paying member of our union!’
“Even with her mesmerizing eyes and trance-inducing voice, that sentence made me pause. I don’t know what I was expecting her to say, but it wasn’t that.
“‘A union?’ I asked, ‘What, like a teachers union? I’m not even a teacher yet.’
“‘A teachers union, yes,’ she replied, giggling, ‘But like you see in front of you, we offer so much more than negotiating a higher pay. Because of the power we grant you, we ask for something in return: your soul.’
“She continued to speak in that same mesmerizing voice, like what she asked was the most normal thing in the world. It didn’t help that all the children in the classroom were looking at me with their bright, shining faces cheering stuff like ‘Join us, Ms. Hemway-Fischer!’ and ‘We need you, Ms. Hemway-Fischer!’ I turned around, and millions of college girls were looking at me saying ‘Protect us, Erica!’ ‘Help empower us!’ I turned again, and millions of women professionals were saying the same thing. Even Madam President looked me dead in the eyes and said ‘I worked so hard to finally get where I am, but I could only do it because strong women like you empowered me. Don’t you want that for me? Don’t you want that for us?’
“How could I let all these women and children down? I knew what my answer had to be. But just as I was about to say it, I heard a man shout ‘Don’t do it!’
“Suddenly I was back in Arkham Forest, but where Maggie had been there was now a…a…” Purple Hair stuttered. She looked down, but not before we could see her face going pale.
“A demon?” Travis asked.
Purple Hair looked back up at us, “That word doesn’t do it justice. It was horrifying. Her arms and legs were now long appendages that resembled spider legs, tree branches, and human bone all in one. They all connected to what was now both her head and her body combined. In place of her long, beautiful brown hair were patchy, gray, frizzy strands that grew all over her head body. Her mouth had become a wide, gaping maw with rows upon rows of enormous, pointed teeth, almost like a great white shark. But her eyes were exactly the same.
“Maggie, or whatever Maggie had become, turned in the direction of the voice and snarled ‘Do you mind? I’m making an ask here!’
“I looked in that direction as well and could make out the figure of a tall, thin man approaching through the woods, ‘All you need to do is say no, signorina.’
“‘Are you going to let him mansplain to you, Erica? You’ve spent your entire life doing what men told you to do.’ Maggie’s voice had returned to its soothing, hypnotic tone. I looked back into her eyes and I was in the classroom again, at the National Mall, on college campuses. She may have looked like that sweet little girl again, but after that man had shouted and revealed her to be that…thing, I couldn’t shake it from my mind. ‘Join us,’ she said, holding out her hand to me, ‘Give me your soul.’
“‘No!’ I screamed, not out of defiance or principle, but cowardice. I fell backwards to the ground and started frantically pushing myself away from her. It was all too much. I just wanted it to stop.
“The classroom, National Mall, and college campuses all faded away. Maggie again appeared in her horrible, monstrous form. But instead of staring me down with those beautiful eyes, she was now looking at the man who had just appeared, who was now standing between me and her.
“‘You’ll pay for this, priest! I’ll report you to your dean for violating our agreement!’
“‘I never made any agreement with you,’ the man growled, ‘And I am not a priest!’
“Maggie only hissed in reply before vanishing, leaving only a thin, purple mist behind that quickly dissipated.
“‘Are you alright?’ the man asked as he kneeled down beside me, “It’s okay, you’re safe. It’s over now,” he reached out his hand to pull me up, “I am Doctor Giuseppe Andolini.”
