“What happened yesterday?” Travis asked me as we waited for the bus the next morning. We hadn’t seen each other since lunch the previous day.
“I should be asking you that,” I replied, somewhat miffed, “I spent nearly half an hour looking for you after I nearly went to the emergency room over this monster of a rash. Not to mention I had to spend that half hour with my mom, who was also interrogating me about your whereabouts because she was supposed to be picking you up as well, like she does every day.”
“What was I supposed to do? Just sit and wait around for you to get out of detention when Charlie had ditched rehearsal too? The buses still hadn’t left, so I took the bus.”
“See, that’s why you need to explain your version of the story first, because parts of mine don’t even make sense to me yet. When did Charlie leave rehearsal?”
“About right after it started. I showed up and told him that it was only going to be him and me, since you had detention with Purple Hair. I explained the whole situation with getting caught passing notes and the compromise we reached, but he wasn’t having it. He was pissed. He started angrily talking to himself in some weird language, probably his mother tongue or something. I asked him what he was saying and tried to calm him down, but it’s like I wasn’t even there. It was terrifying. His talking gradually became shouting, and for a split second it looked like he…”
Travis paused, like he was trying to recall a dream, but had come to a part he couldn’t describe now that he was awake.
“Looked like he what? Looked like he what, Travis?” I pestered, trying to get him to snap out of it.
Travis looked me directly in the eyes and said, “For a split second it looked as if he shapeshifted into…something else. Like a monster or something.”
I tried to keep my poker face and my voice steady as I asked him, “Would you say he shapeshifted into something that looked like a demon, maybe?”
Travis immediately furrowed his brow and glared at me. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me! You think I’m just like all the other kids at school who believe in those dumb rumors. You think I’m like Jeff Hennessy and his friends, letting their minds play tricks on them when they see something that scares them! I shouldn’t have even told you this stuff.”
“Hey! Travis, hold on!” I shot back, “I never accused you of any of that stuff. I was just asking.”
Travis looked a little embarrassed as he gazed down at his shoes before admitting, “Yeah, you’re right. My bad,” then looked back up to continue, “Anyway, he snapped out of whatever kind of tantrum he had gotten himself into and remembered where he was again, although he still looked angry. He told me ‘I’ve got some business to handle. Stay here,’ before he bolted out of the band room. It was almost like he vanished.”
“Vanished?” I asked.
Travis opened his mouth to answer, but before he could say anything SCRREEEEEEEEEECH!
The school bus came to the stop before ours about half a mile away with its top-of-the-line brakes. We didn’t have much time to discuss this further before it reached us. Now was not the time to be talking about demon janitors on a full school bus, and Travis and I wouldn’t see each other until study hall that day.
“Travis, quick, you said Charlie told you to stay in the band room but you left and took the bus home anyway, right?” I asked him as the bus approached us.
“Well, yeah, but don’t tell him that!” he replied.
“I won’t, but how did that rash on your left shoulder feel when you left?”
Travis gave me a surprised look, as if I already knew the answer. I guess I kind of did.
“It stung for a few minutes. It actually kind of hurt a little, but eventually it went away.”
We had to switch subjects and pretend to talk about music, video games, homework, and other benign stuff while we rode the bus, but I wrote down my summary of what had happened to me the previous afternoon, concluding the note with “let’s meet at the library during study hall.” Travis read the note, nodded at me in agreement, then tore it up and threw it out the window so none of the other kids would get ahold of it.
–
We met later during study hall in the corner of the library where no one would bother or overhear us.
“First thing’s first,” I said to Travis, “Let me see the rash on your left shoulder.”
“You want to see it? What’s so special about it?” Travis asked, confused.
“Just humor me, okay?” I responded.
Travis lifted up his shirt sleeve to reveal an oddly-shaped rash, identical to the one on my left shoulder. I raised my own shirt sleeve to confirm.
“What kind of ‘rash’ looks like this?” I asked, “What kind of rash forms in this weird shape? What kind of rash can two people get together at the same time, that looks almost exactly the same, with no known explanation?”
“What are you trying to say, Eric?” Travis asked, furrowing his brow at me.
“When did we both get these rashes?” I asked. This time it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“Errrr, about a month ago?”
“Right,” I continued, “What happened a month ago?”
“Is that supposed to be a trick question or something? A lot happened a month ago. We had that history quiz, my sister got food poisoning…”
“Travis!” I snapped as loudly as I could without making a scene, “Come on, don’t be dense with me!”
“Oh! And we met Charlie!” Travis was finally starting to catch up.
“Exactly,” I said, “We met Charlie, made a deal to jam with him every day, and suddenly we both got the same weird-shaped rash that stings when we broke that deal. Now let me ask you this: have you ever gotten a good look at Charlie’s left shoulder?”
“Ha ha, it’s hard to miss! He’s always rocking a band t-shirt with the sleeves torn off at band pra…wait a minute, his tattoo looks exactly like our rashes!” Travis had finally caught on.
“That’s right. I think we bit off way more than we could chew, Travis.”
Travis did not take this well.
“What does this mean? What is he going to do to us? Are we marked for life? Is this permanent? This was all your idea! You dragged me into this! And now I’m part of some kind of occult blood oath! We were just writing a song about a virgin sacrifice, well guess what? Joke’s on us! We’re the virgin sacrifices! You ever seen The Wicker Man? That’s how these freaks get us, man! They lure us in, making us think it’s our idea, when really we’ve been playing into their hands all along! Oh, I can’t believe I agreed to this!”
“Travis, Travis! Shut up!” I had to physically restrain him and cover his mouth to get him to quit hollering. Not that I particularly cared about the rule that you had to stay quiet in the library, but considering the stuff Travis was shouting, I had to take it upon myself to aggressively enforce it.
Once Travis had calmed down, I let him go and said “That’s why we’re here in the library. Instead of just freaking out over wild, unfounded predictions, we’re actually going to find out what this symbol is, and what it has to do with Charlie. That way we’ll at least know what we’re dealing with.”
Travis started nodding his head in agreement, “Okay,” he said, “Well, let’s get started. Where do we start looking?”
I paused for a few seconds, realizing I hadn’t actually looked for a book in the library in well over a year and completely forgot how to find one. This was probably the first time Travis looked for a book in a library in his life. We didn’t have much time to try and figure it out ourselves, so we had to check our egos at the door and ask the librarian, Mrs. Kelsey, for help. It is a truly humbling experience to ask a woman who looks at least 60 for how to find books on the occult and weird skin conditions, but she helped us find what we needed.
This was the first time I had tried to read a book in a while, let alone a thousand page long hardcover behemoth called Encyclopaedia Daemonica. I left Travis to page through The Encyclopedia of Dermatology. I didn’t need him jumping to conclusions and freaking out about how some arcane horror was trying to possess his “brain” or whatever. I didn’t have much hope that photos of freakish skin diseases wouldn’t also cause him to freak out, but what other options did I have?
As I scanned through the pages of Encyclopaedia Daemonica, I couldn’t help but be surprised at the number of “demons” that were supposedly out there, at least according to the book’s author, Giuseppe Andolini, PhD. However, I wasn’t finding anything that resembled our drummer or the rashes on our shoulders. Even if there was a section in the book about either of those things, I was beginning to worry I wouldn’t be able to find it before we had to go to band practice with Charlie again.
That’s when I saw it.
“Travis? Travis!” I hissed. He was busy chuckling at photos of people who got poison ivy infections in rather unfortunate places. “Travis!” I hissed again.
He snapped out of it, “What?!”
“Come look at this.”
I showed him the page I had just turned to. On it was a picture of a symbol that looked exactly like our rashes and Charlie’s tattoo. The caption read:
Symbol of Chernobog: One of the most powerful deities in Slavic mythology. His name translates to “Black God.”
