I thought my nerves were bad when I gave Charlie the slip yesterday. It turns out the prospect of confronting him to his face was far more terrifying.
Travis and I met each other after the last class period of the day and started heading toward the band room.
“Know what you’re gonna say?” Travis asked.
“Yeah, hopefully my mouth will be able to say it once we get there,” I replied, my voice already shaking.
We arrived in the band room, carrying our instruments. Well, technically they were Charlie’s instruments. Charlie was sitting at one of the tables with a laptop, typing something.
“Hey guys! You’re just in time,” he said, looking up from the screen, “I’ve got something I need to discuss with you before we start jamming today.”
“Actually, Charlie, Travis and I need to discuss something with you first,” I interrupted.
Charlie looked mildly surprised, but said “Okay, what’s up?”
“You know how I had to go to the nurse’s office because my shoulder was killing me yesterday? Well, it had something to do with this rash I have there, see?” I pulled up my shirt sleeve and showed him my rash. “I couldn’t help but notice it looks a lot like the tattoo you’ve got on your left shoulder. And the rash appeared a month ago, when we first made our deal.”
“Yeah, it does kind of look like my tattoo. What, were you drawing on your skin with poison ivy or something?” Charlie laughed.
“N…no,” I said. I think that was the first time I had actually heard Charlie laugh, “I don’t know how I got it. But isn’t it a little weird that it looks almost exactly like your tattoo and is in the exact same place?”
“Oh, it’s weird for sure,” Charlie replied, “I’m even a little jealous. This tattoo was expensive, you got yours for free!”
Another joke. I wasn’t sure how to handle this side of Charlie.
“Look, Travis has a rash just like it as well.” Travis showed Charlie his shoulder.
“No kidding! You guys wanted to have matching band tattoos and that’s the one you went with? I’ve got a way cooler one on my back!”
Maybe humor was Charlie’s defense mechanism or something. I ignored his wisecrack and continued.
“Well, Travis and I decided to do some research into this symbol, and this is what we found…”
I showed him the chapter of Encyclopaedia Daemonica about Chernobog and summarized what Travis and I had discovered earlier that day.
After I finished explaining, Charlie stood still for a second or two with a stone-cold poker face. Then he burst into laughter. I mean absolutely cracking up. I thought he was scary before as a near-emotionless robot, but that was nothing. This was straight-up terrifying.
As his laughter started to die down after what seemed like at least five minutes, he regained his ability to speak and wheezed out: “You think I’m some kind of pagan god with his own cult? Let me tell you, if that were true I’d recruit my cult members from sororities, not work as a middle school janitor! Ah ha ha!”
Even Travis started to chuckle a little bit until I shot an angry glare at him.
“Okay, well why do our rashes look exactly like your tattoo? And why are they in the exact same place?” I wasn’t ready to put this to bed just yet.
“I don’t know anything about your rashes, I’m not a dermatologist. But I got this tattoo as a spur-of-the-moment decision when I was seventeen at a sketchy hole-in-the-wall tattoo shop. I didn’t know what to get, so I picked this out of the designs the tattoo artist had in his book. I thought it looked pretty metal without being the usual pentagrams or inverted crosses. I didn’t learn the meaning of this symbol until later. Now if you’re done with your horror movie conspiracy theories, I’ve got something to show you.” He turned his laptop screen to show us the email he was drafting.
Although I still wasn’t ready to let Charlie off the hook, I was too dumbfounded by his refutation to think of a response before he derailed the debate.
“Today is the last day to register for the Battle of the Bands audition. I’m about to send the organizers all the information they need to book us an audition spot next weekend. I’m only missing one thing: our band name. Obviously we need to discuss that as a band before I send the email. I’ve got a few ideas, what do you all think of Tartarus?”
Despite it being his idea to confront Charlie about our rashes, Travis seemed all too happy to change subjects at the first opportunity, “Tartarus?” he asked, “What’s that?”
“You know how all mortals go to Hades when they die in Greek mythology? Tartarus is an abyss below Hades where the most wicked souls go to be tormented eternally in death,” Charlie explained.
“That is pretty metal,” Travis said, “but doesn’t it kind of sound like a gum disease?”
Charlie paused for a couple seconds before saying “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Do you have any ideas?”
“How about Depths of Despair?” Travis asked.
“That sounds pretty cool, but isn’t it a little too close to Shape of Despair? The Finnish funeral doom metal band?” Charlie responded.
“Hm, yeah I guess it kind of does,” Travis said.
I finally came to my senses and chimed in: “How about Anhedonia? That’s a psychiatric term for the inability to feel pleasure.” I don’t usually pay attention in science class, but the unit we did on mental illness was able to pique my interest.
“Okay, but doesn’t that sound kind of like Katatonia? Also a metal band name and also a psychiatric condition,” Travis replied. I guess he had been paying attention during the mental illness unit, too.
After about ten minutes of suggesting band names and shooting them down, we all ran out of ideas.
“Look, guys, we’ve gotta pick something,” Charlie groaned, “I’ve gotta send this email before midnight to get us an audition slot.”
I looked at Travis and noticed he was staring at Encyclopaedia Daemonica, which I was still holding. We made eye contact with each other and I immediately knew what he was about to say, and knew I had to stop him from saying it. I inhaled to shout something, anything, in order to cut Travis off, but he was too fast.
“Let’s name the band Chernobog!”
I shot him a glare as if to say Are you out of your mind? We still don’t know if we can trust this guy, now we’re naming our band after him? He just smiled back at me, the freak.
Charlie sat there for a moment, contemplating, before saying “I like it. I don’t think I’ve heard of any other bands with a name like that. But it’s still definitely dark and occult. Chernobog is my pick. What do you think, Eric?”
I’m not about to name my band after a guy who may have just inducted me into his cult without me even knowing, I wanted to shout. But now that I no longer had Travis’s support in challenging Charlie, I had to play it cool. I tried to think of what my opinion of naming the band “Chernobog” would have been if I didn’t suspect my drummer of being a demon with the same name. I came up blank. Who was I kidding? It was a great name.
“Sounds like that’s our best option,” I answered unenthusiastically. I wanted Charlie to think I was being a team player without Travis getting the idea that I was okay with the stunt he just pulled.
“Great!” Charlie said as he turned back to his laptop, “I just sent the organizers the email. I’ll let you know when they reply to me with our audition time slot. Now we’ve got a lot of work to do before then. Eric, you still have those lyrics you wrote?”
“Right here,” I replied. Even in the pandemonium of yesterday’s detention and nurse visit, I still somehow made sure I got my lyrics back from Purple Hair.
“Great. Let’s play it from the top.”
I was suddenly holding my guitar instead of that book, with a mic stand in front of me.
“Eric, just sing, growl, or scream the lyrics however you see fit,” Charlie was now seated behind his drum set instead of his laptop, “One, two, three, four!”
–
Travis and I waited outside the school building for my mom to come pick us up after band practice. Even though I didn’t get the outcome I had wanted going in, we really shredded. Both Charlie and Travis were clearly impressed with my vocal abilities on our original song, and we only screwed up the instrumental parts a handful of times, despite writing them just two days prior. But I was still pissed at Travis for suggesting our band’s new name.
“That was some stunt you pulled earlier, saying we should name our band ‘Chernobog,’” I said.
“What? You don’t like the name?”
“It’s not about that! Why would we name our band after an ancient demon thing that may have recruited us into some kind of cult?”
“You mean you weren’t convinced by his story about how he got that tattoo?”
“No! There are still too many similarities between what we read in Encyclopaedia Daemonica and what’s happening to us. And Charlie ties into every one of them.”
“Okay, well if you don’t think confronting him directly worked, what’s your suggestion?”
“I guess we’ll have to take an indirect approach. Tomorrow is Saturday. You have any plans?”
“No, why?”
“Because we’re going to be spying on Charlie.”