Travis and I decided that since no adult had any intention of teaching us, or even interacting with us, it was best to spend the rest of the day searching for Charlie. We spent all day looking. No one tried to stop us. We checked every janitor’s closet in the school. No luck, they were all locked. We checked the band room. It was in use for a music class. We checked every nook and cranny of the school we could access with no sign of Charlie anywhere.
“School’s almost over and we’ve searched the whole building,” I said to Travis, “The battle of the bands audition is this Saturday! Where could he be? We’ve looked everywhere!”
“Are you sure about that?” Travis asked, “They have janitors clean more than just the building, you know.”
“Are you trying to suggest we search the entire school grounds? Do you know how big the school’s property is? We’d have a better chance of getting lost in the woods than we would finding Charlie out there!” I was being mildly hyperbolic, but the school’s property also consisted of a large wooded area.
“Not the entire school grounds,” Travis said, “just the parts they need the janitors to clean. Somewhere where people drop snack wrappers and soda cups while they watch a home game. Somewhere we encountered a janitor before.”
I finally caught on.
“The bleachers,” I said.
“And underneath them,” Travis smiled.
–
“Charlie? Are you here?” Travis shouted to the underside of an empty set of bleachers. The echo of his voice gave us our answer. We had scouted the entire athletic complex before concluding our search at the bleachers. No luck.
“Give it up, Travis. It was a good idea, but he’s not here. We looked everywhere,” I said despondently before lying on the ground in exhaustion. It was probably pretty gross down there, but I didn’t care. I was exhausted.
I gazed up at the cobwebs and chewed gum that occupied the underside of the bleachers. Some of them even had stuff stuck to them, with the cobwebs and gum serving as a kind of adhesive. Pencils, candy wrappers, a few tubes of lip balm…wait a minute, what was that thing? One of the bleachers had something a lot bigger than a pencil stuck to its underside. Whatever it was, it occupied nearly the entire bench. I stood back up again to get a closer look. Was that…was that a guitar?
“Travis! Come over here!” I called, “Look up! Do you see the same thing I see?”
“Uh, pencils and candy wrappers? Yeah, I see them t-is that a guitar stuck there?!”
“Sure is,” I replied, “A Jackson RR24 from the looks of it. Charlie has had me playing one of those lately. I’ll bet it’s the same one, but let’s find out. You go onto the bleachers, and I’ll watch from below to guide you as you reach for it.”
“Wait a minute, why do I have to unstick a guitar from the gum underneath the bleachers? Checking the bleachers was my idea, why don’t you do it?” Travis asked indignantly.
“Yeah, but the only reason we found it stuck there is because I gave up and lied down while you were still searching the same spots we had already checked. Now get up there.” Travis could be so ungrateful sometimes.
“Alright, I found it, but there’s a lot more than gum keeping this thing in place. It looks like it’s tied to the bench with a whole bunch of…bass strings? Whoever tied this thing here must have been in the Navy, because I have no idea how to untie these knots. I can probably cut the strings with my knife, but when I cut the last few you’ve gotta be ready to catch it. Will you be ready?
“Sure, I’m standing right underneath it,” I answered.
I waited a couple minutes as Travis cut through the strings. As he reached the last few holding the guitar to the bench he shouted to me: “Okay, I’m about to cut the last strings! On the count of three! One, two, three!”
Travis cut the last strings, letting the guitar fall to me. If I had paid attention in science class, I would have known that when an object falls, the heaviest part of it tends to point downward. Since the RR24 has a rather pointed body, that meant that point was now sailing straight for my face.
“Aaaaaahhh!” I screamed as I faced certain death. They say your life is supposed to flash before your eyes, but the only image that came to my mind was how getting impaled with an RR24 would make a great album cover.
I continued to scream for a couple seconds before I realized the guitar should have hit me by now. I opened my eyes and saw a hand holding the guitar by its neck. My eyes went from the hand, to the arm, to the body, to the face of the person who just saved me from getting impaled (Okay, probably not impaled, but broken ribs weren’t out of the question). That face was wearing his trademark smirk that let me know I was in for it.
“Wouldn’t want the guitar to have all the fun, now would we?” Jeff said, his voice oozing with mockery. He then looked behind me and said “Grab him.”
One of his thugs seized me by the arms and pulled me back.
“You’ve got some cajones!” I shouted, “Remember what happened to you guys the last time you tried something like this? Remember what happened to Ms. Hemway-Fischer? You are in for a world of hurt right now!”
“Oh no! You going to summon your demon on me again?” Jeff feigned being scared, “The same demon you spent all day looking for and couldn’t find?”
My stomach did a somersault as Jeff called my bluff.
“You’re not the only one Tom Seiks spills his guts to, Eric. He may have been scared of you, but he’s still scared of me, too. Scared enough to tell me all about your little three-way wrestling match in the bathroom, at least,” Jeff chuckled at his innuendo, “I figured if you didn’t know why everyone was afraid of you, then there probably wasn’t anything to be afraid of.”
That was probably the hardest Jeff had ever had to think in his entire life.
“You two dorks only confirmed it once you started searching the school like a couple lost puppies. You think no one noticed that? People were avoiding you, they weren’t ignoring you.”
Another one of my fool-proof plans turned out to be not so fool-proof at all. Crap! At this point there was no point in bluffing anymore.
“Travis! Run!” I shouted.
“Hey, great idea, Eric! Why didn’t I think of that?” Travis said as another one of Jeff’s thugs pulled him next to me. A few more of them emerged from the woods and surrounded us, with Jeff front and center.
“To answer your question, Eric, yes I do remember what happened to us the last time we met here,” Jeff began slowly pacing back and forth as he talked, dragging the guitar along the ground as he did it, “I gotta hand it to you, your demon friend was terrifying. Threw us for a real loop, that’s for sure.”
“Hold on, you mean you still believe there’s a demon? You just said there was nothing to be afraid of!” I shouted incredulously. One of Jeff’s thugs balled his hand into a fist and looked at Jeff, as if waiting for permission. Jeff, as pissed as he appeared at this point, shook his head and the thug backed off.
“I know what I saw, freak!” Jeff said, his voice rising, “You’re not going to gaslight me into thinking there was no demon. Look, I don’t know what went down between you since then, but I know you couldn’t find him when you needed him today, and I know he’s not here to rescue your sorry butts like he was last time. So now I’m going to make sure it never happens again while I’ve got the chance.”
I knew we’d have to come completely clean with Jeff. Sure, it might have gone against our agreement with Charlie, who was far scarier than Jeff, but only Jeff was here right now. And he and his friends were about to tear us a new one if we didn’t do something.
I looked at Travis and asked “Should we spill the beans?”
Travis replied “What do we have to lose? Do it.”
Jeff’s friends surrounding us looked ready to let us have it, but Jeff signaled them to wait.
“What are you talking about? You better not be playing games with me,” he asked.
“Far from it,” I said, “Jeff, there’s no demon. There never was. That thing you saw last time that came to our defense was a guy named Charlie. He may look big and scary, and I guess he kind of is, but he’s just a janitor. I ran into him sweeping the floor shortly before we crossed paths that day. It turns out he’s the only other metalhead in Felmore besides us, so we’ve been jamming together in the band room every day after school since then. Why do you think you haven’t seen us under the bleachers after school since your encounter with him? What would be the point of summoning a demon to keep you away from the bleachers if we don’t hang out here anymore?”
My rash started to sting again, but it wasn’t constant and consistent like last time. The pain flashed on and off, like when you’re trying to talk to someone on a cell phone and the call is breaking up. I looked at Travis and it looked like he was feeling the same thing.
The goon holding me, probably losing his patience at having to restrain me this long, started to shout in my ear “You think we can’t tell the difference between…” before Jeff interjected:
“Shut up, Troy! If he wants to dig a hole for himself, let him. So, Eric, if what we saw was just a janitor named Charlie, how come none of us have seen him since?”
“Because we asked him to stay hidden!” I desperately tried to reason, “After everyone in school mistook him for a demon, we wanted to keep it that way so you’d leave us alone! If people saw a guy around school scrubbing toilets who matched the description of the demon, people would connect the dots and realize he was just a janitor.”
“You expect me to believe a janitor who’s well over six feet tall and jacked has been able to do his job here for a month without anyone in the school noticing just because you told him to?”
I was beginning to realize Jeff was smarter and more logical than I had given him credit for. The only problem was that he was still using that logic to convince himself that our janitor was a demon.
“More than I’d expect you to believe he’s a demon, yes,” I replied.
“I want to believe you, Eric,” Jeff said in a condescending tone, “I wish this was all just a big misunderstanding. But we weren’t the only ones who were threatened by your demon after crossing you. Like you said earlier, Ms. Hemway-Fischer had a run-in with your demon as well. Which is why I know that if you’re willing to threaten an adult with that thing, you’re dangerous and need to be stopped.”
“How would you know that?” I blurted out, “You weren’t there! How could you possibly know that? That’s just a dumb rumor some moron started!”
“Because that ‘moron’ was me!” Jeff shouted back.
Everyone was silent for a few seconds.
“I got sent to Principal Porter’s office after school last Thursday when Ms. Hemway-Fischer bursted in and demanded to talk to her,” Jeff explained, “The stones on her, right? Making demands of her boss like that? Porter tried to tell her to take a hike, but Hemway-Fischer wasn’t having it and wouldn’t leave. So Porter told me to wait outside her office.”
“I heard almost everything,” he continued, “The walls outside Porter’s office are paper thin. Hemway-Fischer accused Porter of sending one of her ‘recruiters’ to blackmail her into joining the teachers union. Porter tried to deny it, but Hemway-Fischer shot back with ‘You can’t fool me! I studied at Miskatonic, I know what those things are, and I know what they charge! If you want me to pay the union dues with my soul, you can count me out. I don’t know how you recruited the rest of the faculty with these methods, but I’ll have no part of it!’ Hemway-Fischer may have thought it was Porter who sent the demon after her, but I knew better. She and I had one thing in common: we both had beef with you two freaks.”
If Jeff had wanted to beat us up, he could have done that already without making up a justification. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time. He must have truly believed what he was telling us, but how could he have believed we had summoned a demon to threaten Purple Hair?
Could Jeff have been right about Charlie? Were we wrong? Was he a demon after all? I quickly dismissed these doubts; unless Jeff had also done a library study session and snuck through Charlie’s neighbor’s yard to spy on him, there’s no way he’d know better than us. Was Charlie a mysterious guy? Sure. Was he scary? Absolutely. Did he threaten Purple Hair? He implied as much when he showed up in the nurse’s office. But that didn’t make him a demon. It couldn’t, could it?
“Okay, Jeff, so now that you’ve got us without our ‘demon,’ what are you going to do?” Travis asked.
“Same thing I always do whenever I need to put you devil-worshippers in your place, only this time I’m going to start with your guitar. You guys like Jimi Hendrix?” Jeff said as he raised the RR24 over his head and smashed it on the ground.
“No!” I shouted, not that Jeff cared. I struggled against Jeff’s friend holding me back, but even after all that debate his grip was still unwavering. Jeff continued to bash the guitar against the ground, support beams of the bleachers, and any other hard surface he could find until it was just a pile of woodchips connected with strings.
Both Travis and I stared at the remains of the RR24 with our mouths agape, but Jeff didn’t leave us much time to mourn. He walked toward me and said “Now it’s your turn,” before punching me in the face.
–
Travis and I slowly got up from the fetal position. Jeff and his goons had probably left about five minutes ago at this point, but we had to wait a little longer for everything to stop hurting in order to stand. I was eventually able to stand up on both feet and hocked a loogie that was mostly blood. I did a quick survey of all my important body parts. Fortunately nothing was missing, broken, or irreparably damaged. I took a look at Travis to find him doing the same.
“How do I look?” I asked him.
“I’d say it’s an improvement,” he replied.
“Hey, shut up!” I started to laugh, but it quickly turned into a painful wheeze.
“Sorry,” Travis said sheepishly.
Travis and I had taken beatings from Jeff and his gang before, but nothing like this. Before, the beatings came from a sense of insecurity. Deep down Jeff knew he was a loser, and beating up on the only guys lower than him made him feel better about his pathetic self. As long as he let us know who was in charge, he was happy. He wouldn’t wail on us for the sake of wailing on us.
This time was different. This came from a place of malice. He and his friends legitimately believed Travis and I were some kind of existential threat to the safety of everyone else at Felmore Middle School, possibly even the whole town. If it didn’t hurt to laugh, I would have chuckled at the irony of a world in which Jeff and his crew were the good guys.
“Eric,” Travis said, his voice labored, “I wish we had never met Charlie. I just want everything to go back to normal.”
“Yeah, I guess I do, too,” I replied, “But we can’t change the past. We made a deal with Charlie, and now it’s him who’s not fulfilling his end of the bargain. We’ve gotta find him and change that.”
I tried to sound confident, partially to convince Travis that the situation wasn’t hopeless, but mainly to convince myself.
Where in the world was Charlie?