Instead of answering any of the multiple questions that arose from encountering Purple Hair snooping through Porter’s office with a gun at 3 in the morning, her explanation had only prompted more so far: How many of these demons were out there? How many people have given their souls to join the union? Do we know any of them? What does giving up your soul even mean? Why teachers? Purple Hair met Giuseppe Andolini? And he was a professor at Miskatonic? How could he have been a professor if he wasn’t even a real PhD?
Purple Hair seemed too enraptured in her own story to notice our confused looks and kept talking: “He led me out of the woods, trying to talk to me to help me relax after what I had just seen, like I had tried to do with Maggie. He failed. I don’t remember a single word he said to me, and I don’t recall saying a single word to him as we walked through Arkham Forest. But I remember what he looked like: he was tall and wiry, olive-skinned, had black shoulder-length hair that was starting to go gray, and a mustache, also black and gray. His eyes were dark and piercing, like they had seen too much, although they were not unfriendly.
“Only once we had gotten out of Arkham Forest into downtown did he snap me out of my stupor, trying to ask me where I lived. I eventually figured out how to speak again, and as he walked me home we began to have an actual conversation. He told me he was a professor of theology at Miskatonic. I replied with something like ‘Oh, so you must know all about that thing in the forest asking me for my soul.’
“He replied by saying ‘My knowledge of these beings is still very limited, but I am doing my best to expand it. That’s why I’m here at Miskatonic. It is one of the few knowledge hubs in our world on the subject.
“I told him that I was studying to be a school guidance counselor. His only response was ‘That may explain why it targeted you,’ but he didn’t elaborate further.
“When we reached my apartment he made some kind of tea that he said would treat my shock and help me sleep. Before he left he took one of my sticky notes and wrote down the location of his office and direct line with a note that read ‘Contact me if you want to discuss this further. If you can’t reach me, look to the heavens.’ I wasn’t entirely sure what that second second meant, but I figured since he was a theology professor he was trying to subtly push his religion on me. Whatever.
“The next day, I decided I did want to discuss this further, so I called him. The line was dead. I tried to get the university’s operator to put me through to him, but she insisted no one by that name had ever worked at Miskatonic.
“Despite my incredibly busy study schedule I carved time out of my day to visit him in his office. No one was there. Or at least no one was in the office Andolini claimed was his. The bookshelves were empty, although they couldn’t have been that way for long, since dust only occupied the edges of the shelves. The chalkboard didn’t have a single mark of chalk on it, smudged or otherwise, and smelled faintly of cleaning solution. The desk was barren as well, but like the bookshelves, there was only dust on the edge on the side opposite of where one would sit.
“I started scrounging through the office looking for something, anything that could have confirmed this was Andolini’s office, anything Miskatonic may have missed. I rifled through desk drawers, filing cabinets, bookshelves, everything. After about half an hour of searching with no success, I figured anything important had either been taken by Andolini or the university. I lay down on the floor, exhausted and defeated.
“I spent a few minutes blankly staring at the ceiling tiles, trying to make sense of everything that had happened in the past 24 hours. Where did Maggie come from? Where did Andolini come from? Where had they both gone? Were either of them real? Or just figments of my stressed-out, sleep-deprived mind? The scratches and scrapes all over me definitely weren’t. Had I done that to myself? Doubtful. Had I also written this note to myself in a handwriting I probably couldn’t replicate now if I tried? Also doubtful. Would I have written the address of a real office I had never been to before? All but impossible. And why would I write something like ‘Look to the heavens?’
“As I continued to stare blankly at the ceiling, I noticed one of the tiles was slightly ajar. ‘Look to the heavens.’ Had I seriously been overlooking a thinly-veiled riddle this entire time? Only one way to find out.
“Somehow I was able to move enough of the furniture to let me reach the ceiling. Risking serious injury and inhaling dust and styrofoam, I groped around above the ceiling tiles until I felt a plastic, box-shaped object. I pulled it out to reveal a backup drive labeled ‘Backup Copy.’
“I must have sat at my desk, staring at my computer with the backup drive in my hand for half an hour, wondering if I should plug it in. This drive supposedly belonged to a man who rescued me from a monster in Arkham Forest in the middle of the night. Now, the next day, he had seemingly disappeared, with only a sticky note and this backup drive as proof of the encounter. Did I really want to see what he could have saved on this? He could have it hidden under layers of encryption; would I even be able to see it? Or it could have contained a virus that would have turned my laptop into a paperweight. Given Miskatonic’s reluctance to admit to Andolini’s existence, I doubted their tech support department would have been much help fixing my laptop if that happened.
“After a few more minutes of staring, I plugged the backup drive into my computer. There was no encryption, no viruses. Just a folder named ‘Encyclopaedia Daemonica backup.’ I opened the folder to reveal hundreds of Word documents with names like ‘Mephistopheles’ and ‘Lillith.’ I read through a few of them. Although Andolini’s written English, if Andolini had written this, wasn’t great, one thing was clear: Maggie wasn’t the only one of those things getting people to sell her their souls.”
“Was there an article about Chernobog?” Travis asked.
Purple Hair jolted as if Travis had startled her, like she had forgotten he and I were there.
“Huh? Chernobog? I don’t know, maybe. I didn’t read all of them. There wasn’t an article titled ‘Maggie,’ I can remember that much. It was the first one I looked for. Although I guess ‘Maggie’ wasn’t that thing’s real name. And considering how quickly Andolini vanished, I doubt he had much time to write a new article about whatever that thing was and save it to his backup copy.”
It was starting to get a little lighter outside now. We didn’t have much time. Travis asked “Do you still have it? The backup drive?”
She pursed her lips and replied, “I’m getting there. I never saw Andolini or Maggie again after that. I never looked at the contents of that backup drive again. I graduated a month later, got the guidance counselor job here in Felmore, and hadn’t had any paranormal or supernatural experiences of any kind since. Until…”
“Until you met Charlie last week,” I interrupted.
“Charlie?” Purple Hair asked.
I realized Charlie and Purple Hair’s meeting probably wasn’t a formal introduction. I explained, “The giant, yoked, metalhead-looking guy who worked, or works, as a janitor at FMS?” I wasn’t really sure whether to use present or past tense when talking about him.
Purple Hair paused again before saying “Yeah, that was him.” She paused a little longer, then continued, “I had just taken you to the nurse’s office, Eric, and had gone back to mine. I was a little shocked at first; I had never seen a rash like that.”
“Never?” I interrupted again, “Not even at Miskatonic?”
“No,” she replied, “Not even at Miskatonic. Anyway, I went back to my office, marked my calendar to speak to you both the next day after class, and started gathering my stuff to go home when I heard a loud RAP RAP RAP on my door. It startled me, since I can usually hear footsteps outside my office when someone is approaching. I opened it, and this massive dude with long hair, a huge beard, a cutoff tank top, camo pants, and combat boots was there glaring down at me.
“‘Can I come in and speak to you?’ he asked. Normally I’m not a fan of the stereotypical teacher response ‘I don’t know, can you?’ but in this case it may have been a fair question judging by his size in comparison to the door frame.
“‘Excuse me, who are you?’ I asked, trying not to sound intimidated by some man trying to assert his dominance over me in my own office.
“‘I’m the guy who tells Eric and Travis where they’re going to be after class,’ he said, suddenly inside my office. I had no idea how he got in, one second he was standing outside the doorway, the next thing I knew he was inside. A man that size should have at least struggled a little to get himself through the door frame, but he did it almost instantaneously. You know how cramped my office is. With him inside I practically had my back to the wall with him towering over me, ‘And you’re the one who stays out of my way. Everyone else who works at this school has been claimed, but not you, which makes this much easier for me. You don’t make those boys go anywhere after class, and I let you live. Got that?’
“He no longer had me with my back to the wall. His body had taken up nearly the whole office when he first went in, but at this point he had enveloped the entire office, with me inside it. I can’t quite explain it, it only seemed to last a few seconds, but somehow his presence covered every cubic inch of the room, preventing any chance I had of escaping. When I told him yes, it all stopped, he said ‘Good, glad we understand each other,’ and left, shutting the door behind him. I needed a few seconds to catch my breath and process what had just happened, but as soon as I returned to my senses I bolted out of my office to see where he had gone. I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t hear any footsteps of him walking away.
“His words ‘everyone else at this school has been claimed’ stuck with me. I remembered my experience with Maggie in Arkham Forest, beckoning me to join her union. Could everyone else who worked with me have actually done it? Maggie showed me that if I joined, I would be able to achieve social justice and gender equality. But maybe some other teachers sold their souls to this giant dude to power trip over kids, and didn’t want to compete with me over who got to hold you after class. Or maybe this big guy, Charlie, was also trying to recruit me to the union using a different method: extortion. As much as I hate to admit this, it wouldn’t be the first union to do so.
“Either way, I knew I had to stand up for myself. I didn’t have a clear idea of what to do, but I figured Porter would know something about it. I marched to her office, demanded to see her, and I guess you already know the rest.”
“Well, sort of,” I said, “except for one part: how did that conversation end?”
Purple Hair rolled her eyes, stuck her lower lip out, and exhaled, pushing a lock of hair up with her breath, “She denied everything, tried to gaslight me into thinking I had hallucinated, and condescendingly ‘suggested’ I take the next day off from work. But I knew what I saw! Porter must have been involved somehow.”
Travis and I looked at each other again as if to ask “Should we tell her what we know?” We had already spilled the beans to both Jeff Hennessey and my mom; our “agreement” with Charlie was hardly a secret anymore. Purple Hair was the only other person we knew who had contact with these…demons, or whatever they were, but that didn’t mean we could trust her. I also had no way of knowing what telling a third person would do to my rash, but it still didn’t hurt that much.
Purple Hair continued before we could make up our minds, “I went home and thought about how Charlie said I was the only one at FMS who hadn’t been ‘claimed.’ Was it because I was younger than everyone else who worked there? Surely other young, strong, women educators like me wouldn’t have taken well to some brute trying to intimidate them, right? But I remembered what Maggie showed me in Arkham Forest, and decided I needed to reconnect with my old college friends.
“I hadn’t spoken to them in a few years, but I was able to track most of them down through UVM’s alumni network and a few internet searches. I called them, asked about what they’d been up to, where they lived, what they’d been doing for work, et cetera. Nearly all of them were working in education, especially K-12 public school teachers. Eventually I broached the subject: had they joined any unions? Their answers were all the same: of course! Some of them had joined it before they had obtained their teaching licenses. One had even joined while she was still student teaching in college.
“Trying to hide my alarm on the phone, I gently inquired more about the union. I asked if the pay was any better, benefits, perks, normal stuff like that. They all practically laughed and said ‘Erica, of course all that stuff is better, but that’s not the real benefit of the union! Surely you of all people would know why we joined. I’m changing the country! I’m changing the world! Just like we said we would do in college. I’ve got my students reading Jürgen Habermas, Angela Davis, and Naomi Klein. They’re actually excited to learn and talk about the evils of capitalism! I’m telling you, Erica, our students are going to abolish the patriarchy for real! That’s what my recruiter told me I’d get by joining the union and that’s what I’m getting every day at work! But I’ll bet you know all about that as a guidance counselor. All those troubled, confused kids looking to you for support because their parents don’t give them enough attention at home. I’ll bet you’re making a new activist every time a teacher sends a kid to your office for fighting, or whatever, right?’
“Every time the conversation came back to me, I would try to casually laugh it off and say something like ‘Just doing what I can, you know?’ But after telling me all about what they had been doing as teachers, they all wanted to hear my stories about how the union had helped me fight the patriarchy as a guidance counselor. As much as I tried to avoid the question or tell them half-truths, these girls knew me well enough to know there was something I wasn’t telling them.
“Each one’s tone of voice dropped, becoming more cautious as they asked me stuff like ‘Are you not a member yet?’ and ‘Why haven’t you joined already?’ or ‘Has a recruiter never approached you?’ When I couldn’t give them a straight answer to any of these questions, all of them suddenly had something important to do, said something noncommittal about meeting over summer break, and hung up.
“After having those conversations with my old college friends, I had to face a harsh reality: those old educators like Principal Porter and Mrs. Whitley actually had a lot more in common with younger educators than I thought. I wasn’t different from the rest of my colleagues because of my age, I was different because I hadn’t sold my soul to join the union. I was different because I saw what Maggie, one of the union ‘recruiters,’ really looked like. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Andolini, she would have only been a cute little girl showing me how I could get everything I wanted in life. Maybe the other teachers’ recruiters didn’t appear exactly as I saw Maggie, but they must have all appeared as something the teachers wanted to see. They must have all shown the teachers what they wanted to achieve.”
Travis and I exchanged another worried glance. What did we want before we met Charlie? A drummer. Why did we want a drummer? So we could form a band and become metal gods. What happened after that? We met a six-foot-something yoked up multi-instrumentalist metalhead who scared bullies and started a rumor that we were the band who recruited a demon to play with us. But it was really the demon who had recruited us.
However, Purple Hair’s story didn’t entirely line up with Travis’s and my experience. Most importantly, we had never agreed to give our souls to Charlie to have some wild fantasies come true. Sure, we were rather explicit about wanting metal street cred during our shouting match in the band room, but we weren’t trying to change the world like Purple Hair or her friends.
Charlie also hadn’t induced any hallucinations of our wild fantasies, either. He spoke to us, telling us exactly what he offered, and that was it. Even if we took Purple Hair at her word, he didn’t induce any crazy hallucinations when he confronted her, either. He apparently filled the room somehow, but Purple Hair didn’t say anything about seeing fire and brimstone or anything like that. We hadn’t done the same thing Purple Hair’s friends had done, had we? We hadn’t sold our souls?
Purple Hair continued her story before I could give the question more thought, “I realized that whatever was in control of all these school districts was much bigger than me; I needed help. And there was only one person I knew of who could help me with these things: Dr. Giuseppe Andolini. I hadn’t thought about him since graduating with my master’s, but if there was a time to dust off his old backup drive, it was now. Only one problem, I had lost it.”
Our disappointment must have been visibly obvious because she then said “So you’ve heard of Encyclopaedia Daemonica, too. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. Well hang on, I haven’t finished the story. I tore my apartment to bits looking for the backup drive, just like I did with Andolini’s office. But I’ve moved apartments a few times since I acquired the drive, and one of those times I must have left it behind.
“Without his ‘encyclopaedia,’ I figured I could have at least found some information about Andolini online. It turned out Miskatonic, despite being a prestigious institution, has a website that looks like it was designed as an afterthought. It was hard enough to find any information about the current theology faculty, let alone former staff. No worries, I could at least call the phone numbers the site had listed and ask. That yielded the same results as it did the last time I tried it: everyone I called, the current dean, the registrar, even the president’s office, claimed no knowledge of a Giuseppe Andolini ever working at Miskatonic University.
“I turned to searching for his name and ‘Encyclopaedia Daemonica’ on the internet. My initial findings were not encouraging; most of my search results for his name were different people with the same name. However, after some digging I finally found a few obscure blogs and forums in the far corners of the internet talking about the guy I had met. Most of the people posting on these sites had the same problem as me: despite hearing about him or Encyclopaedia Daemonica at some point in time, they couldn’t find any corroborating evidence of either’s existence now that they were looking for it. Only a few claimed to have ever met him in person, and none had claimed any knowledge of him working as a professor at Miskatonic University. But several agreed to the existence of a print hardcover edition of Encyclopaedia Daemonica.
“Although I had read one of the early drafts on a backup drive, a print edition of the book was news to me. The forum posters who claimed it existed said they had seen it in places like libraries, schools, universities, and the odd yard sale, although none of them currently possessed a copy. I thought I’d start with our school library. To my surprise, the online catalog said we had a copy, although it was currently checked out. I asked Mrs. Kelsey when it would be back, but she told me to kick rocks, in so many words. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me after I denounced a union that she and all my other coworkers belonged to. Shortly after this conversation I checked the library’s online catalog again only to find the book was no longer listed.
“I figured if I couldn’t count on their help, I’d have to help myself. If they had just taken the book off the catalog, they probably had it stored away somewhere. They wouldn’t have risked throwing it away and having someone find it. Maybe they had destroyed it, but I had to look for it to be sure. After trying Mrs. Kelsey’s office with no success last night, I thought I’d try Porter’s office tonight. I was packing in case anyone caught me, but I wasn’t expecting it to be you.”
At this point it was about 5 in the morning. Not that we didn’t want to reciprocate by telling Purple Hair what we had been doing in Porter’s office, but we also wanted to catch a few Z’s before school. Not to mention Travis’s parents would be awake soon, and if they noticed their grounded son wasn’t home there would be hell to pay.
Purple Hair must have noticed us nodding off, saying “Maybe it’s just because some of your eyes are almost swollen shut, but it looks like you guys could use some rest. How about this: I’ll give you a ride home on the condition that you tell me what you were doing in Porter’s office later this week. It won’t be in my office after class, I’ve learned my lesson there. But you will have to tell me some time. Think you can work that into your schedules?”
Despite my sleep deprivation going on two nights in a row, the idea somehow came to me to suggest, “How about tonight? We can explain it as you drive Travis and I to band rehearsal.”
Travis looked at me like I had shot his dog.
Purple Hair chuckled and said “You’ve got some nerve suggesting I become your roadie and act like it’s you returning me a favor. Was this Dunk’s breakfast not good enough for you?”
Although I knew I was making a tall order, that bike ride to Charlie’s house for another two nights in a row would eat up valuable rehearsal time. Not to mention we would need someone else to drive us to the battle of the bands audition since our parents had grounded us. Fortunately, I thought I knew just the line to use on Purple Hair:
“Well, we sort of need a roadie now. The battle of the bands audition is this Saturday and we need to rehearse, but school is no longer a safe rehearsal space,” I said, pointing to my black eye.
Purple Hair looked at both of us in silence for a few seconds, realizing that we were in similar predicaments: none of us had any other allies at Felmore Middle School. As a scab, Purple Hair could no longer count on any of her union member coworkers to have her back. Travis and I couldn’t count on the faculty either, not to mention our peers who thought we had summoned a demon. Purple Hair wasn’t in the position to be choosy with her friends, and she knew it.
“Okay, I’ll do it. Let’s get back in my car, I’ll drive you boys home to catch some shut-eye before school starts. That way I’ll also remember how to get to your houses.” Upon entering her car, she asked, “The only other things I’ll need to know is the address of your rehearsal space and when you want me to pick you up. You guys don’t seem to mind being up at 3 AM, does that work for tonight?”
Before I agreed, Travis cut me off saying “Actually, how about we all get back to normal sleep schedules and do it after classes let out.” Purple Hair started to say something, but Travis cut her off, “You probably won’t have to worry about another run-in with Charlie. He’s not exactly dictating where we go after class anymore. We’ll explain it all during the car ride.”
Purple Hair pulled over and looked at both of us. She couldn’t have looked more serious, “I’ve already had two encounters with those things, and both times it almost ruined my life or worse. I am not going to risk another one. So when you tell me I ‘probably’ won’t have to worry about another run-in with Charlie, how probable are we talking?”
Travis and I shot each other a look before I answered her question, “It’s not impossible that he’ll show up to threaten you again. But I think the last time he did that is the reason we haven’t heard from him all week. I don’t know what he is, but I can tell you this: he’s no recruiter for the teachers union.”
Purple Hair looked genuinely surprised to hear this, but I could tell she believed me.
“Fair enough, meet me in my office after class. I’ll give you a ride to rehearsal from there,” she said as she shifted back into drive.