“Wow, sounds like you guys are in deep,” Purple Hair said after Travis and I explained everything in a plot-convenient 10-minute car ride. My rash started to tingle a little bit more, but I barely noticed it.
“Welcome to the party,” I replied as she pulled up to Charlie’s house, “We’re rehearsing in his house.”
“What?!” she screamed, “I lied to your parents about me keeping you in detention so we could go to Charlie’s house?! You just told me this morning you haven’t heard from him all week! You told me there was almost no chance I would run into him aga-”
Travis and I cut her off and explained that Charlie wasn’t home. But the only way to get her to calm down and believe us was to explain how we knew. Travis and I had a brief moment of hesitation before revealing this, because contrary to what I said a few paragraphs ago, we hadn’t exactly explained everything. But ultimately we came clean about sneaking into his house by finding his keys in his car ignition. Between breaking into several private offices, stealing from one, and brandishing a deadly weapon at minors, Purple Hair had confided several of her secrets to us. What was admitting one more of ours to even out the score?
“So that’s how you guys got the keys to the building!” Purple Hair mused, calmer now, “I forgot to ask you how you did that. It sure beats the way I got mine.”
“Didn’t you get them when you got the job at the school?” Travis asked.
“Only the ones to unlock the front door, my office, and my desk drawers,” Purple Hair replied, “To get the keys that unlocked Kelsey and Porter’s offices I also had to be friendly with a janitor. But not ‘friendly’ in the same way you guys were with Charlie, if you catch my drift.”
Ew. That was one secret Purple Hair could have kept to herself.
We went inside and Travis and I got our instruments and the drum machine set up. As I closed the door to the recording studio, I noticed Purple Hair start to wander around Charlie’s house, like we had done a couple days prior. On the one hand, this worried me, since I had no control over where she went and what she did while Travis and I jammed. But on the other hand, I was relieved. Travis and I had been struggling with the pesky notion that everything we did was playing into Charlie’s hand, but I doubted he would have wanted us to bring the woman he had threatened into his house while he wasn’t there.
As we had explained to Purple Hair, Charlie couldn’t have been a recruiter for the teachers union. Porter made it clear that his presence at FMS had hurt teachers union recruitment, and she even called him a “metalhead recruiter.” But that title didn’t explain much. From what we knew, the teachers union recruiters like Maggie, and whomever we overheard Porter talk to, presented and promised their prospects’ wildest dreams in exchange for their souls. We didn’t really know what “selling your soul” actually meant in context, but it sounded like a pretty steep price to pay.
All Charlie promised Travis and I was to be our drummer, defend us from bullies, and “be a demon.” Admittedly that last part sounded pretty ominous after what we had since learned, and he had demonstrated some unnerving abilities, but nothing compared to what Maggie allegedly did. And all Charlie asked of Travis and I in exchange was to keep our agreement secret and to make a real effort to be better musicians. Certainly a commitment, but again, nothing compared to selling our souls. Probably.
So why was that commitment so important to Charlie that he threatened someone who jeopardized it? Why was that secret so important to keep that my rash put me in crippling pain when I divulged it? And why did it only feel like a minor pang now that Charlie had disappeared, even though I had told two more people about the agreement since then? Didn’t Porter say something to her recruiter about Charlie being caught? Maybe Charlie and these teachers union recruiters were more different than we thought. Maybe they actually had beef with each other…
Thump, thump, thump!
“Oh, come on! I was just starting to get into my groove!” Travis complained.
I stopped the drum machine and opened the door to find Purple Hair looking terrified.
“Guys, have you seen this dude’s garage?”
“Yeah, what about it?” I asked.
“Come with me!” she commanded.
Despite her getting dangerously close to telling us where to go after class, we obeyed.
We entered Charlie’s garage, looking at his workshop of bizarrely shaped tools and devices intermingled with guitars and other musical instruments.
“Yeah, this is Charlie’s workshop,” I said, “We figured he was making his own custom instruments.”
“It’s not the instruments I’m worried about,” Purple Hair muttered, keeping her eyes fixed on the oddly shaped objects, “Do you know what those other things are?”
Travis and I both shook our heads.
“Although I no longer possess Encyclopaedia Daemonica, there are still a few entries that have stuck with me,” Purple Hair said, “After my encounter I wanted to learn how to prevent running into those things again. And if I did have another run-in with one of them, I wanted to know how to defend myself. Only one entry in the Encyclopaedia discussed a surefire way to defeat these things: holy weapons. And your buddy’s garage is full of them.”