It seemed Mr. Culpepper was highly motivated to make my life difficult, too, seeing how he took nearly a half hour to arrive. A strange clicking sound preceded his appearance down the corridor. Mr. Culpepper was leading a leashed dog beside him. No, not a dog—a hellhound. As it grew closer, I saw the hairs of its black coat were more like scales than fur, hard and slick as armor. Its eyes shone like flashlights. I’d heard rumors that Culpepper had a hellhound, but I’d never seen it before. Not surprising, since hellhounds were nocturnal—and extremely volatile.
“Why on earth did you bring that mangy thing along?” Ms. Hardwick said.
The hound growled as if it had understood the insult. The sound made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Culpepper grunted. “Somebody’s out there killing folk, if you haven’t noticed.”
Hardwick snickered. “And you think they might come after you? My goodness, Faust, you’re getting more paranoid every day.”
Culpepper glared at her. Then he looked at me and glared some more. “What’s she doing here?”
“Detention. Did you bring my package?”
“Yeah, but what about her?”
Hardwick waved, dismissively. “Never mind that. Hand it over, if you please.”
Culpepper grunted again as he set the toolbox he was carrying with him on the floor. He bent over it and pulled out a brown paper package the size of a pencil box, which he handed to Ms. Hardwick.
He stood up again. “Gonna check things out.” Then he turned and entered the bathroom, taking the hellhound with him.
I sucked in a relieved breath—the hound had been watching me with its eerie eyes like it was hoping I might make a run for it so it could give chase.
Hardwick ripped into the paper surrounding the box with her long, thick fingernails and yanked the lid off to reveal a stockpile of candy bars. “Would you like one?” she said, pulling out a Baby Ruth.
Under normal circumstances, I would’ve jumped at the chance to indulge in a piece of contraband candy, but something about the way Hardwick was looking at it, like a dog drooling for table scraps, decided me against it. “No, thanks.”
Hardwick shrugged and tore in—literally—gobbling down the Baby Ruth in a matter of seconds. Next she started in on a Mr. Goodbar, then a Butterfinger followed by a Clark Bar, and so on. I was beginning to notice a disturbing theme to the names of these candy bars and had to rein in my imagination before it started picturing what other edible things a hag might eat that would produce that same chomp-chomp-chomp sound.
To take my mind off the sick feeling in my stomach, I thought about Culpepper. It seemed a safe bet he was running some kind of black market here at Arkwell, apparently one that provided the faculty with banned substances like chocolate. But I knew my mother didn’t have a sugar problem. So what had he given her? Sugary contraband wasn’t very serious, but what if he dealt in harder stuff? Like maybe black magic items. The little I knew about black magic was enough for me to suspect you could do any number of horrible, vile things with it.
Culpepper and his hellhound emerged a few minutes later, long enough for Culpepper to pull out a couple of tools. It struck me as a bit odd that he hadn’t tied the hound up in the restroom so he could have both hands free. He must not want the animal out of his sight. What was he so nervous about?
I checked his fingers for rings when he emerged again to get even more tools, but he wasn’t wearing any. It was a stupid idea anyway. For one thing, I seriously doubted anybody would’ve made Mr. Culpepper the third Keeper. For another, it was highly unlikely I would recognize a Keeper ring if I saw one, besides Rosemary’s. There was no reason to believe the rings looked the same. Even if they did, surely the person wearing it would be smart enough to disguise it with a glamour.
When Culpepper went back into the bathroom again, I noticed that the contents in the toolbox had shifted to reveal a set of keys. Not just any set, but the mega-ultra-open-every-door-on-campus set. At least a hundred keys hung from the big silver loop. I thought it likely that one of them would open the door into the crypt Culpepper had disappeared into that night.
I spent the next couple of minutes contemplating how to steal the keys without getting caught. Fortunately, I’d worn my Chickery High School hoodie, which had a huge front pocket. Unfortunately, I was certain Ms. Hardwick wasn’t distracted enough with her candy bars not to notice me pilfering Culpepper’s toolbox.
When Mr. Culpepper came out of the bathroom for the third time, he looked like someone had given him a swirly. Droplets of water fell from his wet hair and shirt, and he was angry enough that I could see the tips of his horns showing through the glamour and the hint of an electric green glow in his eyes.
“This is going to take the rest of the night to fix, stupid idiot sons of … No point in hanging around here if you’ve got other things to do. I’ll let you know when I’m done, Emma. It’s gonna need a good cleaning.” He turned around, muttering swear words as he went back inside.
“Well, that’s a shame,” said Hardwick, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. The gesture didn’t help. The chocolate smears remained around her lips, looking like dried blood. “I suppose you’d best call it a night, my dear. We can pick this up again next week.”
“Oh, okay.” I stood, not sure if I should consider myself lucky or not. On the one hand, I was so tired my eyeballs were twitching, but on the other, I hadn’t made it through one building in an entire night. Detention was going to last forever at this rate.