The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

The Kind of People Who Have Special Plans

Previously: "Jamming with Javits" 

You might have tried mixing more than one face into the mask, if the horrifying phrase The love-child of Seth Javits and me hadn't occurred to you. A thing that mixes my DNA and Seths? You have to fight down your gag reflex.

So, you return to the garage to fetch a paint brush. As you pass through the living room, your dad asks what you're doing. "Uh, working on that chemistry thing for Caleb?" you reply, remembering the quick lie you improvised for him when you set that fire up in your room. "Don't worry," you hurriedly add when he does a double-take at you, "I'm not burning anything."

Your dad looks skeptical, but lets you go. You wipe away some flop sweat as you run up the stairs.

* * * * *

The sealant went on fast and dried even faster; and, thank God, there wasn't any more polishing. The stuff was like clear mucilage, and the interior of the mask is little changed from before, except that it might glisten a little more brightly. The ghostly image of Seth that floats inside is also unchanged.

You would have tried the mask out that night, except that you were unnerved by the interest your dad showed in your project, so you hid the mask in your bedroom dresser along with the grimoire, and packed everything else up into the old backpack you used in middle school (which you still haven't thrown away) and set it beside your bed. Then you tackled your homework.

Or you tried to tackle your homework. Of course, it's hard to concentrate on calculus and English when you've got a magical doohickey that you're dying to try out.

The trouble is that, if it's easy enough to daydream about using it, it's also easy to imagine the trouble that might come from it. Leaving aside the really scary worry—like, what if you didn't make the mask correctly, and it turns you into a mutant freak, and you can't change back?—there's others. Suppose you do put it on, and it does turn you into a copy of Seth Javits. What if you can't get it off? (There are instructions for removing the mask, but what if they don't work?) Or suppose you do try it out, and it works, but you get caught? Or suppose you don't get caught, and it works perfectly—what would you do with it?

It's that last worry that comes to prey on you most. What use is the thing? What could I do with it? What good would come of making myself into Seth Javits's twin?

You suppose that the magician who wrote the book would have some ideas, and it doesn't take much to picture what those might be. Either they were black magicians intent on subverting society, or they worked for princes or nobles. Either way, they would be people with a reason to make magical disguises—to spy and to steal, to create chaos, to attack and hurt their enemies. They would have goals and a plan, and they would also have the resources to back their plans.

Ah, Alphonse! With this mask, which duplicates the features of the Archbishop, you shall infiltrate the Curia and impersonate our most implacable foe. Our assassins are hidden in the wood and will seize His Eminence the next time he travels to Cordoba. You shall accompany them, and replace him in his robes and in his coach. This letter, to be unsealed only when you have occupied his palace, will explain to the steps by which you will wreck the Treasury and cause His Majesty's armies to be disarrayed, so that our rebel forces can capture Toledo!

Okay. But how could you do the same sort of thing at Westside High School? And do you really want to?

Well, there is one thing you could do, if you were clever enough to set it up right. Seth is dating Cindy Vredenburg, one of the cheerleaders. She's a delectable thing with long, platinum hair and the strawberry-and-cream complexion of a Swedish dairy maid. (More importantly, she has, as they say, boobs and a butt that just won't quit.) If you got Seth out of the way—making sure somehow that he was busy with something else, which he couldn't get away from—maybe you could get up close to Cindy and get some of the action that Seth gets, by pretending to be him?

It's an inviting thought, and you are long in indulging it, especially after you've put away your homework and brushed your teeth and and wriggled into bed with the lights out. Except it's not long before you've dropped the pretense that it's a Seth Javits lookalike that Cindy is sucking off. No, it soon evolves into the fantasy that it's you she's making out with, and she's congratulating you on your cleverness with the mask and is asking if you could make some masks of some of the other cheerleaders, for her to wear, so that she can suck you off from under a variety of faces and give you a variety of boobs to suckle on and pinch ...

* * * * *

Tuesday morning. You see Seth coming before he sees you. Not that it does you any good. You're stuck inside the writhing mass of students that seethes and squeezes through the school corridors, like a slurry of undigested pig parts wriggling down the gullet of a python, and have nowhere to run. Also, he's coming toward you, and you've been fighting your way toward him. So when you come face to face—

For a long, hanging moment you think he's going to look through you and let you pass, for Seth is frowning with some kind of inner concentration, and when he looks at you his eyes register no recognition.

And maybe if you hadn't been staring at him with open-mouthed fear and horror, he would have passed on by. But you were staring at him, and you are so close you can feel the hot steam blowing out of his horsey face when something clicks behind his eyes, and you realize that you are not only in shit, you are going to be shit once Seth gets through scraping you off the bottom of his shoes.

You try to claw your way away, but Seth shoots out a strong arm and shoves you hard against a locker. "Hey, watchit, man!" someone hollers but Javits ignores them, to glare with a bright and hard grin into your face.

"Oh, fuck you, man!" he gloats. Boom! With a hard fist he punches all the air from you. "You wanna know how much trouble you're in, you little cocksucker?" Another blow, even harder than the first, glances off your arm, jarring and numbing it. "You're gonna need to hook yourself up to a machine just to shit straight by the time I'm—" He knocks the cap off your head and seizes a fistful of your hair.

Javits whips you around, and with half of your hair gripped in one fist—like he's trying to tear the scalp off your head—and the hem of your pants gripped in the other, he rams you through the thick crowd like the prow of an icebreaker. Bodies bounce off you, bruising your shoulders and face. When you reach an open pocket, Seth breaks into a sprint and runs toward the double doors leading outside. Using you as a battering ram he knocks them open, then hustles you across open ground toward the ancient portable units that sit in a mouldering semi-circle in back of the school. Students squawk and scatter like birds; and more than a few of them heartlessly point and laugh at you.

Javits throws you against the doorway to the nearest portable, folds you up with a punch to the kidney, then reaches past to twist the knob and push the door open. He kicks you until you tumble over the threshold, then slams the door shut on you both.

And then he gets mean.

* * * * *

"What was the occasion?" Carson Ioeger asks you later. "It looked to me like a celebration. You and Javits have some kind of anniversary today?"

"Yeah, what's the deal?" James asks. "Hey Tilley, is Javits two-timing you?"

Keith lays his sandwich aside and shows James two very stiff middle fingers.

It's lunchtime. You're sitting out on the grassy quad out front with Carson and his friends. Keith is with you too, as is Caleb.

It's not a rare thing, eating with Carson and James (and Jenny Ashton and Paul Davis). But today you felt a special interest in eating with them, for they like you have a history with Javits.

(So does Keith. In fact, Javits is much more likely to torment Keith, against whom he has a special and obscure grudge. You can only pray that that grudge is has not been transferred to you.)

"You know Javits," you growl back. "Does he need a reason?"

"No," says Carson, "but usually he likes to pretend that he does. How did he explain it to you? What crime did you—?"

"I looked at him funny. Or he thinks I did. Someone did, and he thought it was me."

Carson shrugs, but you catch James giving you a long and thoughtful look, as though he's dissatisfied with your explanation. But he says nothing, and Caleb seizes control of the conversation and steers it onto the topic of the time capsule that your class buried last Friday. You all have to write papers on your contributions, due at the end of the week.

But you're not paying attention. You're wondering— If I got Carson and James to draw Seth off, could I get in to do some mischief with that mask I made?

Next: "The Counterfeit Asshole" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 1)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)"