The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Good Little Foot Soldier

Previously: "The Burning Issues of the Day" 

When the lunch bell rings, you follow Jenny inside, and ask her opinion about what's going on with Caleb. "You think he's really gotten himself in trouble?"

She shrugs. "All I know is he's managed to piss a lot of people off lately," she says. "It's nothing huge, except for the money thing." She hesitates, then pulls you aside.

"Are things okay with him at home?" she asks. "Are him and his mom having money problems? Because I know things with them are sort of, you know—" Her face crinkles in an expression of worry and embarrassment.

"I dunno. He hasn't said anything to me."

She squints at something in the distance. "Well, do you think you could tell people that they're a little, you know, stretched? It would probably make things easier for him until he gets his issues sorted out, whatever they are. It could be money issues, couldn't it?" she blurts out. "Caleb's not the kind of guy to just take stuff that doesn't belong to him, you know—"

"Caleb wouldn't just steal money."

"I know." Jenny's frown deepens. "That's why I'm thinking it could be money problems at home. He'd be way too embarrassed to ask for help, so if he's desperate enough to— Well, it must be really bad. God, he probably feels terrible. That could be why he's acting out, too."

You tell her you agree, that Caleb's money woes, if he has any, could be behind his strange behavior. But you remind her that Caleb has also recently got a job—"Where my dad works"—and that if he and his mom are having money issues, it could be a short-term thing, until his first paycheck comes in. "You could mention that to Carson and James, tell them that, uh, maybe in a couple of weeks, they might find they've gotten their cash back." Your voice deepens. "As mysteriously as it had vanished." You raise your eyebrow meaningfully.

"Mm-hm," Jenny says, though she sounds skeptical. "I'll mention that."

* * * * *

Your talk with Carson has done this much: It's cured you of the desire to torment Caleb anymore. And it's given you a project: Get some replacement money so as to restore fellow feeling all around. But where to get the cash?

That's another project for the masks, and you can think of some deserving victims.

If you can get close to them.

But the next few days pass slowly and without incident. You hoard what money you have left, in case you need it for whatever spell comes after the present one, and content yourself with finishing up a sixth mask. You've enough extra material to chisel out three more of those metal bands, though, and time enough, for the fire in the basement continues to burn. The earth is metamorphosing within it, tightening up into a compact mass, and coming to look more like a cylindrical block than a loose pile. You worry a little when a couple of rents open up in it, as though it is cooking unevenly, and you grimace at the thought of having to make another trip out to the graveyard if this experiment goes south. If you do, you decide, you'll wait until you have a mask of someone big and strong and mean, so that you'll have a better set of muscles.

As it happens, both project come to fruition simultaneously. The fire is out again on Wednesday morning, when you check on your way in to school, and again on Thursday afternoon. On Friday afternoon you find it again extinguished, but this time it won't relight, no matter how many matches you set against it, or where. You step back to examine what you've made.

You hope the thing is not malformed. It is about six feet in length and about two feet across at its broadest. A rent up the middle has cloven it in twain, and two smaller rents on either side have separated out long, arm-like splinters. "Arm-like" seems an apt description to you as you study it. They do look like arms resting by the torso of the heap. And that other rent has created two legs. You eye flicks to the opposite end. There's a bulbous mass there, like a head.

It's with a thoughtful expression that you pick up the book and flip to the spell. The page doesn't come away, though, but with a hopeful frown you lay the book on top of the heap, count to five, then try again.

This time it easily flips.

With the help of your cell phone and an internet translator, you work out the explanation for what you've made. It's a servant, according to the book. If you set a mask on it, it will take on the image and mind of the person within the mask and obey your commands.

You let out a low whistle. That could be really useful. Fuck, it could have been really useful the night you got the dirt to make the damn thing.

Unfortunately you have to "polish" it before it's done. You make a face at that. The thing is enormous, and is white in just the way the masks are. The car buffer is at your house, but you strip off your shirt and start wiping at it.

It only takes you a few minutes to realize that the thing does not need polishing the way the masks did. A thin film of dust comes off it, but when you rub at it more firmly the underlying material begins to gleam almost instantly. It doesn't change color, but the highlights off it already give it a "polished" effect. Hope rises in your chest, and after you've rubbed the dust from it all over, and given it a slightly deeper scrubbing, you take a chance on activating it. Caleb's mask is in the basement with you, so you scramble over to retrieve it. After just a moment's hesitation, you place it on the "face" of the thing.

It's like dropping a dish into a pool of water. It vanishes, and you almost fancy a ripple runs through the "pedisequos," as the book has dubbed it. But you've no time for such fancies, for suddenly you're not looking at a stony, vaguely man-shaped blob, but into the face of your best friend.

Caleb Johansson lays there, and before you can suck in a breath, his eyes snap open and lock onto yours. "Oh God," he exclaims. "How did you get out there?" Then he sits up. "And what the fuck did you do with my clothes?"

Naturally he'd ask, because he's completely naked.

* * * * *

The conversation that follows is pretty tricky, for you and he—it?—are more than a little freaked out. At the same time it goes much more smoothly than you'd have feared, because fake-Caleb actually has a fairly good idea of what's going on.

"Yeah, I know what you've been up to," he says in the exact, sour honk that Caleb uses when he's pissed at you. "Fucker." He's huddled up in a corner, his bony knees up under his chin, and he glares at you. "How fucked up is my life these days?"

"You tell me," you retort.

He doesn't know. He only knows his own life up to the moment that you slapped that metal band on to the real Caleb's forehead, and the stuff you were doing when you had the mask on. So he remembers being an ass at all those parties, and he also remembers digging up all that dirt—"Jesus, you could've at least stolen a backhoe while you were committing grand larceny all over town!"—and buying the fuse and starting the fire. "You should'a blown yourself up," he says. He is also aware that during those last episodes it was really you inside him, for he has memories of taking his face off, and infers that it was you doing these manipulations because you were at your house or in your truck or reading the book while inside the mask.

As for what he—it?—is deep down, he has no idea. He doesn't know how he got into the basement, or anything about this "pedisequos" spell. He is "Caleb Johansson" all the way through, but that is all that he knows. His personality is totally Caleb's too, and there is no "robotic" quality to his voice or movements, and no lack of luster in his eye. He can even produce saliva that he can spit out on command.

But really, that's all you need. He doesn't need to know what kind of thing he is so long as he knows he has to obey you, and he confesses that he gets a funny feeling inside him—"But not funny that way!" he snarls—when you tell him to do things, like spitting or walking or slapping himself. After reading through the spell with you, and checking the translations online, he declares that the best description for what he is, is "lackey."

"What are you going to do with me now?" he asks mournfully as the evening light is waning. You answer by telling him to lie back down. You grasp his face, mutter the formula, and pull. The mask comes away in your hand, and Caleb reverts to a featureless, stony lump. You assume that for him it will be like going to sleep.

You look at the next spell. Like the previous ones, it only gives you a sigil, some ingredients, and directions for combining them. You've got plenty of stuff on hand for executing it, except for one thing.

It calls for a human being.

Well, you yourself are a human being, but you're not going to use yourself in a spell. You have a suspicion that your lackey (you like the word) won't count as human. That means you'll have to go find someone.

You look at the pedisequos. There would be two of you, now, to take down someone like the Molester. You could make more of them, though that would take a lot of time.

Or you could make do with what you have, and ignore the next spell in the book.

Next: "The Abduction of Jeff Spencer" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"