The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Abduction of Jeff Spencer

Previously: "The Good Little Foot Soldier" 

You don't know that sacrificing someone in the next spell will harm the victim. It might even give them superpowers.

If so, that would be a pretty solid reason not to use the next spell on someone you don't like.

But you'd bet that it's going to do them no good, and you can think of some people who you wouldn't mind hurting in a good cause.

You also know where to find them.

* * * * *

Eight o'clock. The corner of Borman and Hoover Roads.

It has been a drizzly day, and the wet roads glisten under the streetlights as you pull into the McDonalds at the corner of those two very busy thoroughfares. The parking lot is mostly full, and a line of half of dozen vehicles, their brake lights forming a glowing trail, wind around from the drive-through window. You back into a space from which you can watch the door to the restaurant. The rain has at least stopped, and it's still a reasonably warm evening, though it is the first week in October, so you roll the window down as you settle back. All your supplies from the school basement are in the back, under a tarp.

You're here because of a conversation you overheard in third period. Jeff Spencer is in that busywork class—Career Planning—and though he rarely attends, that morning he'd popped in long enough to confer in a low tone with Nicholas Horner, one of the "pilot fish" that swim around him and the others. You kept your eyes off them, but your ears were open as Spencer muttered plans with Horner about meeting him and some other guys at the McDonalds at eight o'clock.

You have no idea what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. Everything that comes next is going to be purest improvisation.

The caper starts a little after you arrive, when you see Spencer loping into the restaurant. After a two-minute wait you go in yourself, to order a small, second supper, and you're still in line when Spencer, Horner and Joshua Call collect their food and retreat into a back booth. You get yours to go, and sink down behind your steering wheel to munch your fries while waiting for those guys to reappear. Some possible plans coil and uncoil slowly in your head.

At a little after eight-thirty, the three come out. Call and Horner go off in one direction, but Spencer with his head ducked walks toward you. He's just veering off to the side when, on a sudden hunch that this is the moment and this is the way, you hop out.

"Hey Jeff!" you call. "Spencer!" He stops, and even in the dark parking lot you can see the droop of his lower lip as he gapes at you. (Spencer always looks like he's about to start drooling from the effort of trying to think.)

"Hey man, I'm glad I ran into you," you say. "Can you do me a favor?" He says nothing. "I'm supposed to meet some guys here, but I need to drop my wheels off over at the soccer fields. If I gave you ten bucks, could you drive my truck over there so, uh, Jessica Garner can pick it up?"

You're not sure even you understand what you've just said, so it's no surprise that Spencer just glares dully back at you. "Help me move my wheels?" you repeat.

"Ten bucks?" he says, as though trying to dimly recall something he may have heard someone say once upon a time.

"Yeah. My truck." You point. "It needs to go over to the soccer fields. You know, by South Creek Park? But I have to wait here. Could you move it? I'll give you ten— No, twenty bucks, if you drive it over." You pull a bill from your pocket.

Still, he eyes you warily. Or maybe he still hasn't fathomed the offer, for after a moment he blinks and says, "Jessica Garner?"

"Yeah!" You're glad you improvised one of the cheerleaders into the lie. "She's waiting over there. She can give you a ride to wherever you need to go."

He blinks again. "Jessica?"

"Yes. Jessica. Twenty bucks." You point to your truck again. "You drive my truck over to the athletic fields by South Creek while I wait here."

"You wait here?" An actual expression—one of puzzlement, but still an expression—wrenches itself onto Spencer's face.

"Yes. I'll wait here while you drive my truck over to—" Twice more you have to explain it while he grunts over the details.

Then, to your immense alarm, he grins. "Sure," he says in a soft, guttural chortle.

"Awesome." You fight down a shiver. If this was a bona fide favor, you're sure you'd find your truck in the river when you went looking for it. (And that would be a best-case scenario.) "Let's get in and I'll show you a few things."

So Jeff Spencer gets behind the wheel of your truck with you standing next to him.

"There's a little trick to getting it started," you tell him. "Oops, hang on, let me get the fuckity-what." You half hoist yourself into the bed of the truck, and from under the tarp pull out one of the blank masks, into which you've glued a mind-band. "So, this thing," you say after you've hopped out and are leaning back into the cab, "we have to put here." You slam it into Spencer's face.

Thank God his reflexes are as slow as his thought processes. You catch him as he falls out of the truck, then push him into the cab and over into the passenger's seat. "Don't touch my fucking shit," you mutter at him as you haul yourself up behind the wheel.

* * * * *

It was sheerest improvisation, but now you've got a victim, and you've even got a place to dump him, at least temporarily. You are also anticipating what comes next as you hightail it down Borman to the municipal sports complex. The athletic fields are dark and empty, and with a hard jolt you jump the curb of the parking and drive out onto one of the grassy fields. You wait.

But not for long, and after catching the mask as it falls out of Spencer's face, you reach across to open the passenger side door and push him out. There's a heavy, squelching noise as he hits the wet ground. You pull the door shut, and with a roar of the motor fishtail away. In the rear view mirror you see him already sitting up as you peel off across the parking lot.

God save you if you ever meet up with him again.

You park in the South Creek Shopping Center, in a corner where you're not likely to be seen, and from under the tarp retrieve the next thing you need: a brush and the sealant. The name JEFFREY CARL SPENCER stabs you in the eye as you paint the inner surface of the mask. You work quickly, even though you dread the next part of the still-evolving plan.

If you're going to know where to recapture Spencer, you're going to have to know where he lives and is likely to hang out this Friday night. And in order to learn that ...

Your stomach is heaving up on you a little as you blow the mask dry. In order to put off the inevitable a little longer, you drive around the city, looking for a dark, quiet, safe place to make the transformation. Eventually you give up on finding someplace new, and yield to the obvious by driving back into Acheson, to the elementary school. You park and turn off the motor and sit back with a sinking heart as you look over at the mask. You buy yourself a few more seconds by loosening your pants and pulling them halfway off your butt, for you're sure that Spencer is huskier than you. Finally, after rubbing your eyes deeply, you snatch up the mask and put it to your face before you can dream up another way of procrastinating.

The mask seems to grab and drag you under head first.

* * * * *

There is no moment of waking. There is only the consciousness of being awake, and of being behind the wheel of a truck. This strikes you as significant. You sit up and clutch it. Vroom vroom, you think.

You press the heels of your hands into your eyes and rub deeply. Your fingers slide up into your hair.

You freeze. There's not as much there as you're used to, and it's farther back on your scalp.

You groan.

That's right. You're Jeff Spencer now.

Well, how bad can it be? You settle back with a sigh, and wait for the memories to come.

And you wait and wait.

And wait.

You know you put a metal band in it when you made the mask. You stared at the name while you sealed the mask, so you know that "Jeffrey Carl Spencer" is inside the mask, and so he's got to be inside you now, too, just the way Caleb had been when you were wearing his mask. So where are the memories?

Maybe if you closed your eyes and relaxed, tried to forget that you're Will Prescott ...

Oh God.

It's like a slowly swelling wave of hot tar, and once it starts creeping up you and over you and into you, there's no resisting it even as you frantically try beating it back. For Spencer's mind is sticky and suffocating, and soon, like some prehistoric brute flailing in a mire, you are dragged into it, and under it, and are permeated by it ...

... until you are nothing more than the fossilized bones of Will Prescott, suspended inside the mind and personality of Jeff Spencer.

* * * * *

You pull up your pants, turn on the motor, pull into the street.

Find Jeff. Smash with rock. Where?

Next: "The Coming of Jeff Spencer" 

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