The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

Let Mikey Try It

Previously: "Backyard Magic" 

You and Eileen and Joshua all look at each other. No one speaks.

Someone is going to have to put the mask to his or her face.

It seems like such a small thing. Just pick it up, lift it, and put your face into it. A very simple action, when you think about it.

But what happens after that?

If this was just a regular arts and crafts project, just some ... thing ... you had made with plaster or soap or anything normal, then there'd be no big deal.

But this is magic. Or, at least, it looks like magic. No one carved or sculpted the thing into the shape of a mask, with blank eyes and brow, nose and mouth, cheeks and chin. It was just a hemisphere of hardened goop. But you made it according to a recipe in book that contains a magic sigil, and after Joshua picked it up, it just jerked and twisted in his hand into this new shape.

That isn't natural. So what would happen if you put it onto your face? Something equally unnatural? Something that would cripple or even kill you?

You can tell that's what the other two are also thinking.

* * * * *

"Look, nothing says we have to do anything with it," Eileen argues after you've cleaned up the mess in the back yard and moved back into the basement. "I mean, the book says what you have to do in order to finish the spell. It doesn't say that you have to finish, or that something bad will happen if you—"

Her eyes go very wide, and some of the color drains from her face. "If you don't," she finishes in a whisper.

You and Joshua exchange an uneasy glance. Well, uneasy in your case. He looks frightened. Because Eileen has just accidentally voiced a thought you hadn't yet had. What if something bad could happen as a result of leaving the mask unfinished? Would it be like leaving some magical box open? Could some of the magic start leaking out, mutating things? Could the thing be, like, magically radioactive or something, and it has to be sealed up? With a prickling fear you grab the book (which you carried into the basement) and consult the spell again. There's nothing that says bad things will happen if you leave an unfinished thing around. But the spell is in Latin, and what comes out of the online translator is pretty garbled. You can make out the sense of it. But what if there are nuances of the Latin that the translator has lost, or which an experienced magician would know or recognize but you wouldn't?

None of you talk much, because there doesn't seem much that has to be said; you can read on each other's faces the worry and fear.

But finally, as it gets on toward five o'clock, you get a text from your mom, asking if you're going to be home for supper, so they'll know whether to eat leftovers get some kind of takeout. That stirs you into movement.

"I gotta get going," you tell the other two as get to your feet. You wipe your sweaty palms on your pants. "Um, do you mind if we leave the stuff here? I mean, the stuff I bought to make the ... you know?" It's all in Joshua's garage, and that seems the most convenient place to leave it. He blanches, though, so you add, "I don't really have a place for it back at my place."

"You want to leave everything here?" Joshua asks. His face and tone are wary.

"Well—" You bite your lip. You've got the book in your hand. "I'll take this with me. I won't be able to do anything with it if I leave the stuff in your garage," you add, "so that'll be safe." You don't add the corollary: He won't be able to do anything without the book, which has the sigil in it.

"What about the, uh, thing we made?" Eileen asks.

You hesitate. You'd volunteer to take it with you too, except you're not sure how that would look to them. Like you're taking one for the team by exposing yourself to its magic? Or like you want to continue the experiment without them?

You're saved from deciding by Eileen. "Maybe I should take it," she says. "That way each of us"—he points to each of you in turn—"has something. Then maybe tomorrow we could get together and ... talk about it some more?"

You wonder what good that would do, if you can't talk about it and decide about it now, but you nod. Maybe things will look different in the morning, after you've all had a chance to sleep on it.

It's an awkward parting. Eileen and Joshua both follow you up and out to the front door, and there you all tentatively agree to talk later. There's an unsuccessful attempt to shake hands or bump fists or something, but you wind up just giving them a little wave before walking out the door. In your truck you squint back, half-expecting or -hoping that they will have followed you out to wave at you or see you off, but the door is shut.

Probably, you bitterly reflect to yourself, they're down in that basement, with its creepy marionettes and slithering zither music and the lava lamps, looking at each other and saying, God what a fucking perv and weirdo that guy is!

* * * * *

You would expect to have weird dreams that night, and maybe you do, because you are exhausted and clammy when you wake the next morning, as though you spent the night thrashing in your bed, but you have no memory of any. It's a very unpleasant morning anyway, on account of it's Sunday and you have to go to church. But it doesn't help that—besides the itchy woolen pants and the badly fitting dress shirt, the constricting tie and the jacket that cuts you under the armpits, and the hard-fought and totally unsuccessful battle to get your stiff shock of hair to lay down neatly—that you feel like a guilty blasphemer against all that is holy when you troop into the sanctuary. Not that your mom or dad apparently notice how you feel. To them, you probably look just as sullen and resentful and twitchy as ever.

But it also ruins what should have been a fairly decent outing. Your cousin Umeko sang specially today, and because Umeko (who was a Japanese orphan adopted by your aunt and uncle, so it's sortof-okay to notice things) is a sweet, smart and smoking college girl, you had been looking forward to enjoying her church recital, and to talking to her about it afterward, and congratulating her. It was going to be especially nice, because you were going over to be joining her and your Uncle Scott and Aunt Mary for lunch. But though you do perk up a little and do talk to her, it's your little brother, Robert—a pestilential thirteen-year-old who thinks he can compete with you at everything—who shoves in and gets all the face time with her.

What with one thing and another, it's not until you are home and changing out of your church clothes that you find the text message on your phone. You had to turn your phone off, of course, the moment you got in the car to go to church, and it's not until you find the lump of metal and plastic in your sports jacket coat pocket that you remember you never turned it back on. There's texts from your friends, too, but it's the one from Joshua that gets your attention. Dood u got to come over n see this. It was sent at ten-thirty, and there are a trail of follow-ups, all begging you to come out to his house. Instead of texting back, though, you call him direct to find out what's up.

What he tells you sends you racing over to his place.

* * * * *

Joshua pushes his long, thick, curly hair out of his face with both hands, then grips it. "It was fucking freaky, man," he says with staring eyes. "Fucking freaky."

"It" was what happened when he put that mask on someone. He didn't like having it around his house—Eileen hadn't left yet, him and her were still hanging out last night after you'd gone—and when he saw a chance to use it and to finish the spell, he took it.

It was one of Eileen's friends, a girl named Julie, who he tried it out on. Eileen said she needed some distraction, so she called Julie out to his place, and everyone got high. Maybe that's what gave Joshua the courage to try the mask out. The girl was asleep or something—she was lying back with her eyes closed, so Joshua got the mask from Eileen's bag, and dropped it onto her face.

And it vanished.

Joshua says that was the worst hour of his life—or maybe the worst ten seconds; being pretty baked he wasn't sure how long it lasted—but he put the mask onto the girl and it just disappeared. He freaked out hard and crawled all around with Eileen looking for it, and made so much noise that even his mother looked in to see what was going on, but it worked out when they discovered it had been sitting on Julie's face all along. Or it had returned there. In the cold light of day, Joshua isn't sure what really happened.

It's just you and him (Eileen has to do something with her family) when you haul out the book to see what, if anything, comes next. You're both astonished when you turn to the spell, and find the page disfigured by the faint outline of an oval that hadn't been there before. You stare wide-eyed at each other, then with a gulp—and feeling like you're picking up something very dangerous—you set the mask onto the oval. It fits perfectly over it.

And when you lift the mask again, the page beneath flutters. The page that had been locked down to the book beneath has now turned loose. You turn it over.

There's a continuation of the spell on the reverse side. And what looks like a new spell on the facing page.

Next: "Face Time" 

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