The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Bands of Silver

Previously: "An Outing of Fakes" 

You must not have heard right. Did Natalie just suggest that you not take off these masks you're wearing—masks that turned you into each other—before going home? "Wait, what?" you say.

"You heard me." The guy with your face grins at you, looking like a demented rodent. "I go home as you, and you go home as me!"

Oh my God! She must be nuts! Or she's just teasing.

"That wouldn't work," you flatly declare.

The smile falls off your twin's face. "Why not?"

"Because how am I supposed to fool your parents?"

"By looking like me!"

"I don't know them! I don't know you! How am I supposed to act—?"

"Just bluff them, Will! What are they gonna think, that you're a fake?"

"I could accidentally get you in trouble! What if I say or do something that gets you in a bunch of trouble?"

"You won't."

"What if you get me in trouble?"

He starts to protest. Then he stops and looks very puckish. "Could I?"

"Of course you could! You could—"

"I mean, do you give me permission?"

"What? No!"

"Spoilsport. Okay," he sighs. "It was just an idea—"

And a really hare-brained one, you think.

But she relents, and drives you both back to the elementary school. The lights are burning in the community center, so you walk the long way around the front to reach the basement. You go down first to change while Natalie keeps watch outside, then she changes while you keep watch. You take advantage of the moment, while she's unconscious, to take the book and hide it in your truck. It's not that you don't trust Natalie, exactly. But it seems the most ... cautious ... thing to do after that squirrelly suggestion she made.

* * * * *

The day at school is extremely normal and boring. It's almost as if the events of the weekend had never happened. Caleb never references Gillian or Braydon's hunt for you (and you don't bring it up!) and Delp himself is missing from the fourth period class you share. Your closest brush with the weekend's events comes when you pass Gillian in the hallway, and she turns to yell at you: "Did you have fun with Natalie this weekend?"

"Uh ... Yeah!"

"She's a fun one alright! Just keep your hands inside the moving car at all times!"

Then she's swept away by the crowd before you react further.

* * * * *

"I got in trouble last night because of you," Natalie says in a sing-song when you pick her up at the other high school. The buses are long gone but the teachers' lot out front is still full, even though it took you half an hour to get from Westside.

"How'd I get you in trouble?" you ask as you turn toward the mall.

"You weren't supposed to bring me home last night."

"What was I supposed to do, leave you in Acheson?"

"I told my dad I was going to be with Gillian yesterday, so when I said that you brought me home—"

"Does he have a problem with me?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"He thinks you're a bad influence."

You boggle. He doesn't even know you, and if he did know what you and Natalie have been getting up to, he'd have to admit that if anything she's been a bad influence on you. "How does he figure that?" you demand.

She gives you a sly look. "Don't you want to be a bad influence? Don't you want to be the bad boy?"

"I—! Um—!"

She giggles. "You don't have to be, Will. But it's more fun if I tell him you are."

Yeah, but what if he complains about me to my dad? you glumly wonder.

* * * * *

You've got the book in the truck for reference, so it doesn't take you long to gather up the supplies for the next spell, and Natalie pays for them. She teases you a little about that, telling you that means that she gets to be in charge of whatever you do with them, and even though she says I was just kidding! Jeez! when you protest, it doesn't sound like she's going to back down.

The spell doesn't call for as many ingredients as the first two, but the process of putting them together is a little more involved. It doesn't call for any mixing or firing, though, so you park your truck on one of the streets bordering the community center (but out of sight of the center itself) and work on it in your truck bed. You start by copying the sigil into Natalie's notebook, which takes an hour or so as you sun yourselves and chat amiably about this and that. Then you do the honors as Natalie watches and kibbitzes from the side: cutting strips of copper and zinc, sandwiching a bead of mercury between them, and then sandwiching this composite between two pocket mirrors, turned reflective sides toward each other. This you carefully lay onto the copy of the sigil, and with a steel-nib pen (the most expensive of your purchases, but one that Natalie says she'll get some use out of) you scratch a set of runes (given by the book) into the back of the top mirror. The stack hisses malevolently as you copy the runes, which gives you a sweat, but there is no fire, and the sounds cease abruptly once you've made the last stroke. You and Natalie give each other a wide-eyed stare when the runes you'd made vanish as though they'd never been.

Carefully you separate the mirrors, and a single strip of metal, about an inch wide and five inches long, falls out. It is silvery but with an oily shine. It is very thin and flexible, more like paper than metal, but with more heft. It bends to fit comfortably in the cupped palm of your hand.

"Let's make another one," Natalie says, and this time you let her do it. The process and results are the same.

You're not done yet, though. The book gives another set of runes that have to be inscribed onto the strips. You and Natalie each take a steel-nibbed pen from the pack you bought and set to work.

It's a lot harder and takes a lot longer than you would have thought, and you both wonder aloud if you performed the spell correctly because of the troubles you have. The surface of the metal bands doesn't want to give under the pressure of the nibs, so that you have to push extremely hard into them to even make a mark, and the runes fade away almost as soon as you make them. Even after you've scratched one in, it will become fainter and fainter as you work on the next, so that you're constantly having to backtrack to re-carve lines that you thought you were finished with.

The whole thing takes something like three hours, and you're both exhausted and a little out of sorts when it finally looks like you've made a semi-permanent set of runes in each metal band. You have to adjourn to McDonalds for supper (after each of you texted home to say you were out "studying" with a friend) and finish in a back table there, hiding your work behind your backpacks from passing eyes.

When you're done, you take your things back out to the truck, and with a heart sick with fear that you've done it wrong, you lay one of the strips across the sigil. But to your joy, when you lift it, the page beneath flutters.

Eagerly you turn it. There is only a single line of Latin text there: Noscĕre mente alius.

You and Natalie are both silent as you fumble out your cell phone to make a translation. "To know the mind of another," it says.

You blink at it, then lift your eyes to meet Natalie's. There seems little doubt what it means.

* * * * *

"Oh, come on, Will!" Natalie pleads. "Think how much fun we could have!"

Yeah, you think with a gulp. Fun.

You took the stuff back to the elementary school, and this time you went down into the dark basement (it was after nine when you got there; the sun has long set) because for this part you wanted privacy. The book didn't specify how to apply the object, but if it was going to copy your brain—

Like the mask copied your body.

—it seemed best to put it to your foreheads. You insisted on trying it first, and you laid yourself out on a table top before laying the warm metal strip onto your brow. You weren't surprised to feel yourself waking with a snort, or to learn from Natalie that the thing disappeared into your forehead, and didn't reappear for another ten minutes.

The really freaky thing was discovering that the runes have vanished, replaced by a blue, glowing Roman script that seems to float above the surface of the metal. It gave you a bad turn to see it spell out your name in full—WILLIAM MARTIN PRESCOTT—like it knows who you are.

Then Natalie squealed "My turn!" and quickly stretched out and put her band onto her head. Like a shallow slick of water evaporating in a scorching hot skillet, the metal strip seemed to vanish there. She was out cold for ten minutes, during which you had ample time to anticipate what she would propose on awaking.

"Let's go home as each other! I'll wear your mask and you'll wear mine, and I'll wear your brain thingie and you'll wear mine! And then we'll be able to fool our parents perfectly!"

Well maybe it would work like that and maybe it wouldn't. And even if it did—even if it did copy everything in your brain, everything you've ever thought or dreamed or wished or fantasized about—would you really want Natalie seeing it?

Because some of it is pretty yucky, even you think!

Next: "To Know the Mind of Natalie" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"