The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

The Fire Behind the Face

Previously: "The Face Factory" 

You bolt upright, every nerve in your body a taut, fiery bowstring. Motherfucker! you scream inside your skull. Where's the God-damned little cunt? I'll fuck him, and then I'll skin him and kill him and eat him! And then I'll get mean!

You're in Dane Mathias's messy bedroom, on the filthy bed where that motherfucking fuckmeister hat dich mit einem hollischen Gerat erwischt—!

You bridle your anger. Time enough for cussing, Joe, you remind yourself, after you've caught the little shit. Then you can set him on fire and piss on him to put him out before setting him on fire again. Did he take your clothes? Fine, now you won't have to drop your trousers before you shit in his mouth!

Actually, your clothes are stacked neatly on the other side of the bed, but you ignore them as you leap to your feet and tear the bedroom door back. You are vibrating with rage as you stalk nakedly down the hallway. Fucking smug little pissant! "I'm going to add your face to my collection, Joe," he said. Fuck you, I'll tear your face off and jack off through the bloody flap that was once your mouth!

A figure is sitting on the sofa with his back to you. Before you can leap on him, he turns and looks at you with a wondering, curious expression. It's Gordon Black.

And with a choke you catch yourself almost in mid-leap. It hits you between the eyes like hammer: That's not the face you're looking for, even though he—

Prescott! That's who you're looking for, the scrawny little shrimp who made it onto the squad with you and Frank! ! Will Prescott! He—

He—

"Whooooaaaa!" You're hit with a massive head rush and fall into a crouch, pushing your face into your bare knees. Will Prescott!

He—! He's—!

You swallow hard, and start to shake violently.

He's you! I'm him! I'm Will Prescott, and I— I—

You lift your head and, blindly, feel at your face. It makes you both ill and excited, all at once, to brush the cheek and touch the lips and nose. We're collecting faces, you told him, and you're my latest.

And so now here you are. Wearing the face of—

Of—

~ ~ ~

Ten days ago. Conor Nilsson dribbles left, then feints before shooting the basketball to Frank. Time dilates as you jump and stretch and put a toe on that extra tank of gas you keep for just such emergencies ...

And your fingertips brush the ball just enough to knock it away. Frank scrambles for it but Timothy Johnson catches it first and tosses it back to you. You wheel toward your own basket as Frank and Conor fall back toward theirs. But you hang back, grinning and dribbling the ball as you calculate whether to run it past Conor or try to totally fucking humiliate Frank by getting it past him.

It's a cool Saturday afternoon, and your quartet—all members of the Eastman basketball team—are playing a game of hoops on the battered basketball blacktop of an elementary school near Conor's house. You guys get enough practice during the week, but this is for fun. Or, it would be fun if all four of you weren't so intensely competitive.

"Hey guys!" a voice shouts from the direction of the parking lot. You turn in time to see Ian Carpenter, your team captain, vault the chain link fence that separates the school yard from the parking lot. He's dressed in a soft green track suit whose white lines accentuate his long, lean build. There's a bright grin on his brown, elfin face.

"No one invited you, Carpenter!" you yell. "This is a friendly game!"

"You gonna pass that pop quiz in Jones's class on Monday?" he retorts.

"What pop quiz? No one told me there was gonna be a pop quiz!"

"That's what makes it a pop quiz." He looks over your quartet with gleaming eyes. "Shirts and skins?" he asks, for despite the chilly breeze, you and Timothy are bare-chested. "Balanced match up. What's the score?"

"Sixteen, fourteen," Frank says. "Us."

Ian grins at you. "Oooo!"

"Oh, fuck you! Is there really going to be a pop quiz on Monday?"

"I dunno." Then he does a double-take at you. "You know, I was looking at your grades," he says. He's also the teacher's aide in the remedial math class you're taking, so he can. "Did you know you've been stuck at a seventy-point-one average for the last three weeks? No matter how high or low you score on your quizzes or homework, your average always comes back to seventy-point-one."

"Is that good enough to keep me on the team?"

"Just barely."

"Then what do I care?"

"It's just weird, man. Oh, speaking of weird." His eyes grow large. "You guys hear about Gordon Black? What happened yesterday?"

Timothy snorts. "He finally get arrested for sexual assault or something?"

"That's not funny. But no, he got kicked off the Westside squad!"

There's gasps all around, and a shocked-but-gleeful "Nooo!" from Timothy.

"And it was Patterson who got him kicked!"

"But they're partners in douchebaggery!" you exclaim. "At least," you add, glancing around, "that's what I hear. I never met 'em myself."

"You're not missing anything. But yeah, Black's gone!"

"What happened?" Conor asks.

It's a fragmentary tale Carpenter tells, full of "I don't knows" and "from what I hear" and "Alyssa told me", for most of it comes via Eastman's head cheerleader. The long and short of it is: Gordon has been skipping practices and getting stoned off his ass, to the point that his best friend and teammate, Steve Patterson, staged an intervention. But it didn't take, so he went to the coach and got Black kicked from the team.

It would have just been gossip but for the talk you and Frank had with Alyssa at a party that night.

"Girlfriends?" she says to you and Frank. "Between you and me? That boy— It's the difference between night and day! I saw him out at Joshua Cheswick's yesterday—ain't never seen him out there before!—and he was as gassed up as hot air balloon! And grinnin'? That's what knocked me back!"

"Black doesn't grin?" Frank asks.

"You know Black! Oh, wait, maybe you don't, you not been in town long enough. The Gordon Black I know's mean enough to melt lead just by lookin' at it." She glares, briefly, to illustrate. "An' every party I seen him at he's the biggest, sourest grunch ever. Looks like he wants to go around pullin' heads off'a necks. But yesterday night, at Joshua's, he was laughin' and carryin' on and tickling girls and getting tickled by 'em. I had to get up close to tell it was the same guy, and even then I wasn't sure b'cause I've never seen him smile!"

"A personality change over at Westside, huh?" you observe to Frank later that night (really, early Sunday morning) as you drive home. "And a pretty radical one by the sound of it. What do you think, Frank?"

"It's at Eastman, Joe," he says.

"It was at Eastman. Are we sure it still is?"

"How would it get to Westside?"

"With someone who transferred over. I can name at least three people off the top of my head who suddenly moved to Westside this year."

Frank chews on this. "So we talk to Gordon?"

"At least we talk to someone who's talked to Gordon."

And it is from just such an acquaintance that you and Frank learn how Gordon Black is going around telling people that his real name is "Dane Matthias," and that he got body swapped with Gordon Black.

~ ~ ~

Frank is making a saddle with his hands, hoisting you up so you can change the bulb in the kitchen, when the phone rings. "I'll get it," he says. You wobble a little, and when you look down, you're standing on air as Frank exits the room. "Lemme down!" you holler. Instead, the invisible hand holding you three feet off the ground tightens its grip around your calves. "Frank!"

"It's Dad!" he yells back. "Hang on!"

But he doesn't return, leaving you (literally) hanging in mid-air as he consults with the head of the occult Order to which you both belong, and for which you are conducting this investigation. "Frank!" you scream, but he continues to ignore you.

"Did you finish changing the bulb?" your asshole brother asks when he finally saunters back in.

"I was waiting for you to let me down!"

"How can you change the bulb if I let you down?"

You flip him off. Hard. But then you change the bulb.

It turns out your dad just called to say he's starting the work on getting you and Frank transferred to Westside (as per your request), to continue your hunt for the Summa Libra Personae, an infamous work of occult magic that is rumored to have recently turned up in the little town of Saratoga Falls.

It's a book that can be used to effect—or at least mimic—body swaps.

You were so excited by the new lead that you hopped into the back yard to smoke a cigarette. Not until you patted your pocket for a second one did you realize you forgot to bring matches or a lighter. You had lit up the first with your own fiery enthusiasm.

It's a thing that sometimes happens, and you have to be careful not to accidentally show off that talent—that prodigy—in front of the normies.

~ ~ ~

So, you now know, Joe Durras—real name Franz Felix Liebesspruch—is a kind of natural-born warlock, sent with his partner/brother to find and confiscate your book. You know Joe from the inside now, so you also know that despite the fury he'd feel, he and Frank wouldn't hurt you. Well, not too much.

Caleb has made noises about putting things back to normal. The arrival of Joe and his brother offers a face-saving way to climb out of the mess you've been making.

Next: "Fast Work and Fast Talk" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"