The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

Like a Key in a Lock

Previously: "At the Mercy of a Dumbass" 

"Why were you fucking around with Stephanie Wyatt?" Caleb wants to know.

"Why were you fucking around with that thing I made?" is your demand. Caleb nudges you hard.

"Dude, I was just pranking someone!"

"And you didn't know what you were doing!"

"Will, we wouldn'a known what we were doing," Caleb honks at you as Keith turns red. "So leave Tilley alone. Though the way you did it," he tells Keith, "was fucked up. Stephanie's the last person I'd fuck with. Okay, she's about ninth or tenth on that list, after Javits and Black and Patterson and a couple o' more people. But—"

"Dude!" Keith yells. "I don't care about—! The things is, what if she's—!" He gulps. "In the hospital? Or—?" He gulps again.

You and Caleb exchange another in what has been an unending series of glances. "Well," Caleb says, "we'll find out tomorrow, I suppose." Then he turns exasperated when Keith groans. "Then you and Will can go check up on her. Go up to the school again, maybe call or text people who know her—"

Keith turns white. You exclaim, "Why do I got to?"

"Because look at Keith," Caleb retorts. "He can't do it by himself. He shouldn't even be driving." Keith gives him a reproachful look but doesn't argue.

"Well, why can't you go with him? Why me?"

"Because I'm going to stay here and figure out what we've got." Caleb holds up the mask that Keith filched, and squints thoughtfully at it.

You'd argue, but Keith plucks at your elbow. You relent. "Okay, come on," you growl. "We'll take my truck. But you're buying me dinner!"

* * * * *

Keith is pathetically grateful for your help, but he's also pretty useless, and spends most of the drive up sniveling and apologizing for fucking around with your stuff. "Yeah, well," you tell him hotly, "if you'd actually believed me when I told you about it!"

But as you turn it over in your head, you begin to see what Caleb must have grasped before you did.

Keith had no idea what the mask would do when set on someone. But you and Caleb didn't either. That's why you were so gun-shy about trying it out. It took a doofus like Keith, who didn't believe and who has almost no self-control, to make the breakthrough. So thanks to him you're actually better off than you were before. But the trouble, of course, is: What did the thing do to Stephanie?

The student parking lot is mostly empty when you arrive, but there's still lots of cars belonging to student athletes who have to stay after for practices of various sorts: some of them are out on the athletic fields now. But the bleachers are empty. You try telling Keith that that's a good sign; he mournfully suggests it only means the ambulances and fire trucks have come and gone. You could ask some of the guys at practice if that's true, but they're big and burly and not at all the kinds of guys you feel safe or comfortable talking to.

But there's some people at the tennis courts, so you and Keith wander over there. A few of them are standing around, and you ask them if there's been any excitement, like ambulances or EMS vehicles, but they all look puzzled and shake their heads. Then you ask if anyone there knows Stephanie Wyatt, or knows anyone who knows her, because you're trying to find her and don't have her contact info.

No one can tell you anything there either, but talking to them does jog your memory of having run into her a couple of times over the summer, hanging out with Eva and Jessica Garner. So you text Eva and ...

* * * * *

"Look, she's alive, and that's what you were most worried about, right?" Caleb frowns at Keith. "Look for her at school tomorrow. If she's turned green or is missing a couple of fingers, then you can feel sick. But for now, would you shut up about it?"

So, yeah, long story short, you got a text to Stephanie, pretending to ask of she'd seen someone around after school near the bleachers, and she said she hadn't, and that's where you left it. Keith didn't seem comforted, but you punched him until he said Quit it! and then drove him and yourself back to the old basement. You were much more interested in finding out what Caleb had found, but Keith got in first with his and your news.

As for Caleb's news:

"Lookit this," he says, pointing to the open book. It's the spell but the page has been damaged. Or altered. Anyway, there's an oval stain on it. Caleb didn't put it there, he says, and when you round on Keith he insists he didn't touch your "freaky-deaky magic book" either. But Caleb is unperturbed. "I think it's the book that did it. Some sort of 'spooky action at a distance', when Tilley here got hold of that mask and did something with it. Look." He sets the mask onto the oval, and you are startled to see it is a perfect fit. "Like the key in a lock," Caleb says. "At least, that's what I told myself after I tried it out. And look what happened next." He picks up the mask, and turns the page underneath.

It takes you a moment to realize what he did, and what it means. That page had been stuck to the rest of the book, like all the other pages. But now it turns. Easily and freely. You touch the reverse side, and the page behind, and find no stickiness and no residue. Just clean parchment.

"Uh huh," Caleb says when you look up at him. "The page was still glued down, or whatever, when I was looking it over after you went. But after I laid the mask down on it, this is what happened." He flips the page back and forth. "Didn't you say that this page"—he indicates the previous one—"didn't come unglued until you stuck your bloody thumbprint on the thingie?"

"Bloody thumbprint?" Keith exclaims in disgust as you nod your head. You also add, "And the first page didn't come unstuck until after I bought the book."

"You have to perform some action connected to the last open page," Caleb declares, "in order to get it to turn. The completion of a spell, or something like that. And you have to—" He hesitates. "Show it, to the book, that you did it." His manner, so confident up to now, falters a little.

"So what's it say over here?" you ask. You point to the reverse side of the spell that made the mask. It's covered in Latin writing, and you fumble for your phone. Keith, despite looking very whey in the face, crowds close.

"I was in the middle of checking on that when you guys got back. So far it's said something about 'absorbing the form' of people when you put the mask on them. Which we knew, and which we now know how to do." He gives Keith a look. "And it also says that you can keep 'absorbing forms' until you seal the mask."

"And what does that mean?"

"That's where I was when you guys got back."

So the three of you crowd close around the book, each one entering the sentences into a translation app on your phones and arguing over the translated sentences. Eventually you converge on a common interpretation:

A mask will copy and hold the form and image of someone when you lay it on their face. Then, if you seal it, anyone who puts the mask on will transform into the image of the copied person. But before you seal the mask, you can lay it onto other people. Each time you do this, the images inside the mask merge into new images, into the faces and bodies and forms of people who combine and synthesize and average out those faces and bodies.

"So it appears that this dumbass," Caleb says, glaring over at Keith with twitching eyebrows, "managed to put his form and Stephanie's form into the mask, and now they're all gooped up with each other." Keith grins nervously.

"Yeah, and I think I see them," you announce. "Look!"

You had reached the same conclusion as Caleb, and got out the mask to examine it. It glows and shines with highlights, which run and pool over its shimmering surface as you turn it this way and that. But some of the highlights don't shift, and as you stared at them you realized they made a pattern, and then a form. They come together, under the surface, as a ghostly face.

It's hard to read the face, except to see that it has the usual features: eyes, nose, mouth, brow, chin, cheeks, and hair. It's got more character than the generic features of the mask itself, but it doesn't look like anyone, though if you sort of squint, it does sort of look like Keith. Everyone is very quiet as you pass the mask back and forth to each other.

"So what do we do now?" you finally ask.

"Seal it up?" Caleb suggests.

"How do we do that?"

"Look at the next spell," he replies, and turns to the book. The newly exposed page looks much like the previous one, with a list of ingredients and instructions at the top and an intricate sigil dominating the bottom half.

A quick translation tells you nothing about what the spell is supposed to do, but you have all the necessary ingredients on hand, and quickly complete it. The result is a bowlful of a runny sort of paste. When you lift the bowl off the sigil, the page beneath flutters, and you turn it. The reverse confirms what you suspected and hoped: You now have a sealant that, if brushed onto the inner surface of a mask, will seal it and allow it to be worn.

"Okay," Caleb says, speaking for you all. "One of us should go home and get a brush. And then, well—" He takes a deep breath. "Do we try it out?"

Next: "Your New Face" 

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