The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Wednesday in a Car with Cameron

Previously: "The Infiltrator" 

You are wearing some of Sean Mitchell's actual clothes, but they are the ratty kind that will look a little odd for a guy who's left the gym behind. You retire to his bedroom to change.

It all feels very natural and familiar to you, just as it felt natural and familiar the first time you put on Gordon's mask. It isn't just that Sean has the usual kind of furniture: the bed, the desk and chair, the dresser, the posters and pinups and ribbons and old toys scattered around. You know these things, and the corner of the bed sags in the expected way when you drop onto it to pull off your shoes. Almost without thinking, you bend over to look under the bed to see if a semi-clean sock has rolled under there, which would save you the trouble of opening the third drawer in the dresser to pull out some clean ones. (There isn't.)

You change into fresh underwear, clean blue jeans, and a light purple shirt that stretches tightly across your brawny, barrel-chested torso. Sean is both a wrestler and a football player, which gives him muscles on top of muscles. In the bathroom, you wet a comb and slide it through your short blonde hair, brushing it sideways and patting it down. You have wide-set eyes and an easy grin with straight teeth, and when you smile all the muscles in your face relax into an expression of warm geniality.

It's a face that Sean shared with his brother, Taylor, up until a few months ago. A hard twinge runs through you. I don't have a twin brother, you remind yourself. Never did. Has nothing to do with me.

You pause, and blink, as you stare at yourself.

The resemblance between the brothers was so close that even their parents couldn't tell them apart many times. With this mask, you don't just look like Sean Mitchell, you look just like the late Taylor Mitchell. And a vaguely disquieting thought comes to you.

When this scam is over, Cameron Huber is going to discover that he supposedly spent the afternoon with his girlfriend, Anne Starkey. He's going to deny it, strenuously, and he's going to insist he spent it with one of his friends, Sean Mitchell. Sean Mitchell, meanwhile, will strenuously deny that he saw Cameron that day, because he was working at Salopek, and he'll have witnesses backing him up.

What is Sean going to think when he hears Cameron say that he drove around all afternoon with a guy who looks just like Sean? Is he going to shrug it off as Cameron telling stories? Or is he going to wonder about the doppelganger, and who it might have been?

You shiver, not on fear for your own plan, but a sympathetic pre-reaction to what Sean might feel.

Then you shake it off. You have to meet Cameron. You lock up the house, return the key to its hiding place, and haul ass back to where you parked Gordon's Bug. You drop off Sean's gym clothes inside it, then go around to the front of the strip center to wait for Cameron.

* * * * *

"So what are we gonna do about Black and his gang?" you ask Cameron after he's picked you up. You're on your way to the farthest side of town on the first of several fake errands that will have you hitting all four of the most distant corners.

"Like I said at lunch, let him think he's made his point and just go on."

"Looks like they're building up to something pretty nasty."

"Eh, fuck 'em. What else can they do? And there's nothing else we can do."

You lean back and look over at Cameron Huber. He's another big dude, shaped a lot like Mitchell. A round torso with muscles you could bounce quarters off, rippling biceps, and powerful legs. His dark hair is trimmed very short, though, and has an oily sheen, as does the fringe of beard that runs along the line of his jaw to join a patch of beard on his chin. His nose is like the prow of a Mediterranean trireme. In fact, now that you think about it -- with Sean's brain; he's read books about this -- Cameron has a build and a profile that would look natural inside the crested helmet and bronze breastplate of a Greek hoplite.

He catches you staring at him. "What?"

"Nothing. Just kind of surprised you're taking it lying down."

"I'm not taking anything lying down, Mitchell," he snaps. "We had our fun, we're taking our lumps. You knew what kind of shit Black would throw back at us."

"So you gonna ignore him after this is done? Or are you gonna -- ? Oh!" You return the hard grin that Cameron's given you. "You're gonna wait till Black thinks he done, aren't you? And then you're gonna -- Come on, tell me!" You lean over and jab Cameron in the shoulder with a fist. "What are we gonna do to him?"

"I'll tell you when I know," he laughs.

"You gonna coordinate it with Arjis or Ansell?" Those are the chief guys on the lacrosse team. It surprises you, when you think of it with Sean's memories, that they cooperated with Huber to raid Chelsea's party.

"Nah, let those guys do whatever the hell they want." He concentrates on his driving for a bit -- construction has Twentieth Street in a bit of a mess. "What about Laurent and Brownie?" he asks. Those are the two guys who run the wrestling squad. "They said anything to you about this shit?"

Obviously, you have no answer to that, and have to let Sean's instincts speak for you: "I don't wanna get 'em involved. This is your play, not theirs."

This kind of talk continues all the way up to Northgate Mall, the area of your first supposed errand, and during the subsequent drives out to the municipal airport, down to a flower shop in Acheson, and then back out to a garage on the southeast part of town. From the talk you get a feel for the state of relations between the various sports teams at Westside.

Regarding the track and tennis and swimming teams there is little to be said. So far as Gordon and Cameron are concerned, these don't even qualify as "sports" as there is no such thing as goal-making and goal-tending. Besides, they are mostly the preserve of non-jocks -- kids who balance out their academic careers with some mild exercise.

The basketball squad, as you know from your time playing Gordon, is a sport apart -- it's the most prestigious of the teams, and the one with the nastiest reputation: arrogant, bullying, thuggish, and exclusive. From what you learn as Sean and what you learn from Cameron, all the other squads are more or less united against them. Partly this is because of overlapping memberships -- guys like Sean, who are on both the football and wrestling teams -- but also because they all just hate the arrogance of the basketball players. It leaves you wondering how Gordon is feeling, as he gets an inside look at what Cameron Huber thinks and feels.

For your part, a lot of the anger you feel for Cameron has evaporated. A lot of the fury seems to have been bound up inside Gordon's mask, and Sean's own fondness for the quarterback has mostly replaced it now that you've swapped masks. It's not enough to make you regret what you're doing, but you don't feel the same urgent drive to humiliate Huber as you did before.

So you relax as you drive from point to point, chatting and laughing easily with Huber about classes and the teams and girls. He teases you about not having a girlfriend, which you deflect with some embarrassment. It's kind of relief, you find, to discover that a guy like Mitchell, who's got the stereotypical advantages -- he's well-built and good-looking -- has insecurities not too different from your own. You talk about some of the girls that he likes, and laugh and tease Cameron back about his girlfriend when he agrees with you about the merits of the girls you name.

The final stop is a garage a couple of blocks from Mitchell's house -- the place supposedly where your truck is being looked at -- and since it's getting close to the time that the original and his mother will be getting home, you just have Huber drop you off. You duck into the shop long enough to borrow their phone to call Caleb's number. A dude with Huber's voice answers, and you find that everything went off without a hitch: he's just leaving Anne's place and will meet you at Caleb's in a little while. You then hustle back to the Mitchells' place and dive into it just fast enough to return the credit card and key. Five minutes later, you're crouched down in the Bug and are about to rip Sean's mask off.

You stop right after tearing the shirt off when something catches your eye: the tattoo that Sean has on his bicep.

It wouldn't mean anything to you, except that you have Sean's memories of where it came from. It's a new thing, something he had done as a memento of his brother. While going through Taylor's things, Sean found a sheet of paper with some oddball designs on it. He didn't know where they came from, or why Taylor had them, or even if Taylor had made them. But Sean had copied parts of them down and had them tattooed onto his arm.

You don't get a clear image of them when you try to picture what Sean saw, and the tattoo on your arm is a partial image of one. But there is something very familiar about its look. It reminds you very much of the sigils that are in the grimoire.

But how and why would Taylor Mitchell have had any of those sigils in his possession?

You've got to get changed, though, so you fit your hand to your brow and remove the mask.

* * * * *

But the image of the sigils is playing in your head when you wake, like the remnant of a vivid dream.

Next: "An Embarrassment of Cameron Hubers" 

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