The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)

A Trip Past the Supermarket

Previously: "A Collision of Conspiracies" 

It's fine, you tell yourself as you pick up the phone to thumb in text. Caleb is going to be Caleb. He's not going to be ... someone else.

* * * * *

Caleb's face is a twisted mask of incredulity by the time you get finished stammering it all out to him: your story about doppelgangers and imposters and people at school being replaced. It took forever to get it all out, too, because he kept interrupting and asking you to start over. Wait, does all this have to do with that book you were so fucking worried about? he asked at one point. You know, the one you said disappeared from the time capsule? He groaned when you confirmed that you thought maybe it did.

Only one thing (you can tell) keeps him from throwing you out of his house: your telling him that Carson is also convinced that something weird is going on at school. After taking a long time to chew on his lower lip—and after disappearing into the bathroom, to have a good, long think while taking a good, long shit, he tells you—he tells you that he wants to talk to Carson himself.

"And I guess I'm taking a pretty big risk if you're not both full of it," he sourly tells you as he leads you out his front door. "'Cos if there's anything to all this, maybe you're just trying to get me off somewhere to do the thing to me."

"Why would anyone want to turn themselves into you?" you retort. But his words give you a shiver.

"Why would they do anything to you and Carson?" he snorts.

Because we know about it, you think, and your shiver starts to turn into the shakes.

* * * * *

Caleb insists on driving—So I can take you out to Russian Lake and drown you if all this turns out to be one of Carson's sick pranks, he tells you when you ask—but it also works out for him because he gets a text from his mom asking him to stop at the supermarket while he's out.

It's getting on in the evening, and the supermarket is almost completely empty except for the occasional staffer flitting along an aisle. Maybe you're already in a mood to be edgy, but the place feels oddly creepy: aisle after aisle of inanely packaged food, preserved under soulles fluorescent lights. There's no music playing either, so the only sound is the squeak and creak of your shoes on the tile floor. When you pass the black and blank windows looking onto the front parking lot, it becomes easy to imagine that the store has been drowned under a lake of inky water, and exists only as a vapid bubble of normality while things swim around outside, wriggling and feeling for a way in. When you try to express this thought to Caleb, though, it all comes out wrong, and he only looks up at you from his phone—he's texting his mom with questions about some of the brands he should be getting—with a blank look.

"Just one more thing to get," he mutters after about fifteen minutes of circling the store from one end to the other and back. You're passing a set of swinging doors that lead into the alcohol section when he nudges you. "If you had your fake ID, we could get a six pack or something."

"I don't have a fake ID," you retort.

"We'll have to get you one," he says.

At that moment the doors swing open and three burly guys come busting out.

The first your recognize immediately as Gordon Black. The second is Steve Patterson. And the third is Seth Javits.

Normally, you'd jump out of their way, or even maybe just try to ignore them, because after all you are not on school property. And probably they'd ignore you, too.

But these three, after glancing around and catching sight of you, advance directly on you with hard, blank faces..

For a moment your feet are frozen to the floor. Then you wheel to run.

But Caleb is behind you, and you crash into him and tumble to the floor in a tangle of limbs. Hands lay hold as you try to scramble to your feet, and you are held and lifted up in a great bear hug. Seth steps in front of you, and smashes something into your face.

* * * * *

"—the Collegiates, out west of Denver," the man across from you is saying. "We used to go hiking up there every summer when I was in graduate school."

"Which school was that?" asks the man sitting next to you.

"Boulder."

"This was back when he was dating Andi," says the woman sitting next to him. Her hair is cut stylishly short, but is a powdery gray, and her face is lined. Her eyes narrow into slits as she grins at her companion. "You're lucky she didn't push you down a mountainside."

You're sitting in the cool twilight, under a wood-framed canopy, on an outdoor patio that overlooks a dock. Beyond, under the stars, the dark water of an ocean inlet spreads out like an inky blanket; on the far side of the inlet, lights from houses and resort hotels twinkle. You are sitting at a large table covered with a white table cloth, but your table is one of only a dozen that dot the patio. At the next table over, a handsome, twenty-something waiter in a white shirt, black pants, and green serving apron hovers solicitously at the elbow of a grizzled, elderly man and his gaunt, chicken-necked wife.

It is a moment or two before you realize that you are holding a wine glass, and have a wide smile stretched across your face.

"Well, that was forty years ago," says her companion. (Dennis, it comes to you in a jolt, like the memory of a dream. His name is Dennis. And the woman next to him is ... his wife. Her name is ...?) "I'm sure she's mellowed since then."

"Unless she's in jail."

"This was your first wife, right?" Garson asks. (That's the man next to you, and the thought gives you a worse jolt than the first, because he's also your husband.)

"We weren't married, exactly," Dennis says, and looks uncomfortable.

"It was your sixth sense that saved you there," Allison says. (That's his wife's name!) "Andi was—" She shudders.

"Andi was something else," Dennis says, and drinks from his own wine glass.

"Heather," someone on the other side of you says. "Are you okay?"

Not until Dennis and Allison (and Brian and Erin) have turned to look at you, do you realize you are being addressed. With a start, you turn to answer the speaker.

She's a fair-complexioned woman with a bouffant of bright, blonde hair. She is a handsome woman too, carefully made up. But there is no hiding the fact that she is in her late-fifties, at least.

"Heather?" she says again, and the faint smile she has turned onto you fades a little with concern.

"I'm alright," you stammer. The wine in your glass sloshes a little as you set it down beside your plate. (The half-eaten dinner of shrimp-and-chicken jambalaya and squash Rockefeller is suddenly unappetizing.) From the corner of your eye, you catch Garson frowning at you.

Suddenly you panic, and your feet and hands turn to ice; your heart drops into your stomach. Am I having a heart attack? you wonder. Or a stroke?

"I just— Excuse me," you mutter. "I have to—" You rise on trembling legs, laying your cloth napkin carefully beside your plate, and totter off toward the interior of the restaurant.

You have to pass through two dining rooms, and past the giant tank swimming with lobsters, before you find the ladies' room. Why am I heading in here? you ask yourself even as you push the door open. This is for women!

But I am a woman, returns the thought.

The restroom is softly lit and carpeted, with draperies hung along the walls. Vanity tables line one wall, with mirrors and cushioned stools. Half of these are occupied by customers of various ages, but no one looks up or askance at you as you stumble in and fall onto the nearest empty seat.

For a long minute you sit, staring at the hands you have folded in your lap. They are thin and lined with stretch marks and wrinkles, though the nails are brightly polished. You have a wedding ring on one hand; the other sports a ring with a bright stone of turquoise set in a large, silver setting.

Fearfully, you raise your face to look sidelong into the mirror.

As with Melissa, your face is carefully made up, but the lines still show in your forehead, and at the corners of your eyes, and at the folds at the corners of your mouth. It's a wide face, a healthy face, and a reasonably handsome one, with a strong jaw and wide-set eyes. It is framed by platinum-blonde hair that makes up in a kind of rough-hewn honesty what it lacks in body as it falls flatly down just past your shoulders. You are wearing a long, charcoal-gray tweed jacket over a white shift with a plunging neckline; below, you are wearing tight black pants and black, leather boots. It's one of many similar outfits that you own, each element just different enough from the others that they can be mixed and matched to create unique but similar ensembles.

In the mirror you see the door open, and Melissa comes in. You can't help flinching a little.

"Heather," she says in a voice soft with concern. "You're not alright, are you?" She brushes your shoulder with gentle fingertips. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

You say nothing, but in a sense you have seen a ghost. You saw him the eyes that stared haggardly back at you from the depths of the mirror: the eyes of a seventeen-year-old boy named Will Prescott.

"I'm sorry," Melissa says. "Is it about Garson?"

Garson. My husband.

Who is dying slowly of terminal, ineradicable cancer.

Next: "The Temptation of Heather Dow" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 5)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)"