The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Wicked Stepfather

Previously: "The Basics on Baphomet" 

dont need musle for tnite, you text Sydney back.

She replies: What if we need more dirt?

You make a face. talk after school.

* * * * *

Sydney has gymnastics practice after school, and you text her to say you'll wait for her in the library. You try to concentrate on your homework, but you're distracted by a group of kids huddled at a nearby table.

They look like freshmen or sophomores—fresh faces and squirrel-bright eyes. The guys are in hoodies and distressed jeans; the girls in skimpy tops and shorts. Most of them have their cell phones out, and they're not making a lot of noise, except occasionally to lean over to whisper at a neighbor. A couple of times a girl will gasp aloud and roll her eyes before bending over her phone to tap at it furiously. Only once does a real conversation break out, but the three girls hiss it so furiously at each other that you can only make out a few words: bitch and party and tear her face off.

You're not sure why they fascinate you, except for the sense that they are existing in two unconnected worlds: the physical space of the library, and whatever secret online spaces they are actually talking to and through.

There's what's here in front of me, and there's the world inside their phones. Here they're students in a school library. But in there, what are they?

Undoubtedly they're just teenagers doing the same kind of teenage things as you. But your recent experience with fakes has given you a kind of second-sight. Or, at least, the knowledge that a second-sight might reveal unsuspected layers of reality.

Those kids might not even be kids. Just as who they are online might be different from who they are here, who they are here—in the library—might be very different from who they are ... really.

It gives you a cold shiver.

* * * * *

So you're not too deep into your homework when Sydney, glowing with a healthy exuberance, bursts into the library. "Hey babe," she says, and leans over to kiss you on the cheek.

You jump back a little, and she grins. "Did I surprise you?"

"G'yung?"

"Didn't you like the way I said hello?" Sydney drops into a chair and seizes your knee. "I've been dying to try it out on you!"

"Oof!" is all you can say as your hair rises on its ends. She titters.

"You got something to say to me?" she asks.

"Um?"

"About the 'muscle' we were talking about."

"Oh. Um—"

"Because I'm wide open for anything."

Your guts freeze. Her eyes are bright and her grin wide, and she looks like she's just begging to be flirted with. Flirted with? She looks like she's dying for you to push her over, pry her open, and go to town on her.

"I'm not trying to put you on the spot, Will. I'm just asking about your 'muscle' idea."

"Oh." You wince as disappointment rises to swallow your guts. "That's all you want to talk about?"

She puts her face next to yours.

"You are so adorable, Will, and I will talk about anything you want to talk about."

* * * * *

After all that, the actual talk is pretty anticlimactic. Basically, you tell her that you like her idea for ambushing her stepdad with pretended car trouble, and if you do it that way you won't need "muscle," and if you need to dig up dirt, you've got that mask of Caleb you can put on the golem.

She says she's fine with that, and she's really glad that you stayed behind after school to explain your thinking, and that if you've got the stuff to copy her stepdad already is there any reason not to do it tonight? You feel yourself in a dream-trance as you tell her that would be fine, and that you've got a fresh mask at home. She's already got the mind-band that she used on him.

You walk out of the school together, touching hips but nothing more, and after she drives away you spend a couple of minutes gathering up your attention so you won't distractedly throw your truck through any storefronts on the drive home.

* * * * *

That night. You and Sydney are waiting at the old elementary school, leaning against her SUV, when headlamps sweep up and a luxury sedan pulls up next to you.

A man gets out. "So what happened?" he brusquely demands.

You cast a startled look at Sydney: Even in the dark, the guy is far from the middle-aged "Dad" that you were expecting.

His hair is long and thick, for a start, and hangs to his shoulders. He sports a scruffy beard. Though you can't make out his features, your first guess is that he can't be more than twenty-eight years old.

"I don't know," Sydney tells him. "We can't get it to start." She gestures at the hood, which is already propped open. The engine is illuminated by a flashlight balanced on the edge of the compartment.

Nicholas Lawhorn grunts and walks over to it. "Try turning it over," he orders Sydney.

She hands you the mask, then clambers into the SUV cab. "Ready?" she calls as he bends over the engine.

"Yeah, any time," he growls back.

The motor churns for half a second, then catches. You walk up beside Lawhorn as Sydney races it. Her stepdad straightens up. "So what's the—?"

It's like an out-of-body experience. Your arms and hands are numb as you smash the mask into the side of his face. He wheels and topples, flopping onto the ground. You hunch over him. The mask has vanished, and he lays before you unmoving.

A car door opens and slams. You look up into Sydney's face. "Did you get him?" she asks.

"It's working on him now."

She glances around. "Maybe we should move him down into the basement."

"Get his feet," you reply.

* * * * *

Nicholas Tyler Lawhorn crouches with a bestial snarl on his face. With his long, tousled hair and beard, he looks like the Wolfman. Only an order from Sydney, it is clear, keeps him from springing. "So how old is he, anyway?" you ask your girlfriend.

"Nicholas," she says. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-eight!" he spits.

You'd have pegged him at closer to thirty, but the confession is believable, at least in the dim basement light.

After getting him downstairs and undressed—he came in t-shirt and jeans but with a sports coat and boots; California office casual—and after retrieving the mask when it came out of him, you dumped him, the dirt, the powders, the liquids, and a few strands of Sydney's hair onto the book and set him on fire. Not until the purple flames shot out did you stop to think, What if this spell takes a week to finish like the last one?

It didn't, thank God, it lasted only a minute, and when the fire went out it left a petrified version of Nicholas Lawhorn behind.

Really. He lay on the table looking completely unharmed save for the unnatural pallor of his skin. And when you pressed a fingertip to him, you found that except for a slight "give" he was as stiff all over as concrete. Even the hairs had turned to something like stone. But he was so perfectly detailed that you could even see the pores.

You wondered if he would wake up, and what would happen then, until you pried at his eyes and found the lids frozen shut. That's when the word "petrified" suggested itself. And when Sydney pointed out the similarity of color between him and the unmasked golem nearby, you deduced almost simultaneously that the spell had turned him into a golem.

The test came when you dropped Caleb's mask on him. Caleb appeared and woke up, and under a little questioning showed that he had no idea who or where "Nicholas Lawhorn" was. He also refused to obey your orders, though he did obey Sydney's.

The second, and more dangerous, test came when you sealed up Lawhorn's mask and put it on him. His skin instantly turned flesh colored, and his hair softened, and he woke. But now he obeys Sydney: not only telling her his age, sign, and Social Security number while pounding himself in the balls, but even confessing with his own mouth to the murder of her father.

You wince as she grips your arm, the nails digging into your flesh.

"We did it!" she says in a haggard whisper. "Oh, God, Will, we did it!"

"Uh huh. Can you tell him to calm down? Can you tell him to get dressed?

"Sure," she says. There's a feverish light in her eye as she turns toward her stepfather. "And I know a lot of other things I can tell him to do!"

You quail, worrying that she'll tell him to drown himself or steer his car at seventy miles per hour into a wall. But she's a lot more restrained than that. She only tells him to leave her alone, to not speak to her unless she speaks to him first, and to tell no one about what has happened that evening.

* * * * *

You are shaking with adrenaline when you get home, and make an early night of it. But you are wakened at a little after eleven by a phone call from Sydney.

"Hey," she says in a low voice. "Just wanted you to know it's all good. I— I spent the evening talking to ... him. Got him to confirm everything." Her voice starts to shake. "I got him confess everything, in his own voice, what he did and why! Oh, Jesus!"

"I'm sorry," you tell her.

"Don't be." Her voice is coming in gasps. "I had to hear it— From him— For myself."

You hang fire while she seems to gather herself.

"Anyway, thanks for everything, Will," she says.

"Glad to help," you say.

There's a pause.

Then she says, "Would you be up for helping me do the same thing to all the other motherfuckers in the Brotherhood? Do the same thing to them that we just did to him?"

That's all for now.

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"