The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)

Stolen Lore

Previously: "Blackwell Has a Visitor" 

No guts no glory, you tell yourself with a gulp.

But you find you can't move. You are paralyzed with a frightened indecision.

For several very long moments you feel yourself torn first one way, then another, impelled from within to rush out to intercept the departing visitor, yet locked in place by unyielding feet.

But at last the futility of the situation kills whatever quickening ambition you felt, and you fall miserably onto the chair next to the pile of books that Blackwell left you to work on.

You stupid, miserable, cowardly ... cow! you chide yourself, seeking to put as much of the blame as possible onto Melody's feigned persona. And yet, guiltily, you have to acknowledge that you're scared as well.

Spitefully, almost, you pull down the top book from the pile and glance it over. It's a small, fat book, bound in black leather, showing no letter or design upon either its cover or spine. You open and flip through it, and are startled to see that the text is hand-written in a fair and flowing cursive script. A few loose papers have been tucked between its pages in spots, and these too are in the same hand.

As you are studying it, there comes the sound of footfalls outside the door, and the murmur of voices. They pass, and you wait—the book still open in your hand—until the library doors rattle and slide back. Professor Blackwell, looking drained and unhappy, stands in the doorway.

"Ah, Miss Weiss," he mutters. "I am afraid that I must ask you to curtail tonight's session. I am— Unwell."

"Oh. Um, okay," you say. For a moment you think, Now's my chance to get the mask on him! But again, you find yourself too frightened to move, even when he comes over to stand beside you. "Do you want me to finish up this one book?" you ask in a wavering voice. (What if he notices I didn't get any work done? you wonder.)

He twists his head around to look at the book in your hand, then with a frown reaches down to pluck it from you. He blinks once, hard, as he examines it, then says, "No, that's alright, this one is already cataloged. I, er, had it out earlier and must have set it down by mistake." He edges past you, and slips it onto a nearby shelf where there's a gap. "I will of course compensate you for your time." Listlessly, he hands you five twenties, then pads for the doorway.

Then, at the prompting of some irresistible impulse, while his back is turned, you quickly slip the mysterious book from the shelf and shove it into your bag. He turns in the doorway to watch you with a dull but owlish expression as you pack up the few things you had left out, then leads you to the front door.

* * * * *

In a daze of fright, you drive around randomly, as though trying to shake off a pursuit that you fear is upon you, and quite against all reason find yourself up near the municipal airport, on the northwest side of town, before you are able to get a grip upon yourself. You then take the long way back to the college, using the interstate, so that you are ragged with frustration as well as a kind of panic by the time you get back to your dorm.

How the hell am I going to get that book back onto the professor's shelf before he misses it? you wonder to yourself as you take it from your bag. How am I going to explain why I even took it, if he figures out it was me?

And why did you even take it?

* * * * *

For the rest of the evening you put it out of your mind, concentrating instead on readings that you have to do for various classes, and not until you have put those away and have gotten ready for bed do you let your eye wander back over to the bedstead, where the stolen book is sitting. You make a face as you hesitate, then decide that having stolen the thing you might as well have a look at it. You get into bed with it, and after making yourself comfortable sitting up, you open the front cover and prepare to go through it with more care and deliberation than earlier.

Immediately you discover two yellowed sheets of loose paper pressed between the cover and the first page. You gingerly pull them loose—they are lightly stuck to each other and to the page behind—and read them.

The first is written in a slanted hand. It is a letter, but undated:

Dear Mr. Gerrare—

I write you in haste, having only received your letter of the 5th this morning the 29th and being full of misgiving. Something is betwixt us of a nature I dread to speculate. Separately, by the hand of one I trust, I have already dispatched the items and papers of which I told you. May they find you speedily and safely.

A peculiar darkness pervades the house, and I am sensible of being watched. Were it not for the invalid state of my mother I would remove myself to a hotel. Pray for me and mine.

It is signed "Julia Devere."

The second is a small sheet seemingly torn from a bookkeeping ledger. Scrawled across it, in thick green ink:

The bearer tarries, the bundle miscarries. A sign is set upon the house.

In the bottom-right corner of the ledger-sheet is a smudge that is either the faded imprint of a crushed insect, or the blackened stain left by a small, pressed flower. In either event, it is an ugly shape, like an unwholesome stamp or seal.

You replace these, then turn your attention to the first page of the book itself. It is blank save for a single name, written in an expressively florid hand, in the upper-center of the page: LAURA MAE DEVERE. On the pages that follow the same hand appears, writing in a smaller script. You quickly surmise that it is the journal a girl of seventeen (the book itself, she declares in the first entry, is a birthday present), begun in the year 1892.

It is a puzzlement to you, at first, that the professor should keep such a book in his library, for the first score or so pages—which you scan with a quick and mounting impatience—merely record the scattered thoughts of the author re: her family, her house, her church and school, and a boy who simultaneously vexes and fascinates her. There is no great drama to it. From the entries you glean that her father travels extensively on business for a commercial banker, leaving the care of his sickly wife to the girl Laura and her older sister, Julia. Both Laura and Julia seem to be of an artistic inclination—Laura reports on the books and magazines she reads, and worries over her own attempts at crafting stories, while Julia paints. You wonder that the sister is unmarried, and can only guess that there is a clue in the occasional references to the cane which she requires when mounting and dismounting the staircase to the second floor of their house.

You are on the point of putting the book away and going to sleep when the narrative takes an abrupt turn:

May 5 [it begins]

In answer to an advertisement in the Standard, I have interviewed for and been engaged as a personal secretary to Rutherford Keyserling, the president of the new college in Saratoga Falls. He is a fine looking gentlemen—tall, narrow-waisted, with iron-gray at his temples, and a thick, flowing beard—with a very correct manner. Julia is somewhat displeased with me, as the circumstances of my new employment shall compel me to remove myself to Saratoga Falls. But Mr. Keyserling has kindly offered me room and board at his presidential residence, at no additional expense and at no diminishment to the proffered compensation. He explains that he is a bachelor, and that the house is cold and hollow in the evenings, and that my company shall be a compensation to him. I asked (and so informed Julia when she asked me) if there were not servants already at the house, and he allowed as there were, yet they are uneducated creatures with whom he cannot converse. I confess myself flattered that I acquitted myself so well in the interview that he—the president of a college!—should think I can complement him with discourse!

You flip back a few pages, scanning entries over which you had only glanced, but can find no mention of whichever town or village the Deveres resided in. But it is apparent that Laura Devere physically removed herself to Saratoga Falls to take the job.

More to the point—and this sends prickles up your spine, for it hints at Professor Blackwell's interest in the journal—you know that the "presidential mansion" where Laura Devere took up residence can only be the villa in which the professor now resides.

You turn again to the front, and the two scraps of paper pressed there. Their meaning is no clearer. But knowing that they are connected in some way to villa makes them read very sinister.

That's all for now.

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