The Book of Masks (Abridged)

The Magician's House

YOU SUSPECT THE CARD will be a fake, or that Blackwell will just laugh in your face when you ask for the rest of your money. But you definitely won't get your money if you don't make the effort.

* * * * *

The house, when you arrive there at six on the dot, is a large stone villa on the outskirts of town. It is surrounded by a tall wall of whitewashed stone; you pass through an ornate iron gate to find an extensive front yard that is intricately landscaped but entirely devoid of grass. Instead, little stone walls and towers run hither and thither; the ground stacks up in terraces; and stone flowerboxes squat on the ground like pygmy monoliths.

Yet there are no flowers, and the bushes are nought but nests of dead sticks withered leaves. The only living thing is a yew tree standing at the corner of the house by a small stone shed.

Or maybe it's not a shed. You edge closer, and see three gravestones arranged near it. Opposite it is a pile of dirt, and a shovel leans against the wall.

You swallow. It's not a shed. It's a small mausoleum.

Your nerves aren't improved when you mount the steps to the broad porch and find the doorbell set inside the iron jaws of a ravening wolf. Instead of chancing your finger inside what looks like a trap, you knock heavily on the immense wooden door.

Your pessimism proves groundless. The door opens, and Blackwell beams when he sees you, and he ushers you into a dark foyer with many ostentatious welcomes. There is a stack of bills on a small table by the door, and he carefully counts each twenty into your outstretched hand.

"—two-eighty, three hundred, three-twenty— I beg your pardon, but you are quite sure you won't take that job I offered you?"

"Thank you, no. Three-twenty?" you prompt. After his trick with the book you are going to be very careful with him, and you suspect he'll try some fast talk with the money.

"Yes. Three-forty, three-sixty— How about one night's work? Tonight? For twenty dollars an hour?"

"Um ..."

"You see, as a result of today's meeting I am suddenly called out of town. I must leave early tomorrow morning and I'm in a dither over packing. I have several books I need to take but I must catalog them before I go. I cannot possibly get everything done in time."

"So for twenty an hour—"

"Two hours' work at the most. You'll be home before nine."

Well, that's another forty dollars. "Two hours at twenty bucks," you mull aloud. "Two at twenty, two at twenty. Yeah, I'll do it." The professor beams at you. "Two-twenty," you say, pointing to the cash in your palm.

"Of course. Two-twenty, two-forty, two-sixty—" He pauses and gives you a sharp look. "You'll find all your money here," he says, and presses the rest into your hand.

* * * * *

He shows you into the library, which is a very large room looking into the "garden"; several ornate desks sit in the middle, but there is only one chair. He guides you into that chair, which is facing a very incongruous-looking laptop computer.

"It's all terribly simple really," he assures you as he launches the software. He has no concept of personal space and presses in far too close. "Title, author, etcetera. Some of the books may be a little tricky on account of their being so old," he warns, and points to a stack of books that rises from the floor to your elbow before leaving you alone.

But it takes you almost no time to do the first book. Perhaps some of the others will be "tricky," but you don't see how this job will take you more than forty minutes. You dial back your efforts accordingly. If you can stretch this out to two hours, that'll be forty bucks, and you'll have given Blackwell reason to think you're a moron. Maybe then he'll stop pestering you to take a job with him.

It's not hard to slow down, either. The room keeps distracting you, and not in a good way. Its three interior walls are mostly covered with bookcases that rise to the ceiling, and the ceiling rises so high that its owner has installed a ladder to reach the top shelves. The rows are only occasionally broken up with other objects, but you find you don't like to look at them. They are statues of owls and cats and wolves and ... Yow! That one in the alcove by the door looks like a hairless orangutan flashing fake vampire teeth. You resist taking a closer look, but are pretty sure it has only a single eye in the middle of its forehead.

There are also the clocks. Two large grandfather clocks sit next to each other, touching corners, but turned at right angles to each other. From them comes a discordant ticking, and by listening very closely you realize that they are out of phase with each other. Meanwhile, behind your left shoulder there's another clock ... No, now that you take a closer look, you see it's just a pendulum, almost flush with the wall, in a space bare of shelves. It swings in a wide, slow arc. Your eye follows the shaft, which disappears through a slot in the ceiling. You look back down, and notice that the pendulum is shaped like a scythe. Peering closely you see that although it does not brush the ground, it slips back and forth over a well-cut groove in the floor.

* * * * *

After about an hour of this you are eager to get out sooner with less money; you also don't like that your back is turned to the high windows that now look out into a dark landscape. You are soon down to only three books when—

"Oh, for fuck's sake." The software freezes and the entire computer has to be rebooted. It takes precisely ninety-four ticks of one grandfather clock (and eighty-three ticks of the other) to get back to where you'd been when it crashed. (You know how many ticks because your mind has become morbidly fascinated by the noise they make.) You start to type in the book title again—

"Son of a bitch," you mutter; the software has crashed again. You press your hands to your ears, trying to shut out the clocks. You pull open a desk drawer, looking for something that will occupy your attention, and find a hunk of modeling clay the size of your fist. You grab it up and start working at it.

It is very dry and hard and flaky, impossible to work with, so you spit a huge loogie onto it and work the moisture in. Almost instantly it becomes soft and pliable, and seems to slither beneath and between your fingers. You're holding it in your left hand when the spreadsheet relaunches, and with your right hand you hunt-and-peck the book title into the box—

"Piece of motherfucking shit!" you scream as the screen fades to blue. You fall back into the chair and work angrily at the clay. A perturbed Blackwell looks in through the doorway. You blush and hang your head.

"Is something wrong?" he asks in a polite tone.

"Sorry," you mumble. "The laptop keeps freezing." He comes over to look at the computer and the book. He smiles tightly when he opens the latter up to its title page.

"Mmmm, yes, it's a pity no one knows how to write stable code anymore. I've gotten quite superstitious about it myself. Where does it keep crashing?"

"In the title box." The title is a jumble of words that sound vaguely Russian. "Three times it's done it. I mean, Christ!"

"I doubt he has anything to do with it," Blackwell says. "If it gives you trouble again just put in a placeholder title. That's one of my superstitions, and God knows why it works." You pull and press at the clay and study his head resentfully as he leans in to point at the screen. "Here, just put in an acronym of the title and then the author's name in parentheses. I'll change it to whatever suits me later."

The software has relaunched by this point, and you follow his suggestion. Luckily, the fourth time is a charm and it takes the entry. You set the clay down on the desk and turn to the rest of the information.

"What's that?" Blackwell cries in a strangled voice. You glance up, and find him gazing down at the lump of clay. His expression is one of bug-eyed terror.

"Oh, sorry," you mumble. "I was just playing with that stuff while waiting for the computer to come back on." You reach out to take it, but he grabs your wrist in a vise-like grip. He makes a choking sound, and gingerly picks the lump up himself.

But it's not a featureless lump anymore. Or, at least, not quite: it has acquired an eerie resemblance to Blackwell himself. And not a flattering resemblance either; it looks like a the work of a caricaturist with a deep loathing for his subject. But it captures him perfectly: the skinny legs, the apple-like belly, the sloping shoulders, the bulbous head with the drooping nose and protuberant lips, and the combover, like a limp snake trailing over his scalp.

At least, that's what it looks like from your angle, in an admittedly dark room. It must be a trick of the light and your nerves.

"How did you soften the clay?" the professor asks.

"I spit in it. Look, I'm really sorry—"

"No no no. No." He seems to have recovered, but he has grown quiet. "It's quite alright. I'm just startled is all." He turns toward you with an intense expression on his face. "You have a prodigious talent."

"I was just goofing around."

"I will give you fifty dollars an hour to be my assistant," he says. "You can set your own hours, your own schedule, to work around the job your father has given you. What do you say?"