The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

A Dead End and a Detour

Previously: "The New Spell" 

Caleb argues, but you come real close to forcing a decision on your terms. Before you can settle firmly on an alternate decision, though, you let him return to the clubhouse so he can set his mask back on the golem—the one you turned your father into—so he can send it home. While he's gone, you open up the grimoire so you can study the next spell.

At first it goes easily enough. It opens with a list of ingredients, which some cross-checking shows is identical to the list of ingredients for the mind-band. There is only a single line of instructions on assembly, though, and the translation seems to be ambiguous: "Use me, solve me" seems to be the most straightforward translation, and there are any number of ways of understanding that gnomic line.

Is there any clarification below? Apparently not, for the bottom half of the page, where the sigil should be, is a jumble of blurry lettering, as though the page had got wet and the ink had run.

But wait, that's not right. You frown at it. It's not only blurred. It is also ... blurring. Actively shifting, like words glimpsed at the bottom of a choppy pond.

You rub your eyes, then focus on a spot in the middle of the page. Yes, the letters are shifting. A word that looks like mrefph turns into nncigb and then into imq8s. At the same time, the words you glimpse in your peripheral vision seem to stand still, and if they weren't in Latin you could almost, you'd swear, be able to make them out. But when you shift your gaze to look at them, they begin to dodge and weave.

After only a minute of this you feel a headache coming on, and rest your eyes.

When you open them again, you attack the page in a more relaxed way, skimming it lightly and picking up details from the corner of your eye. In this way you're able to pick out that there's a faint line running across the middle of the page, just below that one bit of Latin. You brush it with your fingertips, and find that it's an imperfection in the paper itself. It feels as though—

You cover that mad, dancing gibberish with your left hand, and peer at and brush the page with your right.

It's a tear. The bottom half of the page has been torn away. You're not seeing the bottom half of the spell. You're seeing the bottom half of the spell behind it.

And in a flash you understand what must be happening. The book will not let you see the next spell it contains until you've solved the previous spell—it keeps the page locked. But some idiot has tried to get around that by tearing out a page. And instead of becoming legible, the text beneath has become dancing gibberish.

Caleb, when he returns, finds you grinning angrily at the book. "What's wrong?" he asks. You show him the book and explain your deduction. "Can we do the spell anyway?" he asks.

"No instructions," you point out. "Unless this 'use me, solve me' is it. But even then—" You flip to the earlier spells. "They all use sigils, see? Sigils at the bottom of each page." You return to the torn page. "The sigil has been torn out."

"So it's a dead end?" Caleb asks. He has the grace to sound horrified.

You don't answer. Your dad wouldn't give up, and neither will you, for both your sakes. But neither can you see a way forward.

Except to execute this spell as far as you can, in case there is a clue to be had there.

"It's looks like it makes a mind band," you point out to him, "at least until the sigil does its work. Tomorrow, do like you did today, send Will in to work, and make the thing up like it's a mind band. We'll look at it tomorrow night. Maybe one of us will have a brilliant idea in the meantime."

Caleb nods soberly.

After that, you do homework together.

* * * * *

Later, in bed, Martha brings up the topic of Will's working someplace where explosions can go off so easily. You remind her that you're at greater risk than he is; and besides, while you were tutoring him he told of some things he noticed in that that room that make it look like it wasn't an explosion. She gives up on convincing you that he should quit; but you don't get lucky a second night in a row.

Which is, admittedly, an ambivalent defeat.

The next day, at a meeting to discuss the break in, Mike Salazar reports that he's at a loss to explain the damaged window. No residue on the glass, no residue on the shutters, nothing on the walls or floor or ceiling, no damage to anything in the room. Not even to the dust on the top shelves. Maybe the damage was inflicted from outside? Some machinery that pulled the shutters back? But the glass was exploded outward. Mike is utterly baffled. "If you ask me, it was the Incredible Hulk," he says. "He was inside the room and he punched his way out."

You just tell your wife, when you get home, that the investigation ruled out an explosion of any kind. "Just someone with a sledgehammer," you tell her. If you thought that blaming the mistake on a maniac would make her feel better, you were wrong.

Will doesn't look very happy either when he gets back from Caleb's, where (he explains) he stopped off on his way back from work. When you're alone with him for the evening, he violently tugs the grimoire from his bag.

"Fucking Molester," he snarls. That would be Lester "The Molester" Pozniak, the soccer goalie and bully who occasionally pops into the lives of you and your friends long enough to make you miserable. "So I'm standing at my locker, about to go to math, and he grabs my book bag and goes walking off with it. It and everything in it," he adds as he yanks more books out and drops them with a clatter on the desk. "I had to tackle him to get it back. Right in front of the main office." His head sinks. "I have three days' detention, starting on Monday," he mutters.

For an instant only, you'd like to yell at him. But you know the Molester too well. "What's the Molester's punishment?"

"Nothing!" Will flings out his arms. "Get this, he grabs my bag away, but according to Sagansky, that's not worth detention. But I'm supposed to be punished because I 'used violence'" —He makes very violent air quotes around the phrase— "to get it back instead squawling off to a teacher."

"Christ."

"Am I in trouble?"

"No, not with me. As long as you didn't lose anything."

"I didn't." He shuffles through the book bag, then pauses. "Unless I did."

Your scalp starts to crawl. "What?"

"Keep it together, man," he mutters, and starts methodically pulling out the rest of his books and papers and looking through them.

"What did you lose?"

"Nothing, I hope! But, um—" He bites his lip. "Could you help me find a metal band, about yea inches long and yea inches wide" —He pinches the air to show the dimensions— "that looks kind of like a—"

"You didn't lose it at school if you made it after school, Will! Er, Caleb!"

"But I did make it at school. I skipped third period." Caleb paws through the untidy pile of schoolwork without meeting your eye. "I snuck into one of the portables and made it there. What?" he exclaims when you start breathing heavily. "I could get it done then! Save time afterward! And even if I lost it, I can make another one lickety-split, it only took, like—"

You cut him off with a word and start helping him to look. Fifteen minutes later, after looking through each book, each notebook, each wad of paper, and the pockets and lining of the bag, you find no sign of it.

You sigh and open the grimoire. "Then you'll make me another one," you tell him grimly as you leaf through the book to the torn page.

You reach it and you go right past it. Not until you've turned it does the fact register. You flip back and stare.

The page looks very different when it is whole than when it is torn away. You have to check to see that the previous spell is the one that makes that stuff you put inside a mask, and that the ingredients at the top of the page, and that curious instruction "Use me, solve me" is there.

And the really strange thing is that there is no tear immediately below that line. Instead the page is whole, and shows no seam or any other sign of repair. It is also unblemished by any kind of mark: no words, no pictures, no stains, and no sigils. You and Caleb can only stare at it with looks of dumbfounded stupefaction. "You saw it too, didn't you?" you ask him. "Last night?" He nods. You turn the page, then flip it back, then turn it again. There is nothing written on the other side.

The page magically repairing itself is almost worse than its being torn, and you very nearly declare yourself ready to be rid of the book. If it is going to be this strange and this creepy ...

But your dad's mulishness pushes you ahead, and you and Caleb bend your heads cautiously over the next spell.

* * * * *

Later that evening, after you're watching TV with your wife: "Honey, do you think you're bonding with Will?"

You look at her. "Somewhat," you allow, then decide to go further. "Yes, I think I really am."

"So you're not angry with him? I noticed you didn't say anything at dinner."

"About what?"

"His detention."

You blink. You didn't know Caleb had told her about that.

You grunt and turn your eyes back to the TV. "No. He explained it. The other guy was in the wrong."

"So you're okay with it?" she says. "Even though he sent that other boy to the nurse's office?"

* To continue: "One Well-Armed Research Project" 

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