The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

By Mystery Possessed

Previously: "Masks and Veils" 

"So tell me this plan you guys got, from the start," you tell Taylor. "Maybe I want to be in on it."

He looks at you in surprise. "Why's that?"

"Because my dad might be mixed up in it! You told me his name was on the box the stuff came in."

"You said it was a mix-up."

"Sure! But I need to know, man!"

Taylor sucks on his lower lip, then shrugs. "It's what I told you. The idea is we get some aliases and we leave town to go check up on where the stuff came from."

"So where did it come from? What city? And why do you need an alias? Why can't you—?"

"Would you wanna go out investigating this kind of stuff without putting on a disguise?" Taylor retorts.

You see his point, and lapse into silence.

"So the plan," he continues, "is that we get some false faces for ourselves. Fairfax is making up a new identity for me, so that's a face I can put on and take off, no problem. But Sean wants to go too—"

His jaw tightens, and you infer that there was some argument between the brothers about whether Taylor would make it a solo assignment.

"Anyway," he continues, "the, uh, logistics of it are a bitch to keep straight, but we're gonna need two masks, one for Sean and one for Sawyer."

"Sawyer's going too?" Maybe you don't want to go with them.

"No, he's staying behind. We'll make him stay behind." He gives you a quick look. "Don't tell any of this to Fairfax, okay?"

More secrecy. But you nod.

"It'd be better if you stayed behind too," Taylor mutters. "You and Sean are supposed to be—" He breaks off. "Um, you're supposed to be a couple or something, right?"

"I'm going," you insist. Taylor grimaces.

"Well, in that case we'll need a third mask, for you."

* * * * *

The whole thing begins to sound very confused and hare-brained, especially after you pick up Sean—in the Scott Bickelmeir mask—and the twins start arguing with each other about how they had decided to do things. None of you is very well-informed on the masks and how they are supposed to work, and you get the dreadful feeling that you're going to fuck up somehow.

But after stopping at a dollar store to buy a small notebook and pencil, and parking at the municipal athletic fields so you can hash it out without risking a car wreck, a firm plan develops. It takes lots of sketching, of names and arrows and little mask icons to indicate which masks would be going onto which people. But the bottom line of the final plan calls for you guys to get three new masks from Fairfax and the gang. One for you and one for Sean to wear on the adventure, and one for Sawyer to wear while he stays behind to supposedly help you and Sean improve your social life while you're out of town. Your beta will remain behind, of course, and Kristy will have to stay behind as a beta as well.

You probably won't have much trouble ordering up the masks. Each person in the gang (except for Sawyer, per Fairfax's orders) has the right to two aliases. Sean already has two—Scott Bickelmeir and Will Prescott—but you still need to pick an additional one for yourself. Taylor has said he just wants one alias—the new one that Fairfax is making for him—but he can tell Philip that he's changed his mind. That way you can get an alias you can leave town under; and the one that Taylor picks as his second will actually be worn by Sean while Taylor will leave town under the new character being constructed by Fairfax.

But the Mitchells have additional news for you.

* * * * *

"So, here's the rest of what we're investigating," Sean says after you're back on the road out to Eastman High School. He's much more forthcoming than his brother. "Some pretty bizarre stuff happened to Sawyer while he was in that coma. You know he had that mask on? Turns out it wasn't like the ones that Taylor and Scott made."

"Yeah, it didn't turn him into someone else," you observe.

"Actually, it did."

"What?" You swing around with your mouth hanging open. You remember seeing Sawyer in that hospital bed. It was him, and you're pretty sure his family and the doctors would have noticed if it was someone else.

"Yeah. Except it wasn't like transformation, like with—" He points to his face; Scott's face. "It was like possession. Long-distance possession."

"Unless it was just a dream," Taylor puts in.

"Pretty goddam lifelike dream, bro, from the way he described it. And accurate. Everything he said he did in it checks out."

"What did he dream?" you ask.

"That he was this old guy out at Salopek," Sean says. "Jack—" He nudges Taylor. "What's Jack's last name? But anyway," he continues when Taylor shrugs, "he runs the mail system and storage centers out there. And Sawyer says that he was Jack while he was in the hospital, the same way I'm Scott and you're Kristy."

Sean looks at you with Scott Bickelmeir's eyes; you look back at him with Kristy Suffolk's.

"So he knew everything that Jack knew," he continues, "and he knew how to act like him." To Taylor: "That's gotta suck harder than being Scott, right?" To you: "Jack's, like, sixty years old."

"Jesus!"

"And everything that Sawyer says he saw in this dream, everything he did, it all matches up with stuff that we know Jack did at work." Sean lifts his cap and scratches his scalp. "He remembers when I came in after being hired, and he remembers stuff happening out there that I remember happening too. Stuff that Sawyer couldn't know 'cos, you know, he was in a hospital bed in a coma. So it was like his spirit went out and possessed Jack."

"So why didn't he say anything to anyone, while he was being this Jack guy?" you ask. "To you? Or to Taylor? Why didn't he go looking for you guys?"

"He says he was freaked out. Wouldn't you be? He was too freaked out to even go up to the hospital to look at himself."

Silence falls over the cab of the truck. It kind of makes sense, you guess. If you found yourself suddenly transported into another person's body, with no idea how you got there, you'd freak out too.

Except you'd try not to show it. You'd probably carry on as carefully as you could, trying not to attract notice.

"And you know," Taylor says after this quiet interlude, "after I'd been stuck as Scott for awhile, I started not being sure who I really was. Was I me disguised as Scott, or was I Scott and had Taylor's memories all mixed up with mine? It was probably something like that with Sawyer.

That gives you something else to chew on. "You said after you got out Scott's mask you didn't want to be someone else," you tell Taylor. "So why is Sawyer so hot to get back in a mask?"

Sean snorts. "After being an old, unsexy guy, he says he wants to be a really sexy girl. Scrape the old man stink off me, is what he said." You shudder and retch.

"Anyway, Sawyer told all this to us and Fairfax," Taylor says. "Fairfax is all excited about it. He's got that mask that Sawyer was wearing. I bet he gets into it soon, if he hasn't got into it already."

Taylor says, "You told me Jack was sick yesterday, didn't come in to work. You think maybe Fairfax was ...?"

"Could be. Whatever it was, it was lucky for us, 'cos I got in to copy that return address."

"The one on the box my dad was supposed to get?" you ask.

"That's right. Jack— Sawyer— Whoever. After he got turned into Jack, he put the box aside, off in his own private corner. Sawyer told me where it was, and yesterday I snuck in and got it."

"Did you tell Philip?"

"We're gonna give him the stuff out of it, but we're not going to give him the box. We'll tell him we threw it away. That way only we know where it came from."

Again with the secrecy.

"As long as he's got the stuff out of the box," Taylor snorts, "I bet he'll be happy as a pig in slop."

* * * * *

It's that stuff out of the box that you're driving to Eastman High to get. After the accident, Taylor split up the stuff they'd taken from it. Some of it wound up back at his and Sean's house, but the rest of it he hid in a maintenance tunnel at the other high school.

So they're meeting some guys up there—team guys who can get into the school's athletic facilities. From there, they can sneak into the tunnel where Taylor hid the rest of the stuff.

"It's guys from the basketball team," Taylor tells you. "It's not our usual thing," he admits, for Scott and Sean are football players and wrestlers. But it's the only way of getting into the building. "It's one reason we asked you to come. You— Kristy is on the girls' squad back at Westside. So it makes sense you'd come out and watch."

"Do you want me to sneak off and try getting the stuff? You guys are going to be busy on the court."

"You don't know where it is," Taylor says.

"I don't either," Sean points out. "You should tell us, in case you can't get away."

So while sitting in the parking lot at Eastman, Taylor describes the layout of the gym, how to get from there to the storage and maintenance areas, and where in it he hid the box of loot. "And here," he says, handing you a small flashlight from the glove compartment. "You might need this."

"Am I the one who's going to try getting it out?"

"You don't have to," Taylor replies. "But it's best to be prepared, right?"


That's all for now.

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