The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

Love Scene in a Cemetery

Previously: "Confessions of Two Magic-Users" 

"Pretty romantic, huh?"

Sydney returns your jape with a sidelong look and half of a smirk.

It's Thursday night—the night after your tete-a-tete in the elementary school library—and you and she are back in the Masonic cemetery. There's a front moving through: the wind is blowing and the clouds are flying and the temperature is falling. So although it's still too warm for the mood to be truly Halloween-ish—it's only October 2—the mood is right for some corny jokes.

It's your and Sydney's second "date," though you decided last night that it would be too risky to boldly proposition her. It seems enough, for now, to have a spark between you. A spark borne of a secret, shared interest in the occult; a spark she couldn't share with anyone else at school. So why would you even bother to ask her if you're "going steady"? Just be friends, and wait for the benefits to fall into your lap.

(Or, more accurately given your state of arousal, "impale themselves upon your lap.")

Anyway, it's your second date, and romance has led you back to the cemetery so that she could show you what she was up to last Saturday night, just as you've shown her all the stuff that you were up to.

She has brought two instruments with her. The first is a thing like a gyroscope. Or, as she explained, like a dowsing rod. "You set it spinning, and the axis points to any ley lines nearby. You have to triangulate on them, though, and if they're too far off then you have to drive all over the place and mark lots of angles and lines on maps before you can start pinning down its exact location."

Mostly this explanation only served to remind you that she's taking a bunch of AP classes and that you aren't.

But once you were in the cemetery, she could show you directly. And, sure enough, as she paced the grounds with the spinning top suspended from a string, the central axis first rose to point ahead of her, then dipped to point straight at the ground, then twisted to point back the way she came. "Right here," she said, returning to the spot where the rod pointed at her toes. "It runs right through here."

You stood beside her, but felt nothing but the animal excitement of being close to a small, slim, tautly muscled blonde goddess.

She has set that instrument aside now, and has been fiddling with the other one she brought. It's like a sextant, made of brass or of gold, with strange figures and devices carved into the curved compass. After pushing two pencils into the ground to mark the direction of the ley line, she has laid down on the grass, with you beside her, and is sighting through the eyepiece.

"There," she says. "You can see it now." She rolls away. "Go on, take a look. It's like a phosphorescent line."

You flatten on your stomach and peer through the eyepiece without touching the instrument. At first you see nothing but the dark ground. Then, as though your eyes were adjusting to the dark, a faint, bluish-green glow appears, stretching out in a thin line in front of you.

You peer over the top of the scope. "I don't see anything," you say.

"Don't be derpy. Of course you can't, not with the naked eye. That's the whole point of the thing, it helps you see lines that are invisible."

"Where did you get things? Did your dad teach you about this stuff?"

"No. I don't think he'd have told me about it, not in a million years. You sure never could've told just by looking at him that he was into this stuff."

Just like you, you think. But Sydney is still talking.

"I told you he left a bunch of stuff behind when he died. These things, plus a lot of notes and papers. He had them in a rental unit. A high-security place, practically a bank vault, not like where you store an old sofa you can't get rid of. My mom and—" She snorts. "Her new husband, they couldn't ever get into it because you needed a security code. Not just to get into the unit but into the facility. My dad paid, like, twenty years in advance on the place."

You're both lying on the ground, and when she props herself on her elbow you mirror the pose. It's very easy, you find, to listen intently and sympathetically to a beautiful girl.

"My mom's new husband—" She hesitates. "I heard him talking to her one day. This was back when they were just dating, a couple of months after my dad's funeral." She makes a face. "Anyway, he said he'd found this Ouija board in our game closet. He asked if she'd ever tried using it to contact my dad. She said she hadn't, and she never would. Good for her," she snorts. "But something about the way he said, it gave me the feeling that he wanted to use it, that there was something he wanted to learn from it. I went in and stole it before he could get to it. I played with it, and it worked."

"You talked to your dad?"

"I don't think so. But some kind of message came through. It just kept giving me a seven-letter code over and over again. It gave me the idea that maybe that was the security code for the rental unit. I got a friend's mom to take me out, and it worked, it got me in. I snuck all the stuff out and hid it in my room. I've been figuring them out ever since."

You stare deeply into her eyes, even though you're pretty sure she's staring at a spot a couple of miles behind your ear.

"Anyway," she says as she sits up, "speaking of figuring out where things are, how about let's find the focal point of this ley line."

"You think it's here in the cemetery?"

"A ley line only becomes visible when it's close to a focus, so yeah. I was just starting to trace it out last Saturday when I heard your truck. Go on." She pushes you away from the sextant and takes your place at it. "Take a hike. I'll tell you if you get off the beam."

So you trudge across the cemetery, dodging head stones and following Sydney's shouted instructions when you deviate from the line. You've no idea what you're looking for.

Then, all at once, you're pretty sure you've found it. Sydney comes in answer to your shout, then brings that sextant over to confirm. "Well, it might not be in there," she says as she stands up and brushes herself off. "But it seems pretty likely, right?"

That's what you thought. If anything is going to be the focus point for a power line of occult significance, it would be a mausoleum, wouldn't it? And the ley line runs straight through the center of its door.

It's built of white stone and shaped like a Greek temple, with solid walls under a slanted roof with two pillars in front. The iron door is low—you'd have to duck your head to enter—and locked. You and Sydney circle the exterior, looking for other entrances. You've no idea how many coffins could be squeezed inside a building of this size, but you'd guess it could fit half a dozen without crowding.

Sydney has brought a flashlight, and she casts the beam about until it catches a name etched over the door. "Keyserling," she says.

"What, like the college?"

"I guess so." She looks around. "Oh my God," she murmurs a moment later.

"What?"

"This has got to be the focus. The axis is all wrong."

"What are you talking about?"

"The axis. Graves are almost always oriented east to west, with the gravestones facing east. If they're not east to west, they'll be north to south. See?" She points to the nearest gravestones. As near as you can judge, she's right that they are facing east. "But this thing—" She points at the crypt. "It's not east to west. It's not north to south, either. It's at least—" Her head swivels. "At least thirty degrees off a north-south line."

"So?"

"So that means it's intentionally laid out wrong. You don't just make that kind of mistake. The ley line runs through the door, and the axis is turned to align with it. The focus has to be in there."

You lick your lips. "Do we have to get in there?"

"We do if we want to tap it."

"Do we?"

She is very slow to answer. "I had an idea for what I wanted to do," she finally says, "if I found one of its foci." She looks around. "We could try finding the other focus, though, if we don't want to use this one."

"What do you want to do when you find one?"

She hesitates much longer.

Then she does something wonderful. She steps up close and puts her arms around you. In your surprise, you fail to reciprocate as she pulls herself close to you.

"I've never been with a guy before, Will," she murmurs, and rubs her face in your shirt. "I'm a virgin."

You freeze all over. It sure as fuck sounds like she's leading up to the idea of ... fucking.

But your burgeoning erection—which she can surely feel through your trousers, but you can't help yourself—slows at her next words: "And I have to stay a virgin."

"Yeah?" you croak.

"Uh huh. But I think there's a way around it, if you'll help me."

Anything! your brain screams. I'll do anything!

"I can keep my virginity, but also—" She gulps. "I think I can do what I need to do, at a focus point, if you make me a mask. So that it's technically someone else who gives herself to you at a focal point."

Next: "The One Who Might Be Your Girlfriend" 

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