The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Hole

Previously: "A Coffin Gets Another Nail" 

With a sigh you lumber to your feet and trudge over to Joe. Without a word, you grab him by the face.

"You really want to hear what I want to say," he says in a muffled voice, and seizes your thick hands and tugs at you hard. You pause fractionally, then quickly murmur the words that will release the mask, and a moment later it comes off in your hand. In the moonlight he seems to change to stone.

Fucking Frank. It must have been his idea of a joke, putting the mask onto his golemized brother. It's lonely and you want company, even if it's only Joe's ghost inside of you, so you don the mask.

Nothing happens, and the mask falls back into your hands. You carry it over to where a patch of light glows on the concrete floor, and examine it. The interior is blank. The mask must have reset to the blank layer you put into it. You fiddle clumsily with the outer surface until Joe's spectral face appears in the surface, and put it back on.

Joe's reappearance within you is welcome. But what trick did Frank tell it to play on you? How did it pull off that trick with the globe of light?

You frown at the empty answer: the last memory is the one you had when Frank stripped you of it. Why are there no memories between when he put it back on the golem and when you took it off? Has Frank found a way to alter the memories inside a mask?

You sink onto the cot and close your eyes and think deeply, but even between your memories and Joe's own knowledge you can come up with no plausible answer.

You end up dozing fitfully until dawn.

* * * * *

You are woken from a light sleep by the sound of the secret door opening, and by Frank calling your name. With a glower you stagger to your feet and glare up at him. "Turns out I'm not much of a guard." Your smile is sarcastic. "Prescott escaped."

His lips twist in exasperation. "Just get up here." He disappears back into the library.

Each step you take as you mount the stairs fills you with greater disquiet. What has he planned for you? Probably you could have busted out, but didn't because you thought it better to see what would happen next. But now you're regretting not making an escape when you could.

Frank turns as you step out from behind the bookcase, and raises his hand. Again, you are clenched in a great, invisible fist. Then he slaps something very hot against your forehead, and the world turns an alarming shade of white.

* * * * *

When your consciousness returns, it comes with a feeling of something tugging at your face, and then the world snaps back into view. There's a tennis shoe by your face, and you raise your eyes to see Frank gazing down contemptuously at you. Both of you seem to be at the bottom of a trench of earth. He holds a mask in his hand, and you quickly realize he has stripped Joe's disguise from you again.

"I'll thank you this much," he says. "You made it a lot easier to decide what to do with you. I had other plans, but after the shit you pulled last night-- It wasn't even smart." He tosses the mask over the lip of the trench.

You try to reach for him--however fruitless a fight would be--but you can't move your arms. In fact, you are only able to move head a little from side to side. But you're able to move it enough to see that you are buried up to your face in earth, and that even your head is several feet below ground level. Though the trench rises to Frank's shoulders, it's with no great difficulty that he clambers up out of it. "Ashes to ashes and earth to earth," he says in a taunting tone. "I'll dig you up again when I need you." And with that he picks up a shovel and drops a great, wet pile of dirt onto your face.

"Durras!" you shout, but your cry is muffled by the earth, which fills your mouth as you open it. More shovelfuls fall on you, and the rhythmic thump of falling dirt grows softer and dimmer, until it ceases entirely.

Well, being a golem, at least you can't suffocate. But neither can you move--you are packed in too tightly. Slowly and with infinite effort you try to lift your arm. But if it is even shifting you can't tell. All is silent. All is dark.

All seems hopeless.

You reflect bitterly on the mistakes that led you to this pass. Where did you first go wrong? Was it when you decided to help the Durrases against Blackwell? Was it when you agreed to work for Blackwell? Was it when you bought the damned book in the first place?

And what will happen now, to the transformed Joe, to Blackwell, to other people, when Frank has mastered the Libra? What will he do to you, when he finally finds a use for you?

You go in circles and circles, and not one loop brings you any closer to escape.

* * * * *

Time passes. And more time passes. Nothing happens.

* * * * *

Is it night yet? How could you tell if it were? And what difference would it make?

* * * * *

You will your consciousness into "fast forwarding" through time. It doesn't seem to make a difference.

* * * * *

You have only a rudimentary sense of touch in your golem body, so it's probably a snake and not merely a worm that you feel sliding through the dirt and across your face. Probably you will attract all manner of evil creatures.

* * * * *

There is dirt in your ears. Of course there is. But you become absurdly, insanely conscious that you have dirt in your ears. You will go mad if you can't get it out. You will go mad if you can't forget that you have dirt in your ears. Don't think of the dirt. Don't think of the dirt.

The crisis passes only when you remember that you don't have ears to have dirt inside. That actually makes it worse. Where is the illusion that you have ears coming from?

* * * * *

Are those digging sounds? Is Frank digging you up? You strain to listen. Something seems to be tunneling nearby.

The sound, if it was real, fades, and doesn't return.

* * * * *

At least you don't have unscratchable itches. Oh, God, now you do.

* * * * *

Someone will come and get you out. Frank, eventually. Unless Blackwell returns and deals with him. But Blackwell wouldn't rescue you, would he? Someone will defeat Frank. But how will they find out where you are? Your best hope lies in Frank discovering something so amazing that he has to dig you out.

No, that's what he wants you to feel. He wants to break you, so that you'll help him, if only to be free from this grave.

* * * * *

Is it your imagination, or is that a light off in the distance?

* * * * *

No, it was your imagination.

* * * * *

You start composing your autobiography. It is depressingly brief and short on exciting bits until the very end. And that's when it ends.

* * * * *

Again, there's the sound of digging, of shifting earth. Not another illusion, you groan to yourself.

This time it comes with the illusion of light, a dim glow out of the corner of your eye. The earth seems to be shifting as well.

Have you been "fast-forwarding" all this time? Is the earth wearing away through erosion? Will it suddenly vanish, like something in a time-lapse film, to reveal a changed, post-apocalyptic world? A post-technological world, tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the future?

No, it's just another illusion.

* * * * *

Or so you think, until the earth before you suddenly parts, and a dimly glowing something appears and fills your very limited field of vision. It is very pale, except where it is flecked with red, and flat, except where it has some very rounded protuberances.

It's a face. Or, rather, it's a skull, but an inhuman one, with a great, gaping hole where there should be two eyes: the skull of a cyclops. The mouth opens--

There is no way anyone could have that many teeth--that many sharp, fang-like teeth, in an infinite series of rows vanishing back into an endless gullet.

With a gasping, ravenous hiss, it lunges at you, snapping its jaw over your head ...

* * * * *

You ought to be terrified, but you have no nerves or glands to vibrate. So it is with a distinct lack of surprise that you find yourself standing in darkness on what seems like a smooth, flat floor. You are free of the earth, and turn around and around and around again. Endless, unrelieved emptiness, as black as the grave you've been trapped in. But at least it is open. You take a tentative step--

Two thing happen, simultaneously. A small, hard light appears in the distance, and at the same time the floor falls away beneath your feet, sloping at an alarming angle backward. You fall forward and are only able to cling precariously to what now feels like the sharply angled slope of a smooth hill.

The light glows above and in front of you. Glancing back and down, you have the sense of an enormous cavern opening up. It seems to exhale, and tendrils of air, colder than you've ever felt, curl like tentacles about you, stinging everywhere they touch.

* To scramble up the slope: "Backwards From Where You Came" 
* To let go and fall down the slope: "Your Reward for a Misspent Adventure" 

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