The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

Corpses and Killers

Previously: "Stuff Gets Real" 

"Killing?" you shriek. "Who says we're going to—?" You choke on the words kill someone and replace them with a robot.

Sydney freezes and gives you a sidelong look. With her ankles together, arms folded, shoulders hunched, she stands like a spike. Her expression is hooded but calm even as you feel your eyes bulging and your jaw working.

She gazes at you for a long minute, then closes her eyes and shrugs.

"Alright, Will," she says. "It was just an idea."

Instantly you feel abashed. "Look, I'm sorry," you stammer. "I know this guy hurt you, and I want to help. But—" The thought using magic to kill a guy leaves you light-headed and short of breath.

"No, I understand," she says. "You're right. I guess if I really wanted to get back at him I guess I could just shoot him."

Shoot him? You gulp. "Have you really thought about—?"

"Wouldn't you?" she asks, "if someone killed your dad? The only thing stopping me," she goes on, "is I'm afraid of getting caught. But I don't know how long even that will hold me back."

She glares at you. "What would you say, Will," she asks, "what would you do, if you woke up one morning and read online or heard at school that I'd been arrested for killing my step-dad?"

* * * * *

That's who it is, it's her mother's new husband, she explains after she's calmed down. Calmed down, though, is a relative condition, and she snarls and snaps and hunches and paces as she tells you what she knows and what she suspects.

"I'm not totally sure, not absolutely sure. But the way he acts, the things he does, his relationship with my dad. It all makes sense that he'd be the one who did it. And I know he used the stuff he and my dad knew about it, the rituals of Baphomet, to do it."

Her stepfather's name is Nicholas Lawhorn, and like her father he worked for Parsons Collegiate Media. "Except he was in marketing. The snake," she snarls. He was also a member of the Brotherhood of Baphomet, one of five in their cell in Kansas City. "There's always five," she explains. "Five or ten. My dad was his superior, both in the Brotherhood and at Parsons. Except that Nicholas"—she calls him by his given name when she has to refer to him at all—"didn't report to my dad at the company."

Among the notes that her father left behind were minutes of their meetings and records of their rituals, and running through them was a constant thread: the insubordination of Nicholas Lawhorn and his obvious ambition to take over the cell. Sydney's father, as leader, was privy to arcane knowledges not available to the others, and coordinated with other cells of the Brotherhood; Lawhorn hardly bothered to disguise his burning thirst to take Matthew McGlynn's place, and in private notes McGlynn recorded his suspicion that Lawhorn was secretly using malign and forbidden rituals to sabotage him.

"And my father died in a car wreck," Sydney tells you. "It's a standard trick. You put an aureax in the car with them. It takes the steering wheel and drives them off the road, killing them. No one ever questions a car wreck, unless it's done with mechanical sabotage, and an {i]aureax isn't mechanical sabotage."

"But your mom married this guy," you point out.

Sydney's complexion curdles so hard you think her skin's about to split and peel back, exposing the skull.

"Yes. Oh, fuck him. Fuck him! God damn it!" She grabs a stack of old school desks and hurls it to the floor. "That ... that fucker! He was always at our house anyway, back in Kansas City," she hisses, "'cos he and my dad were in the business together. My dad didn't like it, I could tell. He thought Nicholas was a snake, and I think—" She hiccups. "I think he thought he was after my mom, too. But he was always showing up unannounced, with a bottle of wine or something. They'd go off in the den to talk. But Nicholas was always coming out and making nice with my mom. And he was all over her after the funeral, being so ... so fucking comforting and ... and shit!" She buries her face in her hands, and her shoulders shake.

"I try not to blame her," she moans after she's recovered herself somewhat. "She felt lost, I'm sure. Lonely. And that asshole— Well, he can be charming. Even I can see that. But he doesn't love her, I can tell. After they were married he— Well, he's not bad to her, but he doesn't pay hardly any attention to her anymore. I've caught her crying a couple of times. She always stifles it and says she's just thinking about my dad. But I see the way she looks at Nicholas, and I know she doesn't love him either."

"So why did he marry her?"

"To get at my dad's things! My dad hid them all, I told you. Nicholas spent the first month after the marriage—they didn't even go on a honeymoon!—he spent it 'cleaning and reorganizing' things." She says it so you can hear the sarcastic quotation marks around "cleaning and reorganizing." "He was just snooping, snooping, and I could see it made him mad that he didn't find anything. Or not everything he wanted to find. I'd found it and hid most of it by then. I have to be really careful, you know," she adds in a fearful aside. "I don't think he suspects me. I just try to play the, you know, popular cheerleader." She strikes an ironical pose with her arms and hands in the air. "But sometimes I catch him looking at me, and I think he wonders. I did catch him snooping through my stuff when we were packing to move here from Kansas City."

"But he didn't find anything?"

"No. I'd packed it all up separately and given it to my friend Alexandra, told her to mail it to me after we got an address here in Saratoga Falls. Even then, I had her send it to one of my new friends here, and I picked it up from her. Told her it was an ultra-secret birthday present for my mom."

* * * * *

Sydney's theory sounds very plausible. But even as sympathetic as you are, you know that it's all supposition and guesswork.

Fortunately, there's a way of finding out if it's true.

You show her the spell for making the metal bands that copy people's brains, and explain that by getting one of them onto her stepfather, she would be able to get into his memories to see if he had done what she suspects him of doing. She hesitates for only a few seconds before eagerly declaring her willingness to try that method of confirming her theory.

She insists on performing the spell herself, and as you have sufficient ingredients on hand you supervise her as she mixes them together and fires them over the sigil. "It'll take a couple of hours to carve the runes into the band," you tell her, but she's more than willing to do the work. At her request, you also guide her through making a mask as well. You sit with her, keeping each other company, as she works on the memory strip while you polish the mask. You finish well before she does, and use the extra time to make and polish another mask and to start another memory strip. Hers is ready by the time you part early in the evening, and she takes it with her.

You take the grimoire home with you, for you are interested to see what the next spell will be. It gives you a very bad turn when you read it. It is very similar to the spell that made the golem. Only instead of four hundred pounds of graveyard earth, it calls for only forty.

But it also calls for a "human body."

A corpse? you wonder. Or a person? Neither sounds appealing, and the spell pitches you back into that horror you felt yesterday when "Baphomet" reared his goat-like head. So bothered are you by this turn in the book that you put the memory strip away without working on it and turn with relief to the homework you've been neglecting. Tomorrow is Monday, after all.

* * * * *

"Will!" You turn at the voice, and your heart leaps to see Sydney running across the student parking lot toward you. You have a momentary vision of her crashing into you, embracing you, and burying her face in yours.

But she just pants to a stop in front of you.

"I did it!" she says, and there's exultation in her voice. "That metal strip! I got it onto Nicholas last night and I put it on! I got into his head, Will, and I saw it!"

Her face is flushed and her pupils dilated.

"He did it, Will! The fucker did it!"

Next: "How to Replace a Stepfather" 

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