The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Focus of Your Efforts

Previously: "A Mask Is Dropped" 

Partners? You're doubtful. But there doesn't seem any graceful way to refuse. You take her hand and reply, "Okay, partners."

And maybe it would work out. You'd like to hang out with Sydney anyway. There will be time later to decide if you're genuinely interested in being partners with her.

You and she shake hands. You wonder if she's making the same calculations as you, and you can't help noticing that she makes the next move: "So what's this book you found, and how does it work?"

"Whoa, hang on," you riposte. "I already told you a lot about it. What can you bring to this partnership?"

* * * * *

She's got some notebooks, she tells you, bequeathed to her by her dad, who belonged to some kind of occult secret society. She has been figuring them out since he died, and with their help she was on the verge of pinning down the focal point of a ley line that runs through the Masonic cemetery before she was distracted by your own raid on the graveyard. She hasn't time to show you—she has a "stupidly early curfew"—but you arrange to pick her up and take her out to the cemetery Thursday evening. You will also bring Caleb's mask, so that she will see how it works.

"One more thing," you tell her before you part. "This partnership of ours. It's strictly a business partnership, okay? No mixing of business and pleasure."

Sydney looks very amused by that, and assures you that she'll keep things strictly professional between you.

Upstairs in your bedroom, as you lay on your back and probe at the dark ceiling with your eyes and your straining cock, you wonder why you sabotaged yourself so thoroughly by telling her that. Understanding dawns when you wake at three o'clock from a nightmare in which you made a pass at her, and with a raucous laugh she turned you into a frog. You told her you wanted things professional between you, you realize, so that she wouldn't be the one to insist on a professional relationship.

* * * * *

It's also probably the reason you show up at her house the next night wearing Caleb's mask—so that it won't be you that she's distant and professional with. And she is distant at first, and draws back warily when she sees who it is grinning at her on the porch to her house. She's also shy about accompanying you out to your truck. "Kinda freaky, isn't it?" you tell her.

"Uh huh. It makes me wonder if this whole thing isn't just an elaborate prank that two guys are playing on me."

"It's me, Sydney," you assure her in Caleb's most nasally honk. "Will Prescott. Go on, ask me anything about our date last night." So she does. Slowly at first, then with quickening energy—and something almost like anger—she quizzes you on what she and you said and did on Wednesday.

"If that's a mask you're wearing," she says when she's exhausted herself, "can you take it off when we get to the cemetery, so I can see it's really you?"

"Sure, but let's wait till we're on the other side of the evening. It kinda knocks me out to put it on and take it off."

It's a dark night, with a blowing wind and scudding clouds and falling temperatures. But it would have to be colder, and there would have to be fewer leaves on the trees, before October 2 would begin to feel like October 31. Still, it's a fit night to visit a graveyard.

Everything, as Sydney had promised, is business-like between you. She has brought some of the instruments that her father left behind, and demonstrates their use. The first is a thing like a gyroscope, with a forked metal prong like a "Y" suspended between two spinning hoops of steel such that it bobs and floats freely in all three dimensions. "It's kind of like a dowsing rod," she explains, "only it finds ley lines instead of water. You set it spinning, and the stem points to any ley lines nearby. Well, 'nearby' is relative," she adds, "and if they're far off you have to drive all over the place and triangulate and mark all sorts of lines and angles on a map before you can start pinning down its exact location. And of course since it's a line and not a point you're triangulating on, it's even messier."

You nod sagely at all this, for you've Caleb's brain to help you.

With its help she has traced a line through the cemetery, and now she uses it to show it to you directly. She paces the grounds with the thing cupped in her hands, and the stem points first ahead of her, then dips to point at her toes. "Right here," she says, and taps at the grass with her foot. "It runs right through here."

She drops to the grass with the second instrument she's brought, a thing 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 a length of the ley line, she lays down on the grass and sights through the telescope. "There," she says after fiddling with it. "You can see it now." She gets up. "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. "Does it have terminal points?" you ask.

"It can, if it intersects other ley lines and you perform an anchoring ceremony at them. Otherwise they just peter out. But with the anchoring ceremonies you can make triangles, or squares or pentagrams, or just about any kind of geometric shape. The triangles and pentagrams are the most powerful shapes."

"For doing what?"

"For doing stuff I'm still figuring out," she says after a lengthy hesitation. She looks around. "What we need to find now are the focal points. The two spots that you bless so you can cast a ley line through them. That's where you want to do something if you're going to do something with the ley line."

"Like what?"

"Stuff I'm still trying to figure out," she replies, and you say it with her. She gives you a playful shove. "You trace out the line," she tells you as she drops to the grass. "I'll tell you when you're 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, until all of a sudden you think you do. Sydney hurries up in answer to your shout.

It's a mausoleum, built of white stone and shaped like a Greek temple, with solid walls under a slanted roof with two pillars in front. The ley line runs straight up to and through the middle of the door. Sydney casts the beam of the flashlight at the name etched over the door. "Keyserling," she murmurs.

"Like the college?"

"I guess so." She looks around. "Yeah, this has got to be the focus."

"'Cos it's a mausoleum?"

"No, because its axis is all wrong. Graves are almost always oriented east to west, or north to south. But this thing is—" She swings her head around. "It's at least sixty degrees off the angle the graves are laid out on."

"That's a hefty surveyor's error," you observe.

"So it's probably not an error. The focus has to be in there."

"So we break in? I didn't bring a crowbar."

Sydney studies the door. "Let's go find the other focal point," she suggests, and that is fine with you.

* * * * *

You have a choice of looking for it north or south, and you choose south because that way leads away from town. It also leads into open country between the southern reaches of Saratoga Falls and the northern edges of Acheson, where there are plenty of open lots between houses. Between the detailed maps that she has printed out and plotted, the gyroscope, and the sextant, you are able to easily track the line across Orlando Road and into land that is still undeveloped. The line, to your delight, brightens in one empty field before vanishing through a high wall. Rather than scale the wall, you investigate the other side, and find it fading out again. "The other focal point is in there," Sydney says. "Figures someone would have built a house over it.

You circle around the wall until you come to a gate made of iron bars. Through these you peer. It's too dark to make out the house—the exterior lights are off—but it's a good-sized thing at least two stories tall and shaped like a shoebox. At the northern corner low lights burn through heavy drapes.

"That's funny," Sydney says, and she glances back over her shoulder before peering through the gate again.

"What is?"

She doesn't reply right away, but continues glancing back and forth between the grounds outside the wall and the grounds inside.

"The lawn in there," she finally says, pointing through the gate. "Except there isn't one. See? No grass."

You peer between the bars, and confirm that she's right. The grounds inside the wall, as near as you can make out, are bare dirt. "Maybe it's a bad piece of land," you suggest.

"But there's grass and weeds and all kinds of trash outside." She points, and again you see that she's right. Lush grasses run right up to the wall, breaking against it almost like a wave running up against an embankment. "I wonder why it's all dead inside there," she says.

Something to do with magic, would be your suggestion.

But your thought is interrupted by a rustling from inside the wall. At first you take it for dry leaves rattling in a hard wind. Then you decide it's more like the clatter of stones rolling down a tile roof.

Then a different aural picture occurs to you:

It's the sound of thousands of teeth chattering excitedly.

Hungrily.

That's all for now.

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