The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Who Comes Here?

Previously: "Of Two Minds About Almost Everything" 

wrestle with the question for a good long while: To try this new memory strip on yourself, or on someone else?

It's not hard to find reasons for testing it on someone else. You've no idea what it does, or even if you've made it correctly, and you've got Gordon Black as a example of what can go wrong. But if you test the strip on someone else, it might reveal things to the person you were testing it on, leading to awkward questions.

It's a narrow-run thing when the former choice finally wins out over the latter one, and you feel your face tightening into a rictus of fear as you raise the ruby-red memory strip to your face. You hesitate, grit your teeth and shut your eyes, then slap it against your forehead.

* * * * *

You wake with a long, hard gasp and bolt upright. Am I drowning? you ask yourself. You certainly feel like you've popped to the surface from the bottom of a very deep lake.

Your heart races and your nerves vibrate, and you tremble all over. Oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK! What is going on? You were parked by that old school where Dana asked you to meet her, and you saw this skinny kid ambling toward you. You were only puzzled when he bent to tap at your window, and you rolled it down with an impatient frown.

But before you could ask what he wanted, his hand shot out and—

Oh, Jesus, it was like a thing with teeth biting your forehead.

You look around now. It's gotten a lot darker. Did you get knocked out? That kid has gone, and you're all alone in—

You blink.

This isn't your car. This is an SUV or minivan or something, not the old, hand-me-down sedan that your grandmother left you. The fuck? You grab the wheel and twist in the seat.

That's when you notice that your clothes have changed as well. You're wearing sweat pants and a floppy t-shirt. Your feet are bare.

The thought date rape drug flits across the forefront of your mind.

Gingerly, with a mounting dread—a premonition, horrible, of the deformity you will find—you lay an open palm over your crotch.

There's a thing there, inside the sweat pants with you.

It moves, and you scream.

* * * * *

Of course, you jumped when you screamed, and banged your head into the roof of the car. Maybe it's a good thing that happened. It jogged something loose in your head.

More particularly, it jogged loose the memories of a kid name "Will Prescott."

Not you've ever heard of before. Which made it very weird—okay, it was absolutely terrifying—when those memories, sizzling like the current running through a high-voltage power line, crackled through your brain, lighting it up with images, sounds, feelings, and desires that you have never had. Even worse was when the electric newness of it faded leaving you with Will Prescott inside your brain—

And inside your body.

And inside your soul.

—like a living, breathing, dripping presence. When you raised your hands, you felt his hands inside yours. When you squirmed in the seat, you felt his skin prickle and quiver inside your own.

The real horror came when you realized that you had his body in addition to his mind. It was his hands you were raising, and his skin that was itching, and his ... thing ... that was twitching between your legs inside the sweat pants.

The only comfort was that, with his memories, you at least understood what was going on.

Sort of. Even Will Prescott is confused by it all, when you grapple at the issue with his thoughts, his memories, his knowledge.

Okay, so, he got himself a book of magic, and thanks to a lot of very confusing things that happened over at his high school—Westside—he disguised himself as Dana Pak and moved over to your high school. He made himself a new magical whatsahootsie, and he decided (like a real son of a bitch) to test it out on you. And when he did—

Well, somehow it seems to have body swapped you.

Not like he was doing with the masks he was making, which just had the effect of disguising him. No, the result was a full-on body swap.

Because, as near as you can tell, he pulled your mind—maybe your very soul, the soul of Lisa Frances Rickover—out of your body and put it into his.

Which means—

Oh God. You shudder and shiver all over.

—his soul must be inside your body.

* * * * *

You spend the next thirty minutes fighting down the need to vomit.

It's fear, of course, rank and dank. It fills your lungs and courses through your heart and befogs your brain. You feel as though you are drowning again.

It's boredom, of all things, that first cracks the terror so that you can start to think clearly again. You can hunker in the cold cabin of Dana Pak's SUV for only so long before your brain starts looking for something else to do besides cowering.

So, for a start:

If you and Will Prescott swapped bodies, he must be going through the same thing you're going through. Except he won't be panicked by it all. He would be confused, but no more confused than you are. And he'd be bound to realize that if he's in your body with your memories, then you must be in his body with his memories.

So there wouldn't be any reason for him not to call you. He'd know that you know just as much as he does.

So why hasn't he called or texted you yet?

Oh God! You shudder all over. What if the body swap happened while you were driving down a busy thoroughfare, and that Prescott (in your body, driving your car) was in an accident?

But then—

You press your forehead against the steering wheel. You're getting a headache from trying to figure it all out.

The last thing you remember, just before waking after the body swap, was that skinny kid—Will Prescott—tapping at your window. But that wasn't when the body swap happened. That kid—it was actually some kind of clone of Prescott, not Prescott himself—took the magical thingamabob back to the real Prescott, who was waiting around the block, and Prescott couldn't have done anything with it until after you drove off. The swap only happened when he put that thing onto his forehead.

So why don't you remember waking up, and talking to Dana, and driving off—stuff that happened before the body swap?

That thing he put on his forehead. He called it a "memory strip" because it looked like a thing he had made before: a thing that copied other people's minds. Well, the new one did something like that. Only it yanked your mind—your soul—out of your body when he put it on you.

But then, if your mind, your soul, was ripped from your body, how come your body was able to talk to Dana when she ambled out to talk to you, and to drive off afterward? Was it only some kind of robot until Prescott's mind and soul went into it?

Or—!

(It's a good thing you like science-fiction; it's helping you come up with ideas about what's happened.)

Or what if your body really was only a wet, meaty robot when it drove away—because your soul was gone from it—and it is still only a wet, meaty robot now, because Prescott's soul is still in here with you? What if you have only sort of smothered his soul with your own?

What if you have now possessed his body, leaving yours as a kind of zombie?

Would it reverse if you pulled that memory strip off yourself? Gently you pat and rub your forehead, as though you might feel the metallic strip under the skin.

I should take it off, you think. If I take it off, maybe it will reverse the possession, and things will go back to normal. Yes, that's what I should do!

But when you raise your hand again—

It freezes in mid-air. It's almost as if another hand has seized yours by the wrist. Sweat breaks out all over your body as you struggle to grasp yourself by the forehead. You tremble all over with the strain of forcing Prescott's body to obey your will.

And when something cracks, it isn't the resisting force. Your hand drops into your lap.

Goddamn you, Prescott, you mutter. God DAMN you.

Your only consolation is that he is probably in the same shape as you are. If you have been body swapped. If you haven't, and you've just possessed Will Prescott—

And that's when the heavy clouds of depression are first pierced by something like a ray of hope.

* * * * *

"I'm back!" you call as you stride in from the garage.

"Did you eat?" Dana's mom calls back.

"Yes! I texted you!"

"Just making sure."

Mrs. Pak looks up with a small but warm smile as you walk into the living room. You smile back. You exchange light chit-chat—the sort Dana and her mom would—then go up to Dana's room.

It was a fraught moment when you put Dana's mask back on, but it fitted perfectly, giving you her appearance and her memories, even as you retained hold of your own and Will Prescott's.

And why not? If you've possessed Will Prescott's mind and body, then you've got everything he's got.

Including all that magic gear he picked up. It your gear now. To do with whatever you wish.

"So tell me, Ms. Lisa Rickover," you murmur at Dana's reflection as you puckishly scope out your disguised body in the mirror; you twist a strand of her long, coarse hair between your fingertips. "What are you going to do with it all?"

Next: "A Dana's-Eye View" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"