The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

Coming Clean with Katy Conlee

Previously: "That Voodoo That You Do Too Well" 

It takes you a long moment to realize what Katy is suggesting. "Will!" she finally shouts when you only stare at her, and points at the finely executed statue of Hannah Westrick that is sitting behind the wheel of the SUV. "That's what Stephanie and them did to Hannah last night! When they—!"

"Wait wait wait wait wait!" you yelp. "What are you—? How did Hannah get out here?"

"I called her," Katy says. She eyes swell up and her lips puff into a quivering frown. "I wanted to see if she was okay after what happened last night! So I asked her to meet me out here, and she asked if you were going to be here, and I said yes because I thought maybe you would be, that I'd call you anyway to come help check up on her. Well, she got here, and—"

Katy swallows hard and holds something up. Only now do you realize that she's been holding a mask all this time.

"She seemed like she was okay," Katy continues, "only she was mad about the thing last night. But I thought I should check on her anyway. I remember you told me that you put a mask on her that was mind-controlling her. So I decided to try taking it off her to see if that made a difference, and— And—!"

She bursts out crying and points at Hannah.

Oh Jesus, you think. She really does think the voodoo spell did that Hannah.

You've no idea what exactly her reasoning is, but you can sort of guess. Dominique Hughes (another of Stephanie's friends) came out of a bedroom dressed in an old-fashioned silk gown, wearing contact lenses that turned her eyes a milky white, like a blind woman's. While chanting some kind of Creole curse, she hurled a fistfuls of dark earth at Hannah, while from another angle Meghan surreptitiously lit and tossed some paper cartridges of flash powder that Caleb had made up.

Dirt plus fire. It's not so different from the stuff you used in the spell that really did turn Hannah into this ... thing. The spell might even have used some of the same chemicals that Caleb's flash powder used. And for sure Katy has no better idea for how Hannah could have been turned into a grayish-white stone statue.

But even though her mistake gives you perfect cover for hiding your own responsibility for Hannah's current condition, you can't let Katy think that she and her friends are even accidentally responsible.

"It's not your fault, Katy," you tell her. "It's not Stephanie's fault or Dominique's fault or anyone's fault that—"

"But the thing we to her did last night!" she wails. "With the dirt and the spell and—"

"Hannah was already like this," you blurt out. "Last night, even before she got out to the party!"

Your words seem to catch Katy by surprise, and she abruptly stops crying, although the snot and tears continue to stream onto her cheeks and lip.

"It's my fault," you tell her. "I'm the one who did this to her. I didn't want to tell you."

Katy's forehead creases in puzzlement, and she blinks at you.

What you tell her next is the hardest thing you've ever had to confess, and you feel like you're going to throw up as you relate it.

"It's one of the spells in the book. Before the, uh, mind-control spell. You were going to talk to Hannah, remember, to make a mask of her? Only she texted you and cancelled? Well, that was me texting you, on her phone. Because I asked her to come out here early and meet me."

Katy's brow furrows even more deeply, and she wipes the snot off her lip.

"I did make a mask of her, like we were going to, but I did more than that. The, uh, next spell in the book, the one before the mind-control spell, it called for a special ingredient."

You swallow hard, and your heart beats so rapidly that it feels like a bird flapping against your rib cage.

"It said you had to use a person. A human body. I didn't know what it would do, but I had Hannah, and she was unconscious, so—"

You close your eyes and grind the heels of your hands into them.

"So I dragged Hannah downstairs and I used her. It turned her into this." You drop your hands from your face and point to Hannah.

Katy turns with a puzzled frown between you and Hannah. Her expressions shows no sign of comprehension.

"It's a— Well, it's like the last thing I made. The, uh, lackey. Only it uses a person, and it turns the person into a lackey. It works the same way, though. If you put a mask on it, it has to obey you. Well, I had Hannah's mask, so— Well, I put it on the first lackey, the lackey one. Hannah popped up, and I sent her home after texting you to cancel the meeting. God, I was in such a panic! I sent her home, but I was stuck with this thing. I had to hide it. So last night, before the party, I texted, uh, Hannah to come out, and I moved the mask onto this one." Again, you indicate the statue sitting in the SUV. You smile wanly to yourself. "It was the perfect place to hide her."

All the expression has fallen from Katy's face. She stares at you. "So she's not real?" she asks. "Hannah isn't real?"

You can only shrug. "Depends what you mean by 'real'. I guess, though, it's just a ... a thing that's disguised like Hannah."

"I thought you said she was Hannah, but she was mind-controlled."

You shrug again. "I didn't know what to tell you, Katy. I thought you'd be mad. Mad at me for—" You have to swallow hard to push back the tears that you feel forming. "For doing that thing to Hannah. I know you don't like her, but—"

With sudden violence Katy shoves you and storms past. Before you can react she runs to her car and rips the door open. She starts it and drives off. You can only stand and watch.

And because she has taken Hannah's mask with her, she has left you at the school with a petrified Hannah Westrick sitting in the driver's seat of her SUV.

* * * * *

You spend the next few hours taking your phone out and putting it away. I should talk to Katy vies with I need to give her some time and distance. But you are also getting texts from friends, more than you are used to. Caleb wants to get together with you—he implies without saying so that Meghan and some more of her friends would be along, so it sounds like he wants you as male company—and you even field some texts from a couple of Katy's friends, asking what you're up to. But it's not until you get a text from Stephanie that you begin to think that you might be in even worse trouble than you suspect.

Until that text comes in, though, you try to keep your mind off the disaster by digging deeper into the book. You have the wild but vague hope that there might be way to reverse the spell. At the very least, you could show Katy (assuming she ever speaks to you again, and doesn't just turn you over to the cops or something) that you're serious about fixing your ugly mistake.

Alas, you find you've reached a dead end. The book is damaged. Half of the next spell—the bottom half where the sigil would be—is torn away and missing. So, not only are you unable to complete the next spell, you are unable to turn the page to get at the spells that follow.

You are still trying to grapple with the magnitude of this disaster—and trying to figure out how one can tear away a page that doesn't want to turn loose from the pages behind—when the text comes from Stephanie: Wht thehell u say do to katy?

You have no idea what she means, so you ask. Stephanie replies, Nvr seen hrer thismesseed up bfor. Painfully over the course of a half dozen of the most atrociously misspelled texts you've ever tried deciphering, Stephanie explains that Katy was out at her house briefly and was nearly incoherent with anger, both at Stephanie (and her other friends) and at you. Because Stephanie doesn't think she did anything wrong, she is sure that it must be your fault. You tell you have no idea what Katy is mad about, which earns you a frosty-feeling silence from Stephanie.

It's not long after that—and you're still down in the basement, numbly trying to figure out what to do—when you hear a car and look out the window. It's Katy. Maybe she remembered to bring Hannah's mask back, you think. At least that's something.

Katy's expression is stony when you go up to meet her, and she looks like she's been crying. "Katy," you start to say.

"Just shut up, Will," she says. "I need your help, but after that—" She sniffs hard, and shudders.

"I need to get Hannah's clothes," she says when she recovers. "And I need you to make sure I don't mess anything up."

"Mess up what?" you ask with wary fear.

Katy draws a deep breath.

"I'm going to put on Hannah's mask. If it'll work for me," she adds. "I'm going to turn myself into Hannah." Again, she shudders a little.

"What? What for?"

"For ever," Katy declares in a gloomy voice.

You stare. "What?"

"I'm going to ... to turn myself into her. Take her place." Katy sniffs hard. "What we— What we did to her is awful. She— We can't just leave her this way. She deserves to have a real person live her life for her. Not just a ... a magical dummy!" Katy pats her eyes with the back of her hand. "And doing that for her is the least I can do!"

That's all for now.

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