Chapter #40The Face of a Doppelganger by: Seuzz   Joe can't really fill you in any more, because he doesn't know any more: the Westside doppelgangers kept the Libra Personae—the book that makes masks—in the Westside loft. But during their move to Eastman, it vanished. "One of them apparently stole it," he says, "and they don't know who. It's got them pissed off, and frightened, because it means one of them is double-crossing the others."
"But can't they still make masks? I mean, if the book told them how—"
"It doesn't work like that. It's an old book, you know, and there's a lot of lore floating around about it, if you know where to look. Anyway, the spells use sigils, and only the sigils inside the Libra actually work. You can't copy them out, you need the actual sigils in the book. So, no Libra means no more making masks. They didn't say anything about this to Monique, or the person playing her?"
"No, I'm sure they didn't. I think Monique was the last one they got." You rub your forehead. "It was Wednesday when Jonathan—" You shudder. "Do you have a full list of who's a fake?"
"Yeah. There's about two dozen of them, but we can take 'em. Since Monique's the newbie in the bunch, leave it to me to do the talking and the unmasking."
* * * * *
You're the smallest, so you have to get in the back when Darcy Whitehead comes down the steps of her apartment building. You hadn't much to do with Darcy during the time you were playing Joe at Eastman, and Monique also had few dealings with her. She has a hard, intense expression under a brunette bob, and her jaw always seems clenched. She doesn't look happy now as she approaches the car.
"What's going on?" she demands as she buckles herself in.
"I told you on the phone, we have to go out to Ezra Drive."
"Have you heard from Brandt? Does it have anything to do with those guys?"
"No, it has to do with book." Jonathan puts the car in gear and races out the parking lot, and curves hard into the street. Darcy cusses, but he ignores her. "Boss man wants a solid search of all premises. He wants to nail whoever took it."
"Christ! He can't—!" She fumbles at her purse.
Jonathan puts his hand on her arm. "Don't fight it. It looks bad. We go out there, you let me look around, and then no one can look at you funny. You sent Rebecca to the school like I told you, right?"
"Yeah. Why did I have to do that?"
"To insure privacy."
Darcy continues to pepper him with questions you don't understand, and he parries them, either because he's bluffing or because they make sense to someone wearing Jonathan's mask but not Monique's. But you're at the Ezra Drive address within fifteen minutes. You don't recognize it as you pull up.
You stay behind as Darcy leads Jonathan inside. The door has been closed only a few minutes when Jonathan comes back out. "Done and done!" he exclaims, and drops a mask into your lap. Darcy's name floats above its inner surface.
"That was fast."
"I can book it when I want to. I also tossed the house, in case she did have the Libra there, but she didn't. Gonna be a motherfucker—a fun motherfucker but a motherfucker—if we have to get inside Darcy's mask, or the others, to see if where it got hid."
* * * * *
Next on the list is Nikki Cave, one of the Eastman cheerleaders. You have to pick her up at the mall, and you find it hard to not stare as she comes out of Nirdlinger's. Nikki is a dusky-hued Iberian, with a mane of hair that's as thick and coarse as a horse-tail, and even though she plucks her eyebrows you have the impression that they meet in the middle. She is round and curvy and firm, but gives the impression of plumpness all over—the kind of plumpness a guy would like to suck long and gently at. And although you can't put your finger exactly on why it is, you have the impression that a plume of humidity is constantly vaporizing off her sexual parts. "Hello, Jonathan," she says in a low, thrumming alto. "Monique," she adds in a harder, more chipped tone.
She is much more accepting than Darcy about the story Jonathan tells, and welcomes the chance to take him to her old address. She asks if he'll be dropping you off first, and you find yourself blurting out that you'll not only be coming along, you'll be coming inside with them. Nikki takes it in a very cool way, but you follow Monique's jealous lead.
Nikki guides you to a duplex on the edge of a bad part of town, but her half is neatly painted and trimmed; the inside is equally well kept. You trail the other two inside, and you've just pushed the front door closed when Jonathan wraps his arms around your hostess. You hear a gasp and a gurgle, then he is gently lowering a form to the floor. He hands you a mask. You glance at the name inside it. It's Nikki's, of course.
Then you slowly edge around Joe, so you can finally look onto the face of one the people who has been chasing you to the edge of panic and insanity for the last few weeks. Joe guffaws and nudges you in the ribcage. "Check it out, Prescott," he hoots. "They're more like you than you thought."
You have to cock your head and twist around to get a good look, for the head is flopped to the side so that you can only see it in profile. But no matter how you try to orient yourself, the face just won't come out right. The hair—which is dark—is all wrong for a start, and so are the cheekbones. There's something gone bad with the skin as well. And as wrong as the details are, what's worse is the way they hang together. Or the way they don't hang together, for you've a loathsome sense that they've been mashed together higgledy-piggledy, maybe out of the pieces of other faces.
Then, as you blink stupidly, it comes into focus.
It's a man.
That's why the face seemed so wrong: You were expecting a girl, so your brain wasn't prepared to recognize it when it turned out to be a guy under the mask of Nikki Cave. Not a bad-looking guy either, if you were to be honest. Sure, there are a few pockmarks on the cheeks, but he's nothing worse than a Hispanic male with regular features under dark, closely cut hair.
And you're pretty sure you've never seen him before. That's what you tell Joe when he asks. "Oh well," he says. "Westside's a big school. There's lots of guys at Eastman I wouldn't recognize. Especially if I caught them in a dress." He snickers. "Wait for me in the car while I search this place."
You're in a daze as you walk back to the coupe. It feels almost depressing, so anti-climactic, to finally see the face of one of the doppelgangers and to find that it's a stranger. You almost feel like you know them, for they've been harassing and frightening you for weeks now: plotting against you, surrounding you, tricking you and framing you, with such care and attention that it's almost flattering. So it's not fair that you don't know them. If you're going to be bullied, it ought to be by people like the Molester, like Kirkham and Chen and Evans, like Lynch and Black and Patterson and Javits. It ought to be personal, dammit!
You don't tell Joe any of this when he asks, and sink into yourself while he calls another cheerleader—Leslie Keys. Moodily, you sit in the back and stay there when he follows her in to relieve her of her mask. "You wanna switch into Kyle," he asks afterward. "We could go find Jenny."
"I don't care," you mumble, and make no move to help when he does pick up Jenny—the gorgeous captain of the girls' soccer team—and takes her to a large house in a leafy subdivision.
"You're not having much fun," he says when he returns with Jenny Taylor's mask. "You starting to have adrenaline withdrawal?"
"Are you having fun?"
"Not with you being like this."
"I'll try to be more cheerful," you say.
"That's my sugarpop. I'm starting to feel more in character," he adds. "I think that's one reason I'm not having fun. You're being moody in a very Monique way that Jonathan would recognize, and not like."
You look up at him. His blue eyes are limpid and kindly, and you have the urge to straighten out the careless curls around his ears. You don't stop yourself when your hand slips into his. His smile widens just a fraction, and he leans over to kiss the top of your head. You wince, but don't pull away. "Okay, we kissed and made up," you murmur. "So don't do that anymore." He laughs quietly and turns the motor on.
* * * * *
"What do you mean 'No'?" Jonathan asks. "This comes from the boss man himself. It's so there's no one else around when we meet there." He listens to the phone. "I don't understand the problem, Becky. Well, alright, if that's the way it's got to be. See you in a few." He hangs up.
"What's wrong?"
"Becky won't call her original and send her away. Says it's 'impossible'. I wonder what we'll find when we get out there." You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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