Try as you might, after several hours, you’re no further along than where you started. The next spell on Blackwell’s notes requires the same components as the stuff you have to make the masks, but the process is different. It requires a bowl – just like the spell that makes the masks – so you figure it must make something like the liquid mixture that creates masks, but other than that, you’re at a blank. And that translates to the sigil process. It was easy for you to decipher the first, because you knew what it did, in a way. This one, however, is too new, and the notes are cryptic.
You give up when Taylor tells you that he needs to go pick up Lucy and bring her back to the basement. "Is she okay?" you ask.
"She’s in a much better mood", Taylor replies. "Being here drove her mad, y’know."
"Well, I’m glad she’s better. Too bad she doesn’t wanna deal with any of this."
Taylor's answer surprises you. "Yeah", he says. I still find it hard to figure out how to do anything good with more masks. But after seeing it ... well, it’s a bit cool."
"It'd be great for spying", you point out. "Or beating up bullies by being someone bigger."
"Yeah, but that’s not very nice."
"Some people would deserve it. Although", you add after a moment's thought, "it would be pretty awful if the wrong people got it. I mean, I wouldn't even want to imagine the CIA with this stuff, let alone someone worse."
You're both silent, and if Taylor's train of thought is paralleling yours, he's imagining a secret group of people armed with masks - and maybe robot dupes to fool people around. That would make for one heck of a spy organization. All they’d need is a good reason not to go mad with it.
You glance at your brother, and suddenly your stomach grumbles. Or they could end up in the hands of people that need to be a bit more responsible...
--
That night, you dream.
You’re back at the planetarium, the planets whirling around you. You feel at peace, as if you belong here. Once again, a symbol is drawn on mid-air. You identify it, since you had looked up the meaning before. However, as before, it turns and shifts and wobbles and rips and opens, too fast for you to follow. You’re more observant, however, as you manage to see new symbols forming as part of the changes. The end result, as always, is a complex wheel that contains multiple symbols, but this one seems a lot simpler than the one of the mask.
As you wake up, you seem to understand a bit better how to proceed. You’re unsure of the actual way to do so, but after the dream, you get an idea. You jot on your notes five different ways to do it – ideas on what to do, mostly, but just as cryptic to anyone as Blackwell’s notes are to you – before you set up to school.
--
Saturday afternoon. You’re at the municipal library once again, trying to see if this time you can complete the sigil successfully. You have two days of work behind you, and have thrown out all but one of the ideas you started with, but you feel like you're making progress, for even in your mistakes you are seeing new ways to proceed.
Robert is with you, watching attentively as you brusquely explain (half to him, half to yourself) what you're doing. But he's also polishing his new mask, and grousing about the work. "It’ll help you build muscle", you remark. "Or you can pretend you’re jerking off to porn." But he's made progress too, and a large spot on the mask (when he showed you last) is now a deep blue in color.
You notice Scott approaching, and you wave him over. He looks around before drawing another notebook – similar to Blackwell's – from his book bag. You also notice two more masks hidden inside. "Is that all?", you ask.
Scott nods. "Yeah. Took everything. Gonna put the other thing with all the other stuff", he says. You agreed to have Taylor hide the supplies and the masks on his house, and only take them out once you were ready to test everything.
"Took you a while", you respond.
"Had to talk to some old friends. Watch out for Belinda. Wasn’t easy." Scott points at your notes. "Any luck?"
"Pretty close, but no cigar." You open the new notebook and look inside it. "Hopefully this’ll work."
The handwriting in the notebook is spidery, delicate, and you have the impression it must have been written by a woman. As you flip through it you see that it has something Blackwell’s didn’t - sketches. There's a sketch of a mask on the first page, for instance, as well as some cryptic instructions. "Press to face. Assumes image. Must be sealed." There are also some crude sketches of some sigils.
You turn the page to find more drawings of sigils, with the heading "Sealant for Mask". You grin as you flip to the equivalent page in Blackwell's notebook: EMPLASTRUM, it says.
So your intuition was right – more than one spell is necessary to complete a mask. Maybe that’s what happened to Sawyer, you think. Maybe he put on an incomplete mask. If so, it is lucky that you never tried putting on that mask you made of Marc. But you say nothing, and set to the absorbing work of collating the information in the two notebooks and applying it to your own hunches. Taylor settles in at the table with you, and out of the corner of your eye – but without giving him any attention – you see him take out some schoolwork ...
--
You grin and stretch after setting your pencil down. The sigil inside the box seems very familiar, as if you had seen it in a dream. You are certain that it is next sigil, and all you need is to follow Blackwell’s instructions to execute the spell.
"You got it?", Robert asks, and sets the mask down on the table
"Pretty sure", you answer. "All I need is to test it and see if it works", you add as you push the mask back toward him. He puts it under the table.
Robert reaches out to grab the sheet, but you slide it towards Scott. "I'm gonna let him hold on to this one."
"Why?"
"So we don't lose all of them if Dad goes snooping inside your room."
Robert frowns angrily. "As long as you let me do the spell after this one, okay? It’s my stuff, after all."
You shrug, and flip deeper into the new notebook, looking for additional clues about the rest of the spells.
Blackwell has labeled the next spell as "MENS." The new notebook calls it "Mind," and adds some partial sigils, which seem to correspond to Blackwell’s own, but the word by itself seems to confirm your own strong hunch that it will have something to do with copying minds.
You gasp audibly when you turn to the next spell, though. Blackwell calls it a "PEDISEQUOS," which even in translation is obscure. But the new notebook is very blunt. It sketches a thing with humanoid proportions and calls it a "golem." "Put on mask and mental strip", it says. "Assumes form of mask placed. Creature obeys your orders blindly."
Your mouth goes dry. That must be how Blackwell replaced Lucy, you think. He copied her body and mind and put them onto one of these golem/pedisequos things. It would act just like Lucy, but obey his orders blindly.
Now you feel trepidation as you flip forward to the next spell. Blackwell's word – was chilling enough. What will the new notebook tell you?
At first it doesn't look so bad. There's another humanoid figure sketched in, as on the previous spell. But this one is drawn with more detail and more realistic proportions. There are the usual roughly drawn sigils – suggestive more than discursive.
But your stomach sinks when you see the words at the bottom of the page: "Human sacrifice."
Is that where this is going? you wonder. Is Lucy right, that all this is leading, that it can't help leading, to evil?
And even if it doesn't, even if you promise them and yourself that you will never indulge in human sacrifice, do you dare let Taylor and Robert know that the spells are heading in that direction?
You shut the new notebook, but your eye jerks over to the one you stole from Blackwell. CADAVER, it says.
With a chill of horror you realize what that means. Blackwell must also know what the spell does. Has he used it? If so, who has he used it on?
And would he hesitate to use it on your father, when he knows that he could replace your father with one of those golem/pedisequos things?
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