There are two paragraphs of Latin at the top of the page: a list of ingredients, and a set of instructions. The bottom half of the page is dominated by a sigil: two circles of nearly the same size, one enclosing the other, to make something resembling a rimmed wheel. Inside the rim (the 1/2-inch space between the circles) are inscribed intricate symbols resembling Hebrew or Arabic or Sanskrit. Similar symbols are inscribed along the inner surface of the innermost circle, and around the outer surface of the outermost circle. The interior of the circle is empty.
It gave you a headache to puzzle out the Latin, particularly such expressions as calx celeritir, which turns out to be an ignorant stab at translating "quicklime" into Latin. The book is also dreadfully nonspecific about measurements. A handful of quicklime? A spoonful of wet plaster? How much is that? You guessed that it didn't matter much, and it turned out that it didn't. Nor did it seem to be very picky about what kind of "wood ash" was wanted.
The ingredients were not hard to procure, though you had to run around all over town to get them:
A handful of quicklime, a handful of wood ash, a spoonful of wet plaster, a spoonful of olive oil, a lump of quartz as large as your thumb, a handful of ice, a scrap of wet paper, and your own hot breath. You also had to by a convex mirror and a metal bowl. You had your own set of matches, though.
All told, it cost you about $60 to buy the supplies, and with them you are able to make 6 masks.
You start by combining the quicklime, wood ash, and plaster in the metal bowl and set it on the sigil. Three times you run your fingertip around the circle. The ingredients hiss and release a faint stench. Then you add the quartz and wet paper. But when you plop the ice in, the stuff in the bowl hisses and pops, and a great smoke pours out. So too does a stench, as of sulfur. You wave it away run your fingertip twice around the sigil.
Now the worst part: There is still a great stink coming out of the bowl, but you put your face to it and breathe hard on it. Once more you run your fingertip around the sigil, and the fizzing mixture settles down into a grayish paste.
The book tells you to pour the stuff over the mirror and then set a flame to it, and the first few times you executed the spell, that's what you did. And of course it worked: Ghostly blue flames danced for a quarter hour over the shell, then winked out. After that, you peeled the shell (surprisingly cool) off the mirror.
These days, though, you set the stuff on fire while it is still in the bowl, then pour it over the mirror. It was an accident the first time you did that, but it turns out to work just as well as the what the book specifies. The stuff burns in the bowl for fifteen minutes, then hardens when you pour it over the mirror. It creates the same kind of hollow hemisphere either way.
You steel yourself against what comes next after pulling it off the mirror; no matter how often it happens, you never get used to it. The hollow hemisphere twists in your hand like a live thing, and it is only with supreme presence of mind that you don't drop it.
But it is no longer a hemisphere. It is now a mask, a thing with the shape of a face: brow, nose, cheekbones, lips, chin. The eyes are solid, though. But though it is the face of no one in particular, it closely fits your own features when you press it to your face. Of course, nothing happens when you do.
Before you can do anything with it, you have to polish it. The first few times you used a cloth, and it took you several hours work for several days -- maybe twenty-four hours of sustained polishing spread out in two- or three-hour chunks -- before you had buffed the mask, on both sides, to a deep and burnished blue, like that of a cloudless sky. These days, though, you use a car buffer, and it takes you only forty-five minutes, tops.
You still didn't know what you had the first time you made one of these things, and it was only after setting it on your own face that you finished the magic. You became very stiff all over, and if you hadn't been lying on your bed you would have fallen over like a plank of wood. For a moment only you felt the weight on your face. Then it began to press down on you, and a warmth spread through all your limbs. You felt yourself dragged down into unconsciousness. The first time it happened you felt panic. The second time (for you had to make a second mask after losing the first) you just felt pleasantly drowsy.
You wake twenty minutes later, feeling stiff all over, and push the claustrophobic mask from your face. It has now acquired a shine, and liquid drops of light run over its surface. They coalesce, though, into the ghostly image of a face, like a 3-D image inside the mask. If you turn the mask this way and that, you can make out different sides of the face; the top of the head; the top of a bare set of shoulders; and so on. It's your own face. (Or, when you put a mask on another person, it is their face.) But you have to know what you're looking at in order to recognize it, for the image is faint.
You return to the book. The first time you made a mask, an oval stain had appeared in the middle of the page, and you laid the mask atop it. When you lifted the mask, the page, which had been firmly stuck to the page behind, fluttered loose, and the stain vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. On the reverse was an explanation of what you had made: Per hoc ars est, receptaculum est. Habes effudit in eam imago et fecit persona. In hoc receptaculum a secunda imago potest infundi, et tertia, et magis. Per hoc ars nova personis fieri potest. Persona non potest subtritus, donec fuerit signati.
Blah blah blah. There's more, but basically it says, "Congratulations, you've made a 'receptaculum', a thing that can you can use to copy people. You can fill this thing with a person's imago, which more or less their bodily form, inside and out. You can fill it with the imago of a second person, too, and the two will mix up with each other to make an imago that is like a combination of the two you put into it. You can keep adding imago, making new imago until you get bored. But you have to seal the 'receptaculum' up before you can do anything with it. After you've got it sealed, you will have made a 'persona',"
That's what it calls these things: Not masks, but "personas", like pretended characters. Which, you can see, is just what they are. Masks that turn you into other people, either a person that you have copied, or the people you have created by mixing up the forms and images of lots of people.
The back of the page also gives you a way of taking off a mask -- or persona; whatever you want to call it. You have to clutch your forehead -- or the forehead of a person wearing a mask -- between forefinger and thumb and pull while chanting a certain word three times fast. When that happens, the mask comes away in your hand. You have to be lying down when you do it, though, because you pass out again when the mask comes away.
That's the thing about taking off masks and putting them on. They knock you out. If you put a blank one onto someone, it sinks into them like a stone, vanishing, and they fall unconscious, and no matter how much you shake them, they are unresponsive. After ten minutes, the mask will reappear on their face. If you do nothing, they will remain unconscious for another ten minutes, but you can at least shake them awake. (But man, are they groggy and angry when you do that. You feel a little sick when woken up like that, usually with a headache. At least it goes away quickly, once you start moving again.) Similarly, when you put a mask onto someone, they fall unconscious for ten minutes, though at least you can wake them.
Putting a mask on someone, though, is nothing like in a movie, with blurring or morphing. Put a mask on someone and it instantly vanishes, like a stone sinking beneath the surface of a pool of water, and suddenly they are not them anymore, but are someone else. Snap of a finger, blink of an eye. You once watched very closely, to see if you could catch the moment of change. You're not sure, but you think you caught them wavering, like a reflection in a pond when a ripple runs through it, and then the reflection has changed. But it happened so fast you can't be sure it wasn't your imagination.
* Note: If wearing a mask and a mens that are not glued together, they must be removed separately. The mask will be the first to come off, followed by the mens.
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