Chapter #29Moonlit Madness by: Seuzz   It all seems a bit too weird, and you can't resist challenging Caleb. "If it was all so fucking obvious," you ask him, for you an't stand the smug look on his borrowed face, "how come we didn't figure it out when I was wearing my dad's mask? Using his brain?"
"I don't know," Caleb says. He looks down Stephan Welch's nose at you. "Maybe you have to have the right kind of brain."
"Oh, bite me," you grumble. "Go on."
"Go on with what? That's all. I used the book to make one of those brain-copying metal things and I put it on the book. Then, when it came out again—"
"You think the book's got a brain?" you ask.
Caleb turns a little white.
"I don't think it's got a brain," he mumbles. "I mean, that would be creepy—"
"Like it's not creepy already."
"I just think that whoever it was wrote the book set it up this way. Anyway, I put the thing onto the—"
"Was there any writing on it? On the metal thingie?"
He frowns again. "What kind of writing?"
"Like a name. Like, if you put it on a person."
"I didn't look for a name! I just stuck it inside the book, on that page."
"And what happened?"
"Magic, I guess." He points to the page, now fully repaired. "It just sort of repaired itself."
"So what's on the other side?" You turn the page.
Ouch!
"Yeah," Caleb drawls, though you said nothing. "That's what I thought when I saw it."
There's nothing on the reverse of the once-torn page, but opposite is a solid wall of words. No obvious list of ingredients, no set of instructions, no sigil, as with all the previous spells. Just a densely packed jumble of words without punctuation or paragraph break.
You try to turn it, but it is stuck solidly to the pages behind. You flip back to the previous page, and to the spells you've already performed, then forward to the new one.
The difference is night and day. If the wall of words is a spell, it's clear that the book has completely changed its approach.
"Did you try translating this?" you ask Caleb.
"I started right after I texted you about dinner." He glances at the kitchen, then pads back into it, with you trailing after. "And I wasn't getting anything," he says he plucks up another piece of sashimi. "Just gibberish."
"So are we stuck again?"
He gives you a look of disgust, then shrugs as he gums down the sashimi.
"Let's just finish translating it," he says. "Then we'll see if we're stuck."
He says it with all the cool self-assurance that's native to Stephan Welch.
* * * * *
But by eleven o'clock even he is willing to give up on it, at least for the night.
It must be some kind of a word scramble, he told you with something like disgust when you came into his study after you'd washed your face and changed into a nightgown. He was sitting at Stephan's desk, in front of the big bay window on the second floor, with the book open before him and a stack of loose-leaf paper by his hand. He had covered the top sheet with scribbled words, as you kneaded the back of his neck. When you were tired of waiting for him to make a breakthrough, you told him to come to bed. He'd replied with a veiled look.
And he has the same veiled look on his face when—clad only in Stephan's usual bedtime wear of black jogging shorts—he crawls into the sheets beside you. For a minute he holds his tongue, then says, "Any chance of a repeat of last night?"
At first you don't answer, because he was being such a smug crud all evening about solving the earlier puzzle when you couldn't.
But then a feeling steals over you.
It's the same feeling you had last night, before riding his cock to a climax. Sure, he was being a smug piece of shit, exactly the way Stephan would have been a smug piece of shit.
But he's not Stephan. And that thought excites you.
Well, it excites someone, and having spent more than twenty-four hours impersonating Shannon Welch—and pretty deeply, too, at work—you are more confident in assuming that it's Shannon who feels a kick out of replacing her husband with a doppelganger. I got it over on him, you find yourself thinking as you reach over to grip your bedmate by the upper arm. He's exactly like Stephan, he's got Stephan's body and memories and every other thing, but it's not him. I just gave all his stuff to someone else and then I got rid of him.
I got rid of him but no one will ever know.
Because this is someone I can have fun with.
It gives you a hard thrill and a hard itch, and you groan with anticipation as your husband's replacement rolls over to paw and pinch at you in that relentless way that the original liked to do.
But though it's the same old Stephan moves, it's so much hotter now that it's someone else doing it to you with his body.
* * * * *
It's after midnight when Caleb unjams his meat from inside you and rolls onto his back with an exhausted snort. After luxuriating for a good ten minutes with the filth he left behind—pushing it deeper inside with your fingers—you toss back the covers and creep for the bathroom, where you squat over the bidet and splash it all out again. Then, thirsty from the night's work, you go downstairs to get a pull of bottled water.
On the way back to bed, your attention is caught by a gleam in the corner of your eye, and you look into Stephan's study.
The moon is riding low, and like a drooping eye it seems to be looking directly in at you from over the roof of the neighbors' house. That's what initially caught your attention, but now your eye is drawn to his desk, where something silvery is shining. Unable to make out what it is, you go inside for a closer look.
It's a piece of paper, shining so brightly it almost glows in the dark. You bend over it, frowning.
The glow, you see on closer inspection, comes from the line work that covers it: a whirling swirl of intricate curves and circles, drawn in a silvery ink, forming a circle whose rim is enclosed with smaller circles and swoops and curls. It looks like—and then you gasp a little when you realize it exactly resembles—the sigils inside the book.
But where did it come from? Did Caleb make it? And if so, how? And when?
Gingerly, with a forefinger and thumb, you pick it up by its corner. That's when you find that the paper was resting on the open grimoire, on the page with all the dense writing on it. You glance between the paper and the book, trying to figure out what is going on.
And then you almost drop the paper—almost you hurl it away—when the silvery lines darken and blacken into a sable ink.
* * * * *
"I don't remember putting a piece of paper onto the book before I came to bed," Stephan says the next morning, down in the kitchen. He takes a short but thoughtful sip of coffee. "But I guess I must have."
It's the next morning, and you also need coffee to wake you up, despite the shower you are fresh from. It was after one in the morning before you and Caleb—who you woke to show him what had happened—got to bed, and you were restless all night with dreams you only vaguely remember now. Caleb could only conclude that it had something to do with the moonlight and "secret writing," an explanation that (it seems to you) doesn't explain anything at all. It just describes what happened in a more unsettling set of words.
"I'll play around with it before I go in to the university," he continues, "and I'll come home early again."
"Don't do anything without me," you tell him.
"What, are you gonna skip work? Or do you want me to just sit on my hands?"
"I could tell you what you can go sit on," you start to say, for he's being very Stephan-like again, and when he's not half-naked in bed (where you can take advantage of it) his manner is a lot more annoying. "Fine, you can play around with it, see if you can make something, like you did yesterday. But whatever you make," you insist, "don't do anything with it."
"Alright," he says, and abruptly pulls you close to kiss you on the forehead. "I'll let you be the boss lady on this one."
* * * * *
He keeps you posted with texts, and while at work you get to hear how neither a mask nor a pot of paste, when placed on the sigil, do anything. Will make another metal strip when I get home from classes, he tells you, and you answer with a curt acknowledgment.
You assume that's as far as he got, because you don't hear anymore from him. But when you get home, he has that same smug expression as yesterday, and dangles a metal band in your face.
"Pretty sure this is what it's supposed to make," he tells you. "I assume it's a different kind of thing, but I don't know what."
His mouth goes crooked.
"Guess we'll have to test it out on someone," he says.  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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