Chapter #34Joe's Mask and What You Found Under It by: Seuzz   You look at Cara. It's really Joe Durras, of course--the guy who lunged at Cara's mask, and seemingly told Chelsea that he and she could be "simpatico." Why is he now offering to give Cara's mask back to you, and trying to push you close to Chelsea?
So he has unwittingly now given you another reason to get back inside his head. "I don't see the point," you tell her--him--gruffly. "Besides, me and Chelsea put stuff inside our masks, so you couldn't put mine on anyway." As soon as you say that, it occurs to you that maybe he's less interested in getting away from Cara than he is in getting inside you. That's another reason to brush off his suggestion.
"We can always make a new mask of you," Joe says.
"I'm getting really tired of people making masks of me," you say. "Caleb made one of me, and Chelsea made one of me, and I think there's a third one running around."
"Sounds like you're popular," he says with a grin. "So's Cara." He plucks at your shirt.
You jerk a little, for you can't help getting a twinge of desire, even knowing who it really is standing in front of you. You take a step back and shake your head.
"Oh, dude," Joe sighs. "Maybe there's no point to it, then." He looks away, then gives you a sidelong glance. "Me and Frank kind of messed things up for you and Chelsea, didn't we?"
"That's what you wanted to do, wasn't it?" you retort. "To stop us from ... having fun with these things?"
"That's not what I meant. But whatever." A pitying look comes into his eyes. "Well, it's a standing offer," he says.
You make a face and just tell him you'll talk to him later.
* * * * *
"That's Prescott's dad," Frank says.
You look up from the dining room table, where you're slumping. "What?"
"Harris Prescott," Frank says. "You said 'Harris Prescott,' and I said, 'That's Prescott's dad'."
"I know what you said, and I know who he is," you reply, not bothering to hide your irritation. "Who's paying you to tell me stuff I already know?"
Frank snorts, then gets up from the table and strides into the kitchen, where he opens the pantry and stares critically at the shelves. "Well, who's paying you to think about this shit? That's what the real versions of ourselves are supposed to be doing."
"Well, pardon me for thinking I can help out a little. The real Frank needs all the help he can get, and it's probably more than--" You stumble a little. "Than the real me can supply."
Frank's golem just gives you a dirty look before turning back to the pantry. "I haven't felt hungry since the switch," he mutters.
"It's good for the household budget."
You're sitting in Frank and Joe's house--the one that they have to themselves, renting while carrying out their pursuit of the Libra--under Joe's mask. You'd had to call Chelsea just to get Joe's phone number, and then call Joe's golem and get their address. You'd done the switch out of the other golem's sight, and it had given you a queer look when you'd re-emerged from the bedroom with a fake Will Prescott. But it didn't argue when you'd pretended you were nothing more than the golem-version of Joe Durras.
And now here you are, reading their files on the PC and dragging up Joe's own memories of their investigation.
The Libra is quite old--many centuries old--and had existed as only a sinister rumor for three hundred years, before word came to the boys' dad that a book answering to its description had turned up in upstate New York as part of the estate of recently deceased woman. It had seemed like a small job--a quick trip to the northeast to quietly scoop it up--so he had given it to the two youngest members of their secret society. But they had gotten there too late, and it had been sent off as part of a package to some of her heirs.
Except it hadn't. Someone else had gotten wind of the find and gotten there first, and the whole package had been redirected. Luckily, Rick Bredon--one of the senior members of the society--had also been on hand, and he'd found that it had been sent to Saratoga Falls.
Specifically, it had been sent to Salopek Engineering, care of Harris Prescott.
Harris Prescott, who (as golem-Frank has so redundantly reminded you) is Will Prescott's father.
You pluck at your lip. Yes, it is quite a coincidence--your finding a book that had been sent to but somehow escaped from your own dad--and from deep inside Joe's mind you can understand why it would excite Frank's lightly buried sense of suspicion. Grimly, you can also understand why Joe himself might think it worthwhile to go snooping inside Will Prescott's head, to find out what he might have meant when he foolishly said that it was a "coincidence" that he had found it.
The hell of it is that it is a coincidence. And it puzzles you, too. For you know what you know, and you know what Frank and Joe know, and none of it is enough to explain that very puzzling gap in the Libra's journey, between when it got sent to Salopek and when you found it at Arnholm's.
For the box containing the Libra did arrive at Salopek. After reaching Saratoga Falls, the boys had broken into Salopek and found the box in the company's distribution center--the same building where Caleb had his secret workshop--but had failed to find the Libra. The box had been abandoned on the "dead shelf," where Harris Prescott had apparently sent it after opening it. The simplest hypothesis would be that Mr. Prescott had taken the Libra from the box, and that Will had somehow gotten ahold of it after that. That's what Frank and Joe would suspect, and so would suspect you of lying about finding it at Arnholm's.
But--dammit--you did find it at Arnholm's. So how did it get there? Did your dad sell it to Arnholm's? You try to recall what Ted Arnholm had said about it and its provenance, but you can't. It's too long ago, and you weren't paying much attention.
There's also the matter of those Eastman kids. That's what had led Joe and Frank into enrolling at the other high school: some kids from Eastman had been working at Salopek, and shortly after the Libra would have arrived at Salopek, they had been involved in a series of bizarre accidents. One of them had fallen into an inexplicable coma, and another had died in a car wreck. Things like the Libra--and you shiver as you unwillingly think of a few other things rather like the Libra--tend to do things like that to the unwary.
So Joe and Frank had enrolled at Eastman, and had snooped around. They'd had one stroke of good fortune, and hidden away in a sub-basement they had found a notebook containing some very eerie sigils, and a mask that seemed similar to the kind of masks the Libra supposedly could make. That certainly suggests--though it hardly proves--that Sawyer Harrison and Taylor Mitchell had themselves found the Libra, and that that's how it got out of Salopek. But it doesn't explain how it got to Arnholm's.
And it certainly can't explain why it is that Will Prescott, of all the dumb people to wander into Arnholm's, came to buy a book that had been sent from upstate New York to his own father via decidedly illegal means.
"So who's paying you to review stuff you already know?"
Frank's voice jerks you back into the present, and you glare up at him as he peers over your shoulder.
"Nobody. I'm bored out of my fucking head," you say. Fake Frank just looks at you, and you wish it was under your control so you could tell him to go away; clearly it suspects you're not just golem-Joe, and you wonder if it might try interfering with you.
So you slap the laptop shut and snatch up the little golden disc that lays nearby. It's a clever little device: a kind of compass that is good at detecting essentia, the stuff that natural-born magicians carry around inside them. It hadn't done Frank and Joe any good to have it, but Joe had liked to play with it. Its surface is covered with a fine scrollwork of complicated lines along which a little golden bead can slide, and when nervous he would fiddle with it as a kind of toy. Now you're nervous, and so instinctively you have grabbed it.
Possibly, Harris Prescott took the Libra from that box, and sold it to Arnholm's; and Sawyer Harrison and Taylor Mitchell--why is that latter name so familiar?--had just stumbled onto some other items he had left behind. But why would your dad have taken the Libra, and then gotten rid of it?
Or Sawyer and Taylor had found the Libra, and one of their families had found it and sold it to Arnholm's after the accidents.
Or maybe Aubrey Blackwell is involved. That's a professor at the local university, and Rick had discovered that Blackwell--who had taken a trip to upstate New York around the same time Joe and Frank had--was the one who redirected the box containing the Libra. But why would he send it to your dad? And if Blackwell had somehow gotten the Libra out of Salopek, why would he sell it to Arnholm's after going to all that trouble to steal it?
And none of these possibilities can answer Frank's challenge: Why did you find it?
You sigh and glance down at the disc.
It's pointing at you.
Well, of course it would, you sigh. You're wearing Joe Durras's mask, and he's got essentia spurting from every pore.
But the mask only copies imago, a little voice tells you. It shouldn't point to Joe's mask.
You blink, and reset the disc. You fiddle with it slowly and carefully, trying (as Joe had had to do) to keep it from pointing at you. If it detects essentia in masks, it should now point to golem-Frank, who is again sitting across the table.
But it refuses to point at him.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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