This choice: Meld the Jeremy mask and the Lisa mind-strip. • Go Back...Chapter #15The Hermaphrodite by: Seuzz   It's quick work, which doesn't make it any less nerve-racking to complete: Attaching the mind strip of Lisa to the mask of Jeremy and then coating the inside with a goop made from a variant of the golem recipe. There is some momentary doubt about whose hair to use in the formula; of course you would rather use yours, but that is out of the question, so you use Caleb's instead. You have to set fire to the mask, but it takes almost no time to burn, and polishing it takes little time as well. But even before it's done, you can tell it is not going to solve your problem.
"Oh God, this feels funny," you say, squirming uncomfortably after you've got the mask on. The word "horrifying" might be closer to the mark. No sooner had you pressed it to your face than you felt Lisa's mind and personality erupting inside yours. That was weird enough, but then she started screaming, and even after you had shut her up and reasserted your own control and sense of being you still felt her sense of disorientation and self-loathing as you looked down at Jeremy's body. You didn't even want your arms touching the sides of your body; and when you spread your thighs so they wouldn't rub against each other ... Well, that only made you more acutely conscious of your male package.
"I don't seem gay, do I?" you ask in what even to you sounds like a bit of a whine.
The other two look shifty. "I'm not going to dignify that with an answer," Dylan says through gritted teeth.
"This isn't gonna do anything," you say. "I'm taking it off."
"No, leave it on," says Caleb.
"Why?"
"Just leave it on. Maybe something will happen."
"Fuck you, it isn't going soak into me," you say crossly. "And if it did, boy would I be fucked up then."
"I said don't take—Oh, fine." You've already ripped the mask off, and a quick glance down confirms that you are still a dull, white, stony color.
"What does that spell even do?" Dylan murmurs in that nasally, passive-aggressive voice. "So you put some of that golem stuff inside the mask. So what?"
Something about the words "golem" and "inside the mask" click inside your head, and as he turns the mask over to frown at it, you suddenly punch him in such a way as to knock the mask onto his face. He staggers back and collapses.
"The fuck was that for," Caleb starts, but you silence him with a finger. After Jeremy appears, you slap him awake. Most satisfying, it is.
"Oh God, I was hoping it was just a dream," he mutters as blinks around. "Wait, what happened?"
"Don't you know?"
"Why should I?" The person on the floor doesn't seem surprised to be here, but he does look around with a vexed expression on its face. "Is someone missing?"
"Who are you?" you ask him.
Jeremy makes a face. "Don't ask me questions I don't want to answer."
"Come on, answer." It only sighs sullenly.
"Answer him. It's important," Caleb says.
Jeremy gives him a resentful glance. "Everything in my head wants to say that I'm Lisa Yarborough, and I want to know how I got from the movie theater to this—" He looks around. "This junk yard. But I know it has something to do with you and—" He cocks his head and blanches as he looks at you. "With Will here," he says slowly. "Wasn't I standing where he was just a moment ago, and wasn't I--?" He swallows. "Wasn't I thinking his thoughts?"
"Where's Dylan?" Caleb asks.
"Who? Oh—" Jeremy's gaze grows even more puzzled. "That was that other guy, right?" His expression turns inward, and then he gives Caleb a piercing glance. "I'm not a hundred percent sure, boss, but if I had to make a guess ..." He lightly presses his hand to his chest.
"It makes the person disappear," you say, turning to Caleb. "Like, if you want to get rid of the original while you take his place. Or, you know, if you just want to get rid of someone because he's fucking annoying."
Caleb gives you a look and removes the mask from Dylan.
* * * * *
Your little stunt costs you what little good will you still had with Caleb's cousin. Not that you'd mind, but he is very churlish and insists on taking and keeping the golem and blank mask that you'd made for him, even though you and Caleb ask him to leave them with you. "It's all right with me," you grumpily tell Caleb afterward. "This thing has been a disaster ever since he showed up."
Well, naturally that provokes your friend into making a sharp retort, to which you make a sharper retort, and things escalate from there; and even your trump card—you point out that you've been turned into a goddamned golem—doesn't impress Caleb, who reminds you that you were the one who did it to himself. But nothing gets broken in the fight, and though the air between you is, at best, only grim and business-like, Caleb agrees to an improvised plan of action. "I'll park your truck in a handicapped spot or something," he says before he goes. "That way it gets towed and impounded by the cops instead of being stolen or trashed."
"What'll you tell my folks?"
"That I haven't seen you since you left school yesterday. Duh."
Only afterward do you wonder at the fact that he locked you in the basement when he left. You are a prisoner until someone takes the padlock off the door.
* * * * *
And so you pass the night in the dimly lit basement (after moving some tables around to screen the light from the windows). You have the Lisa-Jeremy hybrid mask, but after your short dip into it you've no wish to put it back on. You were inside it long enough to know there is nothing there that would make you feel good about your relationship with her.
Instead you concentrate on the book. You and Caleb fell into a fight so fast that you didn't talk about the difference between your reaction to the Lisa-Jeremy mask and Dylan's: you still felt yourself to be yourself while wearing it, while Dylan himself completely disappeared. Your non-existent grasp of Latin is certainly not enough to glean an explanation from the book; you can only guess it has something to do with your being a golem.
Nor is there anything new in the book that could help you. The page for the next spell is damaged; the top half only discloses a list of ingredients, while the bottom half—that would tell how to put them together—has been ripped wholly from the tome. With no way to complete the spell, you have no way to progress in the book.
The terrible conviction that you are stuck in your new form, and that you will have to find a new existence under a new identity, settles over you.
And then the door to the basement opens.
Actually, the first thing you hear is the sound of the padlock coming off. You look up in surprise—it's nearly three in the morning—but it's neither Dylan nor Caleb who comes charging through the door. As near as you can tell, to your shock and chagrin, it's the cops.
There are two of them, and they're decked out in dark clothes—black pants and long-sleeve shirts and ski masks—and they have guns out. They sweep quickly but professionally around the room, checking its corners and behind and under its furniture, muttering cryptically to each other in muffled tones. And the entire time they ignore you; and since you've no desire to provoke them, you don't move. Let them think you are a highly detailed statue.
Their words grow louder and more distinct as their search continues, and their tone grows more querulous. Before long—
"Beats me, Frank," one says from behind you. "The compass pointed here."
"Where here?"
"I can't get a more precise reading. You know that. Nothing better than a fifty-foot radius, which is pretty fucking precise—"
"Don't cuss at me, Joe."
"I'm not cussing at you, Frank. I'm just saying—"
"I know what you're saying. And I'm sorry, I shouldn't have gotten pissed off. I'm just nervous."
"I am too. He's got to be around here someplace."
Who are they talking about? You?
"At least we know we've got the right address." Out of the corner of your eye you see a hand pick up the book. "The Libra Personae," the voice says softly. "After five hundred years it finally turns up."
"It's a damnable thing."
"Fuckin' amen to that, bro. But it's only loot. We need to find the cocksucker who's been using it as a home-and-garden guide to making lawn gnomes."
You don't realize he's referring to you until his partner walks around to peer into your face; his brilliant blue eyes, visible through the eyeholes of the ski mask, are pools of pity and horror. "Poor kid," he mutters through his ski mask. "I wonder what his name was."
Even if you don't know how to reverse the spell that golemized you, you can't let the police—or whoever these guys are—make off with the book.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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