The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

Cindy's Story

Previously: "The Prank Pals" 

You can't imagine why Cindy Vredenburg would want to talk to you. She's one of the snooty cheerleaders, and she only ever acknowledges your existence when she happens to be talking with Jenny. And even then she only sniffs at you.

"What does she want to talk to me for?" you ask Jenny.

"I told you, it's about that book, apparently."

"I thought Carson lost it."

"Well, Cindy has it, or something. I don't know." Jenny glances around with a pained expression on her face. "Look, I don't want to get in the middle of whatever this is about. Do you wanna talk to Cindy or don't you?"

You have no idea what could be going on. But Cindy is a leggy cheerleader with sheets of platinum-blonde hair.

So you ask Jenny to set something up with her.

* * * * *

The meeting doesn't come off until the next day—a Saturday. Jenny texts to tell you that Cindy will meet you at the Crystal Cave coffee shop at a two.

You make sure to get there early, but to your surprise Cindy is already there, sitting at a table and staring off into space with an expression of intense concentration. You have to square up your gut muscles before approaching. "Hey. Cindy?"

She does a small double take at you, and with a quick intake of breath retrieves her attention from light years away. After an awkward moment, you add, "I'm Will? Jenny said I was supposed to—"

"Oh!" she says. "Will. Hi." She gestures at the chair opposite her with a slim hand. "I'm Cindy," she says, as though you didn't know, and as though you've never met. (Though, to be fair, she probably doesn't remember. To her, you are probably just one of the many ratty-ass high school seniors who scuttle through the hallways, getting in Her Imperial Majesty's way.) You pull out a chair and drop your bony butt into it. You can feel Cindy pull just a little bit away from you.

"So, uh, Jenny said you wanted to talk about some book or other?" You glance around, half expecting Jenny to come charging around a corner.

"Yeah." A tiny wrinkle of puzzlement disfigures Cindy smooth, creamy forehead. "She said it was yours."

"Well, if I could see it," you suggest. But there's an expectant pause before Cindy bends to fuss with a backpack in the chair next to her. When she straightens up, she lays the book on the table between you.

It's the same book, all right. Red leather covers, with a gold pentagram stamped onto its spine. You open the cover and blink again at the row of faces that march along the bottom of the title page. Without thinking, you flip the page, and are greeted by great blocks of Latin written in an ornate but readable script.

A warning bell goes off inside your head, and you flip back and forth between it and the title page. Something's wrong. You remember not being able to turn any pages, but here you are flipping between two of them.

And you think you would have remembered this page if you had seen it! The top half is covered in Latin text. But the bottom half is covered in an intricate, wheel-like design containing many strange symbols woven into its whorls.

But you are baulked when you try turning to the next page. You dig your thumbnail deeper into the book, trying to peel it apart, then pick it up and shake it upside down. But only those first few pages flutter freely.

"Is something wrong?" Cindy asks. She is giving you a grave look when you look up at her with staring eyes. "I thought Jenny said you used to own the thing."

"I did. I got it at Arnholm's." You nod your head at the wall behind her, on the other side of which is the used bookstore. (It was Jenny's idea to meet at the Cave after you told her your history with the book—it shares a building with Arnholm's.) "But—"

"Yeah?"

You take a deep breath, and scratch your scalp under your ball cap.

"Well, I couldn't get any of the pages to open."

"What, none of them?"

"No."

"None of them?" she asks again, accenting the first word.

"No! I was stuck at the title page."

You flip back to the front of the book. SUMMA LIBRA PERSONAE, the title page reads in large letters at the top. Then, in smaller letters beneath, Personae, de Elementa, et ad Relatio Inter Se; et eorum Constructio; et Modum Repraesentationis et ejus Reflexio in Materia. There's another paragraph beneath this one, but your eye glazes over as you stare at it.

Then your gaze drifts over to the facing papers glued to the inside of the front cover. There's that single sentence whose sudden appearance so freaked you out, and the small, thumbprint-shaped design beneath it. You do a double-take at it, and raise the book almost to your nose to give it a closer look.

The ink is smudged over with a reddish-brown stain.

You lift your eyes to stare at Cindy over the top of the book. She stares back.

"I'll tell you what I know about it," she says, "if you tell me what you know."

* * * * *

She tells you that she found it in Seth's locker, which she shares with him, about ten days ago. (She has a locker of her own, she explains, where she keeps some other of her things, but she also keeps a lot of her stuff inside his.) She had to take it out in order to get some of her own books in, and then she forgot about it and unloaded it from her backpack when she got home, intending to give it back to Seth the next time she saw him. But she didn't remember until Seth himself asked about it the next day.

He was in a pissy mood, for Mr. Sagansky himself had pulled Seth from class and forced him to open his locker, and had searched both it and Seth's backpack. When Seth demanded to know what the deal was, Mr. Sagansky said he was looking for a book bound in red leather that another student had lost. Seth denied anything about it, and Mr. Sagansky had dropped the matter. So Seth wanted to know what Cindy knew about it.

Cindy showed him the book, and he grunted over it, but then tossed it away, telling her that if she wanted to talk to Mr. Sagansky about it, she could. Cindy took the book in to school with her the next day, intending to do just that, but she mentioned it to Jenny first, and Jenny warned her off, telling her that the book had been planted in Seth's locker by some friends of hers as part of a prank. "You'll get in a hell of a lot of trouble if you show it to Saganksy," she warned Cindy.

So she kept the book back, and started looking through it out of curiosity. She found, like you, that the pages wouldn't turn, so she translated the Latin and found that she'd have to "give it some blood". That gave her a bad turn, but she decided to try it, and found that after that the title page would turn.

Behind that was a page of warnings and a more thorough description of the book and what it is. Then came the first spell.

That's right, she emphasizes, and she's a little pale in the face when she says it. It's a book of magic.

She decided not to show it to Seth, but instead started playing around with it to see what it did. She couldn't get the book to turn past the spell on that first page, so she tried working it. It took her almost a week to make the thing—hiding her work in her bedroom because she felt so ashamed of playing around with the occult in her parents' house—but when it was done she was suddenly able to get the next page to turn. "It says I made a mask," she explains in a near whisper. She takes it out of her bag to show you.

It's a shallow oval, and shines all over with a brilliant glow light, like the sky on a cold, clear winter day. There are bumps and depressions in it, corresponding to a human brow, nose, cheekbones, and lips. But the expression is blank, and the features generic. Except for the color, it resembles a classic tragedian's mask. "So does it do something?" you ask her. "If it's magic?"

Cindy bites her lip. "I don't know," she says. "The book— I can't read Latin, and the book's instructions all come out wonky when I run them through a translator. But it says something about how it 'absorbs' the image of the person who wears the mask."

"You mean like it sucks them inside it?"

She shudders slightly. "That's why I wanted to talk to you, to see what you knew about it."

You spread your hands in a shrug. All that you know is what you told her, that you picked up the book for cheap in Arnholm's because everyone thought it was some kind of fake.

Cindy sinks back in her chair with a silent frown.

Next: "The Sequel to Cindy's Story" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 1)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)"