The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Spencer Explains

Previously: "Extra Bodies, Just Laying Around" 

You shake your head, even as you can't tear your eyes from the gleaming mask that Spencer is showing you.

"No," you say. "I didn't get into the book. I just saw the thing about the blood, and I said, Fuck this shit. Then I showed it to my dad— Not the stuff about the blood, just the book, and we figured it was a trick book, 'cos none of the pages would turn. An' I brought it to school, and then I saw you and—" You trail off.

Spencer snorts. "Well, a fucking lot of good you are."

You bridle. "Fuck you. Tell me about this thing."

You reach for the mask. Spencer doesn't let go, but he doesn't fight you either, and you wrest it from him.

It is surprisingly light, as though made of a lightweight ceramic or alabaster. It is thin, too, but it feels sturdy between your fingertips. You turn it over in your hands. It is a deep, glowing blue on all sides, and in the dim portable you suffer the brief, vertigo-inducing illusion that you are holding a piece of the sky.

Spencer makes a face. "Well, at least I figured out how to make the book work," he boasts.

"You mean you found the hidden compartment?" You continue studying the mask. It fascinates you.

"I told you, there ain't no hidden compartment, dumbass," he sneers. "You can turn the pages in it no problem. Except you have to do some stuff first."

"Like what?"

You look up when he doesn't answer, to find him studying you with a critical eye.

"Come on," he says after a moment's thought, and sweeps a backpack off the floor. "Let's go find someplace else to talk."

"What about Justin?"

"He'll be okay. He'll just wake up wondering if he smoked a whole blunt an' passed out, that's all. Anyhoo, he's how come I don't wanna be here when he wakes up. Don't wanna explain anything."

He's at the door before you get your own self in gear, and after squinting up and down the alleyway, he crosses to try the door of the portable across the way. It won't open, so he darts farther up the alley, trying knobs until he finds another portable that's open. It smells and looks much like the other: dank, dark, and dirty.

Spencer squats under a window to unzip his pack, and you squat next to him. He pulls the book from his pack, and you shiver a little at the return of the sight of its cover of blood-red leather.

"Okay, so, you gotta sign the book with your own blood," Spencer says as he opens it. "Only after you do that do the pages start turning loose. 'Cept they don't all of them turn loose, it's only one page at a time, okay? Rest of the book is still locked up"—he demonstrates that almost none of the pages will flip—"and it's like you gotta unlock each page by doing something different each time. But here is the first spell in the book."

He turns it around so you can see better. The words are unreadable in the dim light of the portable, but they take up the top half of the page. The bottom half of the page is covered in a wheel-like design that would probably look very intricate if the light was better.

"That's the spell that makes a mask," Spencer says. "After I made one, I was able to turn this page. Like this."

He pulls the mask from your nerveless grasp and briefly sets it onto the open page, then lifts it and turns the sheet.

"It's like a key or something. And that's the way it is for all the pages in the book, I think. See?" He points to the page he's uncovered, which looks almost identical to the first: paragraphs of text, and a wheel-like design covering the bottom half of the page. "Each time you do a spell, it makes something you can use to unlock the book. I'm through the first two spells." He turns another leaf, showing a third page that looks like the previous two. He pulls at it, but it won't come away.

"That's pretty freaky," you say.

"Yeah, well, it's not half so freaky as the stuff it makes. Like that mask." He sucks in his upper lip. "You saw what it did to Justin."

You're not sure what it did to Justin, so you don't answer. Spencer glances around and licks his lips. "I haven't tried one out yet," he says.

"Tried what out?"

"One of these masks. That's why I want someone around, to watch in case something goes wrong."

"What could go wrong?" you ask in some alarm. Your face feels pale, and your hands have gone cold.

"I don't know," he says. "That's why I want someone around."

"Are they supposed to do something?"

Spencer blinks.

"Sure, didn't I tell you?" he says. "They're magical disguises."

* * * * *

They copy people, he goes on to explain, so that when you put on a mask that contains you've used to copy someone, it turns you into a copy of that person. He made a mask of himself to start with, but it didn't seem to work on him. "I don't guess it makes sense to disguise yourself as yourself," he says. But now, with a copy of Justin, he is prepared to see if the masks actually what the book says they are supposed to do.

"And you believe it?" you ask of the book.

He gives you a look.

"I already seen it do some crazy shit," he replies. "So I believe it when it says—"

He breaks off to look down at the mask. It seems to remind him of something, and he shakes himself. "Well, first you gotta finish prepping it."

That means coating its inner surface with some kind of transparent paste, which is in a plastic tub that he takes from inside his bag. He uses a paint brush to carefully draw the stuff over every bit of the mask's inner surface. He blows on it, and touches his fingertips to it. "Dries right on," he murmurs. "Here, see it for yourself." He offers you the mask, but you hang back.

"Alright, if you're going to leave it to me," he says, "you need to know what to look for. I'm gonna put it on—" He pauses to kick off his shoes. "And I don't think I need to take my clothes off. Anyway, I'm not going to. But if this works as advertised, it should turn me into Justin."

You glance over your shoulder at the door. Voices have been drifting on the wind, and you wonder if any of Spencer's friends are going to come looking for him, and for you, and what they might think if they find Roth passed out in the other portable. But Spencer recalls you to the moment by nudging you with his foot.

"So it should turn me into Justin, but I don't know if I'm gonna be, like, awake for it. When I put this one on Roth, it knocked him out, so it might knock me out too. But go ahead and try to wake me up, though, if it does."

Part of you wants to reach out to stop Spencer. But you're paralyzed, not from fascination or anticipation, but from a dumbfounded disbelief. You can hardly believe you are even here—with Spencer Osbourne, in a ratty old school portable—let alone that you are helping him out with some kind of experiment in magic which is literally incredible. Even as he cradles the mask in his hands, and licks his lips, you expect him to break into a wicked grin, and to shout Gotcha, asshole! and then all his friends will pile into the portable and the lights will go on and everyone will jeer at you for your gullibility.

So you are frozen in a crouch when he puts the mask to his face.

For a moment his palms cover his face. Then they fall away, and he falls backward. The back of his head cracks loudly as it bounces off the floor of the portable. You wince and gasp and scramble over to check that he's okay.

But he's not Spencer Osbourne anymore. The incredible has—incredibly—occurred.

It's Justin Roth sprawled now in front of you.

* * * * *

"Whoa, wicked cool," Spencer says as he gently strokes his forearms. There's a wondering expression on his face.

On Justin's face, which he is wearing. He has Justin's voice too, you suppose, for his jeering tenor is now a resonant baritone. But he is still in his own clothes.

He was unconscious when you looked into his face, and you had to shake him hard for nearly half a minute before he finally roused himself. He complained of a headache, but those complaints vanished when he heard his voice. He looked at himself on his cell phone, gently stroking his cheek, before peeling off his jacket and touching himself under his shirt.

"I guess it works," you say.

He freezes, and looks up at you with a wicked gleam in his eye. "You wanna try?"

Without waiting for an answer, he pulls his bag to him and opens it up to show you: three more masks.

"I can go copy someone now," he says. "Roth'll get the blame, and you and me can have some fun after school."

Next: "Spencer's Gift" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"