The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

A Friend's Favor

Previously: "A Friendly Face in an Unexpected Place" 

"Da fuck?" you mutter as you examine your ugly face in the rearview mirror. Your eyes twitch beneath the monobrow—that thing like a black and fuzzy caterpillar—and you gingerly touch a crusted-over zit in the middle of your forehead.

"Look, I'm gonna need you to keep calm," Will says. He takes a deep breath. "'Cos this is gonna blow your mind."

"Just tell me who the fuck you are," you retort, even as you continue to study your face with grim fascination. "I mean, obviously I know who you're made the fuck up like— But who—?" You squint at him. "Tilley?" you hazard. "Is this your idea of a sick, fucking—?"

"Okay, just calm down, man," he says for about the tenth time.

"I am calm, you dumb fuck. You're the one who's freaking out on—"

You sit up very straight and look around the restaurant parking lot. "Mike and them coming?" you ask.

When Will doesn't reply, you turn to frown at him. His eyes are nearly bugging from his head. "Pull the fucking sock out," you tell him. "I asked you a question!"

"N-no," he stammers, "it's just us. You and me, uh, man." He licks his lips. "You're taking this pretty goddamn well," he bleats.

"'Cos I got a pretty fucking good idea what's going on!" You squint off back in the direction of the storage center. The pieces ... Well, they're not exactly falling into place, but you do have a very good sense of what the pieces are and how they're shaped. "You and the guys, back at the complex. You were gonna do something with Eva. But then I showed up and—" You rear back. "And you're wearing that mask you got onto me out in the portables a coupl'a days ago!"

"Jesus Christ!" Will throws himself out the driver's side door.

"Hey, don't freak out on me, man!" you yell after him. You glance around again, and only now do you recognize it's your own truck you're sitting in. "Just tell me what's been going on since, um—"

You cast your mind back. You can remember everything that happened to you up until this afternoon, you can also remember what happened to Keith only up until ... yesterday afternoon?

The really freaky part is, you're not surprised that you can remember stuff he did, like hanging out with Mike and his friends, and making magical disguises and plans to use them.

"Cindy!" you yell, and jab an accusing finger at Will, who's staring with haggard eyes at you from outside the truck.

"Eep," he says.

"Yeah, you were going to turn yourself into Cindy! Oh, you cocksucker. Nnhn!" You bite down hard on your lower lip as a boner unfurls inside your jeans. "And Mike and Carlos, it was gonna be Eva and Jessica for them! Josiah ... Chelsea! Philip ... Maria!"

"How the fuck are you getting this?" Will shrieks.

"If you don't want me knowing what goes on in your garbage fire of a brain, don't stick me with a copy of it, you dumb, cocksucking—!"

"Will!" Your doppelganger scrambles back into the truck cab. His eyes are feverish. "Are you telling me you know all about, um—?"

"What you and Carlos and them've been getting up to? Oh, fuck, yeah! YouTube videos my pimply ass! Where the fuck did you get the—? Oh shit!"

You feel your eyes pop as a few more locks open, and a few more memories come. Like the old, leather-bound grimoire that Philip showed you and the others, with the Latin spells and the sigils that show how to make magical masks that can duplicate the memories and features of other people. It's the same book—you'd swear it!—that you bought at Arnholm's, and lost when you brought it to school! But how did Fairfax get ahold of it? Did Philip buy it off Mendoza?

"Will," the other you says in a quavering voice, "if you remember everything ... Um ... You're not pissed at me, are you?"

"Depends." You reach for his face, but he pulls back. "I keep asking you who you are, but you—"

"It's me. Keith." He seems to be having trouble catching his breath. "I, um— Listen. There's stuff that I need to catch you up to speed on."

"I bet there is." You point at his chest. "Because you were planning on giving yourself a pair of awesome jugs, if I'm remembering right."

He makes a face, and nods. "Just as long as you don't flip out too hard on me," he says.

* * * * *

It's your own fault, it turns out. Because you just had to follow Eva out to the storage facility.

You had a chance to join the gang. That's what yesterday's invite was for. Keith had pleaded and cajoled the others—you can remember what he said, from his own memories—into giving you a chance to join the club, and they had reluctantly agreed. You were supposed to go out to the storage center yesterday, where Carlos and the others would have shown you the masks, and shown you what they could do, and offered you a chance to join them in a little light body-swapping. Mike and Carlos are gonna turn themselves into Eva and Jessica, Keith was going to explain to you—he had it all rehearsed out in his head. Josiah's gonna be Chelsea Cooper, and Philip is gonna be Maria Vasquez. Yeah, we're all gonna turn ourselves into cheerleaders. Oh, and me? I'm gonna be Cindy Vredenburg! So who do you wanna be?

But then you turned him down, and Carlos and the others said I told you so, and they returned to their original plans which had no place for you. Eva was to be their first victim, which is why they invited her out today. They were going to copy her into a mask, and then Mike—unless it was going to be Carlos—was going to put on her mask and use her and her phone to invite her sister and her friends out, one at a time, to be replaced with imposters.

As for the girls themselves—

Well, it's a good thing that Keith already knew what was going to happen to them, so that he doesn't have to explain it to you. They were going to be shoved under masks of the boys who were going to replace them, and a kind of amnesiac spell would make them docile, mind-controlled slaves of the imposters who had replaced them. That way the boys wouldn't seem to disappear after turning themselves into cheerleaders, and the girls would be kept out of the way where they couldn't do any harm.

But then you barged in on them. They argued about it after Keith took you aside to keep you busy, and then they argued some more after they pulled Keith back into the studio. (And as they argued they stood over the unconscious Eva, who was splayed out on the floor while the first mask copied her.) They weren't going to explain things to you, and they weren't going to ask you to join the gang. No, they were going to get you out of the way the same way they were going to get the girls out of the way. By trapping you under a mask that they could control.

Then Keith jumped in to save you. Except he didn't tell them he was going to save you. He just volunteered to give up his dream of transforming himself into the sexy cheerleader Cindy Vredenburg so that he could take your place as Will Prescott. He's my friend, he told Carlos and Mike and Philip. I owe it to him. He told them that he was going to impersonate you for as long as they were going to impersonate the girls. It's my own fault for trying to get him involved, he said.

So instead of trapping you under a mask of yourself, Keith said that he'd trap you under a mask of himself. But he double-crossed them at the last minute, and after driving off with you in your truck, he didn't put the stuff into the mask that would put you under his control, and instead is leaving you free and conscious alert—but at the cost of being transformed into him. We'll give the guys a chance to show them that you're a team player, he told you. You'll play like you're me, like you're brainwashed into acting like me, and you'll be totally trustworthy, and then we'll be all, like, psych! It was really Will all along! Then you can join up and it'll all be cool!

The only part of Keith's plan that didn't go off was that he wasn't expecting you to have all of his memories so quickly. It usually takes, like, a couple of hours before the memories start coming, he said. (A fact you know because you remember everything he knew about the masks.) Like, I'm not remembering anything that you know, he said while point at his fake face. But even that worked out well, because he didn't have to explain nearly so much to you as he was afraid he'd have to.

You take it all in calmly, because most of it—thanks to the memories that Keith has saddled you with—is familiar to you. Naturally, you're a little sick at the thought of what Carlos and them were planning to do to you. And you're not feeling real friendly toward Keith, even considering the massive favor he's doing for you, because he's been pairing off with them instead of you. But you keep your temper under control.

"So there it is," your friend concludes after he's given you the rest of the story, and you've talked it over a little while, mopping up the details.

"There it is," you agree. You eye him up and down. "I guess maybe we should swap clothes," you add, for despite the switch in faces, you are still in your original wardrobes.

"I guess so," he says. Still, it's with evident reluctance that he pulls off his shirt.

Yes, this is going to be real interesting, you think as you pull off your pants.

Next: "Faking It for a Friend" 

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