The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Boys Will Be Boys

Previously: "The Middle School Muddle" 

"Brah!" you exclaim. "When'd you have time to make all these?" You can't believe the riches laid out in front of you: four masks, ready to enslave and convert new allies.

"Brah!" Riker retorts. "I had all the time in the world when I was playing Eric! When I wasn't jacking off to our mom I had, like—"

He stops short with a frown, and gets a furtive look. Carefully, he creeps around the room, peeping under some of the books and papers piled up on the rickety old desk that Eric has shoved into the corner of the room, and peering inside the bookshelf. When you start to ask what he's doing, he motions you to silence. Each step he takes is elaborately careful and silent.

The skin ripples up and down your spine. The room is trapped! you think. Eric caught the twins going through his room a couple of months ago, and after half-suffocating each of them in a mud puddle he warned them that they'd never live to see their thirteenth birthdays if they ever did it again.

He won't catch us, Micah jeered at Riker when he hung back from making another secret search for contraband. But Riker reminded him of Eric's exact words: "If you ever do it again." He won't have to catch us direct, Riker said. He'll know!

But why is Sydney creeping around, looking for the trap? She was Eric for a whole day. Surely she remembers where it is!

* * * * *

"Nah, I couldn't remember, not exactly," Riker tells you later as you and he root through Alec's closet. He had finally found the cell phone inside a ratty old teddy bear perched on the corner of the desk. The lens was positioned behind a wormhole in the bear's chest, and a wire led out from the bear's ass to the laptop. The laptop (he explained) in turn was wired to an electrical system attached to the door. The result was a jerry-rigged motion-sensor alarm that would automatically bolt the door shut if it detected an intruder. You and he escaped capture only because Eric had fortuitously shut the laptop, putting the whole system to sleep.

Together you find an old pair of Alec's sneakers, which you take outside to muddy up inside an impromptu puddle. You slip them on, and track them up the outside steps to Eric's room, then slip them off and throw down to Riker so he re-muddy the soles. (He takes great care to cake as much stiff, red clay to their bottoms as possible.) Then he hurls them back up to you, and you track them all over the floor of Eric's room. That done, you open the secret compartment under the loose floorboard, extract the bottle of rye, and carefully pour most of it off into the empty Pepsi bottle you retrieved from the garbage. You replace the depleted bottle, close the floorboard, and toss the Pepsi bottle out the window down to Riker.

Last, you power up the laptop. The deadbolt in the door shoots shut with a hard clack. You stop the recording, then delete the video file, but you leave the laptop open.

Last, you toss back the sheets to Eric's bed, jump up and down on them a couple of times in Alec's muddy shoes, and push open the window just over the bed. You clamber out—planting one last muddy footprint on Eric's pillow—and drop to the ground below. Riker high-fives you, and you collapse, snorting and giggling, against each other.

"What have you boys been up to?" your mother asks in a guarded tone when you and Riker reenter the house.

"No good," Riker replies.

"I hope it's the kind of 'no good' our Lord would approve of," she replies.

* * * * *

Alas, the attempted frame-up goes awry because Eric gets home before Alec. Eric catches you and Riker by the neck and hauls you up to his room, where he sets you to scrubbing his floor and changing the sheets on his bed. And while you're doing that, he makes a special trip to your mud hole, and when you get back to your room you find his footprints on your floor, in your beds, on your desk, and on your walls, so you have to wash them down as well.

"Oh, stop it, Will," Sydney says, breaking character when you suggest that she "order" Eric to clean it all up himself. "It's good training. We should have been smarter, and this will teach us to be smarter. And we want to be smarter, brah," he adds, and the shift back into character is subtle but noticeable, "if we're gonna get us some more converts!"

You talked about it while you were setting up the raid on Eric's, and you could tell that Sydney was getting aroused as you talked over the possibilities: she got a noticeable tent in her shorts while ticking down her fingers about which kids at the church you could "convert" to the worship of Baphomet while pretending to hold Bible studies at the Browns'. But you thought that was a little too creepy, though you tried to be diplomatic about rejecting it.

But she was almost as excited about the prospect of taking over another family. There were lots of possibilities at the church, she said, from some of the respectable middle-aged people to some of the young couples. There are also the families of some of your school friends, not only at the middle school, but at the college and at the high school.

That's the move you ultimately pick, because look how well the Browns have worked out for you. But who?

"There's only one thing I really want out of this next stage, Will," Riker says when you're done cleaning up from Eric's rampage. Word came upstairs that dinner would be ready in about fifteen minutes, and you and he are changing into fresh clothes. You're both in your underwear when he surprises you by putting both arms around you and pulling you over to the bed. He throws you onto it and, as he did in the shower this morning, he nuzzles at your mouth with his. "I need one more face for myself," he murmurs as he pecks at you with tiny kisses. "And I want it to be a girl. So that you can—"

He gurgles with excitement, and grabs the front of your underwear. Though it's a shock, you shoot to attention as he rubs you hard through the front.

* * * * *

So you're late getting downstairs, and Riker has to bark a sharp word through the locked door at Eric when the latter comes upstairs to bang on it, and then you have to order your mom back downstairs when she comes up to insist that you boys join the family right now. You both peeled off your underwear, and rolled around on the lower bunk bed, squeezing your rock-hard penises between you. You hug each other tight, identical face pressed into identical face, and kiss each other all over your mouths and cheeks and noses.

"Jeepers, I think I could do this forever," Riker says as he squeezes you inside his arms. "You're so hot, brah! I really wish— I want to feel you up inside me. But from the front!"

Your dinners are still sitting on the table, though the rest of the things have been cleared away, by the time you get cleaned up and get downstairs. Riker finds Alec and Eric, and orders them to stand at silent attention while you and he, grinning at each other as you eat in clockwork unison, wolf down the meal. Your mother says nothing when she comes out from cleaning up the kitchen, and only takes the plates while you and your brother compete in a belching contest.

"Have you done your homework yet?" is her only question—and a carefully stated one it is, too—after you and Riker push away from the table. You're about to promise that you'll get started when Riker catches your eye and lifts an eyebrow.

"We're going to a movie with Knox and some friends," you tell her. "So we'll need someone else to do our homework for us.

"I see," she says, after a fractional hesitation. "But won't your teachers—?"

"We'll copy it out when we get back."

"Alright," she says. "If that's the plan."

"And one more thing," you add, then gesture everyone to follow you into the family room, where your father is relaxing on the sofa. He looks up with an expression of mild curiosity. "We're going to add another family to the, uh, organization. It's got to have four people," you continue as you tick off the necessary prerequisites off on your fingers, "all living in one house."

"One of them has to have a pussy," Riker smirks.

"And the rest—"

"Cocks," he finishes for you. His smirk deepens.

It'll be nice to have Sydney back to being a girl, you think. It's unsettling having her talk and act so much like a twelve-year-old boy.

* * * * *

The trip to the movies is uneventful, and even a little boring, because it's Cravenmoor, which you've already seen. Afterward, Riker teases you about being so freaked out after your first viewing of it.

Back home, you find that the others have been busy. Not only have they finished your homework, they have given you four candidate families.

Or quasi-families. Eric suggests four roommates up at the college he knows. Two are a boyfriend-girlfriend who are living together, and the other two are some of his friends. But from the others:

Your mom suggests Dylan and Cheyanne Ritchie, a twenty-something couple from the church with a baby. Your dad suggests Colonel Malcolm Green, a British officer stationed at Fort Suffolk with two twin boys attending the prep school west of town. Alec suggests Gabriel Kern, a wrestling buddy of his who graduated last year, who along with his younger brother lives with his older brother and the latter's wife.

But you have a candidate of your own: the family of Eli Cabot, an eighth-grade soccer player at school whose family is impossibly WASPy.

Next: "The Golden Child" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"