The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

The Girl in the Palm of Your Hand

Previously: "Masking Mia" 

There's now a face inside the mask. You got back into your truck, pulled the mask out, reexamined it to see if you had been hallucinating, but no. There is now a face inside the mask.

Oh, it's not easy to make out, because it's not like a photograph. It's a ghostly image composed of glimmering lines, like the gleaming highlights that skitter and slide across the mask's surface when you hold it up to the light. But these highlights don't melt and run when you turn the mask in your hands. They hold their shape. And the shape they hold is the face of Mia DeWitt.

It's a waxy visage, with no light in its eyes or life in its bones. But it is her face, and when you turn the mask in profile her face goes into profile, and when you look at the mask top-down you can make out part of the crown of her head (there's no knit cap in the image) and what might be the tops of her bare shoulders and bare breasts down below.

So is this what the book meant when it said that the mask would "absorb the form" of he (or she! in this case) who lays it against their face? It does look like the "form" of Mia DeWitt is now inside the mask.

You sit in your truck, the burning curiosity to explore this mystery fighting with the more ordinary desire to attend a Friday night cookout and party.

* * * * *

In the end, curiosity wins out. I'd just sit around wishing I was working on the mask, you tell yourself as you shoot a quick text to Caleb, telling him you got a call to come home and will have to miss the party.

You get home in the middle of dinner, telling your surprised family that the cookout got cancelled; you wolf the rest of the meal with them after putting away the food you took and bought. Then, after rushing through the after-dinner chores you race upstairs with your bag to your bedroom. If you had even the tiniest doubt that there is magic afoot, it is vaporized when you open the book to the spell and find that the page itself has altered. Superimposed on the Latin is a faint oval, the same size and shape as the mask. The meaning seems clear enough, and after you gulp hard you lay the mask on the open page of the book, over the oval. When you lift it, the page beneath, which had been tightly bound to the page after, flutters loose. With beating heart you turn it over to study the continuation of the spell.

It doesn't yield easily to translation, but maybe that's because you're a fumble-fingers with your phone as you put the words and phrases into the online translator. But gradually it yields, and you lean back on your bed, staggered by what the spell says you have done.

It confirms that the mask now contains the very form and image of the person you set it on: Mia DeWitt. It also promises that if you "seal" it, then any who don the mask will assume her form as an impenetrable disguise. It also includes instructions for how to remove the mask once it has been donned.

But last, it says that if you don't seal the mask but instead set it on another person, it will absorb their form as well, but without displacing the previous form. Instead, they will "mix" to create a new form, belonging to nobody but containing elements of the two forms so mixed. Other forms may also be added in this way, until such time as the mask is sealed, whereupon it can then be worn.

So if you "seal" the mask, then put it on ... you would turn yourself into the double of Mia DeWitt. You close your eyes and let play in your imagination those curves, those breasts, those pouty lips and that long, delicious hair. It gives you a small but lovely shiver just to imagine them. To imagine touching and playing with them by making out with Mia, that would be even better. But to actually have her breasts to fondle, to have her lips to touch with gentle fingertips, to have her trailing hair to twist around delicate fingers, to have her ... mwah ... to touch and probe? That gives you the shakes all over, enough to make you wonder, a little guiltily, if there is something wrong with you for wanting something like that.

Yes, you quickly decide, forget making a "new" face by mixing Mia's with someone else's. The only someone else you can get fast ahold of is yourself, and how gross would it be to mix your bony, hairy boy's body with that supple, feminine body of hers? No, you're not going to wait for another chance to get the mask on some other girl, you're going to test the thing out as soon as you find out how to "seal" it, which presumably involves another spell.

So you eagerly turn your attention to the facing page, newly uncovered.

It's very similar to the first, with Latin text taking up the top half of the page and a wheel-like sigil taking up the bottom. You flip back and forth between the two, confirming that they use the same ingredients in what seem to be identical proportions. The preparation is a little different, though, for there is no call to use that convex mirror. Still, you make a note to pack it up as you empty your backpack so you can fill it with supplies.

You still remember what happened when you made the mask up in your room—the smoke and the stink and the burning—and you're not going to repeat that, so after shoving the book and the mask and a few other things (like the mirror) into your backpack, you go down to the garage to pack up the rest of the ingredients. On your way through the living room, you tell your parents that you're going to meet friends. "Be back by eleven," your dad tells you in a preoccupied tone as he focuses on the television screen.

But instead of driving out to the party, you drive a couple of blocks over to the Acheson Community Center. It's an old school building, built as an elementary school nearly a hundred years ago, but closed and converted to community usage a few decades ago. You don't remember the last time you set foot inside the community center proper, but last year you succeeded in breaking into the building through an outside door. It was at the bottom of a set of shallow stairs, and after you got the padlock off with crowbar (for you were in a mood to cause mild destruction) you found a basement on the other side. It was crowded with cast-off furniture—school desks and book shelves and cabinets and tables; exercise equipment and discarded sinks and plumbing parts; and even a giant, floor-length mirror—but you explored around it and made yourself a little fort, then put your own padlock on the door. A week later or so, you checked and found that your padlock was still there, whereupon you summoned Caleb and Keith out to look around, and for a couple of months you used it as a hideaway and secret bunker where you could hang out. But it's been months since you've been back.

You're not heading there now, though, just to the school itself. Dusk has fallen, and you want to find a secluded corner hidden between two of the wings, where you can perform the second spell without being spotted. You find such a spot, and there's even a wide concrete porch there, in front of a door that must once have been one of the back entrances leading out to the playground. You set out all the supplies, then make a quick patrol to ensure that the community itself is dark and locked up, and that no one else is loitering nearby, before setting up the spell.

It goes fast and with a lot less bother than before, to your surprise and relief. Though you mix the same ingredients into a bowl and fire them over the sigil, there is no stench or smoke, though it yields a runny slurry similar to what the first spell made. And then there's nothing else to do. After lifting the bowl from the book, a slight breeze makes the page beneath curl, and you turn it over to read by the light of your cell phone. It takes only a few minutes of work to confirm that you have now made the "sealant" which, if applied to the inner surface of a mask with a brush, will stop it from "absorbing" any more forms and will allow the mask, with its transformative powers, to be worn.

The whole thing has taken much less time than you thought it would, so that it's hardly dark as you pack back up, but you return to home anyway, to snag a spare paintbrush from the garage, and to transfer the slurry from the open mixing bowl to a dusty Tupperware container that you find in one of your father's carpentry cabinets. Inside, you tell your parents that the party you went to was "lame," and that you're just going to watch a movie upstairs. Instead, you unpack your bag and hide the things about your room: under the bed, in the dresser, and on the shelves high up in your closet. You fire up a game on your console, but it's all you can do to stay engaged as you anticipate the experiment to come.

* * * * *

Midnight. You have closed yourself up in your closet with your phone, the book, and the mask. You are prickling all over as you huddle in the corner with your back to the wall and your knees drawn up close. You are naked and chilly, but it's with anticipation that you shiver as you cradle the mask in your hands. It's a terrible risk you're running, and you know it. The risk of getting caught after transforming yourself into the duplicate of a classmate. The risk of turning yourself into some kind of twisted ogre because you messed up the spell. But the risk that troubles you the most, in fact, is the fear that you'll put the mask to your face, and ... nothing will happen!

But there's nothing to do but try. You close your eyes, take a deep breath, then lift and press the mask to your face.

You feel yourself swoon, and fall into oblivion. Then you know nothing.

That's all for now.

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