The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Den of the Body Thief

Previously: "Covering Tracks" 

You straighten up and roll your head around on your neck. Then you reach forward to pull the unconscious Frank Durras upright in his chair. Boot to the back of the head, you think with a faint smirk. Just like I did it with Joe!

You talked Frank into dropping by the house before heading over to Dane Matthias's trailer, and while there you went into the bathroom to pretend to take a long shit. When you came out, Frank was hunching at the computer, checking something online. So predictable, you thought as you sauntered up behind him. He always goes to check email or something if he's got a few minutes to kill. "Any parties happening this weekend?" you asked.

"Huh? No." He was closing tabs as you grabbed up some of those pencils you'd artfully arranged earlier. The mens was among them, and before Frank could stand you popped it onto his head. He pitched forward, almost breaking the laptop with his face.

Frank and Joe Durras are a study in contrasts. Frank is tall with lush, dark hair that looks good even when it hasn't been brushed. He is moody, with a hooded and wary gaze that isn't softened even when he smiles, which is rare. He is well-built but with more natural proportions than Joe, for although Joe has built himself up to have a wrestler's physique, Frank can thank good genes for his strength, which he has only sculpted with the exercise equipment. Frank tends to be quiet in company, and listens with a grave intensity rather than talks. He doesn't lack a sense of humor, but he smiles at jokes rather than laughs, and he never tells any.

Joe is blonde, effervescent, and irrepressible. His eyes dance with a pixieish glee, and his face naturally relaxes into a grin. He's a chatterbox and a loudmouth, and a boastful one at that, though a lot of that (you know from wriggling inside his psyche) is a bit of a front. The fact is that Joe is good and he knows that he's good, and he can't stand the idea of hiding his light under a bushel. So he lampshades and exaggerates his already swollen ego, to make it a little comical so as to not offend people quite so much.

(Or, at least, that's what he tells himself he does. You can't help suspecting that what he thinks is self-exaggeration is genuine self-conceit squirting out through the seams.)

It also doesn't help that he's the younger of the pair of the putative brothers—they were each adopted separately when young, and raised together in the same house—and is the smarter of the two. But Frank, for all his silences and retirement, has an overpowering presence of his own that Joe can't help punching up at. Sometimes, when Frank stands in his way or squashes one of his ideas, Joe just wants to burst!

So you can't help puffing up a little as you pull the unconscious Frank from his chair and drop him to the floor, and you grin over his slack face and loose limbs. Boo-yah! you think. Too fast for you again, Frank!

* * * * *

You're stripped to a pair of freshly laundered boxers and sitting on your bed with the open Personae in your lap when Frank puts his head around the corner to look in. "Text from Dad," he says. "He's going to call in an hour or so."

"Thanks," you mumble around the pencil you're chewing. You've got three of them: one in your mouth, one over your ear, and the third in your hand, hovering over the notebook at your side. "When he calls, let me do the talking. I'll tell him you're making a grocery run and haven't got back yet."

"Sure thing, boss."

"Don't call me 'boss', Frank," you tell him as he turns to go. "It's out of character. Just remember that I'm your boss."

"Yes ... Joe."

You sigh as he pads back down the hall. You had a better grip on him when he woke than you had on Joe: you were sitting on his chest, your knees on his shoulders. Not that it would have done you any good if it was the real Frank and not a fake, a pedisequos, as the Personae calls them. He would have thrown you so hard into the air your head would have gone through the ceiling. But even without his prodigies, Frank is dangerously strong. So you had him pinned, and the first thing out of your mouth when his eyes shot open was Stop it! Don't move! Listen!

You fear now that you took too much of the steam out of him as you talked him into his new role as a servant to your commands. One of the things that gives Frank charisma despite his withdrawn personality is the impression of immense, banked energies and pressures. On your second day at Eastman, Conor Nilsson, while watching Frank stalk off the court, turned to you and said, "I'd hate to be in front of your brother if he came charging in my direction." Though he is not impressively big—being only a shade over six feet, and lacking the barrel-chested heft of a Gordon Black—there is always the impression of a bow-wave in front of Frank, and of a heaving wake as he passes. But the Frank Durras who plodded about the kitchen this evening, cleaning it up after supper, looked like he had sprung a leak, and that all the steam pressure had sighed away. You'll have to do something about that. Maybe spend a day in his mask pumping him up again, getting him to act like himself. But like himself if he was on your side.

But not right now. Right now you need Joe's brain. He's the smarter of the two, the one with all the specialized learning, and the one who can actually read and digest the Summa Personae Libra instead of merely using it as a cookbook, the way you were.

The secret, you discerned almost at once on turning to the first spell, is in the sigil. The ingredients and the processes are, if not arbitrary, at least dependent upon the sigil. Rewrite the sigil, and a different set of ingredients would produce the same results. But you are pretty sure the sigils set down in the book are the simplest and most efficient possible for the task.

They are certainly marvels of construction. You—

Well, that is to say, Joe; it is so easy to identify with him, especially as your mind races along, absorbing and deciphering the Personae.

Anyway, Joe was trained from an early age to read and understand them, and he can construct simple ones with very little trouble. But such things are not really in his wheelhouse, and he lacked the patience to make anything more complicated than a kind of magical can opener.

(Okay, he lacked the patience even for that. He was so proud of that sigil that he didn't even test it out before showing it to his teacher, Nash Carnes. Instead he ran to fetch can of corn chowder from the pantry, set it on the sigil, and summoned Nash in. The two watched—Joe with surprise and horror, Nash with a chortling amusement—as the can unpeeled itself into a spiral, with the chowder gushing out over the table and work top. Joe ground his teeth with embarrassment as Nash showed him where he had made his error.)

But even for Joe, reading sigils is an exacting task, akin to deciphering a complicated math equation in his head and reducing it to its simplest expression, then doing the same to another formula and combining the results of the second operation with those of the first. Sigils are not pretty designs. They are a kind of code—instructions for manipulating the metaphysical dimensions of physical items. To understand them, you have to cast them symbol by symbol and line by line in your head, and in your head comprehend what would happen if they were cast in the world.

But the sigils of the Personae, though seemingly as devilish and intricate as any that Joe tackled before, unfold elegantly to your understanding, as simple as "2+2; 3-3; 0+0."

So the first spell makes an imago, that is, an image of a person, either by absorbing a copy of a person's imago or combining several such into a new imago. Once sealed with a membrana (the sealant made by the second spell) it can be worn by another person. The wearer's own imago is not transformed (as you would have originally suspected); rather, it is attached metaphysically (and temporarily) to the wearer and manifested in preference to the wearer's own imago on the material plane, like turning "heads" into "tails" by flipping the coin over.

The third spell makes a mens, which is an imago of the mind. However, it does not replace the original mens on the physical plane but coexists alongside it. The mind, though a thing of the physical world, is like a shadow cast upon the physical brain by the non-physical spirit, and a mens is like a second shadow cast by a different light source (that light source, in the metaphor, being the mens) in the brain of the wearer.

And so on through the book, through the construction of a persona, a pedisequos, a vinctus, and a ludius, until you reach that torn page.

You wonder what Caleb made of that page. Ancient damage to the book? The attempt by religious fanatic to destroy a thing of evil?

Oh, yes. Caleb ... You haven't told him where you are or what you're doing. You should do that before Joe and Frank's dad calls.

Unless ... Given the kind of knowledge and power that is at your fingertips now ... Maybe you should ghost him and the others? They're no real use to you.

That's all for now.

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