The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)

Getting to the Root of Things

Previously: "Tongues of Fire" 

"I don't have a job," you tell Joe.

"When you ran me over last night, you said were on your way home from work."

You give him a quick, dirty look. "I didn't run you over. You jumped out in front of me."

"While you were on your way home from work." He grins.

"I don't have a job," you repeat, and bury your nose in the cup as you take a long sip. "I just said that because, you know, I was embarrassed that I didn't have anything to do on a Saturday night."

"Well, at least I fixed that for you." He scoots over and slides his free arm around your waist. "And if your morning and afternoon today are empty—"

"Don't you have something to do?" you ask before you can stop yourself.

"Oooh!" he says, and withdraws his arm. "Okay, I'll get dressed now."

"Joe, I didn't mean—"

"I can take a hint," he says as he gets up. "You don't have to drop a house on me, I can tell when I'm not wanted."

"I just meant—!"

"If you got a to-go cup, I'll just— No no, I'll just leave it by the sink, it was presumptuous of me to even get into your coffee," he says as he picks up his jeans from off the floor.

"I don't want you to go!" you holler. "I just meant, you know— Maybe you have something you have to do today. Don't feel like you have to stay with me."

With a quick grin he sets the coffee on the nightstand and jumps back onto the bed with you. He doesn't climb in, though, he just puts his face into yours.

"I actually do got things to do," he mumbles between the series of quick, hard kisses he gives you. He holds your face in his warm hands. "I just wanted you to beg. A guy wants to be wanted, you know."

Then he bounds back off the bed.

"I'll call or text you later," he says as he scoops his clothes up. "Or you can call or text me. We'll figure out a place and time we can regularly meet, coordinate our schedules. Say, when's your last class of the day?"

"Depends on the day."

"Well, let's see if we can meet up semi-regularly at least." His chest swells. "I don't want you forgetting about me."

You're not likely to forget the guy—certainly not someone who can casually walk out into the dorm hallway in only his underwear, with his clothes balled up in the crook of his arm.

* * * * *

You text your replacement, asking him to get you word on progress on the mask after he's checked it this afternoon. His reply at two o'clock is that the mask won't be ready until Monday evening at the earliest; you tell him to bring you all the supplies that can be spared and to leave them in the same classroom in Mirren Hall. He texts an hour later to tell you it's done.

It's right about then that you have a moment of intense panic when you can't find the grimoire. In your mind's eye you dropped it on the desk next to the computer, but it's not there, and for a dizzying minute you are gripped by the terror that someone broke in and took it—or even that Joe might have made off with it.

Fortunately, it turns out that you had only put it on the floor at some point, and it had gotten kicked under the divan. Still, the episode has left you panicked and paranoid, and when you leave for Mirren Hall to pick up those supplies, you take it with you. Then, after picking up and jamming the bag of supplies into your book bag, you make a special trip to the university library. There is a shelf there where you know you can keep the grimoire safely hidden.

And while you're there, you happen to spot a book that catches your interest.

* * * * *

"Say that again."

Your doppelganger pauses in mid-sentence, and glances up. Then he reads the sentence again. "See if you can find that address online," you order. He lays the book aside and picks up his phone. As he searches, you resume your own work—carving runes into the metal band. The Umeko golem has a watchful expression on her face as she continues to polish a mask.

It's Sunday evening, and you are spending it in the basement of the old elementary school. You started out in your dorm room, working to complete the memory strip that the golem had brought up to you, but your eye kept reverting to the book that you found and checked out of the library when you hid the grimoire. So you had put the strip aside to start reading, but then felt yourself distracted by the metal band. The solution you settled on: You met your golem-doppelganger at the basement, so he could read aloud to you as you worked on the runes. Not only is this successful multi-tasking, it is also restful.

"Oh my God," Will Prescott murmurs as he studies the screen of his phone. He touches it a few times. "It's—"

"No, let me guess," you interrupt. "It's the professor's house, isn't it? Because of course it would be," you add as he nods.

By 1847, he had been reading, the congregations associated with the tabernacle had mostly drifted away, either abandoning the nascent city for new colonies in the west, or joining the mainline Christian churches that were being organized by the newcomers. Hostility by these newcomers toward the sect must have undoubtedly also played a part in the winding down of the Tabernacle of the Knights of Jehovah, and in 1848, the year that the original, religious charter for the city was replaced by a new, secular one, the tents of the tabernacle were finally struck, never to be raised again.

And yet the old site was not forgotten. In 1867, Nicholas Biddle Batcheller, the nephew of Philip Sherman Batcheller who had by then become mayor, built a new and grand house on the grounds where once his uncle had raised his tabernacle and performed its ceremonies. For a hundred years, first in the possession of Nicholas Batcheller and then in the possession of the Keyserling family—who used it as the president's mansion after the founding of the college which was named after them—the house was a centerpiece of social life and prestige in Saratoga Falls. It continues to stand proudly to this day, even if it is safe to say that few who drive past—

Here the author had given the address. A sudden chill had jolted you.

And the quick online search had confirmed it: Professor Aubrey Blackwell lives in a house erected on the land where the cultists who founded Saratoga Falls performed their sacred rites.

* * * * *

Okay, it would be too much to call the founders of Saratoga Falls "cultists," or else you'd have to call the founders of Utah "cultists" as well. They all came out of the same hysterical Millenarian stewpot that roiled the United States in the early nineteenth century:

The wagon train that entered Acheson on the morning of June 11, 1825, probably resembled except in size every other wagon train that had passed through the village. But this one was different. Holding the reins that guided the horses was Philip Sherman Batcheller. And holding the reins that guided his hands (so he claimed) was the angel Elochaim.

So begins the book your golem is reading to you: Saratoga Falls: The City Founded by an Angel, by Linda Kinney Olsson.

The basics of the history are familiar to you, thanks to Melody's own studies, though her grasp of them is (as she herself would have admitted) facile. The First Synod of the Tabernacle of Jehovah—or, to use their colloquial name, the "Knights of Jehovah"—were a religious movement that sprang up in western New York, out of the same swirling religious maelstrom as brought forth the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and other, lesser known movements. This one had money behind it, and in 1825 it sent a few hundred of its members westward to found a colony on the Mohegan River. Rather than build a church, they had raised a great tent on the ground chosen by the angelically inspired leader of the expedition. Tablets inscribed with the teachings of the sect were buried on the site. And later, so the book has now informed you, a house was built there, beneath whose foundations, possibly, the tablets still rest.

It can't help but give you the creeps.

And there was lots of burying of sacred objects in Saratoga Falls, seemingly. This is only the latest that Melody has learned about.

It was the chair of the anthropology department, Dr. Richard Carter, who turned her attention to the history of Saratoga Falls. "There's a lot of esoteric stuff around here," he brayed at her one afternoon a year ago, when she was up in his office. "Whole place was founded by a bunch of Mormon knock-offs. No one's gonna send you to Germany to look up the Rosicrucians, or anybody," he continued, "but if you want an honors thesis topic, look at the stuff around here. It'll be good practice anyway and maybe you'll turn up something interesting. I'd be interested," he'd added, off-handedly.

So she'd done some digging, though there didn't seem to be much in the usual places. Most of what she had learned had come by finding one or two books of local history at Arnholm's, and she hadn't yet cornered anybody at the local historical society before she lost interest. But she learned enough—and seen enough with her own eyes—to figure that there might be a coherent occult theory in back of some of the stories.

Your eye strays to your own phone as your doppelganger resumes reading—now about the history of the post office. You are too shy about all this weirdness to share your troubles with anyone else—to tell them of Blackwell, and of the book, let alone what you have done with it. But you wonder if Joe might be interested in the history of Saratoga Falls. Or if he would at least pretend an interest if you told him that you were interested in it. In that way, you might pick up a kind of ally.

* To talk to Joe: "An Interview Amongst the Antiques" 
* To carry on alone: "Relics of Saratoga Falls" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 5)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)"