The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

Prisoners Below

Previously: "The Desperate Collector" 

The fat man beams at your acceptance and hurries off to an ATM. You are extremely pleased to pocket the five hundred, but a little less pleased when he asks you to come to his house this evening for your first work session. He seems desperate, though, for he offers you a fifty dollar bonus for abandoning your evening plans—which are actually non-existent—to start immediately.

* * * * *

You arrive at Professor Blackwell's at a little after six. It's a large stone villa on the outskirts of town, surrounded by a high, white-washed stone wall. It's a handsome place, even though the large yard and garden out front are entirely dead. Indeed, the only living thing to be seen is a yew tree in the far corner, next to a stone shed.

Blackwell is delighted to see you and expostulates over your obvious work ethic; you don't correct him. He leads you through the foyer and into his library. Well, he goes into the library; you stop a few steps in.

It's a huge room, lined on three sides with bookshelves that reach so far up to the high ceiling that its owner has installed a ladder. There is a discordant ticking from the two (!) grandfather clocks in the corner, and an oppressive atmosphere of watchfulness seems to hover over it. Statues of beasts of various types sit in alcoves, and you find you don't want to look too closely at any of them.

Blackwell gestures you over to one of the desks in the room, on which sits a laptop computer and a pile of books. He leans in very close after you are seated at it and explains how to enter information from the books into the database. "Don't worry overly much about getting everything absolutely correct," he says. "I will go over your work after you are done and make corrections. Right now, I just need the fields filled in. And now if you'll excuse me, I have pressing matters elsewhere in the house."

The work is astonishingly easy for the amount of money he is offering, and you are not eager to get through it quickly; there is more money to be made by being slow and methodical. And so you make a great show of being diligent, flipping through the books to be sure that you have all the information he desires correct.

It makes for interesting but creepy reading. Many of the books are in Latin or German; a few, by their scripts, seem to be in Arabic or even Chinese. (These you have to put aside.) But several are in English, and it soon appears that most of them have to do with magic in one way or another.

You are flipping slowly through one of the English-language books when an illustration catches your eye: it shows a book whose cover looks astonishingly like the one that Blackwell just bought from you. You read (once you have penetrated the archaic spelling):

"... the Privy Chancellor asked after the disposition of the book, and the Duke told him he had caused it to be burned with anathemas made over it, and their makeshift council did determine after discussion to make no mention of the matter to His Majesty, as it might enflame relations between the King's suite of German servants and his English ministers. And yet upon the death of the Duke some decades later a catalog was made of his library, and there was found in it a book that the late Chancellor, who as a benefactor to his heir was in attendance, recognized as the Libra, though he was very old. No art could be found that would cause its pages to yield to inspection, and none were willing to make a pact with the devilish spirit that guarded it. It could not be said by any who knew of the matter, when they were consulted, who were very few in number and very old, whether the Duke had spirited the book away to satisfy his own curiosities, and had made any study of it, or whether being intrigued by the design of the book had made a false copy to bemuse visitors with, for the Duke was known for his jests and had an entire suite of humorous devices with which to delight guests. And yet, before the matter could be seen through a great Sickness descended upon the house and the book was not to be found afterward. One of the Duke's trusted servants was later found to have disappeared in the meantime, and it was supposed that—"

Before you can read further, you hear a noise directly behind you, and something closes over your face.

* * * * *

You wake to darkness. Well, mostly darkness. A single bare bulb glows dimly from far above. You are laying on hard, cold cement and are thoroughly chilled, for when you sit up you find that you are naked. "The fuck ...?" you mutter aloud.

"Better get used to it," a voice says. You wheel around: a young woman sits on a bed, and you guess from the way she has the sheets drawn up under her chin that she is also naked.

"Cindy?" you exclaim.

She shakes her head. "Lucy," she says. Then she adds, "Her sister."

Of course: in the dim light it is easy to mistake the gorgeous Lucy Vredenburg for your classmate, Cindy. Easy to mistake them in a lot of ways, for they share the same long platinum-blonde hair and buxom chests. When you were a sophomore you used to fantasize about both of them in equal measure ... "Where are we?"

"Professor Blackwell's basement. I don't know why he's collecting us. Well, I can guess why he collected me, but unless he's got really perverted tastes, it can't be why he's added you."

You grimace. A magician and a sex maniac?

You look around. Besides the bed there is a chamber pot (which reeks); high up in one wall of the narrow space is a window. A spiral staircase leads up to a door high above, and something about it makes you very much not want to climb it.

You introduce yourself to your fellow prisoner and in a stumbling, mumbling way briefly tell what brought you to the house, but she doesn't seem interested. She doesn't even react much when you sit on the edge of the bed. In fact, she doesn't speak again until the door above opens with a soft creak. "Try not to scream when he comes in," she says softly. "I don't think my nerves could take it."

What could be so horrible that you might scream? Blackwell in a leather gimp suit? Blackwell not wearing anything, not even a leather gimp suit?

You can't make the figure out too well as it comes down the stairs, except that its clothes look familiar. Then it turns a corner and steps into the light, and you get a feeling like a hard fist punching you in the chest.

It's you: the same clothes, the same stiff, straw-like hair, the same long face and squinty eyes. The imposter purses his lips. "Yo, dude, toss 'em here." He points to the floor.

You tear your eyes away from the apparition long enough to glance down: your car keys glitter on the floor. Numbly, you pick them up.

"Don't give them to him," Lucy hisses.

"Fuck you, bitch," the imposter says. He turns back to you. "You don't want me coming down there, bro. I can really fuck you up if I want."

"Who are you?" you finally bleat.

"It's a fake you," Lucy says bitterly. "He's got one of me running around."

The imposter clucks his tongue. "Almost but not quite, my dear. I've only got one golem, and it's out pretending to be you. So until I can make another, I've got to play the part of Will Prescott myself." He turns back to you. "Dude, I'm not kidding. Toss 'em here."

"P- Professor Blackwell?" you gape.

He sighs. "Jesus. One more time, dude, and then I'll have to make you my bitch. Toss. Them. Here."

Weakly, you throw the keys, and they clatter on one of the steps below him. He glares at you, and bends over to pick them up.

"You won't fool anyone," you object. It's too late now, but you have to protest somehow.

He gives a tired sigh. "I know everything about you now. I can talk like you and act like you. I know your locker combination, and I know who you fantasize about when you jack off." A malicious gleam comes into his eye. "I might even get lucky with one of them before I get back." He waggles his eyebrows lasciviously, and goes back up the stairs.

"Blackwell!" you shout, but he's gone.

That's all for now.

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