The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

The Many Faces of Crime, Part 1

Previously: "Discarding Dwayne" 

You wake the next morning from a hard, dream-filled sleep in which (you seem to remember) you faced down every thug and bully in the school, as well as Karol Mathis and Dwayne Macaulay. It fills you with a determination to follow through on that vague plan for making yourself king of the high school underworld. The determination is only reinforced when, after a shower, you take a seemingly casual stroll down Twentieth Street to the Lazee-Nites Motel, where you note that all the windows in Dwaynes' car have been smashed in.

Karol Mathis is already on the hunt for you. He just doesn't know who "you" are—or who you might be.

* * * * *

Back at the Donna, you use the rooms' landline to call Caleb. He picks you up at around nine (having sent his golem in to cover for him at school) and you treat him to breakfast at the nearby Sunshine Diner. He gives you the latest news—Andy Jensen and Justin Orr have already picked out two new sophomore faces for themselves—and asks you about your own plans.

"Let's leave Gordon and Dane where they are," you say. "We can put 'em back to normal later if we want."

"Dane's mom wants him back to normal," Caleb reminds you.

"She'll get him. I'll cover for him."

"You?" Caleb blinks hard.

"How hard can it be? Besides, after everything that's gone down, I want a vacation, and that goofball's the right kind of vacation." You twine your hands behind your head and sit back. "Every day's a day at the beach for Dane."

After some thought, Caleb sees your point and expresses a certain amount of envy. But then he changes the subject to tell you about some damage to the grimoire.

"I didn't do it," he insists after retrieving it from his car and showing it to you. "It" is the page that comes after the spell that makes the golem paint—the bottom half has been torn away. Without a full set of instruction, and no sigil, it will be impossible to execute the new spell, which means you can't get to the spells that come after. But after staring at the page awhile, you shrug. "We got enough to have fun," you tell Caleb. "Speaking of which, what are we gonna do today?"

His plan accords fully with yours: buy supplies and make more masks.

For seven hours straight you work. You return to the Donna, where you make a dozen masks and blank mind bands, and a tub of sealant. You also make a small tub of golem paint using your hair, which means any masks you put it in will make golems under your control. Caleb asks why you need it, as your plan is to leave Gordon and Dane to manage as best they can. "In case I need to get out of the Dane mask, and into someone else's," you tell him—an explanation he accepts.

You also bought a car buffer—with the fifteen thousand from the Warehouse you could have bought hundreds of them—and polish up the masks while Caleb carves mind bands. You have six masks and six bands by the time you break for the evening. You've also heard in the meantime from the sophomores, who want to know when things will be ready for some body-jacking, but Caleb puts them off (at your insistence) by telling them that nothing will happen until all the necessary masks are prepared.

After Caleb has gone, you put on Dwayne Macaulay's mask, and with his phone you text Erik Carstairs. You give him your room number, and tell him you need to see him in an hour.

* * * * *

You're at the door almost before the sharp knock subsides. You open it and hop back into the middle of the room. "Hey, you alone?" you demand of Carstairs. "Come in, lock the door."

"Yeah, I'm alone. Who would I bring with me," he says as he shuts the door.

"Don't know. Don't wanna know." You hop over to the curtains. "Sit on the bed."

"The fuck's going on, man?"

"Gotta make sure of things." You peep through a crack between the edge of the curtain and the wall. It's dark out, so it's mostly a futile action. "I said sit down," you repeat. Carstairs drops onto the bed with a worried frown.

"There's been a change in management downtown," you tell him. "That's why I'm a little jumpy. You can do me a favor, help me out."

"What's that?" Erik says with obvious wariness.

"You see that thing on the bed next to you? That mask? Put it on your face."

He doesn't move. "I said, put it on your face," you repeat.

"The fuck is going on, man, you can't just—?"

But you can and do. You whip the pistol from the back of your jeans and train it on his face. "Put it on, man."

He jumps back. "Jesus!"

You advance two steps. "Put it on, kid, I'm telling you nicely you'll—"

"Alright! Alright! Jesus!" He almost drops the mask as with trembling hands he lifts it and puts to his face. For a moment it hangs there, making him look like a blank, blue-faced ghost. Then it vanishes. His hands fall to his side, and he sags and falls back. The bed bounces under his weight.

You cross to the rear of the motel room, crouch behind the bed, and with the pistol cover the doors and windows. For ten nerve-twisting minutes you wait for someone to burst in. Dwayne always worries about unexpected company.

No one does. But still your heart hammers in your chest when a blue glow from Erik's face tells you the mask has finished copying him. With one hand gripping the pistol, you nudge the mask off him, and drop a different mask onto him. From your vantage point he's upside-down, so you don't see the change until he sits up and turns around. Will Prescott pulls at his shirt—a sleeveless purple thing that was too big for Carstairs and is like a tent draped over his new form—and gazes back at you with round eyes.

"Oh God," he says. "It worked, didn't it?"

You weren't keen on duplicating yourself, but you need a spot to put Erik until you're done making his mask. "Take those things off and get under the covers," you order your temporary self. "Anyone comes in through that door— Well, I'll probably hear them myself," you finish lamely as you sweep up Erik's mask and take it into the bathroom.

Now it's your hands that are trembling, and it seems to take an ungodly long time to get first the sealant and then the golem paint into the mask, time during which at each moment you expect to hear the shattering of glass or the cracking of the door. When you're done you don't even bother to switch out of Macaulay's clothes, but instead just drop into the bathtub—like a too-small sarcophagus—and rip his mask from your face.

And then you don't have to relax, because the darkness drops on you of its own accord.

* * * * *

Waking is a brief matter. And again darkness engulfs you after you've torn Macaulay's brain band out of your forehead.

* * * * *

And another darkness overwhelms you after you've placed Carstairs mask on your face. First, though, you'd given yourself a minute to clear your head and study the mask. The lights that played over its surface suggested, in an abstract way, the narrow, angular lines of his face. More convincing were the blue letters that danced over the brain band: ERIK THOMAS CARSTAIRS. This will be your first experience with a mask that unites body and mind, and it makes you nervous, for Caleb has warned you that memories are slower to come when brain and body overwhelm the wearer at the same time. But you don't think you need to be convincing as Carstairs for the next part of your plan, and you're pretty sure you can remember all that you would need to know to pull it off.

Besides, you'll be taking a convincer with you.

* * * * *

There's a hard pain in your leg when you wake, and you have the impression that you've only been unconscious for a few minutes, and maybe only a few seconds. Certainly you're very groggy. Your legs are bunched up at the head of the bathtub, and with a hiss and a grunt and a gasp you unfold them. There's something funny about them. The calves are very large and dark, and they're covered with fine golden hairs. You put your hand to your forehead, as though intuitively trying to ward off an incipient headache.

Oh God! You fly backward, and crack the back of your head on the tile behind. You nurse it as a cascading flood of memories pours through that crack, washing away your own brain and replacing it with another.

At least, that's what it feels like. Then, when your skull has filled with memories and impressions that tell you that you're ERIK THOMAS CARSTAIRS, you feel yourself materializing in the middle of them, like a fish in an aquarium. They seep into you, and you fill them with yourself. You sink lower in the cold tub with a soft groan.

For several minutes you relax there, letting yourself acclimate to the eddies and currents of Erik Carstairs' mind. Your cock unfurls as you think of the girls you've had; your muscles tense and ache at the memories of the tackles you've made; you smile as you think of friends embraced and enemies humiliated. You wedge your strong, narrow feet against the tile around the spout, and let mind and muscle and blood and sinew knit into one solid whole.

You are Erik Carstairs.

You cradle your hairy nuts and tell it to yourself again. I'm Erik Fucking Carstairs.

Then with a heaving gasp you get to your feet and study yourself in the mirror. The close-shorn blonde hair with the twinkling highlights. The dark eyes under the dark eyebrows. The mischievous smile that slashes across your face. The meaty slabs of the chest.

The naked Will Prescott watches with wide eyes as you swagger into the bedroom to dress in Erik's—your—clothes.

* To continue: "People and Possibilities, Part 2" 

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